- Very honored to introduce a fellow journalist here.

As he said, Alex Shepard is the senior editor of The New Republic.

Where he's covered politics and culture since 2015.

And that’s been such a boring period.

I don't know how he's found anything to cover or write about.

I mean it really hasn't been much going on in politics.

You know, lately.

So, yeah, so very busy with that topic.

You could, you could see him online with, some of his recent title headlines that he's had, J.D.

Vance just gave us a preview of Trumpism without Trump and also the Nobel Peace- The Nobel Prize in literature is boring now.

So the wide range of topics that he covers and he also, talking with him has had an interest in sports betting, you know, coming out of Covid.

Noticing going places and seeing the rise in people on their phones and rather than just watching the sports, actually placing bets and wanted to look into what that impact has been.

So he'll be sharing more on that.

In addition to his role at New Republic, you might recognize him from some of his regular appearances providing political analysis and commentary for MSNBC.

Sirius XM, and CBS radio, and he also covers politics and sports for Sky news.

And then outside of politics, he is the co-host of Mister Difficult, which is a podcast about contemporary authors.

And he's the co-founder of Full Stop, which is a literary review focusing on works in translation.

And it, typically features debut authors and those that are ignored by mainstream publications.

So check that out too.

And Alex is a New Yorker, grew up in Binghamton area and now lives in, Brooklyn area.

But he's also no stranger to Northeast Ohio.

He did go to college here and graduate, with an English degree from Oberlin College.

And, so he's familiar with the area, and we're glad to have him back here to speak with us in northeast Ohio.

So please join me in welcoming Alex Shepard.

- Thank you so much for having me As, was just mentioned, Northeast Ohio has a special place in my heart.

Though I hope you won’t to hold the Oberlin College thing against me.

In any case, it's a real honor to be speaking to you, today in Terry Pluto country.

Last spring, just days before the start of the 2024 Major League Baseball season, reports emerged that investigators had uncovered nearly $5 million that had just been transferred from Shohei Ohtani, the pitcher slash designated hitter hybrid who had just signed a mammoth deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers to a bookmaker who was the subject of a federal probe to say that the story caused an earthquake in the world of sports would be an understatement.

Ohtani was, and still very much is, baseball's biggest star, a generational talent who may very well be the best player since Babe Ruth.

And yet here he was, embroiled in a scandal that threatened to undo his career and jeopardize the integrity of a sport that had only recently rebounded from the long aftermath of a steroid scandal that had tainted the reputation of many of the best players of the late 90s and early 2000s.

Everywhere you turned ESPN sports radio and especially social media, there was fevered speculation about what exactly was happening.

Was Ohtani throwing games like the Chicago White Sox team, immortalized today as the Black Sox that threw the 1919 World Series?

Would he follow in Pete Rose's footsteps and be banned from baseball for gambling?

When the Los Angeles Dodgers fired Ohtani’s translator, Ippei Mizuhara, and alleged that he had stolen more than $15 million from Ohtani, there is more than a little eye rolling.

The story seemed far fetched.

Mizuhara owed everything to Ohtani, who he called his brother and said he spent more time with him than he did with his own wife.

Just weeks earlier.

The two had been spotted goofing around together during a pre-season trip to Japan, and how could anyone not realize they were missing $15 million?

As a story, it was irresistible.

Its central character was practically Homeric, stoical, square jawed and divinely talented.

He was a throwback in an era of oversaturation.

He was so publicity averse that shortly before the scandal broke, there was rabid speculation over the name of his dog Not so long ago his mythic qualities harken back to an older era before scandal tainted baseball.

Now they suddenly seemed more insidious, the gargantuan sum hovering over everything $15 million only made it seem more fantastic.

Its stakes were certainly existential, and threatened the future of one beloved if embattled institution, professional baseball, and one that was the personification of pure evil, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

But its consequences would be limited to a game if there was a tragedy.

It seemed more Greek than human.

We were either witnessing the downfall of a flawed hero, or perhaps that hero's betrayal by his mortal aide de camp.

In any case, it all seemed to be happening on a different plane of reality than the one that the rest of us occupy.

But when a criminal complaint was filed against Mizuhara a few weeks after the story broke, it told a different story.

Mizuhara wasn't a fall guy.

He was an addict.

Criminal complaints are a bit like addiction.

We're conditioned by film and TV.

You expect them to be thrilling in practice.

They're always tedious and repetitive.

But the story of Mizuhara’s addiction, as told through messages to his bookie included in that complaint, is worth dwelling on, if you'll bear with me.

These came from a, helpful summary done by the defectors Barry Petchesky.

On January 2nd, 2022, Mizuhara asked his bookmaker for a bump and increase in his line of betting credit because he had maxed out with losses.

Reload my account, he asked.

I lost it all.

On January 15th, Mizuhara saw a credit increase.

F I lost it all lol.

Can you ask the bookmaker if you can bump me 50k?

This will be my last one for a while if I lose it.

On November 14th, Mizuhara wrote, I'm terrible at this sports betting thing huh lol, any chance you can bump me again?

As you know, you don't have to worry about me not paying.

On December 9th, Mizuhara wrote, can you bump me last 200?

I swear on my mom this will be the last ask before I pay it off once I get back to the states.

Sorry for keep on asking.

These go on and on.

Like this.

On April 10th, the federal government unsealed that complaint that included those messages and announced that Mizuhara had accepted a plea deal.

That evening, Ohtani went one for three in a loss against the twins.

If the plea bargain received considerable media attention, it was only because it provided a sense of finality to a story that had long since been settled.

