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‘Deseret Voices’ Episode 54: What sports betting does to your soul
On this episode of “Deseret Voices,” McKay Coppins, author of the viral Atlantic article “Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler,” sits down with Paul Lambert of BYU’s Wheatley Institute to discuss President D. Todd Christofferson’s landmark talk at general conference for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, condemning gambling in all its forms.
Apostle denounces gambling at Saturday morning session of general conference
They unpack new survey data showing that 55% of American adults now gamble at least monthly and that 1 in 8 gamble every day. They explore why mobile sports betting has exploded from $5 billion to $160 billion in annual wagers since the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling, why prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket let people bet on wars and assassinations, and why the moral case against gambling has been missing from the national conversation — until now.
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_Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins._
**McKay Coppins** : Paul Lambert, thank you for coming on “Deseret Voices.”
**Paul Lambert** : Happy to be here. Thanks, McKay.
**MC** : So, Paul, we just heard this past weekend a talk from President D. Todd Christofferson of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was kind of a sharp, righteous condemnation of gambling in all its forms. And it’s a talk that I think a lot of people in the church were wondering if we would get, you know, given the kind of changing landscape of gambling in the U.S. I’m wondering first if I could just get your thoughts on why you think the church leaders and President Christofferson, in particular, felt that they needed to address this topic right now.
**PL** : Yeah, good question. So I certainly, in no way, feel like I can speak for them, but, you know, I think I think for the same reason, you know, your editors, McKay, asked you to to do a piece on this. It’s just a huge, hugely — well, really fast-growing issue. It’s kind of taken the world by storm, and I think one of the differences with this, I mean, it’s not just a morally hazardous habit. It doesn’t seem to be seen that way, right? So, I think one of the things, and I’m sure we’ll get into this, is there’s a lot of people that don’t see this current form of gambling or these new forms of gambling as something that’s as morally treacherous as perhaps other previous forms. And I expect this is of great concern to leaders like President Christofferson, seeing so many people take this up, and without thinking, perhaps about the long-term consequences, or in some cases, the short-term consequences as well.
**MC** : Yeah, to me, there’s kind of like two linked phenomena that kind of made a talk like this necessary. One, to your point, is just that the industry has exploded in popularity in the past decade, right? I always use this statistic to illustrate that in 2017 Americans legally wagered about $5 billion on sports. Last year, they wagered over $160 billion, right? So, that just illustrates how much bigger this has gotten since 2018 when the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting. So, that’s one thing. It’s just gotten a lot more common, a lot more popular. And then linked to that, to your point, is that it’s gotten normalized in a way, especially among younger people and younger men, that has led a lot of people, including, I think, even a lot of young men in the church, to not think of gambling as a moral issue at all. And in fact, to maybe not even think of sports betting and prediction markets as gambling, which I think is an interesting kind of distinction that a lot of people are making.
So, we have this situation where, you know, millions and millions of people are now walking around with casinos in their pockets. The industry is exploding in popularity. Gambling is permeating the culture. And unlike in past generations where people saw gambling as a vice and would talk about it in moral, spiritual, religious terms if they were people of faith, a lot of people of faith now are were not thinking about it that way.
And before we get into the kind of details of President Christofferson’s talk, which I thought was kind of masterful in making a moral case against gambling, I want first to ask you about some of the research you’ve overseen at Wheatley Institute at BYU because you have actually been working on a survey on this. You surveyed a lot of people about their attitudes toward gambling. I actually advised you a little bit on it. Can you just lay out some of the key findings in that survey to to set the table here?
