The other day I was telling my wife about the latest season of Michael Lewis' podcast “Against the Rules.” If you're wondering why there's so many ads and nonstop blather about sports betting as you're watching a sports event, well, this answers it. Blame New Jersey, Ted Olson (RIP), and the John Robert Supreme Court. In Murphy v. NCAA (2018), with Olson arguing for the bad guys in front of several of his Federalist Society club members, the court overturned an earlier Sen. Bill Bradley law that prevented most sports betting in the country, and the floodgates opened.

Here's the question I asked my wife. The year before that decision, in 2017, legal sports bookies generated $300 million in revenue in this country. What was that figure in 2023?

“I don't know,” she said. “A billion?”

“Wait, you think it tripled in five years?”

“Well, I don't --”

“It's $11 billion.”

And of the two big sports betting companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, that were already in place? Lewis says, “It's as if when Prohibition ended, there were these two massive liquor companies sitting there with databases on individual Americans and their taste for alcohol. And the government ordered them to go wave a glass of whiskey under the nose of every alcoholic to persuade as many as possible to start drinking again.”

All of this is from Episode 4: “A Hard Way to Make an Easy Living.” Not pretty, much recommended.