HELLO FUTURE: The Future of Sports Gambling

What Are We Betting On Next? Kevin Cirilli sits down with Dustin Gouker, one of America’s leading experts on sports betting and the former Vice President of Content for North America at Catena Media, to explore how gambling has become a defining part of modern sports culture — and where it’s now crossing the line. As news breaks that NBA figures including Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier have been arrested in alleged Mafia-linked betting and game-fixing schemes, Kevin and Dustin examine what this moment says about the multi-billion-dollar legal sports-wagering industry. From fantasy leagues to real-time micro-bets on who scores next, the rise of mobile betting has turned fans into participants — and every play into a potential payout. But as AI, analytics, and inside data blur the boundary between prediction and manipulation, what happens to the integrity of the game itself? Is this the new frontier of entertainment — or proof that the digital gambling boom has outpaced its safeguards? This is the high-stakes, high-speed future of fandom — and the biggest integrity test in modern sports.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
What is the future of sports gambling? I mean, we
live in a world where everything now you can bet
on with polymarkets and fantasy leagues and sports betting. I mean,
you don't have to go to Vegas anymore to do
all of this stuff. Not to mention this big scandal
last week with the mafia and the NBA. It's wild. Hello, Future,

(00:34):
it's me keV. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier,
the Planet Deserved. The year is twenty twenty five. My
name is Kevin Sirilli, and my guest today is someone
who tracks all of the sports gambling, not just sports gambling,
but betting on everything, and today we're specifically going to
talk about sports. His name is Dustin Gouker. I've been

(00:55):
following Dustin Goucker for years and he's got a substack
on addicted Markets. He talks about poly markets, but he
also talks about sports gambling. Dustin, my friend, thank you
so much for coming on. I know that it has
been a wild weekend for you, buddy, as you make
your way through this NBA saga.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, there's just been a lot of news around sports
betting and prediction markets and how this ties in with
players and leagues and technology, and it's only going to
get worse as time goes on.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Let's talk through a little bit about what happened, which
the indictment alleges, which is essentially some injury information was
leaked to betters. Correct.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, the big one is Terry Rosier, who was a
member of the Charlotte Hornets in March twenty twenty three,
allegedly told some folks that he would leave the game
injury early with an injury. He said, said you should
bet my hunters, basically just conveying that information to other people.
More than two hundred one thousand dollars in bets were

(02:01):
then placed on its unders at sports books around the country,
and then he left the game, and obviously those bets
would pay off. And this is a huge thing in
terms of game integrity and legal sports betting and everything
that's going on in the world. And it's a big
point for sports leagues and for prediction markets too as
we figure out whether they what they're doing in terms

(02:23):
of integrity and sports and all of this. It's just
a big story in the world of sports, not just
in gamble.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
So the technology of all of this, I mean, you
and I were talking about this the other week at
Penn State when we were speaking up there. But the
technology behind all of this, I mean, you can bet
on anything in sports and the prediction markets try to
put in perspective for us just how much this industry
has boomed and how technologies impact on it has led

(02:54):
the folks who are trying to regulate it to really
have to try to stay on offense.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, we had sports betting kind of limited fashion in
Nevada and a few other places prior to twenty eighteen,
and then in twenty eighteen, the Supreme Court struck down
a federal ban around sports betting that would let states
legalize sports betting as they chose to do so, and
that really led to the proliferation of online betting that
was pretty small in the US here it was offshore.

(03:22):
There are places in Costa Rica and elsewhere where you
could bet online, but not really legally. So now we
have more than twenty states where you can bet online, DraftKings,
fandle lots of places. Now you can also bet at
Calshi and polymarket prediction markets. You can bet on fantasy
apps where you parlay different people to do things in games,

(03:42):
and it's just huge. It's exploded in the last eight
years with the legalization of sports betting. And yes, it's
easier to bet on things, it's easier arguably to manipulate
those things, but they're also being caught because of technology.
We would never have known that Terry was here, was
doing this if he hadn't placed his associates, hadn't placed

