Sports betting, prediction markets, fantasy sports, and online gambling are capturing the focus of many young men. But what does Scripture say? Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm are joined by Michael Foster to examine the heart behind gambling and the crucial difference between Polymarket, the stock market, and biblical investing. As Foster observes, “Fundamentally, gambling is a tax on people whose hearts are not satisfied with God.” Together they explore why Christians should seek to create value through diligent labor. Their charge: Build, don’t gamble! As stewards of God’s resources, we’re called to bear one another’s burdens — not profit from them. 

Thanks for checking out the podcast. Just a quick reminder, not to use this as a replacement for the good pastoral leadership and teaching in your local church, but really just an encouragement for quiet faithfulness through the sufficiency of Scripture. Of scripture. So Jason, there's a there's a there's an epidemic among young men today with gambling different different than what I've seen I think in my lifetime and you got you got a lot of young men who are kind of binging on different kinds of gambling opportunities so that's what's going on That's what we want to talk about. You watch TV, it's dominating the advertising slots.

Yeah, you watch podcasts and boom, you know, all advertisements for gambling. You can just hit your phone, bing, bang, boom. You know, it used to be you had to go to a casino like that. Boy, things have accelerated, you know, over the years. We could talk about the different iterations of that.

But Here we have Michael Foster with us. Michael, it's so good to see you, man. Hey, good to be back. Appreciate you coming to our conference. That was a blessing.

It was really a joy to have your family there. It was a good time. I really appreciate it. Yeah. So this whole thing, this whole world of gambling, how do you respond to this idea that you've got, young men particularly are getting wrapped into gambling today?

Yeah, there's a lot of ways that come to it. I'll tell you kind of a funny story, maybe that gets us there. And when I was in finishing a bachelor's, I worked at Verizon selling phones. And this would have been, you know, 2010 or something like that. And this middle-aged woman comes in really upset about her iPhone and she's playing Farmville.

And oh, no, not Farmville. She's playing Candy Crush. And something was wrong. She wanted me to fix it. I had never played Candy Crush before.

So I'm working on her cell phone trying to help her out. And I'm listening to the tones, the music of Candy Crush, and I'm recognizing it. And it sounds just like the Wheel of Fortune slot machines at the casinos. And I can get into this a little more, but I used to be a professional card counter. As part of a card counting team, I played blackjack for a living.

They made a documentary about it called Holy Roller is the True Story of Christian Card Counting. We're highly financed. We had a bankroll of over a million dollars. I've won and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars playing blackjack. I've been kicked out of 180 casinos because they're allowed, it's a private business so they can back off anyone they want.

So it's not like I was doing anything illegal. The house can kick out whoever they want. They don't like people who went on purpose. So I'm very familiar with that world. And I was very familiar with that sound.

And I thought, man, that is fascinating that Candy Crush on a cell phone is using the sort of soothing music that you have at these Wheel of Fortune slot machines. And so you'll see these old people. Everyone thinks that casinos are full of like sexy, young, hip energy. They're not. They're full of old people gambling away the inheritances that they should be leaving to their children.

And they're listening to it and their brain is being put into this kind of soft state where they just keep spending money. So now, in a world where we have mobile games, they started utilizing all they've learned about human neurology to pacify the brain and make people addicts, little tiny wins and all that through things like Candy Crush. You have in-app purchases. Now that has extended into gaming. And I remember reading an article, which I don't have on hand, about how the designers of Fortnite, which is a very popular game, designed, kept playing around to see which music, which character design, all this stuff that really appeal to young people's senses and got them addicted to Fortnite.

And again, they're using the music, all this sort of stuff, in-app purchases. And now we have an entire generation that's grown up gamified. Everything's gamified. Everything's designed to hack neurology, in particular, male neurology. I mean, think about this.

You go to a gas station and you get little bonuses if you use their stupid card. You can get a small coffee, eight coffees. Everything's a game. Now they have tied that to where all of life can be bet on. Through polymarket, you can bet on things.

Through betting on, you take fantasy football, you turn football into something, instead of a spectator sport, now you gamify it through fantasy football. And then you start adding financial components to it. We have a generation that's grown up swimming in video games, in phone apps, to gas stations, to everything that's been gamified. And now it's turning into betting, right? Into actual gambling.

