The “Degenerate Gambler” Edition
Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gabfest. March 19, 2026, the Degenerate Gambler Edition. I am David Plotz of CityCast here in Washington, D.C. from the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School, and still Puerto Rico, Emily Basilon. Hello, Emily.
Speaker B: Envy is a terrible thing. Hi, David.
Speaker A: Are you saying that I am envious of you?
Speaker B: It certainly sounded that way.
Speaker A: Maybe somebody maybe being defensive about one’s extended working vacation.
Speaker B: I think I’m being smug. Not defensive, but I could be defensive and smug. I feel smug. Those of you playing at home, if you could chart this out, the smug, defensive and envious through line, my question is just why am I going home? Why can’t I stay forever? Anyway, continue on.
Speaker A: You can. From New York City, maybe. Yeah. New York City, John Dickerson. Unemployed still, but John, heard you got funding for your new nonprofit this week. Congratulations.
Speaker C: What is that?
Speaker A: As you know, Emily, John’s passion is human connection, human physical connection. He has a new organization that’s going to train people to walk around American cities giving out hugs. He’s calling it the Free Press, which I just love. I love that name. It’s great.
Speaker C: John, I don’t know how to respond to that, David, except to thank you for all of the energy you put into these preambles every day.
Speaker A: Would you please, like, get something that I can just say that you’re doing this so I can stop.
Speaker C: Well, last week you said you mentioned my substack, and that was very useful. People learned about it and subscribed and there’s lots of content on there. It was very useful. You could.
Speaker A: Okay.
Speaker B: All right.
Speaker A: I’ll just. Now it’ll just be John substack.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker B: There are many things you could say. I mean, I’m enjoying the humor, but it’s not like John is, like, sitting around. Exactly.
Speaker A: I know John is not sitting around. That’s why I feel that I can make fun of him.
Speaker B: Yes, I totally agree with the mockery completely.
Speaker C: Yeah, no, sure, please. I know.
Speaker A: I mean, this week on the gabfest, Trump’s war on everything. On Iran, perhaps on Cuba, on our allies, maybe on the press. Will anything stop his anger at everything? Mostly we’re going to talk about Iran, but sort of in the context of Trump’s anger, then sports gambling has infected the United States, especially American young men, at a shocking rate. We are going to talk to the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins about his crazy year as a degenerate gambler, and then has a judge put a stop to RFK Jr. S war on vaccines. Plus we’ll have cocktail chatter. I don’t know where to start with Iran, but I’m gonna start sort of sideways on it. There was a perceptive piece by Peter Baker. Every piece Peter Baker writes in New York Times is perceptive about the naming of the operation for the Iran war, which is Operation Epic Fury. And apparently Trump was presented with a whole bunch of names for the potential names for the operation. He rejected them all until someone came up with Epic Fury. And he was like, yes. And the point, of course, is that Epic Fury is Trump’s pose towards basically the whole world. Fury towards Iran, fury towards allies who won’t help the Iran war, fury towards the Cuban government. Now towards the press. Fury. I think you could say that American policy right now is the policy of fury and the policy of dominance. Those are the two things that seem to be guiding America’s stance towards the world. So, John, you can. You can go to Iran or you can talk about this kind of question about Trump’s anger. Yeah, whichever you want. Start wherever.
Speaker C: All right, I’m gonna go to a third place, Tucson. Now, the I. What I think of when I think of Epic Fury is the disconnect we have in this war right now, because on the one hand, you have this extraordinary military dominance, the number of targets hit, the decapitation of the Iranian regime, the battlefield success. And that is complicated by the fact that the most knowable retaliation from the Iranians, the most predictable countermeasure, which was that they would try to block the Strait of Hormuz, seems to have been not prepared for at all. And there’s reporting. The president, in fact, was told that this would be the countermeasure and said, oh, we’ll be done, you know, beforehand. And so all of the success, I mean, and this is not an unfamiliar story in the American war fighting history. You can talk about Vietnam or Iraq, where, you know, in Iraq, the. The. The. The mistake of planning was discovered once de Bathification turned out to be the beginning of the mistake. Because when you take out everybody who ran the government, you don’t have people to run the government, and you don’t have a tradition of running a democratic operation in a country. And you can’t just add one and pour water here. The mistake of the planning was in not predicting this obvious countermeasure. And so you have this problem going on, and a president who says, well, I’ll just kind of know when it’s over. So there’s this question of still, what are the objectives of the war how will you know when you’re done? And was it worth all of this destruction? And the. And the retaliation. Retaliation is not just oil prices and the increase and the devastation to the world economy, but the undoubted. You know, whenever Iran decides to respond with sleeper cells, that will be, you know, a retaliation and a cost here. So I don’t know what that all means, except that the idea of epic fury is. Is. Does suggest, you know, a lack of precision and planning and strategic thinking. You just hope that fury will solve it. And there’s been plenty of fury and successful fury, and it has not led this to the kind of quick conclusion that the President was expecting.
Speaker A: Yeah, there’s this interesting kind of, I feel like intellectual, or it’s not intellectual debate, because it has huge consequences, but the question about, like, how do we resolve this? So Iran has effectively blocked the 20% of global oil trade that goes to the Strait of Hormuz because ships are not willing to risk passage because of mines, because of the risk of some form of boat attacks, of who, you know, other forms of drone attack. And so they. Global trade has stopped. And the. The obvious result is that oil prices have spiked, and then there’s risks to other industries like fertilizer. So one outcome is we declare victory. Trump declares victory and negotiates with a. Whatever the rump regime that remains in Iran. And they kind of agree not to open the strait. And they agree to open the strait, and everyone proceeds and it’s a victory. But the regime stays in place, and Iran has shown that it has huge leverage. The other path is, you say we’re going to fight this war, we’re going to devastate the Iranian regime, we’re going to destroy every tiny little boat that exists, we’re going to de mine the Strait of Hormuz, and we’re not going to let anyone pass. And it’s going to be. And operations can take weeks and months and be hugely costly to the United States, but at the end of it, we will have militarily ensured that the strait remains open. Emily, that will. That would also mean that the world will endure probably months of higher oil prices as a result of that. Do you think Trump is willing to take the kind of pain and time that might require to actually militarily keep the strait open and have to protect it, to have to kind of continue to keep it open if that Iranian regime chooses not to play play ball with us?
