In one of experiment, people expected a phone call to be more awkward than an email. But when they actually reached out, those assigned to call felt more connected—and the conversation was no more awkward than it was for those who typed.

That gap between how we expect an interaction to go and how it ends up shows up throughout Epley’s work. We often worry about finding the right words, making a good impression, or being rejected. And yet we typically underestimate how much someone else will appreciate hearing from us.

Epley is a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of A Little More Social. In this week’s conversation, I ask whether his advice would change if he were writing specifically for boys and men. His answer surprised me: men and women often have similar fears—and both underestimate the benefits of connecting.

We discuss:

• How Epley went from being terrified of public speaking to enjoying it, and what practice taught him about how we think we’re assessed versus what others really care about.

• Why we tend to exaggerate gender differences in empathy and social skills.

• Why we worry about sounding competent when the other person often cares more about whether we seem warm, honest, and interested.

• What a voice conveys that text leaves out, especially when we disagree.

• How technology helps us connect across distances while also making it easier to spend an entire day alone.

• The tension between wanting genuine connection and seeking the status metrics of likes, followers, and attention emphasized by social media.

You can listen to the audio above or watch the video below. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the comments or via a direct message. Better yet, why not call a friend who has been on your mind?

It’s an oft-repeated claim by industry representatives. The logic goes something like this: Look, 1% of people are going to develop a gambling problem regardless of what’s legal. Even if you ban gambling, they’ll find an illegal bookie or offshore website. So better to offer a regulated market and fund prevention and treatment for those who experience harm.

There are two problems with the 1% number.

As we note in our Sensible Sports Betting policy framework, estimates vary depending on the definitions of problem gambling. Harm exists on a spectrum, and is often episodic. A bettor could go years without any problems, and then have an out-of-control night that leads to bankruptcy or worse. Another could experience serious financial or relationship problems without meeting the clinical threshold for a gambling disorder.

But the bigger problem with the 1% figure is that it is a relic of the past, when bettors still had to visit a casino or call a bookie. Today, we have casinos in our pockets, personalized promotions, constant notifications, and gambling products appearing alongside investments in finance apps. While researchers are catching up to the effects of the technological changes, journalists are starting to uncover how particular features are used to hook a new generation of gamblers—mostly young men.

ProPublica’s 30-minute documentary showing how DraftKings encouraged a journalist’s problematic play now has over 4.2 million views on YouTube. Jake Pearson spent 10 weeks mimicking risky gambling: escalating wagers, chasing losses, and betting more frequently—all clear warning signs of problematic play. DraftKings rewarded him with VIP status, personalized incentives, and continued opportunities to bet. (AIBM fellow helped guide the experiment.)

Former employees are speaking out, too. My colleague Jonathan Cohen spoke with Jayden Betts, a former DraftKings analyst in his twenties. Betts built an internal tool to reduce spending on promotions that generated losses for the company. Soon, he discovered that same tool was used to target more vulnerable customers.

Moving gambling from casinos onto smartphones should have made safeguards more effective. Gambling companies have the data and the models to predict and prevent harm. But the same data can help target the most vulnerable bettors to boost profits.

The Feed

Research

Teen boys’ lives, on-screen and off |

A survey of 1,194 U.S. boys ages 12–17 complicates the story of teenagers retreating to their devices: 84% played video games in the previous week, but 67% spent time outdoors, and 51% see friends outside school several times a week. However, there were differences by geography and class: frequent in-person socializing was reported by 61% of urban boys versus 34% of rural boys. And 60% of boys in households earning at least $150,000 played a sport in the previous week, compared with 26% in households earning less than $30,000.

Most boys report at least three hours of daily screen time outside school—mostly gaming with others and watching creators, while just 8% named posting their own content among their main online activities. Among the 602 boys who wrote in a favorite online personality, MrBeast dominated. Not a single boy named Andrew Tate, Fresh & Fit, or Clavicular.

Legalized sports betting linked to increased mental health care use

Using nearly 62 million enrollee-years of U.S. insurance claims from 2016–2023, researchers compared changes in states that legalized online sports betting with those that had not. Among men, legalization was associated with increases of 0.57 percentage points in antidepressant use and 0.67 percentage points in outpatient anxiety diagnoses. The quasi-experimental design measures treatment use—not necessarily new illness—and does not establish that those receiving care were bettors.

Where Americans find community online — Pew

Men and women are equally likely to belong to an online community (36%), but women are three times as likely to join one specifically for their gender (15% versus 5%). Gaming is a particularly important source of community for younger adults, though respondents were split on the meaning they get from their online relationships: 47% of Americans consider online relationships less meaningful than in-person ones. Open-ended responses described communities built around sports, gaming, hobbies, neighborhoods, music, and medical conditions, illustrating how community can emerge from a specific interest or need, rather than an explicit search for friendship. (n=9,750 U.S. adults May 26–June 1).

What stories do boys want? — Center for Scholars & Storytellers

In a survey of 1,537 U.S. respondents ages 10–24, boys and young men ranked action and superheroes highest among the most desired topics, followed by hopeful stories about people beating the odds, people with lives like theirs, and friendships. Across the full sample, seeing a movie in a theater was the most appealing of six proposed weekend activities when money and access were no obstacle, followed by playing a new video game and attending a concert.

Policy

• Italy and European authorities scrutinize in-game spending. Italy is leading coordinated consumer-protection action involving Microsoft-group games, with scrutiny of virtual currencies and practices affecting children.

• Utah sues Kalshi over alleged illegal gambling. The state is asking a court to stop the company from offering wagers in Utah and require location checks to enforce the restriction.

• Eight states sue OpenAI over ChatGPT’s safety claims. Coordinated lawsuits allege that the company marketed ChatGPT as safe while concealing risks.

What else we’re reading (and listening to)

• “I’m Not Going to Have Blood on My Hands” — by

• Why Americans Stopped Falling in Love — interviewing

• From Disengaged To Selective: The Profiles Of Young Adult Daters — IFS

• How to Know if Your Porn Use Has Actually Become a Problem – Separating Fact from Fear by Lauren Clark, Men’s Health

• Help! My boyfriend is dating a video game character by Hatti Rex, Dazed

• Churches Are Finally Making the Moral Case Against Sports Betting by , The Atlantic

• ‘You Barely Understand Regular Money’: Why Young Men Keep Gambling by Victoria Guida, Politico

• A Bet That Young People Are Willing to Make by Will Gottsegen, from The Atlantic’s new newsletter on gambling

• Inside Polymarket’s Paid Quote-Retweet Esports Program by Mikhail Klimentov, Aftermath

• Are Digital Rips the Next, Next Big Thing? by

Events & Funding Opportunities

• Open Call for Proposals: Communities Leading on AI | Humanity AI | Initial Application due October 21

• Navigating the Manosphere: Harmful Online Masculinity Content and Youth | Virtual | October 28

• Family Online Safety Institute Conference | Washington, D.C. | November 19

Correction, October 27: The original opening incorrectly presented a quotation from Paul Burns as a response to the recent Globe and Mail article linked above. His statement appeared in an October 22, 2009 editorial responding to the Globe’s “Bad Bets” series and referred to a 2007 review of severe problem gambling prevalence.

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Do you have an intuition about how pathways into problematic gambling may have changed over the past decade? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

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Over time, he began to see those accomplishments differently. Looking at the harms accumulating from the expansion of online gambling, he came to see his work as “friendly fire” on his fellow Gen Z young men.

In this week’s episode, Jonathan D. Cohen speaks with Butts, whose account of his work at DraftKings was recently featured in a New York Times investigation. Their conversation explores how gambling was normalized long before he joined the industry, how DraftKings’ promotional system targets vulnerable users, and what ultimately changed his view of the business.

They discuss:

• How childhood scratch tickets and betting with Counter-Strike “skins” made gambling feel like an ordinary part of growing up

• What first drew Butts to DraftKings

• How customer data could predict who would respond to a promotion

• How a tool he initially built to reduce promotional spending became a way to target customers more likely to lose

• His policy proposals to reduce harms and increase transparency

Butts is candid about both his pride in solving difficult problems and his growing discomfort with what those solutions enabled. If you’re skeptical about the need of new regulations for online gambling, this one is worth your time.

We welcome your thoughts in the comments or in a message.

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Mike Goldstein is the founder of the Center for Teen Flourishing, which he describes as an R&D lab for the hours between 3 PM and 3 AM. By his estimate, about 40% of teens are languishing. They’re not in acute crisis, but they sure aren’t flourishing.

