America’s gambling rehab crisis |
America’s gambling rehab crisis
There are more gambling apps than gambling rehab centers. Digital sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel innovated us into an addiction epidemic. Can we muster the will—and the funding—to innovate ourselves out of this mess?
[Source images: Adobe Stock]
It’s sometime after midnight on a Monday morning when Zach unlocks his phone and starts scrolling for something to bet on. He’s 26, tucked into his childhood bed at his parents’ house in Washington, D.C. He moved back in after a stint in Las Vegas that didn’t go as planned. The NFL is done for the night. The NBA’s late games have wrapped. Mainstream sports are fast asleep.
In FanDuel’s live betting tab, he finds a women’s tennis tournament streaming from somewhere in Southeast Asia. Two unranked, unknown teenagers, one boasting a 0–1 career record. Empty arena, no ball boys. Between points, the players jog to the fence to retrieve the ball themselves.
“I wasn’t thinking what a normal person would think,” says Zach, who asked to be identified only by his first name. “I was on autopilot.”
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A founding editor of The Players’ Tribune, Paul Mueller is a regular contributor to Fast Company. He has written about the Savannah Bananas and the Most Innovative Companies in Sports for the magazine.. Focusing on the intersection of business and sports, his online pieces range across all sports, from the NFL's secret mission to rid the U.S More