Speaker B: I mean, no, I would not expect that. You know, on the one hand, the military is, I think, satisfied with the degrading of Iran’s forces, that’s happened, right? I mean, in that sense, the war is succeeding. If, if your aim was to ensure that Iran could not use missiles, et cetera, in the way that it had before, it seems like that’s significant. It’s just that that was not, I mean, in the hodgepodge of justifications for this war, that was what the general said and some of what Heg, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, said, but it wasn’t what Trump said. And so there isn’t the groundwork laid for political support, either domestically in the United States or internationally for the protracted campaign you just described. And Trump always figures out a way to pull out of things when they’re going badly. Not to mention that this is very poor timing for the midterms for Republicans, right, to have oil prices remain high. They’re up 48% right now. If they stay in that realm, then voters here are going to be feeling that pain. It’s really hard for me to imagine that he will stick with that rather than finding some way to declare victory that you just laid out. Another thing I wonder what you guys think about is the way in which the economic effects are worse for Europe and Asia than they are for the United States because we have natural gas reserves that they don’t have. And there just is this irony here, right, where, like, they didn’t start this war. They’re not interested in it. They’re not sending their ships to, you know, defend the oil tankers coming through the Strait of Hormuz. But the leaders in Europe and Asia are going to be increasingly, and already are very distressed by the price rises that they’re seeing. And so that is, like, part of this dynamic, right, that somehow Trump has succeeded in catching other countries in this vice in a way that’s actually worse than it is for the United States.
Speaker A: Although I don’t understand. I mean, I guess I understand from a ha, ha, it’s your problem, you broke it, you fix it. Perspective. Why, if you’re Europe or an Asian country, Japan, why you wouldn’t send ships to help form convoys to get tankers out of the Gulf there? But it would help them. Like, it would be good for them. So why aren’t they helping? Is it that they just feel like the help will. Will somehow backsplash on them in some way that they can’t anticipate or their pub.
Speaker C: The public won’t stand for it if the US Navy can’t do the job? What I mean, the question is do you get engaged in a very complicated problem that doesn’t have an easy, quick solution? In other words, just. Just lending a hand doesn’t mean it’s going to solve the problem quickly. So it’s not just, you know, rescuing the President from his lack of planning. It’s possibly getting dragged into something that. That doesn’t solve easily.
Speaker B: And it’s not in isolation. Right. It’s like after the tariffs, and it’s, after all, like Trump has hardly created.
Speaker C: Right.
Speaker B: Turn them into friends. So even if it is just like, screw you, you could understand it. Sorry, John.
Speaker C: Trump thinks of this as an obligation so that if they do anything, he’ll just punish them for it. I mean, in other words, he doesn’t. He’s not going to say thank you. Also, you hook yourself to a person who has said, I’ll know when it’s over. I’ll feel it. I’ll feel it in my bones. That’s an embarrassment. No American president should say that because you don’t go send people off to die and then kill lots and lots of people because you feel it in your bones. And that explains why, you know, as we look at why and how this war started, there’s a lot of evidence that the president just kind of felt it in his bones. Well, he also apparently felt in his bones that the Strait of Hormuz wouldn’t be a problem because it would end quickly. He also felt in his bones apparently, at one point that the Iranian people would be able to rise up. And then late. And then this week he said, well, you know, it turns out if they rise up, like they’re going to be killed by the regime, which is a surprise to no one. War committed by somebody who says, well, I just feel it in my bones is the opposite of the way it’s supposed to work. And how zany are the bones in which he feels this. The president this week said he talked to one of his predecessors in the office who said, you know, I really wish I’d done that with Iran. None of his predecessors talked to him. He made it up completely. And this is not the first time he’s made up conversations with his predecessors to pretend to affirm the something he said. Now, some people might be like, oh, well, he lies all the time. Fine. He’s lying here about war, which is the most important and dangerous thing and the thing over which a president has extraordinary control.
Speaker A: And again, to note that the Congress, and especially the Republicans in Congress entirely the Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to have any influence over this, to have any exercise of will over it, any willingness to exercise their obligation under Article 1 to determine whether the United States should go to war. It’s just. It is, yes, it is the zany bones of one president, but it’s also the wraith, like zombie corpses of an entire party that are causing this to happen.
Speaker B: Can we talk a little bit about the attacks on the press that are starting to be part of this war messaging which are making me feel like someone’s dragging me by the hair? I mean, there, you know, you have Hegseth railing against cnn and bang, for David Ellison, the conservative mogul, to be taking it over as he will soon be doing, and as he did to cbs. You have Trump railing against the press coverage of the war. I mean, basically, this is just shooting the messenger over all these uncertainties that we’ve been talking about and these questions of whether there are clear goals and whether they’re being met. And, you know, and then you have FCC Chairman Brendan Carr talking again about, in this sort of doomy, foreboding way about, you know, broadcast licenses. And this is just like basic freedom of the press stuff. Like, there’s nothing complicated about this. This is supposed to be something that has real bipartisan agreement in the United States of America that it’s important to have a press that holds the power accountable. And especially during war, you need to have honest, critical, thorough coverage. Do you guys think that what we’re hearing from the administration could actually cow the press out of doing its job?
Speaker A: Yes, yes.
Speaker C: It already has, obviously.
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s. You know, there are places you’re, you’re brave. New York Times, your colleagues at the New York Times, not cowed. But virtually every other media organization that covers has trimmed its sales in some fashion. I mean, John’s former employer, cbs, there’s obviously been a huge shift. We’ve seen it at other networks that have other business interests at the local station level. There have been repeated incidents where local stations have dialed back on coverage that would be seen as critical of the administration because they’re getting messages from their corporate ownership. We don’t want to annoy the bull. So, yeah, so even though cars, threats to take people’s licenses are fundamentally empty, it would take huge amount of process for him to take licenses. And even taking a license usually would. Wouldn’t affect a network because the networks don’t generally own licenses. They’re owned by individual companies. But, but even that threat is empty. And yet it is. Despite being empty, it’s incredibly effective because you have corporate ownerships that are. That have so many complicated business interests, and they so fear getting on the wrong side of the Trump administration, which has shown itself willingness to be vindictive in all kinds of ways, that, yeah, they are. They’re clearly. They’re clearly changing what they’re saying and dialing back what they’re covering. Don’t you agree, John?
