Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast, your source for policy rants and raves from Tech Freedom,

your Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate. I'm Evan Swartzraver,

your host on today's show, Draft Kings, Fandle, and the

wonderful world of fantasy sports. Joining me in our DC studio to talk about all of that is Chris

Kutman, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a university-based research center. Chris,

thank you for joining me. Thank you so much for having me on. So, Chris, to start, what is fantasy sports?

We're not talking about quidditch, right?

No, this is not fantasy sports in the idea that the sports don't exist.

This is fantasy sports and the idea that these are games where participants assemble teams

made up of real-life players. And the winner of these

fantasy games are the teams that do the best with regard to their players in real-life sports.

So to give you an example, let's say, fantasy football. Fantasy football, if you and I were

in a league together, we would be competing based on the players we select and how well those players do in their respective games.

So a lot of our listeners are probably familiar with fantasy sports and that they have a friend or a family member who's in an office pool and they all compete amongst themselves.

But how is,

you know, your family fantasy pool different than Draft Kings or Fandul, which is daily fantasy

sports? Yeah. So fantasy sports for most of its existence has been season-long fantasy. The idea

being that a group of maybe 10, 12 of us would get together at the

beginning of a season, we would all draft teams. That is, we would have a fixed

pool of players and we would all draft and select players out of that pull. And then we

would compete against one another throughout the entire season. And success or

failure in that league would be based on how well your

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