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.

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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!

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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:

I’m filling in for this week. He’ll be back for the next digest.

Can a face scan keep teenagers off betting apps?

A bipartisan federal proposal announced last week would require sportsbooks and prediction markets to use facial recognition or facial age estimation when a user logs in or places a wager. It targets a real loophole — reporting from NPR describes how teens can bypass legal age restrictions to gamble by using shared devices or an adult’s phone.

Noting the workaround, Rep. Josh Gottheimer observes, “We wouldn’t accept that at a casino in Las Vegas. We shouldn’t accept it on the phone in our kid’s back pocket.” The move follows a similar effort by New York’s Governor Hochul in March.

But it leaves a harder question unresolved: should 18-year-olds be allowed to gamble on their phones?

The proposed bill could help prevent teens from placing bets on the phones of adults. It could also normalize 18 as the federal age to provide unlimited access to gambling. But most Americans think online gambling should be restricted to 21+. A recent poll of 1,514 registered voters by Change Research found that 76% of respondents think online gambling should be restricted to 21 and above. Majorities also preferred a 21-plus threshold for pornography websites and cryptocurrency trading apps, but not for AI companions, gaming platforms, or social media.

The Feed

New data on sports betting prevalence

New research by the Urban Institute examines how and why Americans bet on sports. Among the findings from a nationally representative survey (n=3,194):

• 17% of Americans age 18-29 report betting on sports in the past 12 months. Of adults overall, men (13%) are more likely to bet on sports versus women (9%)

• Most bettors bet infrequently: about half have only bet “once or twice” in the past year, and just 4% report betting daily.

• Few bettors report missing bill payment because of betting (3%), but more (12%) report having saved less money than they would have otherwise because of sports betting.

The Urban Institute also released similar research briefs on cryptocurrency and Gen Z’s financial attitudes.

Settlement manipulation in prediction markets

Using Polymarket’s trading records and Binance crypto data, the authors of this preprint find evidence of traders manipulating Bitcoi

n prices during the final seconds of five-minute “up/down” contracts. They identify roughly 1,600 likely manipulations and 821 accounts that earned $8.2 million from them; 93% of the resulting losses fell on retail traders. After sports, wagering on the price of crypto is the most common activity by volume on Kalshi.

Safer defaults reduce exposure to harmful content

Participants aged 13–15, 16–17, and adults used a simulated social platform with varying defaults for messaging, location sharing, and network expansion. Users frequently maintained safer, more restrictive defaults, suggesting that reducing harm need not depend entirely on self-control. With vibe-coding bringing down the cost of simulated platforms, we’d like to see similar studies testing default guardrails for gambling apps.

Prices, Probabilities, and Parlays

A prediction market contract trading at 30 cents is normally understood to imply roughly a 30% chance of paying out one dollar. This preprint paper finds that Kalshi’s 30-cent sports parlays won only about 24% of the time. Put simply, buyers paid 30 cents for something returning an average of approximately 24 cents before fees. The discrepancy grew as additional legs were added.

What else we’re reading

• Betting on Better Evidence — Arnold Ventures announces a $2.6 million research portfolio on gambling exposure, financial harm, industry tactics, and policy effectiveness.

• From isolated openings to streaks: a sequential observational study of loot box openings in livestreamed gaming — This paper examining loot-box openings in livestreams finds that the vast majority (93%) of loot boxes are opened in streaks rather than as isolated events.

• European Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act — The Commission found that Meta failed to address addictive design, including infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and highly personalized recommender systems.

• A year of age assurance under the UK Online Safety Act — Early evidence from the UK telecom regulator that age verification creates friction but remains incomplete and vulnerable to circumvention.

• Jonathan Haidt Is Wrong About Age-Gating the Internet — Kelsey Piper favors restrictions on advertising and engagement design, chronological feeds, and device-level controls. She suggests devices for adolescents that “as a hardware restriction, didn’t access vice sites (like porn or gambling).”

• How young people are coping with the attention economy — introduces a documentary series centered on young people’s own accounts of attention, connection, and digital well-being.

• Why Is Everything Gambling Now? — A holistic framing of gambling mechanics spreading across finance, entertainment, and digital platforms.

• Warren Buffett and Kalshi’s CEO disagree on gambling versus investing — "Since humans love to gamble so much, there's more money in cultivating gamblers than investors."