**PL** : Yeah, and I should say, I mean, as you know, McKay, but, for the listeners, you were a big part of why this survey got fielded in the first place, with the piece that you wrote just opening up the door to thinking about what are the moral effects of this new trend. So, yeah, let me talk, I’ll give maybe some high-level findings that were interesting to us, and we can dig into those, if of interest. So, just just starting with the basics. So, our survey found is that it was a nationally representative survey of American adults, but we oversampled, meaning we did a significant size of young adults, ages 18 to 29. And what we found is about 55% of adults are gambling at least monthly, and 1 in 8 are gambling every day, which is remarkable. Another interesting statistic here, about 4 in 10 of those gambling say that making money is the main reason, which, again, is remarkable —
**MC** : Can can we just pause on that one briefly for those who are not acquainted with gambling or sports betting? You know, most survey data, most research on this — and it’s been extensively documented — suggests that around 98%, 95 to 99% of sports bettors will lose money over the long run. It is not a habit where you make money. So the people who think they’re making money have been kind of successfully deluded by the sports betting industry or the gambling industry. But sorry to interrupt.
**PL** : So I’ll dig into the data a little more here, and President Christofferson actually referenced this kind of finding, which is, so in our survey, we asked some questions about this, about do you think you’ll make money, do you think gambling is a good way to make money? So, I’ll just give you two little things here. So over 80% of people think that people that gamble lose more than they make, right? So that’s not quite up to what the statistics would say you’ll lose, but a large majority of people are saying, “Oh yeah, I expect gamblers to lose money.” Except when you ask them about themselves, right? And then 50% of people think that they’ll win if they gamble. Even 20% of people think that they’ll win consistently if they’re gambling often, which, right, it’s just exactly opposite to the way the gambling industry is organized, the way that it’s made.
Again, I think President Christofferson said a great point about this. He said something I can’t quote him, but something along the lines of, “Please remember that the revenues of these gambling organizations are because people are losing, right?” So when we see these giant revenues, it’s because people lose. If people aren’t losing, the industry doesn’t work at all. So, anyway, that was an interesting finding for us.
Another really concerning one, I think, is 2 in 5 people know someone with a gambling problem. So this isn’t just I know someone that gambles. Two in 5 people say that they know someone with a serious gambling problem. One in 5 say that they’ve been hurt by someone else’s gambling problem. That’s really concerning to me. Again, this is just we go back not that far, and there’s not that many people engaged in this mobile betting. And now it’s everywhere, like I said, 55% of adults are gambling at least monthly. And the impacts, we’re already, even though this is a new trend, we’re already seeing these really negative effects manifest themselves.
**MC** : Yeah, I mean, there’s so much to dig into there. To me, when I looked at the data that you collected, the kind of findings in your survey, like the thing that jumped out to me is just that this is quietly hurting a lot of people who might not talk about it, right? Like, we all hear the stories about the kind of gambling addicts who are, you know, gambling away their mortgages, and, you know, losing all their money and end up in rehab centers. And those are the kind of dramatic stories, but there are millions and millions of people who might not be diagnosable gambling addicts who are still losing time, you know, agency, whose experiences, peace of mind, emotional well-being, mental well-being to this habit, right? And then and it’s affecting the people around them.
I mean, I guess this is a a good time to kind of share briefly my experience with it, for those who are are not aware. I wrote this piece in The Atlantic, earlier this year, in which The Atlantic staked me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of an NFL season. And the idea was they wanted me to, in the midst of my reporting on the industry, actually feel what it was like to be a gambler, experience the phenomenon firsthand.
And I write about this in the piece, which my editors chose to title “My Year as a Degenerate Gambler.” Much to the chagrin of my wife, I should say. But, you know, the thing that I noticed about it, more than anything, and the thing that’s still stuck with me, is that it just consumed my attention to a degree that I was not at all prepared for. Like, I write about how I was, you know, hiding in the bathroom and in the kitchen pantry so that I could gamble without my kids seeing. I was routinely staying up till 1 in the morning, scrolling through DraftKings and FanDuel looking for bets. I was watching hours and hours and hours of games that I didn’t care about because I had money on them. And it affected my marriage. It affected my, you know, my presence as a parent, a father. I was even, you know, busted by my wife at one point checking DraftKings at church, which was not a good moment.
