1311: Online Gambling | Skeptical Sunday

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Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday, co-host, writer and researcher Nick Pel, which means you know it's going to be a banger, because he only gets the topics that nobody else will do. Here on the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills, the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use

to impact your own life, and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week we have long-form conversations with the variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, on Sundays though, it's Skeptical Sunday.

A rotating guest co-host and I are going to break down a topic you may have never thought

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disinformation, junk science, crime, and cults, and more, that will help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbanger.com/start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Alright, here we go. Let me set the scene.

A guy at a bar whips out his phone, he's six beers deep, and in the middle of watching his favorite team play. Not exactly drunk, but definitely not sober. He decides it's time to put his mortgage payment on an in-play bet. A bet placed after the game has started.

He follows the sport closely, he knows both teams well, he even knows the spread. Plus it comes with a risk-free bet that if he hits both, it's going to pay his mortgage for the entire year. So, why not? Right?

Well, of course, the bet doesn't hit and now five seconds spent on his phone has him wondering how he's going to stay in his house this month. He's not a habitual loser, in fact he wins more than he loses, but when he loses, he loses big, and often finds himself worried about how he's going to make ends meet this month.

And he is not alone, since the legalization of sports betting at the federal level, there's been a flood of apps that make it easier than ever to put your hard-earned money on a sure thing. But is any of this a good thing, who's making the money and who's losing it, and what are the broader social effects?

Here today to help me raise the stakes as writer and researcher Nick Pell, are you a gambling man, Nick? I think I know the answer. No, no, no. I trade crypto like a respectable degenerate.

Oh, right. Yes. Totally not gambling. I forgot. I use charts and graphs for my gambling.

I mean trading, it's called technical analysis, and it's totally not a strategy for crypto pros. You actually, you came to me with this topic, which I was a little surprised by because, well, because you trade crypto, which is kind of just like gambling for nerds. Not gambling, Jordan.

Not gambling. Again, there's charts and graphs. Charts and graphs. Yes.

“So I wanted to do this because I think gambling should be legal because any time you say something”

should be illegal, what you mean is, state resources should be expanded on putting people in prison for this, which I don't believe about gambling.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not critical of it.

I don't have to be uncritical of things just because I don't think there should be laws against them. I think drugs should be legal, but if a business was making billions of dollars, door-dashing, crack to people, I don't think that legality shields them from criticism or prevents people from discussing the negative implications of quick and easy crack delivery.

The ease of access to online gambling is a different issue as opposed to should gambling be legal. It's a different question. There's also a secondary issue involved where it's like, do you want people who traffic in human misery having any kind of influence in your society?

I don't. And I don't care if they're involved in voluntary commerce. If they're trafficking in human misery, I don't want these people having any kind of voice in our society. Right, okay.

It is really crazy how fast sports gambling went from something illegal.

“Basically, you need to use to need to know a guy to even do it.”

Now, I see ads constantly for it and constantly banning them from this podcast, basically that the advertisers are rejecting them as sponsors, much to the chagrin of my podcast network because they come in with truckloads of money. Yeah, and the fictional story you described at the beginning of the show is very real. If I download fan dual, I can be absolutely hammered and put my kids college fund on a

thousand to one shot. Should anyone be in jail for this? I don't think so, but are people who make this easy for me to do morally questionable?

In fact, my family was involved in the gambling business such as it was in the '70s and

the '80s.

“My uncle was a bookie and my father was in what we would you for mystically call collections.”

Okay. They did not work together. There's an element of danger to gambling during that time period, I, well, right. Because there's somebody who didn't pay her uncle, they're going to get a visit from your dad.

Yes, and like you said, it was not as easy as downloading it out. I mean, you could not even gamble on sportsbook in Vegas until 1975. Really? That's wild to me that it was illegal to bet on sports at a building dedicated to gambling. It wasn't illegal.

It was taxed into oblivion. There was a 10% tax, and that made it unprofitable. In 1974, lefty Rosenthal, presumably not his given name. The guy who Robert De Nero's character in Casino is based on, he successfully lobbied to get a dropped to 2%.

I don't need Google to tell me that lefty Rosenthal was some kind of gangster. That's... Yeah.

“He basically built Vegas at least the sports betting side of things.”

Prior to that, the closest you were going to get was off track betting, where you went and gambled on horse races over the television. In Rhode Island, when I was a kid, you could also gamble on Highly, which most people

have never heard of, and probably couldn't pronounce if they saw how it's spelled.

Is that the sport with the little, you use like little basic big ice cream scoops to whip up all around? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a little tiny clip of it in the opening montage of Miami Vice. That's from anybody.

Is this big of a Miami Vice fan as I am? You could do that in Newport, Rhode Island. What's gambling wasn't legalized in Atlantic City until 2018, and that was when the Supreme Court ruled that the law of banning sports betting was unconstitutional. It is worth mentioning that sportsbook is the safest form of gambling for people who actually

know what they're doing. So explain what you mean by that presumably you don't mean safe because they're not going to get taken out back and worked over with a shovel if they well-chun a bit. The sports book along with horse racing, which we're kind of going to take horse racing out of the equation.

But these are the two forms of gambling that you can realistically make money on. The playing field is much more level and lots of guys do make money just playing the horses. I work at a new stand next to a horse track once upon a time and there was a guy who would come in every day and get the racing form, which is like the daily newspaper about horse racing.

He got it every day because his job was betting on horses. It's really grueling work. But if you love horse racing, why not? Why is that? What makes that different?

There's lots of reasons.

First of all, table games and slots are just hard-coded so the house always wins on a long

enough time frame. The math does not math for you coming out on top at table games and card games and slots. Unless you're extremely skilled, maybe, over the years casinos have basically figured out how to prevent rain man from coming in and cleaning house, in sports and paramutual betting that's horses.

You're not betting against the house. The odds are determined by what other people are betting on. It's peer to peer. You're betting against other gamblers. The house makes its money on volume, not by winning bets over time.

In fact, a bookies dream is equal amounts of money on both sides of a bet.

“That's why they'll move the line to make one side more attractive if the other side is”

getting too much action. If you've ever seen the movie, the grifters with John Kuzak and Angelica Houston and Angelica Houston's job is to go into horse tracks when the odds are too lopsided and throw a bunch of money to even the mouth because that's how they make their money. Doesn't matter who wins to a bookie because they're getting their juice, which is typically

10% of all the action, they're not trying to out bet anyone. They want to manage the line and the big makes that profitable. All right. This is one of those terms I've heard in every gangster movie ever, and every episode of the sopranos or whatever.