• How this World Cup is being used to turn a new generation of teens into gambling addicts — Researcher Darragh McGee argues that smartphones, in-play wagering, targeted advertising, inducements, and casino cross-selling have transformed sports betting from an occasional act into continuous engagement.

• The Black Markets Fallacy — argues that the existence of black markets is not a convincing case against banning vice.

  ---

Events & Funding Opportunities

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

• 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? How do you think we should handle young people’s technology use? 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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• Courts may be the new front in tech regulation. Recent cases against Meta and other platforms are testing whether addictive and unsafe design features—not just user-generated content—can create legal liability.

• While the media have focused on financial penalties, court-imposed design changes could be more consequential. Courts could require changes to features such as autoplay, default notifications, age verification, and features that connect minors with unknown adults.

• Many safety tools, including parental controls, appear designed to reassure regulators rather than meaningfully change behavior. Internal company documents suggest that some platforms have measured safety interventions partly by ensuring they do not substantially reduce time spent online.

• Litigation and legislation should be complementary, not competing strategies. Democratic institutions should establish broad rules, but lawsuits can expose internal evidence, compensate people who were harmed, and correct risks that regulators failed to anticipate.

• The same design framework applies beyond social media. Sports betting, prediction markets, gaming, and other digital products increasingly use similar mechanics to extend use and spending, creating an opportunity for common standards around friction, transparency, limits, and user control.

• The ultimate goal is to restore human agency. Early online communities often helped people collaborate, learn, and build relationships. Today’s platforms too often make users feel that they are fighting an algorithm designed to override their intentions. Better policy should help technology work for people again.

For more from Pete:

• TIME: “Why Fines Alone Won’t Make Social Media Safer for Kids”

• Tech Policy Press: “What US Lawsuits Reveal About Platform Design That DSA Reports Don’t”

• KGI: “Designing Technology Remedies: Lessons for Social Media and Generative AI Chatbot Litigation”

• KGI: “Measuring Risk: What EU Risk Assessments and US Litigation Reveal About Meta and TikTok”

Introduction from David: In a recent edition of CTRL Agency, Anders Knospe highlighted a new study examining how state age-verification laws affect pornography use. We wanted to give the study a fuller treatment by inviting two of its authors, Matthew Brown and Emily Davis, to summarize their findings, limitations, and implications for policymakers. As we noted in a recent landscape scan, pornography policy is evolving faster than the evidence base. This paper—coauthored with Devin Pope—is a valuable example of policy-relevant research that uses an innovative study design and unusually detailed browsing data to measure not only whether regulation changes behavior, but also how users and platforms adapt in response.

By Matthew Brown and Emily Davis

Half of all U.S. states have implemented laws that require pornography sites to verify users’ age. In response, the largest porn website, Pornhub, blocked access to all users in states with such laws. Pornhub is one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world, receiving over three billion visits globally each month. So, when it disappears, do people stop watching porn—or do they find workarounds?

As academic economists who work on public policy, we thought this question was worth answering. These recent laws are some of the most ambitious online regulations in U.S. history, and other states, such as New York and Pennsylvania, are debating whether to implement their own versions. But the overall impact of these laws is not obvious. It’s plausible that some users are deterred from viewing porn by Pornhub’s access restrictions, but news reports have highlighted that others get around the restrictions by using VPNs or migrating to other porn sites that did not comply with the laws.

Using anonymized browsing data from more than 500,000 devices, we find that age verification laws do reduce porn-site viewing. But the effect is modest. Total time spent on porn sites fell by roughly 10% among the adult devices in our sample. Many users appear to have circumvented restrictions with VPNs or shifted to noncompliant sites that did not verify age.

Our findings suggest that age verification laws can reduce access to porn, but their impact depends heavily on enforcement, platform compliance, and how easily users can move to less regulated corners of the internet.

What we measured on 500,000 devices

We purchased anonymized internet activity data for over 500,000 mobile devices and computers from 2022 to 2024.1 With this data, we could observe every time a device visited a website and how long that visit lasted, along with some demographic information about the users of the devices.

While our data is much more detailed than data used by previous studies, it is not perfect. Crucially, it is not a representative sample of U.S. porn browsing in terms of demographics and device types. We also do not capture website visits from private browsers like Google’s Incognito mode.2 Most importantly, our data only contains devices owned by adults, even though the laws are targeted at minors. Therefore, our research directly measures how adults responded to the laws, which might provide indirect insights into impacts on kids and teens.

How did the laws affect porn viewing?

