We Legalized Sports Gambling. Now We're Paying for It — ft. Jonathan D. Cohen

What It Covers

Scott Galloway interviews Jonathan D. Cohen, gambling policy lead at the American Institute for Boys and Men, examining how the 2018 Supreme Court decision legalizing sports betting across 39 states created a $148 billion industry that disproportionately harms young men through frictionless mobile apps and predatory design.

Key Questions Answered

• •Bankruptcy correlation: States legalizing online sports betting see bankruptcies surge roughly 30% within a few financial quarters. Additional measurable effects include rising credit card and auto loan delinquencies, increased debt collection accounts, reduced savings in low-income households, and a spike in child protective services calls — all appearing within one to two years of legalization.
• •Self-exclusion as harm proxy: Pennsylvania's self-exclusion program enrolled roughly 50 young adults aged 18–35 annually from 2006–2018. After legalizing online sports betting in 2019, that number jumped to approximately 1,500 per year — a 30x increase — representing the clearest current data point for measuring rising gambling addiction rates among younger populations.
• •Friction as the primary policy lever: Cohen advocates replacing opt-in safeguards (deposit limits, time limits nobody uses) with opt-out default protections modeled on Flutter/FanDuel's UK and Ireland policy, which automatically caps monthly losses for users under 25. A national cross-platform self-exclusion registry would prevent addicted users from simply switching apps.
• •Prediction markets are sports gambling: Roughly 90% of trading volume on platforms like Kalshi involves sports. Because these platforms are classified as 18-plus rather than 21-plus and operate in all 50 states versus 32 for licensed sportsbooks, they effectively deliver sports gambling to 19-year-olds in states like Utah and Texas where it remains otherwise illegal.
• •Regulatory mandate reform: The single highest-leverage reform Cohen identifies is rewriting state gambling agency mandates. Maryland's current mandate explicitly prioritizes maximizing tax revenue from sports betting. Changing that North Star to prioritize resident well-being would organically produce downstream friction policies without requiring legislators to specify every individual consumer protection measure.