Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rustin, president of NCFamily. In each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. Thank you for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.
I'm Mitch Prosser, Vice President here at North Carolina Family Policy Council, joined by our Director of Research and Education, Adama Manfra. Welcome to the tenth episode of the Truths We Hold, an honor of America's 250th anniversary and our 35th anniversary here at NC Family. This year, we're taking a deeper look at the foundational values that have shaped our country and continue to shape the work we do here at NC Family. On this episode, we're taking a deep Look at gambling and its effects on the family and our culture. Of course, this is one of the foundational truths or principles that we have here at our organization, and not necessarily in a good way.
We're not encouraging people to go out and gamble or anything like that. Let's walk through gambling, what that means, especially in light of the Declaration of Independence. We've talked about life, liberty, and now the pursuit of happiness, Adamo. How does gambling fit into the pursuit of happiness? Sure.
So we talked about last month religious liberty and how that is the proper pursuit of happiness that our happiness is found in our relationship with Christ and eventually union with God in the next life. But in this life, we often pursue happiness in the wrong places, and one of those places has, for a long time, been money, wealth that has taken different forms historically over time. But pursuing wealth is one of the areas that people will often seek happiness, and anytime we seek happiness, In something that doesn't fulfill, not in God, will always be left wanting.
So, gambling can be a pursuit of wealth in the sense that it seems like easy money. We can also pursue happiness wrongly in the pursuit of pleasure, and so gambling can also be, whether as a fun activity or a sort of almost drug effect in how it increases the stimulus and the attachment and the dopamine hits, whether with sports gambling or casino gambling or other things. But in both of those ways, gambling can be. A faulty pursuit of happiness, and so this would be: yes, we're free to pursue happiness, but we are meant to pursue it in the right places and the right ways. And religion, family, goodness, virtue, love—those are places to find happiness.
When you start hoping to find it in sensory pleasure, dopamine hits, or easy money, you're going to be left wanting, and there are going to be impacts of that. That's a great explanation. I think on a previous episode we talked about how we live in a virtuous society, and this clear. Goes up against that as we explore what it means to pursue happiness. In this pursuit of happiness, that Jefferson gives us, this clearly is not that.
In fact, it seems to be a direct affront to virtue. Gambling appears to be a vice. Is that correct? I think certainly we would approach it that way. You know, are there ideal circumstances in which you play bingo at church and maybe it's not in this category?
But when you think of vice versus virtue, a vice is just a habituated bad action. And so, again, when you're pursuing easily. Begotten money, so Proverbs is very clear that money easily gotten is easily lost.
So when you're pursuing gambling in that way, or when you're pursuing again hedonistic pleasure and stimulus response from the excitement and exhilaration of gambling on something you can't control, or increasing your attentiveness and excitement around some sporting event because you put some money on it, all of these things are going to be habituating a negative behavior, which is vice by definition.
So let's talk a little. A little bit about problem gambling, and and this is again, this is a pretty wide brush stroke here because there's several different problems with gambling. But those that struggle with gambling or problem gambling, what does that look like?
So one of the challenges here is that, like many things, there's sort of a spectrum on this.
So one of the abbreviations that you see in this space is PPG, pathological and problem gambling, or problem pathological gambling. When you get to that level, we're typically talking about people who are going in. Who have stopped paying bills? Kids are going hungry. Yeah, they're not taking care of their responsibility.
They might be losing jobs. They're leveraging debts and finances to pay off bills.
So that's the that's often what people. That's sort of the extreme PPG. But really, you're getting into problem gambling, where gambling is more than perhaps not the most virtuous of social activities, but it's becoming a problem when you're doing it really to any level that you're drawn to it, and it's. Almost instinctive because again, now you're forming that habit. You're habituated to doing this thing that isn't good, that isn't improving your life, isn't bettering you, isn't helping your family, isn't helping the community.
Once you're habituated to doing something of that description, you're getting in that vice category.
So that's a problem, and so that can look more like.
Some researchers have looked at where the economic trade-offs when people start getting into particularly sports gambling, but any kind of gambling can be related to this. That it tends to first start coming out of savings and investments.