And that has created an epidemic of sports betting with young people in particular that a lot of people don't know. And as you just pointed out, these are being advertised all over social media on all sorts of sports games. They are teaching young people that it's a luck culture, which wasn't Western culture, right? So that's one way to get into it. This is a huge issue, but it's tied to the whole structure of modern society that's built around gamifying everything so that you can extract more value from customers.

You know, Zeratian, I bumped into a book that I haven't read. I just hit little parts of it by Verne Poirthras, you know, the Presbyterian theologian, really great guy. He wrote a book called Chance and the Sovereignty of God, a God-centered approach to probability and random events. Well, he's a mathematician. He's not just a theologian.

So he- It's a great book. Yeah, and he rolls through the complexities of probability theory, and particularly in gambling and things like that. It's very, very interesting. But he said in this book, fundamentally gambling is a tax on people whose hearts are not satisfied with God. It's a great line.

It's true. It's a great, yeah. 75% of lottery winners go bankrupt in five years, and they were never good with money, and more money just makes them worse. Yeah. So a lot of Christians, they know instinctively that casino gambling is wrong, but they're less sure about sports betting and fantasy sports that you mentioned, Polymarket, crypto speculation, day trading, stock trading.

So I think maybe we could just talk for a few minutes about some of the distinctions. Is Polymarket the same thing? Is fantasy sports the same thing as investing in the stock market. So let's throw that around for a minute. Sure.

Well, let's take stocks. Stocks represent a good or a service produced by another company. You're buying part of what represents what a company does. Right. And actual work produces a good or a service.

And so we buy a stock, you are participating by financial investment in them doing that. So you gotta ask like, when I'm gambling, what am I participating in? What good or service am I actually producing? And what's it, Proverbs 13, 11 says, wealth gained hastily will soon dwindle, right? And when you think you can just go win that money and get lucky or whatever, you think you can keep doing that.

You don't really learn to appreciate a dollar or whatever. But so I think part of the problem is you're not producing any good in the world. You're extracting money from other people who are not as lucky or didn't have the information you made when they made that guess or whatever. So you really, it's one thing if a couple of friends are playing Texas Hortum with like, you know, dimes and nickels around a table. Like you could have fun doing that.

But what if you're sitting around the table with some friends you take as rent money, right? Is that loving your neighbor taking their rent money over a game? There's been no exchange of goods or services. It's just been they're bad at probability, and now you've taken their rent money. So when you are in participating in something like Polymarket, you really are just extracting value from idiots, from fools.

And it's not a loving thing to do, and it's not producing anything in the world. And so that's one reason I would say anything that does that is wrong. Now, take card counting, what I did. I ended up quitting. I played for a while.

It wasn't illegal. It wasn't against house rules or anything like that. I ultimately quit, not because it was gambling, because I would argue it's not, which is hard for people to comprehend because it happens in a casino. But there's a mathematical formula that you follow. You have something called basic strategy, and then you count cards, which gives you, it's a high-low method that tells you the ratio between large cards and small cards.

And the more large cards left to play, the more blackjacks you get, the more the dealer busts, the more stronger hands you get. And that ratio informs when you break away from basic strategy. If you have enough money, you will eventually win. There's something called AV, actual value, EV, expected value. So, AV is I invest in the stock market and I'm supposed to get a 7% return over this period of time.

But it may be that At the end of the year, you've gotten 14 or 20 or 30% or maybe that you've gotten 10% or negative 10%. So that's the variance between what is expected and what you actually have. Actual value will look like that, but as you plot expected value, it'll plot right through that. And over time, if the math is right, you will get that return on your investment. You have ups and downs.

So when you're card counting, when you're playing blackjack, if you have large enough bankroll to survive the variances, negative going down, then you will eventually have, you'll make a certain percentage of return and the risk will ruin is very low. Anytime you're buying something you need to know what is what the expected value is and what the how long it takes to mature to that you know like what the actual value is. So take like student loans. I would say taking out student loans that have a high interest rate or a fairly high interest rate to get a degree in something foolish, I don't know. Let's say gender studies, okay?