But, you know, the thing about these apps is they are designed to be addictive. They’re designed to be compulsively usable products, and they’re very well designed. And so, my kind of experience with it really left me thinking about all the people who didn’t go into this as journalists, kind of open-eyed about what the experience would be, and who are just sort of, you know, logging on thinking, “Oh, this will be a fun pastime,” and it turns out that it can really suck you in and start warping your psyche, warping your your experience before you even know what’s happened.
**PL** : Exactly. For so many people, I think they think gambling is, “Oh, it’s just my thing. It’s my, you know, whatever you want to call it, my dirty secret, or but it’s just me, right? It’s just me doing this thing.” And, right, the truth is, it’s not. I mean, this is not a vice that is that stays with just you. It has immediate impacts on other people. Again, going to President Christofferson’s really, really powerful talk yesterday is he talks about this, the second and third and fourth order effects of gambling, right? There certainly are negative personal effects. We can’t deny that. That is absolutely true. But the idea that it won’t have impacts on those around us is just completely false, yeah.
**MC** : Well, let’s actually dig into into that talk because, to me, I’ll tell you the thing that stood out to me overall while watching it, and then I revisited it in preparation for this conversation. The first kind of half of the talk was reciting a lot of the statistics we just talked about. He clearly had a very strong grasp of the industry, of the online gambling landscape, you know, even was talking about the kinds of bets people can make on prediction markets, including, you know, the timing of the Second Coming. And he had the great joke, you know, “Where do you go to collect on that bet?”
But so it was clear that he was kind of, you know, it was well-researched, he was well-briefed, he had done the work. And the first half of it, you know, almost kind of read like it could have been, you know, an op-ed in The New York Times or, you know, a piece in The Atlantic or whatever. But then, about halfway through, he pivoted to what I think was the real point of the talk, and what made it, honestly, kind of unique. He said, I’ll just quote him, he said, “For us as Latter-day Saints, overarching all other concerns is the fact that gambling is morally wrong. Gambling is built on the desire to obtain something for nothing. Its structure requires that any gain comes at others’ expense. It’s hard to reconcile that with the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.”
So right there, you know, I think it kind of struck me that this is a really unusual way to talk about this issue. You know, we’re seeing a lot of national discourse now about gambling as it’s become more and more popular. You know, we have articles in all these national publications, investigations, members of Congress are starting to talk about it, people like you and I are digging into it. I feel like what we have been lacking, honestly, is a strong, moral case made by people with religious and spiritual authority and credibility. Which is strange to me because, historically, that’s where a lot of the pushback to this vice came from. It came from churches, it came from religious leaders. President Christofferson kind of modeled a moral case against gambling that I thought was was really necessary to the discourse. I’m wondering what you thought of that.
**PL** : Absolutely, McKay. I think that’s exactly right. Look, we all recognize, as you said, and we talk about this, we all recognize some of the immediate negative impacts. This is like any other addiction, and that comes with some really serious social issues. But what’s been missing is a strong, moral argument. And President Christofferson just so clearly lays that out. And I think there’s a couple of really important pieces of this. One is, he does talk about, “Hey, addiction is real, and there are real impacts to being addicted to something.” Now, we could be talking about things that people think of more often with addiction, but he talks about the principle that you just referenced when you were talking about your own experience of, when I’m obsessed with this and spending all this time doing this, I’m not doing anything else, right? And so there’s a serious opportunity cost.
**MC** : Well, I’ll just say, while my wife was listening to it, she obviously doesn’t have a gambling issue, but she said, “I just kept thinking about Instagram, right? I kept thinking about social media for me.” And I think a lot of people could listen to that talk without ever having gambled and apply the principles to other potentially addictive habits. Anyway, sorry, go on.
