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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
David Sirota
From the levers reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm David Sirota. If you've been watching the NBA finals this week, you've probably been asked to make a bet on who's going to win at all. I don't mean figuratively either. The NBA is literally asking viewers to gamble through a partnership with a company called FanDuel. For NBA fans, online gambling commercials are now as common as three point shots. But fans like myself can remember an era when neither were very common. Today, fans, particularly young adults are bombarded with calls to gamble. And not only on basketball, the culture of online gambling has grown larger than just sports. Today, people can make bets on everything from how many times a Taylor Swift commercial will air to the electoral votes in November's election. It's all part of a full court press by gambling companies to hook and extract as much money from viewers as possible. And in the case of the NBA, it's all happening with the approval of the teams and the league. Today on lever time, we're going to look at how sports gambling became synonymous with basketball. Senior Podcast Producer Arjun Singh explores the rise of beddings to most dominant firms. FanDuel and DraftKings. Then he sits down with an expert in addiction to hear how these companies prey on young people. And our June also talks to sports journalist Bomani Jones about how big money is changing the game he loves.
David Sirota
When it comes to NBA basketball, I'm kind of a Rip Van Winkle. I was really into it when I was a kid growing up in the Philadelphia area. But then after too much heartbreak watching my favorite Sixers teams lose. I gave it up for about 20 years. But then I recently came back to it but my kids and I got into the nuggets here in Denver, where I now live. And when I woke up and reengaged after 20 years, I noticed two new things. One, there are a lot more three pointers in today's basketball, and two sports betting has become an invasive part of the game. Look, sports betting was definitely out there. When I was a kid. One of the first huge scandals I can remember was in 1989. That's when one of my favorite Philadelphia Phillies Pete Rose was thrown out of baseball by major league Commissioner Bart Giamatti.
MLB Commissioner
Mr. Rose is accepted baseball's ultimate sanction in his lifetime and eligibility. This salary episode began last February when baseball received firm allegations that Mr. Rose bet on baseball games and other reds games. Such grave charges could not and must never be ignored. Sidenote,
David Sirota
Pete Rose may have been on the Reds but he'll always be a Philadelphia Philly to me. I also remember how sports betting was the central way. The villain Biff in the Back to the Future series made his fortune. Alright, puff. What's the gag?
Biff
How did you know what the score was gonna be?
Biff from the future
I told you it's in this book. All you got to do is bet on the winner and you'll never lose.
David Sirota
Another side note. Back to the Future screenwriters have said that Biff was based in part on Donald Trump. So look, sports betting has always been a thing. But it was the kind of thing people had a bookie for or had to go to some special storefront to place bets. Sports betting wasn't everywhere. It wasn't on our mobile phones. It wasn't commercially advertised during the games people were betting on and it wasn't actually sponsoring league play. So something is changed. Today when you watch an NBA game, you're gonna get celebrity ads for DraftKings. Heck the icons on the screen showing scores might be sponsored by fanatic sportsbook. This shift from accepting to celebrating gambling was no accident. As with everything in America, there was a huge lobbying campaign to change laws to make bedding, not just ancillary to sports, but a central part of sports culture. So we're gonna go to lever time senior Podcast Producer Arjun Singh to explore exactly what happened. Find out exactly who made it happen. And look at whether this is really what we want from our country's multibillion dollar sports industry. I
Albert Chen
mean, my first experience was very simply just like watching. They're just kind of carpet bombing of commercials in 2014 It really began where FanDuel and DraftKings were just like spending a ridiculous amount of money on ads on NFL Sundays where basically, you switch to commercial and you'll see a FanDuel or DraftKings ad and I was just kind of curious.
Arjun Singh
Albert Chen is a journalist and the author of billion dollar fantasy, the high stakes game between FanDuel and DraftKings that up ended sports in America. I
Albert Chen
logged into this app. And, you know, I mean, I didn't necessarily think of it as sports gambling. I've thought as a new version of fantasy sports where you could win and lose money based on how your players that you picked did that particular night,
Arjun Singh
Albert's describing the first time he used the app FanDuel a sports betting app. Sports fans probably know FanDuel or its main rival DraftKings. Because of those commercials that are multiple times during games fan duel casino has your chance at the number one feeling when winning ranks higher than any other feeling higher than number and NBA fans probably have a particularly unique experience when it comes to FanDuel. And not just because they've had to watch those same weird commercials with Charles Barkley talking to a younger version of himself dozens of times during games
Charles Barkley
I was fans gonna bet on my favorite player, young man. Hey, look at this place. We live here. Yep. Oh, no, we know.