So a parent might not stop paying for food and rent and entertainment and all these like all of the normal expenses, if you will, are still okay. But they would be setting aside fill in the blank amount of money to their four hundred one k or their long-term investments or their student education. Their child's education in the future, and they're not anymore because of privatization. It's not the future; it's the now. I need to have this now.
Okay, yeah.
So they're sort of excusing it because they're not even seeing the pain because this is stuff that you wouldn't be touching for years anyway. And so it kind of starts with rationalization and, "Hey, this is going to be okay." And so really, what they're doing then is they're focusing on the here and now as opposed to the future. And they're ultimately, it starts. Down a pathway that that can be very detrimental for not just them but those around them. We've kind of isolated two types of things that people are pursuing, and those that are struggling with problem gambling.
Two types of things that they're struggling: one is the idea of gain, and the other is the idea of pleasure. Walk us through that. Make the distinction between the two. Sure.
So all of these things are places where somebody could tell themselves, and this is obviously pride rearing. Head here where it does often saying oh well I'm I'm smarter than the average person or I follow sports enough or I know how to count cards or I know the real probabilities of poker so if I play smart I will come out ahead right and so I can do this and make a lot of money which is much easier than finding a job or investing in something more tangible or particularly with again futures markets or sports gambling where you're not even playing anything you're just saying with my extreme. Insight and intuition and whatever, yeah, I can beat the house. Unfortunately, particularly with things like sports betting, the algorithms behind the systems will actually throttle you if you even are capable of consistently beating the house, if you want to call it that.
So that's that's sort of the pursuit of gain. It's it's a quick, easy.
Well, wouldn't it be easier if I could just sort of use my smarts to get quick, easy money instead of going and sitting for the job, earning it, or or producing something of value to someone that then I'm getting paid for that. And then the other being just the pleasure.
Well, it's fun. It's enjoyable. I put some money in the game, and now I'm really investing in the game, and so the game is more exciting. And there was even a a news story when sports gambling was first legalized here, where the news reporter was going around, just sort of interviewing man on the street, kind of at like sports bars and stuff, about like, oh, what did you bet on? And they were betting on ridiculous things like a ping pong match.
And you'd see people say, I wasn't really into ping pong until I started betting on, and now it's exciting because that the effect of having skin in the game kind. Raises the stakes and makes it exciting, and now you're getting those those fear triggers and those excitement triggers and the reward triggers that you wouldn't have gotten watching right ping pong. I think it was that same report that talked about how people would stay at these 24 seven sports bars until three four in the morning because these were Chinese ping pong matches and they were happening on the other side of the planet. Again, they weren't necessarily drawn to this until there was money on the line. We see this work itself out in a lot of different ways.
Let's talk about a few of those ways where people. Struggle with problem gambling, or that are problems for the practice of gambling. You mentioned the lottery for just a second, and we hear all the time the education lottery, and maybe there's this misnomer that goes along with the idea.
Well, it's just helping kids in school or pay for school or this, that, or the other. There's really a lot of people who are struggling with it. Let's talk about casinos, then. How does this work? What does this look like?
So, casinos. We might be picturing big, fancy, shiny Vegas. Or Atlantic City, but when you think about these things, they're very shiny and oasis-ish from the outside, and then you get in, and they are designed to trap you. Oh yeah, there aren't windows. The layout of things are designed to be a maze that will intuitively get you to like loop back in rather than actually find an exit.
And then the games inside, particularly things like slot machines, which this also applies to video lottery, and other games that are out in our communities, particularly in rural communities. These are designed to have things called. Near miss effect. Yep.
So you're not actually really close to lucky when you get seven seven bar. That's designed so that you see that and your brain says, "I was so close." If I do it again, I'm much more likely to get it. It's not like shooting basketball where you get close and that means you're likely somehow to make the next basket. Pulling that, yeah, right, does not have that effect.
Now the one arm. These slot machines. Not only do they possess the tangible things, they also have these giant screens on them. We're seeing, and so you're getting the feedback loop of. Screen and the dopamine hit from the screen.