And so he’d to see like more minds working on a practical problem — how do you help a young person get unstuck?

We discuss:

• Whether a busy teen is a flourishing teen, and whether screen time is less important in itself than what it crowds out.

• Whether “flourishing” should be defined by participating in offline activities or by things that are harder to measure, like agency, motivation, and progress toward one’s goals.

• What Mike has learned from coaching teenagers with ADHD. (About 80 percent of the teens he coaches are boys.)

• The role of institutions in helping young people discover something they care about.

• Whether Iceland-style recreation debit cards could be a better use of the Meta settlement funds than additional funding for therapy.

• Why so many teens drop out of therapy, and what coaching offers as an alternative.

• Mike’s favorite pilot projects to test, including coaching low-income college students into internships.

If we want young people to spend less time scrolling passively online, how can it become easier to find something else worth doing?

You can listen to the audio above or watch the video below. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the comments or via a direct message.

When does technology help young men flourish? And when does it become a distraction, or even a substitute?

Four new reports offer a more nuanced picture than the familiar story of young men withdrawing into their screens. Devices can facilitate learning and connection, and help stimulate interest in sports. They can also make that same sports participation feel risky, promote gambling, and offer the simulation of intimacy without the demands and growth of a human relationship.

Equimundo’s State of American Men

’s new report, based on a December 2025 U.S. survey of 1,000 men and 500 women ages 18–29, shows that technology is deeply woven into the lives of young men:

• 75% report gaming at least an hour daily; roughly a quarter report four hours or more.

• 35% report having used prediction markets, including 16% in the week before the survey.

• 58% have formed a close friendship with someone they met online, and 59% have met an online acquaintance in person.

• 78% report using AI, and 60% say it makes learning easier. College graduates are more likely than nongraduates to report improved career prospects (51% versus 27%).

Cygnal’s Young American Men Survey

The Lafayette Company’s survey, fielded by Cygnal among 800 male registered voters ages 18–30, offers another view of support and belonging.

• When something goes wrong, 7% name AI as the first place they’d turn.

• YouTube was named as young men’s leading news source: 46.5% select it among their primary sources, followed by TikTok, X, and Facebook.

• Some 38.5% say their closest male friendships developed through doing things together, compared with 18.8% through talking openly about personal matters; another 28.7% say both equally.

Aspen Project Play’s Boys in Sports Report

Aspen’s Boys in Sports report complicates the idea that gaming simply displaces sports.

• Among boys who formerly played organized sports, 26.8% said video games reduced their interest. And yet, 55% of boys who had never participated in sports said gaming increased their interest.

• In focus groups, boys described fears that poor performances would be recorded and circulated among peers.

• The report recommends training coaches to help athletes navigate social media, establishing “No Recording Zones,” and seeking children’s consent before creating content featuring them.

Movember’s Real Face of Men’s Health: California Report

Movember shared a report on the state of men’s health in California, noting the opportunities and risks of using technology for mental health:

• Telehealth and wearables can reduce practical barriers and make sensitive conversations easier to initiate.

• AI coaching may appeal to men and serve as an entry point into human care.

• Social media can intensify isolation, body-image concerns, and social comparison.

The Feed

Research

Gaming and brain structure: what the scans can—and can’t—tell us

A NeuroImage study analyzed gaming habits and MRI scans from 5,686 adolescents. More gaming was associated with slightly lower cortical thickness. Single-player and mature-rated gaming showed significant associations; multiplayer gaming did not after correction for multiple testing. Boys reported more gaming than girls—4.2 versus 1.8 hours daily—but the brain associations did not significantly differ by sex. This cross-sectional study cannot establish that gaming changed or damaged brains, as cortical thinning is also part of normal development. The authors caution against interpreting these differences as harm.1

Emergency visits after Ontario’s gambling expansion

A study of 17.35 million Ontario residents eligible for public health coverage identified 952 gambling-related emergency visits by 757 people during January 2012–June 2025. By April–June 2025, visits among males ages 10–29 were estimated at 154% above the modeled counterfactual, with no corresponding increase among females.

Gambling marketing embedded in World Cup coverage

AI-based analysis of all 104 World Cup matches identified 9,360 prediction-market and 6,429 gambling-brand appearances in match footage. Even with greater calls for advertising restrictions (see below), young sports fans are still routinely exposed to gambling marketing throughout match coverage.

Federal and state policy

Utah’s VPN-related pornography provision is preliminarily blocked

The court blocked enforcement of the provision's age-verification requirement based on users’ actual location, even when VPNs disguise it. It found likely constitutional problems associated with reliably identifying physical location.

Iowa proposes pornography age-verification implementation rules

Proposed rules would implement Iowa’s age-verification law through methods including digital identification, transactional data, and approved facial age estimation. A public hearing is scheduled for October 20.

New York sues Polymarket over sports wagering

New York alleges that Polymarket US operates unlicensed sports gambling, including access for 18–20-year-olds despite the state’s 21-year mobile sports-betting threshold. New York seeks an injunction and financial remedies.

Sixth Circuit rejects Kalshi’s bid to shield sports contracts from state gambling laws

In consolidated Ohio and Tennessee cases, the court held that the sports-event contracts were not swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act and rejected federal preemption of state gambling laws.

What else we’re reading (and listening to)

• I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP. | ProPublica (They are looking for bettors to donate their data.)

• Research papers presented at The Gam(bl)ing Conference 2026 at the City University of Hong Kong.

• Are Prediction Markets the Best Forecasting Tool Ever — or Just Another Casino? | Freakonomics

• Are Prediction Markets Gambling? A Lot Rides on the Answer | New York Times

• Quick dopamine, mental health, and why the impact looks very different in boys than it does in girls | Mel Robbins podcast with

Events & Funding Opportunities

• New: Groundwork / Unwritten Challenge | A $15 million, three-year US/UK initiative includes a first challenge for U.S. nonprofits offering $50,000–$100,000 grants. Inquiries open September 23 and close October 16.

• Who is the “Real Me”? How Online Life Influences Youth Identity Development | Online | October 8

• Family Online Safety Institute Conference | Washington, D.C. | November 19

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Do you have an intuition about how pathways into problematic gambling may have changed over the past decade? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

And share!

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Intro: Much of our work at AIBM documents how online sports betting harms young men. So it may surprise readers that our sports betting policy fellow is making the case for more gambling, of a certain kind. argues that low-stakes games among friends can be a real source of connection, but the apps may be crowding them out. Isaac also discusses the piece with colleagues Jonathan D. Cohen and Anders Knospe in an accompanying conversation. Watch the video below, or listen to the audio above — or via your favorite podcasting app.

Some of my fondest college memories are from the poker table. For four years, rain or shine, mask mandate or not, tough week or tough breakup, I could count on a Sunday night spent joking around with friends at the semi-regular cost of $20.

One of the most common questions I hear from parents concerned about gambling is whether they should let their sons play poker or join fantasy football leagues and March Madness pools. My answer depends on their age and the stakes (ten-year-olds shouldn’t be playing cards for hundreds of dollars); I generally advise against a blanket ban.1 Social gambling—low-stakes games among friends—can be an important source of connection at a time when men are spending more time alone.

Last year, the psychologist Annie Maheux wrote for AIBM about the social benefits of video games for young men. She noted that while gaming is “often seen as an activity that isolates, addicts, and even ruins young men’s lives,” it can also be “a primary space for social connection.” As one mother of a 13-year-old boy observed, her son and his friends often discussed school, friendships, and even intimate emotions while gaming together—in between the standard cheers and jeers.

Investigations into the social dynamics of gambling are scant, but some research has identified similar benefits. A 2012 analysis found that the main reason for poker tournament participation was “social interaction,” and that tournaments can “overcome social, age, and gender barriers.” A 2026 study found that betting often served as an ice-breaker to initiate social interaction. As one participant put it, gambling is “a starting point, and then everything goes from there.”

There are real risks. Gambling can beget more gambling, and underage gambling is associated with a greater risk of harm later in life. But low-stakes games with friends, in addition to providing social connection, may also substitute for more harmful and isolating alternatives.

Friends have reasons to care about how much their friends lose. A 2024 study of Swedish poker players described how the men limited buy-ins and rebuys out of concern for each other’s finances. As researcher Klara Goedecke put it, poker “encompassed care which moderated competitiveness.” Casual games can also offer a forgiving environment to learn important gambling lessons; one player emphasized accepting what he couldn’t control, explaining that “all you can do is perform your best every time” without getting angry or sad, because “[losing] is a part of it.”

