Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Danny Funt, author of the book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling.
This episode isn’t really about sports. It’s about how sports gambling evolved in the U.S. from a patchwork of legal quirks, a highly coordinated state-by-state lobbying campaign, and a set of product dynamics that, over time, became increasingly adversarial to the customer.
Danny and I walk through the key inflection points: from the 1992 PASPA (Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act) federal ban, to the fantasy sports exemption that gave FanDuel and DraftKings their head start, to the widely misunderstood 2018 Supreme Court ruling, to the rise of VIP host programs and affiliate-driven media incentives.
And finally, to prediction markets, which in Danny’s view look a lot like a compressed replay of the same playbook.
For anyone in financial services watching gambling and investing collapse into each other in real time, this conversation has a lot to say about where that’s heading.
Check out Danny’s book here: https://a.co/d/04liSaKI
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