The Casino-ification of America

In the following excerpt, Derek talks to McKay Coppins about his own foray into sports gambling for the Atlantic cover story.

Derek Thompson: You are the author of The Atlantic’s latest cover story, “Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler.” How did a Mormon end up writing the Atlantic cover story on gambling in America? What’s the backstory here?

McKay Coppins: That’s not a natural fit to you.

Thompson: Not the most obvious fit, no.

Coppins: So this started as a more kind of normal magazine story assignment. You know how these things go, right? My editor said, “We want a big story on the explosive growth of the sports betting industry, the online gambling boom, what it’s doing to America.” And we started kind of charting the course of normal reporting, like, “Oh, I’ll interview executives at FanDuel and DraftKings, and I’ll interview athletes and people maybe who are struggling with gambling addiction.” And I think it was my editor who first said, “It would really be better if you had a little skin in the game, experienced it firsthand.” And I said, “Well, yeah, but for religious reasons, I don’t gamble.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I know, I know, I know. But what if we staked you some money?”

And I think it was actually the editor in chief, Jeff Goldberg, who was like, “Well, what if we staked you $10,000?” I thought it was going to be a few hundred bucks. He had this idea of giving me a bunch of money, and the deal was, “We’ll give you $10,000 to gamble with. We’ll cover your losses, but to keep you kind of invested, we’ll split the winnings 50/50, if there are any.” And so I write about this in the piece. I was intrigued. I had never been a gambler, partly for religious reasons, partly just not that interested. I’m a sports fan. I felt like I didn’t really need to bet on the games to enjoy them. But I did go and consult my bishop about it, which was an awkward conversation. He basically kind of tacitly agreed, but was also like, “Look, you need to be careful with this. I’ve seen this wreck people’s lives,” right?

And I will admit that in that moment, I kind of smugly brushed him off because I was like, “It’ll be fine. This is a journalism stunt.” But I think that, look, my editors, I think, thought there was something just inherently funny about taking a kind of suburban Mormon dad and dropping him into this world.

Thompson: Your editors were right. It is objectively funny.

Coppins: And it turned out to make the story a lot more entertaining. I will say, I did not expect to write as much about my own experience when I started. I thought this would be maybe one section where I wrote about my own little foray into gambling, but it ended up kind of consuming my life in ways that I wasn’t expecting.

Thompson: Well, look, before we talk about how the perverse casino-ification has destroyed America, let’s actually hold on your experience. I mean, can you admit that sports gambling is kind of fun?

Coppins: Yes, of course. Novel insight by McKay Coppins, new gambler: Gambling can be fun. I remember the first game I bet on, it was the first game of the NFL season. It was Eagles-Cowboys. And I punched in a bunch of bets. I didn’t know what I was doing at all at that point. I’d just downloaded DraftKings. And I remember sitting down to watch the game, and within 10 minutes, I was like, “Oh, this is why people do this.” Because I had purchased a synthetic rooting interest in a game that I would otherwise have no reason to care about, right? In my normal life, the way I would’ve watched that game was turned it on, folded some laundry with my wife, probably fallen asleep, turned it off at halftime, checked the score in the morning, right? Because I don’t care about the Eagles or Cowboys really, but I bet on the Eagles and I was locked in. And there was a weather delay. There were a lot of weird things in that first game. Somebody got ejected for spitting on—

Thompson: Jalen Carter, yeah, the defensive lineman for the Eagles, I think spat in Dak Prescott’s face. But also, there was a reverse camera angle that suggested that Dak may have spat at him first.

Coppins: Yes, yes.

Thompson: And this was the first 15 seconds of the NFL season.

Coppins: Of the NFL season. And I was riveted, right? Riveted. And I ended up staying up till midnight to finish the game. And what helped also was that that first night, I came out 20 bucks ahead. And I was like, “This is amazing. This is awesome. I totally get why this is so popular.” And also, when you have your first win as a gambler, there’s kind of nothing like it. I remember I told my wife the next morning, and she immediately was like, “Whoa, are we going to win money? Can we buy a new KitchenAid mixer? Can we …”

Thompson: It’s that easy for a Mormon wife to go from gambling is against my creed to, “Oh, if we extrapolate this out over the course of the season, we can totally redo the kitchen”?

Coppins: Look, she had bought into the spiritual workaround logic of the whole thing.

Thompson: OK, good.

Coppins: So she had already made her moral peace with it. And now it was all like, “Can we remodel the pantry? Let’s get going.”

Thompson: So I’m going to let listeners in on a little secret about Atlantic magazine features, which is that there’s a template, there’s a formula. And part one of a classic Atlantic cover story is you have this microcosmic anecdote, this anecdote often in the first person that contains the stakes of the story and the import of the story: “Here is my experience in gambling, and this is what it reflects about American life.” And always in part two of the story, the lens is pulled all the way back, and we go back to the beginning of human history and walk forward the chronology of this topic.

Coppins: Yeah.

Thompson: So we are both vets—

Coppins: Yes.

Thompson: —of Atlantic feature writing, so let’s stick with that template here. Gambling has a millennia-old history. The ancient Greeks wagered on the Olympics, the ancient Romans wagered on the gladiators. Can you tell me a very specific potted history of gambling in America between the 1600s and the year 2010? And the reason to stop in that year will be made apparent to people in just a few seconds. But give me a sense of America’s history with gambling from the 17th century to the early 21st century.

Coppins: Yeah. So I think it will surprise nobody that the Puritans, not huge fans of gambling, right? From the very beginning of Plymouth Colony, gambling was banned under penalty of punishment. And basically, that attitude toward gambling stretched throughout the early colonies, the Founding Fathers, George Washington. I found this amazing quote where he talked about how gambling can be linked to every other evil, it’s the child of avarice, et cetera. And basically, the laws varied state by state, century to century, it changed and evolved, but the general American attitude toward gambling was that it was a socially costly, civilizationally ruinous vice that might need to be tolerated, but should be regulated, stigmatized, and ideally kept to certain kind of containment zones, like riverboats and red light districts.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: McKay Coppins
Producer: Devon Baroldi