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SportsTranscript
00:00Now, I know the story that we've talked about previously is now coming to light a little
00:06bit.
00:07This congressional hearing that is going on, a lot of scrutiny going on, how to make sports
00:11betting better for people to avoid some of these controversies with players, athletes,
00:17everything else, learning a lot more about it thus far.
00:20What have you learned?
00:21What's happened?
00:22Yeah, so yesterday was the first congressional hearing about sports betting at a U.S. federal
00:28level.
00:30Senate Judiciary Committee, their last meeting of the year, their last meeting with a Democratic
00:34chair.
00:35So next year, it's going to switch, of course, because the majority of the Senate will switch.
00:39So you'll have a Republican.
00:40So that kind of plays into a little bit of what we're going to talk about here in a second.
00:45What's interesting about this is the panel was largely made up of problem gambling kind
00:52of people, responsible gambling.
00:54There's also Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA, and David Reebok, who's probably
01:00the most famous, most well-known, well-regarded regulator.
01:03He's a former director of the New Jersey Department of Gaming.
01:09And yeah, there were 10 senators sitting there talking about it, taking them, you know, everybody
01:14was asking questions, kind of figuring out where that they need to work.
01:19And of course, Charlie Baker, who has been championing a ban on collegiate prop bets,
01:25he used his platform to further push that.
01:28That seemed like certainly kind of the biggest topic of discussion and most interest of the
01:32politicians, seeing, understanding that that does lead to athlete harassment and can be
01:38problematic and things like that.
01:42They certainly do want to focus kind of on consumer protections and figure out where
01:46that goes.
01:48David Reebok was the lone kind of pro sports betting voice, I would say, in a lot of ways.
01:55He was trying to make the point of, hey, the states are doing this.
01:58The state regulators and legislators have the same concerns you do.
02:02They're working on it.
02:03This should be a state issue, not a national issue.
02:07And yeah, from there, we kind of got to see where it goes.
02:12Dick Durbin, the chair, said, you know, this is only the beginning.
02:15This is not the end.
02:16It was a very short committee hearing, way shorter than I expected yesterday, probably
02:20a little under two hours.
02:23But yeah, it doesn't seem like it's going to go anywhere anytime soon.
02:27Again, this was a Democratic-led portion of it because of the majority at the moment,
02:32which Richard Blumenthal is on there.
02:34He's one of the authors of the Safe Bet Act, which is a pretty expansive consumer protection
02:40and advertising and a lot of different components to that bill.
02:45That will unlikely be able to move with a Republican-controlled Senate.
02:48So things are going to shift a lot.
02:52Senator Tom Tillis from North Carolina had a lot of interesting questions.
02:55He's a Republican and will probably continue this discussion into next year.
02:59He compared it to the marijuana industry and the state-by-state kind of regulations and
03:03how we need to somehow come up with some sort of federal regulation, which again, goes against
03:09Reebok's suggestions that the states have it and the states will continue to do a good
03:13job on it.
03:14So it was very interesting.
03:17Also of note, because of Charlie Baker's presence there, there were two Republican senators,
03:22John Kennedy and Josh Hawley from Missouri.
03:26They decided to make it about why the NCAA allows trans athletes to compete, which does
03:32not seem at all on topic with sports betting.
03:35So they spent their five minutes of questioning on that topic.
03:40So definitely went off the rails a couple of times.
03:42But yeah, again, this is not going anywhere.
03:45It will continue to be in the federal spotlight for at least a couple months, probably a couple
03:49of years until something happens.
03:51Who knows if the bipartisan issue can come together and come up with any sort of solution
03:58to what they want.
03:59But anyway, again, the spotlight's on it and it will remain.