Below is a lightly edited, AI-generated transcript of the “First Opinion Podcast” interview with Isaac Rose-Berman. Be sure to sign up for the weekly “First Opinion Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get alerts about each new episode by signing up for the “First Opinion Podcast” newsletter. And don’t forget to sign up for the First Opinion newsletter, delivered every Sunday.
Torie Bosch: Even if, like me, you don’t follow sports, it’s been impossible to miss the explosion in sports betting in recent years. With that rise is coming a new challenge for public health.
Welcome to the “First Opinion Podcast.” I’m Torie Bosch, editor of First Opinion. First Opinion is STAT’s home for big, bold ideas from health care providers, researchers, patients, and others who have something to say about medicine’s most important and interesting topics.
This is the first episode of our spring 2026 season, and we’re trying something a little different. This season, we’ll be focused on the intersection of culture and medicine, including religion and vaccines, doctors on social media, and much more.
Today, I’m speaking with Isaac Rose-Berman. He’s a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men focused on gambling research and policy. After a quick break, I’ll bring you our conversation about why he considers sports betting a public health threat in the making.
Isaac Rose-Berman, welcome to the “First Opinion Podcast.”
Isaac Rose-Berman: Thank you for having me.
Bosch: So we’re recording this a few days before the March Madness Finals. Do you have a bracket going this year?
Rose-Berman: I do, although I got lost very early, so not still in the running.
Bosch: What was the game you lost on? Was there one that kind of took you out of the running?
Rose-Berman: I mean, it’s almost impossible to do that well so I think I was out by about the third game in terms of overall. I did have Duke winning in a couple of my brackets so that didn’t go over too well.
Bosch: And I can pretend to know what I’m talking about here, but I don’t, so I can’t share experiences. I have never done a sports bracket.
Rose-Berman: No worries whatsoever.
Bosch: So we’re talking because you recently wrote an essay for STAT, arguing that the rise of sports betting is a burgeoning health crisis. So I’d like to start by taking that argument in two steps.
First, for anyone who has somehow managed to avoid all of the commercials for DraftKings and all of other apps, can you briefly explain the recent rise in sports betting?
Rose-Berman: Yeah, so in 2018, the Supreme Court overturned this law called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which basically prevented states from legalizing sports betting and kept it in Las Vegas. They did that in 2018.
And then in the subsequent years, 40 states have now legalized sports betting. Thirty-two of them have legalized online sports betting, and a lot of it wasn’t actually just in response to that change. It was really during Covid. And so a lot of states had budget crises and this is sort of an easy way as has been the case historically with legalizing commercialized gambling. You know, you can kind of just raise a bunch of tax revenue easily without officially raising taxes on people, which is very appealing for lawmakers.
And the problem, or not necessarily the problem but the thing about that is, it’s very hard to close that [door] once you’ve opened it up. Lawmakers get really attached to that revenue. And in this iteration, we got kind of online sports gambling in a way that we haven’t really had at any point in history. You mentioned kind of the marketing blitz, right? Ten years ago, commentators wouldn’t even really talk about anything betting, and now you can’t watch a game and hear them and not hear them talk about, you know, the betting lines or hear LeBron James and Peyton Manning advertising this stuff during all the commercials. So yeah, it’s kind of everywhere and it’s happened quite quickly.
Bosch: And it’s more than just sort of who’s going to win what game, right?
Rose-Berman: Yes. So there’s all sorts of things you can bet on. Traditionally, you know, you would bet on who’s going to win a game. And that’s sort of why sports betting was seen as the least dangerous form of gambling because it was quite slow. You had this bet and you would get to watch the game for a few hours. And then maybe you’d place another bet at the end of the game.
The rise of sports betting is a growing public health crisis
Now you can bet on every single pitch, every single basket, you know, who’s going to the quarter, all of these things to really be engaged, much more kind of like a slot machine than a traditional sports betting experience.
Bosch: And it can get down to sort of really niche sports and individual players, right?
Rose-Berman: Yeah, I mean you can bet on, depending on what state you’re in, you can bet on really anything. At 2 a.m. in New Jersey, for example, you’re not going to have any MLB or NBA games to bet on. But you can pretty much always find, you know, Belarusian table tennis or Malaysian women’s volleyball. And all of that stuff is there not really because people want to bet on those sports, but because they want something to offer their users to bet on 24/7.
Bosch: So that’s the rise in sports betting part of it. What is the public health angle here exactly?