And I have no idea what it means with Vig. You apparently do. So can you explain what the Vig is for me and everybody else who didn't grow up with an uncle who was a bookie? Did grow up in a mobbed up family.

Right. It is mostly an interest rate thing, it's usually how it's used. But in gambling terms, it's the house advantage that's baked into every bet. You're not wrong in a certain sense that crypto is sports book for nerds for sure. And much like in crypto trading or other forms of trading, you know, you can place bets

in sports book in a way that makes sense. You can get partial wins. You can make wins that easily compensate for your losses. If you're a whiz at arbitraging your bets, this is called dutching in the world of gambling,

If you just bet the minus 110 line, you only have to be right 52% of the time to make

money. Okay, without getting too deep in the weeds, what does that mean slash what would that look like? A 110 line means you spend a buck 10 for every $1 you hope to win. And the 10 cents is the big or the juice, that's the house advantage.

Bookies want to take money from the losers and give it to the winners and then pocket the 10 cents. So it actually is quite a bit like trading crypto or stocks. I mean, we're talking market maker fees and stuff. So super simple math here in terms of how you would win by losing.

Say I'm at the horse rack and I put a dollar on a 10 to one shot and five bucks on a three to one shot. While the three to one shot loses or I lose five bucks, but the 10 to one shot comes in.

“So I made 10 bucks, so I'm still up, like I think the actual math is four bucks, you're”

up four bucks, multiply it by 10 or 100 or whatever. You played the odds. That's what you do. You play the odds. This is effectively what day traders do.

You know, if your trade is unprofitable, you throw more money at it at a lower price so that you're in profit more quickly, DCA down, the math is somewhat more complicated here because there are fees, but the basic point remains that the thing is you play the odds. So at the very least, it's slightly less stupid than just pumping your money into video poker.

You can actually get an advantage on video poker, but the squeeze is not worth the juice on that. But it can be done. With sports book, you can manage the downside and take home decent profits. And do you want to know how online betting apps deal with guys who know how to arbitrage

their bets properly? I see. Am I guess as they ban those users, your guess is correct. They call it non-recreational play. Recreational gamblers want a high win rate, pros known as sharps in the field of sports gambling

are dutching their bets and they focus on things like expected value and arbitrage. Okay, what's expected value again for people who didn't take statistics slash gambling

class in college or never took gambling?

Yeah. Yeah. So it's a method of calculating risk versus reward and sports book. You want to bet online with positive expected values and avoid negative expected values. But yeah, these platforms, they use AI to ban people who actually know how to bet.

“Which should tell you everything you need to know about these apps.”

Yes, that is definitely really sus, like you're too good, you're out of here. And it's not cheating. You're not cheating. You're not hacking anything. It's not even like sports book version of card counting or whatever that might be.

You just happen to know what you are doing so they throw you out. What I don't get is why ban them, they're still making money off those users. I don't really understand. You're messing up their business model. There are places that are specifically for the sharps and they love sharps because you're

creating data for them. You're helping them set a better line. So they don't care. They welcome sharps because they're using your brain as part of their computer to train where the bet line whatever should be if you're smart.

Yeah, they will literally say sharps welcome. Like you said, their business model is like, well, these guys know what they're doing. Let's use them to set our line crowd source data. Yeah. Yeah.

Most guys and they are overwhelmingly guys using these apps are just going to yellow a thousand bucks a clip at a 10 game parlay because all they see is, oh, man, if this hits, I get 75 grand and that's the business model of retail gambling apps. Explain what a parlay is again for people who are not compulsive gamblers. Sure.

So a parlay is when you link a number of bets together, making them into one. They can kind of be compared to meme coins for gamblers for people who may understand the world of meme coins.

“Your chances of buying the next doge coin is like zero, right?”

But if you throw a thousand bucks at doge coin at launch, you're going to make a mint. So a simple example of what a parlay is is if you bet on 10 different games and make them into a 10 game parlay, you're now betting on all 10 games as a single bet. So if you win nine and you lose one, you go home with nothing. In fact, which might be a good risk to reward ratio if you throw 10 bucks at it.

But it's closer to a lottery ticket than a bet. I see. Pro gamblers don't go 10 for 10. Yeah, of course. Yeah.

How prevalent is online gambling? Do we have any idea on how many people are problem gamblers? It's a huge market globally.

It's between 77 and 101 billion dollars with North America being the biggest market.

In the United States, it's a little under seven billion dollars a year and it's expected

So people are gambling the GDP of Serbia. That's just crazy. Yeah, about 22% of all Americans reported having a sportsbook account in late 2025, including nearly half of all men between 18 and 49. That's according to a survey from St. Bonaventure University, a survey taken by the American

Psychiatric Institute in March 2025 found that 28% of all American adults gamble online daily, which is insane to me. That is insane to me as well, mostly because of the daily part. How do these people have the money for this? No idea, but mobile devices account for about 80% of all these wages, according to a

Mortor Intelligent Study. That is just, wow, take these people's phones away, I guess. I don't know. It would not be the worst idea, because it's going to get very, very greasy the further we get into this.

Yeah.

“So lots of people are gambling with their phones, but okay, devil's advocate, who cares?”

You have all people to agree. This is not a problem in and of itself. So, how do we know when gambling is actually a problem versus just a really dumb hobby? Absolutely. The Mayo Clinic offers us a comprehensive list of signs of problem gambling.

You're constantly obsessing over gambling, including figuring out ways to get more money for gambling. You're probably a gambling addict. Like any other addiction, gambling addiction requires increasing amounts of the drug to get the same thrill.

You're taking bigger risks with bigger bets, just to feel something. In the words of Axel Rose, I used to do a little, but the little wouldn't do it so the little got more and more. Yes, okay, now I can relate. Axel explained it for you.

Axel explained everything. Yes. Another common symptom of addiction that applies to gambling, trying to quit without success, irritability when not gambling or gambling to avoid your problems, chasing losses, which is gambling more money to win money back, lying to your family about losses or otherwise

letting gambling interfere with your personal or work life. Finally, there's borrowing money to cover your gambling expenses. I'd probably also add to that gambling money you don't really have, which I guess is covered by borrowing money, but it seems worth pointing out that once you start gambling money, you can't afford to lose, slash is not even yours.

