David Sasaki

Repairing our relationship with technology to rebuild agency, purpose, and belonging.

[Richard V. Reeves @RichardvReeves]

Five months in, Boys & Men Online is cutting through the hysteria and thinking about what online life is actually doing to boys and men. @oso’s latest piece hits on the real conversations about prediction markets, porn, gaming, and AI that we need to be having.
https://t.co/ZtQaAnF3xc

[David Sasaki @oso]

I was nervous talking to a religiously affiliated publication about pornography. I thought they might be looking for a gotcha quote. But @grahamtoday was very fair-minded about a complicated topic that deserves more attention and nuance.

[Richard V. Reeves @RichardvReeves]

"Very few people want to be ‘the pornography professor’ or ‘the pornography funder’ at a foundation or at the NIH. It just doesn’t attract the attention that it deserves."
@oso discusses a new research focus for AIBM with @grahamtoday on @Deseret https://t.co/CscAqzVrgT

[David Sasaki @oso]

Our digital lives are too vast to be simply good or bad. But they can be better.

It's been 5 months since @aibm_org launched Boys & Men Online to improve our relationship with online gambling, pornography, gaming, and more.

We've got an exciting lineup of new talks and projects:

https://t.co/DfCMgpFoCd

[David Sasaki @oso]

@jameslynch32 @FamStudies @BradWilcoxIFS @grantjbailey @azpolicy Bs are now defined as "poor grades"!?

[Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky]

It’s actually crazy we don’t have RCTs of programs designed to help young men/women find love.

Finding recruits would be easy. Follow up time wouldn’t be that long. Numerous cheap candidate interventions are available but untested.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right.

Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025. They lost $16 billion of that. FanDuel pulled $6 billion of the losses. DraftKings pulled $5.3 billion. Every state with legal mobile sports betting collected a tax on the bettor side. New York alone took in over $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax revenue.

Layer the lottery on top. State lotteries generate over $90 billion a year. The bottom half of income earners account for roughly 70% of total spend. The average lottery player makes $38,000. A household earning $20,000 spends three times more on tickets than one earning $30,000. The implicit tax rate, meaning whatever the state keeps after prizes, runs 30 to 50% depending on the game. No other revenue source in America has that base and that rate.

The structural design is the engine. A single straight sports bet carries a hold of 4 to 5%. A four-leg parlay carries a hold above 30%. FanDuel and DraftKings spent five years rebuilding their apps to make parlays the default product. FanDuel's blended hold rate hit 11.4% in 2025, up from roughly 7% in 2022. The product got worse for the customer and the customer wagered more anyway.

Now look at the substitution. Nine US states have no state income tax. Seven of those nine run state lotteries. Seven of those nine have legalized sports betting. The states most committed to never taxing wealth are the same states running the largest extraction machines on people who cannot afford to lose. Read it as policy.

Here is what Buffett is actually pointing at. The state needs revenue. It can raise income tax on the top decile, or it can run a lottery plus a sports betting tax. The second option raises the money from the people who can least afford it. The first option becomes politically optional. New York's $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax is $1.2 billion the state did not have to ask of someone earning $5 million.

DraftKings and FanDuel sell a privatized collection mechanism for a regressive tax that the state never has to defend at the ballot box again. Voters approve legalization once. Collection runs forever. The state takes a cut. The wealthy get a quieter top bracket. The bettor's cut shrinks every quarter as the parlay menu gets pushed harder.

The function of a government, Buffett said, is not to play its people for suckers.

Thirty-nine state governments now do.

[David Sasaki @oso]

But what are prediction market users mostly betting on? Apparently, Indian cricket, which airs in the middle of the night in the US. Via @DustinGouker https://t.co/yD6NeG2E9X

[David Sasaki @oso]

The gamblification of our digital lives can harm the gamblers.

But it’s also yet another force pushing news to become a nihilistic spectacle.

From @sarafischer and ⁦@Christiiiinnne⁩ - The attention economy's dark side: gamifying tragedy https://t.co/kHZa4yjyV4

[David Sasaki @oso]

My pitch: a social media platform where men and women say nice things about each other.