Rose-Berman: There’s a couple different parts of it. So the first thing is from a purely financial standpoint, right? Gambling is a transaction between the user and the operator. And as we all know, the house always wins in the long run. So there’s one way to view this, which is through a purely financial lens. Americans bet about $150 billion on sports last year on legal and regulated sites, which means they lost about $10 billion of that. Which is a lot of money, right?
And so you can sort of look at the result of those losses. Obviously, you know, a portion of that is going back into tax revenue and state coffers, and there’s sort of questions about how you think about the overall utility of that, but purely on sort of the financial losses side, it’s a pretty big deal. Although, you know, for reference, Americans lost $30 billion to the state lottery last year. So it’s still a lot less, and actually the distribution of revenue was much more skewed toward lower-income communities, toward minorities for the lottery than it is for sports betting, but the losses are still very concentrated. You have about 2% to 3% of the players that are accounting for 70%, 80% of the revenue depending on which sports book you’re looking at.
And obviously the sports books will often say, well, those are really rich people who can afford this and Jeff Bezos is not gonna have fun if he just bets 5 bucks on a game. He’s gonna want to bet more.
In reality, a lot of those losses end up coming from people who might not be able to afford it. And so that’s the sort of the first thing, the purely financial side.
And then the second part of it. Is the way this is sort of encroached on people’s lives and especially sort of the smartphone nature — it’s always in your pocket 24/7. The “casino in your pocket” is a bit of a cliché, but it is objectively true.
And that poses a lot of dangers for a lot of people, in particular young men, who are sort of the target demographic for this. You can imagine someone who, as I wrote in my STAT piece, perhaps hasn’t lost a ton of money, but they’re spending all of their time thinking about gambling. Whether they’re a student, they’re leaving class thinking about gambling, they’re caring about their schoolwork less, their job less, they’re not as engaged with their friends. And so that’s, I think, a lot of the danger — not just the financial side, but really the way that this kind of can take over people’s lives.
Bosch: Right, so it’s compulsive behavior and then can also, depending on financial outcomes and what it does to your social network, could also lead to suicide ideation or suicide, anxiety, depression, that sort of thing, is that right?
Rose-Berman: Yes. I mean, gambling addiction has the highest rate of attempted suicide of any addiction. And I want to be clear, you know, you said at the beginning that this is sort of a public health crisis. I think you said a “burgeoning” public health crisis. I think “burgeoning” is doing a lot of work there. Not that this is not sort of significant danger and a rising danger, but I don’t want to make it seem that, you now, every single young man is being totally devastated by these apps. And I think that’s a bit of an over-exaggeration.
But there are some real dangers here and as this becomes even more normalized and widespread those dangers do grow.
Bosch: Right, yeah, I’m so glad you clarified that because, the thing is that we’re just talking about such huge numbers here, right. And so even if it’s a relatively small percentage of people who are doing sports betting, it still becomes by merit a lot of significant number of people. Does that seem right?
Rose-Berman: Yeah, no, it’s definitely true. And I think the normalization is a big part of this, right? You simply cannot be a person engaging with sports in America today, whether you’re a young man or not, and not encounter all of this stuff. And so all of the athletes and celebrities, the influencers who are promoting it, it’s really inescapable.
And I that’s sort of the big danger — even if not everybody is losing a ton of money right now, you’re sort of creating this culture of large numbers of gamblers. It’s not going to be healthy down the road. I would tie it into the trends around gamified finance, right? I don’t think the person who’s placing a parlay on DraftKings is that different than the person who’s buying a short dated option on Tesla stock on Robinhood.
And you can see that actually directly with like, if you download or look at Robinhood now, the number one thing on their app is going to sports betting. And that’s because there are relatively lax current regulatory environment that they’re able to offer those products and services, but it’s really all part of this overall phenomenon where, you know, young people are gambling and whether that’s because of legalization of the products, or it’s because this sort of sense of financial nihilism, where maybe they feel like they can’t get ahead via sort of traditional means. So, you know, might as well try to hit it big gambling. It’s all sort of part of the same trend.
Bosch: Can you talk a little bit about the role gender plays here? So you mentioned that young men in particular are likely to be engaged in this kind of sports betting.
Rose-Berman: Yeah, so I mean, there are a few reasons for that. The first is that, you know, young men are generally wired to kind of engage in more risky behavior. The other is that they just really like sports a lot more. And so the sports betting aspect in particular sort of really skews towards young men, both because they like sports and because it kind of gets at their ego, right? You know, like they want to be smart. They want to feel like they know sports. And a lot of the marketing really appeals to that, right? This idea that you can kind of turn your sports knowledge into cold hard cash is very appealing.