That is a problem.

“So how common is problem gambling that specifically related to mobile and online platforms?”

According to the National Council on Problem Gambling between 2 and 2.5 million adults have

severe gambling addiction, with another 4 to 8 million with gambling problems that impact their lives, but don't take enough boxes to officially be gambling addicts. The lifetime risk is that between 1 and 2 percent of all Americans will experience a gambling problem at some point in their life. We talked earlier about how it's mostly men who are gambling.

How does this work out when it comes to problem gambling? Men are twice as likely to have gambling problems as women according to a poll from fairly Dickinson University. This is especially true, young men as many as 10 percent of men under the age of 30 have gambling problems, Asian Americans and black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans

to have a gambling problem. And how does that compare to the past?

How much is this a growing problem as opposed to when it always existed, but we just started

measuring or discovered?

“We don't have super specific stats, but we do know that problem gambling has increased”

not just with the legalization of sportsbook, but also with the dissemination of online gambling. Search for help for gambling addiction, spite between 30 and 67 percent after the mass legalization of online gambling. We know that frequency of play is the biggest red flag according to recent national polling,

35 percent of people who gamble even casually already report at least one problem behavior, such as chasing losses or lying loved ones. When you look at high intensity groups like online sports betters, the number nearly doubles with 68 percent showing signs of problematic play. That's from the Fairly Dickinson University study cited earlier.

For those of you listening at home, if you and two of your friends use fan dual, a lot, one of you likely has a gambling problem. That's how serious these stats are. I feel like it goes without saying that the problem isn't just a need for greater self-control on the part of people gambling, I mean, some of it may be, but it's not just that.

I want to be careful because people do have agency and we shouldn't be blaming their gambling addiction on the fact that they can download a betting app.

I can download a betting app and I never have.

No, you gamble on the illiquid shit coin cryptos guilty, but I have bought a house twice doing that.

I don't think I'm taking in here those bugs. I can stop anytime I want, I've done it a hundred times, one of those here, I'm working

on the third house in any event.

I think that we can say that more people have access to these tools and that as a clear negative impact on society, without painting these people as helpless victims, refer to the addiction episode for more about this. But the fact that they're reaching off for help shows that a decision to stop gambling

“is within their ability, and I'd also say that for many problem gamblers, the only way”

to stop is going to be to get some outside help. Both of those things can be true at the same time. It's not simply about greater self-control, but self-control is eventually going to have to be at least one component of quitting. We talked earlier about how sports gambling used to be a thing you needed to know a guy

to be able to do. So how did this blow up? Yeah, how did this become a thing that everybody does? Yeah. So everything traces back to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Paspa in 2018, before

this legal sports betting was largely a Nevada phenomenon, and as I said, that wasn't even a thing until 1975. So what is Paspa and why is it such a big deal? What happened here? Paspa is the professional and amateur sports protection act of 1992, and overturning

this law is our pivot point. This is why sports betting goes from an underground thing to something that every sporting event is wallpaper with ads for, and grandfathered in state that already had sports betting,

which basically meant Nevada, Oregon, Delaware, and Montana had super limited sports betting,

and they were allowed to keep it. So repealing this is what makes sports gambling accessible to basically everybody. Yeah. Before the repeal, you had to know a guy or hop a flight to Vegas. Murphy, the National Collegiate Athletic Association is the case that overturned Paspa in 2018,

and it was brought by the state of New Jersey. They argued that the federal government had no authority to prevent states from legalizing sports betting. Presumably because they were mad that Vegas had sports betting, but Atlantic City didn't. I don't know.

I mean, that would be my guess. Now, here's the important thing. The Supreme Court doesn't magically make gambling on sports legal from coast to coast. It just says that the federal government does not have the authority to prevent states from legalizing sports gambling.

“So how many states legalized it because of the Supreme Court decision?”

38 plus DC. Now, one thing that's important and interesting to note is the timing because this happens just as apps and mobile technology are really hitting their stride with massive penetration. I mean, but think about what apps were like in 2015. Yeah.

It was goofy stuff. It was stupid for the most part, or social apps. But apps really are hitting their stride when they pass this decision. So it was like a nuclear bomb. If the Supreme Court overturned the law right after it was passed in 1992, like who cares?

It wouldn't have been a big deal. You couldn't download an app on your phone that let you put your life savings on a 10-game parlay 15 minutes after some guy tells you about an app that you can gamble your life savings on and by the way, your eight beers deep at the bar. How much of an impact does the legalization of sports gambling have financially speed?

Well, how big did this all get? That's what I'm asking.

For the repeal, we had a $5 billion industry that was effectively confined to one state.

“Afterwards, it's a $120 billion enterprise.”

Wow. Okay. That's like 25 times what it was before. Holy smokes. Yeah.

It's a big deal. Now, this is where it ties into digital gambling. 94% of bets are now placed online or via mobile. In 2025, American gambling platforms close their fourth consecutive year of growth when we include both sports betting and online slots and table games, which is insane to

me that the people can do slots on their phone. We also have some data about how online gambling is impacting problem gambling in the United States. If you gamble online, you're three to eight times more likely to develop a gambling problem than a brick and mortar gambler.

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Back to Skeptical Sunday. Yeah, my friend James clearly wrote this book called Atomic Habits. He's been on this show before. Super bestselling book. He's got this concept of adding friction to things that you don't want to do.

So if you play too many video games, unplug your Xbox and put it in the closet. And then when you want to play video games, you got to go to the closet, plug in the wires, get the controllers set up, and then you play for a few hours. And then you're done. You take it all down so that you don't just walk in your house.

You're like, oh, it's played 15 minutes.

“And then five hours later, you're still playing for a game video games, right?”

So this is the opposite of that, so that we had this with gambling before, right?

Where you would have to get in your car and like call the bookie. And then you get a hold of them. And you realize he's at a bar or something to get a drive to the bar. You have plenty of time to talk to yourself out of it or decide that you're going to do less of that or whatever.

Now you're just like on the toilet and you're thinking, oh, I'm just going to pop in and bet. And it's like it's just way too easy to do now. Yeah, when I lived in Ireland, there were bookies absolutely everywhere. It was legal.

