Hi, this is John.

Hi, Jonathan Cohen.

Yes.

Jonathan Cohen, author of the bestselling book, Losing Big, America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.

Oh, is this my mother-in-law? How did you apply the word best-selling to the front of it, but sure. Well, I assume it's a bestseller. I see you on TV all the time, so, you know. Yeah, okay, fair enough. So, well, thank you very much, in all honesty, for taking the time to talk to us today. Appreciate it, and I know you have been busy, because I have seen you on TV quite a bit lately. Yeah, okay.

And especially, I think with all the stuff that happened, however long ago it's been now,

with the NBA and Chauncey Billups and sort of the beginning of the professional sports betting scandals.

And it felt like after that, and I know it involved a lot of like poker games and the

mafia and that stuff, but it still touched on these sports betting scandals.

And then we've just kind of seen one after the other.

A couple more basketball.

There's some talk of stuff in the UFC.

Then we had the two pitchers in the Major League Baseball.

So, you know, is this one of those kind of moments where you're like, I told you so?

I would love to say yes.

My, I mean, a little bit, a little bit, yes.

Because the promise of the sports leagues, when this was legalized back in 2018 and when they began to pursue it in earnest, was that basically that this wouldn't happen, right?

That we would be making our games safer, more trusted, rather than less, by legalizing it, by bringing this into the light, by bringing

it above ground.

And of course, now they're claiming, oh, this is proof the system is working, right?

This is proof that the legal regulated market is safer because now we caught all these people

with, of course, out any acknowledgement that a lot of these people probably wouldn't have been gambling in this way, but for the version of sports betting, the sort of technologically supercharged version of sports betting that we got. And then there's a whole other side of, I told you so, that's related to the player safety and addiction but we can get to that

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