You take out a degree, you take out $70, 000 in loans, you live on campus, you get to some middle of the line school and get your BA in gender studies. Well, What's the ROI on that $70, 000? Well, it could be this or that. What's the likelihood of that actually happening? Well, the likelihood is pretty low.

Well, then you are essentially gambling away $70, 000 that are non-dischargeable debt with this high interest rate. That's gambling. Gambling is when you are being foolish with your money and you're hoping against hope that you'll just get lucky, right? You'll land on your feet. And so you have to ask when you spend money, what is it producing and what are the odds of an investment that there'll be a reasonable ROI.

There's a way that index funds have behaved that we can see a history. If you buy a house at a certain range, it's a good store of value over a certain period of time. Gambling is where you go against the history, the behavior of financial investments, and you throw caution to the wind and hope that you're special. And you're not, math is, God has built order and design into the world and math works a certain way. That's God's, He's done that.

I think it was Doug Wilson who said that gambling is God's tax on those who don't understand math. Math is more special than you. He knows how to understand math. Because he knows a really good at math, but the people that go there usually aren't. So if you back up, who, whose money is being gambled?

My money. Are you sure about that? Yeah. Are you bought with a price? Did Is God actually the one who's giving you resources?

That sort of changes the discussion when you establish whose money this actually is. God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, He's apportioned some of them to you, and now what you thought you should do with his catalyst to gamble. It doesn't sound right when you start to put it in those terms. People you're not going to get any reward. You're not going to be satisfied.

Like making money on luck. Right? And so I remember once I walked into the Wynn Casino and everyone was around this craps table. There's a ton of people and there was this Asian fellow had huge stacks of chips And I knew the pit boss there and I asked, how much is there? He says, oh, that's 4 million.

And I said, how much is he up? And he's up, he's down 2 million. And so He looked, everyone's excited, they see all those chips there. It's like when people tell you how much revenue their company makes. Cool.

What's your gross profit margin? I got kicked out of this casino once. It was the win, actually. I got kicked out because card counters don't lose. And I was down 50 grand and I reached into my pocket to grab another 10 grand because the count was good and I would eventually beat them.

And they kicked me out. They knew that eventually I would eventually come back and win, and they kicked me out. Now, if someone was up $100, 000 and they were on a card counter, they wouldn't kick them out. They're not worried about that because they know they will put that money right back in there. They know if they get them hooked that they can extract value.

They know if they can get these kids hooked on video games, they can sell them a video game for $50 and then extract another $200 when they get addicted and they want to do the inapt purchase to get some stupid skin. My kids are always like, hey dad, can I buy this skin? And that's like a clothing outfit for their online character. No! Why spend $20?

Does it make you better at the video game? No, it just looks cool. So they get them addicted to the game to extract more value. They get them addicted to, you know, you want to put certain number of winners, low winners in those scratch offs so people feel like they win every once in a while. And then they'll keep buying it and they'll put way more money in that.

The whole thing is to capture your heart to feel like I'm so close. I've won a couple times. I'm gonna finally win big. But those people just keep gambling. One of my favorite lottery stories is this woman won a million dollars in New Jersey, lost all of it, won a million dollars in New Jersey again, lost all of it, and ended up homeless.

Right? Money will not fix your problems. Discipline and trust in the Lord will. And that's not pietism, that's just a fact of life. So here's a verse.

You can't find one that says, Thou shalt not gamble, but you can find this. This is Luke 12-15, and Jesus said to them, Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses." So, you know, we're a people set apart by God, for a God, to God, And our life isn't about the abundance of the things that we possess. And when we find ourselves doing things and really money is an end in itself, this is not good. What would you say to a guy, a young man who says, so I've been studying these teams, I know the players, I know the chances, this is me, I'm backing this team, just like I would back the stock market, or I'm backing this player, or this number of home runs, or whatever it is. What would you say to that guy?

Well, I would say, What's this called? This is not work, what you're doing, because it brings nothing into the world. You say you're backing the team. They're getting a cut? What do you mean?