These were as common as dollar generals are in poor rural towns in America. And I lived in the absolute middle of nowhere. We have multiple places you go gamble, patty power, and stuff like that. But the thing is, even if we had a situation like that in the United States and mobile gambling was not legal, you still have to get in your car to come make a bet.

And the other thing is at some point you leave the casino or you leave the bookie bar when you're done. But when you've got an app on your phone and it's sending you a push notification, if you've got a gambling addiction or even just poor impulse control, like this is like an alcoholic getting push notifications from the liquor store all day, except in this case, your

iPhone actually pours the shot into your mouth without you having to drive over, even to pick up the booze that you bought on your phone app. Like there's just nothing that quite compares to the same thing that maybe like porn addiction, right? Except you, it's cheaper.

That's probably the best analogy.

“In general, I think that there's a real problem with people being able to indulge their”

vices whenever a stray thought floats through their head. And you know, presumably we had, we also had way less porn addiction when you had to drive to a sketchy part of town and park your car. And front of the place where some of you might see it, there was friction there and there was a stigma and that kept a lot of people from getting in over their heads.

The University of Maryland did a study that found that disordered gambling increased from 4 to 5.7% since legalized, mobile betting. That doesn't sound like a lot. It's a 1.7% increase, but I know you're going to push back on that. I hope.

It's an increase of 42% in three years. Wow. Big jump, 1.7% over 4% is that's a big jump. Did all the people with a propensity to become problem gambler is just make the leap because it was easier?

Only time will tell. But I do think mobile gambling platforms present problems that you just can't hand wave away with. Well, you know, people are a lot to gamble.

There's a reason I've never accepted sponsorship from gambling platforms.

I mean, I have offers all the time. I'm just pretty firmly in the demographic of guys that they want is customers and so is much of the audience listening right now. But to me, it's kind of like being sponsored by cocaine, you know, can hear me out. Can some people do it responsibly?

Maybe. Is it fun? Maybe. Or so I've heard, right?

“I mean, I can stop and it's on my one if done in a hundred times, right?”

I made a joke earlier. But most people who are willing to try it in the first place, they're not going to be able to do that. Just I don't feel comfortable shilling for a gambling platform. Some things are just not for sale or maybe, I don't know, sell out later and holding out

for more cash. I just don't realize it yet. Like you said earlier. Time will tell. But I just, I don't know.

I just, I don't like giving people a taste of this because clearly most people can't actually handle that.

No, and the problem is really sharp when it comes to Gen Z, a 2025 Trans Union report

found that Gen Z and Millennials who use cryptocurrency apps are significantly more likely to engage in high frequency mobile sports betting. But the worst problem is that they see gambling on sports and meme coins as an investment strategy. Oh my god, that is bleak man.

I can't tell if this is just ignorance or sort of like cope because the financial situation for that generation is so cooked. Yeah, I think it's pretty cooked and, you know, maybe it is their best shot. But it's bleak regardless. Yeah, and I don't want to like lean too heavily on this, but I do kind of want to throw

out that Millennials in Gen Z had been prepped for online gambling and mobile gambling to a certain degree by loot boxes and video games. I don't think it's a direct pipeline, but I do think it's kind of easier psychologically to see gambling the way that they do when you've been avoiding in-game purchases by finding loot boxes for like your entire life.

For those of you who aren't gamers, loot boxes are what boxes full of in-game treats like skins for your weapon and make things ways to make your player look different that you could also, you can either find them or buy them, right? Am I getting it right? Yeah, I think that like special weapons and armor.

“I don't, I'm not a gamer either, but I think that's what they are.”

And I'm not saying band loot boxes. I'm just saying maybe this is makes it easier for Gen Z and Millennials to become problem ever. Because they're all right. Because they're prime for it.

Yeah, this is like why I don't like my kids watching when they call them unboxing videos because it's just like, hey, it's not consumerism. You're watching another kid open toys and then put it aside and then open another toy and then putting it aside. And like, no, no, no.

This is just consumerism training speedrun. We don't need this. Yeah, it's about to get a heck of a law bleaker though, man. Yeah, okay. Well, everyone knew they were in for a cheery sunshine filled episode when they saw your

name on the podcast today. Like I said at the top of the shows. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's go for it.

In 2024 alone, call volume to 100 gambler, which is the pipeline for problem gambling. That's spiked by 33%. When sports book was legalized in Ohio in 2023, their state managed help lines saw their call volume skyrocket by 27% in the first month compared to the previous year.

“That is a really Ohio stat is important because it gives us a much more granular view of”

the topic. This is perhaps the darkest stat on the entire show, gambling disorder has the highest suicide attempt rate of any addiction according to the Ohio casino control commission. It's roughly one in five with 80% experiencing suicidal ideation. Gee, so it's not Ohio against gambling.

It's the actual government agency in charge of gambling in the state. Yeah, and it's because people are facing financial ruin that they've probably been hiding from their friends and family and to kind of put a dark lining around this dark cloud because it's mostly men we're talking about, the chances of those suicide attempts being successful are much higher, matter remarkably effective at suicide.

That's so sad. I mean, not to state the obvious, but there's just no amount of money worth taking your life over. I agree, but the only time in my life I ever wrote a note, it was over money.

But the thing people don't understand who've never been in the situation of losing a

lot of money is that it's not just about the money, it's about I failed my family. And I have to face them, you know, I'm the guy who just lit five figures on fire because of my stupid gambling habit, that is so much more crushing than the loss of money. And when I lost a lot of money, I had it to lose. Some people might correctly think that they're going to lose their house, their car, their

know, a lot of little bets that add up over time. I think their families would rather just be broke, but have them alive, but you know, I guess I understand the logic. You're not wrong, but let's look at it from the perspective of the gambler. There's a concept called a psychological cliff and it's a lot steeper with gambling.

As a point reference, let's talk about opioid addicts.

There's a very long, slow curve from I tried to bike it in for the first time to I just

sold all my furniture to buy a bag of dope. And I know a guy who did exactly that good luck hiding your opioid addiction from anybody, especially now that heroin has been chased out of the market by fentanyl. You look like shit, you can't keep up your basic obligations to work and family and friends. You're going to know something's up, even if they can't specifically nail down that you're

using dope, even alcohol, people are going to know a lot of the time if it's severe enough. It's not going to be a surprise to anybody when they find out you have a drug addiction. That's a pretty good point. I'm not used to this, but a lot of my Asian friends, they just love the love, love, love, love, love gambling and you can hide it really well.

