Sports betting feels like it’s everywhere.

Ads for online sportsbooks like BetMGM, DraftKings, or FanDuel are ubiquitous, whether on social media or while you’re watching a game — and they all offer some amount of free money for your first wager.

During pregame shows or on sports podcasts, you’ll hear the odds for every contest; you’ll hear about prop bets, like whether LeBron James will be the first player to score for the Lakers against the Warriors on Christmas Day; and you’re likely to hear about risky, multistep bets called parlays that could turn a $25 wager into $237,553.

The explosion of sports gambling into the zeitgeist is the result of a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that undid a nearly nationwide ban on gambling on competitive sports. Since that ruling, sports betting has been legalized in 38 states and the District of Columbia, and the American Gambling Association reports that the American sports betting industry posted a record-high in revenue with $10.92 billion in 2023; according to a recent poll by Seton Hall University’s Stillman School of Business, more than one in three Americans have at some point placed a bet on sports.

For the athletes competing, like three-time NBA champion and podcast host Danny Green, who retired from professional basketball in the fall, hearing from bettors who are upset about lost wagers has become the norm. “They say, ‘You owe me money,’” Green told Today, Explained about angry sports bettors messaging him on social media. “They’re obviously cussing, saying, ‘You bleep! You son of a you-know-what! You cost me. Couldn’t you just get two more rebounds?”

Superstars like Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving have also spoken out about how legalized sports gambling has changed the relationship between athletes and fans. “Gambling and sports betting has completely taken the purity and the fun away from the game at times, let me just be honest with y’all,” Irving said on the streaming platform Twitch last year.

The harassment doesn’t stop at professional sports, either. The NCAA, which governs college sports, released data this year that shows one in three high-profile collegiate athletes receive abusive messages from someone with a betting interest, and that 90 percent of harassment against athletes is happening online via social media.

Charles Fain Lehman recently wrote about sports betting for The Atlantic, where he argues that legalizing sports gambling was a mistake. With the holidays underway and loads of sports on TV, Today, Explained reached out to Lehman — who usually writes about addiction, drugs, and public safety — to ask: What’s so bad about legalized sports gambling?

A partial transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows. Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts.

Charles, what do you think that legalized sports gambling is doing to our country?

When you do the cost-benefit math, gambling looks like any other addictive substance, which is that most of the people who participate in it get some small sort of utilitarian hedonic benefit. They get some fun out of it. And then a smaller subset of those people will become seriously addicted and do serious harm to themselves, to others, and potentially ruin their lives.

Gambling addiction is associated with all sorts of terrible outcomes, including loss of your home, loss of family, loss of life through personal action. And so we’ve created this enormous concentrated social harm, and in return, we’ve gotten some anemic tax revenue and a bunch of ads everywhere. It just doesn’t seem like a worthwhile trade-off to me.

Wow. It sounds like you really don’t like it.

I don’t! I don’t! I don’t like it for the reasons that I’m skeptical of a lot of vice goods. I think we tend to systematically underrate their harms, but the problems are the same in every case, which is that they concentrate in a small number of users who will do the overwhelming majority of the using and will experience the overwhelming majority of the harm. And everybody else is sort of benefiting off of their backs, which is an alarming arrangement to me.

Do we actually have any receipts of the widespread legalization of sports gambling increasing how many lives are ruined due to legal sports betting in this country?

Absolutely. You know, and I think at this point, many Americans know somebody who’s been affected by this. I was at a wedding recently and a friend of mine from college told me about a friend of his back home in Erie, Pennsylvania. He works at the post office. Not a well-off guy who’s $28,000 in the hole on sports betting. Just a tremendous problem. The interesting thing about gambling legalization: We have information on this, mostly from the UK’s experience, which is pretty grim. There’s one estimate that says 8 percent of all suicides in the UK are attributable to sports gambling addiction.

Because gambling was legalized in different states at different times in the US, economists can use a fairly specific set of methods to isolate the causal effect of sports gambling — not just the correlates to sports gambling but what sports gambling causes on a number of different outcomes. One of the studies that I point to, from economists at Northwestern University, estimates that for every dollar spent on sports gambling, households put $2 less into investment accounts.

There are big increases in the risk of overdraft in your bank account or maxing out a credit card. There’s another paper from economists at UCLA and USC looking specifically at online sports gambling. They find that legalization increases the risk of bankruptcy by 25 to 30 percent.

The other thing that really sticks out in those studies is that the harms tend to concentrate among the most economically precarious, right? The harms tend to concentrate in the areas with the highest levels of poverty, and they also tend to concentrate among young men who are already at risk for all sorts of not-great financial decision making. And so it’s not just that gambling harm befalls some people, it’s that gambling harm often befalls the people who can least afford to have it come down on them.

Do we know how much money, on average, people are losing versus winning?

Absolutely. There’s another study from folks at Southern Methodist University where they have a panel of 700,000 sports bettors and they show a couple of really interesting things. Only about 5 percent of people in the panel withdrew more from the apps than they deposited. So 95 percent of people are losing money. The really interesting thing is that about 3 percent of bettors drive 50 percent of sports gambling profits.

How much does the amount people are losing have to do with how much gambling has changed with the little devices that we keep in our pockets?

It’s a big part of the story in more ways than one. One component of it is it’s just much more readily available, which is to say, if I have to go to a casino to gamble, I may not want to take the time out of my day. I may not get drawn in, and so over the long run, you generate fewer people who are addicted because they never get exposed in the first place. The virtue of keeping gambling in Las Vegas is you have to go to Vegas to do it.

The much more alarming thing is that app-based gaming facilitates algorithmic discrimination on the part of the sportsbook provider. They can tell who the people are who are going to spend the most. They know when you check your bets in the middle of the night.

They know when you are watching the game, they know what you are doing and how much you are betting. And then what they can do is algorithmically reinforce that. They can make you offers, they can assign you a personal concierge who encourages you to bet more. This is actually what they do in casinos in Vegas if you are a whale, a big spender — you’ll get all sorts of good stuff comped. But instead of that happening in a dingy hotel or even in a glamorous hotel, that’s happening on your phone all day, every day, until they get all of your money.

It’s quite clear from speaking with you that there’s a lot of harm being introduced to states across the country from legal sports betting and it’s especially hitting young men. But it was legalized with the promise that it was going to bring a lot of benefits to the states that approved it. You seem to believe that isn’t paying off.

I think that there were a few arguments here. One is tax revenue, and that’s a big selling point. And the reality is that the tax revenue has been pretty anemic. If you look at the 38 legal states in their most recent count, together gambling is generating about half a billion dollars a quarter, which is not nothing but is a drop in the bucket compared to not just most state revenue needs but also substantially less than you get from alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana.

Another argument is that you would reduce the reach of the offshore gambling sites. That doesn’t really appear to be happening. There’s a survey out of Massachusetts where they found that bettors were just as likely to use unauthorized betting sites after legalization. But it makes sense — if you’re an active sports bettor, you’re betting on multiple sportsbooks, you’re trying to get as much action as possible. And so the offshore sites are just complements. They aren’t substitutes.

And then the third argument is one that I think we should take seriously, which is the hedonic benefits and the individual liberty benefits. But we didn’t live in a terrible dictatorship in 2017. If you and I made a bet together, neither of us was at any risk of going to jail, right? That is, it was not illegal for us to make an interpersonal bet. The thing that was illegal was for big businesses and states to get involved in the action. And I’m just not that upset about restricting the liberty of the state of Georgia to get involved in your and my bets.