Baseballs greatest player had been taken advantage of by a devious confidant who betrayed his trust and robbed him, robbed him blind, then squandered his fortune, all without his knowledge.

If conspiracy theories continued to proliferate, they hardly mattered.

As far as the US government and Major League Baseball were concerned, the case was closed.

Shohei Ohtani was innocent.

When I first opened the complaint against Mizuhara, I knew and accepted all of this.

None of the details in it were shocking.

What surprised me was my reaction, for weeks, Mizuhara had been a figure of fun to me and my friends.

Somebody to joke about.

Now I found myself pitying a man who had stolen millions of dollars from one of his closest friend, the man he owed everything to.

Not only that, I recognized him.

I don't know what it's like to befriend a superstar athlete.

I don't know what it's like to lose $15 million.

I am lucky enough to not live with an addiction.

I grew up in a small rustbelt city in central New York that isn't so different from Akron, though, one that has been ravaged by alcohol, opioids, and fentanyl.

Media coverage of the, Mizuhara scandal understandably focused on everything that made it extraordinary, namely Shohei Ohtani and his $15 million.

But when you omit those details and most of Mizuhara’s messages to his dealer, do what you're left with is something uncomfortable but utterly unremarkable a familiar, even mundane portrait of addiction.

The lengths that Mizuhara went to, to support his are undoubtedly remarkable, but the broad outline is familiar.

Over the last few years I've talked to many people, most of them young men, who are struggling with gambling addiction, and a lot of them sound like Ippei There seem to be more of them every year.

I'm sure that some of you are already arguing with me.

Mizuhara wasn't using DraftKings or FanDuel, the two most ubiquitous sports gambling apps, neither of which would have allowed him to lose so much money.

Regardless of where he was getting it from.

He not only wasn't gambling legally, but he was placing bets in one of the handful of states that still has restrictions on sports gambling.

California for as long as human beings have been wagering on things, which is to say, forever, there have been, Ippei Mizuhara’s gambling addiction, like drug and alcohol addiction, hasn't just been with us since the dawn of civilization.

It's part of who we are.

It's a particularly vicious sickness because it is so human.

Few alcoholics think they can solve their problems by drinking, but many gamblers are convinced that the simple, simple solution to all of theirs, all of the ones that are caused by gambling is more gambling.

All they need is a run of good luck.

Gambling is now unique in another way.

A fentanyl addict cannot get fentanyl delivered to his phone, but a gambling addict can.

And they can do so legally via apps like DraftKings or FanDuel.

So I'm here really to talk about the legacy of Murphy versus the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The 2018 Supreme Court decision that made those apps possible by allowing states to legalize sports gambling.

I started with Ippei’s story, however, because I think it would be a mistake to think that the problem is limited to those apps because it would suggest an equally simplistic solution.

Just get rid of the apps.

It would, moreover, imply that we could simply return to the world as it was before Murphy.

But the story of legalized gambling in America is already bigger than FanDuel.

It's now the story of a culture where gambling is ubiquitous and intertwined with sports at every level.

Bookmakers have partnered with every major sports league in the country.

Their advertisements are inescapable in sports media.

To watch a game, whether you're on the couch or in the stands, just to be reminded constantly that you could be gambling, maybe that you should be gambling.

It's also the fear that the game you're watching has been compromised by nefarious forces in some ways, and that its outcome is serving the needs of someone sitting on a field.

Just on my way here, I was talking to my Uber driver and he just said, yeah, it's all rigged now.

And I think that that's the kind of thing that you hear all the time now, Ippei’s story, thankfully, is not that, but it does illustrate how easily the integrity of sports can be questioned and how even honest athletes are sometimes unknowingly, intimately connected to gambling.

None of this was true before Murphy.

It's inescapable now.

Not so long ago, betting on sports required a bit of effort.

A decade ago, if you wanted to legally place a bet on sports, whether it was on the Super Bowl or a regular season Browns versus Bengals games, you'd have to travel to Las Vegas, Atlantic City or Tribal land.

The 1992 Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act, passed by Congress banned wagering on sports anywhere else unless you were betting on dog racing or Jai alai, which were exempted from the federal ban for reasons I was not able to determine while working on this talk.

I think you can still bet on both of those things.

When new Jersey passed a law legalizing sports gambling in 2012 and then sued the federal government when it was prevented from doing so, the NCAA, the MLB, the NFL, the NBA and the NHL hit back amateur and professional sports are an integral part of American culture, particularly among the country's youth, who often look up to athletes as role models, the league said in a complaint.

Legalized sports gambling the complainants route would irreparably harm amateur and professional sports by fostering suspicion that individual plays and final scores of games may have been influenced by factors other than honest athletic competition that the games are rigged, in other words.

But when New Jersey's suit reached the Supreme Court six years later, the court was unmoved.

The floodgates were open.

Today, sports betting is completely illegal, and only four states Georgia, Hawaii, South Carolina and Utah is trying to think what those states have in common and couldn't come up with anything.

But let me know after the talk.

If you do, it's fully legal in 38.

In most states in, for instance, California and Texas, where, sports betting is partially legal, there are easy ways around it.

Your push towards apps that they claim are games of skill.

So you can only do parlays, which are the hardest bets to succeed on.

Basically the ones that are the best for casinos and sportsbooks.

Every single one of the leagues.

I mentioned earlier that petitioned the Supreme Court to block sports gambling, are now aligned with bookmakers, be a lucrative, in some cases, multibillion dollar partnerships.

Americans bet nearly $1.5 billion on last year's Super Bowl alone, and more than twice that money on March Madness.