Arjun Singh
God. It's weird. Anyways, online gambling companies are seeing explosive growth as more states have moved to legalize online gambling, and their prominence within game broadcast has grown and in the case of FanDuel, the NBA even owns a stake in their growth. Last year, the American gaming Association estimated Americans put almost $120 billion down in bets last year. And today 38 states and Washington DC have legalized sports betting. Sports Betting is nothing new. Its roots go back 1000s of years to ancient Rome, and possibly even before that, and for decades in the US, it's been a mainstay of casinos. But online betting is something totally different. Utilizing smartphones, companies like FanDuel and DraftKings have leveraged to things that have controversially been linked to Addictive Behaviors, gambling and social media. sports books aren't the first industry to leverage the smartphones unique connection to users to juice and industry for profit. But the story of how they became embedded in a cornerstone of our culture, that can offer some lessons about the consequences of moving more towards a digital ecosystem that's ever present in our lives. But before we get into all of these heavy things, let's talk a little bit about fantasy
Albert Chen
football. fantasy sports has been around for a really long time. Its origins really kind of begin in the 70s. When, you know group of guys, basically, big sports fans got together at a restaurant and said, Yeah, it'd be kind of cool if we like were able to draft players and see who was like the smartest sports fan want to be GM among us, and draft players and basically compete against each other. Based on how those players did over the course of a season. Like
Arjun Singh
the name says it all began as a way for sports fans to live out their fantasy, but like real sports, people figured out pretty quickly it was another thing to wager on,
Albert Chen
there was always money involved because things are always kind of like, more interesting and more fun when there's money involved. But it's very much just like kind of like casual sort of pools, but at the end of the day, it was like very low stakes. And it was all about the social aspect of it. You know, a lot of these fantasy sports leagues, they've always been about the social aspect, which is getting together, drafting the players, and having a great time while you're drafting the players and
Arjun Singh
by the 2010s 10s of millions of people were participating in fantasy sports, and a whole cottage industry sprang out catering to it. ESPN started to publish fantasy strategy guides in the business press like NPR is planet money. They started to take note of how much money can be made in fantasy sports.
NPR
Yeah, we do all this reporting here about the economy and how money creates more money, how economic activity leads to more economic activity, more businesses being created, more sort of side businesses showing up. And you can actually see this happening, new businesses being born every day out of thin air in the fantasy economy really was
Albert Chen
this massive thing where I think a lot of the sports leagues including the NBA started to see the huge popularity and fantasy sports and saw that there were just like so many fans that were just tuning into games, to see how their fantasy sports league was to, to see how their players were doing to see how the players they drafted were doing. And that's a lot of eyeballs. That's a huge audience.
Arjun Singh
And that's where FanDuel and DraftKings enter the picture.
DraftKings Commercial
And now humanity has outdone itself because draftkings.com combines what Okay, fantasy sports with winning life changing amounts of cash. Introducing. DraftKings $10 million Fantasy Football World Championships. Before
Albert Chen
2019, it was extremely hard to gamble on sports. In fact, it was illegal to gamble on sports pretty much everywhere outside of the state of Nevada. So FanDuel is from the UK. They were started in oh nine. DraftKings comes into the scene three or four years later, they're founded in Boston. And these two companies very quickly become rivals because they are competing for this massive market of fantasy sports fans who are just waiting to spend money on sports. And so FanDuel came up with this idea that others had tried. They were part of a group of companies that created this game called daily fantasy sports, which was a variation of fantasy games, which was essentially fantasy sports where you could play every single day and you could win money every single night. Which also means that you could lose a tremendous amount of money. Every single night
Arjun Singh
companies like DraftKings and FanDuel initially exploited a loophole in the way gambling is regulated in the US. Prior to states legalizing online betting firms that marketed fantasy sports, they were able to do so because fantasy is considered a game of skill rather than a game of chance, which most other forms of betting are considered. Here's one of FanDuel its founders Nigel Eccles talking about it in 2016. Fantasy Sports
Nigel Eccles
is a game of skill. There's a very clear distinction in state law that gambling is a game of chance and whereas something to give a skill of skill predominant. There's also case law that backs up fantasy sports is a legal game of skill. And there's also a federal law that reinforces again that fantasy sports is a legal game of skill. It's been played since the
Arjun Singh
19. Operating in that legal gray zone. FanDuel and DraftKings soon bombarded the airwaves with commercials enticing people to sign up. Basically,
Albert Chen
every NFL game alternating DraftKings and FanDuel commercials in 2015. Those commercials would appear on an NFL game every 90 seconds, either one ad from FanDuel and DraftKings.