To measure the effects of the laws, we studied whether trends in internet activity changed in states right after they passed the laws. In the graph below, the “0” point on the x-axis represents the week that Pornhub blocks users in states where the laws took effect. Unsurprisingly, we see that time spent on Pornhub fell dramatically after the site blocked users.

What’s more interesting is that some users continued to visit Pornhub even though the site should have been blocked in their state. Time spent at Pornhub fell by about 0.75 minutes per device per week, but that decline only eliminated about half the time people were spending at Pornhub before the shutdown. The most plausible explanation for so much continued use of Pornhub is substantial VPN-based circumvention.

VPNs are not the only way to continue watching porn in states with age verification laws. While Pornhub chose to block access, other popular pornography sites (XVideos and XNXX) have continued operating without verifying users’ age.3

We found that time spent at those websites rose immediately after the laws passed, which is evidence that people were switching from compliant sites to noncompliant sites. Some have argued that this kind of substitution is a downside of regulation, as Pornhub has taken steps to eliminate illegal content (such as content related to nonconsensual activity or child sexual abuse), while many of its noncompliant competitors have not.4

The next graph shows how the laws affected total time spent across all of the 200,000+ porn sites in our data. Despite the presence of VPNs and noncompliant alternatives, age verification laws noticeably reduced porn viewing for our sample of devices.

Quantitatively, we estimate that age verification laws reduced total time spent at porn sites by roughly 10%.

Our final graph breaks down time spent at the top 25 porn websites before and after laws were passed by type of website (compliant or noncompliant), to illustrate the importance of the various channels that we measure. For every 100 hours spent at top porn sites before restrictions, about 50 hours remained accessible at noncompliant sites that never restricted access, 30 hours persisted through VPN-based circumvention, 10 hours shifted from compliant sites to noncompliant sites, and 10 hours were no longer spent on porn sites.

All of these results apply to adult users because we do not have data on minors. One could imagine that the laws’ impact on porn viewing for minors would be larger (young people may be less familiar with noncompliant sites than adults, and some VPNs require credit cards) or smaller (young people may be more familiar with VPNs than adults). We tried to use some patterns in our data to learn about whether impacts on minors were likely to differ, but our tests were inconclusive.5 Overall, though, the effects – modest reductions in porn site viewing, muted by VPN usage and switching to noncompliant sites – appear across many demographic groups within our adult sample.

Broader implications

Whether age verification laws are a good idea depends in part on whether and how they affect porn viewing. People disagree about age verification for many reasons: free speech, privacy, parental authority, child protection, and views about pornography itself.6 Our study does not settle those debates. It answers a narrower question: what happened to porn-site viewing after these laws took effect?

Debates about online regulation extend beyond porn. Policymakers around the world have attempted to regulate activities like social media use and video games. There are many ways to design such policies, and whether the regulations achieve policymakers’ goals depends on how platforms and users respond to these laws.

Platform noncompliance is a major factor limiting the impacts of current regulations for online pornography. Even if policymakers reduced VPN-based circumvention (for example, through device-based age verification), it may still be possible for users to switch to noncompliant sites based in jurisdictions where enforcement is difficult. In other areas of online life, there may be fewer plausible alternatives. For example, in contexts like social media, network effects tend to create markets with a few dominant platforms, and regulators may be able to force all of them to comply. As policymakers design future regulations for online activity, we hope they will consider the viability of enforcement and how platforms and users are likely to respond.

This July I’m (mostly) smartphone-less. I am a week into MonthOffline, a program where you switch to a flip phone (a “dumbphone”) and join a small group of neighbors for weekly meetings they describe as “part support group, part happy hour, part classroom”.

Logging off feels all the rage here in New York—it was just the “Summer of Ludd”, after all—but I was curious if the sentiment is widespread. The evidence is mixed:

• 63% of Americans wish they could take a break from their phone sometimes, but only 39% often do, according to a May 2025 poll from YouGov.

• Last year’s General Social Survey found roughly 70% of internet users had deliberately cut back at least once—with the reason for unplugging split by gender: women were more likely to cite physical or mental well-being (37% vs. 27% of men), while men were more likely to cite wanting more time for offline life (40% vs. 32% of women).

• As for dumphone sales, it’s hard to get a good number. Still, it’s safe to say they remain a niche consumer product.

The Feed

Despite implementation hurdles, Americans like under-16 social media bans

Australia’s landmark social media ban has had a rocky go of it.