But when you look at sort of the revenue distribution of other forms of gambling, like slots, for example, which make up about 70% to 80% of casino revenue, it’s actually relatively split between the genders. And so in 40 states, there’s legal sports betting, 32 have legal online sports betting. Seven states have legal online casino games and that’s a much more profitable product for the house. People lose a lot more to online casino games than they do to online sports betting. But that’s actually relatively split between men and women [but] still skews a little bit toward men. But it’s relatively even. Whereas sports betting you’re talking, you know 85% tp 90% of the users, and the revenue comes from them.
Bosch: You are yourself a young man. Do you see all of this playing out, you know, among your friends and acquaintances?
Rose-Berman: Yeah, I mean everybody, everybody bets on sports. I mean, I think like we have the surveys where it’s like, you know, roughly 50% of men between the ages of 18 and 49 kind of have an active sports betting account. We’ve just done some polling at the American Institute for Boys and Men where I work that suggests that about 30% of young men have used a sports betting app in the last month. It just is widespread, right? If you talk to young men, they will be betting on sports, or there will be people in their social circle betting on sport. And, you know, I think it runs the gamut, right. I know people for whom they’re, this is just sort of a relatively easy way for them to enjoy the game a little bit more. They place a few bucks here. It makes sports more fun to watch. And then I know other people for whom it’s a little bit more of a problem, both on the kind of compulsive use side and the financial side.
Bosch: And so I should be candid that I come at this from a personal sort of experience, which is that my father was a compulsive gambler who committed suicide in 1995 over debts and things like that. And, you know, it’s fine. It’s been 30 years. I’m OK. But certainly I, as someone with that baggage, sometimes look at all of this and I feel a little bit of moral panic, even if I try to look more at the data than things.
I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the fact that these apps are sort of supposed to have resources available for compulsive gamblers. How effective are those resources as far as you’ve been able to tell?
Rose-Berman: Well, first of all, I’m incredibly sorry to hear that. It’s a really tricky issue, because like all, not only modern technology companies, but companies in general: When you think about kind of self-regulation, it’s just weird and tricky and doesn’t really work, right?
And so one of the things about online sports betting in this country is that we rolled it out so quickly, often without really the due diligence on thinking about, OK, what actually regulation should we have in place here? What are the rules here? All of these different things.
Basically, lawmakers let the casinos write the rules and those are often very favorable to the casinos. And in terms of those guardrails, most of them are just set up by the casinos themselves, and there’s some obvious incentive problems here. As I said before, the vast majority of the revenue comes from a very small number of users. And obviously, people who are losing a lot of money are going to be much more likely to sort of have gambling problems. I’ve done some writing and reporting in the past suggesting, or not only really suggesting, sort of showing how these companies not only don’t protect those people, but often will sort of explicitly take advantage of them whether it’s like, you know, if you display these types of compulsive behaviors, you’re more likely to get bonuses or VIP hosts or someone who’s trying to continually induce you to gamble.
They do offer a lot of resources, particularly in the form of responsible gambling tools, which are basically voluntary mechanisms by which someone can restrict how much they deposit, how much time they spend on the app. The reality is that the usage rates for those are incredibly low, right? No one really sees themselves as in need of regulation. And oftentimes when they do, it’s too late. And it’s just, these are self-imposed. I think, you know, it’s not only the operator’s fault. It’s a really tricky thing, right?
It’s not an apples to apples comparison. But we don’t go to a baker and say, “hey, you know, your muffins are so delicious. People are buying so many of them and it’s really bad for them. Stop selling these muffins or only sell them to some people and not to others.” Obviously, you know, not a completely fair comparison. This is a much more addictive product.
But the point being that self-regulation just doesn’t really work. And the system that we have set up right now is not really designed to protect people, especially when the mandate both explicitly and implicitly in a lot of states for regulators is to maximize revenue, not necessarily to protect their citizens.
Bosch: Yeah, the sports publication Defector recently published a piece by an anonymous writer who says they spent several years working customer service for an online sports book, first on the front line and then sort of more behind the scenes. And they write about just what you’re talking about, that duality between the best customers being the people most at risk and how it seems really frankly impossible for self-regulation to happen in those circumstances.
Rose-Berman: I saw that piece and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve seen the inside of that, and it’s scary stuff. And it’s just the incentives aren’t really aligned.