Speaker C: You’re exactly right, David. And what’s cowing them is not actually, and it doesn’t need to be for the purposes of cowing these interests. But it’s not like the claims are backed up by lots of evidence. I mean, to the extent that the administration or the president has called something fake news, it then turned out to be true. Their complaint essentially, is not that the press has gotten things wrong. It’s that the press refuses to promote the administration’s view of things, which is that it’s a tremendous military success and only promote that. That’s essentially that it’s not reprinting the propaganda coming out of an administration. And if you just to remind everyone that one of the ways that Donald Trump got elected in 2016 was by saying that George W. Bush lied about the Iraq war, now you can conclude that George W. Bush made thousands of mistakes in the Iraq war, but it’s a very strong cup of tea to say that he lied affirmatively to go into that war, which is what Trump said, and it’s why Trump said he should have been impeached. Imagine applying that frame to this conflict using Donald Trump’s own way of interpreting things and using that then to evaluate his own behavior. That would be far more critical than the press is being.
Speaker A: Just before we leave this topic, Emily, what did you make of the resignation of intelligence official Joe Kent? Joe Kent is a very, very conservative Tucker Carlson crony who was working in the intelligence infrastructure at a very high level, and he resigned this week over the war, basically saying that it was.
Speaker C: We were dragged into it by Israel saying there’s no strategy, there’s no plan, and that there was no imminent threat.
Speaker A: There has been this worry, I think, among some people who support Israel and among American Jews that the way this war is being carried out will bounce back on Jews and bounce back on America’s relationship with Israel because it does seem to be serving Israeli national interests in a way that maybe over. Over privileges them against American national interests.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, this is such a complicated one, right. Because Joe Kent is a conspiracy theorist. He’s like, there’s a completely valid critique of Israel here, and it lines up with what you just said that, you know, Israeli national interests have primacy here. It’s clearer why it’s in Israel’s interest to be waging this war than it is for the United States. And. But then you can kind of get into some anti Semitic tropes pretty quickly, as often happens in this realm. And it seems like Joe Kent has trafficked in them before, so he wouldn’t be my choice for spokesperson for this point of view. On the other hand, you know, there he was being the counterterrorism chief in the Office of National Intelligence. So whether he should have been in that job or not, presumably he’s looking at information that the rest of us don’t have. And so it seems like he’s playing a fairly important role here, even if he is not who a lot of people would choose to be the spokesperson for that. What did you guys make of it?
Speaker C: Well, it’s a problem when the person inside says that one of the reasons you said you went to war didn’t exist. You know, that’s not exactly a surprise to many external observers. It reminded me a little bit when Paul o’, Neill, the Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush, wrote a book long after the Iraq war had started, basically saying he was in all of the meetings at the highest levels in the Bush administration that looked at the evidence before the war and that he didn’t see an eminent threat and he was excoriated and said he didn’t know what he was talking about and he was only a Treasury Secretary anyway. But when somebody who has been on the inside, and in this case it’s somebody who’s not even a one step away at like a Treasury secretary, but somebody who’s literally at the center of determining threats and counter threats. And then I think it also attaches to what Secretary Rubio said, which is that the timing of the military action was dictated by the fact that Israel was going to hit Iran and that they expected Iran to retaliate by hitting American bases. So it is in fact true that the tempo of the operation was dictated by Israel. Now, Rubio went on to say we had to do this anyway because the ballistic missile capabilities of Iran were basically going to in a year hold America hostage because they were going to be so overwhelming that it would change the national security dynamic. But in so doing, he affirmed that the threat was a year away or more. It’s one of the problems with this engagement, which is that you get a bunch of shifting descriptions of what it’s about. And you could imagine somebody saying, look, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep fighting until we absolutely remove their ability in any way to have a nuclear weapon. We’re going to shrink their ballistic missiles down to a thimble and we’re going to stop allowing them to, through their proxies, keep messing with the Middle east and we’re going to stay in this and it’s going to cost what it’s going to cost so we can do those things. I mean, nobody’s going to say any of that. But that’s kind of at least the first part is the, is I guess the strategy. The problem is are they really, are they really on for the second part? Because the second part doing all that, staying in there, achieving those objectives and showing China that we’re not going to back away, that’s a much longer fight and has obviously significant economic and political consequences.
Speaker A: I mean, I’m, you know, respect Joe Ken, anyone who gives up a job on a principle that it seems like, you know, principle of truth, I think it’s a, that’s a brave thing to do and it’s not easy to become an apostate. I am really worried about what this, this kind of anti Semitic tinge to anti Semitic theme that’s pervading young conservative America and the way that Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, this Senate candidate down in Florida whose name I can’t remember are all pushing. And I think there’s so many legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government and there’s so many great reasons to reconsider how the United States and Israel work together and the US’s relationship with Israel. And but it does give me great worry to see it spilling into overt anti Semitism and then all the other anti, I mean the anti Islamism which is also you see in different passions like the, the, the kind of, the normalization of hateful othering of people in the conservative movement in the, in the mag movement is probably the most dangerous thing that it represents, I think to the American soul.
Speaker C: It’s a great, it’s a great point. And also as you were saying that David I was, you know, Joe Ken has expertise about the imminence of Iranian threats, but he also has expertise to understand that it is a complicated picture and that you can hold the worldview. This of course, wasn’t Donald Trump’s worldview until it suddenly was, but you could hold the worldview that it’s the job of a president to take on, to make hard choices, to take on whether it was a global Sponsor of terror, a country that was obviously working to get a nuclear weapon and if it had one, wouldn’t let it just sit there. That there’s a. There’s a. Like there is a case to be made. The President hasn’t made it, but there’s a case to be made. And if you were in that world, you would run. You would understand the possible attraction of that case and not present it on your exit as simply 100% being dragged in by Israel. So his expertise is both. He’s a witness because he watched it, but he also, if he was being sort of fair minded, wouldn’t have framed it on the way out the way he did.
