David Remnick: When I worked at The Washington Post, early in my career, one of my colleagues had a little bit of a side hustle. Late in the week in the fall, he'd go around the office taking bets on the weekend's football game, and then he'd relay those bets to a bookmaker. Now, a lot of us would put some money down, small bets. Nobody was losing their shirt, but still we a sense that it was somehow illicit, something you did on the QT.

Now, it sounds like I'm describing life hundreds of years ago, because these days we are absolutely inundated with ads offering same-game parlays and no-sweat bets. You just can't turn on pro football or listen to a call-in sports talk show without hearing the odds, without emphasizing gambling. Wagering on the game now seems practically as important as watching it. How did things change so much and so fast?

Danny Funt: Literally, I was watching the last World Series, and right before the first pitch, they said, "By the way, here's a parlay you might want to consider placing."

David Remnick: Danny Funt has been reporting on the gambling boom for The New Yorker. We've seen some pretty startling headlines lately. The former coach of the Portland Trailblazers was arrested, in part for allegedly providing insider information to gamblers. Then there was those two pitchers on the Cleveland Guardians who were indicted for rigging individual pitches. They were purposely throwing wild pitches to align with live bets. They've all pleaded not guilty.

Danny Funt's new book about the boom in sports betting is called Everybody Loses. Can you give me a sense, in dollar terms, of how big a business this is now?

Danny Funt: About $150 billion are wagered every year. Just last November, New York set a record with more than $2 billion wagered in the State of New York alone. It's hard to wrap your head around those numbers.

David Remnick: Who's gambling?

Danny Funt: Mostly young men. That's the target demo, 21 to 34. It's hard to know exactly how many people, total, are betting. I've seen 30% is a good ballpark.

David Remnick: 30% of that demographic?

Danny Funt: No, of Americans of age.

David Remnick: 30% of all Americans are laying down bets on what? What are the most popular things? Pro football?

Danny Funt: Absolutely. The NFL is king. All the major sports. Even in Colorado, where I used to live, when it was legalized during the pandemic, most sports were shuttered, and all they could bet on was Eastern European table tennis. They continue to bet millions of dollars every month. I guess they got hooked on ping pong.

David Remnick: From the title of your book, it's pretty clear what your POV on legal sports gambling is, or am I getting this wrong?

Danny Funt: That's fair. I hope you'll trust that I didn't have that title locked in as I started this. It was a realization of talking to hundreds of people, mainly in the industry, and seeing how they think about their customers, how they think about their business left that impression that not only are we losing a staggering amount of money as we were just talking about, but the credibility of sports, the integrity of sports, the independence of sports journalism, the list goes on.

David Remnick: Are you a gambler yourself?

Danny Funt: Yes. There's a stat that about half of people who bet, they admit that they're not honest about how much they bet and how often they bet. I'm in that demographic.

David Remnick: How would you describe the dimensions of your own activity?

Danny Funt: Mostly when I'm watching a Lakers game, particularly when my wife is out of town, and I've got nothing better to do, I'm trying to liven up a night. I'm alone.

David Remnick: You're scared of your wife, and you're a gambler?

Danny Funt: Exactly. Like a lot of people, it's a thing to do when you're bored and lonely. I'll be honest with you, though, just hearing again and again and again how impossible it is to win, how these sportsbooks do everything they can to prevent you from coming out ahead long term, I've backed off a lot in the last year.

David Remnick: Explain what a sportsbook is for the uninitiated, and then talk to me about how they do their work.

Danny Funt: Sportsbook is a company that takes bets. They have bookmakers and odds makers and hundreds, if not thousands of people who are dedicated to offering as many things as they can possibly think of on every sport in existence, practically. 95% of this business is now conducted online. Back in the day, this was an amenity to lure you into a casino. Just like all you can eat buffets or whatever it was "Let's bring people in. Hey, you can bet on sports, but hopefully you'll play some craps while you're here."

David Remnick: How am I gambling now?

Danny Funt: On your phone, predominantly.

David Remnick: What are the big companies?

Danny Funt: FanDuel and DraftKings control 3/4 of the market.

David Remnick: Why are you so tough on the gambling industry? People pay their $50 bucks, and they lose a little bit more often than they win. What's the harm?