(04:03):
these bets at regulated sports picks. So technology caught it all.
These bets came in suspiciously, they were flagged by a
service that it flags weird bets on games and players,
and then we found out about it. Obviously two years later.
This FBI investigation came after a few years of work,
apparently under the Biden administration it started, and now we

(04:24):
have the scandal on our hands.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Okay, So for folks who don't necessarily follow prediction markets
or poly markets, or you know, maybe they just think
of fantasy football and that's their entry point, talk to me, like,
at a very basic level, what are poly markets and
what are the predictive markets. It's not just are the

(04:47):
Eagles going to win the Super Bowl? It's is this
player at this D three school on the volleyball team
going to start right I mean, it's insane how many
bets there are.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, well it's not quite there yet. For Calshi and
poly Market, you can bet on money lines and point
spreads and totals and whether people will score touchdowns in
football games. But this is new just this year. They
started launching this in January at Calshi in in a
regulated fashion, so you will be able to presumably bet
on NBA props, what players are doing, what college players

(05:19):
are doing, whether we get down to the D three level.

Speaker 1 (05:22):
That's what about high school.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
I presume they won't do that. There's there's a line
where they seemly don't cross. You can bet on in
the high school offshore right now, sometimes for football and basketball.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
You can bet on high school sports on what platforms, Well, these.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Are offshore sports books. Things like bet online and Bovada
sometimes offers sports betting on high school games.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yes, that's crazy to me.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
So or even Little League World Series is something you
can bet on offshore too, not on regulated sportsbooks and
not at prediction markets.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
So see what is that sea. I'm not into this world,
so I know nothing and I'm not going to pretend
that like I do. You can bet on the Little
League World Series and it's not regulated.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yah. Yeah, it's just it happens at an offshore sports book.
Generally places like Costa Rica is the most commonplace, but
Antigua as well. These are places that serve a lot
of countries around the world, but you can bet on them.
In the United States, it's definitely not legal, but you
can bet on them.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
Which is wild. So I guess how is technology being leveraged.
You said that technology helps catch some of this stuff,
but I would imagine it would be very hard to
catch it. I mean, like, what are some of the
technologies that's being deployed to prevent these illegalities from happening
in the sports world.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, well, in the regulated space against sports books like
draft Kings and fandle, and then friction market space against
sites like calshi. You are ky seed, You're getting somebody's
finding out who you are, know your customer, you know
who that person is on the other end making the bet.
That is something that doesn't happen in a lot of
other forums and again offshore, So that is a great
piece of information that helps people figure out whether something

(06:59):
is being manipulated in a real sports match. Again, this
is part of how this happened. We know that bets
replaced by a bushet account, so we know you can
then find out who those accounts are because they're to
have real people attached to them on the other end.
And again it's an argument for regulation that we caught
this because people were dumb enough to try to fix
games on regulated sports books. If you were doing it,

(07:20):
really you'd want to do it offshore and not in
the legal space. But again, like all these bets come in,
there's companies that deal with this all the time. When
a bet comes in that is suspicious, it is flagged.
Sports books are told, leagues are told, and then you
go from there and you get an investigation, and some
of that information ended up in this in this FBI
investigation that led to charges against Rosier.

Speaker 1 (07:42):
Today, how is fantasy football an on ramp for these
prediction markets for sports betting?

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, I mean, fantasy football was really how we ended
up with sports betting in a lot of ways. I'd
say it's it's not per se gambling. But we've had
fantasy baseball, fantasy foot ball in the United States here
for decades. It's been wildly popular, you know, tens of
millions of people do fantasy football every year on the NFL,
and that was the on ramp. We again, going back

(08:11):
ten years, DraftKings and Fandel introduced daily fantasy sports where
you could do it faster, you could do it just
on a weekend of games, and that really did end
up being again that on ramp that you talk about
that we now have sports betting. It's it's set the
stage thing that came after it, and yeah, now we
have these fantasy brands that are really the biggest sports

(08:33):
books in the United States now.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Fascinating. It's fascinating. Dustin Galker really appreciate you making the
time for us. I know it's been a really crazy day.
If people want to subscribe to what you're doing, how
do they find you.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
I'm on substack. The closing line about gambling and the
event horizon for prediction markets awesome.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Thank you, my friend,