Speaker A: We’re joined by McKay Coppins, the brilliant Atlantic staff writer and the author of a new piece, My Year as a Degenerate Gambler. He was given $10,000 by the Atlantic, as all magazine writers are typically, and spent a year gambling on sports, mostly using the omnipresent apps that everyone is getting on their phone. So he’s a middle aged man experiencing what young men in America are experiencing in shocking numbers. The kind of financial fentanyl that is addicting young men in ways that we’ll talk about. Sports betting has been made too easy, too accessible, and impossible to win at. And McKay had the experience of learning that. So, McKay, why’d you decide to do this project? And quickly? What impact did it have on your brain?
Speaker D: Well, it started out as a more kind of standard magazine assignment. And when I was talking to my editors about it, we were kind of plotting the course of reporting where I would interview the executives at DraftKings and FanDuel and athletes and people who struggle with gambling addiction. And my editor, I think Scott Stossel was the one who said, you know, it would be better if you had a little skin in the game. And I actually was resisted at first, although I was intrigued because I am a practicing Mormon and I don’t gamble. It’s, you know, for religious reasons. And I told him that, and he’s like, yeah, no, no, I know, but what if we gave you $10,000 and then, you know, we covered your losses and then we split any winnings to kind of keep you emotionally invested. Wouldn’t God be okay with that? And so I actually, I write about this at the piece, but I went and consulted my bishop who, you know, kind of tentatively agreed that it was, you know, if it was for journalism, then it was okay, but also was clearly very concerned for me. And the last thing he said to me in our meeting was be careful. And I sort of smugly, like, brushed him off at the time. But, you know, as I write in the piece, it kind of did surprise me how much this gambling habit, which was really supposed to be like a journalistic gimmick, bled into my personal life and kind of took over my life, even for stretches.
Speaker B: It was really upsetting to read, I have to say. Like, so, first of all, it seemed like, I mean, obviously your bishop was. Bishop was right. And maybe God really was not okay with this or should not have been okay with this. But, you know, what I mostly wanted to know is whether you thought that, like, just taking one step down this road was too many steps. I mean, there does seem to be, in the piece to contradict myself, a kind of tantalizing opening of a bigger door, which I think is when you’re talking to Nate Silver and you’re like, hey, I’m breaking even, or maybe making just a teeny bit amount of money, and Nate is like, oh, well, then you’re beating almost everyone. And that seemed to kind of get in your head, is like, okay, right, right. And so then I thought, well, maybe if he hadn’t been pumped up by Nate Silver, he might have been okay. But I got so worried about you.
Speaker D: Anyway, I do think we should blame Nate Silver for all of this if we. No, I appreciate that, Emily. It’s funny how many people since the. The piece has come out have, like, I’ve gotten. A lot of people are like, great piece. This is such good writing, whatever. And then a lot of people are like, are you okay? You know, like, is. Is everything okay? And the answer. My wife. My wife is recovering, although she’s very glad that this experiment is over. But, you know, I, I. They often say when you talk to gambling addicts that the worst thing that ever happened to them was that they won, you know, early in their experience. And that that was definitely true for me. And I should be clear, I didn’t have any single big win. It’s just that through the first, you know, couple months of my gambling experiment, I was actually following Nate Silver’s advice on kind of sensible sports betting. And I was basically like, I was up a couple hundred bucks around Thanksgiving. And, yeah, that’s when he told me, like, actually, you’re. You’re doing very well. If you could sustain this. This record over the course of a season, you’d be in, like, the top 5% of gamblers. And that, I think, you know, subconsciously started to convince me that I was maybe really good at Sports gambling, which is a ridiculous thing to say because I, and I think we should make this clear. Almost everybody who gambles on sports, in particular gambling in general, loses, like, literally almost everyone that. I can’t tell you how many people I met in the course of this reporting. When I was more, when I was telling my friends or whatever that I was doing this, they would say, oh, I know a guy who’s great at sports betting. Like, he’s made, he’s made tons of money. If you, if you’re really good at numbers and really know about sports, you can make a lot of money. That is not true. Like, you cannot make the people who have made a lot of money. Sports betting are usually people who have either gotten extraordinarily lucky and then pulled out at the right time or people who have access to some kind of insider information that most gamblers don’t. If you are a recreational gambler, which is what I was doing, you will end up losing money. And yeah, like, I, you know, to answer your question, I don’t know if, you know, if Nate had never said that to me, if I would have like, had a more kind of stable, boring experience. There are plenty of people who bet on sports, you know, casually a couple hundred bucks a month, and it’s not a big deal and it’s fun for them. But there are, you know, a non, not insignificant number of people who become compulsive gamblers, especially when they’re walking around with casinos in their pockets all day.
Speaker C: Yeah, it seems to me that like, often people are like, well, watch out. It can be a slippery slope. When you’re standing at the top of a slide, it’s going to be a slippery slope like there is no other. It’s not like it might be a slippery slope. You’re literally going down a slide. It’s going to be a slippery slope. Since you’ve covered politics and particularly know about conservatives, have you been struck by the. What seems to be total lack of alarm about gambling and how it has just become a central part of our lives now? And I also. Pornography is the same. Having covered conservatives back when they were real values. Conservatives talked about this stuff all the time when it wasn’t a part of our lives.
Speaker D: Now it is and not there’s not a peep, as it turned out. And this is maybe like a hot take. There was some social utility in social conservatism having a little bit more of a voice in the Republican Party than it does today in the Trump era gop, the people who used to sound the alarm about vice and its corrupting nature in American life have really either been kind of marginalized or just dropped a lot of those arguments to go along with Trump. Right.
Speaker C: But, I mean, look, they’re at the casino going, give me a seven, baby.
Speaker D: I mean, literally think about, like you said, the rise of pornography, the rise of sports gambling, online gambling. Weed is another thing. There is this kind of libertarian, libertine streak in the Trump era GOP that has really been kind of assimilated into Republican politics and made it so that I have been, you know, kind of shocked by how this is not a huge issue for Republicans. Like, it’s the kind of thing that 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you would have seen, you know, be a centerpiece of, like, every CPAC speech, every Republican primary across the country. That said, I will say that one of the things that heartens me about the response to this piece is that there is a kind of unlikely coalition of principled social conservatives. I’ve been invited on a lot of religious talk radio shows to talk about this piece. And people on the left who are worried about predatory corporations and corporate power, who. I think they’re both worried about this issue. AOC was liking my tweets about the story. So I think there is space for a bipartisan coalition to tackle the issue, but people just need to get together and take it seriously.