Commercial gambling adds a cost that games among friends don’t have: the operator’s cut. The incentives are different, too: companies want to maximize what they earn from each user, without the same regard for their wellbeing. A recent New York Times investigation found that DraftKings, one of two major sports betting operators in the US, uses AI to identify the customers likeliest to lose and target them with inducements to keep betting. The company has resisted using the same technology to protect gamblers at risk of addiction.

Sports betting and other forms of commercial gambling can be social. Friends can all bet $10 on a game to make it more exciting and watch together. But that social interaction is optional, and smartphones have made it easier than ever before to gamble alone. Putting together a poker game requires coordinating schedules, finding a host, and agreeing on stakes. That friction naturally limits how often most people play, whereas an app can be opened anytime, anywhere.2

Technological advancements have also made modern gambling faster, more intense, and more addictive. Historically, sports betting was seen as the safest form of gambling, as wagers typically took hours to resolve. Today, you can bet on every pitch in a baseball game and possession in a basketball game. Same-game parlays, invented just a few years ago, now account for more than half of all sportsbook wagers and allow gamblers to easily create custom lottery tickets.

Personalized, optimized online gambling not only increases the risk of harm. It can also change expectations, increasing people’s desire and tolerance for more potent forms of gambling while making slower, more social alternatives less appealing. Someone accustomed to daily bets and longshot payouts is more likely to become bored by a low-stakes, season-long fantasy league.3

So is the cure for male loneliness more poker nights? Not on its own. But as apps make gambling faster, lonelier, and more lucrative for operators, it’s worth remembering that gambling can also be a social activity—something people do with friends, around a table, rather than alone against an app. Policymakers and parents who treat all gambling the same risk losing the kind that brings young men together in their efforts to address the kind that isolates and exploits them.

Two recent reports from our partners at examine different parts of that story. The Grift Economy, produced with Reset Tech, maps how some creators turn young men’s aspirations and insecurities into revenue. Men’s Flourishing + Media, produced with Harmony Labs and LinkUp Lab, looks at what people watch and how different audiences respond to selected media. In this week’s conversation, and I explore what each report can tell us—and what we still need to learn. We discuss:

• How some creators turn young men’s aspirations and insecurities into attention, paid memberships, and courses

• Whether grievance about women is central to that business model, or whether typical self-improvement marketing does more of the selling

• What Harmony Labs found when it looked for a “rabbit hole” in men’s YouTube viewing1

• Why watching a provocative clip tells us little, on its own, about what a young man believes

• How to learn from young men who already assess online content critically

How can we take exploitation and misogyny seriously without assuming that every young man who encounters this content is drawn in by it? Caroline and I don’t agree on every part of the answer, but we agree that the distinction matters for research, for parents and educators, and for anyone trying to offer young men something better.

You can listen to the audio above or watch the video below. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the comments or via a direct message. As we book upcoming guests, what else would you like to know about manosphere research?

• Why “financial nihilism” is an incomplete story: Gen Z may feel that the economy is stacked against them, but they are also saving and planning for their futures.

• How sports betting and prediction markets can make gambling feel, sound, and look more like investing.

• How fun, social connection, and social media messaging shape financial decisions.

• What we still don’t know about young people’s financial behaviors, and how policymakers, banks, and educators can build useful guardrails.

Gen Z is trying to build financial independence and keep up with their peers on social media in an environment that feels unusually uncertain — and they are being offered plenty of high-risk ways to do so. So how can financial institutions, policymakers, and educators meet the demand while ensuring meaningful consumer protections and financial literacy?

You can listen to the audio above or watch the video below. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the comments below or via a direct message. Where do you think the line between investing and gambling should be drawn?

Sydney Sweeney posed provocatively semi-nude in an advertisement for sports gambling on a prediction market platform. While prompting controversy seemed to be the point, the ad scrambled the usual political associations, with several leftist commentators criticizing the use of soft porn to market gambling and some conservatives offering a sex positivity defense.

But does it qualify as porn?

Here’s what we can say for sure: Even among academic researchers, there is little consensus on how to best define or measure pornography.1 I can say this with confidence because, in June, we convened roughly 40 pornography researchers to identify where the evidence supports consensus and where important questions and disagreements remain. A significant portion of that time was devoted to measurement challenges.

Today we published a white paper synthesizing the discussions and disagreements from the meeting — and offering practical recommendations for funders and researchers. We hope it helps strengthen our understanding of one of the most common and least studied online activities.

You can read the executive summary or the full white paper.

The Feed

Scant evidence of a meaningful relationship between social technology use and subsequent life satisfaction.

Researchers surveyed 1,966 US adults every three months for two years about their use of social media and their subjective well-being. They found little evidence that using social technology predicted subsequent happiness or life satisfaction. Their findings add to a growing body of research showing weak associations. In an accompanying Substack post, and co-authors emphasize what broad measures can miss. They surface three limitations of current studies of social media: 1) surveys don’t account for high-use outliers, where harms may concentrate; 2) broad measures of social media use don’t account for how they are used; 3) reducing social media use produces negative FOMO effects, a collective action problem.

Evidence for social media legislation strategies

Perhaps a better title would have been “little evidence for social media legislation strategies.” A new review in JAMA Network Open examines the evidence behind six approaches to adolescent social-media regulation, including age restrictions, school phone policies, and platform design requirements. The authors find limited evidence about which policies work, for whom, and with what unintended consequences.

But that’s no reason to wait for perfect evidence. The authors recommend a “minimum viable evidence” model: use suggestive evidence to inform protections, embed evaluation from the start, highlight unintended effects, and revise policies as evidence develops.

Gambling problems by gender before and after legal gambling age

This Swedish study surveyed 528 students ages 15–19 at two public high schools. It examined gambling before and after Sweden’s legal gambling age of 18, using a brief screener for possible gambling problems. Among underage students, 20% had used online casinos, 21% had engaged in sports betting, and 25% had gambled for money within video games. 31% of boys screened positive for possible gambling problems versus 4% of girls. Online casinos were most associated with possible gambling problems, followed by gambling in video games and then sports betting. The authors recommend stronger enforcement of age restrictions and greater attention to gambling-like mechanics in video games. The survey cannot establish causation.

Policy

Connecticut targets sports prediction markets and their distribution networks

Connecticut issued cease-and-desist letters to nine platforms, including Polymarket, Robinhood, and Novig, ordering an immediate stop to sports-wager offerings and advertising in the state. It also subpoenaed 29 businesses involved in distribution and payments.

California enacts Adam’s Law

The new law establishes safeguards for companion chatbots used by children, including age verification, risk assessment, crisis responses, and controls addressing emotional dependency. Provisions become operative July 1, 2027.

What else we’re reading

• The Meta settlement won’t fix teen mental health by

• A breakdown of the teenage digital divide by

• Exiting the Casino by

• Smartphones, bans, and the good life by

• New £900,000 study of gambling-like mechanics in children’s games

• New York secures $8 million from sweepstakes-casino operator VGW

• Sports-betting handle is not entertainment spending by

• What the top Fortnite subreddit tells us about young men’s digital worlds by

Events & Funding Opportunities

• New: Groundwork / Unwritten Challenge | A $15 million, three-year US/UK initiative includes a first challenge for U.S. nonprofits offering $50,000–$100,000 grants. Inquiries open September 23 and close October 16.

• Learned Behavior: How Youth Digital Life Shapes Moral Development | Online | September 17

• Family Online Safety Institute Conference | Washington, D.C. | November 19, 2026

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Do you have an intuition about how pathways into problematic gambling may have changed over the past decade? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

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Today, at 28, Moore is the youngest mayor in the history of Los Gatos, California.

We discuss:

• How mentors, meaningful responsibilities, and direct invitations to contribute can help young men direct their energy toward something constructive.

• Why Moore created the Young Leaders Group, where 35 high school students routinely meet offline to discuss topics they select, including a difficult conversation about masculinity, femininity, and the growing divide between boys and girls.

• How boys often build trust through shared activities and shoulder-to-shoulder interactions before opening up.

• Why social media is not a true “third space”—and how skate parks, basketball courts, libraries, athletic fields, sidewalks, and safe bike lanes function as essential social infrastructure.

• Whether the funds from the proposed Meta could help communities build real-world alternatives for young people.

• How expensive travel sports can monopolize public facilities, excluding families unable to pay thousands of dollars per season.

• Why men who benefited from coaches and mentors owe a “generational debt” to the boys coming after them.

• Ending the week right with the Train Hard Men’s Club.