**PL** : Yeah, I don’t think there is any of us that were actually listening — you know, if we didn’t have a gambling problem, I’m guessing we’re all thinking, “Oh yeah, that thing that I do, I anyway.” But so those principles are true kind of across the board. But to me, the one where that just really stuck out to me was this idea of, “This is an attack on spiritual sensitivities,” and and he actually used that that term, spiritual sensitivities and I really appreciate it. He’s quoting President Oaks from a talk President Oaks gave a number of years ago.
But this is an idea that just has been completely absent from the conversation, which is what is this doing to the very, like, moral nature of who we are as human beings, not only as individuals, but I think also as a society? What does it mean if, I mean, in terms of prediction markets, for example, what does it mean if I approach everything as a transaction? What does it mean that if I approach everything as a way to make money at someone else’s expense? What is that going to do to me as an individual, you know, whether we’re talking about in a religious context or not, but in this case, what is that going to do with my ability to be prompted by the Spirit, to understand different things that I should be doing?
I mean, it just it undermines so many of the values and virtues that I think make up a stable person, but also a society that has to have some trust, and has to have living values to actually make it work. So that was a contribution to the conversation that I think was so unique, and so needed, and so important.
**MC** : Yeah, to me, that issue is most vividly on display with the prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket where you can gamble on war. You can gamble on political assassinations. You can gamble on wildfires and famine and whether the Artemis II space shuttle will explode mid-flight.
And, you know, I use this example when I give talks on the subject, but I say, you know, imagine that you woke up tomorrow morning and read in the news that China had invaded Taiwan. The normal human response would be, “That’s horrible,” and you’re thinking about the people there, you’re thinking about the geopolitical consequences. That’s the kind of human response to learn about a war breaking out. But what if you had placed a Polymarket bet on China invading Taiwan? Is your first thought, “How much money did I just make,” right? And like, what does that do to you? What does that do to your soul? How does that kind of warp your sense of right and wrong, your sense of ethics, your basic humanity? And I just think that we are playing a very dangerous game by allowing people to gamble on things like this, and not only allowing it, but normalizing it.
I mean, Kalshi was a sponsor of the World Cup, right? Like, Kalshi is a major sponsor of major, you know, sporting events and world events that we all think of as, you know, important, wholesome, you know, activities and, you know, demonstrations of human excellence. And then you have this gambling app that’s that’s sponsoring it. I just I feel like we are really going down a dangerous path.
**PL** : Yeah, and, McKay, I mean, you’re talking about these serious issues like a war or, you know, an assassination. I think these same principles manifest themselves even at a much more what may seem to be a harmless context like a tennis match, right? I mean, you’ve spoken about this really eloquently. You know, if I’m placing a bet on McKay Coppins to win that particular tennis match, and he doesn’t come through, I find myself just hating you, right? How could you lose that match?
And, right, so there’s a couple of things going on here. One is, I’m just feeding this poison into my soul, right, of I’m going to start disliking because someone didn’t didn’t perform at the level I had hoped they did they would in a sports — that alone, I think, should cause us a lot of pause, that it’s allowing these kind of feelings, and, in some cases, even hatred because we’ve got money riding on this, right? But so at that even that basic level, I think this is really problematic. And as you recorded in your article, this has gone a lot worse than that, right? People making fake bomb threats so that a sporting event would be canceled so they didn’t lose their money. So, I mean, there are all kinds of —
**MC** : They send death threats to athletes. They send, you know, the most vile messages you can imagine. I actually interviewed a tennis player, a professional tennis player, who told me that her entire career, from basically the time she was 16, 17, has been defined by getting the most irate, abusive, violent messages imaginable from gamblers when she loses a match. And that she had just come to accept that as part of being a professional athlete because gambling does warp your psychology. And she would say, “You know, often I would get a message that was just absolutely horrible, and then I would click on his account, you know, his social media account, and it’s like him with his 1-year-old son, you know?” And she just had this thought like, “You probably wouldn’t normally do this. You wouldn’t say this stuff to me if you were in your right mind. But you lost a bunch of money on on a match, and you just lost your mind.” And I think that that is actually a very common experience of gambling, and it’s something that we don’t actually think about enough if we’re not professional athletes or college —
**PL** : Yeah, so, McKay, to me, I feel like this gambling and prediction markets, just betting on everything, to me, I feel like it’s just, we’re intentionally putting in poison, right, into our social fabric. And it would be foolish for us to think that injecting poison into all these contexts is not going to have really negative effects.