Speaker A: I have so many thoughts on this, McKay, and you don’t even know this, but I’ve done a lot of gambling reporting and about this historically. And so I’m obsessed with this issue. And I love. I actually love casinos. I think casinos are totally, completely decent institutions in American life for the most part. They are sociable, they’re communal, they are rigged against you, and people know that. But it’s a. It’s a form of entertainment that almost everyone who participates is okay with it. Different kinds of gambling are differentially dangerous. And I think what is so shocking about what’s happened and what you identify is that the form of gambling that has overwhelmingly taken shape in American life in the past few years is the most dangerous form, casino in the pocket. And you yourself refuse to actually engage in the most dangerous forms of it. You wouldn’t do in game parlays. You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t chase your losses in quite the same way. You weren’t doing the weird prop bets which are suckering other people. Whenever I meet a man under 30, I always ask about the him about gambling. And the last three young men I met all use the same Phrase. They all use the phrase in your piece. They said, oh, I’m a degenerate gambler.
Speaker D: Yeah.
Speaker A: And like, it is, they’re being ironic about it, but they’re not ironic. These are, these guys are going bankrupt. We’re ruining a generation because it’s so easy. It’s so quick. The, the kind of loss follows loss, little, the tiny little dopamine rewards followed by the, you know, the draining of like an ounce of blood. You get a dopamine reward and then they take an ounce of blood, and we’re going to have a financial disaster country for young men primarily. And I, I, this isn’t really a question. It’s just like I am, it, it makes me, I’m just.
Speaker B: Good diatribe, though.
Speaker A: I’m just so, I’m so unhappy about how this is unfolding. And I wish, and maybe the question is, will there be a kind of a, a sports betting Sackler family? Will there be a sports betting moment where we have the same kind of reckoning of like, whoa, we have just ruined the lives of millions of people for the benefit of some people at DraftKings so Kevin Hart could get some big endorsement deal.
Speaker D: So that was the question I talk, I asked to Paul Tonko, who’s a Democratic congressman from New York, one of the kind of leading crusaders against online sports betting in the House. And it was funny. He’s been working on this issue, drafting legislation around it for like four or five years at this point. And he said when he first started out in Congress, when he would talk to potential legislative partners about this issue, their eyes would kind of glaze over. Right. Like, they weren’t averse to it necessarily, but they were also like, this is like a pet issue. Not, not a huge problem right there. We got a lot of problems. It’s not a top priority. And he said in the past four years, that has started to change. You know, more and more people in the House, the Senate, are hearing from their own constituents whose, you know, sons are gambling away their tuition money, who are racking up massive debt, who are even getting into legal trouble to try out, pay off their gambling debts. And, and so he’s seeing more and more alarm and interest in the issue. And, but when I asked him, you know, he has currently a bill that he’s drafted, he has a partner in the Senate, he’s trying to get traction for it. And I said, well, what’s the, what’s the likelihood that this bill will pass? And he was like, look, I don’t kid myself. This Industry’s got a ton of money. They’re, they’re lobbying all over the country and in Washington. And so you. I do think that give it some time and eventually things will get so bad that Americans will be clamoring for regulation. And that’s kind of a bleak best case scenario, but it is. So I don’t know exactly what it. Will it be a Sackler family? Will it be one story of a gambling addict that wrecks his life that just kind of captures the American attention. But his belief is that eventually we will have this reckoning, but we might have to wait for the, the social catastrophe to come first.
Speaker B: That’s dismaying. So one thing I think about a lot with vices, as you were saying, and I think this like, transcends social conservatism, although I appreciate that way of thinking about it. It’s the problem of some behavior in society that we don’t necessarily want to criminalize. Right, right. Like it’s bad, but we also see a whole set of negative consequences of actually like putting people in jail for it. Right. And like marijuana and a lot of drug consumption comes under this heading. And sports gambling, I think too, like, it’s a vice that has real bad consequences and this potential for addiction and we should be regulating it. But somehow, once we’ve decided that it’s not criminal anymore, or in this case it was just the Supreme Court striking down a federal law and leaving it to the states, we have this kind of vacuum and somehow we don’t have a really smart way of just recognizing, well, there’s this whole category of vices and we should be thinking about how to not have as much of them, not more of them. Right?
Speaker D: Totally. I mean, this is the weird thing about this moment because I think all of us have gotten so used to the idea that gambling is like, incredibly pervasive in the culture and that it’s omnipresent. And if you watch any sports game on any channel at any time of day, you’re going to be bombarded with these like, neon soaked ads for, for online sportsbooks that you Forget that like 10 years ago, the consensus in this country was totally different. And I think what you’re describing, Emily, is more or less the consensus that most civilizations came to in the past on gambling, which is that as a vice it should be tolerated but regulated and stigmatized. Right.
Speaker B: And stigmatized is really important. Like we shouldn’t make it just shrug our shoulders and think it’s okay.
Speaker D: There should be. We should as a society, as a country, Be sophisticated enough to realize that there are things that we can decide should not be criminalized. We shouldn’t put people in jail for them, but also they shouldn’t be celebrated and encouraged. Right. There should be a certain taboo. Taboo. There should be a social cost that you pay to identifying as a degenerate gambler. I don’t really think that there is that much anymore, especially among younger men. It’s something that, like a badge that they wear with pride. And I think that that’s the most dangerous development.
Speaker B: Totally. That turn is really dismaying. And then when you combine it with what David was talking about, the casino, meaning your phone that’s in your pocket, like the technology just completely accelerates all of these problems. And I just don’t think we’ve like sufficiently grappled with all of that. I mean, sorry to go on, but then my question becomes, okay, like what’s the best kind of regulation? And I wonder if you’ve seen thought about that.
Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, so we have to decide first of all if we, we are comfortable with online gambling just being legal. Right. Right now in most states, something like 40 states have legalized online sports betting. But the way that it’s legalized varies state by state. Some of them have regulations that for example, prevent individual prop bets on individual players because that incentivizes all kinds of corruption and manipulation in sports. Some of them have much more rigid struct gambling on college sports versus professional sports, for example. You know, I think we could also probably do a lot more of regulation on the advertising for these things. Right. And I think that’s one area where even a lot of people who are hardcore gamblers recognize this has gone off the rails. Like we should not have a situation where when I’m watching a game with my 10 year old son, he has to slog through like 15 commercials for DraftKings to, you know, see the BYU basketball ball gameplay, you know, and so like I think that there are definitely areas where regulation could happen. But I mean this is me and I’m not a full maximalist. I don’t believe in like prohibition. Right. For the reasons you just described. There are bad reasons. There, there are good reasons to let gambling continue in this country. And David talked about it. You know, I actually went to a casino in Las Vegas for this story and, and I had never been to casino to gamble before. And actually compared to the online sports book I describe it as, it was like almost Rockwellian, like sitting at a blackjack table with a bunch of people from around the country with different backgrounds and kind of making small talk with them and friends with them. Like, that’s actually not a bad thing. It’s almost wholesome. But I do think that we as a country need to think much more, think a lot harder about how much of this industry has kind of gotten away from us and how we need to rein it back. Back in.
Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, the. The blackjack table is kind of like the corner bar if you map it to the alcohol analogy. However, if you walk about 20 yards over to the slots, they’re sniffing glue.
Speaker D: I mean, no, that’s true.
Speaker C: The experience in the slots is anything but communal, and it can be the grimmest thing ever.
Speaker D: It actually, those looked like when I saw people sitting at the slot machines for, like, hours, that just looked like me on. On FanDuel at, you know, one in the morning. So I agree with you.
Speaker C: I. I was in a. I was in Kentucky this week, and I went into a gas station, and there. There were those gambling machines that David wrote about many, many, many years ago in South Carolina, and there were two guys just punching the buttons, and they did not look happy. McKay, I. I’ll ask two questions. You can pick one, because I don’t want to hog all your time. One is, I love the G.K. chesterton quote about how. How quickly this happened. And. And so either address that and if you have any strong conclusions that people can’t read just in the piece about kind of how this just happens so quickly. And then the other is, what do the players think about this, this pass? You have a great quote from Bill Bradley, who’s saying, like, I’m not supposed to be bet on, like, a horse or whatever. I think he said, you know, feeling indignant about the betting that was going on. What do the players feel?
Speaker D: Yeah, I’ll take the second one first. I think that I interviewed a French tennis player named Caroline Garcia who said that she first started receiving, like, abusive, often violent messages from angry gamblers when she was still a teenager. I think a lot of athletes at the professional level, and frankly at the college level have completely gotten used to the idea that part of being an athlete is, you know, you have to watch what you eat and exercise and you have to do a lot of travel. And, oh, yeah, there’s this contingent of deranged, you know, psychos who are going to fill your social media feeds with the most, like, vulgar, terrible things you can imagine every time you lose because you caused them to lose, you know, too much money that they shouldn’t have gambled that that is, it is a, like a, just a reality now of being an athlete in this new online gambling boom. But I will say I didn’t get into this in the piece. One thing that worries me is that young athletes are not immune to the kind of generational trends here. A lot of young athletes now are gambling themselves and they are arriving in college, arriving in the professional leagues as if not gambling addicts, at least compulsive users of these online sportsbooks. And that just invites even more potential for, you know, undermining the integrity of these games. Right. Because if you have especially a kind of a lower tier player that’s not making $20 million a year playing and they have an opportunity to, for example, miss a few free throws to, you know, make 200,000 bucks on that game, I don’t know. Do you think that every, every 19 year old is going to be able to resist that temptation? I don’t. And so that’s why that worries me both for the sake of the health of and you know, well being of these athletes, but also for the temptation to manipulate outcomes in games to win in gambling.
Speaker A: McKay Coppins wrote sucker my year as a degenerate Gambler for the Atlantic. McKay, thanks for coming on the gabfest. That was great.
Speaker D: Thank you guys.
Speaker A: Federal Judge Brian Murphy gave the Trump administration its biggest setback on the vaccine front with a ruling that many actions that HHS has taken about vaccines are illegal because either they circumvented a key vaccine committee or because the committee itself was is illegally stacked with people who are not qualified to be on it. So Emily, what is Murphy’s order do for U.S. vaccine policy and was it a legit order?
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean he just rolled it all back. Right. He said that the vaccine schedule that the Trump administration had put out, like he just. No. According to his order. And also that the composition of this key committee, ASIC, the vaccine committee, which has 17 people on it. Right. RFK Jr. The head of HHS, had like reconstituted it, just gotten rid of all the actual vaccine experts actually and put in a bunch of other people. And so in terms of whether this is going to hold up in court or not, honestly, I’m not sure. I mean this is all coming under what’s called the Administrative Procedure Act. And this is this law that Congress passed many decades ago that basically says that if you’re making big changes, added administrative agency, you have to follow the correct procedure to do. Used to be that courts deferred more to agencies in how they made their rulings. But of course, we’ve had a kind of conservative revolt against that deference to expertise and agency policy making from the Supreme Court. So now there is more room for the courts to second guess. And that’s what Judge Murphy is doing here. The standard is whether the changes that HHS made to vaccines are arbitrary and capricious. And Murphy basically says, like they were because they were so not rooted in conventional thinking and science about vaccines. And also because the people who are now on a SIP have such a kind of motley set of credentials. Not all of them, I should say, but a lot of them are not actually like vaccine experts really at all. And those are the kind of twin pillars of this opinion. And I. It’s the kind of opinion where if you’re really worried about these changes to vaccine policy, you could get there. I mean, arbitrary and capricious is. It’s like a high bar, but it’s kind of subjective. On the other hand, if you think, well, maybe there is something to this vaccine skepticism, or just the executive branch should be able to decide what’s good science and what’s not science and make changes, like, we elected Trump and he picked this guy who’s a vaccine skeptic. And so they get to play out this thread and, you know, if the voters don’t like it, well, they can vote them out. Then you’re going to be more skeptical of this kind of judicial refereeing.