Let's say you're wealthy. No one's going to be like, what happened? Because you're not going to lose your house. You're just going to lose a ton of money that you were going to spend on something else or hand to your kids. So I know people that they can gamble like $100,000 in a week over new year.

And they're like, oh, yeah, it's fine.

And I'm thinking, like, is it, though, like, I know you have money, but holy smokes. There's a better use for that kind of money. But with drug addiction, I don't really know that many people who are like, yeah, I'm holding it all together, just fine with my heroin addiction. I mean, there are high functioning heroin addicts, but it makes you feel so miserable

that eventually it catches up with you. Right. So I don't know. You're right. It is quite obvious to see something like this.

People do know something is up, but you can really hide gambling so well.

“You can hide it forever right up until the moment when your life is completely ruined.”

Yes. So where is the phrase where there's a will, there's a way more true than it is with addicts. Say you have a joint bank account with your wife. You're going to find a way to get that money. The same way a crack addict knows where to find crack.

And I mean, I know a guy like who was a heroin addict, and he moved to my little town and my little Providence suburb I grew up in, because he didn't know where to score. And he literally did not make it through the day that he learned where he could score. Oh my God. AddX are going to find a way.

What do you do? I'm so curious. What do you do?

Just go to like the worst part of town and walk around asking people basically?

Probably. I mean, I don't know specifically. I kind of lost touch with them then, and I hope he's okay, but it was literally that day. So yeah, you're going to find a way.

And with gambling, when you reach the point where it's, you just can't hide it anymore, it's going to be really bad, so bad that maybe you think your family is better off without you, which is not true, but to you it is, which is insanely sad.

“And whether you gamble or not, you should be aware that this is the effect this is having”

on people. It is not the harmless pastime or the victimless crime that it is made out to be. You have the gambling industry loves to point out because they push back on why don't want to want this? And because it creates addiction and they're like, no, no, no.

The overwhelming majority of people somewhere between 95, 98% or whatever. They just put 50 bucks on the Super Bowl once a year. They move on with their lives, but I'm like, okay, then why are you offering me $500,000 to be on my show? Because I'm going to get that many people to put down 50 bucks, like no, no, that's not

why. Because it's because you know that you're going to make more than that and how you can do that. How does that math work? If everybody just puts down 50 bucks once a year, that's just, so I'm going to ask you

a question I already know the answer to, is that even true that 98% of people just put a couple of bucks on the Super Bowl and move on? Yes. Yes it is. The overwhelming majority of adults have bet on the Super Bowl at some point in their

life and nothing happened. That is fair. That is accurate. That is true. The issue is the people this is not true of.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I think that's, I probably asked the question wrong, but yeah, I see where you're going. Okay. Yeah.

It's incredibly asymmetrical. The entire business model of gambling apps is based around exploiting people with gambling addiction. And we should be completely candid about that.

“We should remember that when we're watching a game and see ads for gambling apps.”

People are disgusted at the sackler family who invented oxycontin. One of their distributors, it's sometimes attributed to them, is one of their distributors

Jeez. It's a very callous attitude and people hate the sackler family because of their role in the opioid epidemic in this country and people should hate the sackler family. That's an absolutely correctly placed anger that people have at the sackler family. People making their money from gambling apps should be viewed with the exact same visceral

discussed that we have for drug dealers.

Yes, I noticed that drug cartel people and interviews, they're always like, hey, this

is a business. You know, if there was no demand for it, we wouldn't do it. And I'm like, but you're also creating the demand and making it harder for people to kick and poisoning them, right? No, you have people outside of schools selling this and getting fentanyl users hooked

on drink, dope, or whatever, it's not just you're supplying a demand that was already there. You're not not culpable because somebody wants your illegal dangerous product that kills you. It's not how any of this works.

So a really good example of how sketchy the mobile gambling apps online gambling stuff is microbets and this is, it gets the frictionless part of things too. Okay, so let's say you buy lottery tickets. You go to a gas station, you drop 10 bucks, 20 bucks, let's call 100 bucks, 100 bucks every week on mega millions, scratchers, whatever your poison is, there are so many barriers

to doing that.

“A lot of states, you have to go get cash out of the bank because the state, I grew up”

in, you could not buy lottery tickets with even a debit card. And that's true in a lot of states, you got to buy them with cash. Well, then you got to go to the gas station, then you got to stand in line with your numbers pick or pick out your scratchers, whatever it is. So that's all kinds of points of friction where you could stop or you could do less, whatever.

You open up your phone, you can place 15 microbets in an hour on a single tennis match. Wow, okay. So for me and everyone else who doesn't gamble, what exactly is a micro bet? So a normal bet is who's going to win? That can take hours to resolve.

And if you're a mobile app gambler and you got a problem and you're desperately chasing dopamine, that is way too long to wait. So you can place microbets on things like when the next strike will be thrown or whether or not a team is going to make a first down on this drive. And it caught a turn, sportsbook into a slot machine, the national council on problem gambling

and addiction experts like Dr. Harry Levant have pointed out how micro betting transforms sports betting into a high frequency loop. Okay, so rather than having to wait three hours for your dopamine rush, you can get it every two minutes, which compounds the problem of frictionlessness we discussed previously. Right.

You can put down big bets or even just a bunch of little ones that add up to a big bet without anything stopping you from spending all day and night doing it.

I mean, it's always sports going on somewhere.

So back to our lottery ticket analogy, there's a real thing that happens when you want to spend a thousand bucks on lottery tickets. But the rise of the store makes you only want to buy a hundred bucks worth. Your body and brain have time to talk sense plus I'm guessing a lot of guys find themselves up by a hundred bucks from the microbets, but then they piss it all away because I can

make more. Yeah, it's funny.

“You should mention there's always sports going on somewhere.”

I did a show about sports in human trafficking. That was episode 120 for with Chris Delby. I talked a little bit about human trafficking and sports gambling like rigging games and stuff. And you mentioned there's always sports going on somewhere.

I was asking him, how come I see these weird clips of like guys playing soccer, but there's only two of them in their fat and they're not clearly not athletes or there's guys playing table soccer where they're both seated and they're just doing this for hours and hours. And like who's watching this? And he said, this is just exclusively for gambling because maybe there's not a sport

on in, I don't know, year up at four o'clock in the morning when some dude is awake and there's nothing going on in America.