A larger theme runs throughout our conversation. Young people can’t just be told to log off, grow up, and look for work when the pathways to get there are fuzzy and just paying a month’s rent is out of reach for the majority.

If we want young people to spend less time online, we need to help build an offline world that is appealing.

You can listen to the audio above or through your favorite podcast app, or watch the video below. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the comments or via a direct message.

When I created my Facebook account in early 2006, it was essentially a digital address book. There was no news feed, like button, or recommendation algorithm. No autoplay video, infinite scroll, or AI slop.

A profile page offered useful information about your friends — their birthdays, hometowns, favorite movies and music, and whether they were single, dating, or “it’s complicated.”

Facebook in 2006 was designed to deepen social connection. Facebook (and Instagram) in 2026 are more likely to substitute for social connection — an endless, sometimes regrettable scroll of sponsored content by influencers and “conflict entrepreneurs.”

The difference between Facebook in 2006 and 2026 — whether it supports or supplants your friendships — is a reminder that social media is not inherently harmful, so long as it is designed with good intentions. But that is not how social media has evolved. A backlash has been building for the past decade, often drawing comparisons to cigarettes.

A more apt metaphor is the bicycle, write Claudia del Pozo and Nicté Cabañas:

Last week’s settlement between Meta and 48 U.S. states is the largest test whether design regulations can reduce the harms of social media for adolescents by:

• limiting teenagers to two hours a day and silencing notifications during school hours;

• disabling like counts and “make-up filters;”

• notifying users after they’ve spent 15 consecutive minutes on the site;

• giving the option to disable algorithmic personalization of feeds;

• restricting adults from messaging or viewing the content of teenagers.

They are meaningful changes that some critics say still don’t go far enough. And their implementation largely depends on whether teenagers find a way around Meta’s undefined age verification methods.

While teens won’t be able to change the new default settings without permission from a parent, Meta doesn’t have a foolproof system for preventing teens from creating—or asking someone else to create—a fake parental account, according to reporting by Julie Jargon.

Alternatively, teens could simply migrate to other platforms with fewer restrictions, like TikTok, Snapchat, and Discord. Meta issued an open letter to TikTok and YouTube calling on them to join in the deal by implementing the same design changes and paying a fine.1

If successful, the settlement could be the first step toward an industry standard that reduces the harms of social media while preserving benefits. Beyond social media, the same design regulation approach could come to online gambling, gaming, and pornography.

For more context, see my podcast interview with Pete Chapman of the Knight-Georgetown Institute:

The Feed

Microtransaction spending in video games is concentrated among a small, mostly male group

An Austrian study finds the top 10% of paying adolescent players account for 61.4% of expenditure and that boys are overrepresented. Boys spent more on average than girls (€181 versus €102 annually), represented 82% of heavy spenders, and had roughly twice the odds of being heavy spenders after accounting for age and gaming-disorder symptoms. This is not evidence that in-game purchases are harmful to every boy, but it does identify a small, overwhelmingly male group whose very high spending overlaps with indicators of problematic gaming.2

Feeling unseen may link disconnection with adolescent addictive behaviors

Two studies of Israeli teenagers examine a “sense of absence”—the feeling of inner emptiness, disconnection, and being unseen. The first developed and validated a measure among 1,555 teenagers ages 14–18, finding higher scores associated with loneliness, suicidal thoughts, and problematic online behaviors, and with lower hope and self-compassion. A follow-up study of 2,564 adolescents found that this sense of absence was the strongest bridging signal between insecure attachment, poor communication with parents, and behaviors including problematic gaming, social-media and smartphone use, substance use, and gambling. The studies are cross-sectional and do not establish causation, but they suggest prevention should address not only what adolescents are doing, but whether they feel connected, recognized, and valued.

Predicting Sports Betting Intentions Among Adolescents (PDF)

Adolescent sports-betting intentions are associated primarily with two beliefs: that betting is worthwhile or rewarding, and that peers commonly do it. These pathways were broadly similar for boys and girls, although boys reported greater intentions to bet. The study surveyed 1,215 secondary-school students (719 girls and 491 boys) aged 13–19 in Belgium. Most came from relatively advantaged backgrounds and academically oriented schools. Higher perceived household income predicted lower intentions among girls, but had no significant relationship among boys. Overall, intentions to bet were low: 77.4% selected the lowest response on every intention item.

Policy

Maryland Tax Court invalidates the first digital advertising tax in the U.S.

The court held that Maryland’s tax on large companies’ digital-advertising revenue violated the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act because comparable offline advertising was not taxed. It also found problems because tax rates were tied to companies’ global revenue and identified an additional First Amendment problem. Maryland had projected approximately $250 million annually for K–12 education. Similar digital ad taxes are set to go into effect on January 1st in Utah and Illinois, though both are facing active litigation.

Ninth Circuit decision sets up the Supreme Court to weigh in on prediction markets

A unanimous Ninth Circuit panel upheld the removal of an injunction that had protected Kalshi from Nevada gaming enforcement, concluding that its sports event contracts are likely not “swaps” under the Commodity Exchange Act. The court concluded that the contracts function like ordinary sports bets and create consumer risk rather than hedge existing financial risk. The decision conflicts with a Third Circuit ruling that treated similar event contracts as swaps, increasing the likelihood of Supreme Court review. Here’s analysis from AIBM’s own, :

What else we’re reading

• Five questions I’m asking after the Meta settlement by

• Video Games Are Not Making Men Miserable by

• Adults distinguish social media restrictions from school AI bans by Ipsos3

• The Context of the Crisis Facing Young Men by Joe Davis

• NFL renews the visibility of sportsbook brands (NFL announcement)

• Gen Z Is Mistaking Sports Betting for Investing by Allison Schrager

• Canadian securities regulator says sports- and entertainment-based event contracts should not be regulated as securities or derivatives and that regulated dealers should not facilitate them.4

Events & Funding Opportunities

• Civic Innovators Fellowship, deadline Sept. 4 — a free virtual program for ages 13–18

• Learned Behavior: How Youth Digital Life Shapes Moral Development | Online | September 17

• Family Online Safety Institute Conference | Washington, D.C. | November 19, 2026

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Do you have an intuition about how pathways into problematic gambling may have changed over the past decade? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

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In this week’s episode, Diego and I speak with Molly White, a technology critic and the writer behind the widely read Citation Needed newsletter. We discuss:

• Why crypto disproportionately attracts young men

• How soaring prices, FOMO, and “next big thing” marketing fueled the 2021 crypto boom

• The gap between crypto’s promise of decentralization and a reality increasingly dominated by large platforms, Wall Street, and the government

• The tension between claims of “predatory inclusion” by crypto firms and demographic data about the average crypto investor

• How economic uncertainty and “financial nihilism” can push people toward crypto, day trading, sports betting, and other high-risk attempts to get ahead

A larger theme weaves throughout the conversation. In the midst of inflation, uncertainty about the labor market, and the value of a college degree, young men may be increasingly drawn to gambling as a high-risk shortcut to economic independence.

You can listen to the audio above or watch the video below. As always, we appreciate your feedback — in the comments or via a direct message. Do you think crypto is meaningfully different from gambling?

Last week, I came across a paper that has quickly become one of my favorites. It draws on several kinds of evidence to trace how technology has changed young adulthood over the last two decades.

Nathan Hudson and Hernán Moscoso Boedo argue that digital technology may have reduced young men’s labor-participation, not primarily by displacing work, but by contributing to a decline in marriage. They make the case in three steps:

First, they find that roughly one-third of the male workforce participation decline—and most of the corresponding female increase—can be chalked up to the fact that unmarried men are less connected to the work-force, and there are now more unmarried men.

Second, they use time diary data to show that single men shifted around 30 minutes a day towards solitary screen time between 2003-07 and 2015-19, and away from friends—but not directly away from work.

Third, cohorts whose formative years overlapped more with local 4G coverage also married at lower rates, suggesting that digital technology may affect men’s employment indirectly by displacing social connection and therefore partnership formation.

My takeaway: digital life is not simply changing how we spend our time. For some, it is shaping the structure of young adulthood and the relationships that tie them to the workforce.

The Feed

More evidence for financial impacts of online gambling

A new paper uses household panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to study the staggered expansion of online gambling’s effects on financial well-being, finding that legalization increases average household credit card debt by about 11.9% in the relevant states — roughly $470 additional credit card debt per year. The effects were strongest among young men aged 21-45 (+13.4%) and black household heads (+29.7%).

