So thank you.

However, there is another point we must disagree on, Leslie, and that is that I disagree with the distinction between kind of, you know, you've used the term kind of substance abuse or kind of perhaps even alcohol, because you're really what you're getting at there is the ingestion of a substance.

as a driver and a stimulant of a pathway towards an addiction.

This idea that one has to ingest something for it to penetrate our neurobiology or activate addiction.

The American Psychological Association, as of 2013, would disagree with you.

And gambling, as of 2013, and that is the experts here.

And really, you know, I know we're setting this up as you're acting as a straw man here for this argument.

you uh let's let's end on on the topic of how you are prevented from winning

Why those all those ingredients? Like, why did you as a sociologist say, I want to look into sports betting?

Yeah, there's two aspects to that.

And I find myself talking a lot about Canada and the UK and Irish media over the last 10 days.

And that's because I move here in 2010.

I spent, you know, five great years here.

And I left a kind of British and Irish context that was deregulating gambling at the time.

And of course, You know, at a time where the advent of the smartphone is about to change everything for a new generation anyway.

What is the interest of sports? sports team or networks that broadcast these games? Why are they okay being associated with online gaming sites? We see really famous players doing ads or famous broadcasters doing ads for these gambling sites.

How reliable is that picture? I mean, are we talking about a great deal of gambling harm? How much do we know about gambling harm?

Well, we know quite a lot, but it is very politically loaded.

Today, based on recent prevalent surveys, and I would acknowledge they are often flawed, they often use different measures, they have changed in recent years.

But currently, the most reliable statistics we have tell us that 2.7% of the UK population, that is 1.4 million adults, are harmed by gambling, and that is a vast number.

That's clinical level disorder from a small sample self-report prevalence survey.

And what we know about those is they tend to undercount rather than overcount.

We also know about gambling that many people, it can remain concealed.

In what way is gambling sort of related to this support for local teams?

I mean, you could always have a bet on a game and the outcome of a game, but it's gone way beyond that now.

Yeah, arguably in play is the single most transformative innovation in gambling in 100 years, particularly gambling on sport.

Yes, in many ways, you know, when we thought about sport and sports betting maybe 20, 30 years ago, it was a relatively kind of discontinuous experience.

And what I mean by that is a fan would place a game, place a bet, excuse me, before a game and then kind of get on with the business of fandom.

Yes, enjoy the game.

And if, of course, their bet came up, then they would think about it again and go back and pick up their winnings.

And I guess that meant that sports gambling was at the benign end of the industry.

talk to us about uh elliot a professional gambler who you spent time with

Okay, in what way do you mean has gambling hijacked sport?

Well, I guess the book adopts a kind of two decade frame for that.

And what I argue is that since the turn of the century, gambling firms have changed quite radically.

What we understand by the term gambling has changed quite radically.

And what I mean by that is this is an industry no longer kind of tethered to the race course or a day at the races.

This is an industry revolutionized by the advent of the Internet, then the smartphone, the rise of social media, data science, all in essence that the big tech giants of the Silicon Valley kind of unleashed.

And so I guess I'm talking about this new age engineering of what gambling is.

Yeah, that'll work, won't it?

It's no longer on the edge of the sport anymore.

No, and that's something I acknowledge in the book is, you know, you can't spend 400 pages talking about either the technology here or indeed the harms.

And a big part of my book actually looks at the genius of the market.

And part of that has an obvious hook for Irish listeners in the sense that key to that story is Paddy Power, you know.

Stuart Kenny, former CEO, is interviewed extensively in the book and he's very honest about the fact that we were rogues and we knew it and we knew how to We were very happy to offend and outrage the nation if indeed it made our target audience laugh.

And that target audience, of course, was young men.

And there was a genius to it such that I actually argue in the book that gambling companies were at the forefront of what marketing was in the noughties and into the decade that followed.

Are we a bit more responsible in Ireland and the Brits regarding sponsorship?