Danny Funt: The idea of legalization was that, among other things, this would install consumer protection so that you could-- People have always been gambling. Let's make sure you can do it fairly, get paid when you win, not get chased around town if you owe someone some money. There's a lot of--

David Remnick: Your thumbs won't get broken.

Danny Funt: Exactly. Just learning so much about how this business is done, you hear the word "predatory" again and again. There was an executive who told me, "If you think about it," he said, "my job is basically to slowly bleed someone dry," and the techniques that they do to do that. I don't think you have to be moralistic to find issue with that.

David Remnick: I'm old enough to remember Bart Giamatti running baseball, and other sports commissioners were staunchly against any betting at all. They thought it would really have a deleterious effect on a number of fronts. Betting was made illegal back in the '90s with the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. Right?

Danny Funt: Yes.

David Remnick: PASPA, I guess you would call it, although Nevada was grandfathered in. How did that get overturned? You mention in your book that Adam Silver, who's the very popular commissioner of the NBA right now, was really the first to come out in support of this change. Talk about that a little bit.

Danny Funt: His predecessor, David Stern, was among the commissioners who testified during the PASPA hearings and said this is an evil. He went even further with that, speaking with Chris Christie, who was leading the charge for--

David Remnick: The governor of New Jersey.

Danny Funt: Yes. Christie told me that David Stern, who's passed away, said that gambling treats athletes like chattel. he just got very animated describing how awful it was. The year that Stern resigned and his deputy, Adam Silver, took over, he wrote an op ed in the New York Times in 2014 saying, legalize and regulate gambling.

David Remnick: What was Adam Silver's rationale?

Danny Funt: Publicly?

David Remnick: Yes.

Danny Funt: That this was happening underground anyway. He quoted a number that $400 billion were being wagered illegally every year, which I think is a lot.

David Remnick: You said "publicly," as if he had another motivation.

Danny Funt: Yes. My understanding is he was looking mainly at British soccer, at the English Premier League, and how incredibly it had grown in recent years, in large part because teams there embraced gambling and got all this interest from foreign gambling sponsors that put their brands on the fronts of jerseys and poured all this money into the EPL. Silver, who very clearly wants the NBA to grow internationally, said, what are we doing missing out on that opportunity?

David Remnick: I think the most famous gambling scandal-- There have been many. City University had its days in basketball. The most famous scandal was the 1919 infamous Chicago White Sox. Do we fear that this kind of large-scale scandal will happen in modern sports? We're seeing signs of that now.

Danny Funt: Hard to understate what an existential threat the 1919 World Series was to the future of baseball and sports in general after eight players on the White Sox, including Shoeless Joe, obviously, and others, colluded with gamblers to throw the World Series. It was eventually sniffed out by a reporter. They were prosecuted. They were exonerated, ultimately. There's a funny scene that someone else reported that they and the jurors celebrated at a Italian restaurant after that verdict was read. There's so much to learn from that.

As you alluded to, every decade since then, there's been a gambling scandal. You might say athletes make too much money nowadays. They would never do something so foolish.

David Remnick: Yes, but now you've got-- For example, there's a pitcher at the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase, who was allegedly throwing wild pitches on purpose because he was making bets on himself. In the NBA recently, you had the Trailblazers coach, Chauncey Billups, was arrested and charged for gambling with insider information. Other incidents are starting to pop up. I assume part of your concern is the integrity of these sports themselves.

Danny Funt: Yes, which, once again, was exactly what Bud Selig of Major League Baseball, and David Stern, and Paul Tagliabue, and all these commissioners predicted was you would have actual instances of corruption and a general degradation of trust in the integrity of what we're watching. Immediately after Klasse and Chauncey Billups and others were arrested, a poll came out that showed that 65% of Americans think some athletes are colluding with gamblers to affect the outcomes of games. A key argument for legalization was, in fact, it'll strengthen the integrity of games because we'll be able to monitor all this betting activity.

David Remnick: Why are they wrong?

Danny Funt: I've spoken with the companies tasked with doing that monitoring. They say, A, there's still a lot of betting going on under the table. We can't monitor that. Any savvy fixer is not going to go bet on FanDuel. They'll go offshore, or with a street bookie. We'd have little chance of catching that, so we haven't snuffed out that threat.

