Put a sportsbook CEO, a Gen Z economist, a non-gambling New York Times writer, and a guy who wrote a book called Losing Big on the same Zoom, and you’d expect a big fight about gambling.
Except … nope.
That was the surprise running through “The Gamblification of Everything,” a webinar hosted last Thursday by the American Institute for Boys and Men and moderated by New York Times editorial writer German Lopez. The panel: Matt King, who runs the betting arm of Fanatics (and used to run FanDuel); economics commentator Kyla Scanlon; and Jonathan Cohen, who leads gambling policy for AIBM.
They’re three people with very different jobs, mostly agreeing that gambling has leaked into everything and that nobody’s doing much about it.
Lopez opened with the obvious question: How did we get here? Cohen put a date on it: The 2018 Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for legal sports betting “lifted the lid on Pandora’s box,” he said.
But nobody on the panel wanted to pin the whole thing on PASPA getting overturned. Lopez said he’d first noticed the trend years earlier, in the loot boxes built into video games. Cryptocurrency, Cohen added, had been running in parallel the whole time. Different products, same wiring, all “tapping into the same part of our lizard brain and the dopamine delivery systems,” Cohen said.
King’s read was simpler: People have always gambled; what changed is the phone. Once the action went digital, the illegal market went with it, and nobody’s been able to shut that down.
“You’re certainly better in a regulated market where you have some protections than an unregulated market that’s run by illegal offshore operators,” King said.
But King also noted it’s not just sports betting and slot players doing the “gambling.” He referenced the GameStop meme stock insanity. “It was gambling,” he said. “Let’s be 100% clear.”
Scanlon, the economist, framed the activity as a barbell. On one end, people treating gambling like a job. On the other, a group so spooked by the economy they won’t take any risk at all. Both, she argued, are reacting to the same thing: People don’t feel secure.
“When people tell me about their prediction market habits or their sports betting habits, it’s usually because they lost their job,” she said.
Elephants and 800-pound gorillas
Which brings us to the part of the conversation where everybody, including the man selling the product, started pointing at prediction markets.
Cohen said Kalshi and the like “have by default basically just lowered the age of sports gambling in this country to 18” and that “no one asked for this. No one except for the Trump family and Michael Selig, who runs the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.”
The marketing, the panel noted, has made it worse. Scanlon described platforms pitching themselves as a way to make your grandchildren “safe and secure.” King said he saw a billboard in Los Angeles telling people they needed to pay rent, and they could trade on anything to do it. Scanlon cited a Wall Street Journal analysis she said found roughly 70% of Polymarket users lose money.
So what do you do about it? King has an idea, namely labeling as “gambling” everything that is in fact gambling.
“You may not be exactly gambling, but you’re pretty damn close,” he said of the newer products. “You shouldn’t be able to advertise anything related to a guaranteed win.”
Fanatics, he noted, limits its prediction market to 21-and-up, same as its sportsbook, and the company brought its responsible gaming tools straight over.
Cohen would take less than that and call it a win. From Kalshi, Robinhood, and Crypto.com, he said, he’d take “anything at this point” in terms of responsible gambling, any rule at all that wasn’t optional.
For all the alarm, nobody pretended this stuff isn’t entertaining to engage in. Cohen, the author of the critical book, copped to it.
“It’s more fun to watch a sports game when you’ve bet on it,” he said, also noting he has money riding on Mark Kelly winning the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.
King’s data cut against the panic, at least on his side of the house. The number of his customers who’d say they’re trying to make money betting on sports is “infinitesimal,” he said. For most, the $5 bet is “a movie ticket” — in other words, a small price for a couple of hours of entertainment.
Cohen’s worry runs longer than any single product. His son is four years old. Cohen figures parents are going to have to talk to their kids about gambling the way they learned to talk about pornography, before the kid runs into it cold.
Not because it’s evil. Because it’s everywhere now, and pretending otherwise is how people get in trouble.
