Fortune reports: Gambling becomes America’s favorite pastime as Americans spend more on sports bets than movies, arts, museums, and music combined.

In 2025, Americans placed roughly $166 billion in bets on sporting events. That’s more than the entire U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries generated in revenue combined.

The North American box office totaled $8.87 billion in 2025, which is still 22% below pre-pandemic levels. Recorded music revenue hit a record $11.5 billion. Live music like concerts and festivals brought in $18.51 billion. Meanwhile, book publishers tracked by the Association of American Publishers reported $14.6 billion for the year. And the U.S. museum industry generated an estimated $16.4 billion. Add it up and the total comes to roughly $70 billion, which is less than half what Americans wagered on sports.

I have never been attracted to gambling. I would like to say it is because I have a sufficiently rudimentary understanding of statistics that I know it is a fool’s quest. Or maybe it is because I like to get something when I spend money, other than a temporary state of drama before I find out if I won or lost. It may simply be that I am dispositionally risk-averse, especially in matters of money.

I get, in the abstract, the idea that gambling offers the illusion of something for nothing. But I played an annual NFL Pick’Em game (alongside James Joyner and a number of friends and family) long enough to know that, as much as I think I know that the Patriots are a lock to beat the Jets this week by at least two field goals, it rarely was as locked as it looked. Indeed, I went back and looked at my Yahoo NFL Pick’Em stats, and it tells me that over 13 seasons, I was pretty much 50-50. If my vaunted knowledge of my favorite sport was the same as a coin flip, well, what’s the fun in that?

As it pertains to the numbers above, at least if you are spending money on recorded music, a live concert, or a movie, you are getting something material in return. Moreover, you are contributing to the art, work, and labor of a lot of people.

I can get, in the abstract, the notion that low-scale gambling is a similarly ephemeral entertainment experience to seeing a movie. I can understand, for example, how a wager on a random football game could increase drama and enjoyment, the same way playing fantasy football, even the non-money version, can enhance an otherwise lousy Thursday Night Football game. But I also think that the promise of making a quick buck, coupled with a general lack of understanding of statistical probability in the general populace (see e.g., the way in which people can’t fathom how it might not rain when the forecast said 80% chance or how baffling polling and prediction models are to people), creates a potentially very serious dynamic.

Having said all of that, I have never had especially strong views about legalized gambling. It has long struck me as very much a personal choice kind of thing. I have, however, increasingly been of the view that maybe a little more friction would be a good idea. Being able to bet from your phone is about as frictionless as it gets. Maybe having to physically go to the location would cause a few cooler heads to prevail.

This figure surprised me and makes me feel a little better about it all (but it still means that the house is winning):

over 90% of what is wagered gets returned to bettors in the form of winnings. That $1,000 in bets translates to roughly $100 in average losses per adult. “That overall doesn’t really seem to be a crisis,” Matheson said, but he argued the real crisis is the distribution of losses.

I would note that I have read other numbers that seem more dire than those.

Regardless, there is this:

Losses are not spread evenly across the betting population. Roughly 95% of total losses are absorbed by just 5% of bettors, a small cohort of heavy users whose spending looks nothing like the casual fan putting $20 on a Sunday parlay. “That is a problem,” Matheson said.

Conway, who spent three decades as a senior executive at Major League Baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, the Texas Rangers, and AOL, said the platforms are engineered to identify and retain exactly those heavy users. “They’re able to recognize, ‘Hey, this person hasn’t really participated in two weeks. I need to spike them an offer,’” he said. “They’re very good about back-end information about when people are dropping off.”

The free-bet promotions that are ubiquitous in sports advertising—which Conway said is a descendant of the old illegal bookmaking system where bettors received credit to keep wagering after a loss—are designed to pull those users back in. “The best word in marketing in the history of business has been ‘free,’” he said, “and in this case they make it appear as though it’s free, even though we know it’s really not.”

This kind of sounds like offering free booze to a person you know to be an alcoholic just so he will then buy the next six drinks from you.

And the system is definitely designed to suck you in. And the aforementioned lack of friction is notable.

Sports betting has drawn in young, college-educated men who had largely stayed out of traditional gambling. This previously untapped consumer base, Matheson said, has the illusion of control. “You say, ‘If I just knew a little bit more and studied a little bit harder, I really could make money here,’ because this isn’t craps, where the odds are what they are and I can’t throw the dice in some special way.”

That sense of a skill- or knowledge-based edge draws in people who would never buy a lottery ticket. The markets, he added, are priced specifically to neutralize whatever edge bettors think they have. “All of that knowledge is built into these bets in the first place. These lines are not being made by uneducated people.”

“It literally is just a vortex,” Conway said. “It picks up momentum, and that momentum takes it to another level.” Parlays, live in-game wagering, prop bets on individual player statistics are all engagement mechanics that sportsbooks use to turn betting into its own form of sports consumption, competing for the same hours and dollars that once went to attending games or watching them without a financial stake. “They’ve taken something that was just who’s going to win,” Conway said, “and now you’re actually able to get involved in certain other events of the game. That’s a form of engagement as opposed to what we knew previously.”

Which may be leading to the following.

A recent New York Fed study found credit card delinquencies among millennials and Gen Z have risen in states where sports betting is legal, evidence, researchers said, that some bettors are financing the habit with debt. A quarter of sports bettors now say they worry they cannot control their gambling, according to a U.S. News and World Report survey.

“With addictive products,” Matheson said, “the question is whether you kind of kill off your hosts—or whether you can string them along.”

All of this reminds me of a great piece in The Atlantic from earlier this year, McKay Coppins’ piece, Sucker (and his interview about the piece, ‘If You Win One Penny, You’re in the Top 2 Percent of Bettors’).

And, of course, there is the whole Polymarkets/Kalshi part of the equation.

Fundamentally, my current sense is that we need more regulation in these arenas, but not only is this a lower item on the priority lists of things we need to address, but the current administration is also highly unlikely to want to regulate it, given that the Trump family is profiting from it. One could also include crypto in this conversation, but in terms of the gambling aspect of it, and the way in which it is enriching the Trumps.

After I wrote this, I also noted this piece at Liberal Currents that fits: Betting Alone. While maybe some of the existential claims are a tad overwrought, the overall piece is worth a read.