Bosch: So if self-regulation isn’t working here, you know, as far as you can tell, are there tools that lawmakers could be using?
Rose-Berman: There are a bunch of things. So I like to sort of spend my time focusing on the ones that I think are both very politically feasible and politically popular. And some of the issues with some of kind of getting in the weeds of the apps are it’s just very difficult to regulate modern technology companies. Regulation and policymaking is always gonna lag — it just is quite tricky.
So there are two things in particular that I thing are sort of the biggest things that would improve the overall sports gambling ecosystem and sort of overall protect Americans.
The first is not even specifically about sports betting, but it’s preventing the spread of online casino. So as you know, I mentioned before the rates of addiction, the total losses from online casino are far, far higher than they are for sports betting. And modern sports books try their best to cross-sell people into the casino.
So if you are in one of the seven states with legal online casino games and you download a sports betting app, that sports betting app is gonna spend a lot of time and effort trying to get you to use the casino and to become a casino player. Whether it’s every time you place a bet, they’re gonna give you free spins, they’re going to give you special promotions, they’re are gonna have a little pop-up on the screen that’s always pushing you towards the casino. It is not a coincidence that in those states, you are able to download a casino-specific app, but you’re not able to download a sports betting-specific app. All of their sports betting apps have the casino integrated.
So I think the number one thing to protect people is to prevent the spread of online casino. I actually think a world in which we had completely unfettered, unregulated legal sports betting would be far better than one where we had regulated legal sports bedding and online casino games. Not because I want unregulated sports betting, but because one product is just so much more dangerous than the other. So that’s the first thing.
The second is just on the kind of marketing and advertising side. But I think that it’s sort of trickier to track the exact impacts of those, right? Like how does someone’s behavior change if they see, you know, three DraftKings ads a week instead of 50?
But especially when it comes to young people, the normalization is really, really problematic. And we came out with a study with Common Sense Media about a month ago, which just showed how prevalent it was among young people. How often they’re seeing this on their social media feeds, among influencers, being promoted by athletes and celebrities. And so yeah, I mean, I think you should be able to go to a baseball game and watch it, you know, as a 10-year-old or with your 10- year-old son and not be inundated with sports betting ads. I think that’s pretty popular. Most people agree with that.
Some states have proposed whistle-to-whistle bans, which is basically no sports betting or gambling ads while games are ongoing. And you know there’s precedent here, right? We did this with tobacco and the logic there basically was OK, you’re not allowed to advertise this in a way that appeals to minors or in places that large numbers of minors will end up seeing it, which it just turns out is most places, which is why you can’t really advertise cigarettes at all. Alcohol, there’s sort of stricter regulations around the marketing.
And there has been sort of some efforts at [sports betting] industry self-regulation there. So for example, at least ostensibly, they’ve tried to cut back on the no-sweat bets or risk-free signup offers, stuff that was particularly egregious. Early on in the legalization process, you had sports books doing large marketing deals with college campuses. Those have mostly been rolled back for a variety of reasons. The optics there are not good, but, but yeah, mostly this ends up being kind of industry self-regulation and that just doesn’t really work.
Bosch: And what about the public health angle? I mean, do you think that the public health apparatus, which, of course, is facing all sorts of challenges at the moment, do you that they’re taking the potential crisis here seriously?
Rose-Berman: So once again, I think you sort of have to separate the two dangers here. One is the financial side, and then one is kind of just the compulsive use side.
And on the compulsive use side, I don’t see that much of a difference between gambling usage and other technology usage. And I know that, you know, it seems much more pernicious. And for a lot of people, it will be much more dangerous to, you know, spend all of your time on DraftKings versus TikTok.
But fundamentally, if you get rid of the money part, which is obviously a big part to get rid, there are a lot of people who are using these products in very unhealthy ways without actually losing large amounts of money. And so there it’s just this question of, well, it’s really hard to kind of regulate and think about, from a public health perspective, people’s engagement with these products, especially when a lot it is essentially voluntary.
We can have a big philosophical conversation about whether or not someone who has sort of compulsive use problems is really using these products voluntarily. But at the end of the day, you know this is America, we generally believe that if people want to do something, they should be allowed to do it. And so what do you do when you have large numbers of people who are spending huge amounts of time on these apps in a way that is not good for them, not good, for their social lives, and sort of all detrimental to society? But they’re sort of doing it of their own free choice. And I think that applies not only once again to gambling, but really to social media and other technology apps as well. I don’t think we’ve really figured that out as a country. I don’t know if anybody has.
