It's the fourth quarter of a playoff game, and LeBron James is selling me a betting app.

The commercial break hits and there he is, alongside Kevin Hart, mugging for the camera in a DraftKings spot. Then another break, another sportsbook ad. Then ESPN cuts back and the odds ticker runs along the bottom of the screen. Then YouTube serves me another gambling ad before I can skip it. Somewhere in the background, an announcer mentions the spread like it's the weather. This is the NFL playoffs. This is also, apparently, a casino floor.

I don't remember when it became normal. That's the thing about saturation: it doesn't announce itself. One year you're watching football, and the next year you're watching football wrapped in a gambling interface, and at no point did anyone ask if this was a good idea. It just happened, and now it's everywhere, and the people most likely to get hurt are the ones least equipped to see it coming.

The Fences We Built and Why We Built Them

For most of the twentieth century, America kept gambling contained.

Casinos existed, but they existed in specific places: Nevada, Atlantic City, riverboats, tribal lands. You had to travel to gamble. The friction was the point. Gambling ads were banned or heavily restricted on television and radio. Lotteries were state-run and marketed with a kind of bureaucratic blandness that didn't exactly scream excitement. The message, even when gambling was legal, was that this was something to approach carefully, something with known risks, something that had destroyed enough lives to warrant caution.

This wasn't prudishness. It was institutional memory.

The history of gambling in America is a history of boom-and-bust moral reckonings. Lotteries funded the colonies, then got banned after corruption scandals. Gambling halls flourished in the frontier West, then got shut down by reformers who'd seen too many families ruined. Las Vegas rose in the desert precisely because everywhere else had decided the costs weren't worth it. The restrictions weren't arbitrary. They were scar tissue from previous wounds.

The logic was simple: gambling is unusually addictive, unusually destructive when it goes wrong, and unusually difficult for individuals to self-regulate. So we built fences. Not prohibition, but friction. Not a ban, but a boundary. You could gamble if you really wanted to, but the system didn't make it easy, didn't celebrate it, didn't pipe it into your living room during a football game.

That logic held for decades. Then, in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down PASPA, the federal law that had prohibited most states from authorizing sports betting. The fences came down. And what followed was not a gradual expansion but a gold rush.

Seven Years, Thirty-Eight States, Every Screen

As of early 2026, sports betting is legal in thirty-eight states, with more considering it. The market has grown from essentially zero to over $100 billion in annual handle. Mobile apps are the primary channel, which means the casino is no longer in the desert. It's in your pocket, on your couch, at the bar, in bed at 2 a.m. when you can't sleep and the game is still on.

The speed of this transformation is hard to overstate. Industries that took decades to build distribution networks, gambling did in years, because the distribution network already existed. Everyone already had a phone. Everyone already watched sports. The only thing missing was permission, and once the Court granted it, the money moved fast.

What moved even faster was the advertising.

The American Gaming Association estimated that sports betting companies spent over $1.5 billion on advertising in 2023 alone. That money bought saturation. Pre-roll ads on YouTube. Podcast sponsorships. Stadium naming rights. Jersey patches. Halftime segments. In-broadcast odds tickers. The DraftKings and FanDuel logos are now as familiar as the Nike swoosh, and they got there in a fraction of the time.

During the NFL playoffs this year, I tried to count the gambling ads during a single game. I lost track. They weren't interruptions anymore; they were the texture of the broadcast. The line between watching football and being marketed to had dissolved completely.

The Design Is the Point

Modern sports betting apps are not digital casinos. They're something more sophisticated and, in some ways, more dangerous.

Casinos are designed to keep you playing, but they're also physical spaces with closing times, with the friction of travel, with the social visibility of being seen at a slot machine. Apps have none of that. They're private, portable, and engineered with the same behavioral psychology that makes social media so hard to put down.

The techniques are well-documented. Variable-ratio reinforcement, the reward schedule that makes slot machines addictive, is baked into the micro-betting features that let you wager on every play. Near-miss effects, where you almost win and feel compelled to try again, are amplified by animations and sound design. "Free bets" and "risk-free" promotions use loss-framing language that obscures what you're actually risking. Deposits are instant; withdrawals take days. The asymmetry is intentional.

A 2023 study in JAMA Network Open found that exposure to sports betting advertising was associated with increased gambling participation and problem gambling symptoms, particularly among young men aged 18 to 34. This is not a surprise. This is the demographic the apps are designed for: digitally native, sports-obsessed, conditioned by years of mobile games and social media to respond to exactly these kinds of reward loops.

The industry calls this "engagement." A more honest word would be "engineering."

When LeBron James Tells You It's Fine

Celebrity endorsements are not new. Athletes have sold beer and sneakers and cars for generations. But there's something different about selling gambling, and the difference matters.