I'm here to talk about sports, but thanks to sites like Call Sheet and Polymarket, you can now vote on just about anything.

I was watching CNN this morning and they had Polymarket odds for the new Jersey governor's race, I believe, on the screen.

But you can bet on the 2028 presidential election.

You could bet on Ohio's own JD Vance if you wanted to.

Or the 2026 Oscars, you should bet on ‘One Battle After Another’ if you do, the total number of Spotify streams Taylor Swift's new album.

People were betting on that last week.

You could bet on who will win the National Book Award in translated literature.

And I can't tell you who won that one.

1% of the population, 2.5 million people, now meets the criteria for a severe gambling problem, as determined by the National Council on Problem Gambling.

An estimated 5 to 8 million people show signs of mild or moderate gambling problems.

Research in America and abroad has long shown a disturbing correlation between gambling addiction and suicide attempts, and there are troubling correlations between gambling and other societal woes like binge drinking, drug abuse, and especially domestic violence and child abuse, as well.

These findings largely align with those from other countries, especially those, that legalized sports gambling before the United States, most notably the United Kingdom, where a lot of the best, societal, sorry, social research is being done, and especially in the Guardian, some of the best reporting, it's easy to understand why sports gambling spread so widely, so quickly here in America.

That is, states, whether they be big or small, deep red, deep blue or somewhere in between are pretty much all cash strapped.

Raising taxes is rarely, if ever, popular, regardless of the rationale.

And as soon as sports gambling was legalized, an army of lobbyists mobilized, promising a frictionless way to pay for teachers and roads without going through the trouble of raising taxes, Democrats and Republicans alike welcomed an influx of money and shrugged off the societal problems that were attached to it.

They were abstractions not only that, but the lobbyists working for the apps promised that technology would fix the problem.

There were built in mechanisms to identify problem gamblers, they said, and get them to stop before they reached the moment of crisis.

For leagues, legal gambling provided a new source of revenue in an era of cord cutting.

Not only that, it offered an enticement to fans who were being pulled in hundreds of different directions in a, a fracturing attention economy.

It offered a reason to stay invested in sports and to pay attention when you could be watching an endless stream of 30 second videos, the promise of more attention, and most importantly, more money was enough to override concerns about integrity.

For sports media, gambling was welcomed for similar reasons.

It's hard to maintain attention in the social media era, and gambling came with the promise of a virtuous cycle.

It would bring fans in and broadcasters could keep them by offering a constant stream of commentary not just about gambling, but about how to be a better gambler.

If ESPN and CNBC had little in common in 2012, it's hard to shake the sense that they're not so different now.

As with stock tips, gambling media always comes with a disclaimer that's aimed less at discouraging the viewer than indemnify the commentator and the network.

You're always told it's not real advice.

Basically, it's still what's being offered is often financial advice.

Or it is that as much as it is sports commentary and a lot of sports media now carries a hint, and sometimes more than a hint of the get rich quick.

Yeah, you get rich quick schemes that have always been at the heart of American culture.

Pay close attention and we’ll help you make a fortune easily.

Today, it's shocking to encounter any media outlet that doesn't push gambling in some way.

I like a lot of younger men, listen to a lot of sports podcasts, and anecdotally, as I was working on this, I looked at the 12 I listened to most frequently.

And only one.

So these cover basketball, football, baseball and soccer.

Sorry to any hockey fans out there.

I'm not among you, but only one.

The Guardian's Football Weekly podcast doesn't contain ads for gambling everywhere else.

It was everywhere.

Still, it's anecdotal.

Still, even if you're not listening to a podcast that is sponsoring it by a sports book or watching a show on the SEC channel devoted to prop bets, you might be consuming pro gambling content, even live sports are infected with subtle reminders that you could and maybe should be gambling.

I love to harp on the rise of the statistic I hate the most, which is win probability.

As a great example of how sports gambling has changed sports media.

I hope I'm not bringing up raw memories by invoking the Major League Baseball playoffs.

But if you watch the Guardians unfortunate wild card series, you saw a graph popping up showing win probability a team.

It's it's a stat that theoretically tells us nothing that already is an obvious a team that's up, say, six to nothing in the top of the seventh has a pretty good chance of winning a tie game in the same period.

Favors the better team, though that might be tempered slightly by details like who the home team is, or the strength of the bullpen of the weaker team.

All things that any literate sports fan knows, any casual sports fan can tell you who is most likely to win a game at any point, basically, because that information is contained in the score itself.

Still, win probability has started popping up because it's a nudge for committed gamblers, even if it's worse than useless for most casual fans, it's carefully calibrated to activate a degenerate impulse the sense that a game that seems like it's going one way could take an improbable turn out of nowhere.

It's not there to inform viewers, but to get people to gamble.

It's the only reason it's there.

Less than a decade into the era of widespread sports, widespread legal sports gambling, there are already myriad signs that leagues shouldn't have waved concerns about its effect on the integrity of their sports, John T Porter, a benchwarmer for the Toronto Raptors, was banned for life after he was found to have limited his party participation in games and intentionally missed a shot on behalf of prop bettors Tucipita Marcano, a Venezuelan utility infielder, was banned for life after he was found to have bet more than $150,000 on sports while recovering from injury and most recently here in Cleveland.

You have the case of Emmanuel Clase, who, is expected to be banned for life based on sports gambling, although the full details of that are not public yet.

In the case of Luis Ortiz, who's also part of that probe as well, it seems like the case is similar to Porter, that essentially he was throwing pitches to intentionally help prop bettors, outside of the United States, the world of soccer has been rocked by even more high profile gambling scandals, including one in which several young Italian stars were ensnared by organized crime after racking up gambling debts.