• Yesterday, a research team which advised the government’s rollout found that platforms almost never ask users to prove their age. Of 50 test accounts the team opened across nine platforms (including Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat), each self-declared as 16, only one platform ever requested age verification.

• Echoing an earlier NBER working paper, a recent BMJ study found that 85% of Australian under-16s reported still using social media three months into the ban, with no significant differences by sex.

Still, youth social media bans remain popular in the U.S. According to a Pew poll, nearly 6 in 10 U.S. adults support banning social media for those under the age of 16. Another 21% opposed a ban, and 23% were unsure.

Other restrictions on minors social media first polled in 2023 remain popular:

For ongoing coverage of the age-verification debates — Australia, KOSA, the KIDS act, we’ve been reading Quire’s digital childhood briefing.

Putting the gambling genie back in the bottle

Ohio's proposed "Save Ohio Sports Act" would eliminate online sports betting in the state entirely. But as argues, dismantling regulated sportsbooks could just push betting behavior toward prediction markets or illegal operators, preserving the addictive dynamics while weakening state oversight.

Kalshi Suffers Federal Court Loss In New York

Kalshi’s legal fight over sports-related prediction markets continues, with Gouker reporting a federal court loss in New York and an expected appeal. The case remains one of the most important tests of whether sports event contracts will be treated more like financial products or gambling products.

What else we’re reading

• Gambling Addiction Starts in Middle School - Jessica Grose in the NYT

• Many Child Safety Features on Social Apps Don’t Work, Report Finds - NYT (Report)

• OpenAI teams up with kids’ safety group on California ballot measure - Politico

• Loot box purchases are associated with problem gambling severity and harms beyond traditional gambling activities - Kim et al.

• Online Sports Betting: The Problem and How to Respond - Ethics & Public Policy Center

• A loneliness epidemic meets uneven social infrastructure - Axios

• “Social Media Addiction” Is Way More Complicated Than You Think - Persuasion

• What Does a 13-Year-Old See on Snapchat in a Normal Week? - After Babel

• Multimodal imaging and transcriptomics reveal the pathway of mindfulness-mediated recovery in internet gaming disorder - Xu et al.

• CFTC conducting broad probe into prediction market Polymarket - Bloomberg

• At 17, She Sued Meta and Google, and Won. Now She’s Ready to Tell Her Story - Bloomberg

• These Are the Sharps Actually Making Money on Prediction Markets - Odd Lots

• The Digital Choices Shaping our Children’s Health - Emmanuel Macron and Tedros Ghebreyesus in Project Syndicate

Events & Funding Opportunities

• New* Brookings Webinar - Behind the screen: AI slop, young children, and the profit problem | 2 PM, July 16th.

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

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

• New* 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 think logging off is good for you? 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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Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Polymarket paid dozens of mostly college-aged social media creators to make videos placing fake bets on a near-perfect fake copy of their website. Of the 778 videos that showed a bet being placed, all were on the simulated site and at least 69 of the bets shown as wins would actually have been losses. Polymarket then paid a separate army of “clippers” to repost the content, targeting Americans (clippers were only paid if 60%+ of their audience was U.S.-based) despite the platform being banned from offering its crypto exchange to U.S. users since 2022.

I asked our sports betting policy lead Jonathan Cohen for his thoughts:

Of all the absurd things about prediction markets, advertising may be the most absurd. The platforms have taken advantage of the basically nonexistent rules governing their marketing to engage in some of the scuzziest and shadiest tactics imaginable. This might be a short term boost for the company, but will lead to a swifter and harsher crackdown

For more on the proliferation of gambling, check out last week’s webinar with CNN Commentator and AIBM fellow Kyla Scanlon, Fanatics CEO Matt King, and AIBM’s Sports Betting Policy Lead Jonathan Cohen.

And if you like our work or know someone who does, Boys & Men Online is hiring a part-time Digital Media Consultant for July-December 2026. You can find out more about the role and apply here.

The Feed

Sports betting legalization increased food hardship

A new NBER working paper finds that legalizing sports betting reduced household food sufficiency by 2.1% among working-age adults without a college degree — an estimated 10.5% decline among active bettors. Using Census Household Pulse Survey data from nine states that legalized between 2021 and 2023, the authors find that food insufficiency emerges within two months of legalization, persists for three to five months, and tracks the NFL season. The declines are largest among 25-44-year-olds and racial/ethnic minorities, and amount to an additional 284,000 food-insufficient households.

