Almost every tech platform in your life is designed to grab your attention.

And then never let it go. You give it clicks and it gives you dopamine. Scroll to the next story,

dopamine. Smash that buy now button. Here's your dopamine. It's a pretty perfect system.

So perfect, in fact, that you almost have to admire it.

Games, news updates, social media hits.

They all run on the same logic, and we're all more or less adjusted to it.

And now that we're comfortable with this, we can add a new activity to the

list. Gambling. I'm talking about frictionless apps on your phone that let you bet on everything

from March Madness to a pre-game coin toss to who wins a minor league British dart tournament.

In just a few years, sports betting has gone from a legal gray area to a multi-billion

dollar industry.

And this isn't just about sports.

It's about how our economy increasingly runs on behavioral design, how it exploits our cognitive biases, our dopamine

systems, our irrationality.

And it's about how institutions, governments, media companies, even the sports leagues themselves,

have partnered in this system because they all want a cut of the action.

I'm Sean Elling, and this is the gray area.

My guest today is Jonathan Cohen.

He's the author of Losing Big, America's reckless bet on sports gambling.

It's a book about the financial infrastructures that we've built on top of these vulnerabilities, are vulnerabilities.

We talk about how this happened so fast, what online gambling shares with social media and crypto, and

how genuinely destructive on a human level, all of this has been.

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