Even if American sports hasn't been hit by a comparable scandal, let alone one on par of a thrown World Series a la the 1919 black socks.

It's already clear that questions of gambling routinely affect the way that sports are perceived.

You just hear the term rigged being thrown around constantly.

Gambling may be affecting performance in another subtle but insidious way.

Fans routinely abuse athletes after their bets don't hit, leading some to claim a deleterious impact on their mental health and, relatedly, their performance.

Coaches, athletes and officials referees are now subjects of unrelenting abuse, much of it related or directly related to gambling.

After the 2023 March Madness tournaments, the NCAA released findings that showed 1 in 3 athletes reported being abused on social media during the tournament.

These are teenagers, for the most part, they're doxed.

They're threatened often over the relatively innocuous and immaterial statistics that dictate prop betting the spread, how many rebounds you get blocked shot, an errant free throw attempt, decisions that should be applauded.

For instance, a running back for a team that's leading by three points with less than a minute to go, stopping short of the goal line to to ensure that his team can milk some clock and guarantee a victory, now often leads to torrents of vicious, hateful and often racist vitriol.

I spoke to one rising MMA fighter not a star, but a sort of mid mid tier fighter.

Not a household name who showed me his phone shortly after a fight and his direct messages contained hundreds of DMs, many of them threatening nearly all about bets that didn't take.

This is commonplace now.

Athletes are told to kill themselves for screwing up parlays, single bets.

that includes several wagers that pay off only if all of them hit.

If they drop a pass or fail to get on base, they're told to kill themselves.

They're threatened with physical and sexual violence.

Their families are threatened.

I get everything, New York Knicks glue guy Josh Hart told The Athletic earlier this year.

People say, I hope you die.

They wish injury, racial stuff.

Gabby Thomas, the Olympic sprinter, said she was followed around by a man shouting abuse at her, all because of a bet that didn't hit.

We get threats and we get called names, said Denver Nuggets forward Kyle Kuzma.

People never think about like, maybe they're bad at picking the parlays.

It's it's a funny quote, but it gets at something that's instrumental about the current moment, specifically about how gambling and technology are intertwined and how each exacerbates the ills of the other, the speed of gambling, the intensity of gambling.

They've increased exponentially.

We've fundamentally changed the way people gamble.

Harry Levant, the director of gambling policy with the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University, told The Washington Post earlier this year.

Social media creates this idea of anonymity.

We shouldn't be quite so surprised when we see an increase in the number of people demonstrating antisocial behavior.

Social media enables and often encourages antisocial behavior, which is then further inflamed by gambling.

The technology that allows fuming losers to harass athletes has been carefully honed to exacerbate their addictions.

Gambling apps work in pretty much the same way that apps like Facebook or X do.

They're designed to keep you coming back, and once you're there to keep you there as long as possible, they deliver nudges and incentives to gamble, and the palpable sense that you're missing out on something special when you're not.

Those nudges nearly always push you towards bet with that's with huge payoffs and sky high odds, most notably parlays that rarely ever hit.

Even when they do, these apps make it significantly harder to withdraw money than they do to deposit funds to deposit money on one of these apps.

I was just doing this earlier.

You usually have to complete a couple of steps you may make click twice.

Taking that money out, however, is almost always more complicated.

If you're lucky enough to come out on top, it usually takes 4 or 5 times as many steps to withdraw funds than it does to deposit them.

Excuse me.

And while you're trying to take the money out, you're being nudged to stake those winnings on another wager.

Be possible for me to get a glass of water?

Actually.

I'm sorry.

Sorry to Marco Rubio.

My talk.

I thought I could make it through 18 pages.

I won't duck, though.

I promise.

Thank you so much.

Now I guess I did duck.

It's the one thing you're not supposed to do.

It's easy to place a bet for many.

Sorry.

It's easy to place a bet, but for many, it's very hard to stop.

The Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling saw a 91% spike in calls in 2022, the first year the state had legalized gambling.

New Jersey's Council on Compulsive Gambling found similarly disturbing results.

Calls to Its hotlines have tripled since gambling was legalized by the Supreme Court.

Young men, those 18 to 30 in this case, are particularly susceptible to gambling and show signs of addiction at significantly higher rates than those in other age cohorts, which also means that it's a disorder that is destroying lives before they really get a chance to start.

The problems aren't limited to problem gambling.

Research from across the globe shows a clear and alarming correlation between gambling and other serious issues.

Women who gamble regularly were four times more likely to abuse alcohol than those who don't.

Men are three times more likely.

Rates of drug abuse are roughly similar.

And research has shown that problem gambling has a significant correlation with spousal and child abuse, and that incidents of domestic violence are 10% higher in states with legal gambling in the wake of upset losses than they are in states without it.

Suicide rates are often under discussed in the larger conversation about legalized gambling, but they're serious and troubling.

As many as half of all Americans who have sought treatment for gambling addiction say that they've contemplated killing themselves.

And some studies have found that as many as 1 in 5 pathological gamblers will attempt suicide, a rate that far outpaces other addictive disorders.

And the second only to the suicide rate of people with serious affective mood disorders like schizophrenia.

One explanation for that figure is that unlike drug or alcohol addiction, gambling addiction has no clear physical symptoms.

Extreme financial distress and anxiety is a burden that can be hidden in ways that other dependencies can't.

And many carry it until it's too late.

It's also a problem that I think speaks to our contemporary moment in a number of other ways.

As a millennial, I've been on the receiving end of a lot of generational opining, so I'm going to try to resist the temptation to generalize about people younger than myself.