Speaker C: Emily, is it only the Administrative Procedures act that’s, that’s the legislation at issue here. In other words, there’s not some authoring legislation that, that goes into to HHS and says here’s the way a SIP should be constituted and it should have this composition and all that. Because in the judge’s ruling, he was saying that it was, the moves were afoul of the law, but it’s the law. He’s referring to the Administrative Procedures Act.
Speaker B: There’s another law at issue here, John. You’re right. And it’s about how federal advisory committees like this are, are composed. And so the judge was also invoking that law and saying that the administration had violated that as well as the Administrative Procedures Act.
Speaker C: So, but those are general as opposed to, like a specific legislative intent for, for, for Kennedy to follow that he’s blowing off.
Speaker B: Exactly.
Speaker A: So, Emily, it feels like Murphy has taken a totally different path than at least most of the judges who have been looking at what the Trump administration has done. So, so Murphy’s basically saying the, the decision making here was so irregular. The appointments were so out of the norm. The process was so inconsistent with past practice, which has, you know, and, and with the norms of scientific behavior, that it. Whereas so many other judges have basically, in the face of Trump and the Trump administration doing things like destroying whole agencies or making vast changes to how some, some aspect of government operates, they’ve kind of thrown up their hands and said, well, the president gets to make all these choices. This is it. We, you know, when you have an executive, the president gets to make all these choices. Is there, you know, is there any reason to think that in this particular case, the Supreme Court is going to be more sympathetic to an argument like Murphy’s because it has to do with. Specifically around science? Or are they going to be like, no, you got, you’re, you’re. Murphy, you’re, you’re nitpicking. This is the. The president really gets a huge amount of latitude and stop, you know, stop trying to stop him from carrying out the will of the people.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it is entirely plausible, maybe likely that the Supreme Court will overturn this ruling for the reasons you gave. I disagree with you, though, about judges throwing up their hands. I think a lot of lower court judges have tried to stop.
Speaker A: Sorry.
Speaker B: Yeah, right, right. I mean, what you said, just said was true about the Supreme Court. But, like, you know, dismantling Department of Education, dismantling usaid, which we’re going to talk about on Slate plus, like, they’re taking away all the NIH grants. Like, there are a lot of lower court rulings of judges being like, wait a second, this one is just particularly dramatic right now. And then I think you’re absolutely right about the way in which it kind of runs into the executive branch deference that the Supreme Court has showed in, at least in. On the emergency docket, on a temporary, you know, quote, temporary, like two years basis. The Supreme Court has overturned a lot of those rulings where judges have tried to stop the administration.
Speaker A: All right, John, last question on this. Does it seem to you that the Trump administration wants to get away from vaccines being an issue?
Speaker C: Is it helpful for them that it’s always in the news and that people keep talking about it, the reporting suggests that it’s not helpful. I think that we have to be careful about that, what that really means. So I think a sip being in the news and this legal fight, is that really going to break through? I mean, it does keep it in the news, and the administration, I guess, has to make a decision about appealing the ruling. This is a salient issue for sure, because it’s one of those issues that hits parents and kids right where they live. I mean, hits the parents in particular, just in terms of making life more confusing. Health of these, your dear precious children is at issue here, both with the general schedule of children’s vaccines plus the hepatitis B. And it fits into the larger story of just ignoring the rules and norms and just barreling ahead. I think where it comes into possible political issue is when we have these measles outbreaks or we have. We. You see the sort of, the consequences happening. You know, when the Strait of Hormuz gets shut down, you see the consequence of this sort of bull in a china shop behavior. So I think that’s where this ruling. It needs something else for it to be a political issue. But there’s no doubt that it can be a political issue. And it’s just kind of sitting there and, and it, and because it also attaches to the kind of blunderbussing of trade policy that isn’t creating the jobs, that’s not creating the growth, that’s not creating the manufacturing jobs. You know, the war in Iran, that’s not creating the, like. It’s just another wave of behavior that seems very similar as in those other cases that’s having these negative consequences. But I think the negative consequences have to kick in for it to be of particular salience in the, in the elections.
Speaker A: When you are having a cocktail, Emily, maybe a vaccine cocktail, a cocktail of different vaccines this weekend, what are you going to be chattering about?
Speaker B: I’m having a lot of, I guess, like feminist outrage or just like distress this week. So it’s a little tricky because I’m going to connect two things that don’t totally connect to each other. So bear with me for a second.
Speaker C: Okay, so pickleball and tap and the hip bone.
Speaker A: The hip bone and the ankle bone.
Speaker B: I just don’t want to make an equivalence here. You’ll understand a minute. Okay. So I was listening to a BBC podcast about On Liberty, the classic John Stuart Mills book. And I’m sure many people knew this, but I did not. John Stuart Mills had this partner, this like, intellectual and romantic partner, Hillary Taylor, who co wrote On Liberty. And there have been, like, textual analyses of the actual sentence structure in the book that show how it maps onto other writings of Hillary Taylor’s as well as of Mills. And it just like. So it was totally interesting to me to learn about this. I’m sure many people knew. I did not. And then I just found myself, like, so sad that these People who are writing about how social opprobrium and censoriousness is like, terrible, right? I mean, part of On Liberty is about how the government infringes on liberty, but part of it is inveighing against the church. Church and the just sort of like stifling social strictures of Victorian England. And. And yet they couldn’t put Hillary Taylor’s name on this book, right? These people who were trying to be like the. At the forefront of liberalism for their time. So that just sort of struck me. And then I was reading, and this is the tricky move. I was reading the story in the New York Times, this investigation of Cesar Chavez and these women who’ve come forward incredibly bravely to talk about how he sexually abused them. There are two women whom he abused as children, and then there’s Dolores Huerta, who is herself a really important labor leader who worked with Chavez, who it turned out he had also sexually assaulted. And I was feeling so sad for them and just, and also very moved that they were able to come forward and tell their stories finally, which obviously is a really important thing to do. And then just thinking about, like, Cesar Chavez, this incredibly important labor leader who made such a tremendous contribution, but also completely abused his power in this way that men with lots of power seem to, some of them just be inexorably drawn to. Anyway, that was like my swirl of feminist thoughts this week. Obviously they’re not equivalent, but it just like there is just something wrong with, with the world that these things happen. But then there’s also something so striking about how we want these figures from the past to be incredibly forward thinking and not have the clay feet and the like, terrible conduct of their time. And that just like it just, they always fail us.