This increase in credit card debt complements earlier evidence from New York Fed researchers Goss and Mangrum, who found that sports-betting legalization leads to rising credit distress: overall serious delinquency increased by about 0.3 percentage points, with particularly large effects among borrowers under 40, whose credit-card delinquency rose by about 1 percentage point.

Porn, gambling, and video games among demoralized men

The Institute Family Studies released part II of their report America’s Demoralized Men. The second part—based on a 2,000-person survey of men aged 18-29—covers social connection and alienation, with a particular focus on technology use. The report finds strong correlations between various forms of daily use and feelings of demoralization:

They also find that about 2 in 5 regular gamblers report experiencing moderate to severe emotional distress from online gambling.

Gen Z Wants to Do Good: How Helping Others Supports Meaning and Wellbeing

A new Gallup survey finds that many young Americans see excessive and unproductive technology use (52%), mental health issues (47%) and a lack of close relationships (34%) as barriers to finding purpose. The findings are especially concerning for young men: 42% of adult Gen Z men do not feel needed by others, and 35% do not believe they make a positive difference in people’s lives.

Those who feel they positively affect others are three to four times more likely to experience meaning or purpose, suggesting that helping young men build close relationships and feel needed through work, service and community could support their wellbeing.

Against the manosphere “rabbit hole”

Harmony Labs and LinkUp Lab released a new report on men’s media consumption and its relation to their well-being. The wide-ranging report includes analysis of what kind of stories draw men to streaming content, a segmentation of men into five audiences with different values and media diets, and a deep dive into the “manosphere” rabbit hole — along with guidance for content creators trying to reach men. We were most drawn to their findings on the manosphere rabbit hole:

• Direct consumption of extreme manosphere channels is vanishingly rare. Their eight anchor channels (e.g. Fresh & Fit, Whatever) found each reaches about 0.01-0.03% of men in the panel on any given day — versus 1.16% for streamers like penguinz0.

• There’s little evidence for a monoculture, or an escalating pipeline. Men who do engage with manosphere channels tend to also engage with ordinary mainstream outlets like CNN, Fox News, SNL, and ESPN. The idea that men’s attention needs to be diverted elsewhere is misguided because it’s already distributed.

What else we’re reading

• Brain activity inhibition during Short Video Viewing: neurochemical insights - Hong et al.

• Court orders Instagram and Facebook’s Meta to pay $567M to address kids’ mental health online - NPR

• 2025 Youth Perspectives on Online Safety Report - Thorn

• The Grift Economy - Equimundo

• Status defines friendship for too many Americans — Christine Emba

Events & Funding Opportunities

• NCPG welcomes grant applications from any U.S. based nonprofit engaging in problem gambling prevention programming | Deadline: August 19, 2026

• Family Online Safety Institute Conference | Washington, D.C. | November 19, 2026

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Do you have an intuition about how pathways into problematic gambling may have changed over the past decade? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

And share!

Share

In 1976, 86 percent of American high-school seniors said they had ever dated. By 2016, it had fallen to 57 percent. In 2024, it was 46 percent, according to Monitoring the Future data.

The decline is more pronounced for young men, as young women tend to date older men. 63% of men ages 18–29 described themselves as single in 2022, versus 34% of women. (A 12-point rise for young men since 2019.)

Unsurprisingly, 30.9% of men ages 18–24 were sexually inactive during the previous year between 2016-18 compared to 18.9% between 2000–02.

The cause of the decline is more speculative, and there has been no shortage of speculation:

The Guardian produced a three-part documentary series on the decline of dating with episodes focusing on the UK, US, and South Korea. They explore three possible explanations: the manosphere, worsening gender relations, and a higher cost of living.

The New York Times Opinions podcast hosted a conversation featuring AIBM board member . Among the possible explanations they discussed: phones as a substitute for real-world interaction, anxiety among Gen Z women after the reversal of Roe, and #MeToo’s effects on the perceived risks of dating and sex.

Other commentators blame Gen Z’s risk aversion and low self-confidence, the cost of housing, and the side effects of antidepressants.

It’s less common to hear members of Gen Z describe for themselves what it’s like to date today. So I was pleased when AIBM’s summer intern, Diego Nunez, offered to describe his own experience. We discuss:

• Waiting for the milestones: Diego says he hears from his friends that dating waits until the job, housing, and checking account are ready.

• How COVID disrupted his generation’s first experiences with romance in high school

• Designing spaces and events where romance takes shape and women feel safe

• The effects of AI porn vs. the normalization of sexual content on TikTok

• The one thing Diego would do to bring romance back for his generation

You can listen to the audio above, or the video version below:

If dating’s decline is partly a story about disappearing opportunities for connection, what can be done to build new ones?

As we prepared for this conversation, I was surprised by how little research I could find about what works to increase the likelihood of romance and partnership. Much of the research published in journals like Personal Relationships and Journal of Social and Personal Relationships examines relationships that already exist. I found little about the conditions in which new relationships form.

If you’ve seen rigorous research about how to create more opportunities for partnership and romance, please share it in the comments or with a direct message:

PS: Diego was the co-author of our new research brief, “Young men and cryptocurrency: What the evidence shows.” We’ll discuss that during next week’s episode.

Introduction: is a fellow at AIBM focused on gambling research and policy.

When I started speaking with students and teachers about gambling, I was struck by how many of the students most interested in sports betting were also the strongest math students. They carefully analyzed statistics and could recite players’ recent performances from memory.

They spent far less time asking why an app kept encouraging them to place another bet, or how the company behind it expected to make money from them. The archetypical high school math whiz may be more exposed to — not protected from — harms from gambling.

This matters especially for boys. A recent Common Sense Media survey found that 36 percent of boys ages 11 to 17 had gambled in the previous year, rising to 49 percent among 17-year-olds. The challenge for schools and parents is to equip young people to understand both the mathematics of a wager and the commercial interests of gambling companies.

Our world is awash in numbers

Twenty-five years ago, the mathematician Lynn Steen argued that the information age was changing what it meant to be an informed citizen. “Our world is awash in numbers,” he wrote. “As the printing press made literacy a societal imperative, the computer has made numeracy an essential goal of education.”

Steen was writing at a moment when information once confined to experts was becoming available to everyone. If people developed the capacity to think quantitatively, that shift could “serve as a stimulus to democratic discourse.” Without widespread numeracy, however, it would “mystify rather than enlighten.”

In many ways, today’s world is an extension of the one Steen described. Anyone with a smartphone can access more quantitative information than an entire newsroom could have accessed a generation ago. AI can analyze datasets and explain statistical concepts in seconds. The cost of producing, interpreting, and distributing quantitative information has collapsed.

The way we encounter those numbers has changed, too. ESPN integrates DraftKings odds into its broadcasts. CNN displays Kalshi election prices. Increasingly, the same number functions as information, an advertisement for a product, and an invitation to speculate. Many young people — and especially boys — now learn about probability through gambling before they study it in a classroom.

Gambling’s expansion has brought obvious risks. More young people betting means more financial losses, and smartphones have made gambling easier to access, hide, and turn into a daily habit.

Gambling products will keep evolving

Schools are beginning to adapt. Massachusetts recently launched a sports betting curriculum for middle and high school students. Virginia now requires gambling awareness instruction as part of its health standards. Similar efforts have emerged in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom as educators try to keep pace with a rapidly changing gambling environment.

The case for gambling literacy is gaining ground, but for it to be effective, it must keep pace with a rapidly changing market.

A curriculum written when states first began legalizing sports betting in 2018 would have focused on moneylines (who will win) and point spreads (how much they’ll win by). Today, same-game parlays account for more than half of all sportsbook wagers. Introduced only in 2019, they combine multiple outcomes into a single wager with more complicated underlying mathematics — and typically less favorable odds for the bettor.

Sports prediction markets have reshaped the landscape yet again. Platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket present gambling through the language of finance. Robinhood now offers event contracts alongside crypto, stocks and ETFs, and high fees mean prediction markets now generate more revenue for Robinhood than stock or crypto trading. The next generation of gambling will almost certainly look different. A curriculum organized around today’s products will always trail tomorrow’s market. A stronger curriculum would be organized around questions that remain useful even when products change.

Learning from media literacy

Media literacy has already taken that approach. Rather than organizing lessons around Facebook, Snapchat, or TikTok, educators shifted towards what the National Association for Media Literacy Education calls “habits of inquiry.” Students learn to ask who created a message, why it was presented that way, what assumptions it relies on, and whose interests it serves. Those questions remain useful as platforms disappear and new ones replace them.