Beyond that, there's simply too much ground to cover when you carve up a game and do thousands of betting opportunities. Like you were saying, a single pitch is something you can risk a lot of money on. These companies can't possibly investigate every suspicious bet tied to a pitch in a baseball game.

David Remnick: If I were to bet on FanDuel or the like over time, can I win? In other words, I watch these movies like Uncut Gems or Rounders. You've got these savvy professional gamblers who figure out how to beat the house and win consistently. Is that ever true for sports gamblers?

Danny Funt: Well, let's not accuse Adam Sandler's character of beating the house. I think he --

David Remnick: He's a mess, actually.

Danny Funt: He got a bullet in the head when he finally did. Not only do about 1% of customers come out ahead long term, but as soon as you show any signs of competence, not even winning, but just placing the sorts of bets that might give you a chance of winning, they'll limit how much you're able to wager down to literal pennies. I've seen guys who can't get down more than a cent on an NFL game.

Of course, there are ways that you can bend the rules, and they'll definitely show you the door in that case. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with that. It's simply outsmarting the bookmakers. They'll say we're not going to take your bets because of that.

David Remnick: Gambling has gone well beyond sports. Danny, you've also written for the magazine The New Yorker about companies like Polymarket and Kalshi, who they set wagers on everything from election outcomes to interest rates. A recent Polymarket user made a bet, and he made more than $400,000 betting on the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, being captured. Unbelievable. Is this more or less concerning than whether some player might throw a game?

Danny Funt: Of course. By the way, insider trading, that seems to be at hand. How else could you have been so confident that the US would invade at that moment? Of course, betting on natural disasters or wars or things like that is much more serious business than sports.

David Remnick: Why? It's unattractive. It's, as we say, a bad look in some way.

Danny Funt: Well, we can have an easier time understanding that if you're betting on elections, it could cheapen how you engage with politics.

David Remnick: Is that possible in this [crosstalk]?

Danny Funt: People like Elizabeth Warren would say so.

David Remnick: Tell me about that.

Danny Funt: They think that, of course, people vote, at times, based on who they think will influence their pocketbook in a more favorable way. If you've got a bet on the line, could that be an even more problematic way of thinking about who you should vote for? I think when we're talking about what's someone going to say on a talk show, or will it rain tomorrow, that seems like we're just turning every single thing in our lives into an occasion to gamble.

David Remnick: That's an argument that's moral, above all, right? How are you going to get legislators excited about that?

Danny Funt: If they see surging rates of gambling addiction, particularly among young people.

David Remnick: Are we seeing that?

Danny Funt: Yes, so many educators I talk to say they're panicked at how suddenly preoccupied with gambling kids as young as elementary school are, if you can believe that. In college, 20% of students dip into tuition funds to fund their bets. I spoke with an expert in this named Jeffrey Derevensky who specializes in youth problem gambling. He pointed out that one of the dangers of gambling versus drug addiction or other things where you can kind of tell quickly if someone has a problem, typically with gambling, it can take years for a problem to take shape.

David Remnick: Why is that?

Danny Funt: I've spoken with so many problem gamblers in recovery who say, I was fine until I suddenly won $10,000, and I spent every day chasing not only that money, but that feeling. That is so dangerous.

David Remnick: Finally, now that we've seen some of the really negative outcomes of legal sports gambling, death threats for players, fixed games, users going bankrupt, the levels of gambling addiction that you've described, is there any push in the government to regulate this activity again?

Danny Funt: Yes, particularly after those arrests in the NBA and Major League Baseball. The House and Senate sent letters to Adam Silver saying, please help us make sense of what you're doing so that more of this doesn't happen. Brian Schatz, the Democrat from Hawaii in the Senate, recently proposed regulating prop bets. A New York assembly member has proposed banning live betting, which now makes up more than half of betting activities placed during games.

Whether there will be a bill in Congress that reaches the president's desk, I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon. It's hard for anything to pass, obviously. People like Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut have really made--

David Remnick: Senator from Connecticut.

Danny Funt: Yes, have said this is so out of hand, and the industry is so brazen in what they're doing to defy just common sense of what's fair for customers. The federal government needs to weigh in.

David Remnick: Danny Funt, thank you so much.

Danny Funt: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

David Remnick: Danny Funt's new book is called Everybody Loses. You can also read him on the gambling industry at newyorker.com. Of course, you can always subscribe to The New Yorker there as well. newyorker.com.

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