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Chapter 1: What is the explosive growth of sports betting in America?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. When U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader last month, some Americans weren't just watching the news. They were waiting for a payout after wagering on the Ayatollah's fate on a prediction market site called Kalshi. When he died, Kalshi refused to pay, citing fine print that excluded death as a qualifying outcome.
Thousands of betters are now suing for $54 million. This isn't the first time a real-world crisis has become a windfall for online bettors. Days before U.S. forces stormed Venezuela, an anonymous account on the platform PolyMarket wagered tens of thousands of dollars that President Nicolas Maduro would be in U.S. custody by the end of February.
When Maduro was captured, that anonymous bettor walked away with more than $400,000 in profit. That story stopped my guest, writer McKay Coppins, cold. By that point, he was already four months into a reported experiment for The Atlantic, spending an entire NFL season gambling to understand what America's sports betting boom is doing to the country.
He thought he understood the terrain, the apps, the addiction, the game-fixing standals. But the Maduro bet pointed to something bigger. A new relationship with gambling, where everything is potentially a wager. From sports to elections, award show winner outcomes, even tomorrow's weather. His piece explores the personal and societal cost of these bargains.
Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and his piece is called Sucker, My Year as a Degenerate Gambler. It's available on The Atlantic's website today and is the cover story of the magazine's April issue. And McKay Coppins, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Well, what a title, first of all, which we will get into.
But, you know, what was so interesting about this experiment is not only the experiment itself, but that you are a Mormon, which means that gambling is off limits. And yet here you are doing this experiment. What made you want to spend a season doing this?
Well, it started as an assignment to basically look into and write a reported piece about the explosive growth of the sports betting industry in America and what it's doing to the culture, right? And as I was kind of making my reporting plans, I ticked off all the boxes that you would expect I wanted to talk to. people who struggled with gambling addiction.
I wanted to talk to the executives at the big sports books. I wanted to talk to athletes and try to understand the issue from all their perspectives. But my editors kind of at the very beginning said, well, you know, you really should try to experience the phenomenon firsthand. And when I told them, you know, that's fine, but I have certain religious constraints.
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Chapter 2: How did McKay Coppins conduct his gambling experiment?
It's a game of kind of exploiting microscopic edges. So you have to shop for the best lines on any given game. You have to look at all the different sports books, uh, See what the lines are. See what the VIG is. That means like how much they're charging you for a given bet. So one book might charge you $110 to win $100. Another might only charge you $106.
And so you have to really pour over all these numbers and make kind of the most rational bets that you can. But the thing that he said to me in that conversation that kind of floored me was when I asked him, if I'm starting with $10,000, what would be a successful season, right? And I was expecting him to say, well, if you win $15,000, then you can count that as a win.
What he said to me was, he was almost confused by the question. He said, if you win one penny, you will be in the top 2% of sports bettors.
That makes me so nervous.
Oh, my gosh. And you know what? It should have made me more nervous. 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.
Well, McKay, I mean, that is the psychology of gambling. We always feel like we might be the lucky one.
And in general, gambling on sports isn't new, but what you are describing in this piece, and as you talk about all of the different apps, it feels categorically different from what most of us grew up understanding gambling to be, which is a trip to Vegas or March Madness, which we're in right now, or A friendly bet with a friend or your brother, as you mentioned. Something has changed.
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Chapter 3: What are the psychological effects of gambling on individuals?
All the way up until the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 to overturn the federal ban on sports betting, which basically opened the door for states to legalize it if they wanted to. And very quickly, dozens of states followed New Jersey's lead and started legalizing it.
partly because they were seduced by the possibility of the tax revenue that could be generated and partly because these online sports books, which were scaling up exponentially and, you know, basically printing cash, had very good and effective lobbying operations that worked on state legislatures all across the country and convinced them to legalize it. And in very short order, Right.