Speaker A: John, what’s your chatter?
Speaker C: My chatter is it’s, it’s not really cocktail chatter, but it’s, it’s just an experience that I had this week that was really moving. And, and I don’t think it’s just because, well, it’s highly idiosyncratic to me, but I don’t think it would be to other people. I went down to Louisville, Kentucky to speak to the International Thomas Merton Society. They have a lecture that happens on the date or the day before this famous moment in Thomas Merton’s life. And so I was able to go down to the abbey at Gethsemane where He lived for 27 years. And, and I have never been to an abbey or a monastery or to see monks, the way they live their lives. And I was, my Host was this wonderful monk, Paul Quenin, who was a novice under Merton and has written his own books and books of poetry and is just like as an. Is a person illuminated from within and to. We went to prayers at that. They pray seven times a day, so there’s almost. There’s always something going on. But we went to the noon prayers and. And being in the company of people who have dedicated their life to. To monastic rituals and prayer and worldview was really an extraordinary experience, for which I also thank Paul Pearson at the Merton center at Bellarmin University. But as somebody who’s read a lot of Merton and been influenced by him, to then go to his hermitage, which was basically this cinder block room where he lived for many years, was also really moving and something I’m still figuring out the point, I guess, is that if you’re ever in Kentucky, if you’re ever in Louisville, it’s a very peaceful, serene place to go visit it. Think about it. Or if you’re just ever near an abbey and there were also people there on retreat, which is nothing I’ve ever done, but also has struck me as a really worthy thing to just go and spend a few days in silence at a place where silence is. Is sort of the center of. Well, prayer obviously is too. But anyway, it was just a new experience for me that was really interesting. In addition to, you know, having to write speech and not make an a** of myself, which I think I successfully escaped.
Speaker A: I confess I don’t actually know who Thomas Merton is.
Speaker C: Oh, really? He was a Trappist monk who was extremely influential because of a book he wrote called the Seven Story Mountain, which was about his. It’s basically his religious autobiography about how he left. He was a PhD student at Columbia and then entered the monastery and then was a very prolific and influential spiritual writer. And then particularly with respect to nonviolence in. During the Vietnam War era. And then in 1968, on a trip to Tibet, died because he was electrocuted by a fan. So he died at the age of 52. He’s one of the most influential Catholic and spiritual writers of, you know, of that period. And he had all these connections with Eastern religions as well, because he’s very sort of Buddhist in his approach. So if you go on my Instagram account, you’ll see his grave, which is just in with all the other monks who’ve died, the totems people have left who have gone down to Gethsemane just to visit his grave. So anyway, and if you really want the whole thing, you can go on my substack and read the speech.
Speaker A: My chatter is also Cesar Chavez adjacent. A colleague told me about another story I’d never heard of, which has some of the same themes, which is a guy named Larry Lee Hillblom who was an American gazillionaire. He was one of the, he was the H in DHL, so one of the founders of DHL. And he died in 1995 when his seaplane crashed in Micronesia. And he, it was a story kind of about how he had this $500 million fortune. It was basically going to be given to various medical institutions, I think Berkeley primarily. And then a few years later, coming out of the woodwork, as it were, were women with young children. And this is a guy, young women with young children. This is a guy who had gone to brothels and bars throughout Southeast Asia and Saipan and had fathered children, but with 14 year olds, 15 year olds and many, many children who kind of emerged, several of whom became heirs to this estate. And it was a story, it’s just a story about a predator, sexual predator, because he was rich, because he was American, because operating, you know, far from home. And you know, in this case, I guess there was a legal consequence that these children were rightly able to inherit his estate. But it’s just a sense about how, how much men act with impunity and how there is, they’re, they’re not a non zero number of men who are preying on children in the way that Jeffrey Epstein did, in the way that Cesar Chavez may have and in the way this guy did. So it’s a Larry Hillblom, really dark story, listeners. You have stories that aren’t necessarily dark. Maybe they’re dark, maybe they’re not dark. But you have emailed them to us@gabfestslate.com and our listener chatter comes from Portugal this week. Hi, Gabfest, this is Joo calling from Lisbon, Portugal. I wanted to share a small diplomatic story from here. The current US Ambassador to Portugal, Mr. John Arrigo, a former car dealer from Palm beach, recently explained how he got a job in an interview that the US Embassy itself happily posted online. According to him, he was playing golf with Donald Trump when the president suddenly hey, Arrigo, have you ever thought about becoming an ambassador? Arrigo says he hadn’t, but after talking to his wife, he realized actually Portugal could work. Why? He says he has family connections here. A sister in law lives here, a nephew named Cristiano, like the national soccer star. And he once served as the best man at a wedding in the Azores Islands. So next time he sees Trump, he says Portugal. And what struck me is that the embassy proudly posted this story online. No talk about diplomatic credentials whatsoever. Golf, family ties, and attending a wedding might make you an ambassador. That’s just whack. Oh my God. Oh my God. Email us yourchatterapastaslate.com we’re not the only Slate podcast worth a listen this week. Death, Sex and Money, the wonderful Death, Sex and Money from Anna Sale has an episode, AI Confessions. A chatbot ended my marriage. And Rob talked to Anna about how his wife started using ChatGPT and began to change and they ended up getting divorced after his wife in his views ended up in an AI induced psychosis. Ann is always such a great interviewer. And Death sucks. And Money. Such a smart show. That is all for our episode this week. We also have a bonus episode in your feed about what really killed usaid. Usaid? That’s just for Slate plus members. You can become a Slate plus member by subscribing to Slate plus directly from the Political Gabfest show page on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or visiting slate.com gabfest so if you are a member, thank you. If not, please join. You get bonus episodes on the Gabfest. Lots of other great stuff, including never hitting the paywall on the Slate site. That’s our show for today. Political Gabfest is produced by Nina Porzucki, our researchers, Emily Ditto. Our theme music is by they Might Be Giants. Ben Richmond is senior director for Podcast operations. Mila Bell is executive producer of Slate Podcasts, and Hilary Fry is the editor in chief of Slate. For Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson, I’m David Plotz. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you next week. Wow, that was a long one.