So he's got a tune into something and the answer is to drunk Russian guys in a window

less room, pretending to play soccer and just like kicking a ball around and calling it two on two soccer. And they even pretend to be like Barcelona and I don't know, Real Madrid, but it's just the same to drunk Russian dadbots kicking the ball around switching jerseys every hour.

“And they're doing it for like six to eight hours a day, right?”

They're just miserable. They're basically slaves playing a sport, a fake sport. I don't mean the laugh, but it is a little... It's a fun visual. Yeah.

But this is for gambling because I was like, who's watching this dumb crap and he's like gambling addicts who just need to bet on something, they'll bet that like in the next minute that table soccer or guy player one is going to score a goal and then they win 10 bucks and they lose 20. It's just absolutely nuts.

There's hundreds of channels of this by the way, like there's an unlimited amount of

Anyway, I see the whole gambling, I'm up, I'm not going to just cash out, I'm just going to do more. I see this in crypto all the time, guys will get 10x return on something, but then they'll hold it without taking any profit. This is funny, this is all just coming together for me.

The same guys that I talked about who were gambling tons of money, they were up in crypto back in the day.

“Remember when everybody had a million dollars in crypto back in like 2017, 2018, even though”

the guys who you think like, wow, you're not even smart, you have a million dollars.

Those guys, the ICO era. The ICO era. Yeah. ICO era. So this was when they were basically like fake quote unquote, ICOs for new coins.

Anyway, there was a one every five minutes. I knew guys that it made $900,000 and I'm like, you can't even tie your shoes in your up 900 grand and then two, three months later, they were broke. I was like, what in the like, yeah, I wish I'd sold, but blah, blah, and I remember telling these guys, take money off the table, take at least take the 40 grand you borrowed from

your grandma off the table because then you won't have that over your head and they were like, yeah, that would be smart, wouldn't it? LOL. And now they're like, wow, I'm a loser and I owe my grandma 40 grand and I'm broke. And I'm like, how did you lose that?

And they're like, yeah, every time I had profit it off of the new coin offering, I just sprayed it out to 10 other coin offerings, well, they were all scams. So instead of quitting while you were ahead, they got rug pulled and we're life bag holding. And it's like, oh gosh, and speaking of feeling, though, yeah, you feel pretty low when you lose all that money, but you feel really low when you lose your grandma's money when

you could have just paid her back and it wouldn't have cost you much of anything by way of opportunity. So these guys, they don't get a return because they're like, well, it could go higher.

I've already made a million bucks.

“What if I make 10 million more, you know, they just keep moving the goal post?”

I'm not, okay, so I'm not doubting anything you're saying is true, but is there a real scientific reason for why the micro bet thing is more dangerous? Yeah, it's the feedback loop we discussed earlier. The sooner the dopamine comes after an action, the more addictive the behavior is, a study published in the journal of gambling studies.

That's a thing. That's a thing, okay, found gambling with high event frequencies, which is short intervals between the bet and the outcome, they prevent your prefrontal cortex from resetting. Wow, you stay in what players call the zone or the machine's own because rather than having one discreet beginning and end to what you're betting on, you're just bombarded

with offers to bet on whether or not the next pitch is going to go above 95 miles an hour. So listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show will be right back, this episode is sponsored and part by Zipper Cruder. Did you know the average employer has to sort through something like 250 resumes for a single

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Feel free to email me, [email protected]. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of skeptical Sunday. Why do I feel like the journal of gambling studies is totally funded by gambling companies in order to make a really, really smart people figure out how to hack our brains and just

like call it? Yeah. I mean, it is science.

“It is science, but it's also like who's hiring these scientists?”

Oh, wait.

Never mind. The companies we're talking about right now.

Hey, I need a million dollars to see if we can make people bet more by making the bets more frequent. Here you go. Yeah. Because they're going to make that back in a day if they figure out how to hack the cheese.

All right. I'm just picturing a super sweaty guy at a roulette wheel yelling, baby needs new pair of shoes and half of these sort of little micro bet things. This is gross. Yeah.

That's about right, and it's not the only effect either. High speed play induces a state of disassociation. So researchers have found that at fast playing speeds, gamblers become less aware of their surroundings and their mounting losses. That sounds really bad.

So they start disassociating. They aren't keeping track of how much money they're losing because they're out in space. Yeah.

It's a big part of why they lose so much money.

Oh, man. The 2025 study from the University of California, San Diego, that found that 96% of high frequency online gamblers lose money in the long run, which shouldn't come as a shock to anybody because these companies are not in business to lose money. What might be slightly shocking is that they have no idea that they're losing money because

they're betting so fast. And it's about to get even worse. Their misses are processed by your brains reward center almost identically to a win. So you keep getting dopamine hits that tell you to try again because you were just you're so close last time.

Way, way, way. So you're, okay, you're saying even when I lose, if I'm close, my brain says, hey, man, you're not so bad at this.

“You should definitely just try again and again and again and again.”

Yeah, I have this with, there's this frogger game at David Buster's where I take my kid. I'm very familiar. Yes. The huge one.

Yeah.

It's got like Minecraft skins.

Yes. It's a crossie road. It's very similar to that one. Dude. I will just dump so much money into that thing because I'm like, oh, man, that train just got

my guy. I'm going to get, I'm going to get like a thousand tickets. I'm going to get the jackpot and tickets if I just keep playing this game. You know, I actually see an example of this because my wife, Jen, she loves those claw machines. Yeah, the ones where there's like stuff to animals inside and you use a claw and you try

to get the claw to grab it and then of course it lets go right away or it's really weak. They have them in Taiwan as well. They're, it's just a huge thing. She loves it. I will say she's addicted to it, but you know, that's because I don't want to get in trouble.

Anyway, she will do this for hours in Taiwan where it's really cheap. But the difference is in Taiwan if you play long enough, if you put enough coins after it, like you try 10 times, it doesn't work, the machine just gives you the item. You know, it actually would just reach in, grab it normally and drop it in the hole. It's supposed to be fun, a challenge and you can do anything from getting chips or a cola or

something like that. It's not about the item and you often trade in the items to get something else. But it is addicting, right? Because you get it and then it rolls and it almost rolls in and then it rolls back and you just do it again and again.

It's kind of like gambling. I guess the difference is in Taiwan, it's like 10 cents, and eventually you're guaranteed win because, you know, you're pumping money into a stupid machine like this. But yeah, this brain hack is really something that gets a lot of people hooked on just about any type of game of chance.

