Almost every tech platform is designed to grab your attention and never let it go. You give it clicks, and it gives you dopamine. Games, news updates, social media hits — they all run on the same logic. We can add a new activity to the list: gambling. In just a few years, sports betting has gone from a legal gray area to a mainstream multibillion-dollar industry.

And this isn’t just about sports. It’s about how our economy increasingly exploits our cognitive biases and our irrationality, and how institutions — governments, media companies, even the sports leagues — have partnered in this system, because they all want a cut of the action.

Jonathan Cohen is the author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. It’s a new book about the financial infrastructures that we’ve built on top of psychological vulnerabilities. I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about how this happened so fast, what online gambling shares with social media and crypto, and how destructive — on a human level — all of this has been.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the 2018 Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates for sports gambling seemingly overnight.

In 1992, the sports leagues went to Congress because of a threat, that was real at the time, of states legalizing sports gambling. And Congress passed a law called The Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act that banned states from legalizing sports betting. And then, in 2018, the Supreme Court rendered PASPA, as it was called, unconstitutional on the grounds of basically states’ rights. And so, starting in 2018 with the Supreme Court decision, states are allowed to legalize sports gambling if they so choose.

How many states have chosen to do it? And how quickly?

Delaware did within six weeks. Today, as we’re talking in July of 2025, we have 38 states and Washington, DC, with legal sports gambling; 30 with online legal sports gambling; probably soon to be 39 and 31 later this year with Missouri.

FanDuel and DraftKings are the names almost everyone knows. How much of the pie do they control?

A lot. Those are the major players, almost to the point of a duopoly, defining the industry. And they have, I would say, around 80 percent, maybe 85 percent of market share. And of course it depends on some states. There are lots of other companies out there fighting for third, fourth, fifth place.

What happened to online gambling during the COVID era?

It takes off politically in places like New York because of........

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