TikTok’s own words

Leaked internal TikTok documents obtained by The Times show the degree to which the company was aware of their products’ addictive qualities.

• A 2023 document describes TikTok as using “coercive design tactics that detract from user agency such as infinite scroll, constant notifications and the ‘slot machine’ effect.”

• A “Screen Time Management One Pager” defines six or more hours a day as “objectively harmful usage” and states that 10 million users (1.3% of daily active users, ) meet that threshold. A separate study estimates 3% of child users qualify.

• TikTok’s data shows 19% of 13-15-year-olds and 25% of 16-17-year-olds are active on TikTok between midnight and 5am.

• A “Digital Wellbeing Product Strategy” document acknowledged that “compulsive usage on TikTok is rampant” and that “the advertising-based business model encourages optimisation for time spent on the app”

Psychosocial effects of digital media use on boys and men

A new review in Current Psychiatry Reports, partially funded by our president Richard Reeves, synthesizes the evidence on how social media, gaming, and AI chatbots affect adolescent boys and young men in particular. They find that:

• Boys’ social media risks centers on risky body modification trends

• Gender is an independent risk factor for disordered gaming, but gaming also has real prosocial value: 94% of boys game with others and over half say it’s improved their friendships.

• 53% of adolescent boys have used generative AI, and 4-6% are turning to AI companions for emotional support rather than human help.

What else we’re reading

• Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact - Pew

• Interaction with AI Companions and Psychological Well-being - Zhang et al.

• A Viral Knicks Moment, Brought to You by a Prediction Market - New York Times

• Mark Zuckerberg Directed Meta to Create a Prediction Markets App - New York Times

• Why Fines Alone Won’t Make Social Media Safer For Kids - Time

• Feds move to formally allow sports “trading” on prediction markets - Axios

• U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory: Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use

• Gambling-Related Financial Harm: A Public Health Approach to Financial Stability in a Digital Era

• Colorado’s gamble on sports betting: a 3-part special report - The Denver Post

• How your phone keeps you scrolling ... even when you want to stop - NPR: The Indicator

Events & Funding Opportunities

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? How do you think prediction market advertising should regulated? 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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Three forces have converged since the onset of COVID: more time spent on our devices in isolation, the expansion of legalized online gambling, and the rise of digital products designed around engagement loops. Sports betting is the most visible example, but the broader pattern includes prediction markets, crypto trading, Robinhood-style gamified investing, loot boxes in video games, online casinos, meme stocks, and even shopping apps that use gambling-like mechanics.

In this week’s episode, New York Times journalist moderates a discussion between CNN commentator and AIBM fellow , Fanatics CEO Matt King, and AIBM’s gambling policy lead .

There were real disagreements among the panelists. Jonathan Cohen argued that sports betting helped normalize gambling culturally, especially through advertising, celebrity endorsements, and sports broadcasts. Matt King pushed back, claiming that sports betting already existed illegally, and legal markets at least create an opportunity for consumer protections. Kyla Scanlon argued that the deeper issue is not sports betting alone, but economic insecurity, social media, and a broader culture of speculative risk.

Still, the panelists united on several themes:

An old impulse, transformed by new technology

People have always gambled, but it once required effort to get to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or a bookie. Now there is almost no friction. The casino follows you around, available all day, with endless new activities to bet on. Sports betting accelerated and normalized the broader trend. Pew found that 22% of U.S. adults bet on sports in the past year in 2025, and 36% of men under 30 did so.

The blurred line between gambling, investing, and entertainment

Gambling companies present as investment platforms, disguising risk-taking as financial self-improvement. Prediction markets are treated as financial products, but the vast majority of people use them to gamble. An AIBM/Ipsos poll found that 61% of Americans familiar with prediction markets see them as closer to gambling than investing, while only 8% see them as closer to investing.

Robinhood, crypto wallets, same-day options, perpetual futures, and sports betting increasingly live in the same mental and digital ecosystem. A user may open an app to manage money and be nudged toward riskier products. Gambling is quickly moving from niche vice to mainstream digital behavior, concentrated among young men and blended into finance, fandom, gaming, and news.

It’s getting worse, and younger

Nobody was asking to lower the age for online gambling from 21 to 18. But the Trump administration effectively opened a new national loophole by making prediction markets available to anyone 18 or older. President Trump lamented that “the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino.” And yet, Donald Trump Jr. serves as a key strategic adviser to the major platforms Kalshi and Polymarket, while Trump Media & Technology Group announced plans for its own crypto-based prediction platform, Truth Predict.