And again, back to this talk, I think that’s what President Christofferson is suggesting. Like, this is a very serious thing. This is not just me sitting on my couch, you know, engaging in in harmless entertainment, right? This has serious negative effects on society and and on us as individuals. One of the points he makes, maybe I’ll read this quote, and would love your thoughts on it or when we can riff on this a little bit, but he quotes President Oaks, and he says, “The act of taking or trying to take something from someone else without giving value in return is destructive of spiritual sensitivities.”
And again, I think we’ve been talking about this idea of, you know, what happens to us in our perspective on others. This quote also brings another aspect into this, which is we’re trying to get something for nothing, and we’re not providing any kind of contribution to society with gambling. We’re not investing in something that creates. We’re not providing — we’re just trying to get something at the expense of someone else, which is a really problematic state of mind to be in. It’s all about self. It’s actually hoping for someone else to do poorly —
**MC** : Yeah.
**PL** : This was really powerful to me.
**MC** : And, you know, one thing that I noticed when I was gambling for that story for The Atlantic was that I found myself during that experiment thinking a lot more about money, and how to make money, and how to get money quickly. And, you know, even my social media algorithms, like, as they started to see me spend more time on, you know, gambling websites and on these gambling apps, started to feed me videos for get-rich-quick schemes. And I, you know, in my normal life, I would never be interested in that stuff and look at it. But like, in this kind of warped context where I’m spending so many of my waking hours trying to figure out how to extract money from nothing, I’m like, “Well, maybe I I would be interested in this, you know, vending machine MLM, right?”
Like, there is this, you know, he talks about being destructive to spiritual sensitivities. I think that’s true. I think there is an inherent greed in gambling that changes the way that you interact with concepts like money and capitalism and the and, you know, the people around you, that is really bad. I mean, related to that, I actually wanted to ask you about this. You know, another thing he said in the talk was that Christians should think of their money and resources as stewardships. And in that context, he said, “The question is not merely whether a purchase is legal, but whether it builds anything in us, in our families, or in those around us. In the end, gambling produces nothing of value and enriches only its purveyors.”
**PL** : Yeah, and so this is something that I think is another really important contribution that’s often not part of the conversation. And this is where I think a lot of people get some comparisons with gambling wrong. You know, so for example, a lot of young people that I interact with and some other colleagues in the university, you know, you’ll have people making comparisons to, “Oh, well, gambling’s just like the stock market, right? It’s the same thing as the stock market. You’re making a bet on whether a company’s going to do well or not.”
And I think there’s a number of differences, but I think there’s a really fundamental difference there in that when I invest in a particular company, yes, you could say I’m making a bet. I’m hoping that that company does well, but I’m giving that company money for them to build something, right? And if they’re successful in building that, there’s shares that come back from that, right? There’s, you know, there’s profit that comes back from that. That’s very different. That’s a very different process than “I’m hoping you lose so that I get your money,” right? It’s not “I’m building something.” It’s literally taking away from someone else.
**MC** : It’s zero sum.
**PL** : It’s a zero sum, yeah. And so, I think there’s a fundamental difference there where we get these comparisons wrong. And yeah, I think there’s a really important point outside of gambling here, but related to this, which is resources are, and we believe this, right, within our faith tradition, resources are a sacred stewardship. And we are asked to use those things to build the world around us, certainly build a life that’s comfortable for us and our family, where we can progress and seek the things that we need. But also, right, we believe we should be contributing to society around us and helping others. And this is just fundamentally opposite from that. And I think that’s a really powerful point that President Christofferson makes there.
