How a Mormon Journalist Became a Degenerate Gambler
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
I'm Caleb Bissinger. And I'm Rufus Griskam. And this is the next big idea. Today, how gambling took over America. In 2017, Americans legally bet $5 billion on sports.
Last year, that number skyrocketed to $160 billion. Roughly half of all American men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sports book like DraftKings or FanDuel. And nearly a third of 11-year-old boys have gambled in the past year. And with the rise of prediction markets like Calchi and Polymarket, Americans are now betting on everything. I started talking to my editors about doing a story about the kind of explosive growth of the sports betting industry in America and also sort of what gambling is doing to American culture.
That's McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic. His new cover story for the magazine is called My Year as a Degenerate Gambler. As the title suggests, McKay wasn't just a skeptical observer of the gambling boom. He went all in. I looked at my phone and I started to do the mental math, and I realized that I had lost $2,500 in like 13 days.
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