Now a different spectacle as March madness grips America and huge sums are wagered on college basketball, one journalist decided to step inside the frenzy.

McKay Coppins of The Atlantic spent a year as what he calls a "degenerate gambler," placing bets throughout the American football season to understand the explosive rise of legalized sports betting and the hold it now has on millions of Americans.

He's joining Michel Martin to discuss what the normalization of betting reveals about modern American culture.

Thanks, Christiana.

McKay Coppins, thanks so much for joining us once again.

Happy to do it.

You know, we think of you as a political journalist.

You know, you do these deep dives into complex policy issues.

You did this great biography of Mitt Romney.

What made you think of gambling?

How did that start?

You know, I was talking to my editor sometime last year about something that I think we've all noticed if we're, you know, watch sports or frankly just live in America, which is the sports gambling industry has just exploded in popularity, right?

And it's impossible to watch a game without being bombarded with these kind of neon soaked ads for sports books.

But I also felt like there it was something more pervasive was happening like there was something about the sudden rise of gambling that was changing the culture of America and it was leaking into every other facet of American life, sports, culture, politics, geopolitics, and that's really what piqued my interest.

And it was it was not my idea to start gambling myself my editors idea but but it led to some interesting places.

Well yeah exactly because you didn't just sort of do kind of the usual outside in journalistic approach like interview people that the Atlantic spotted you some some dough and said gamble this kind of become part of this world you know and see how it goes and that presented a problem for you ethically right because of your faith practice you're a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and gambling is not something that is approved of you know by the church so what did you do to kind of sort that through well I you know I took the experiment to my bishop and had a very awkward conversation with him which I write about in the piece.

Basically I told him look my editors want to stake me $10,000 to gamble with for journalistic purposes which right off the bat you know that sounds like a preposterous thing to tell your bishop and I kind of watched as a look of pastoral concern bloomed across his face and you know ultimately he gave his kind of tacit blessing for the experiment he recognized that gambling with my employer's money versus my own was different but he also said look I've seen this vice ruin enough people's lives that I can't let you leave without a word of warning and he told me some cautionary tales and he talked about how this can become a slippery slope and what starts out as sort of a modest habit can really come to consume your life and the last thing he said to me before I left his office was "Ne careful," and at the time I will admit that I kind of shrugged him off a little smugly you know I said look this is a gimmick for a magazine article it's not going to affect me you know personally spiritually it's not gonna be a big deal and and I have to say in retrospect his his warning was actually kind of prophetic you write that since legalization in 2018 Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports and roughly half of men aged 18 to 49 have online betting accounts it's almost like it's like in the air now it's a more about that like why is that yeah I mean there were a bunch of things that changed kind of all at once in the last really decade and I think it's easy to forget that this new kind of wild west era we're in is very new right as of 10 years ago people were gambling around five billion dollars a year on sports legally last year it was a hundred and sixty billion the the average person if they wanted to gamble on sports either had to go to Las Vegas or one of a handful of other jurisdictions where it was allowed or they had to seek out a bookie or call an offshore sportsbook in Antigua and you know I really put some work in what's changed is that one state started to legalize it the online sportsbooks just exploded in popularity right they they all of a sudden almost overnight we took what was widely seen as a pretty dangerous vice that we need that should be regulated and stigmatized and put it on everyone's phone and eliminated all the friction that once existed to access that vice, right?

And so that when you when you say it feels like it's in the air, I agree with you.

I mean, I feel like you can't watch sports, you can't talk about sports, you can't listen to a sports podcast without just finding yourself in the middle of a conversation about gambling.

All the sports analysis, the punditry now, is about point spreads and money lines and prop bets and parlays.

And, you know, one statistic I came across that I thought was really alarming was that almost a third of 11-year-old boys say that they have gambled in the past year in America.

you had an early win you were up what was it 20 bucks 20 bucks on the first night yeah which maybe the worst worst thing that could have possibly happened to me because I was all of a sudden filled with irrational confidence that I could win a ton of money as a gambler oh my god but but it kind of went south pretty fast yes you want you you won just three out of your first 14 bets but then somehow you had irrational exuberance and you still thought you could gain the system.

Why is that?

That's kind of funny.