I do think, however, that sports gambling gets at the heart of a lot of the ills of the current moment, nearly all of which have been brought about or exacerbated by technology.

Status and wealth have always been central.

But this is an era where both are flaunted in a way that does feel novel.

It's also one where wealth confers status in many ways.

Influencer culture revolves around ostentatious, ostentatious displays built around massive wealth that have, and that wealth is often accumulated not by hard work or ingenuity, but by being online.

There's a pervasive sense that the internet is now something akin to California in 1848.

There's gold in those hills.

You just have to be there to find it.

Hustle culture and the internet, meanwhile, have transformed just about everything we encounter or consume into an opportunity to make money.

Sports are no different.

If you're watching sports and not gambling, you're losing money.

That's the message that you get from pro gambling influencers and from sports media.

All of that feeds a huge driver of gambling addiction, which preys on dopamine levels in a way that is astonishingly human.

We are all residents of a planet where life is chaotic and uncontrollable.

Gambling is addictive because it gives us the rush of feeling like we're masters of reality, that we're benefiting from that randomness and chaos instead of being at the mercy of it.

In an era of wage stagnation and the hollowing out of stable middle class jobs, it's also easy to see the pull of something that offers a path to economic self-sufficiency.

I don't think it's accidental that most experts agree that problem gambling increased dramatically during the pandemic, a time of heightened anxiety, economic stagnation and decreased social cohesion.

Leagues fell in love with sports gambling because it ensnares casual fans.

And theoretically at least, it can make any game matter to a viewer.

But an era of decreased social cohesion and cultural and increased cultural fragmentation, sports are one of the few things that can bring us together.

Gambling threatens that, too.

Sports are an important under discussed part of social cohesion, particularly in an era of cultural homogenization and increased political partizanship.

Economic changes have, for good and ill, blurred regional distinctions in a number of different ways.

But it does still matter if you root for the Jets or the Giants.

I'm a bills fan, for what it's worth.

But don't talk to me about that, please.

Right now.

Or it matters if you root for the Bengals or the Browns and certainly the Ravens or the Browns.

But by adding stakes to individual parts of games, the number of rebounds that Evan Mobley grabs or how many field goals he attempts.

Fans attention is divided in a way that I think has subtle consequences.

Fans are encouraged to gamble on players and teams that are rivals of the team that they support, in a way that I think diminishes their connection to their teams.

I go to a handful of Knicks games every year, and over the last few years, I've seen an increase of young men decked out in orange and blue, who are cheering when an opposing team hits a field goal.

And it's because one of their parlays just hit, and it drives me crazy if you can't tell.

If it's not already clear, I find this personally annoying.

But as someone who frets about community bonds and social cohesion, I think it does matter.

So where do we go from here?

Despite the clear, irrefutable wealth of research showing that, that legalized gambling has had significant negative impact on American life, it's not a question enough people are asking.

Leagues and media organizations are raking in too much money.

They don't want to jeopardize vital income streams.

It's worth noting that the two largest sports media organizations in the country, ESPN and The New York Times, which owns The Athletic, have both done admirable and significant reporting about the American gambling epidemic.

But it's undeniable that that reporting pales in comparison to the pro gambling output that both outlets produce.

It exceeds that kind of journalism.

Politicians are seemingly just as disinterested in what could fairly be described as an epidemic.

Here, too, you can follow the money and get an answer that tells almost the whole story.

The revenue that states receive from gambling is a pittance compared to what sportsbooks rake in, but it's far from insubstantial.

No one wants to jeopardize an income stream that pays for services.

More than that, no one wants to have to replace it with tax increases.

There's another story here as well.

And though it involves politics, I'll try to tell it without getting too political.

But not so long ago, both parties had sizable constituencies and sensibilities that made them approach legalized gambling cautiously, if not with outright hostility.

For Republicans, there were moral grounds to oppose it, especially among Christian conservatives suspicious not only a vice but a vocations that made a mockery of the virtues of hard work and discipline.

For Democrats, it was an affront to a egalitarian principles, and it redistributed money from the poor to the most avaricious of big businesses casinos.

Although the general character of both parties is still broadly similar to what it was a half century ago, the parties themselves are significantly diminished to where they were in the years after World War Two.

They're what political scientist Sam Rosenfeld and Danny Schlozman have called hollow parties, unable to effectively organize their voters, or, in many case, their politicians, to achieve specific ends.

As a result, they are susceptible to highly motivated interest groups like, for our purposes, a gambling lobby that tells them what they want to hear.

It is, in other words, harder than ever for politicians to act in the public interest.

That is true in the case of gambling that it is in other policy areas, because young, even though young men are disproportionately harmed by gambling addiction, gambling is very popular with young men.

The 18 to 30 cohort is coveted by both parties.

The last election was decided in part because of the influence of the podcasters and YouTubers in the so-called manosphere, where sports gambling is very popular and certainly more popular than electoral politics.

Gambling regulation would risk blowback in these spaces, and with young men at risk, neither party seems eager to take.

That may be changing, however.

For all the talk of polarization, public opinion is still elastic and malleable, and there are signs that it is shifting on gambling.

Today, 43% of American adults say legal sports betting is a bad thing for society.

Up from 34% in 2022.

And 40% of adults now say it is a bad thing for sports.

Up from 33%.

The number of young men who feel the same way is even higher 47% a figure that is almost double what it was just three years ago, when only 22% agreed.

Still, sports gambling isn't going anywhere.

Even as public opinion shifts.

It is still backed by an incredibly powerful lobby and supported by the commissioners of every major sports league, collegiate and professional in the country.

