Open a sports app, a brokerage app, video game, or even shopping site, and you’ll likely find design features borrowed from slot machines. Gambling has moved from casinos and lottery tickets to becoming a core business model of our digital lives.
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 Germán López moderates a discussion between CNN commentator and AIBM fellow kyla scanlon, Fanatics CEO Matt King, and AIBM’s gambling policy lead Jonathan D. Cohen.
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 kyla scanlon. 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.