I mean, what's almost comical about this is.
is that the professional sports leagues, they fought this for years. They even testified before Congress calling gambling an existential threat to sports. The NFL and the NBA did. And then the moment that the court ruled against them, they kind of ran towards the money. Like how quickly did that reversal happen?
Yeah.
Almost overnight. They had been so opposed to sports betting, they had used all this kind of righteous language about how bad it was for the integrity of the game, how bad it was for athletes. And then as soon as it became legal in states, they realized that there was a huge opportunity here.
And I mean, this also corresponded with organized sports in America kind of facing a number of problems, right? TV ratings were beginning to dip for the live broadcasts as viewers had more options with streamers and whatnot. They also were dealing with the fact that younger fans were beginning to drift away. And
They saw sports betting as a way to kind of engage younger fans, revitalize public interest and, you know, to bring a lot more money into the leagues by partnering with these very, you know, cash flush sports books.
So I want to talk a little bit about maybe what could be called an integrity crisis, because while you were gambling your way through this NFL season, something else was happening simultaneously. Walk us through what the FBI was uncovering, because it wasn't just one thing that they were looking at. It was several scandals all at once.
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Chapter 4: How has sports betting impacted American culture and society?
And it kind of made me realize that to gamble on sports in 2026 is to almost inevitably become a Are there athletes who are rigging this game? Are there refs involved? Are the coaches involved? And every time one of these scandals is revealed, it further exacerbates those kind of conspiracy theories. And there's actually a lot of survey data on this.
You know, majorities of Americans now say that they believe that athletes occasionally change their performance to help gamblers. Sports gambling has decreased the integrity of the game. And that actually could be an existential threat to organized sports if something doesn't change.
Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with McKay Coppins, whose Atlantic cover story follows a season inside America's sports betting explosion. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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Okay, we're going to get back to sports, but you also write about these prediction markets, and they represent something categorically different. How did we go from a college basketball player taking a bribe to someone betting on a U.S. military operation?
The platforms that are used to bet on outcomes in politics, in geopolitics, in war, in culture, are different from the online sportsbooks that I spent most of my experiment using. They're called predictive markets. Polymarket and Kalshi are the most popular ones, but they operate slightly differently. And
By doing so, they've managed to kind of get around a lot of the federal regulation that exists for online sports books. Rather than taking bets themselves, they allow people to invest in predictive outcomes as though they're investing in positions in like a derivative market, right? And so you can buy a position in a question like, will Gaza experience a famine this year?
As macabre and kind of insane as that sounds, you can invest in a position like, will a nuclear bomb be detonated by a certain date? How many people will be deported from the United States in 2026? Will Donald Trump declare martial law before leaving office? These are actually all live bets that you can make on these platforms.
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Chapter 5: What scandals have emerged alongside the rise of sports betting?
Because they also seem to be fine with insider betting. So death is the red line.
Yeah.
Well, this is one of many cases where the predictive markets are different than the sportsbooks. If a sportsbook refuses to pay out a bet and it becomes controversial for some reason, there are existing regulatory bodies that will receive complaints from gamblers, look at the evidence, and basically rule on whether the sportsbook has to pay out that bet.
And these bodies have existed for a long time in Las Vegas. They're actually very powerful. But, you know, there is a regulatory framework around this stuff. The predictive markets are really even compared to the online sportsbooks operating in a Wild West.
And I think it's worth noting that under the Biden administration, the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had both opened investigations into Kalshi and Polymarket, looking into whether they were disregarding or disobeying federal regulations. But all of that kind of ended when Donald Trump returned to office.
Part of that is because the predictive markets figured out how to play the political game in Trump's Washington. Polymarket hired a former Trump advisor as its first Washington lobbyist. Both Polymarket and Kalshi added Don Jr. to their payrolls effectively. And the investigations were quietly closed. The companies have begun to scale up rapidly.
And I think that they feel like they can operate with a certain degree of impunity.