Gambling literacy should borrow that framework. The goal should not just be to equip students with the skills to understand the mathematics of a same-game-parlay. Rather, it should be to instill in them the habits of inquiry that will remain useful as products continue to evolve. Students should understand probability, expected value, sample size, and regression to the mean. They should also learn to ask why certain bets are promoted, what information is left out, and how companies profit from wagers.

Education alone will not protect young people from every gambling-related harm. Even well-informed adults struggle with products designed for speed, convenience, and repeated engagement. Gambling literacy should complement age enforcement, advertising restrictions, safer product design, and limits on practices that encourage compulsive use. As AIBM’s sports betting policy framework argues, information and awareness are most effective when combined with meaningful consumer protections.

Twenty-five years ago, Steen concluded that quantitative literacy was “not a call for more mathematics,” but “a different and more meaningful pedagogy across the entire curriculum.” He argued that students needed “tools to think for themselves, to ask intelligent questions of experts, and to confront authority confidently.” Today, they also need those tools to keep from getting taken by whoever’s on the other side of their bets.

Two weeks ago, we announced a project with the National Research Group examining young men’s lives online, and we asked for your input: what are your hypotheses about how time spent online affects men’s well-being? (Still time to give us your thoughts!)

Shortly after, we came across a new paper testing exactly the kind of hypothesis we were hoping to hear. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, the researchers tested the “need density hypothesis” — that problematic gaming can take hold when they satisfy core psychological needs that a kid’s offline life doesn’t. In other words, they hypothesized that players were at a higher risk when gaming provides autonomy, achievement, and social connection, and offline life fails to.

Following 661 Belgian adolescents over a year, the researchers described their results as partial support for that hypothesis. But the clearest pattern was simpler: weak need satisfaction outside of gaming predicted increases in problematic gaming on its own, even when the game was reported to provide a sense of autonomy, achievement, and social connection.

We’ll keep asking for your hypotheses (complicated ones included)! But this is a nice reminder—sometimes the simpler, less sexy story is the right one.

The Feed

Porn and porn-like content on social media

Abdul El-Sayed, who won yesterday’s Michigan Democratic primary, recently spoke about how “every third video [on Instagram] that scrolls on its own is going to be some OnlyFans model.” Sexually explicit content is commonplace on social media feeds. Building on an earlier project tracking social media feeds of 21 children ages 14-16, UK research agency Revealing Reality examines how young people are exposed to porn on mainstream platforms through sexually explicit videos used to funnel viewers to creators’ paid content.

It’s not just Instagram and TikTok, either. One in four Snapchat users aged 10-17 have seen sexually suggestive content or messages in the past year (49% of boys vs. 62% of girls), according to a similar report by the Heat Initiative and partner organizations.

Nearly half of teens exposed to AI-generated sexual content

Common Sense Media surveyed 1,314 teens, following up on its 2023 report on adolescents and pornography. They find that 74% of teens have seen porn, and 44% have seen sexual content they believe was AI-generated. Of respondents who had seen AI-generated porn, 82% said they encountered it on social media sites versus 41% who said they had on porn sites. Boys are more likely than girls to have seen AI sexual content depicting themselves or someone they know (28% vs. 19%).

More evidence that heavy social media usage is associated with harms—for girls

AEI’s new American Teenagers Survey finds that heavy social media use tracks with worse outcomes on nearly every measure—but only among girls. For instance, among teen girls on social media four or more hours a day (3 of 10), 24% say they’re very or completely satisfied with their lives, versus 54% of girls using it less than an hour a day. The same pattern does not hold for teenage boys.

Interestingly, the survey also finds that only 77% of teenage boys own their own smartphone versus 91% of teenage girls.

What else we’re reading

• Revenge of the Simps: How a community of porn addicts tried to rescue the teenage camgirls they worshipped from the clutches of a violent webcam pimp - The Cut

• Prediction Markets Don’t Need Villains - AIBM fellow

• Raising Good Games: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being - Games For Change

• What we know about the typical Polymarket user - Pew

• Australia’s Social Media Policy Is Succeeding - AfterBabel

• Senators Kim, Schiff, Lummis, Barrasso Introduce Bill to Protect Children Online through New Age Reporting Requirements

• Cognitive flexibility, impulsivity, and compulsivity in problematic consumption behaviours - Jara-Rizzo et al.

• How US Youth Use AI Chatbots: Conversation Patterns From Naturalistic Keystroke Observations - Maheux et al.

• Categorization of Loot Box Design: A Scoping Review of Problematic Features - Ivern and Carbonell

Events & Funding Opportunities

• NCPG welcomes grant applications from any U.S. based nonprofit engaging in problem gambling prevention programming | Deadline: August 19, 2026

• Family Online Safety Institute Conference | Washington, D.C. | November 19, 2026

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Do you want to help us craft our collaboration with NRG? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

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This digest is meant to provide a high-level overview for anyone who is fortunate enough not to follow gambling news every day. If daily news is more your speed, I recommend three newsletters that I relied on to compile this post: Straight to the Point from and the Event Horizon and the Closing Line, both from .

To the (nonexistent) news:

Americans like gambling (and, ahem, hedging financial risk) on soccer

One sportsbook executive pegged the amount bet in the U.S. on the World Cup as the equivalent of “10 Super Bowls.” Meanwhile, $40 billion was bet traded on Kalshi on the World Cup (not all from the U.S.).

Prediction markets are in the business of stepping on rakes, and business is booming

At this point, you have to wonder if it’s on purpose. Prediction markets remain front page news thanks to some scandals and some strange new products.

• A Wall Street Journal investigation showed Polymarket using a bunch of shady advertising practices, including using dummy websites so social media influencers could fake big wins and—without acknowledging that they were being paid—post about the “free” money they won. The CFTC, which (allegedly) regulates prediction markets, is investigating.

• President Trump’s teleprompter operator was caught betting on the words the president would say. Kalshi is patting itself on the back for catching him, even though he was only betting because the company created an economic incentive for him to do so. Also, who is going to pay back all the people who were on the losing end of the ill-gotten winnings?

• Kalshi paused a plan to offer contracts on airline delays but is setting up to allow bets on college conference realignment.

Congress doing congressional things

A subcommittee of the U.S. House Agricultural Committee—the committee that oversees the CFTC, because the agency is supposed to be regulating pork belly derivatives, not Houston Astros parlays—held a hearing on prediction markets. This came a few days after a half-dozen Democratic members of Congress, with the support of one of the Kalshi CEOs, put out a bill requiring facial recognition for accessing prediction markets or sportsbooks, ostensibly to protect children. Lo and behold, the bill also includes language to make it easier for the CFTC to approve contracts related to “gaming.”

In the meantime, states remain the battleground over prediction markets. Two bizarre situations are unfolding in the Midwest:

• Wisconsin: The state has an old law on the books that residents are not allowed to bet on an election in which they also vote, meaning someone who votes in Wisconsin cannot purchase an event contract on the outcome of that election. This is probably headed to court.

• Michigan: After a state court ordered Kalshi to stop offering sports events contracts, the CFTC demanded that Kalshi not comply with the order and told the company not to cancel any trades. So much for states’ rights.

The state of Washington also won an injunction against Kalshi for operating an unlicensed gambling site. The company is rapidly building a track record of taking Ls in court.

Don’t forget about good old-fashioned online sports betting

A bettor in Philadelphia lost $2 million after he claims he developed a gambling addiction. He is suing FanDuel and DraftKings (among others), and the Philadelphia Inquirer released a portion of a video with a personal shoutout from Philadelphia Phillies star Bryce Harper, allegedly commissioned for the bettor by his FanDuel VIP host. Harper has since issued a statement that he did not know what or who the video was for, or how it would be used.

New research

One of the landmark working papers on sports betting has been released in the Journal of Financial Economics. The paper finds that the spread of sports betting “does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly reduces savings,” especially in low-income households.

Until next month

That’s it for this month’s nonexistent gambling news. The scandals will keep grabbing headlines. Meanwhile, gambling is becoming an ordinary, frictionless part of American life, while the costs, especially for households with the least money to spare, are becoming harder to ignore.

This post was written by Ben Samuels. In addition to his work on online gambling, he writes about policy and politics every two weeks.

Since the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports gambling in 2018, it’s been an all-out land grab for FanDuel, DraftKings, and other gambling platforms: to push for state-by-state legalization, to acquire customers, and to make gambling an integral part of watching sports.