That's microbedding, you know, microbedding creates this constant stream of near misses. Oh, the ball was just out of bounds. And then, you know, the brain scans show that the ventral striatum, which is the reward center in your brain, it reacts almost exactly the same. To that near miss as it does to a win, it releases it at dopamine and you're like, I'm

going to try it again immediately because the wind fell just I was so close. I got it this time. Oh my god.

“I think well, actually, I know my brain also does this.”

Thank god, I don't actually gamble for real because I'm the same way with a lot of video games and stuff like the thing is I own the game. So I can play 500 times and I paid my 20 bucks already or I'm at, I don't know, whatever the equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese, David Buster's type thing is and even if I play for like two hours, I'm out $18 or I don't know, 30 bucks, whatever, right?

It's just not that bad and also it's that point. I'm so sick of it. I can't wait to get out of there. It's not like I cheat. I'm going to win it back.

Right. I know. It's over. Yeah. You're just not that good at hot wheels racing, Jordan, but yeah, we discussed earlier.

These companies have been six hours playing Tetris or something because you're just like, I got it. I got it. It has happened. That these days, no, I don't get hooked in like that anymore.

We discussed earlier, these companies, they're not in business.

Well, actually, here's the difference, right? David Buster's at some point, you're like, I'm hungry. I want to go to the bathroom. I want to wash my hands on a bathroom that doesn't smell terrible. I want to eat food that isn't pizza and wings.

Yeah. Like you're going to leave. Right. You're going to leave the casino. It's different when you have this in your house.

So we discussed earlier, these companies are not in business to lose money. Is the game rigged against the better? There's a house advantage almost every game in the casino, right, roulette and blackjack and poker.

“What if how does that play out in terms of sports gambling?”

So traditional sports betting inside a casino has a big, right? We talked about it. Yeah. It's the cool gangster term for the house advantage or the wildly exorbitant interest rate. The big is about five percent inside a traditional casino.

For the micro bats on the betting apps, the big is like 15 to 25 percent.

Wow. Brain rate for micro bats is way higher. So you might lose a hundred bucks in three hours betting in Vegas on, you know, Rams versus Chiefs or whatever. Sure.

You can lose a hundred bucks in three minutes on an app. Yeah. Because now you're betting on like, is the Empire going to blink or whatever. You're chasing the dopamine hit of the next hit before you even get the dopamine off of the last bet.

Yeah. The games worth of money before the first commercial break. A really good way of illustrating how sports betting apps are different from more traditional forms of sports betting because even if they introduced micro bats in Vegas, you'd have to get up, stand in line, fill out a form or something, all these steps which create more

time and more decisions and more places for you or your friend to stop you and be like, hey man, we're good. Yeah. I'm good. Yes.

We've said it, but like, let's just be later the point. And micro betting is the fastest growing segment of the industry is projected to account

for $20 billion in wages by 2027, which is more than the entire gaming industry was

making before the legalization of sports betting nationwide. Yikes. Wow. That's who it's. Yikes.

Yeah. This is crack. And we should view them in the exact same way that we view crack dealers.

“Do people have a right to engage in business with predatory actors?”

I think so. Maybe you don't. That is not your ability to view predatory actors as pawn scum, which is they are. They're not good people. And then there's like the whole tech dystopia aspect where these companies use AI to target

their micro bats. Yeah. I think people have the right to engage with predatory actors. You want to go get a payday loan and pay a crazy rate on your check because you're either hurting bad or a dummy, go ahead, but that, yeah, I think the payday loan guy is a piece

of crap. And I don't want him in my neighborhood. I don't care if he's got a race car or whatever. These people are terrible. Yeah.

The AI thing also. I'm a little grossed out by that because I'm guessing what are they doing with AI now, just figuring out how to lower our defenses even more and take advantage of us. Yeah. That's a super short version of us.

Yeah. Why not? What else would they use it for?

“They know so much more about you than just who you bet on.”

They know what time you bet, what teams make you emotional, how you react when you lose. And they use all that to pick your pocket even deeper. So they predict things like high state of arousal or emotional vulnerability. So if you just lost a 10 micro bat parlay of one or two bats, they offer you five bucks to bet on the next one and maybe you win and they lose money, the point is just

to get you to keep the app open. And they've used AI driven personalization to drive a 58% increase in play betting engagement. So say you do close the app and you don't open it for three days. You're not just going to get some generic email that sits in your inbox. You're going to get a highly specialized push notification straight to your phone, tailored

to your habits sent at a time that you are most likely to gamble and the offer is probably going to be what are the like some sort of boost on a micro bat that fits the profile of a bet you consider low risk because you've given them all of this data on a team that you like on a sport that you like, whatever. Again, the point is just to keep you opening the app again and again, again, so it becomes

a habit that you can't break. Yeah, here's five bucks. Right. The bet on the thing that we know you're going to bet on. How is this?

So insidious and targeted, I hate it, the industry framed all of this as a way to identify what they call erratic gamblers, right, not gambling addicts or problem gamblers, just erratic, nice turner phrase. And also, I love that they're like, we want to identify these people. Oh, so you can avoid them?

No, so that we can target them more specifically because they give us all their money. Oh, okay. You're a terrible person. Yeah. It's the Anakin meme.

Yeah. So you can help them, right? Right. It's currently languishing in Congress.

sports betting advertising during live sporting events or between the hours of 8 a.m.

and 10 p.m. So they're like, you know, sexy 900 ads used to be like they're on late at night, banning advertisements using terms like bonus, no sweat or odds boost, language to induce gambling and prohibiting the purposeful targeting of problem gamblers or individuals under the age of 21.

Say that I like sports betting. I just think it's fun. Sometimes I went sometimes I lose maybe a lose more than I win whatever, but I'm not giving Tony's a prano. My kids car to cover my gambling debts and I'd like to keep it that way.

How do I keep making watching sports more interesting by putting money on the line without becoming a cautionary tale or, you know, leaving my kids without a father? Like, can you do this safely? Yes, and this guy is totally a guy like this is a guy. He just throws a little money at it.

It's whatever. Sometimes he wins. Sometimes he loses.

It mostly is probably just revolving account of like 500 bucks, you know, that like

sometimes it's 600, sometimes 400, whatever. You like doing it and you're not ruining your life, who am I to tell you not?