Our guest today is journalist McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic. We'll be right back after a short break. This is Fresh Air. So, McKay, we talked earlier about how the Supreme Court opened this door for But let's talk a little bit about what is happening next at the government level, because it wasn't like Congress has stepped in in any way with the plan for regulation.
Kind of walk us through kind of what is sort of a regulatory vacuum that followed.
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Chapter 6: How do prediction markets differ from traditional sports betting?
Hey, I want my boy to watch the Sunday NFL games with me. This will entice him to take an interest. And the dad will kind of say, look, I'll cover the losses, and if we win anything, we'll split it, right? But what happens is the dad then, you know, Sunday ends, the dad goes to work, whatever. And the son still has access to the account.
And I talked to people who had crazy stories about young people getting deep, deep in gambling debt without their parents having any idea until they would get a phone call from somebody saying, hey, you owe me $5,000. And they would say, what are you talking about? He'd say, well, your son has racked up this big gambling debt and somebody's got to pay it.
And it's all happening digitally, you know, right?
A lot of it is happening digitally. Some of it's happening, you know, kind of in a more analog, old-fashioned way. But the key point here is that because it's almost impossible now to watch a sports game without getting bombarded with ads for sports gambling, because it's almost impossible to consume sports media without hearing your favorite sports media personality talk about
money lines and point spreads. I think that it's just much more in the culture, in the conversation. I think young people are much more fluent in the vocabulary of gambling than they were a generation ago.
You interviewed the president of some of these sites. I think it was FanDuel and an executive of DraftKings. They both told you that their companies don't want revenue from people with gambling problems. But What we know about gambling is that it can be compulsive by nature. And then you add on top of that, our phones are designed to keep us addicted.
And then these platforms, as you laid out here, will allow you to virtually bet on anything at any hour of the day. You're going to get a snack. You're laying in your bed, all of that stuff. That is nearly a perfect recipe for exactly the kind of customer they claim they don't want. Right.
Yeah. I mean, I have to say, like, I was skeptical of these sportsbooks claims that they are committed to what they call responsible gaming. Even at the outset, I kind of figured that that was good PR. And then I spent time talking to some of these executives, and I think they really believe it. Right. They will tell you.
We have all these different policies that are designed to identify and slow down users who are exhibiting reckless and addictive behaviors. If people are really acting and gambling in reckless ways, we'll actually kick them off our platforms. And they claim that they even have a self-interested reason for that. They say, we don't want any revenue from someone who has a gambling problem.
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Chapter 7: What regulatory challenges are faced by the sports betting industry?
There's some pretty good odds for some of these teams. And then I remember looking through, I think it was Kalshi, and seeing the Oscars odds that you could bet on best actor, best picture. And it just kind of dawned on me that morning that I wasn't going to be able to just easily walk away from this thing that had kind of consumed my life over the last five months.
And so almost on impulse, honestly, I pulled up the self-exclusion form in Virginia. I Googled it, found it, and I quickly filled it out before I could talk myself out of it. What is that?
Explain it. Yeah, explain it for folks who don't know.
Yeah.
Self-exclusion form is a form that most states that have legalized online sports betting offer, where if you think you are at risk of gambling addiction or you think you are becoming a problem gambler, you can fill out this form, submit it to the state, and it legally prohibits online sports books from taking your action. Yeah. that you will not be allowed to bet for a determined period of time.
In Virginia, you can ban yourself for one year, five years, or for life.
You started off with $10,000 to bet with. What did you end with?
The answer is basically I lost everything. At the end of the season, I had lost $9,891. Wow. Yeah. And as much as I tried to make this a realistic simulation of gambling, I was playing with a safety net, right? I always knew that I wasn't going to lose my own money in doing this. But the temptation to just keep going is... is really strong for gamblers.
And any gambler will talk to you about this, whether they're a gambling addict or just kind of a recreational gambler who does it a few times a year. All of them will tell you that there is this kind of reality-distorting effect that gambling has on you. It almost doesn't matter how much you lose. You convince yourself that the way to fix the problem is to gamble more.
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