By almost every measure, they’ve succeeded. State-licensed sports gambling is legal in 39 states; it’s legal online in 27 states.1 But as the American Institute for Boys and Men has written about extensively,2 this has had profound social consequences:

• When states legalize online betting, bankruptcy rates rise as much as 30%.3 One study found that for every dollar bet on sports, investment contributions fall by 99¢.4

• When states legalize online betting, alcohol consumption goes up, calls to gambling helplines go up, child maltreatment goes up, and food insecurity goes up. Problem gamblers are much likelier to have suicidal tendencies.

• Projected state tax revenues from online gambling have been far lower than what was promised. When you factor in societal costs—higher bankruptcies, higher rates of substance abuse, more violent tendencies—states may be losing money.

When you look at young men, what we’re seeing is even more concerning. So-called “prediction markets” like Kalshi, which are largely unregulated and available to any American 18 or older, are really just sports gambling platforms in disguise. They’re exacerbating this problem.5

Most alarmingly of all, gambling apps, prediction markets, pseudo-gambling apps, freemium games, and more are all targeting boys under 21. These companies are creating a funnel that has young men habitually—and often problematically—gambling well before they should legally even be allowed to open an account.

Boys under 21 can’t legally gamble, but they’re doing it anyway

Common Sense Media put out a terrific report on how boys under 18 are gambling. Gambling is pervasive, even among boys as young as 11.6

Source: Common Sense Media

This isn’t inherently bad. I think most parents would be fine with their teenage boys playing a poker game at home with friends, or putting a few dollars into a March Madness pool. For lots of boys under 21, it really is just that.

But home poker games don’t blow up your phones with notifications, nor do they offer ACH withdrawal, nor are they available 24 hours per day.

Minors can access online casinos through offshore and unlicensed platforms, crypto casinos, or accounts belonging to parents and older siblings, all of which are common and easy workarounds. Consequently, even if it’s nominally illegal, young men—who are especially susceptible to gambling addiction—are getting themselves into serious trouble.7

There’s a lot of harrowing, well-researched reporting on boys getting themselves into serious debt before they turn 18. And of course, countless other stories are never told.

• “Teen gambling is turbocharged thanks to sports-betting and prediction markets. Parents often have no idea.” (MarketWatch)

• “Gamification and memes lure young people to sports wagering apps and prediction markets” (Associated Press)

• “‘Public health crisis’: Experts weigh the stakes of youth gambling in America” (ABC News)

• “Prediction markets have made betting easier than ever—and young men are paying the price” (Fortune)

• “Young man reveals how online gambling put him thousands in debt before age of 18” (ABC 7 NY)

These trends are likely to accelerate as prediction markets—which are available in every state, are less regulated, and have an age limit of 18 rather than 21—become more prevalent.

While we know that prediction markets can feed gambling addictions, we don’t know how many of their users are under 21. That’s because they’re not required to disclose who’s gambling on their platforms.

Despite requests from members of Congress, these companies have opted not to share that information.

Gambling ads reach—and target—boys under 21

Obviously, boys who are watching television are going to see the (ubiquitous) ads for FanDuel, DraftKings, Kalshi, and other platforms that are spending billions per year on advertising.8

That may not be ideal, but it’s hardly unique. Beer companies get to advertise on television, and that’s not meant to reach minors.

What’s more alarming is that boys are more likely to encounter gambling ads on platforms capable of targeting them directly (namely, YouTube and social media):

Source: Common Sense Media

The content on social media can be relentless, and it seldom includes disclaimers about gambling addiction, which violates the gambling industry’s own guidelines.

FanDuel, DraftKings, and others have public positions about their commitment to promoting responsible gambling and preventing minors from gambling. In practice, they don’t operate that way.9

Their public comments on the topic are fairly explicit. Here are a few examples from investor presentations and earnings calls:

• Back in early 2021, FanDuel put together slides on “Attracting and Engaging Gen Z” and “Building a Product for Gen Z.” Keep in mind that at the time, the vast majority of Gen Z wasn’t of legal gambling age: approximately 20% of Gen Z was 21+, and approximately 40% was 18+.10

• FanDuel and DraftKings are actively thinking about how to make sure that young adults are in their pipeline. This question came up in a DraftKings earnings call earlier this year,11 and FanDuel last year announced the launch of FanDuel Predicts explicitly as “a new prediction market product which will include sports in states without access to regulated sports betting.” Prediction markets are 18+, not 21+.

• Super Group, a gambling company that trades on the NYSE, spoke about “a growing population of customers turning 18 and 21 every year” abroad as a demographic opportunity for the company.

Moreover, all of these companies are hiring brand ambassadors who are popular with people under 21. Take Pat McAfee, who just signed a sponsorship deal with DraftKings to replace his FanDuel sponsorship deal, which was worth up to $30 million per year. He has a large TikTok following, and his content is immensely popular among people under 18and among people ages 18-21, who are exposed to all of his gambling content.12

Polymarket may be the most shameless, hiring brand ambassadors in fraternities and paying them to recruit new customers. College campuses have been particularly lucrative for prediction markets.

Believe it or not, these aren’t even the worst actors. Plenty of illegal casinos operate without proper disclosure, operate without licenses, and target minors.13 Ads for these casinos are nominally prohibited on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch, but they proliferate anyway, and teenagers have found themselves deep in debt well before they’re legally allowed to gamble.

What can be done?

As anyone who’s ever been a teenager on the internet can attest, it’s very easy to break the rules. And while some of that creativity is admirable—a fake moustache to get around AI age verification tools, for instance—minors can get themselves into serious trouble before they even turn 18, much less 21. Gambling companies have little interest in keeping them from seeing their ads and sponsored content.

What’s more, these companies use aggressive, predatory methods that aren’t legal elsewhere in the world to reach new customers. U.S. regulation hasn’t caught up.

Four policies that are obvious and urgent:

1. Regulate advertising for prediction markets. Right now, they’re basically unregulated. That’s a regulatory oversight at best, and they should be subject to the sorts of rules that other online casinos face.

2. Require more extensive disclosures. For prediction markets, how many 18-to-20-year-olds are using these platforms? How many minors are trying to create accounts? How much of their content on social media is being seen by minors?14

3. Limit how much young gamblers can wager per month. Flutter, an Ireland-based gambling company, limits gamblers under 25 to £500 per month. That should be enshrined in American regulation.

4. Crack down on illegal gambling. Crypto casinos and other unlicensed offshore casinos are operating in the U.S. without consequence. State and federal regulators must do better to enforce the laws already on the books.

This is a perpetual game of regulatory cat-and-mouse. Despite what they’ll tell you, gambling platforms are reliant on high-frequency problem gamblers, who drive much of the platforms’ profits. They know that young men in particular are especially vulnerable—and, therefore, especially lucrative.

7

Good data on what constitutes “serious trouble” is challenging to come by, but this chart tells an interesting story:

Source: Common Sense Media

There is more than one way that gambling can be problematic. But using your parents’ credit cards without their knowledge is unquestionably problematic behavior—even if it doesn’t constitute a formal gambling addiction.

Steven joined our pornography research convening in Minneapolis in June, and this conversation picks up where that meeting left off. We discuss:

• Where he’d like to see pornography researchers focus: Researchers study men in the problem, rarely men who’ve come out the other side. He’d like to see work following men six, nine, twelve months into recovery that studies whether and how shame recedes, confidence returns, and intimacy develops.

• Frequency is the wrong metric. After working with thousands of men, Steven doesn’t ask how often. He looks for loss of control and accumulating consequences: relationships, sexual function, work, general peace of mind.

• Porn as a regulation tool, not a sexual behavior. For the men he works with, porn has become the primary way they manage anxiety, boredom, loneliness, anger. With a phone in every pocket, he compares pornography to being newly sober from cocaine while carrying a pocketful everywhere you go.

• Which is why “just stop” fails. Recovery, as he describes it, has surprisingly little to do with not watching porn. It’s about becoming emotionally regulated, socially connected, and honest — building a life you don’t want to escape from.

• “Men need other men to become better men.” While therapy can generate useful insight, Steven has observed that behavior changes in the company of other men you don’t want to let down. Those groups exist, but they carry stigma and still aren’t easily accessible for your average 18-year-old.

• Recovery as something you’re building toward. Recovery is often understood by what’s being left behind. Steven frames the process as a move toward healthy masculinity — integrity, brotherhood, service, alignment between values and behavior. “You can fool the world, but you can’t fool the man in the mirror.”

• Losing the tolerance for discomfort. His recovery work with young men transcends pornography. Most young men, growing up with a phone always within reach, have not sat with discomfort long enough to develop the resilience.