Although players unions are speaking out more about the abuse they suffer as a direct result of legalized gambling, they aren't demanding a change that would cost athletes money to.

Even if there was a shift in one of several, one or several of those areas.

There is the little problem with the fact that the door to legalized sports gambling was opened by the Supreme Court.

Even if a Congress that cannot keep the government funded, or to somehow pass a ban on legal sports gambling, which is not going to happen, it's unlikely that the nation's highest court would feel any differently today or next year, or any time in the foreseeable future, than it did in 2018.

Ippei Mizuhara should have been a wakeup call for the sports world.

His story showcased not only the impossibility of quarantining sports from gambling, but the inevitable, the inevitability of scandal.

In a world where gambling is permitted and ubiquitous, sports will always be brushing up against it in uncomfortable ways.

Like all near-misses, it was a warning.

In this instance, there was no evidence that baseball’s integrity, was jeopardized.

But that won't always be true, as we just saw this week with the Emanuel Clase story.

Eventually, players, maybe even star players and possibly entire teams will be compromised.

Mizuhara’s proximity to the sport matters in another way.

If he represents the failure to keep Gambling's criminal element at bay, he's also a manifestation of the impossibility of shielding sports from the human devastation that inevitably accompanies it as well.

He's hardly a sympathetic figure, but his story is still an increasingly familiar one.

Addiction and desperation led him down a dark path that he otherwise likely would have avoided.

If his fate is easy for many to write off.

One does not have to look very hard for more relatable victims of Americans gambling addiction, America's gambling addiction, people who have lost their homes and their families or who've taken their own lives.

Lives are being ruined, sometimes irreversibly.

Is that worth the quarter of $1 billion that Major League Baseball reportedly raked in the year before?

Mizuhara's arrest?

For the MLB, its 32 teams, its players union and the media organizations that cover them.

The answer is yes.

The discussion of legal gambling has understandably focused on that trade, off of the human misery that inevitably accompanies the hundreds of millions that flow to teams, leagues and governments after sports gambling is legalized.

That's a galling pressing problem, but it's also one that is easy for many of us to write off.

Most of us are not professional athletes or team owners.

I think, at least while gambling addiction is a growing problem.

It's still one that many of us will never experience or maybe even witness.

But it is a problem.

But there are a lot of problems going around these days, and this one is easy to dismiss as someone else's.

I think it is our problem though.

Governments and leagues all over the world now accept a certain level of devastation in exchange for millions or even billions of dollars, and the human wreckage looks pretty similar, whether you're in New York or London.

I know it's a risky thing to say during college football season in Ohio, but if you've attended a soccer game or a cricket match abroad, you know that Americans don't have a monopoly on sports fandom and they don't have a monopoly on gambling addiction either.

Still, I think that America does have a unique relationship to sports, and that gambling threatens that relationship.

For over a century, we've used football and baseball and basketball and sometimes even hockey to tell stories about who we are and what we stand for.

Many of those stories are Rockwellian.

We love sports stories that value fairness and hard work, and perhaps above all, ones where underdogs triumph in the face of adversity.

Stories that harken back to the American Revolution and the promise of a country where success is never pre-ordained or inherited, but is instead derived from merit.

It's a surprisingly malleable national story, one that has, especially in recent decades, also communicated our halting, incomplete path to racial and racial equality.

America is a nation of high school football and Jackie Robinson.

It's the land of Rocky, Hoosiers and Remember the Titans.

But we don't tell ourselves those kind of stories as much as we used to.

In Moneyball, the best sports movie of the last 15 years, our heroes, the cheapskate Oakland A's, falter in the face of the deep pocketed pinstripe New York Yankees.

This isn't rocky, and there is no winning and losing.

Just a story about how merit and hard work only take you so far when your opponent is filthy rich.

To tell us a story about sports now.

To tell a story about America now it has to be about money, greed, ambition, individualism.

These are qualities that are inseparable from our meritocratic ideas.

And they're part of America's national story, too.

But it increasingly seems like that's the only story we have now.

Gambling makes a mockery of ideals like sportsmanship, fair play, and community.

It represents two of the most insidious aspects of contemporary life the increasing atomization and financialization of society.

Sports gambling disconnects us from our communities and replaces social bonds with get rich quick schemes.

Sporting events are no longer a connection or started.

Sporting events are no longer occasions to connect with friends and family.

They're opportunities to make money, a collective experience that has been replaced by an individualistic, selfish one.

The end result is almost always the same.

The house wins.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you very much, Alex.

As you heard before, he has graciously agreed to answer some questions.

And we have a lot of them.

Let me start out with some of the influences.

So there's two different questions I'm going to focus on.

And one is how would you describe the influence, if any of professional sports teams in gambling.

And the second is a little darker.

What about organized crime?

- If I understand the question correctly, it's it's how are, teams actively participating?

- Yeah.

Well, is there a I think Is there a profit?

for sports teams.

- Oh, yeah.

Yeah, certainly.

So I mean, I think for individual players, the answer is a little more complicated.

So it's technically no.

But the way that most, sort of collective bargaining agreements are done is that players get a share of the total revenue that leagues make.

So, Most of that money comes from cable TV rights or streaming rights, now, but you're seeing a huge uptick of gambling money.

Now, that's important because the money from cable TV and streaming, although it's still gargantuan billions of dollars.

I think there's a sense that cord cutting and the kind of increased monopolization of telecom industries will make that money go down at some point, especially since, leagues were banking on things like meteoric growth in China, which seems unlikely for geopolitical reasons, even if it was already halting for cultural reasons.

