McKay Coppins

But that was my first experience with the kind of delusion of the sports better.

Because I remember he said that and he walked through all the facts.

He said, look, almost everybody loses money.

That's just how this industry works.

If you gamble for long enough, you will lose money unless you're in a very small percentage of people who are either using inside information or really good proprietary models or are just really lucky.

And my reaction should have been, oh, I'm not going to make money doing this.

But I had this kind of irrational belief that I would beat the odds, that I would be in that one or two percent of gamblers for no reason.

I had no reason to believe that.

But even though I intellectually understood what he was saying, I kind of was filled with this irrational confidence.

Yeah.

I mean, just to give you a sense of how quickly and how much this industry has grown.

In 2017, Americans legally wagered about $4.9 billion on sports.

Last year, that number had risen to at least $160 billion.

It's almost impossible to overstate how dramatically this industry has kind of taken off.

Yeah, that's right.

And it's interesting.

I talked to Chris Christie about this, and he said at the time he signed this bill because he was trying to help the sort of flagging economy of Atlantic City.

And he recalled just this absolute outpouring of outrage and indignation, specifically from the professional sports world.

the leagues were just, you know, completely outraged that he was trying to expand legal sports betting.

The leagues were dead set against it.