• Moving toward alignment with values. “There’s this idea that this is about morality, that these are men without values — that can’t be further from the truth. They’re suffering because they’re living a life not in alignment with their values.”

PS: Steven’s personal story is inspiring, unlikely, and quite funny. To learn more, check out his interview with Theo Von.

Over the course of the next year, we’re partnering with National Research Group (NRG) on an ambitious project examining young men’s wellbeing and how it relates to their lives online.

While the study's structure is set, we’re still developing our hypotheses, and we’d like your help. What should we be asking young men about the pathways to purpose, connection, and flourishing? What hypotheses should we have in mind when we’re studying how young men use technology to meet their goals and desires? But before we ask for your input, first some background on where we are now:

For too long, it was difficult to ask whether boys and men were doing okay without appearing to diminish the challenges facing women. Much of the public conversation about young men focused on harmful masculine norms, including aggression, misogyny, emotional suppression, domination, and the influence of the so-called manosphere. Those are real concerns, but they offer an incomplete framework to understand how young men are actually doing, what they want from life, and what might help them flourish.

Thankfully, the conversation about young men is becoming more curious, with growing recognition that concern for men and concern for women are complementary. Over the past 18 months, the Institute for Family Studies, Public Agenda, Cygnal, the Young Men Research Project, and Equimundo have all published survey research examining young men’s goals, identities, relationships, worries, and wellbeing. Qualitative work, including and ’s Nobody to Call report, offers texture to the findings in the words of young men themselves through in-depth interviews.1

The reports have some differences. They cover various age ranges, ask different questions, and assess through different interpretive lenses. Most are cross-sectional surveys, meaning they can describe patterns but cannot tell us what causes them.

Even so, a fairly consistent picture emerges.

Young men are not without goals

None of the reports reveal a generation of apathetic young men.

Young men commonly say they want financial stability, decent work, independence, housing, close relationships, family, connection, respect, and the opportunity to contribute. What varies is whether they can see a clear, credible path toward the lives they want.

Cygnal found financial stability to be young men’s top current priority. The Young Men Research Project found respondents nearly divided over whether they felt financially secure. Equimundo emphasized the psychological consequences of economic insecurity in a culture where many men still feel pressure to provide.

The Institute for Family Studies reached a similar conclusion: Financial independence and personal responsibility ranked among the most important markers of adulthood. The report’s authors argue that many young men are not apathetic but demoralized. They have the same conventional aspirations as previous generations while doubting the pathways to achieve them.

Young men’s attitudes toward education illustrate the gap between conventional aspirations and uncertain pathways to success. Young men are often described as turning against college, but the surveys reveal something more complicated. Many believe college can create opportunities while also worrying about debt, uncertain returns, or choosing the wrong course of study. Trade school, apprenticeships, online learning, and entrepreneurship appear increasingly attractive, but none offers a risk-free path to economic stability.

The reports also complicate common portrayals of masculinity. Young men typically describe manhood with the prosocial language of virtue: responsibility, honesty, confidence, sacrifice, providing for others. Rarely do they cite dominance or aggression. At the same time, gender-based ideals can become burdens. Being relied upon can provide purpose, but feeling unable to provide can produce shame.

The same tension appears in relationships. Forming a family has not disappeared as an aspiration, but it has often become conditional on financial and emotional readiness. A young man may want a partner, marriage, or children while believing he must first secure a stable job or a place of his own.

And young men can be connected online without feeling known. Group chats, multiplayer games, Discord servers, subreddits, forums, and social media may satisfy their desire for companionship and community. But online interactions do not necessarily produce trust, recognition, or someone to call during a crisis.

The tensions are the story

Understanding the tensions running through these reports — rather than explaining them away as complications — is essential to developing realistic and credible solutions.

In focus groups and surveys, young men report feeling optimistic about their own lives while believing that success is becoming harder for men generally. They can doubt college while recognizing the advantages enjoyed by graduates. They can value autonomy while wanting more guidance. They can spend much of the day interacting with others while feeling lonely. A growing sense of responsibility manifests as both purpose and pressure.

Their online lives contain similar apparent contradictions. The same phone can teach a trade, maintain a friendship, organize a sports league, or dissolve an evening into a zombie night of doomscrolling. Gaming can provide mastery and camaraderie, or become a place to escape anxiety. YouTube can offer education, aspiration, and entertainment — and also contribute to social isolation.

Screen time is too blunt an instrument to distinguish between what enhances and inhibits thriving. Such blunt measures produce confusing results, and we can do better with more specificity: which young men, using which technologies in what ways, affect which outcomes — and through what mechanisms?

Better measures distinguish between what a young man is doing, why he is doing it, whether he chose it, who is with him, and what it displaces.

Survey data can tell us a good deal about what young men value and fear, but they reveal less about whether young men align their days with their aspirations, and what obstacles get in the way.

That is a gap we aim to address through our new research partnership with NRG.

Our research starts where other studies end

The study includes boys and young men across four distinct life stages: ages 14 to 18; ages 19 to 22 in college; ages 19 to 22 outside college; and ages 23 to 29.

We will include young men who consider themselves thriving, struggling, and the many who feel somewhere in between. We will also include variation in geography, socioeconomic background, identity, education, work, and patterns of technology use.

During phase 1, we’ll develop a detailed understanding of the online and offline lives and wellbeing of a sample of 30 young men through behavioral tracking of their devices, time diaries, and in-depth interviews.

In phase 2, we’ll broaden our focus to validate those findings and identify solutions through co-creation groups, digital ethnographies, and a nationally representative survey.

The goal is not to divide their days into a virtuous offline life and a harmful online life. Digital and physical experiences shape a single ecosystem of habits, routines, and relationships. We want to understand how that ecosystem supports and interferes with the life a young man is trying to build.

We aim to go beyond mere diagnosis by providing young men with the data, tools, and dialogues to identify what healthier relationships with technology would look like, and how to build them.

Our framework for young men’s wellbeing provides a starting point for this research

We need a descriptive framework of thriving and struggling to understand the role of technology in shaping young men’s wellbeing. Informed by academic literature on youth development and flourishing, our current framework has five layers:

First are goals, such as financial stability, work, learning, independence, health, relationships, family, connection, and civic leadership.

Second are four psychological needs. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, we include autonomy, competence, and belonging — along with mattering:

• Autonomy: feeling ownership over one’s choices and time.

• Competence: feeling capable and able to make progress.

• Belonging/relatedness: feeling accepted and connected to others.

• Mattering: feeling valued and able to add value to one’s communities.

Third are the character strengths and supports that may help translate intentions into action: judgment, self-regulation, perseverance, initiative, reliability, care, mentorship, routines, useful feedback, and credible institutions.

We initially considered calling this the “virtues” layer. There is something important in that language: living well involves not only feeling good, but developing the character to pursue goals and meet obligations to others.

But “virtue” also risks implying that young men struggle because they lack character. No amount of perseverance can manufacture an affordable apartment, reliable transportation, a decent job, or a welcoming community. Personal capacities always operate within economic conditions, family circumstances, institutional opportunities, and digital environments.

Fourth is daily behavior: how time is actually distributed across work, school, relationships, exercise, sleep, hobbies, care, gaming, social media, video, and unstructured hours.

Fifth are the resulting outcomes. For instance: connection, confidence, progress, satisfaction, distress, or regret.

The framework is not a causal chain. Wellbeing can influence behavior just as behavior can influence wellbeing. Young men with greater resources may find it easier to exercise, join groups, sleep well, or use technology intentionally. Heavy online use may contribute to distress, or distress may lead people online.

Those rival explanations are part of what we want to investigate. Another goal is to move beyond simple models — “phones are bad (or good)” — to specific hypotheses that inform solutions, such as:

1. Isolated young men with few offline alternatives may experience stronger social connection and reduced loneliness through multiplayer games with voice chat.

2. Short-form video feeds may keep adolescent boys up late at night, disrupting their sleep and impairing their concentration and performance in school.

3. Young men whose only dating experience is through dating apps may experience greater romantic frustration, increasing their chances of giving up on dating altogether.

We also hope to shed light on foundational questions about how young men find pathways to thriving:

1. What gives a young man credible evidence and recognition that he is making progress?

2. What forms of guidance support autonomy, rather than coming off as controlling or patronizing?

3. Does having a recognized role — on a team, at work, in a family, or in a community— strengthen one’s sense of mattering and self-esteem?

This framework is provisional. Before we enter the field, we would value feedback and criticism from researchers, practitioners, parents, educators, technology professionals, and young men themselves.

You can respond via a brief Google Form, in a comment below, or by sending a direct message: