Category: 3. Business

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To most people, being $12 million in debt sounds like an absolute nightmare. But for Michael Elefante and his wife, it’s the price of financial freedom.

In a recent X post (1), Elefante told his story. He and his wife walked away from six-figure jobs, borrowed hundreds of thousands to buy their first home in Nashville, and listed it on Airbnb. The gamble paid off. The property earned enough to cover the mortgage and then some.

Six years and 11 houses later, they claim to be earning $50,000 to $100,000 a month from short-term rentals — all while carrying millions in debt from their multiple mortgages.

Their message is simple: Instead of fearing debt, use it to buy assets and let those assets pay for your life. It’s a bold strategy, but is their attractive lifestyle a model to follow or a dangerous bet that could collapse under the wrong conditions?

On the surface, the pros are clear.

Elefante and his wife leveraged debt to buy income-producing assets and create financial freedom, allowing them to focus on family, travel and experiences. For those who value time and don’t want to work the 9-to-5 grind, it’s an appealing trade-off.

But the risks should be examined. Carrying $12 million in debt means their success depends entirely on Airbnb listings. Basing your income on another platform’s whims is always risky — if tourism slows, regulations tighten or expenses rise, they’re still on the hook for all 12 mortgages.

If any of their homes were impacted by natural disasters, the income they depend on would be suddenly limited. Even something as simple as a pipe bursting could have an oversized effect on their budget.

And while the couple claims they work only a few hours a week, the reality is likely more complex. Managing multiple properties typically requires full-time attention or the services of an expensive property manager.

On top of that, Elefante has built a side business around teaching others how to follow in his footsteps. He sells books, online courses and content that walk aspiring investors through the process, which suggests that their workload may be more demanding than it appears [2].

In short, managing multiple properties can be complicated — and sometimes you need a little bit of extra support.

That’s where Baselane can help you manage your properties more efficiently. Baselane can save investors an average of $5,000 a year through automated rent payments, visibility improvements and built-in financial tools. Its AI-powered bookkeeping software could even shave up to 150 hours off of your spreadsheet labor a year, depending on the size of your portfolio.

Even better, Baselane is already trusted by 50,000 plus real estate investors.

Baselane’s Core tier includes accounting, tax packages, Schedule E reports and automated rent and late fee reminders for free. You can even sign up today and get a 30-day free trial of their Smart tier, including fast rent deposits in 2 business days and VIP priority support.

Read more: US car insurance costs have surged 50% from 2020 to 2024 — this simple 2-minute check could put hundreds back in your pocket

Most people can’t walk into a bank without a job and qualify for the $420,000 mortgage Elefante used to get started. It’s worth noting that Elefante grew up in Chapel Hill, NC, a well-off area with strong schools, attended the prestigious Elon University (3), and both he and his wife had six-figure jobs before they began their Airbnb venture (4).

That doesn’t make his success impossible to replicate, but it does make it harder for the average person to follow in their footsteps.

Airbnb can also be unpredictable (5). Cities across the U.S. are tightening short-term rental laws, and oversupply in popular markets has already reduced bookings (6) and could cut into host profits.

A recession or shift in travel patterns could quickly change the math, which is an important consideration right now when travel to the U.S. is down (7). And, offloading those homes to get out of the mortgages if needed might not be easy as interest rates rise (8).

If you’re considering an Airbnb investment strategy for yourself, it’s important to start small and keep the risks low. Consider renting out a room or ADU (accessory dwelling unit) on your current property first to test rental demand. This can also help you learn the ropes before taking on a whole mortgage.

Before jumping in, ask yourself:

• Can I afford the mortgage if bookings dry up?

• Do I have cash reserves for repairs, vacancies or slow seasons?

• Am I comfortable being a landlord or paying someone else to do it?

• What are the local laws on short-term rentals?

• Are there any laws in the works that might impact short-term rentals?

The reality is, you don’t need to buy property outright to benefit from investing in real estate. For instance, direct access to the $22.5 trillion commercial real estate sector was long limited to a select group of elite investors — until now.

First National Realty Partners (FNRP) allows accredited investors to diversify their portfolio through grocery-anchored commercial properties, without taking on the responsibilities of being a landlord.

With a minimum investment of $50,000, investors can own a share of properties leased by national brands like Whole Foods, Kroger and Walmart, which provide essential goods to their communities. Thanks to triple net leases, accredited investors are able to invest in these properties without worrying about tenant costs cutting into their potential returns.

Simply answer a few questions — including how much you would like to invest — to start browsing their full list of available properties.

And if you’re looking for consistent rental income, just like the Elefantes, you don’t need to go into debt or even lock in a mortgage. You can invest in shares of vacation homes or rental properties through Arrived.

Backed by world-class investors, including Jeff Bezos, Arrived allows you to invest in shares of vacation and rental properties, earning a passive income stream without the extra work that comes with being a landlord of your own rental property.

To get started, simply browse through their selection of vetted properties, each picked for its potential appreciation and income generation. Once you choose a property, you can start investing with as little as $100, potentially earning quarterly dividends.

For most people, the safest path to this type of financial freedom is through gradual growth. Build equity in your current home, save aggressively and scale up after building a financial cushion. While Elefante’s path isn’t impossible to follow, it may not be as easy to replicate as his online content makes it seem.

Taking on millions in debt can create a lifestyle of freedom, but it can just as easily backfire. The line between financial independence and financial ruin often comes down to the financial resources that you start with, timing and risk tolerance.

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@melefante6 (1); Skool (2); Elon University (3); Michael Elefante (4); Bloomberg (5); Air Hosts Forum (6); The Associated Press (7); FRED (8)

This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.

Introduction

Declaration of Generative AI and AI-Assisted Technologies in the Writing Process

During the preparation of this work, the author used Claude 3.5 Sonnet to provide editorial feedback to improve clarity and readability. After using this tool, the author reviewed and edited the content as needed and takes full responsibility for the content of the published article.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant inroads into health care, demonstrating capabilities that complement and challenge traditional pharmacy practices. For instance, AI tools trained on clinical notes from electronic health records (EHRs) provided clinical predictions—including in-hospital mortality and 30-day readmission—with accuracy exceeding state-of-the-art risk scores.¹ AI interpretation of routine imaging (eg, chest x-rays) has the potential to provide comprehensive disease risk assessments, including risk of heart attack, stroke, and diabetes.² Electrocardiogram interpretation by an AI tool, flagging high-risk patients and notifying physicians, was found to reduce patient mortality.³ Additionally, patient assessments of responses to their questions found that those from AI chatbots were of higher quality than those from physicians.⁴

Turning to pharmacy, current and future AI applications include drug safety, pharmacy operations, precision medicine, drug reference navigation, clinical surveillance, and electronic clinical quality measures.^5,6 Looking forward, AI has the potential to use comprehensive patient-specific data such as EHRs, imaging, omics, and real-time monitoring data, in combination with medical domain expertise built on a foundation of medical literature to support caregivers in a variety of clinical tasks.⁷

As these AI-driven innovations continue to integrate into medical and pharmacy practice, critical questions emerge: What becomes of the pharmacist’s role? Where can the pharmacist fit into this new paradigm to provide value supporting safe and effective medication use? To see the path forward, it is helpful to first look backward.

Pharmacy’s Historical Adaptability

The pharmacy profession has a long history of evolving to meet health care needs. Over the decades, we have witnessed the emergence of specialized roles—drug information specialists, informatics pharmacists, and pharmacogenomics specialists—that did not exist previously but were created to address specific needs in the health care system. When a gap was identified between the health care team’s capabilities and the patient’s needs, pharmacists developed the drug information, information technology, and genomic expertise to fill those needs.

Illustrations of pharmacy’s adaptability are limited to not only the emergence of new roles but also the evolution of skills required for the role of any pharmacist. Before the emergence of electronic medical records (EMRs) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE), pharmacists were routinely tasked with interpreting handwritten prescriptions. Due to the influx of hurriedly scribbled prescriptions, pharmacists needed to accurately interpret such prescriptions to maintain efficient pharmacy operations. This skill, which was only tangentially related to medication expertise, became essential for pharmacists then. With EMRs and CPOE, this skill has all but vanished from the modern pharmacist’s arsenal. Computer skills are another example. While these had little value in pharmacy about 40 years ago, now they can dramatically impact the productivity of a pharmacist. Valuable skills for pharmacists will continue to evolve, and what present-day skills will become obsolete remains to be seen.

Adaptability has been a hallmark of the pharmacy profession, allowing pharmacists to remain integral to health care teams despite technological and systemic changes. As we stand on the brink of an AI alteration in health care, this adaptability will again be tested.

Emerging Gaps, Evolving Roles, and Preparing for an AI-Enhanced Future

As AI reshapes the health care landscape, new gaps will emerge between AI’s capabilities and patients’ needs. Given the plethora of possibilities, the challenges of regulatory approval, and the complexity of implementing new technology into health care delivery, it is nearly impossible to predict where AI will impact practice. If the dawn of AI in health care looks anything like the emergence of technology into any other industry, it will not fulfill its full potential in one fell swoop. Imperfect AI applications will emerge sporadically and improve iteratively over the years. This means that the gaps for pharmacists are likely unpredictable and unstable.

In the setting of this uncertainty, high-level skills that are broadly useful to a diverse set of scenarios will be most valuable. The following tasks are well-suited to leverage pharmacists’ clinical expertise while incorporating new technological competencies: AI education and implementation, loop oversight, human-on-the-loop oversight (quality assurance), and interdisciplinary collaboration (Table).^6,8 To thrive in this evolving landscape, the pharmacy profession must proactively prepare for an AI-enhanced future through education and continuous learning, hands-on experience, and advocacy and leadership.

Conclusion

The arrival of AI in health care presents challenges and opportunities for the pharmacy profession. Although some traditional roles may be transformed, pharmacists have the potential to adapt and evolve alongside these technological advancements.

By embracing change, acquiring new skills, and positioning themselves at the forefront of AI integration in health care, pharmacists can continue to fill crucial gaps in the health care system. The future of pharmacy in the AI era is about leveraging technology to enhance capabilities and improve patient outcomes.

About the Author

Steven Smoke, PharmD, is the clinical informatics pharmacist at RWJBarnabas Health in West Orange, New Jersey.

The AI transformation in health care represents a significant shift in how we approach medication management and patient care. By actively engaging with these changes and helping to shape the integration of AI in health care, pharmacists can work toward maintaining a crucial role in the evolving health care ecosystem.

REFERENCES

1. Jiang LY, Liu XC, Nejatian NP, et al. Health system–scale language models are all-purpose prediction engines. Nature. 2023;619(7969):357-362. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06160-y

2. Topol EJ. AI-enabled opportunistic medical scan interpretation. Lancet. 2024;403(10439):1842. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00924-3

3. Lin CS, Liu WT, Tsai DJ, et al. AI-enabled electrocardiography alert intervention and all-cause mortality: a pragmatic randomized clinical trial. Nat Med. 2024;30(5):1461-1470. doi:10.1038/s41591-024-02961-4

4. Ayers JW, Poliak A, Dredze M, et al. Comparing physician and artificial intelligence chatbot responses to patient questions posted to a public social media forum. JAMA Intern Med. 2023;183(6):589-596. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1838

5. Wong A, Wentz E, Palisano N, et al. Role of artificial intelligence in pharmacy practice: a narrative review. J Am Coll Clin Pharm. 2023;6(11):1237-1250. doi:10.1002/jac5.1856

6. Smoke S. Artificial intelligence in pharmacy: a guide for clinicians. Am J Health Syst Pharm. 2024;81(14):641-646. doi:10.1093/ajhp/zxae051

7. Moor M, Banerjee O, Abad ZSH, et al. Foundation models for generalist medical artificial intelligence. Nature. 2023;616(7956):259-265. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05881-4

8. Nelson SD, Walsh CG, Olsen CA, et al. Demystifying artificial intelligence in pharmacy. Am J Health Syst Pharm. 2020;77(19):1556-1570. doi:10.1093/ajhp/zxaa218

Electricity generated from renewable sources has surpassed the amount of electricity generated from coal in Australia for the first time.

In September electricity from solar, wind hydro and biomass totalled 9.24 terawatt hours, compared with 8.8 terawatt hours from burning coal, according to data from the energy thinktank Ember.

Click here for an audio accessible version of the chart.

According to Renew Economy, the monthly record for renewables was in part due to strong electricity production from windfarms in Tasmania, and strong electricity production from solar farms around Australia.

Electricity generation from renewables also surpassed coal globally in the first half of 2025.

Artificial intelligence sure has been taking a lot of flak lately.

Only 8.5% of the 48,000 people recently surveyed by accounting firm KPMG said that they “always” trust AI search results. Another report from Gartner found that more than half of consumers don’t trust AI searches, with most reporting “significant” mistakes.

A McKinsey study found that 80% of companies using generative AI have seen “no significant bottom-line impact”, with 42% of them literally abandoning their AI projects. An MIT study found that 95% of the AI pilot projects at the big companies they surveyed “failed”.

And now there’s workslop!

A new study published in the Harvard Business Review says that more than 40% of US-based full-time employees reported receiving AI-generated content that “masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task”. This “workslop” is “destroying productivity”, according to the study’s researchers.

Who is really to blame for workslop? Sure, blame big tech companies for yet again releasing untested and unproven products before they’re ready for prime time. Or the media and tech community who, for the past three years, have been writing pieces like Yahoo Japan wants all its 11,000 employees to use Gen AI to double their productivity by 2028 or AI will replace doctors, teachers, and make humans “unnecessary for most things”. All of this creates a lot of unnecessary hype and unfounded expectations.

But in the workplace, the buck always stops with the boss. The responsibility for AI’s “workslop” lies fully at the feet of the employer.

For more than 20 years, my company has implemented customer relationship and financial management applications at hundreds of small and mid-sized businesses across the country. We’ve worked with thousands of employees. We’ve had good projects and straight-out failures. As a technology consultant, we’ve made our share of mistakes. But the most common root cause of technology disappointments, failures and letdowns can always be found with the people who are buying and implementing the product.

So before throwing shade at software companies rolling out AI, I think it’s fair to ask employers a few questions.

For example, did you invest in training for your employees? Do your employees truly understand how to create the right prompts in order to get the best answers? Has your company standardized on an AI assistant or is it just a free-for-all mess of apps?

Do you have an AI policy that formalizes what AI can and cannot be used for and who can and cannot use it? Do you have a designated person in your company who is responsible for your AI-based applications? Has this person been trained and provided technical support to do this job? Are you working with a competent partner, consultant or developer to provide these kinds of services?

Most importantly, do you actually have a plan for using this technology effectively or are you just leaving it up to your employees to figure it all out? Do you have specific metrics for measuring AI’s effectiveness, or are you just relying on vague assumptions of “productivity”?

Unfortunately, many employers are duped by big tech into thinking that they just press a button and their software starts doing magical things that spew out money for their business. But, in order not to scare people away, these same tech companies don’t warn their customers of all the other things that need to happen – and money that needs to be spent – in order to maximize the use of their product. In most cases, the software is not the problem. It’s the lack of investment in the people using it.

AI can be a powerful tool if deployed the right way and with the right expectations. But in the end it’s just that: a tool. And new tools require thought, training, processes and investment. In the end, AI doesn’t produce “workslop”. Employers do.

Publishing a website is still more complicated than it has any right to be, but the best website builders streamline the process. Instead of juggling a bunch of files on a server and learning the ins and outs of networking, website builders do exactly what’s written on the tin. Piece by piece, using a drag-and-drop interface, you can design your website the way you want with immediate feedback, rather than spending time buried in code and hoping it comes out on the other end.

There are dozens of website builders, and most of them range from decent to straight-up bad. Any web host with a bit of ambition has a website builder floating around, even if it’s slow, clunky, and lacking features. I focused on finding the best tools for building your website that go beyond just an add-on, and these are my favorites. If you’re after something simpler than a full-blown website, check out our list of the Best Portfolio Websites.

Best Website Builder for Most

You’ve heard of Squarespace over and over again, I’m sure, and that’s not an accident. It’s an inviting website builder that made a name for itself with bold, striking templates. Beneath the veneer of attractive, but seemingly simple, websites, you’ll find one of the most capable website builders on the market. That balance of power and usability is what sets Squarespace apart.

It feels like a creative tool. Where other website builders lag and stutter to get a new element on your page, Squarespace feels fluid. Your dashboard gives you quick access to edit your site, and around every corner, Squarespace feels designed so you never have to look up a tutorial. I started a simple photography website, and within an hour, I had a custom course page set up, an appointment schedule with automated confirmation emails, and services (with pricing and the ability to accept payments) configured.

Squarespace isn’t cheap, but it also doesn’t meddle in restrictive, low-cost plans. Even on the Basic plan, you have access to ecommerce tools and space for multiple contributors.

Best Cheap Website Builder

Hostinger is better known as a web hosting provider, but it has a surprisingly robust website builder that you can use on its own or for free as part of a hosting package. You don’t get the same world-class template design and dense feature-set of a more expensive builder like Squarespace, but that’s OK. Hostinger’s website builder will run you just a few bucks a month, and based on my testing, it feels heavily angled toward newcomers.

You sacrifice some power for convenience, but there’s an awful lot you can accomplish with Hostinger. Integrations with PayPal, Stripe, and Square allow you to quickly set up e-commerce. Add-ons with WhatsApp give you live chat capabilities, and Printful support means you can sell print-on-demand merchandise. And, if you outgrow the website builder, Hostinger allows you to export your website’s content to WordPress.

Where Hostinger wins for me is through its AI tools. Just about every website builder these days has AI integrated in some way, but it’s around every corner at Hostinger. You need to pay extra for some of these AI features—the logo generator, for example, requires credits—but they give you a great starting point for mocking up the look, feel, and tone of your website.

Best for Small Businesses

Wix is undoubtedly the biggest competitor to Squarespace, and I had a hard time putting one above the other. Ultimately, Wix ended up in the backseat due to higher prices and a slightly less intuitive interface. That’s partly because of how powerful Wix is. Rather than corral you in an elegant (if restrictive) website-building workflow, Wix gives you a ton of options.

First, templates. You get a few hundred elsewhere, but Wix offers over 2,000 templates. At the time of writing, there are 223 pages of them on Wix’s website. They aren’t all winners, but I was able to mock up a quick photography portfolio website within a few minutes by browsing the templates and uploading a few photos.

A worrying trend is emerging in Pakistan’s economy as multinational companies continue to scale back or completely exit their operations, raising questions about the country’s investment climate.

The latest example is Procter & Gamble, which has decided to wind down its local operations and shift to third-party distribution.

This move follows a series of high-profile exits over the past two years, including Sanofi-Aventis, Eli Lilly, Bayer, Shell, TotalEnergies, Telenor, and Pfizer.

In 2025, Microsoft closed its domestic offices, while Careem suspended services altogether.

These departures are not limited to a single sector. Companies from pharmaceuticals, technology, energy, and telecommunications have all pulled back — highlighting a broader structural problem rather than isolated business decisions.

Analysts say these exits send a strong signal to global investors that Pakistan has become a challenging environment for rule-bound, globally regulated firms.

Experts point to an unpredictable policy environment as the main reason for these exits.

Abrupt tax changes, regulatory reversals, and ad hoc import controls have increased the cost of doing business and made long-term planning difficult.

For many investors, the risk posed by government policy now outweighs market opportunities.

Taxation is a major concern. Large corporations in Pakistan face a 29 per cent corporate tax, an 18 per cent general sales tax, and a super tax of up to 10 per cent, resulting in an effective tax rate that is much higher than regional peers.

Sudden policy reversals have also damaged confidence. In one instance, a planned refinery project became unviable overnight after a last-minute tax change, demonstrating how arbitrary decisions can threaten large-scale investments.

Meanwhile, the informal economy continues to thrive, with smuggling, counterfeiting, and tax evasion estimated at around 68 billion US dollars in 2023, roughly one-fifth of the formal economy.

This undermines fair competition and pushes more businesses off the books, further shrinking the tax base.

While macroeconomic challenges such as inflation, a depreciating currency, and import restrictions are common in developing countries, investors are particularly alarmed by Pakistan’s inconsistent policy responses.

Corporate exits not only result in job losses and missed technology transfers but also weaken supplier networks and damage Pakistan’s reputation as a reliable investment destination.

Experts say solutions are straightforward but require political will. Policymakers need to commit to stable, multi-year tax and regulatory frameworks, bring rates closer to regional averages, enforce rules consistently, and crack down on the informal economy.

Transparent and rules-based dispute resolution is also crucial to ensure that commercial conflicts do not linger for years.

Procter & Gamble’s exit is more than a single company leaving; it is a warning signal. Each corporate withdrawal reflects growing investor unease and the urgent need for Pakistan to prioritise predictability, discipline, and enforcement if it hopes to regain global confidence.

F
or Andrew Douglas, bottom was seven cops banging on the door of his apartment. He’d sharpened the knife “good,” filled the bathtub with water, and downed a vial of Coumadin to bleed out faster. Had his dad not sensed something and dialed 911, Andrew, a star baseball player turned gambling addict in college, would have quietly checked out at age 33, leaving his twin infant sons, his guilt-crippled parents, and many thousands of dollars in gambling debts behind. 

For Jonah, bottom wasn’t failing out of college and mulling suicide. Nor was it the month in a Florida rehab, where, for some fool reason, they let him have his cellphone and he bet money he’d stolen from family on four-legged parlay bets. (More on parlays later.) No, for Jonah, a lacrosse player at a powerhouse program, bottom was crossing the last bridge of honor: trading inside info with players at other schools to cover the over/under on games they bet. 

For the seven mostly young men sitting around this table, bottom was a grave of their own digging — a hole so deep that their cries for help went unheard. “My thoughts were too crazy, I thought that no one would get them,” says Marcus, a mid-twentysomething dressed like a gamer: black glasses, high-top Chucks, and a Playskool-colored sweatshirt. At his bottom, he was staring out the window of his apartment, weighing whether a fall from five flights up would kill or merely maim him. “I got to where suicide sounded sane.” (Excepting Andrew, above, the gamblers in this story spoke in exchange for anonymity.)  

We’re lunching at a sports bar in a Philadelphia suburb, picking at taste-free wings and waffle fries. It’s a curious place to bring a group of recovering gamblers, but the man at the head of the table has his reasons. Harry Levant has always been a rower against the river: a former criminal-defense attorney who lost his license, and nearly lost his life, to his own gambling jones a decade back; a second-chance crusader and addictions counselor who mainly treats folks gutted by gambling disorders; and a peripatetic opponent of the online gambling behemoths DraftKings and FanDuel, and the other sports-betting operators (hereafter, SBOs). Forty weeks a year, Levant’s somewhere in the air, lecturing state legislators and groups of physicians about the betting apps’ ploys and snares, as well as the harms he says they’ve levied on Gen Z males. That grail of Levant’s reads lonely and self-devouring: the mania of the gambler repurposed for public service. “Every addictive product has regulations,” says Levant. “Why is this the only one without them?”  

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As his clients tell their stories, a loose narrative hangs together. With an exception here and there, most of these guys started gambling as teens, playing lunchroom hold-em and NFL parlays for a buck or two a throw. Then they got to college, rooming and running with older kids. Here, suddenly, everyone seemed to be in action, be it betting stupid sums on esports soccer or throwing 15 bucks at a five-legged parlay that paid out 20 to one but rarely cashed. (A parlay is a combo bet on two or more outcomes; to collect, you must win each outcome, or “leg.” Should you hit on four legs but miss the fifth, you lose whatever money you put down. Oh, and the odds of winning that five-legged parlay? Less than five percent.)  

The portals and drivers for much of this action were the giant sports-bet apps. On the party-colored killing floor of online gambling, FanDuel and DraftKings own most of the take, cornering 80 percent of the mobile bet market in this country. Eight years ago, Americans placed around $5 billion in sports bets. Last year, that number zoomed to nearly $150 billion; by 2028, we’ll have bet — and lost — a trillion dollars since 2018. That was the year the Supreme Court reversed a federal ban on legalized gambling, freeing each state to partner with Big Sports Bet and feed their residents, especially the young ones, to the wolves.  

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FanDuel and DraftKings wasted no time. They’d spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and the better part of a decade, carpet-bombing the airwaves with ads. Now, they paid kings’ ransoms to each of the major sports leagues in exchange for their data and branding, and partnered with, or bought up, AI firms to help target their users’ browsing habits, favorite teams, and sports. “DraftKings, for one, bought SimpleBet, the biggest AI firm in this space, to turn data into in-game microbets,” says Levant. “Then they tracked and used their customers’ data to determine which of them preferred making constant, nonstop bets — and pushed those bets their way.”

Bombarded by promos for FanDuel and DraftKings — “Get a $1,000 deposit bonus!” reads one DraftKings blast — underage boys pressed their parents to open accounts, often linked to dad’s ID and banking info, critics claim. Or they surreptitiously opened accounts without their parents’ knowledge, as teens have done with verboten vices since the dawn of time. “Young guys have always bonded around sports; it’s wired into their pack behavior,” says Levant. “What the apps do is monetize that pack behavior: Guys bond over sports bets, not sports, now.” 

Reached for comment on the matter, DraftKings and FanDuel pushed back on the contention that underage gambling is rampant on their apps, pointing to the safeguards they have in place. “DraftKings is committed to providing a legal, regulated, and responsible gaming environment for adults,” wrote a spokesperson for the company. “We employ advanced Know Your Customer (KYC) technology, relied on by the financial industry and law enforcement, to verify the age of our customers. Any use of our platform by minors violates both our Terms of Use and the law, and we actively monitor to detect and report this prohibited activity.”

It bears noting that neither SBO agreed to on-the-record interviews for this piece. Instead, they responded with written statements, like the one from FanDuel, as follows:

“As a legal, licensed and regulated operator, we ​have focused on the importance of educating college students on the risks associated with gambling. Notably, recovered problem gambler and national TV host Craig Carton brings lived experience and well-documented struggles with gambling to campuses through the FanDuel Responsible Gaming College Tour. Additionally, we have extended our education efforts to reach families by creating the Trusted Voices parent portal which provides tools and resources to talk to young people about gambling, associated risks, how to recognize warning signs and where to go for support.”

To be clear, most adults who gamble on sports do so as a harmless time suck, a way to zest their weekend football viewing. And  countless teens put 10 spots on ballgames without getting dragged into addiction. “There are kids with a healthy relationship to money who can gamble casually on sports,” says Jody Bechtold, the CEO and founder of the Better Institute in Pittsburgh and a distinguished lecturer on gambling addiction. “But there are lots of other kids wired differently these days — high anxiety, ADHD, over-immersion in video games — who’re at much higher risk of addiction.” That’s especially so for kids “from affluent families who never learned the value of a dollar. Money’s supposed to hurt when you lose it,” but they were raised on “all things cashless: Venmo, PayPal, you name it.”  

Two years ago, the NCAA published a study on the steep surge of gambling on college campuses. It found that 67 percent of students living on campus were betting on sports — though simple math tells us that the large majority of those bettors likely wouldn’t have been of legal age to do so. Worse, many engaged in a particularly rash form of gaming, making high-speed wagers on in-game action — a pernicious new product called microbetting. Last year, a study by the National Council on Problem Gambling found that betting on campus had surged to 75 percent — and that six percent of students were addicted to gambling, or nearly double the national average.  

And who on campus is qualified to treat this gusher of gambling addictions? Essentially no one, per the experts I talked to. “Colleges aren’t set up to treat [six percent] of their students,” says Jim Lange, the executive director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery at Ohio State University. “That isn’t our business model, and never will be.” He added that most schools don’t even know they have a problem: Gambling is scarcely mentioned in the National Collegiate Health Assessment, the standard tool used by schools to track drug and alcohol misuse by students.  

None of those stats is news to the young men sitting at this table. “When I owed money to every kid I knew and was betting on Chinese ping-pong at 4 a.m., I tried going for counseling on campus,” says Marcus, the gamer kid. “As I’m talking to the counselor, she’s pulling a manual off the shelf, looking up [the definition of] ‘problem gambling.’”  

“In the hospital, where I was hooked up to a bunch of IVs [after his failed suicide bid], they turned the NBA Finals on and gave me my phone; I gambled away my last $100,” says Andrew, the ex-baseball player. Things were no better during his 30-day stay at an addiction clinic in Florida. “They didn’t touch on gambling at all.” So, too, for Jonah, the former lacrosse player, sent to an out-of-state facility at 21. “This place knew nothing about gambling addiction. They gave us two hours of phone time a day, and I set up a VPN to bet in Philly.”  

I hear a collective intake of breath as Jonah wraps his story. For all the suffering at this table, there’s a redemptive kinship as well, and a recognition that feels like rescue. The six percent of college kids who lose $500 or more in a day? “We used to be those kids,” says Marcus, to grunts and knowing head nods. “This is what it looks like, five years later.” Thousands of dollars stolen from a doting grandma. A bride empaupered months after her wedding. Betrayals so base they can’t be spoken to other people — but with this group, there are no secrets or judgments; only gratitude for the chance to come clean.  

Eight years ago, Americans placed around $5 billion in sports bets. Last year, that number zoomed to nearly $150 billion

“After all those months and years in the cold, here you’re among friends who know exactly what you’ve gone through,” says Levant. “And all I ask in return from these guys: Don’t make a bet today.”  

Andrew cuts in here to show me his phone. “Look at that top email, from Caesars,” he says. It reads, Your mystery bonus is here. “Four years since I shut down that app, they’re still tryna get their hooks in me.”   

“And that,” says Levant, “is why I chose this place.” He points to the flat-panels mounted above the tables, 50 or 60 sets tuned to Fox Sports 1 or the umpteenth rerun of “First Take.” Every last one of them posts a ticker at the bottom: Odds brought to you by either FanDuel or DraftKings. “This is what these guys have to live with,” says Levant. “They can’t run from sports or those fucking apps. All they can do is change their response.”

 

MALIK BEASLEY, A SIZZLING SCORER and prime free agent, may never see the floor in another game. After nearly $60 million made in the NBA, he’s awash in debt and unwanted by teams after a federal DA poked through his gambling tabs. (Recently cleared in that probe, he remains unsigned as basketball season approaches.) Emmanuel Clase is one of the best closers in baseball, but he won’t get to throw another pitch until the sport gets done scouring his prop-bet plays. Clase faces a lifetime ban if MLB can prove he engaged in spot-fixing, the practice of shading his own stat lines by intentionally sailing a slider over his catcher’s head. Jontay Porter could be headed to prison shortly: The NBA center copped to conspiracy to commit wire fraud recently for his part in a prop-bet ring. And Ippei Mizuhara is doing fed time already for stealing millions from his famous boss, Shohei Ohtani, to pay off gambling debts. If men who have everything can’t stop betting long enough to save their prized careers, how will we keep a generation of teens from taking a match to their futures?

We find ourselves on the cusp of this disaster thanks in part to a petition brought in 2018 by Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey. Murphy and his predecessor, Gov. Chris Christie, filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to decriminalize wagers on sports in their state. They were suing to unleash a product so destructive that in 2013 the doctors and clinicians of the American Psychiatric Association added “gambling disorder” to the list of substance disorders in their revised standard text, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume 5.

It was an extraordinary upgrade, says Levant, the first of its kind: warning readers of a “substance” they couldn’t smoke, shoot, or snort, but which was nonetheless “highly addictive” and “similar in nature to heroin, opioids, tobacco, alcohol, and cocaine.” “We reclassified gambling because it shared the symptomology of classic narcotic addiction, “ says Dr. Petros Levounis, past president of the APA. “We’re greatly concerned now because of the rise in sports betting. There’s a striking likeness to the tobacco and opioid industries — and there’s consensus among us that those industries committed crimes that resulted in suffering and death.” 

(Approached for comment, Murphy sent this boilerplate: “The Murphy Administration is concerned by the growing national epidemic of online sports-betting addiction, particularly among young men. What begins as occasional recreational betting too often spirals into financial instability, anxiety and depression, and high-risk habits. Our Administration is committed to mitigating the risks associated with problem gambling, including expanding treatment options and holding bad operators accountable.”)

Harmful substances, such as alcohol and narcotics, are typically regulated and controlled. But when presented with what some experts call “the biggest public health threat since Big Tobacco,” SCOTUS killed the only law shielding Americans from the corporate bet sharks. That law, called PASPA (Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act), did precisely what its title proposed. It protected pro and college sports leagues from point-shave rings; kept the Mob (and enraged bettors) off the backs of the players; and put so much physical distance between gamblers and casinos that they couldn’t lose their shirts on a passing hunch. To be sure, problem gamblers found their way around it, opening accounts with offshore sportsbooks or a local guy-who-knew-a-guy. But the damage was contained to the vulnerable few, which is about the best you can hope for from a law. 

What followed, post-PASPA, was so predictable, you couldn’t have gotten odds for it at Vegas. A sanctimonious foe of sportsbooks for decades, the NFL immediately entered talks with FanDuel and DraftKings. For billions in betting revenue, the league leased those firms the rights to its stat packs, metrics, and branding. That proprietary data enabled the apps to launch a brand-new product: live, in-game wagers on practically anything that happened on field.  

No longer were kids forced to wait hours on an outcome; now, they could bet on every play and every player through AI-brokered props in real time. That phenomenon, called microbetting, forever changed gambling by turbo-boosting the speed of betting behaviors. The effect of microbetting, if not its intent, is to induce a fugue state that keeps users in action. “You lose track of time and space, and next thing you know, you’re betting Indian cricket at 4 a.m.,” says Marcus. “I don’t even know the rules of cricket. Those fuckin’ matches go on for three days!”  

Every major pro sports league followed football’s lead, selling their data for a slice of the sports-bet pie. The effect on problem gamblers was catastrophic. “I went from betting money lines on baseball games to betting the number of runs scored in every inning,” says Frankie, a client of Levant’s in his late twenties with a South Philly brogue and a shiny widow’s peak. “Any money left at the end of the night, I’m flipping to FanDuel’s casino. Then it’s slots and blackjack till I bust, and now I’m betting Chinese ping-pong at 3 a.m.” A year ago May, Frankie married his sweetheart in a grand Italian wedding. The guests sent them off with a pillowcase full of cash. Behind his wife’s back, Frankie lost all the cash, then defaulted on the mortgage for their house. “I didn’t know where to turn,” he says. “Suicide was my only option till I found Harry.”  

Two years ago, the NCAA published a study on the steep surge of gambling on college campuses. It found that 67 percent of students living on campus were betting on sports 

Those microbets and parlay packs that hooked Levant’s clients are the SBOs’ profit centers. How do we know this? Because the apps themselves say so: They’re the bets featured in their ads. Kevin Hart, Rob Gronkowski, Tom Brady, LeBron James: You can’t shut them up and make them go away when they’re touting props and parlays in every promo. Nor can you squelch their motormouthed peers on the pods and sports-bet shows: the Bill Simmonses and Charles Barkleys and Scott Van Pelts, who’ve merrily boarded the gravy train as “ambassadors” for the SBOs. (Approached for comment, Simmons, Barkley and Van Pelt declined to speak.) “Among the dangers of celebrity endorsements is the normalization of an addictive product,” says Levant. “They’re accepting enormous sums to push [that] addictive product on an increasingly younger audience.”  

AFTER THE FALL OF PASPA, states raced one another to the betting window, smelling 10-figure windfalls in new taxes. Thirty-nine states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico passed bills that legalized the sports-bet racket. The ensuing carnage was swift and savage. New callers flooded the toll-free hotlines at 1-800-GAMBLER, and frantically searched the web for help, googling “gambling addiction” online. The state of New Jersey saw a nearly 300 percent spike in hotline calls in the first five years of legal betting. (Around six percent of its residents now suffer from gambling disorders — or three times the national average, per a Rutgers survey.) In Connecticut, the number of hotline calls increased 200 percent in the first two years — and the crisis was most acute among young men.  

“Forty percent of those calls are coming from twentysomething males,” says Diana Goode, the executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, who likens the legalization of gambling to the opioid crisis. “It’s literally the same thing they did with pain pills. These companies hand out free samples [i.e., welcome bonuses] to get [young men] addicted to betting.”  

I put the obvious question to clinician after clinician: Why are young people, males in particular, so susceptible to sports-bet apps? Bechtold, the founder and director of the Better Institute in Pittsburgh, began with the mile-high view. “This generation was basically bred for addiction, [having been] raised on cellphones inches from their faces.” The feeds on those devices “disrupted their neural wiring,” leaving them anxious, impulsive, and susceptible to “stims that are quick and constant onscreen.” Their online childhoods also robbed them of life skills best learned by leaving the house. Fiscal savvy gained by working part-time jobs. Risk awareness from running the streets, and an acquired sense of consequences from actions. “When these kids go bust, time after time it’s the parents who bail them out,” says Bechtold. “Every family I deal with, I say, ‘Quit giving the kid money!’ And Mom says, ‘Oh, I’m not ready to do that yet.’” 

Bechtold says these things not to shame her clients, but to name the preconditions that make them targets. They’ve grown up immersed “in a stew of ads” from the Big Two betting apps; been chased across the web by their pings and promotions; and been told by the celebrities they trust most to think that betting’s how winners have fun. It normalizes gambling as “something cool to do with your friends,” she says. Now layer on the male-skewing lubricant of sports, and you’ve built “a mass addiction machine,” says Matt Gaskell, the clinical lead for the NHS Northern Gambling Service in England. “These companies engineered a product that exploits the reward pathways” of young brains. “The constant crackle of dopamine keeps them playing” — and then a big bump, equivalent to a “spike of heroin,” is triggered by “a win on their team.” Eventually, though, the wins and losses cease to matter. What keeps these kids in action is “that neurochemical feed that fires the desire centers in the brain.” 

Gaskell’s had a decade-plus jump on his peers: Britain legalized mobile sports bets in 2005. The fallout has been tragic. “We have an estimated one to two suicides a day in England, and many of the ones I know of are of young men from middle-class families with university training” he says. Rather than confront the SBOs by slapping limits on their ads and promos — “our kids see 1,600 gambling logos in a 90-minute [soccer] match onscreen,” says Gaskell — the British government lamely lists “gambling disorder” as an official cause of death. “This industry has captured our policymakers with its billions, as I expect it’s done with yours. So the warning from over here is, expect disaster.” 

EVER WONDER WHAT LIFE’S LIKE with a serpent on your shoulder, whispering in your ear to bet the Braves? For Andrew, the ex-third baseman in college, that forked-tongue enticer gave him no quarter, hissing Check the bonus! at 6 a.m. “Between the voice in my head and the texts from the sportsbooks, I wasn’t really sleeping a whole lot,” he says in his honey-maple drawl from the Carolinas. “Every night, I’d tell myself, ‘That’s your last bet.’ Then every morning, I’d get up, see the bonus on my phone, and bet double what I did the day before.” 

He’s calling from his flat in eastern Pennsylvania, a bachelor pad he’s put through the wringer. There are gashes in the walls he’s just getting around to fixing: holes he made throwing weights and plates after losing thousands of dollars in three hours. “I’ve never hit anyone in my life,” he says. “But I’ve got a hell of an arm.” Between September of 2020, when he moved up from Atlanta to join the mother of his unborn twins in Pennsylvania, and May of 2024, when he placed his last wager, he bet more than a million dollars, he says, on live, long-shot parlays and props. He’s not sure how much of that was lost on the apps, but concedes it was “a lot.”

A study by the National Council on Problem Gambling found that betting on campus had surged to 75 percent — and that six percent of students were addicted to gambling, or nearly double the national average

He says he stole cash from his parents on visits home to Greenville, and guilted them into stopgap loans he knew he’d never repay. On blue-sky weeks when he won more than he lost, he’d go out and buy himself something he cherished — a new titanium driver; a pricey pair of Jordans — then sell them on for half when he went bust. “I’d walk around my place whenever I hit zero, seeing everything I owned as dollar signs.” His beloved baseball glove; the cashmere quarter-zips his grandma bought him for Christmas — anything to raise a hundred bucks and feed the addiction. 

Andrew got addicted to betting in college, playing — and hitting — his first-ever backdoor cover. “I had Duke in March Madness, and was just about to lose,” he recalls. But then a ref blew the whistle as the buzzer sounded, giving Duke two meaningless free throws while up by four. With a make on the second, Duke won by five, miraculously beating the spread of 4 1/2, per Andrew’s telling. His brain went kablooey on dopamine. “I can’t even describe it — it was the best feeling ever. I thought it was gonna work like that all the time.” 

Gambling experts talk about the “first-win trap” — a neurochemical surge that swamps the pleasure center, sparking delirium only matched by high-test heroin. “The reward’s beyond anything in our day-to-day lives,” says Gaskell. “It’s literally off the scale we see in” brain scans. “There’s a reason we call gambling a substance disorder,” says Levant. “But the substance isn’t the dough — it’s the dopa.” 

Andrew gave up baseball, got a degree in health fitness, and earned a good living as a trainer in Atlanta. He was constantly in the hole, though, laying a dozen bets a day with the bookies or the offshore apps. Then he met a girl and moved her into his place. Months later, she was pregnant with their twins. “She’d no idea I gambled; no one did, till finally my parents caught on.” That’s the core difference between gamblers and other addicts. There’s nothing physical that gives them away: no unexplained weight loss; no cocktail-hour slurring. That secrecy, born of shame, can destroy a spouse and family. They don’t find out that their loved one’s stolen from them till the marshals are at the door with eviction papers. 

For every person hiding a gambling disorder, six people in their orbit are impacted financially, according to the World Health Organization. The collateral impacts of new gambling addictions are just now being charted by clinicians. Among states that have legalized sports-bet apps, bankruptcies are up by 30,000 a year, per a USC-UCLA study still in progress. A second study, from Northwestern, found that eight percent of the households in legal-gambling states were wagering on SBOs — and that every dollar spent on those apps cost households double in net-worth losses.  

And so states that took the bait of new-tax windfalls find themselves in a hole. Who’s going to cover the living expenses of families ruined by problem bettors? And who’s going to pay for those bettors’ treatment when, or if, they seek help? (Less than 10 percent of gambling addicts ever come in for counseling, per the National Council on Problem Gambling.) Of all the grim ephemera linked to legal gambling, this fact might be the starkest: For every dollar paid in taxes by SBOs, the states spend, on average, .0009 cents providing therapy for the addicts they’ve helped create, according to theNCPG.

WHAT’S A YOUNG MAN TO DO when all the outlets he watches — ESPN, Paramount+, Peacock, Fox Sports — either own or have partnered with a sportsbook? When FanDuel and DraftKings push him their bet boosts while he’s scrolling reels? When SportsCenter plates him up a side of “Bad Beats” to pair with its “Top Ten Plays”?  

The effect of all that noise is to sell a tautology: that gambling is harmless fun when done in measure. It’s both the message and the method of the SBOs, who affix their buzzwords — “responsible gaming,” or RG — to the toe plate in all their ads. I called their collective trade rep, the American Gaming Association, to get a sense of RG in practice. Joe Maloney, a senior vice president, explained it to me — after expressing shock that kids use the apps. “The prevailing legal age for wagering is 21,” he told me. “We verify identities, we verify ages — and if a parent is opening [an account] for the use of a minor, that’s a violation of our terms of service. And if it’s found to have been done, then those individuals are banned from having accounts at these sites.”

“If there’s college kids jumping out of windows now, we need to see those accounts to figure out why. We have a moral obligation to those kids and their families. Otherwise, we’ll lose a generation.”

I granted the point, and pressed him about RG. Maloney was just getting warm, however. “We have a code of conduct that includes not casting anyone under 21 in our ads, and ensuring that the known audience of paid advertising is believed to be above 73 percent 21 [or older],” he told me. “We ban all university partnerships. We ban all agreements with NIL [Name, Image and Likeness] athletes. There’s no leafletting and pamphlet dropping on college campuses. None of those things are permitted.”

He went on like this for 15 minutes, laying out the Four Pillars of RG. “Stick to a budget. Bet legally [i.e., on their apps, not offshore sites]. Know the odds. And keep it fun. Do it in the company of others,” said Maloney. “This is not a wealth-creation exercise [or] an investment vehicle. This is entertainment.”

Since grade school, we’ve been trained to blame the addict for addiction: a failure of will and want-to in the weak. Even when the truth emerges, we still default to that warhorse, character, as the root of personal ruin. It’s only when the operators are forced to pay out fortunes that we finally fault the poisoner, not the poisoned. Hundreds of billions recovered from the tobacco companies, not counting the giant verdicts they keep losing. More than seven billion from the Sackler family. In America, the facts must defer to the funds. Our justice is a giant cardboard check. 

No one knows that lesson better than Dick Daynard, the godfather of tobacco litigation. A Harvard-trained lawyer, he founded a pivotal nonprofit, the Tobacco Products Liability Project, as a young attorney in the Eighties. TPLP became the tip line and database for the lawyers, reporters, and confidential sources who finally beat Big Tobacco in the mid- to late-Nineties.  

We’re sitting at a table in his offices in Boston, a quarter or so mile from Fenway Park. Joining us is Mark Gottlieb, Daynard’s voluble chief of staff, and the jet-lagged Harry Levant, just back from two symposia in Colorado. It was Levant who approached Daynard with his next crusade: suing the SBOs for the harms done to their users. Daynard, a laconic sort who wouldn’t order a hot dog without due process, tasked his staff to study the matter closely. “The doom loop of addiction?” says Gottlieb. “The losses that last till the customer drops? It wasn’t a tough decision to go forward.” 

Through TPLP’s successor, the Public Health Advocacy Institute, Daynard’s team brought the first sports-bet lawsuit in Massachusetts in 2023. They picked DraftKings as their opening-round opponent. The complaint they filed was a strategic one: a tautly focused claim of consumer fraud. “Plaintiffs allege that the offer of the $1,000 bonus … was and is unfair and deceptive because, among other things, a new customer would, in order to get a $1,000 bonus, actually need to deposit five times that amount and then, within 90 days, place $25,000 in bets with only certain odds of return,” the suit reads. “In other words, the ‘$1,000 Bonus’ is structured so that it is inordinately expensive to obtain $1,000, and the new user is, instead, statistically likely to lose money by chasing the bonus.” 

“In what world would anyone call that ‘responsible gaming’?”  Daynard says.

He filed the case, a class action, in Massachusetts, a state with stringent consumer-protection laws. DraftKings, for its part, filed a motion to dismiss. Its argument? “No reasonable consumer would have understood the Promotion in the terms that Plaintiffs allege.” That pleading was roundly denied by the judge; last summer, the case proceeded to discovery. Barring a settlement, the case heads to trial in two years. Meantime, Daynard’s colleagues are scouring DraftKings’ files, combing through tranches of court-compelled data to see if they can prove that DraftKings’ allegedly fraudulent ads are “deceptive to its target customers,” per the suit. To be clear: Gottlieb et al. aren’t bucking for prohibition. Legal gambling is here to stay, and they’re … OK with that. “Abolishing it at this point is DOA; there’s too much critical mass to take it down,” says Levant, who recently moved to Boston as the gambling-policy director of PHAI. “All we ask for are common-sense changes to the way these outfits do business.”  

For a list of those changes, I spoke to John Keenan, a reformer in the Massachusetts Senate. Keenan’s seen this rodeo before: He chaired the Senate’s Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse through the last two waves of the opioids crisis. “When you look at Purdue Pharma, what did they have? A new product they hawked relentlessly — and often falsely,” says Keenan. Same difference with Big Sports Bet, except “their marketing’s an onslaught: They’ve rewritten the book on selling addictive products.”   

So Keenan’s sponsored a bill called the Bettor Health Act. Besides raising the state-tax rate on SBOs from 20 to 51 percent, it would instantly ban all sports-bet ads during live, in-game broadcasts. Further, it would outlaw player props, i.e., a parlay on Steph Curry to hit more than four threes and exceed eight assists against the Lakers. (Keenan calls those bets “the crack cocaine” of gambling.) The bill would also slap affordability checks on the SBOs: “If [someone] bets more than $1,000 a day, the industry has to check [his] bank account” to be sure he can support that action, says Keenan. 

But maybe the best thing Keenan’s bill would do is force the apps to share their data with the state. “If there’s college kids jumping out of windows now, we need to see those accounts to figure out why. We have a moral obligation to those kids and their families. Otherwise, we’ll lose a generation.” 

IT’S BEEN MORE THAN A YEAR now since Andrew placed a bet — but he’ll be the first to admit he’s been here before. “I quit cold turkey in 2020,” he says, “when my girlfriend found out she was pregnant.” Months of sobriety later, he rented a U-Haul and trucked their joint possessions to Pennsylvania. But driving across the line into Delaware — the first state, by a nose, to approve the apps — Andrew was beset by FanDuel radio ads and billboards. That night, he opened an account, grabbed the welcome bonus, and promptly lost his mind for four years. 

“The guy I became — I don’t know who that was,” he says. Depressed and withdrawn, “always snapping at my girl; all I wanted to do was go and hide.” He holed up in the spare room of the place they’d rented, betting like he’d never bet in Georgia. “Those offshore apps — yeah, I liked my parlays, but they just had the basics,” meaning money line, point spread, over/under. But FanDuel? “FanDuel was fuckin’ Disneyland, man. You could build your own parlay off a thousand different props — and the crazier the props, the bigger the payout.” That, he hastens to add, is how to tell you’re an addict: “We only play the long shots. Longer, the better.” 

Seven months after the couple moved north, Andrew’s girlfriend left him and took their three-month-olds with her. Andrew hasn’t seen his kids, now four, since; he relinquished his parental rights during that four-year spiral, failing to appear at visitations. Though he’s stable enough now to send her child support, he hasn’t pushed his ex for visitation. “I have no moral ground to be in their lives,” he says. “I burned every bridge and ruined every trust with everyone I ever knew. At this point, it’s just about living my life and trying to prove I can do better.” 

Though we’re speaking by phone, I sense his mood straying, drawn to the shadows of the past. There’s a species of forgetting when you’ve lived apart, a gap that can’t be filled by stepping back into the world. Of all the sunk assets, faith is the dearest: faith that you still matter out there, and still share a language with other people. To reclaim that faith, Andrew’s gone public with his story, telling it to anyone who’ll listen. He’s appeared, under his own name, on CNN and CBS; spent hours on the phone with me to be sure I get it all; and made himself available to the people he hurt, giving a ruthless accounting of his sins. He has no expectation that the truth will set him free, or serve as recompense for the past.  

“I’m just putting this out there [in hopes] that someone hears it and does something before a bunch of people die. The way these companies play you, chase and harass you till you’re worse than broke and get to thinking, ‘Maybe it would be better if I was gone.’” 

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