Bosch: Right. I mean, of course, there’s so much discussion about whether you can be addicted to technology, right? I mean I believe that compulsive gambling, for instance, is in the DSM, the diagnostic manual used by mental health practitioners. But I think there’s been a lot of debate about whether online addiction should be considered a category as well. I mean sometimes it ends up being like, do we actually need a category? But of course we do for insurance reasons. So yeah, perhaps we get into these mind-bending definitional problems there.
Rose-Berman: You’re exactly right. Yeah, sports betting or sorry, gambling isn’t the DSM-5. But when you start looking at it, these are relatively fuzzy definitions, right? The definition, a clinician’s ability to define someone with a gambling disorder or a gambling addiction is do you answer yes to like six of nine questions and they’re a little bit fuzzy. And whether or not something is listed in the DSM-5, I certainly know people and there are a lot of people in this country who have problematic relationships with technology — you can just look at that amount of time spent on screens, particularly on smartphones, and surely that is not healthy whether or not those constitute actual addictions versus dangerous compulsive uses. But yeah, people are spending a lot of time and energy thinking about and on these apps in a way that is often not good for their mental health.
Bosch: And just quite recently we saw a ruling in a court that held Meta and YouTube responsible for a young woman’s addiction to the platforms, which she argued were really detrimental to her life. Do you think the online sports books are paying attention to that ruling or do they see themselves as distinct?
Rose-Berman: I know that they’re paying attention, at least because I’ve seen at least a few articles that have made that connection explicitly, and there are various ongoing lawsuits against gambling companies basically arguing the same thing, that there is not only kind of negligence but there is understanding internally in these companies that these products are dangerous, that people are being harmed, and they’re not doing anything.
Whether those lawsuits pan out is a separate question. There are a couple by the Public Health Advocacy Institute based out of Northeastern, the same people who successfully sued Big Tobacco, and once again, the argument’s the same, that there’s explicit negligence that’s occurring here to the detriment of people’s both financial and social well-being. The outcome of specific lawsuits, I don’t know, but yes, the question of whether or not you can hold platforms and digital companies responsible for harm that is, if not caused by them, at least, you know, highly correlated with them is an incredibly hotly debated topic right now that is certainly impacting gambling companies and will in the near future even more.
Bosch: So we’re starting to run out of time, but before we go, I wanted to talk to you about a big article that went viral recently by McKay Coppins of The Atlantic. So Coppins wrote about how The Atlantic asked him to try sports betting for a year. They staked him $10,000, which, man, they’re rich over at The Atlantic, I don’t know many publications that can just write off $10,000 that way.
He writes that he found his behavior to slowly and then quickly become somewhat compulsive as he found himself, you know, focused more on games than time with his family. And it just changed his relationship with how he watched sports and things like that. And it got a great deal of discussion going about whether his experience suggests that these apps are perhaps even more dangerous than people realize. I would love to hear your thoughts on the piece and the response to it.
Rose-Berman: I think the first thing is it’s a very well-written piece and I think it does a really good job at detailing the sort of problems with compulsive use and the types of issues that can arise when it comes to modern online sports betting or really any technology company. I think he does a very eloquent job of explaining how even at times when it wasn’t impacting him financially — because to be clear, he was never actually spending his own money — it sort of seeped into all of these other areas of his life.
I had some problems with it, though. I think the first thing is that clearly he went in with a very specific belief, which is that gambling is bad. You know, he wasn’t even going to do it initially until he got it cleared with his pastor.
Bosch: Yeah, and we should say he’s a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormon, so he has some specific thoughts.
Rose-Berman: Yes, which on the one hand makes it incredibly interesting, right? Like, I’m intrigued to hear what he has to say about it. At the same time, you know, am I confident that this was given a fair shake? Not really. Not that, you know, gambling necessarily deserves a fair shake, but there are some similar to what we were talking about before. There are some incentive problems here.
So in that piece, for example, he asks some smart people, including Nate Silver, to give him some advice. He kind of gets pretty good advice. The experiment runs the course of the NFL season. And for about 80% of the NFL season, it’s kind of going fine. He’s betting relatively small amounts. He was actually up a little bit of money, but he’s effectively break-even and nothing really happens.
And then he tells us that right toward the end of the season, he kind of goes down this crazy spiral. He starts betting huge amounts of money, taking advice from some pretty bad people. And it sort of culminates in a $4,500 bet out of his initial $10,000 bankroll on the Patriots to win the Super Bowl.