Economic insecurity and the search for escape

There are two ends of a barbell across the K-shaped economy, observed . For wealthy households, online gambling may satisfy young men’s natural desire for risk-taking in a world of complacent abundance. For low-income households, gambling becomes a tempting shortcut out of financial precarity when job insecurity, inflation, and expensive housing make conventional paths to economic stability feel out of reach.

It’s past time to regulate gambling and speculation

The panelists converge around several policy ideas:

• Raise or maintain age limits, especially for prediction markets and gambling-like products.

• Apply advertising restrictions across sports betting, prediction markets, crypto, and other speculative products.

• Require clearer disclosures when products are closer to gambling than investing.

• Separate long-term investment tools from high-risk entertainment products.

• Use responsible-gaming tools such as deposit limits, timeouts, forced breaks, and behavioral flags.

• Regulate influencer marketing and require transparency around paid promotion.

The gamblification of everything is broader than sports betting and prediction markets. Consumer technology companies first monetized attention and engagement through targeted advertising. Now, they have monetized risk taking and economic uncertainty through gambling products that cosplay as investment platforms while all but guaranteeing economic losses and, potentially, severe financial distress.

I spent a lot of time preparing for this episode … and then the conversation went somewhere else, somewhere fascinating and unexpected.

A few of the ideas we explore:

• Impulsivity used to help men hunt. Now it helps DraftKings make money. Risk-taking can be a pro-social trait, a willingness to sacrifice for the tribe. But in a world of frictionless betting, gaming, porn, and status loops, that same impulse is easily exploited.

• Boys and young aren’t addicted to games because they’re lazy. They may be starving for a quest. Digital worlds offer danger, mastery, status, progress, and heroic purpose — often more clearly than real life does.

• The gender double standard in how we talk about sexual fantasy. Male porn use is often pathologized, while female-coded erotica and romantasy are more likely to be celebrated as empowerment — even though both can become compulsive and displace offline sexuality.

• The most radical wellness practices may be the most boring. A cold shower. Silence. Doing hard things. Letting the mind rest instead of feeding it another hit of stimulation.

• Asking for help can tell someone they matter. Reframing help-seeking not as weakness, but as a way to tell someone: “You have value that I need.”

• Self-control is not enough when the casino is everywhere. Individuals have responsibility, but so do companies and policymakers — especially when addictive products are designed to exploid the developing minds of children.

And don’t forget, today, June 18, at 1 pm ET, we’ve got a webinar with , German Lopez, Matt King, and to discuss the gamblification of everything.

You can still sign up here.

Last Friday I watched the Knicks clinch a 105-104 win from outside a bar in Ridgewood, NYC. As a bandwagon Knicks fan, I was happy. But not as happy as our patio neighbor, an affable college freshman who had a $2,000 Kalshi bet riding on the game. When I asked how long he’d been a Knicks fan, he replied he wasn’t really one.

These days you don’t need to be into sports to gamble on sports. And if sports betting isn’t your thing, you can gamble on the next Los Angeles Mayor or the daily temperature in Phoenix. As we’ve covered before, feelings of financial precarity have made risky bets feel rational to many young people. Gambling—and high-risk investing—is everywhere.

Join us next week at 1:00pm ET June 18th, 2026 for a webinar on the gamblification of everything. New York Times journalist German Lopez will moderate the conversation, featuring author Kyla Scanlon, Fanatics CEO Matt King, and AIBM’s Sports Betting Policy Lead Jonathan Cohen. Register here.

The Feed

Sports betting tax design affects betting behavior

A new working paper by Matthew Brown and Jeffrey Ohl looks at how sports betting tax design matters. They find that when taxes are levied on sportsbook revenue—as most states do—costs fall on firms, who respond by cutting back on advertising and promotional offers rather than raising the price or worsening odds. This is effective at raising revenue, but doesn’t significantly reduce betting.

By contrast, when taxes are tied more directly to each bet—as with Illinois’s per-wager tax—sportsbooks are more likely to pass costs through to bettors through fees or higher minimum bets, which more directly discourages betting.The paper also finds that sportsbook advertising increases betting, largely by inducing more people to make deposits rather than by driving existing bettors to deposit more.