DraftKings Commercial
At DraftKings. We play for glory, for bragging rights for fantasy football supremacy. But we also play for this, the giant check.
Albert Chen
And it got to a point where these two companies in the fall of 2015 were the two biggest TV advertising advertisers in all of America, bigger than GEICO bigger than any car company. And they were just willing to spend that kind of money on ads and marketing. And that's how they just brought in a lot of customers a lot of users. But at the same time, they were spending a lot of money, a lot of money that they were able to raise from venture capital and private equity investors, who said, let's just spend a lot of money. Let's get all these users. Let's win the market. Let's worry about everything else a little bit later.
Arjun Singh
It wasn't long before sports leagues themselves began to take notice of the amount of fans who are logging on to these things, none more so than the NBA. Even though this was the same era, the Golden State Warriors revolutionising the game, and LeBron James was in his prime. The league was still seeing some dips in their viewership. And NBA Commissioner Adam Silver wanted a piece of these apps audience and profits. They play
Albert Chen
a very unique role in this story. And even I would say they were a little bit different than the NFL and even Major League Baseball. It begins in 2014 when the NBA becomes the first major professional sports league to partner with FanDuel. And this is the first partnership between a sports league and a company like FanDuel and DraftKings. And this partnership includes the NBA having an equity stake and FanDuel. And this moment is hugely important to the stories of FanDuel and DraftKings. Of course. Because what will later see is that the sports leagues and those two companies are just like, really intertwined and connected and in very important ways. But what's really interesting is that that announcement that the NBA has become the first major professional sports league to partner with FanDuel in 2014. That happens, and the very next day, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, writes an op ed in the New York Times, that really is kind of a watershed moment in The story of sports gambling, Silva
Arjun Singh
would continue to be an outspoken advocate for the mass legalization of sports betting. Here he is in 2016.
Adam Silver
We know it's gonna happen, bring it into the light, regulate it, and by the way, tax it. I've been watching the presidential debates. We need money for our infrastructure, it's a good place they get it from sports betting.
Arjun Singh
Though the NBA is partnership with FanDuel generated some controversy, it didn't really seem to stop the growth of the industry. But they'd soon get a massive opportunity to expand when the Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a 9092 law that outlawed gambling in most states. And naturally, the betting industry saw a gigantic opportunity ensued. lobbyists were flocking to state capitals all over the country to make the case for legalization. And it worked.
News Anchor
So voters narrowly passed a ballot measure legalizing sports gambling here in our state
News Anchor
gambling officially kicks off today at noon in North Carolina, Virginians can soon legally bet on Sports Online, state lawmakers officially legalized it and 2020 sports betting has also changed the culture of the game. Millions of people who may never have set foot in a casino now have the chance to gamble in their living room or at the bar while they're watching the games. And media companies have infused sports betting into their programming.
Albert Chen
There's no question that it's completely changing the fandom. I mean, now you have just fans rooting for different outcomes for you know, a play within a game. And so people are just watching games completely differently. They're watching it, you know, with their second screen up. They're not even watching games, they're following it on their sports gambling app. And does that make things better or worse, I mean, the NBA is thrilled because they have more people watching games,
Arjun Singh
the American Psychiatric Association includes gambling disorder in its influential diagnostic tool, the DSM five, it was a major signal that gambling can trigger the same neurological impulses is consuming addictive substances like alcohol and drugs. Gambling apps, however, take things one step further. Utilizing tactics like offering limited time deals to users, these apps managed to hook people onto their sites. And recently Problem Gambling amongst young adults is reason something some researchers attribute to the rise in normalization of sports betting by state legislatures and leagues, they're
Scott Graupensperger
making it easier than ever to get started. Once they do get started, you know, you download the draft King app, and then you are now getting notifications right to your phone that like hey, the night's not over. And it's really scary to see how this really quick turnaround betting you can rack up a huge bill, you know, if you're just you know, Ding Ding, ding ball strike over and over for the rest of the game. Like you could look down and say, Well, I just lost another 200 bucks. After
Arjun Singh
the break, we'll look at the dark side of these apps and hear what an addiction specialist has learned recently about the relationship between mental health addiction in sports betting. So
Scott Graupensperger
my background is actually more in developmental psychology, sports psychology, studying prevention among young adult among young adults quite generally, but specifically my dissertation looked at prevention efforts in college sports teams. So sport has always been an interest of mine personally, and as much as I can professionally as well.
Arjun Singh
Dr. Scott Graupensperger is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He also leads a research lab that looks into, among other things, the relationship between mental health and addictive behaviors,
Scott Graupensperger
we find it interesting that there's just not a lot of public health perspective on this. They say that gambling in general is one of the most neglected public health concerns out there. And I think that's especially true of sports betting. I think when the states are considering their policies, they're really considering like the financial side of it, right. But they really haven't studied it from a public health perspective in terms of what what are the correlates, what are the maybe downstream impacts that all of this rising sports betting is going to have on these other public health indices that they do view as a public health concern, such as mental health such as alcohol use,
Arjun Singh
one of the first things I wanted to get a sense of was how sports gambling influenced our brains,
Scott Graupensperger
gambling behaviors, and alcohol use are both addictive at the neurobiological level both trigger a dopaminergic reward process. And so we see that there are these shared predispositions towards both of these addictive behaviors. You know, there's predisposed to vulnerabilities that are at the levels of the brain, you know, genetic levels, behavioral levels. So yes, I mean, long story short, is that they are very interrelated. They're very connected. And, you know, there is a move to actually like, consider it more from a similar addictive perspective as substance use. It just hasn't necessarily caught on, especially in the mainstream, right. I think if some of these policymakers would know of this literature and know of this movement in the underlying literature supporting that gambling really isn't addictive behavior. It's that is in line with these substances. I don't know if they would have been as quick to just pull the trigger on legalization.
Arjun Singh
Scott's research is fairly young, and he said a lot more needs to be done to prove definitive links between gambling and some mental health outcomes. But early research does indicate that sports betting is associated with higher levels of things like depression,
Scott Graupensperger
what we're seeing is just at the cross sectional level, people who generally have higher scores on problem gambling, specifically problems, sports betting, are also showing greater mental health concerns pretty much across the board. So we see strong associations with strong associations between problems sports, betting and depression, anxiety, psychological distress, stress, even loneliness. And then when we kind of look at the flip side of that coin, looking at indicators of wellbeing, we're seeing that those who are struggling more with problems sports betting are also reporting lower levels of satisfaction with life, as well as social functioning. So if it really is like there really doesn't seem to be a link between, you know, mental health and just general well being and engaging in sports betting, but specifically engaging in problems sports betting, like symptoms of problems sportsbetting.
Arjun Singh
For their part, FanDuel and DraftKings have both repeatedly said that they take the issue of problem gambling very seriously. And they prominently feature helplines for those suffering from gambling addiction to find help throughout their apps. And it should be noted that a lot of people also participate in sports betting as a form of entertainment without it having detrimental effects on their life. But Scott also told me the rate of young adults reporting problems with gambling has increased, especially in the period that sports betting has become more widely available. Sports Betting is also a culture, peer pressure and the fear of missing out or FOMO is actually a very real reason many keep gambling,
Scott Graupensperger
I definitely think culture is an important piece to it. And so you know, I don't want to throw anyone particular organization under the bus but there is sort of this like kind of barstool culture. It's sort of an identity that along with a lot of young adults have, you know, kind of post college or even during college but specifically post college to kind of identify as being a stoolie Scott's
Arjun Singh
referring to the media company Barstool Sports, barstools. Controversial culture leans into essentially being an obnoxious sports fan. And they've been frequently criticized for promoting a culture of toxic masculinity, including some cases of misogyny. At one point barstool was owned by a gambling company. And they even launched their own sports book. The company prominently features gambling across their blogs and podcasts. And they also heavily cater to young adult males. Here's an example of one of their videos.
