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: An estimated one in three men under 30 bet on sports, and roughly one in three of those men show signs of a real problem with it. The actual test for a problem isn't whether someone wins or loses on a given night. It's whether, tracked over time, they're net negative, chasing those losses, and unable to stop even when they want to. Across the hundreds of clients Dr. Zhang has treated, average lifetime gambling losses run well over $100,000, with some in the hundreds of thousands and a few in the millions. Most of those clients also carried a comorbid depression or anxiety diagnosis that was largely driven by the gambling itself. When the gambling resolved, so did much of the mental health burden. At its root, problem gambling is rarely about the money. It's about self-worth. Gambling supplies a fast, fake "boost," when what a person actually needs is steady, internal "worth." 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. For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online. Follow us on social media: https://mtr.bio/mens-therapy-online.