**MC** : Well, it’s also, again, a moral and theological counterpoint to those who say, “I just look at gambling as entertainment, right?” It’s like anything else. I give myself a budget, and, you know, I could have spent this money going to a Broadway show or a, you know, golfing or whatever, but I thought it would be fun to play blackjack with, you know, for a few hours, and I lost all the money that I had, and that was fine with me. You know, I do know people like that, and I know people who do have the kind of self-control and self-discipline to cut themselves off after a certain period of time and they think that was money well spent.
You know, one of the counterpoints that I think President Christofferson made there was that even pursuing entertainment should ideally be something that enriches you, enriches your family, gives you an experience that you’ll remember or enjoyment, you know, or even, you know, something to think about. It’s not really the same with gambling, but he also made another kind of interesting case against those who say, “Gambling isn’t a problem for me. I can do it responsibly,” where he invoked the Apostle Paul’s counsel about eating food that had been sacrificed to idols, right? And he said, you know, basically, even if you believe the act itself doesn’t compromise your faith, your example can become a stumbling block for someone else.
**PL** : Yeah, and I love this, and frankly, as I was thinking about this, McKay, that this example or this principle is, I think, right, one of the main reasons gambling or sports betting, mobile betting, has grown so fast, which is, it’s been completely normalized, and it’s been treated as something that it’s not that big of a deal, right? And other people are seeing it like, “Oh, that guy’s a good guy, and he’s doing it. It’s probably not that big.” I think there’s been a lot of confusion about the morality of sports betting and gambling and that’s had tremendous negative impact. So I love this example of, “Hey, be careful about the example that you’re providing.”
I mean, this goes back to what we were talking about before. Gambling is not an exercise in isolation, right? Be very careful about the example you’re providing to other people that are watching. They’re going to come up with their own interpretation of what you’re doing, and right, and in a lot of cases that’s going to be justification, or it’s going to be a green light for them to say, “Well, maybe I’ll do this as well.”
So I again, I think gambling has grown so fast in part because people see other people doing it. It’s not like a normal vice that has a lot of stigma. Gambling used to have stigma. Mobile betting does not have stigma, and so, all of a sudden, like, “Well, what’s the big deal?” I can’t tell you how many conversations — you’ve probably had more — but I can’t tell you how many conversations where it’s almost a surprise, especially around prediction markets, for whatever that’s worth, it’s almost a surprise that we’re talking about moral issues, right? It’s like, “Oh, is is that as morally wrong as, you know, going to the casino?” And you think, “Wow, it’s amazing that society so quickly got to a place where we’re just comfortable with this. It’s not a big deal.”
**MC** : Haha, I mean, it’s a triumph of marketing by the sports betting industry that it has become so normalized so quickly that people don’t think of it as something that deserves shame or stigma, that they don’t think of it as a vice at all or even gambling. I mean, the prediction markets, in particular, the very fact that we call Kalshi and Polymarket prediction markets, is a branding win for them, right?
I do sense, though, and, you know, I’ve been talking about this on college campuses, I’ve been reporting about it, I’ve been doing interviews, I get the sense that there is a potential cultural tipping point approaching. You know, last month, The New York Times had this big investigation of DraftKings where they revealed, among other things, that the company had developed an AI model to identify users most likely to lose money so that it could target them with promotions. And then, when employees at DraftKings developed a model that similarly that they could use to identify high-risk users, you know, like users who were demonstrating addictive or compulsive behaviors, so that they could help them, DraftKings sidelined the project, said, “We don’t want to pursue that.”
Just recently, a ProPublica reporter, an investigative reporter, posed as a problem gambler on DraftKings, basically making wild, reckless bets to see how the company would respond, and, you know, DraftKings executives have told me, for example, that they have all these responsible gaming safeguards where they try to weed out problem gamblers. In his experience, he was barraged with promotions and invited to join a VIP program, right? So, these stories are getting a lot of attention.
