Is Sports Betting More Addictive Than Porn? Alex Grodd on the latest scourge affecting young men
The Unspeakable Podcast
Meghan Daum
4.8 • 784 Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2024
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Until 2018, sports betting was almost a sport unto itself. To place a bet, you had to call your bookie, go to the race track, or make a trip to Las Vegas. But in 2018, the Supreme Court put an end to a longtime federal ban on sports betting, and it is now legal in most states and accessible on smartphones.
For years, we’ve been hearing alarm bells about the addictive qualities of online pornography, which many experts believe has dulled the senses and hindered the relationship prospects of generations of young men. But according to Alex Grodd, founder of The Disagreement, a media and education company that puts out a podcast of the same name, sports betting in its current incarnation poses an even greater threat. In this conversation, Alex describes how compulsive betting and predatory marketing is leading to financial ruin for countless users, many of whom he spoke with for a recent episode of The Disagreement. He also talks about how this connects with the “masculinity crisis” as well as the overall drop in attention span for just about everyone.
Listen to The Disagreement here.
GUEST BIO
Alex Grodd is the founder and CEO of The Disagreement and hosts its podcast. Prior to starting The Disagreement, Alex founded and ran BetterLesson, an edtech company that provides professional development tools to teachers. Alex forged his love for disagreement by facilitating debates among students during his days as a middle school teacher at public schools in Atlanta and Boston.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You can bet on every point. You can bet point by point. So if you're watching a Dodger game, |
| 0:10.0 | if you were watching the World Series, you can bet on every single pitch, whether it will be a ball or strike. |
| 0:16.0 | This is purely for addicts, okay? This is not for the responsible gamer who's going to put some money |
| 0:22.9 | on the game and go cheer. Like, if you're betting on every pitch in the game while you're watching |
| 0:27.5 | it, you have a problem. Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dow. If I were to ask you what form of addiction |
| 0:39.1 | is poised to become the next epidemic for young people, especially young men, would you be |
| 0:45.1 | surprised to hear that it has to do with sports? According to my guest, Alex Grodd, sports betting, |
| 0:52.3 | which became legal in the U.S. in 2018 and migrated almost entirely to |
| 0:58.2 | smartphone apps, has become an enormous and unprecedentedly predatory industry. |
| 1:04.9 | Alex is the host of the disagreement, a podcast that takes a complicated subject, for instance, AI in education or nuclear energy, |
| 1:14.1 | and brings together two smart people with opposing views to bring out the best in their arguments |
| 1:19.4 | and more importantly see the best in their opponents' arguments. |
| 1:22.8 | He recently devoted an entire episode to sports betting and the question of whether it has become as addictive |
| 1:29.4 | and destructive as online pornography. It actually drops this week. You can listen to it this week. |
| 1:36.3 | This is a question that touches on many of the fundamental issues that we talk about on this podcast, |
| 1:42.0 | as well as things we've never talked about, |
| 1:44.3 | and it's a great conversation, |
| 1:46.3 | and I'm excited to bring it to you. |
| 1:48.8 | So here's Alex Grodd. |
| 1:54.8 | Alex Grod, welcome to The Unspeakable. |
| 1:56.8 | It is phenomenal to be here. |
| 1:59.7 | I'm very fired up for this conversation. All right. Well, let's just have it. So let's get right into it. So we have a fentanyl epidemic. We have young men addicted to online pornography to the point that they're not even interested in actual sex, at least according to reports. |
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