Instead, from @RichardvReeves, we have this ...

[David Sasaki @oso]

“We are making virtue more difficult and vice easier to access.”

“… the combination of pornography and gambling does far, far more damage to young men than any ideological debate over ‘toxic masculinity.’”

[David French @DavidAFrench]

"Putting it all together, and we’ve devised a grim reality for younger Americans. If you want to watch porn or place a prop bet, the wind is at your back. If you want to go to college or start a business, the wind is in your face." https://t.co/Iu46cxjHbe

[David Sasaki @oso]

It's insanity that Robinhood nudges me to port over my wife's 401k right before offering me $100 to get a friend to gamble on prediction markets.

Kudos to @johnarnold for supporting @aibm_org's work to establish reasonable guardrails for online gambling.

https://t.co/xCzIuXdqfd

[David Sasaki @oso]

Everything you wanted to know about pornography, but were afraid to ask: Join us today at 2 pm ET for a fun webinar with four of the U.S.’s leading pornography researchers! https://t.co/rEbciwMzeJ

[American Institute for Boys and Men @aibm_org]

Pornography reaches boys and men everywhere—but research and policy are far behind. Join us on April 2 for a webinar featuring leading researchers including @oso, Marc Potenza, @kraus_phd, @EmRothman, Josh Grubbs and Bailey Way. Researchers will present their findings from the recent landscape scan and explore a field-wide research agenda. Register: https://t.co/Wo4CHsaVPv
https://t.co/Wo4CHsaVPv

[David Sasaki @oso]

If social media is now liable for addictive design, imagine what that means for gambling apps. Great thoughts from @andersknospe. And more analysis here:

https://t.co/MYg2ry48Fv

[American Institute for Boys and Men @aibm_org]

What does yesterday's court decision about Meta and YouTube signal about potential liability/addictiveness of sports betting and prediction market apps? AIBM's @andersknospe gives his reflections.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

People come at this issue for many reasons: states' rights, morality, closing a tax loophole, religion, protection of minors, etc. Regardless of why, there is a growing consensus that decisions around sports betting should return to states.
https://t.co/CNwGzY2gda

[Jonathan D. Cohen @JonathanDCohen1]

Kalshi runs these super predatory, untruthful ads. And now 41% of prediction market users say their main reason for using the platform is to make money

[American Institute for Boys and Men @aibm_org]

How are AI tools, crypto, and buy now, pay later services reshaping financial lives? And how do we protect consumers? Join AIBM’s @JonathanDCohen1 at @urbaninstitute on March 10 for a robust conversation on these topics. RSVP:
https://t.co/TlvsnsYvF2

[Prof G Markets @ProfGMarkets]

‘$500M Bet On The Iran Strike — Before It Happened’

Ed Elson (@edels0n) speaks with Jonathan Cohen about the massive wagers in prediction markets on the war with Iran.

Then he discusses Anduril’s (@anduriltech) funding round and why a new wave of defense tech startups are shaking up the defense sector with Dan Primack.

Finally, Ed gives his take on why defense might become the next investing trend.

Jonathan Cohen (@JonathanDCohen1) is the Policy Lead at the Institute for Boys and Men and author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling . Dan Primack (@danprimack) is the business editor at Axios and author of the Pro Rata newsletter.

Ep available now in reply👇

[Kevin Roose @kevinroose]

i am begging academics to study AI capabilities using frontier models.

the models used in this study (which is going to be cited for years as proof that "AI is bad at health advice") are GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Command R+, two obsolete models and one i've never heard of.

[David Sasaki @oso]

@AlfredoNarvaez @GKuhlenschmidt Además, el acento de los ricos de las lomas me molesta más que el acento de mis paisanos. Jejeje

[David Sasaki @oso]

@AlfredoNarvaez @GKuhlenschmidt Coincido. Pero es el mismo discurso de los conservadores estadounidenses en contra del concierto de Bad Bunny. Abrazo