In addition to the near miss, and if I just go one more time, and it's these cute little features that they seem to be pretty strange until the person's sitting at the game.
So we've got casinos and all that goes with that. Often it's not the big and the shiny. It unfortunately it's the dark and the grungy that goes along with that. And so let's talk a little bit about sports gambling. That seems to be the hot topic these days, and it's not just affecting that lady sitting in that chair for several hours.
Affecting our 15 and 16 year old boys, what does that look like?
So, sports gambling. If you're awake and breathing and not living on a farm, North Carolina for the last two years, you've seen ads, you've seen marshals, you've seen promotions. Yeah, it's all over the place. It's taken over really the sports world. You get into sports gambling on your phone.
Now it's in your pocket. It's available all the time. You can be betting while it's happening from anywhere. You don't have to go to the casino or go to even to like a sports venue to. Engaging in this, you're just there, and it's available, and you get that dopamine hit, and you get another dopamine hit, and it's really sad.
You used to go to a sporting event to watch the game and fellowship with other people and enjoy it together, and now it's this because we're worried about the line, the spread, the prop bets that go along with this. Not just what color the Gatorade is going to be, but if the guy's going to get five yards on the next carry, or if there's going to be how many sacks, and really it becomes this. Granular, dingy, dirty environment where it literally takes the fun right out of the sport. Because we know this to be true, the house always wins, and so the reality of this is it's leaving, especially our young men and some young women, with this emptiness inside and in their bank accounts or their parents' bank accounts in some cases, because they're just gambling away not just their money but their time and ultimately their peace and happiness. Predictive markets—that seems to be the new thing.
And again, unless you live under a rock, you've seen Kalshi Polly Market and a myriad. I saw a brand new one the other night while I was watching the news. We can gamble on the weather. Predict whether it's going to rain today. Is that is that how this works?
Prediction argues I think are fairly interesting, particularly for us from a Christian perspective, because it it sort of belies its own that we're talking about the future now. It's in the name; it's right out in your face that what you're talking about is you're just predicting the future and hoping to win on that. Which again, if pride gets the best of you and tells you, "Well, you're so smart, you'll have the best intuition about what's likely to happen," but we're now dabbling with future casting and all these things that are warned about throughout the Old Testament. Both the easy money and the predicting the future, divination, divination, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We want to stay away from, and rightly so, because we shouldn't think we have a grasp on the future.
That's that's God's domain. We have now.
So I think all of these things we see—they're bad on so many levels. Let's talk a little bit about government involvement. All of these, there is some sort of revenue generated by the government. Why is this a good and why is this a bad bad thing? To me, this is one of the key problems with gambling as policy—that it creates a perverse relationship between the state and its citizens.
So the state, when it taxes your income, the state gets more tax revenue when You make more money, and so therefore the state is profiting with you, and the state wants you to succeed. But with sports gambling, effectively, when you do the math, the state is taxing losses.
So because that's the money that the sports betting platform makes, the sports betting platform makes money when you lose money. They don't make money when you win money, and that's what they're taxing.
So the state makes more from Fanduel and sportsbook and all that when you lose. Just like the lottery makes more money when you buy more tickets that don't pay out, right? And so now the state is in a relationship with the citizen that the state profits from the citizen's loss, and that is just a relationship we should not want with our state. No kidding.
Well, the old notion that the house always wins—I think it's very clear that when the house always wins, the home always loses. And so, for people who are focused on gambling as a means of production or income, or it's a dangerous thing, you know. Even if it's oh, it's simple entertainment and pleasure. That as well is a dangerous thing. We've covered both of those today.
I think that if there's anything to be learned here, it's that we must spend, invest carefully, wisely, and biblically as we seek to help families not just survive but thrive here in North Carolina. And appears that gambling is certainly not one of those ways to do so. Thank you so much for watching this episode of the truths we hold. Where we focus on those foundational truths and principles that we hold so dear here at North Carolina Family. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org, and check us out on social media at ncfamilypolicy. Thanks, and may God bless you and your family.