You're backing, you're part of a platform that allows you to bet on it. They don't get it cut. You're not an investor in that team. What, your thoughts and vibes count as being an investor in that team? So no, you're not backing them.

You are backing the platform that allows you to do sports betting. That's who you are. And you're betting against other people that's doing it. So you're not extracting or adding value to that team whatsoever. You're taking it from fellow people who are betting on that team.

What are you bringing into the world? You're simply a fanboy that's studying these teams and betting money to make a financial bet to extract value from other fanboys. And you're adding nothing to the world. What did you produce? What good did you do for your neighbor?

What physical, tangible thing did you make in the world? What service did you provide? You did nothing. And so, Can you sit around and be entertained by sports and make money off it your entire life and tell people that's your job? Sure, you might be able to you may be so good so connected and know that if you hedge bets different ways that you could actually make a living.

I just want to be clear with you, you have never done work though. Like you've had effort, but you cannot define work merely by effort because recreation, throwing frisbees, is recreation. Like what did you make? What is the redemptive value of what you're doing? There is none.

No, this is really where I wanted to focus before we end this thing. When you're involved in sports betting and polymarket and all those kind of things, I mean even options trading and things like that, your mind is now focused. The fascination of your soul is directed and you have this investment in fascination and you know gambling draws your fascination to this situation and you're always checking checking checking checking and it's a I think it's I think it's it's it's just it's a character destroying kind of it distracts you from actually adding value to things that matter. And you've added to the money dynamics now, time and attention. So it's not just money anymore.

It's a lot of time and it's a lot of your attention. And the more money that's in play, the more of your attention it has, right? I have some relatives who would on occasion ask to borrow money when they're living a reckless life. And I said, I want to be very clear that I don't have money. You're not borrowing money from me.

You're borrowing money from my household. And when I think of my money that God has entrusted to me, not only do I think of myself as a steward of what God's entrusted to me, but I also think of myself as the CEO of Casa de Foster, right? And This belongs to my wife, this belongs to my kids and my grandkids. It belongs to the generations. And so what is the surest way that I can leave a good inheritance for my children while providing an example of a good work ethic to them.

That's what I'm interested in. And I'll tell you that I do not think that sports betting or whatever, I really don't have any problem with a level of gambling that is low risk and done for fun. You're like, if you wanna like, spend $20 on a slot machine, but how many people can do that, right? Like how many people don't get addicted or you wanna play Texas Hold'em with some friends and play for Nichols or whatever, that's fine. But I want my kids to know what hard work looks like and that God blesses that.

And I'll tell you right now, you guys got thin hair, some thinner than the other, but my hair's gonna thin. I'm not poor anymore. I used to be very poor, very poor. And some of the best days of my life were when I had nothing. Me and my sons flipping over rocks, catching crawdads.

Money is not going to make you happy, guys. If you can't be happy right now, you can't be happy. Does money give you, is it nice to be able to just get an Airbnb and pay for things and not stress all the time? Yeah, it is nice. But as you move up with funds, you move up with responsibilities and other things.

And what I wanna tell people is that you think you can buy your way out of misery, you cannot. Misery is within you, and you have to trust God's goodness and be content with what He's given to you. So here's an additional angle. So prediction markets and gambling is not my world. I don't know much about it, so I was doing some prep for this.

And online I stumbled across an article on denisonforum.org. I don't know whether they're good or bad or indifferent. I've never seen it before now, but the one article that it put me to was interesting, and the title of the article was betting on suffering the moral crisis of prediction markets. And it talked about how you're betting on things that will cause real hardships for people. And one of the closing lines of the article said, we are called to bear one another's burdens, not profit from them.

And it talked about casting lots for Jesus's garments. You have these soldiers and men are dying feet away from them, and they're casting lots. Well, I guess if a guy's gonna die, somebody at least might, should at least get their garments, right? And then they're profiting off of what's happening around them. There is a sense in this.

Michael, you already alluded to this. You might have just won a friend of yours' rent. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good point. There's a sort of, there's a real callousness in our culture right now where there are human beings behind this and Lotteries extract money really from from the poor people in in their culture not from the rich people they They don't spend Maybe a dollar or something here. They don't do too much on that stuff and there's a real callousness towards the poor There's a real callousness towards everyone at this point and I think It's all about can I profit like but what at what costs you know?