I get the sense that there is growing scrutiny on this very powerful and lucrative industry and I think, you know, I’m a journalist. I’m a believer in journalism. I think journalism like this can raise public awareness, it can shape legislation, it can even inform, you know, sermons by religious leaders. I will say, President Christofferson very graciously quoted from my story in The Atlantic, though he referred to me as a journalist instead of a degenerate gambler, which is how my editors chose to describe me, which was nice of him, but the thing is, like, journalists are not moral leaders, right? Neither are legislators or regulators.
And so, to kind of bring this conversation full circle, I think the thing that’s important about President Christofferson’s talk is that it’s coming from somebody with a moral credibility that millions of people in the Latter-day Saint faith consider a prophet, seer, and revelator. They consider when he speaks, they listen, right? And so I should say, you know, he is not alone among religious leaders just recently to start speaking up about this issue. I think, what was it, the Assemblies of God leaders recently came out with a statement about how gambling can erode Christian character. The Southern Baptist Convention last year formally condemned sports betting. So, we’re seeing a little bit of momentum in this direction. I wonder what you think the reaction will be from people of faith, both in our our faith, but also in general to their spiritual and religious leaders speaking out about this. Do you think this could move the needle?
**PL** : Well, so I certainly hope so, and so I think there’s two really important pieces here. I agree with you, I think the gambling industry in the last few years has just kind of taken the world by storm, and I think there are more people now being like, “Wait a minute. I think we need to slow down here a little bit. This this seems to be moving out of control and too fast.” But there’s two really important pieces here, and one is, like you talked about, one is reporting, you know, journalism that just and other voices that just open up people’s understanding to gambling, right?
At the end of the day, this is an industry completely built on your ability to lose, right? And that understanding, we just need more of that. And I think there’s just been a real lack of understanding around the odds, right, around the basic truth of gambling, the way the industry works, what it preys on, all those kinds of things, what what you what your article did so well.
And that other piece that like we’ve been talking about that’s been missing that’s now here, and I hope more and more and more, is that moral voice. Yes, this is bad for all these concrete, you know, definable reasons, you know, just look at the way the market is, that’s not good, right? Beware. But please beware also that this is a tremendously important moral issue. Gambling is a, I mean, the growth of gambling is a spiritual crisis is one way to put it, right? It’s undermining not just spirituality, but our goodness. It’s undermining values that we need in society. So, I’m hopeful that this message, both the concrete understanding of what gambling actually is and how destructive it can be, along with the moral argument of of why we need to stay away from this, those things together can can really move the needle. I expect it will. I’m actually really interested to, I’ve been thinking about what are ways that we might be able to try and measure that, so more more on that later —
**MC** : This is not a concrete finding, but I will say that after President Christofferson’s talk, probably every Latter-day Saint friend I have sent me the same video from Instagram. You may have seen it. It was a group of apparently LDS young men watching the talk on their TV and kind of collapsing in devastation to the floor, and the caption was, “It’s been a good run, boys,” and that suggests, I think, maybe at least a grudging repentance and maybe there will be some change.
**PL** : Yeah, and maybe one thing to note here, we didn’t talk about this in the statistics, but one thing for listeners to be aware of, there is a download reload cycle, right? And I think we have to be aware that that’s something that will be tempting for a lot of people to do is they’ll hear this message, they’ll say, “Ah, I’m going to I’m going to get rid of it,” but there’ll be a real temptation, right, to re-download it, you know, 3 out of 4 men that delete the app, re-download it later on, right? And so, that’s a serious concern, but yeah, I think this combination of understanding the industry and the moral reason of why we need to stay away, I really am hopeful that this can be the start of moving the needle on getting people to stay away.
**MC** : Well, Paul, thanks for all your work that you have done on this issue, and thanks for coming on “Deseret Voices.” I appreciate it.
**PL** : So fun to talk to you, McKay. Thanks so much.