So, you know, I think they always want the, the, the financial line to go up.

And so gambling is, I think, come in at a time when there's heightened anxiety, certainly when you talk to the people that work for, players unions, that, you know, this is money that I think these leagues want.

And again, you know, especially for, players who are journeymen, you know, we're making a league minimum.

I know it it feels, ridiculous to talk about somebody making about $1.2 million as being financially in a financially precarious situation, but, those numbers matter.

So I think that they are encouraging things that way.

But they want that number to keep going up, too.

So you're seeing more partnerships with, with leagues and teams that way, too.

So, you know, for instance, trying to think, I think, you know, for instance, now I can as a New York Mets fan, if I go to see Citi, another story I not want to talk about, if I go to Citi Field or they play now, you can gamble inside the stadium like they have a casino that they're building that's connected to it.

And one of the reasons for that is just that everyone wants the kind of bottom line here to go up.

I have not done a ton of reporting on the organized crime element, but you are seeing it in a lot of places.

So, I tend to go to Europe a lot, partly because I'm a soccer fan and it's nice to get to report from there.

But it's useful because they legalized sports gambling before us.

So what you see, a lot of the time is that people that get kicked off the apps or in some cases, athletes themselves who are prohibited from gambling, get connected to sort of, you know, black market bookies who almost always have ties to organized crime.

So, I brought up the case of this group of Italian players, the most notable of whom is Sandro Tonali, in part because I think it gets at some of that that, you know, there is still a pretty rich and lucrative sports gambling black market, that is controlled by organized crime.

And that once they kind of get their hooks in athletes, they tend to use them in this case, there was sort of one player who, was a gambling addict and got caught into this and the sort of the Mafia elements came to him and said, we want you to recruit other members of your team.

Which I believe is Juventus at the time.

And so all of a sudden they did that so they could, you know, get players that they could then pressure to, throw games essentially that, to the best of my knowledge, didn't happen.

But but it was a horrendous scandal.

And it's something that again, there's very much still a sort of black market for sports gambling in the U.S.

and I think it's something that does threaten, sports, particularly as, as it becomes more popular.

- Thank you.

We have another question.

You talked a little bit about how how different segments of society might approach gambling addiction and Akron, of course, is the home of Alcoholics Anonymous.

What do you see in cities around the nation regarding the funding of somewhat similar services regarding gambling addiction, and what can we do to give this issue the attention it deserves?

- That's a great question, and I know it seemed like I went on forever, but I was editing as I was talking with a sense to time.

But I cut a section on this.

So I think one of the big problems here is that, there's almost no federal funding that goes to treat gambling addiction.

So, like zero actually $0.

There are billions of dollars for drug addiction and alcoholism.

And so I think this I found some research from the National Council on Problem Gambling that said that, again, this is a slightly biased organization, but, it claimed that gambling was seven times more prevalent than other substance abuse disorders.

But it received 300% less funding.

So there's just no treatment.

Some of that is just the novelty of it.

And I think that people are still learning how to treat gambling addiction, which again, used to be fairly, geographically limited.

So I think one thing that you can say is that just funding more treatment programs would make a difference.

You're seeing, I think, a more of an effort lately, from leagues as well, to, to kind of identify problem behaviors.

So if you've been watching college football this season, the NCAA has been running an ad essentially, saying, you know, please don't, tell our athletes to kill themselves if you lose your bet.

And I think it I find it really depressing and darkly funny, but I think that, drawing attention to the kind of anti-social behavior set associated with gambling is one step.

But I think the big thing right now is that it's just, you know, a problem that needs, state and local funding.

And, you know, there are many states use the money that they get from gambling to fund treatment programs, but there are other states I can’t remember if I mentioned this in here.

There are a few states where, you know, gambling addiction programs are funded by yet by like, donation, essentially.

Like, they don't they just sort of ask people to donate money.

There's no taxpayer money that goes there.

So I think that that's just one huge area to change here.

The other is just that there needs to be more research about it.

I think some of this is, again, partly due to the novelty of the technology and the legality of the addiction.

But there just isn't a ton of, work that's being done about how to sort of prevent gambling addiction in these ways, and that that strikes me as the best way.

I mean, I should say I work at the Liberal New Republic, so I, you know, I tend to gravitate towards like, yeah, I'll use public money to fix things.

And, that's a bias that I think doesn't always work.

But in this instance, you know, I think the figure of being 300, 300%, less funding for alcohol or for gambling than alcohol and drugs suggests that if you raise that number, you might be able to at least get a head start.

And then I think from there, hopefully you'd have a better idea.

First, that local and collective ways to, to run treatment programs.

Thank you.

We have several high school students in the room.

What advice would you give to high schoolers and other young adults in the room to either avoid this or limit it, or somehow get treatment for it?

- Yeah.

I mean, I think that, I wouldn't presume to give any anyone advice, but I think one of the things that really comes across when you report on this is that people don't like to talk about gambling addiction, in part because I think it combines two things that are societally frowned upon.

Right?

It's usually financial precarity or loss and addiction.

And that's, I think, one of the biggest challenges here.

It certainly drives a lot of the kind of worst, behaviors that you see is that people hide it.

So I think that, you know, one of the issues with sports gambling is to just be aware of the sort of risk symptoms and warning signs and be open about talking about them, particularly with friends that, you certainly encounter people that are losing more than that.

They say they are trying to conceal winnings and it can be hard.

But I think that there is a, I think that it's generally frowned upon to be open about talking about those kinds of things and that sort of shifting that, makes a big difference here.

You know, I think a lot of people I mean, I should say, too, that I'm someone who bets on sports despite everything I just said.