Age-verification modestly reduces porn site use

We’ve covered the early evidence on age verification before—in particular that these laws drive at least some traffic from compliant to non-compliant sites. This paper, also by Matthew Brown—along with AIBM research fellow Emily Davis and Devin Pope—shows the user side of the equation, albeit among adults only. They find that most adult-site use persists despite the laws. For every 100 hours previously spent on top adult sites, about 50 were already on noncompliant sites, 30 continued through VPN-style circumvention, 10 shifted from compliant to noncompliant sites, and 10 disappeared.

These estimates are for adults only, so they shouldn’t be read as a test of whether the laws reduce minors’ access.

Young people’s AI use falls into distinct social and emotional clusters

A new report by The Rithm Project asks what role AI is playing in young people’s social and emotional lives. Based on a YouGov survey of 2,383 young Americans aged 13-24, they identify four clusters: those who rarely or never use AI; those who use it mainly for information and tasks; those who use it for personal and relational support; and those who talk to AI characters.

One of the most interesting splits is in the third cluster. “Social Processors” use AI for advice on social situations. “Private Processors”, by contrast, appear to use AI more as a substitute for human support. This second group looks more vulnerable: they are much more likely to report turning to AI before people when upset, to feel like a burden, and to report an escalating urge to use AI more and more.

The concern, though, shouldn’t be limited to young people intentionally seeking emotional support from AI. A new paper by Yaoxi Shiet et al. argues that people can “stumble into” AI emotional dependence through routine chatbot use. In a month-long study, they found that daily five-minute personal conversations with ChatGPT decreased participants’ preference for seeking support from humans and increased their preference for seeking support from AI.

What else we’re reading

• Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly - Myers and Hooper

• Why Are Birthrates Down? Two New Studies Point to Phones. - New York Times

• Smartphones broke dating. AI might finish the job. - Vox

• 2026 Chatbot Legislation Tracker - Future of Privacy Forum

• Limbic Capitalism Has Been Driving Addiction for Hundreds of Years - After Babel

• Young People Don’t Want a Social Media Ban. We Want Better Social Media - Young People’s Alliance

• Could the problem with boys be money? - Jonathan Wroble

• We were promised sex robots - Business Insider

Events & Funding Opportunities

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Are you a state legislator thinking about how to design taxes on sports gambling? 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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It’s sure to be a fascinating conversation about what the normalization of online gambling is doing to our culture, politics, and mental health. You can register here.

This week’s episode is an appetizer of sorts. I called up Jon Cohen, who leads our work on sports betting policy, to better understand the history of gambling in the United States as we approach our 250th anniversary of independence.

Jon notes that we describe the American dream as a story of pluck. But there has always been another version of the American dream built on luck.

When people believe that the system is rigged and the economic ladder is blocked, a lucky break starts to look like the only way up.

Online sports betting and prediction markets have arrived during a populist moment of deep institutional distrust. Many Americans believe the experts are wrong, elites are corrupt, and the financial game is stacked against them. Prediction markets channel the mood: the pundits must be wrong, and betting becomes a way to assert one’s agency.

Except the vast majority of regular users end up losing money. The rhetoric is empowerment, but the business model is extraction.

Still, Jon reminds us to never accept the present as permanent. Since the founding of the United States, lotteries spread, provoked backlash, disappeared in many places, survived through exceptions like the Louisiana Lottery, and eventually reemerged through state lotteries beginning in New Hampshire in 1964.

Even if gambling will always exist in some form, it doesn’t have to be as addictive, ubiquitous, and harmful as it has become in 2026.

We also discuss:

• The OG American dream: How a lottery helped fund the Jamestown colony

• The phones changed everything: Pro-social forms of gambling like a neighborhood raffle or poker night with friends are becoming displaced by apps that function more like slot machines: speed, repetition, anticipation, and reward.

• Addiction is not just in the brain: We discuss Hanna Pickard’s What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing But Cocaine? and its implications for sports bettors.

• The takeaways from the case of Carl Jacobson, the New Haven police chief who reportedly embezzled public money while gambling millions through legal betting platforms.

• The real reason why Colorado’s recent reform bill is significant, despite getting watered down on the way to Governor Polis’ signature.

• Why young men, in particular, need stronger guardrails to prevent disastrous financial harm.

• The three approaches AIBM is taking to reduce the harms of sports betting and prediction markets without resorting to prohibition.

Don’t forget, you can register for the June 18th webinar here.