Well, you know, I think this is something inherent to the psychology of gambling, right?

Which is the these, this industry thrives on people believing that they are the exception, right?

That they are the ones that are going to be able to beat the odds, beat the house, make money doing this when almost nobody does.

And I think this is important to know.

Early on in my gambling experiment, I called up Nate Silver, a famous statistics wonk, who has done a lot of polling analysis, and more recently, he has done a lot of gambling stuff.

He plays poker professionally, he gambles on sports.

I asked him, if I'm starting with $10,000, how much would I have to win to count this as a good season?

Right?

Like what would be an impressive season for my gambling experiment?

And he was almost kind of confused by my question.

He was like, no, you don't understand.

If you win one penny, that makes you better than 98% of gamblers.

Almost nobody wins at this, and yet we all believe we're gonna be the exception.

- Yeah, how is that possible?

How is it that nobody can win?

- Well, the whole kind of economy of online sports betting in particular is very deliberately rigged against the recreational better, right?

For one thing, for every bet that you make, the sportsbooks essentially charge you 4.5%, which means that after you pay that and you pay taxes on your winnings, you actually need to win 55% of your bets to break even.

It's not just enough to win most of your bets.

And then there are all these other little things that the sportsbooks do to kind of make sure that the average gambler is losing.

So for example, you can bet on live games as they're happening.

If you watch any given NBA game, NFL game, the line on your app on that game is constantly moving fluctuating based on what's happening on the field or the court.

But if you're watching from home on TV, you might not realize that you're watching on a 20 to 30 second delay.

The sports books have a live data feed on what's happening in the game.

And so you're essentially betting against somebody who lives 30 seconds in the future.

And so there are a hundred little things like this where, you know, that ensure that the industry is almost always winning.

And yet again, they're so good at making you think that you're going to be able to defy the odds.

And they do it in insidious ways, right?

So like if you go a couple of days, for example, without gambling, they will send you something called a reload bonus or a no sweat bet, basically enticing you back to the app saying, "Hey, we'll give you free credits on our app to keep you gambling."

Right?

Or if you lose your next bet, we'll just refund you with more credits that you can use for your next bet.

When did you realize, "Oh, you know, Bishop might have had a point here.

Maybe this is not the fun, detached intellectual exercise that I thought this might be."

When did you start to notice?

I mean, honestly, it was just within a few weeks that I realized it was bleeding into my personal life.

I mean, I very quickly was hiding in the bathroom or in the kitchen pantry to put my bets in so that my kids wouldn't see me gambling on my phone.

I was routinely staying up well past midnight to watch the games that I was betting on and then staying up even later looking through DraftKings or FanDuel for more bets, which meant that I was then sleeping in later, I was less present with my family, my wife started to get annoyed that I wasn't, you know, available in the mornings to help with the kids.

And we got into an argument, I think, around October.

And that was one of the first moments where I realized, oh, this isn't just affecting me, it's affecting the people around me.

And it really just got worse from there.

The truth is, even as I recognized that it was having an effect on my relationships, that it was making me more distracted, more irritable, less present.

I also didn't want to stop.

I mean, you could have told you could have told me right then.

We're calling off the story, you know, the assignments over, and I would have been I would have wanted to keep going.

It pretty quickly that this was not just a journalistic exercise anymore.

It was becoming more of an obsession.

It sounds like an addiction.

It sounds like you know it's having a harmful effect on you, but you keep doing it anyway.

You keep thinking you can stop anytime I want.

And you need more and more of the thing in order just to feel okay.

That definitely happened to me.

I remember when I first started, I was putting about $100 on any given game.

But what happens is, after a while, you need more action to feel the kind of adrenaline rush of the bet.

So then it was $200.

Then it was $300.

By the end, I was betting $500 on a game.

And I was doing increasingly reckless bets, multi-leg parlays, crazy long-shot prop bets that had very little chance of paying off.

But the fact that it was so risky made it more exciting, right?

And most studies suggest that around 3% to 5% of people who gamble online will eventually become gambling addicts.

A much greater number will exhibit compulsive behaviors like I was, and it will start to bleed into their lives.

- Well, let me just bring in what the companies say about themselves.

This is the, these are statements that we pulled from their sites.