“But what you should know is that professional betters do not think in dollars at all.”

They think in units and units are a portion of their total bank roll, which is usually one or two percent. So if you decide that you're entertainment budget for the NFL season is 500 bucks, your unit is five bucks. Even if you feel locked in on a game, guess what?

It's 15 bucks because you're doing three units. You know, that's it. Okay, and then you start building that bank roll. You can bet more because it's still the same 500 bucks. You just turned it into 800 bucks, congratulations.

Yeah. And now your unit's eight bucks. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.

And that's the name of the game for pros. Pros are not looking to hit a 10 game parlay. Pros are looking for a batting average. They want to have consistent base hits that pay over time. It's a slow game.

So you can manually insert friction, right? Every online mobile app is required by law to allow you to set a deposit limit. I know that much.

“I think can you also lock yourself out with for three days or something like that?”

Isn't that a thing? Yeah, it's called the cool off feature. For what it's worth like, I, when I trade, I allow myself to lose two trades a week. And then I go and it's a thing I got from another trader. It's called the losers club, your loser goes in the losers box for the rest of the

week. I don't even let myself look at charts. That's a self-discipline thing, though. But yeah, it's maybe a good tip for people. I assume people want to avoid micro events.

Just bet on the game, put the damn phone away, the end. Yes, they're crack. Just stop it. If you must parlay, it's a lottery ticket. You got a dollar for it.

Right, drop a buck or two, leave it there at the end. Yeah, I mean, are you going to be mad about winning $10,000 because you could have, oh, I could have won a million. I mean, maybe, but don't be. It's free money, man.

Do not gamble, drunk or high. Yeah, I cannot stress enough. This is nearly as dumb as drunk driving. You're just not going to make good decisions and be able to control your impulses, drunk or high.

Obviously, that's kind of the point of drugs and alcohol. Yeah, track your winnings and losses. Your brain is hard-wired to remember big wins and gloss over small losses. Gambling is a lot like alcohol. It's not evil, but it's not neutral either, and some people just plain should do it.

This is all really sound advice from the man who bets on things like fart coin.

I never actually held any fart coin.

Is fart coin real? I was kidding. I thought I'd made that up just now. No, yeah, it's a thing. I'm why I totally missed that.

Okay. So that was the thing that actually made people money, fart coin. Yeah, man. Well, fart coin minted millionaires. Oh, my God.

“Imagine explaining that, like, oh, how did you make your money?”

Crypto. Yeah, yeah, I got some Bitcoin. What do you trade? Oh, I mostly held fart coin and then sold at the top. You have bought it the Bob's old thought.

But if the bottom, yeah, was early in the fart coin game. Unreal. Yeah, I do want to make one last point before we wrapped this up. So I hate gambling. I hate gambling companies.

They prey on vulnerable people. They discuss me. So why don't I want it outlawed? My guess is a hand-wavey thing about individual liberty. No, I mean, well, yes, but also people who want to gamble are going to do it.

And I would way rather they do it with someone who isn't charging them 20% interest compounding weekly, which is what the interest big typically is, and then break in their thumbs when they can't pay. So as bad as these apps are, you do have to compare them to black market gambling, which is demonstrally worse in a lot of very important ways.

Right. But like you said, fear and friction keep people out of those markets. Yes, absolutely fair. If there's one thing to take away from this, it's that online gambling addiction isn't some fringe issue affecting a handful of reckless people.

sticky, and then scaled to millions of people via their phones.

“So that doesn't mean nobody has agency, people still make choices, but it does mean that”

pretending this is just about personal responsibility, it's kind of a convenient way to ignore incentives, design, and policy failures that quietly do real damage. We've seen this movie before with cigarettes, opioids, payday loans. When harm is baked into the business model, the fallout isn't accidental. It's structural.

None of this requires panic or prohibition, but it does require honesty. Gambling is, it's not just entertainment.

Once it's always on, always personalized and always one tap away from your bank account.

At that point, it's a public health issue, whether we like to admit it or not. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away. It just guarantees that someone else pays for it later. Thanks to Nick Pele for helping us call the bluff on online gambling. And thanks to all of you for listening, topics of suggestions for future episodes of skeptical

Sunday to me, [email protected], advertiser's deals discounts, ways to support the show, all searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm @jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with podcast one.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jason Sanderson, Tadasabowsk, is Robert Fogretty, Ian Beard, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own.

I might be a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as right as we can, not everything is gospel, even if it's fact checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being.

Remember, we rise by lifting others, share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we do out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show. Most of us have big goals that we'd like to accomplish. Anything from getting in better physical shape to quitting a lifelong vice to learning a new language, habits academy creator James Clear shares processes and practicals we can use to incrementally change our own lives for the better.

It's not a single 1% change that's going to transform your life. It's 1000 of them.

“Remember, I feel like giving up, I think about the stone cutter who pounds a stone 100 times”

without a crack showing and then on the 101st blow it splits in two. And I know that it wasn't the 101st that did it, it was all the 100 that came before. Newsworthy stories are only about outcomes. When we see outcomes all day long on social and on the news, we tend to overvalue them and overlook the process.

Like, you're never going to see a new story that is like, "Man eats salad for lunch."

Like, this is not, it's only a story, a 6 months later when Man loses a 100 pounds. The real reason habits matter is because they provide evidence for the type of beliefs that you have about yourself. And ultimately, you can reshape your sense of self, your self image, the person that you believe you are if you embody the identity enough.

A lot of people watch too much TV or don't want to play as many video games to do or whatever. If you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face the TV. So it's like, "What does this room design to get you to do?"

You could take a chair and turn it away from the television. You could also increase the friction associated with the task. So you could take batteries out of the remote so that it takes an extra 5 or 10 seconds to start up each time. And maybe that's enough time for you to be like, "Do I really want to watch something?"

Or am I just going to smile and say, "The point here is, do you want to build a good habit? You've got to make it obvious?

“If you want to break about how to make it invisible."”

Your entire life, you are existing inside some environment. Most of the time, you're existing inside environments that you don't think about, right? You're like, "And in that sense, you're kind of like the victim of your environment." But you don't have to be the victim of it. You can be the architect of it.

For more with James Clear, including what it takes to break bad habits while creating good ones, and how to leverage tiny habits for giant outcomes, check out episode 1-8 on the Jordan Harbinger Show with James Clear.