And at that point, I’m like, well, obviously this could have happened. At the same time, it just seems quite strange. It sort of reads like someone who wanted to write a cover story and realized that, oh, actually, if I just write about how this wasn’t that bad for me and I sort of broke even, it’s not gonna be a good cover story. I mean, I think in the same way that, you know, there are incentive problems with the operators. Do we really think that this would have been a cover story had something not bad happened? That’s, I think, you know, part of my issue with it.
Also, there are some instances where he’s talking about, you know, how stressful it was. He’s waking up in the middle of the night because of all the money he’s losing. And, you, know, it wasn’t his money, right? It was The Atlantic’s money. Gambling with someone else’s money is really not the same as gambling with your own money.
The nerdier, wonkier part of me took a lot of issue with the actual structure of his deal, which was that he didn’t incur any of the losses, but he did incur 50% of the profits. And so actually, if you map that out mathematically, what that means is that when you get toward the end of that experiment, if you’re hovering around the break-even part, or if you’re down, you basically want to large amounts of money on crazy things, because if he ends the experiment with $10,000, it’s the same as him ending the experiment with zero, because he’s only getting a percentage of the overall profit. And so, kind of this degenerate spiral that he outlines in the piece is actually mathematically optimal.
Now, that’s not why he did what he did. And I don’t mean to accuse him of sort of journalistic malpractice here. I’m just saying that the incentives are not aligned. Clearly this is someone who kind of went in with the story they wanted to tell. And it felt a little bit weird because he spent so much of the story talking about how everything was kind of fine and then it all went downhill. And once again, obviously that can happen. But I think this was not my favorite example of outlining how that could happened even though his overall depiction of it I thought was quite elegant.
Bosch: So a final question, we talked briefly at the start about your own March Madness bracket. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about how your work and how your research affects the way you think about sports betting in your personal life.
Rose-Berman: Yeah. I think about sports betting and gambling through just a very mathematical lens, which is, you know, not really representative, right? If I am going to a roulette table, and I think I would say that this is generally the sort of, quote unquote, correct way to think about it, obviously, people are free to do whatever they want. And this is not what’s going to happen. Instead of thinking about, “oh, you know, I’m either going to double my money or I’m going to lose my money at the roulette table,” it’s like, no, actually, right when I put that bet down, I’ve lost, you know, 3% or 5% or whatever, it doesn’t really matter.
And the same thing is true for sports betting a lot of the time. And so really just internalizing the degree to which the odds are stacked against you. And the sports books and casinos will say, look, “we want this to be a form of entertainment. We want people to spend some money for fun,” and that is kind of fine and good. In my mind, there’s no problem with people sort of gambling as a form of entertainment.
The problem is that most people gamble, and particularly bet on sports, because they want to win, they want to make money, and they sort of don’t really understand the math behind what they’re doing, how the odds are created, how markets operate in the sense that, yeah, just because you have a hunch about who’s going to win tonight’s game doesn’t really mean that you’ll actually be able to win in the long run.
And so I think the way that the research and the work that I’ve done impacts my gambling is just to really internalize all of the ways that the game is stacked against people. People don’t realize, if you are someone who is skilled at sports betting and able to win, the operators will just kick you out. So it’s not really this fair ecosystem at all. And yes, I think that’s just good to keep in mind if you’re going in with the mentality of “I’m just gonna risk a few bucks … and it can be fun.” That’s great. If you are going in trying to make money, it’s probably not gonna work out well.
Bosch: Isaac, thanks so much for coming on the “First Opinion Podcast” today.
Rose-Berman: Thank you so much for having me.
Bosch: That was Isaac Rose Berman. He’s a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, focused on gambling research and policy. He recently wrote an essay for First Opinion as part of STAT’s coverage of health challenges facing men and boys. That coverage is supported by Rise Together, a donor advised fund sponsored and administered by National Philanthropic Trust and established by Richard Reeves, founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men; and by the Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
And thank you for listening to the First Opinion Podcast. It’s produced by Hyacinth Empanado. Alissa Ambrose is the senior producer and Rick Berke is the executive producer. You can share your opinion on the show by emailing me at [email protected]. And please leave a review or rating on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Torie Bosch, and please don’t keep your opinions to yourself.
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STAT’s coverage of health challenges facing men and boys is supported by Rise Together, a donor advised fund sponsored and administered by National Philanthropic Trust and established by Richard Reeves, founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men; and by the Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.