And, and I think that, you know, it can be something that you can do.

And, you know, just from that perspective, if it is something you do, what I do is I just, you know, it's NFL season and I'll just have a set amount of money that I bet.

And I don't go over that.

That tends to work, even if I also very rarely make money.

Thank you.

We have a question that now focuses on geopolitics.

To your knowledge, are there any other nations that might be adversarial to United States that are heavily invested in sports gambling here to gain some advantage?

- That's a that's a really interesting question.

I have not looked at, actually the kind of financial structure of betting apps and I'm not I'm not sure.

I think that, so I can't answer that question in any literal way.

I mean, I think that, or at least or that betting that's based on statistics or research, I would say that I mean, this is something that we've done to ourselves.

I think, like a lot of maybe I'm getting too much into my other job as a political commentator and someone who's generally skeptical of of a lot of electoral, interference issues.

But, I think that at the end of the day, I'm sure that there are people in, for instance, Beijing looking at this, and smiling, but that this is an American problem and it's not one that, you know, we that we are brought because, you know, Russian bots were tweeting at us no one made me, you know, bet on the Buffalo Bills last week.

I did that myself.

And, and I think that that helps here.

I think it's, it helps in the way that we think about a lot of these things is, is where did this problem come from?

And what do we do about it?

And I think in this case, you know, the problem came from, I think, a blasé attitude both at the state level and the federal level as well.

- So we have met the enemy, and it is us.

You mentioned, the, the, Cleveland Guardians and Emmanuel Clase.

So we have some at least two related questions on that, one, What was your reaction when you first learned of this betting scandal?

And do you see anything unique or interesting in this, as opposed to other sports betting scandals?

You mentioned the the Black Sox scandal, and at least one audience member would like more of a background.

What is this about involving Emmanuel Clase?

- Yeah.

So the details about the Clase, case are actually fairly under wraps right now.

It's a subject of a federal investigation.

And unlike many federal investigations, they’re, they're keeping things fairly tight lipped.

But the involvement of Luis Ortiz, the other pitcher, suggests that we can probably make a couple of hypothetical, judgments.

So it seems like with Ortiz, what investigators are looking at are, a handful of pitches that were thrown that were out of the ordinary and that were associated with high levels of bet, prop betting.

So you saw this with Jontay Porter, for instance that when he got caught, it was mostly because I might be getting this wrong, but he had kind of taken himself out of a game early and a huge people that bet a huge amount of money on him playing less than 4.5 minutes and you're like, who's betting on Jontay Porter minutes anyways?

Like, that's a sign that you have a, gambling problem to begin with.

And so what they were seeing here were unusual spikes in betting volume that were associated with people betting essentially on balls and strikes, which is a big thing in baseball.

So with Clase, though, what investigators are or what reports about this investigation are saying is that it's an open and shut case.

So that may and that may mean a couple of things.

It may mean that he was, talking directly to bettors, via WhatsApp or other text messages.

It could mean that he had deliberately affected the outcome of a game.

I'm not sure.

I doubt the latter, just because we haven't seen a ton of that.

But I think, you know, most of what we're seeing here is not sort of 1919 black Sox stuff.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie Eight Men Out John Sayles movie, it's one of my favorites.

But, you know, in that instance, you had a, you know, a group of players who, were, were convinced by the Mafia to throw the 1919 World Series one of those one of the greatest teams, of all time.

And they just sort of, ate it, intentionally, and for a fairly small amount of money.

This is also a time when baseball players are making a lot less money.

And what you're seeing now is not sort of people deliberately shifting game.

So much is, you know, changing minute aspects of performance.

So in Porter's case, it's, you know, missed, missed corner three.

You know, Jontay Porter playing five minutes is not going to affect the outcome of any game.

And you can sort of see how players convince themselves that this is okay.

So.

Oh well I'm not throwing the game right.

I'm only, you know, throwing a ball when I may have thrown a ball, anyways.

But, but that's how they're getting ensnared.

And in many cases, you know, it's, it's people the, it's many cases people like Porter or Ortiz who are kind of, fringe players and folks who may not, you know, be able to count on the $20 million that Emmanuel Clase was making.

So there, you know, I think easy for, bettors to ensnare, you know, in some cases, it's because they themselves have gambling addiction problems or owe money to to bookies.

The Clase case though I think is notable because of his prominence.

I mean, he's, I think probably the biggest athlete whose facing, a significant ban that we've seen in this country.

And that suggests, again, that this problem is spreading.

And I would say to that, you know, one of the things that, that really jumps out to me when I cover the the sort of bet, the scandals involving athletes is you sort of you forget that Emmanuel Clase is about 27, 28 years old, like they're the prime age for gambling addiction.

Athletes, like, they're young men.

And, you know, it's easy.

I can't, you know, I doubt I could throw a ball 65 miles an hour.

But, you know, in many other respects, professional athletes are just like us.

And in this case, they're just as, subject to things like gambling addiction as anyone else.

- Thank you very much, Alex.

We are out of time, so I'm sorry I couldn't get to all the questions, but I'm sure Alex will still be here afterwards.

And you can ask him that.

If he were a betting man, when would the federal shutdown come to an end?

And he'll have an answer for you.

- Alex, don't go anywhere.

Alex.

Thanks for bringing that topic to life.

For us today, we we really appreciate it very much.

I'd like to invite Michael Batu up to the stage to present our signature contemplative sun to you.

This is a piece of artwork designed exclusively for Akron Roundtable by Akron Artist Don Drumm - Alex, thank you for coming to Akron Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you so much, thanks.