Dave Portnoy
But because we love smart and nobody gives us credit, we don't get the advertising dollars we deserve. That's why we all have the DraftKings app,
Dan Katz
because no matter how little press pays us, it's cool. We can still make money playing Daily Fantasy games.
Scott Graupensperger
And these things definitely seem to go together at a cultural level. I don't have a lot of hard data on this yet. But there are some qualitative studies that have interviewed people about what's happening when they're sports betting and it almost seems like sports betting is a vehicle to engage in alcohol use. So there's sort of like this expectation among sports bettors that if they have a big win. Next round of drinks is on them. And oftentimes, sports bettors are reporting spending more on that round of drinks and even one on their bet right and they're okay with that. That's sort of what they've signed up for. Right? They're getting these sports betting wins, then they're, you know, turning around and buying a bunch of drinks to help celebrate the night.
Arjun Singh
According to research done by a PhD student Scott works with named Frank song about cryptocurrency peer pressure seems to be a driver in young adults conducting speculative trading. And that could help explain why young adults are also driven more to do sports betting
Scott Graupensperger
young adults tend to overestimate how much their peers and how approving their peers are of engaging in behaviors like alcohol use, as well as gambling. And so when young adults think that their peers are engaging in cryptocurrency, trading at a much higher rate than is actually true. They think, well, I don't want to miss out on those opportunities, especially when they're young and their financial independence, or their early on in their financial independence. They want to make sure that they're not missing out on opportunities to get ahead. And if they're seeing their friends, you know, brag about maybe the profits that they're making on things that cryptocurrency they might feel like they're missing out, and it might motivate them to engage in this behavior that they probably wouldn't have otherwise. And
Arjun Singh
of course, there's those annoying commercials that are ever present. Like Albert Scott's also found the marketing campaigns and media culture around sports betting to have a major influence on people
Scott Graupensperger
to sports betting marketing has really been quite outrageous and especially now that ESPN owns their own sports book you can even turn on sports center with us I'm talking about odds did this team cover did this player meet their prop that and so it's become so ingrained in sports watching that it could give the impression to young adult that like if you're just watching without bedding like why bother watching it all. There also catering to a much larger audience by offering all these different prop bets. Again, you don't need to know a lot about the sport to get involved. I thought it was sort of funny and sort of interesting that you could even bet during the Superbowl on how many times they were going to show Taylor Swift, right? Really catering to an audience who doesn't know a lot about football might not even be interested in that finding an aspect of the game that they will find interesting and you know wagering on it.
Scott Graupensperger
I sort of view sports betting as easily accessible gateway into more problem gambling. There's enough literature now for me to say that people who engage in sports betting have more problems with gambling in general, with I just saw a stat that sports bettors are twice as likely to become problem gamblers relative to those who gamble on, you know, non sports events. So it's suggesting that people who are engaging in sports betting are continuing to engage in other forms of gambling as well. You know, now they're thinking about sports in a different way. They're looking at sports differently than they had been before, looking at, you know, ways that they could have some skin in the game, I guess, more so than just being a fan. And so I find that concerning now that
Bomani Jones
these teams sell for billions of dollars, the approach is going to be different like this, sports teams used to be owned by fairly rich people in the occasional Corporation. Now, they're all owned by extremely rich people, all of them certainly had an incentive to try to make some money off of the team. But now it becomes an imperative in a much different way because of the money that the people are putting into these teams. And so as a result, I think the commercialization of it smacks us all in the face in a different way.