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but loses salt? But the but the genius of the marketing is that now the government's doing it, with respect to the lottery, at least in our state, the government is doing it. And it's funding education. So it's not really depriving the poor of any kind of expendable income that they might have had were actually funding education with it. And so you, they found a way to deprive, to take the money from the poor and give their kids a terrible education at the same time.

The double evil, huh? That's brilliant. Well, you know, to me, I think, you know, the biggest issue in the room is the investment of your affections. What is it that's drawing and why, and what is it doing to you? And I think of what Solomon said, it's the little foxes that spoil the grapes.

And I think we're here to say, you know, gambling is a very bad idea for a whole lot of reasons. And young men should stop it. It's really a waste of really the human capital that God has invested in them. And to invest it in something like this is really really harmful to their souls. Yeah the most restricted resource we have is time.

Yeah. And it takes a big big big chunk of time. I think some people buy lottery tickets because it gives them permission for 24 or 48 hours to dream what they would do if they were king for a day. Like, if I had all this money, then I would have a house like this, and then I would do this, and I would do that, and it would be great. And I would finally let my wife come home from work, and we'd finally have that farm we want or whatever, gives them permission to dream is how they think about it at one level for some people.

And I think it can nurture a sort of passivity where like, hey, given time and hard work, a lot of those dreams you have in this country, at least, can be realized. And instead of saying, if the government chooses me as the lucky winner, say, if I'm diligent and wise, God will bless my diligence and I don't have to dream. I can go out and do. There's a sort of passivity where like, well, there's the rich and the poor and there's nothing you do about that. Well, I'm friends with a lot of rich people, and I'll tell you what, most of the rich people I know just outwork the poor, bottom line.

They're more disciplined, and they have more control over their hunger, and they're not passive people. They're very active. I'm sure that there's plenty of evil rich people in the world. But I think gambling also allows people to stay passive and dream about what would happen, you know, and that gets to the affection issue as well. So let's wind it up.

I want to have you guys give a short parting shot of what you would say to young men who are enthralled or getting enthralled with gambling. What would you say, Jason? If I could have a time machine, first of all, I've never gambled in any meaningful way at all. But if I had a time machine, I would go back and waste less time and waste less money. We are bought at a price.

We belong to the Lord. We should, we were set apart to him. And we should treat our time that way and treat our money that way. It's going to catch you. You will be a loser.

It'll you'll be a loser in one way or another. You'll either lose the money or you'll lose your humanity. You're going to be a loser. You keep doing this. How about this?

Instead of wasting money on these prediction markets, why don't you invest in index funds and ETFs and max out your 401k or Roth IRA and then look for physical assets that you can put into a family trust that pass without death tax. Dude, you want to play, You want to get involved in markets, there's real markets with real assets that are great things that you should go after. Learn how to create legal tax shields. What I don't want is less passion, less action. I don't want people, well, you should just love Jesus more.

Okay, 100%, but what does that look like? It doesn't look like luck and foolishness, which is what the prediction markets are and what gambling is. It looks like investing, action, trusting in the power of compounding interest. This is God's design in the world. And don't eat your seed corn, Invest it.

And that's what I'd say. Guys, there is a bigger, better world out there for those that understand that you can't have what some people have in their 50s and your 20s. You can't do it. Do it. But you can build awesome things if you'll be disciplined.

And God teaches us to invest. Investing is a principle throughout scripture. So run from gambling, run towards investing, It's normal to think covenantally or corporately, right? Like people have a good day or a bad day on Mondays, depending on how an NFL team did. But that's a silly way to think.

Why not invest in something you're really part of? Companies that you benefit from, companies in your community or whatever. Instead of gambling, build, build, build. That's what I would tell these young people. Go for it.

You can do these things, but stop wasting your money on stupid things and Bully your friends Listen to me if your friends win $500 on a poly market or whatever You should boy them for a whole week and make fun of them That is Now you have permission from a pastor to bully your friends. Bullying commended here. There we go. All right. That's fantastic.

Guys, thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Good being here. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can be with us next time.

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