In 2025, Americans legally wagered more than $165 billion on sports, money moving through an industry that, outside of Nevada, didn’t legally exist until 2018. Somewhere inside that number is a much harder one to see: how much of it isn’t entertainment at all, but sports betting addiction quietly working its way through a generation of men who never thought they had a gambling problem. That’s where this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast begins.
Marc Azoulay sits down with Dr. Michael Zhang. He is a psychologist who spent years treating gambling-related harm clinically before founding Incumental, a digital recovery support app built specifically for people in the thick of a gambling problem. The conversation moves fast, because the landscape it’s describing is moving fast. Since the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, the activity has expanded from a Nevada-only market capped at roughly $5 billion a year to nationwide legal wagering near $167 billion last year alone about $150 billion of which gets paid back out, leaving roughly $17 billion in industry revenue, on top of another $18 billion or so collected annually in state gambling taxes.
This isn’t just casinos and sportsbooks anymore, either. Dr. Zhang walks through how the same psychological mechanics now show up in prediction markets, cryptocurrency and CFD trading, and loot boxes built into video games aimed at kids, an entire ecosystem, as he puts it, that increasingly looks “set up to turn most people into gamblers.”
The episode works through some of the key realities he’s seen firsthand:
There’s a saying that’s common in recovery communities that Marc brings up midway through the conversation: addiction is sexy, and recovery is ugly. The gambling industry has spent a decade building frictionless, personalized, endlessly accessible products. Recovery support, by comparison, has often been clunky, stigmatized, and reactive, something you find only after you’ve already hit bottom, then found a lower bottom underneath that. Dr. Zhang’s bet with Incumental is that recovery has to borrow the same tech-forward playbook the betting industry uses, just pointed in the opposite direction: short, guided audio sessions built to interrupt an urge in the moment it’s happening, and an anonymous peer community partly staffed by people with lived experience who want to give back.
This episode isn’t about shaming men who place a bet on a Sunday afternoon. It’s about naming what happens when an entire industry is built on the premise that a casual bettor becomes a lifelong customer and giving men a real, accessible off-ramp before the losses end up defining the next decade of their lives.
This episode is for men who bet on sports, trade prediction markets, or play casino games even casually and have quietly wondered whether it’s become something more. It’s for parents trying to figure out how to talk to a son about gambling before a first big win hardens into a pattern. And it’s for therapists, coaches, and clinicians who want a clearer, more current picture of how quickly this landscape is moving and why once-a-week therapy alone often isn’t enough to keep up.
Sports betting addiction is a form of gambling disorder, classified by the DSM-5 as a behavioural addiction. It shows up as a persistent pattern of betting on sports that continues despite financial, relational, or mental health harm. A core feature Dr. Zhang highlights is the skill illusion: many men believe that enough research, stats, and insider knowledge can let them “beat the odds” the way a professional handicapper does. In reality, almost no one who develops a gambling problem ever turns it into a sustainable profession, which is itself a sign that the system, not their strategy, is what’s driving the outcome.
Since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the federal ban on sports betting (previously, legal single-game wagering was confined almost entirely to Nevada), the market has expanded into dozens of states plus Washington, D.C. National handle has grown from roughly $5 billion a year in the pre-2018 era to more than $165 billion in 2025, with sportsbooks keeping somewhere around $16–17 billion of that as revenue and states collecting billions more in tax revenue. Beyond traditional sportsbooks, Dr. Zhang also points to the parallel growth of online casino games, prediction markets, and crypto/CFD trading, all of which function like gambling, whether or not they’re legally classified that way.
The clearest signal, according to Dr. Zhang, is tracking your actual win-loss balance over time rather than your most recent session. Warning signs include chasing losses with the belief you can win them back, feeling unable to stop even when you want to, constant preoccupation with gambling, and watching the impact spread beyond your bank account into relationships, mental health, and work. Most people experiencing a real problem aren’t keeping score at all; they’re only remembering the last few minutes, not the last few years.
Dr. Zhang’s most immediate suggestion is to download the Incumental app and schedule a free onboarding session directly with him to talk through your specific situation. For anyone who wants additional support, the National Problem Gambling Helpline is available 24/7 by call or text.
Dr. Zhang can be reached and connected with on LinkedIn. You can learn more about Incumental, his gambling recovery support app, at incumental.com.
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