The FanDuel says it's, "Committed to ensuring that every customer has access to the right tools and support," and that it encourages users to, "Be aware of their betting habits and monitor their spending."

DraftKing says, "It's more fun when it's for fun," and urges people to only bet what you can afford.

And it says, they say they offer tools like limits and self-exclusion.

And when you hear those statements alongside your reporting, how do you assess that?

Are those effective?

The tools are effective if the customers use them, but they're not required to use them.

And I will say that even as somebody who came to this as a complete novice, signed up for these apps, I wasn't even aware that these tools existed until several months into my reporting.

Once I was really looking into it, I interviewed some executives at FanDuel and DraftKings.

I was made aware of all these tools and they're great.

I would not say that they lead with them.

I would not say that if you pull up the app on any given day, it's telling you to slow down, to be careful.

And look, I don't want to be too cynical here.

I actually think that these companies do want to be good corporate citizens.

What they told me was that they don't want money from gambling addicts, that they do just fine with just regular people who are having fun as recreational gamblers.

And I think they believe that, but running up against a basic economic reality of sports betting, which is that the overwhelming majority of their profits and revenues come from the 10% of people who gamble the most.

And so what that means is that they don't have a super strong economic incentive to kick people off their platforms who are gambling a lot maybe to excess because that's how they make all their money.

It sounds to me though, then that's a regulatory problem.

Are policymakers kind of catching up to this?

Yeah, I think they are, finally.

I mean, it's been a while.

I interviewed a member of Congress named Paul Tonko, he's a Democrat from New York, who has been on this issue for four or five years at this point.

And he came at it through the lens of addiction.

He is on the Addiction Recovery Caucus in the House of Representatives.

and what he said to me was, "Look, these gambling companies are delivering a known addictive product.

They should be regulated as such.

We shouldn't, you know, rely on them to self-regulate when they are making money off an addiction."

Now, not everybody who uses these apps are addicted, of course, but there are a whole menu of regulatory options that could be embraced to tackle these issues.

So let's talk about you again.

How deep in the hole did you wind up at the end of it?

I mean, the Atlantic Center are going to spot you 10 grand.

How much did you really lose?

I returned to them about $120.

The morning after the Super Bowl, I sat down at my desk and I looked through all my wagers and realized I had basically lost everything.

And realizing that I didn't want to stop gambling that even though the experiment was supposed to be over, I was now looking at the March Madness odds.

And I was looking at, you know, the predictive markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, I realized that the temptation was not going to go away.

And so I actually signed what's called a self exclusion form, which is available in pretty much every state that has online gambling.

And if you sign it, you submit it to the state and they cut off your access to online sports books, the sports books shut down your account, they are legally not permitted to take your money, and so yeah, I put yourself on the wagon.

That's right.

And I, you know, I've often wondered if I had won that night, if I had ended up $5,000 up, which is what would have happened if the Patriots had won.

Would I still have signed a self exclusion form?

I like to believe that I would, but I honestly don't know.

You mentioned Kalshi, and Polymarket.

People can essentially bet on everything from elections to the weather.

Do you think that there's something that needs to happen there?

Yeah, no, to me, the prediction markets are in some ways kind of the logical end point of the sports betting explosion in America, right?

That we have taken the logic of gambling and the ease of online gambling and now extended it to everything else in American life, right?

Culture, art, politics, war.

And I think it's really dangerous.

I think that the fact that you can gamble on whether a nuclear bomb will be detonated somewhere in America before the end of the year or how many people will be deported or whether Gaza will experience a famine or, you know, all these kind of very serious grave life or death issues is, is I think, morally repugnant, but also, the danger is that it kind of invites corruption, right?

It invites people with insider knowledge, military insiders, political insiders, to cash in on their insider knowledge.

And maybe even more dangerously, they could start manipulating public events to cash in on poly market bets.

And, you know, who's to say that some military insider won't place a bet on poly market that a missile will strike somewhere in Tehran on a certain date and then make sure that that happens, right?

That this is where I think we need the most urgent regulation is on these prediction markets because it is truly a wild west.

They're completely unregulated.

And I think they're kind of a disaster in the making.

- McKay Coppins, thank you so much for talking with us.

- Thank you.