Gambling is not a product you consume and move on from. It's a behavior with a known addiction profile, a known demographic vulnerability, and a known tail risk that includes financial ruin, depression, and one of the highest suicide correlations of any behavioral addiction. When LeBron James appears in a DraftKings commercial, he's not just selling an app. He's lending his credibility, his aspirational image, his status as a role model to an activity that will, statistically, destroy some percentage of the people who take it up.

The implicit message is: this is what successful people do. This is normal. This is fun. If LeBron does it, how bad could it be?

The answer, for most people, is not that bad. Most people who gamble don't become addicted. But "most people" is a population-level statement, and addiction doesn't distribute evenly. The people most likely to be influenced by a LeBron endorsement, young men who idolize athletes, are also the people most likely to develop problems. The marketing targets the vulnerable precisely because the vulnerable are the most responsive.

This is the same logic that got tobacco ads banned from television in 1971. We decided, as a society, that some products were dangerous enough that we shouldn't let them buy cultural legitimacy through celebrity. Gambling, somehow, got a pass.

The Fiction of Responsible Gambling

Every sportsbook ad ends with a disclaimer. "Gamble responsibly." "If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER." The words are there, spoken quickly, displayed briefly, checked off like a legal requirement, which is exactly what they are.

The problem is that "responsible gambling" is a concept designed to shift blame, not prevent harm.

The apps offer self-exclusion tools, spending limits, reality checks. These features exist, and they're better than nothing. But research consistently shows that the people who use them are not the people who need them most. Problem gamblers, by definition, have impaired control over their behavior. Asking them to self-regulate is like asking someone drowning to swim more carefully.

Meanwhile, the business model depends on heavy users. Industry data suggests that a small percentage of bettors generate a disproportionate share of revenue. These are not casual fans putting $20 on the Super Bowl. These are people betting frequently, betting large amounts, betting in patterns that correlate with addiction. The sportsbooks know who they are. The algorithms can identify them. And the response is not intervention but optimization: more targeted offers, more personalized odds, more reasons to keep playing.

"Responsible gambling" is a public relations strategy, not a harm reduction strategy. It lets the industry claim concern while structuring incentives that reward the opposite.

What We Already Knew

None of this is new information.

We knew, before PASPA was struck down, that gambling addiction was a serious public health issue. We knew that young men were the most vulnerable demographic. We knew that accessibility increases prevalence, that advertising normalizes behavior, that mobile platforms remove the friction that once served as a natural brake. We knew that the industry's profits depend on a small number of heavy users, many of whom are addicted.

We knew all of this, and we legalized it anyway, and we let the ads run, and we let the athletes endorse, and we let the apps optimize, and now we're watching the predictable consequences unfold in real time.

The UK Gambling Commission has been tracking youth gambling for years and has documented rising rates of problem gambling among young people exposed to liberalized markets. Australia, which went through its own sports betting explosion a decade earlier, has become a cautionary tale of what happens when the industry is allowed to self-regulate. The data exists. The patterns are clear. We are not operating in ignorance.

We are operating in denial.

The Fences Existed for a Reason

There's a tendency to treat the old restrictions on gambling as outdated moralism, the residue of a more puritanical era that we've thankfully outgrown. But the restrictions weren't about morality. They were about observed harm.

Generations of Americans watched gambling destroy families, communities, and lives. They watched the promises of easy money curdle into debt, desperation, and despair. They built fences not because they were prudes but because they'd seen what happened without them. The casinos stayed in the desert because the desert was far away, and distance was protection.

We've collapsed that distance to zero. The casino is in your pocket. The ads are in your feed. The celebrities are vouching for it. The odds are on the screen. And the people who will pay the highest price are the ones who never knew a world where this wasn't normal.

A Quiet Suggestion

I'm not calling for prohibition. I don't think it would work, and I don't think it's necessary. People have gambled for millennia and will continue to gamble regardless of what laws say.

But I do think it's worth being honest about what's happening, and I think it's worth making a personal choice about whether to participate.

The apps are designed to keep you playing. The ads are designed to make it seem normal. The celebrities are designed to make it seem aspirational. None of that means you have to say yes. You can watch football without betting on it. You can enjoy sports without turning every game into a financial stake. You can opt out of a system that is, by design, optimized to extract money from people who can't afford to lose it.

The fences are gone. But you can still build your own.

We spent decades keeping gambling at arm's length because we understood, collectively, that some things are dangerous enough to warrant caution. That understanding hasn't changed. Only the policy has. The history is still there. The data is still there. The wreckage, for those who look, is still accumulating.

You don't have to participate just because it's legal, just because it's everywhere, just because LeBron James says it's fine. You can remember why the fences existed in the first place.

And you can choose to stay on the other side.