Arjun Singh
Bomani Jones is an award winning sports journalist and the host of the podcast the evening Jones. One thing both Scott and Albert alluded to was the changing nature of fandom. And it's something I've thought a lot about, as well, as an NBA fan myself, the finals are one of my favorite parts of the year. And at the risk of losing some listeners, I'm all in for my team, the Boston Celtics, but now gambling seems to be the prism some fans view the game,
Bomani Jones
this isn't the reason that any of us got into this. There's not a single person who got into sports because of the gambling, you may have found the gambling after you got there and you can kinda you know, put some stakes on stuff that can make a game a bit more interesting to help you lock in or whatever it is. But nobody showed up because they wanted to get in. Now, if you were to watch a sports broadcast, no matter the channel, no matter the league, no matter the company, you would think the primary reason that anybody is showing up is so that they can gamble. Now a big part of this is especially after the pandemic, where these companies are trying to make up for the money that they lost. During those times, the gambling companies opened the faucet and were bankrolling basically, the entire sports media industry and in large part are continuing to do that they had the money to put out there, and they are pushing it, pushing it pushing it. But when you watch, everywhere you turn, they're telling you the line on this the line on that everybody's advising you, hey, you can bet on this, Hey, this is a parlay that you should check out, Hey, you should do that, that everything else. And notice they're really helping to advertise to you the things that you're not going to win, like the power leg, like you know, it's maybe the most fun, but it is the least likely to generate a payout. But it gives an impression that that's the reason why we're here or the reason that you should be here. And it'll be interesting for younger people as they come up and watching this. There. They will be molded by the idea that this is a context for the games that previous times felt almost salacious and underground. Like you were aware that people were gambling and people were making, you know, they were doing things against the spread and stuff like that. You were aware that that was the pay a thing. The broadcast now give you the impression that is the thing, once you start centering so much of it around gambling, it makes the entire activity or process seem to be transactional. It's bad enough now that everybody's kids are on some kind of travel team and everything else and his kids are basically working to play and that the idea is no longer just to give your kids something to do with some fast track to being a professional in some form or fashion. Right, right. It's all been co opted by capitalism in a way that I think adding the gambling on top for even those who are not necessarily thinking of sports in a participatory participatory sense, you're still getting back to the idea that it is a transaction and I just don't think we need to encourage kids to believe that everything is a transaction so early,
Arjun Singh
and as much as this is a story about mental health technology in the economy. To me it is a story about basketball. Yes, basketball is a sport and it's entertainment, but it's also a powerful illustration of humanity. The game can bring out the best and worst instincts and people force them to change for a greater cause. And it emphasizes the spirit of teamwork. And yeah, the slam dunks don't hurt either. But sports betting is changing the game, even for some of the players. Take Dante Porter, a former player with the NBA Toronto Raptors. Earlier in this year, Porter was banned from the NBA, because he was found to be violating the league's rules around gambling. And the league says that he was even limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes, and betting on NBA games himself. The expansion of sports betting in the NBA in a lot of ways feels like it's taking away from the humanity of that game.
Bomani Jones
But I would say the most underrated thing going on right now in our world is human beings, and so much of what we do and so what you see happening in the economy, a lot of it is the eradication of the human being, or what the human being can provide. That's the discussion of AI. Basically, AI can do all these things. Okay, but what about people? Because we need something for these people to actually do? What about people you ever heard of people, they're right over there, you can do a lot of this stuff and quiet as a cat might even be able to do it better. You just have to pay them in order to do it. But humans are becoming hugely underrated at this point in time. And once you reduce this to a gambling thing, again, those people stop being people and basically just become widgets, they become inputs, they become variables in an equation, when that's the way that you want sports. I think we're here as long as the gambling companies keep putting the money into it. The question is, how long are the gambling companies going to be able to do that? Because they're not making money like that, at least the last time I checked, I think the winners in that game are ultimately going to be like MGM, the people who already had gambling stuff set up kind of like the winners in television, were the companies that were the winners in radio, right? The people that already had the infrastructure in place, and then they went from there. I think ultimately, that's probably what's going to happen with the gambling. But if these companies aren't making money like that, then what we're going to see is a decrease in the push on the broadcasts and the likes. And I don't think that people will miss those things a single bit if they go away.
Arjun Singh
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me our June saying with help from Chris Walker and editing support from David Sirota, Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with more episodes of leisure time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai