What’s next for sports betting

AMY HOWE: It was the biggest crisis that I’ve ever managed through in my professional career. To think about your entire business being shut down, you have no revenue coming in, you have a massive burn rate, and you have thousands of employees who are all looking at you.

JEFF BERMAN: Amy Howe was at the helm of Ticketmaster in 2020 when the COVID pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt. Thousands of concerts canceled overnight, pro sports paused, customers demanding refunds. As Amy shepherded Ticketmaster through the unprecedented chaos, another company noticed her steady hand: FanDuel. The fantasy sports start-up turned sports betting juggernaut was looking for a seasoned leader. Suddenly, Amy had a real decision to make.

HOWE: My whole career has been sliding-door moments, those unexpected turns that take you in one direction. I think one of the things that’s been really helpful for me is that I was always willing to walk through doors that were open for me, that I wasn’t necessarily planning on walking through. But once I did, they opened up a whole new world.

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BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host, and this week on the show: Amy Howe. She’s the CEO of FanDuel, the market leader in sports betting. With a market cap of more than $25 billion, it’s at the epicenter of a rapidly growing and somewhat controversial industry. I spoke with Amy about her strategy for prediction markets, navigating an evolving legal landscape, and the increasingly prominent place of gambling in the lives of millions of Americans. Amy, welcome to Masters of Scale.

HOWE: Thank you. It’s so fun to be here.

Copy LinkAmy Howe on leading Ticketmaster during the pandemic

BERMAN: I’m so excited to have you, especially during Super Bowl week. Why did you take the job at FanDuel?

HOWE: If I rewind the clock to set the scene, it was COVID. At the time, I was running Ticketmaster. We’d just kind of gone through a digital transformation. I’m guessing you remember where you were when the world shut down, when the NBA suspended its season. Do you remember that?

BERMAN: I was on a weeklong retreat with no access to the outside world. As I came out of it, they told us that March Madness had been canceled, the NBA had suspended its season. Being offline for seven days was as if I’d been Rip Van Winkle.

HOWE: I’m sure your phone was blowing up, right?

BERMAN: Yeah, crazy.

HOWE: It was March 2020. The NBA suspended its season and then, from there, the dominoes fell. I was running Ticketmaster at the time for North America. I think we had 54,000 events that were live on the platform. Literally overnight, they were all either canceled or postponed, and you’ve got everybody and their brother asking, how do they get their refunds back? We went through a period of time where you were just in crisis mode. The live entertainment world, and obviously the sports world, shut down. We were just managing through the crisis, trying to be an empathetic leader. As it turns out, nobody gives you a playbook for how you manage during a pandemic. It had never happened to any of us.

BERMAN: It’s been 100 years. It’s hard to run the same playbook.

Copy LinkThe values that attracted Amy to FanDuel

HOWE: It surely hadn’t happened to the live entertainment industry. Fast-forward several months, and somebody from FanDuel reached out and said, “Hey, we’re looking for a president. We’d love for you to come over.” Long story short, after hemming and hawing and saying, “Well, I’m not sure I can leave Ticketmaster right now,” I knew that sports betting was taking off. You couldn’t go to a sports industry conference at the time without hearing about the explosive growth of online sports betting. So it was a little bit of a leap of faith. I knew that I could come in, professionalize the industry, and bring a lot of pattern recognition from having been a partner at McKinsey for so many years.

BERMAN: You were not hired as CEO, but you became CEO very quickly. How did that come to pass?

HOWE: Well, I was hired as president. Matt King, at the time, was looking for somebody to ultimately succeed him. After a few months, I’ll never forget it. Mind you, this was during COVID. I hadn’t met a single person face-to-face. I did all my interviews over Zoom. I think I finally met Matt in New York, and Matt decided it was time for him to move on. He had an opportunity to go work for Michael Rubin at Fanatics. I stepped into the interim CEO role when he left. I was still very new to the industry. This was only a few months after I started, so I was still coming up to speed.

BERMAN: What was it about the team that made you so excited to work with them?

HOWE: When I met the top team, when I met Christian and Matt and so many of the other folks, Andy Giancamilli, who was COO at the time, I could see myself working with them day in and day out. We spend more time with our colleagues than we do, at times, with our family and friends, and you really have to trust and respect that team. But the other thing that really drew me to FanDuel was this: the company lives its principles and values in a way that I’ve literally never seen at any other company. Most people can recite them. We talk about being humble and hungry, which is hugely relevant in today’s world where things are changing so quickly. We are one team. We’re going to win with integrity. We say thank you. These principles are not just a nice placard on the wall. They literally drive the behavior of the top team and the entire organization, and that was meaningful to me.

BERMAN: For someone who spent 15 years at McKinsey, having looked at dozens, if not hundreds, of companies, how were those values so deeply imbued not just in the company but in the teams, so that they weren’t just on a wall but were lived? And how have you carried that forward as CEO?

HOWE: FanDuel, if you think about the online sports betting industry, has gone through a lot of twists and turns, and many of these predated me. In 2016, the daily fantasy sports business, before real-money wagering was legal, was almost shut down, and the New York state Legislature saved it at the last minute. Fast-forward to 2018, when, ironically, the Supreme Court repealed what had been a federal ban on online sports betting. That opened up the market. A lot of these folks were there from the early days. When you meet them, you’ll understand: They’re high-integrity, hardworking, humble people who want to build an organization. They want to be successful. They want to be the No. 1 player, but they want to do it the right way. When I came into the organization, I knew what was important. I was not an expert yet in online sports betting, so I did a lot of listening and learning and getting up to speed. But I said, “These values are great. Why would I change them?”

But having come from McKinsey, which also has a very strong culture, I brought a lot of that pattern recognition as well. I think one of the most important principles that I brought from McKinsey is what they call the obligation to dissent. From Day 1, when you come in, whether you’re a business analyst out of undergrad or, as I was, an associate out of Wharton, you are taught to have a voice. You’re in rooms with partners who may have been there for 20 years, but they hired you for a reason and they want to hear your perspective. That has always stuck with me. I think about our greatest asset at FanDuel: our people. We have nearly 5,000 people all around the world, and we hire them for a reason. So I think it’s important to create an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up if they have a different point of view, because ultimately we get to a better answer, and it’s better for the company.

Copy LinkHow to lead through ambiguity

BERMAN: It is not easy to come into a president role, or a CEO role, or to come in as president and move into CEO very quickly, even if the values are incredible and the team is incredible. What was your process for getting up to speed on what the business really was? Every company is a covered dish. We all know this, right?

HOWE: Yeah.

BERMAN: You start a new job, you think it’s one thing, and then you’re like, “Oh my gosh, why’d they put raisins in this? That makes no sense.” What was your process for getting your arms around the business and figuring out what you really needed to attack first?

HOWE: When I came in, I think I had perspective that I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t just lived through COVID. It was the biggest crisis that I’ve ever managed through in my professional career. To think about your entire business being shut down, you have no revenue coming in, you have a massive burn rate, and you have thousands of employees who are all looking at you, that was a crisis. Even after three months, when Matt King told me he was leaving, I was like, “I’ll figure it out.” I had a certain comfort with ambiguity. I had a comfort with solving very complicated problems. So my thought process was to go back to some of the first principles from being a consultant, but I leveraged my team heavily.

BERMAN: It strikes me also that, in addition to the commitment to dissent, one of the things I’ve said to junior members of the team is that the three most powerful words anyone can say in most settings are, “I don’t know.” There’s a humility that comes with saying, “I may have my own perspective, but I don’t know.” One of the knocks on most consulting firms is that they come in with incredibly sharp analysis, but ultimately they make a set of recommendations and then don’t live with the consequences of how those recommendations are implemented. Did living with the consequences of the decisions you were making change how you approached things at Ticketmaster and FanDuel as you transitioned from the consulting world to being an operator?

HOWE: Yeah, for sure. When I made that initial transition from being a partner at McKinsey to an operating role at Ticketmaster, you learn a lot. You learn exactly what you just said, which is that, at the end of the day, you live with the results. So you need to very quickly develop a dose of pragmatism around the fact that coming up with a great strategy that is never going to be implemented is not that helpful. You have to think about, at the end of the day, what is the North Star? How do we make sure that we’ve got real clarity around what those big bets are, but also that we’ve got an organization that can embrace them and implement them? We also made some changes in the team as we thought about where the business was going. We were on a rocket ship.

BERMAN: It can be really tricky because the host can reject the organ transplant quite quickly. For another business leader who is going through this transition right now, and who’s already locked in their key people but has identified, “OK, these are the roles we have to fill” — we’re here at Super Bowl week, so we need a left tackle, we need a strong safety, whatever it is. What’s the advice you would offer that leader who’s trying to make sure the host doesn’t reject that organ transplant, and who’s going to mesh the old people with the new people effectively?

HOWE: First, I do think it’s really important to bring your top team along on the journey. I had a very clear perspective on where I wanted to go, and I could have just drawn the org chart and said, “Here you go. Here’s the new structure.” But I knew we would have organ rejection, so we went through a very thoughtful process. That was one of the few instances where I actually did use a third party to help, because there’s always a lot of emotion. Anytime you’re doing organizational work, there’s as much art and judgment as there is science. You can do benchmarks, you can look at other companies, and we did all of that. Org work is not the easiest work. But the last thing I’ll say is, it’s always better to do it from a position of strength. If you wait too long, you’re playing defense.

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with FanDuel CEO Amy Howe on what it will take to unlock legal online sports betting in California.

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Copy LinkHow legalization reshaped the betting market

Amy says the recent addition of prediction markets is a full-circle moment for FanDuel.

HOWE: A lot of people don’t even know this, but the original founders of FanDuel — even before the product became a daily fantasy sports product — started with a prediction-market product and exchange. The reason they ended up pivoting into daily fantasy sports is that the insight was that a lot of the volume was on sports. So they ended up pivoting the product to daily fantasy sports. It’s interesting. As somebody who has three boys, and for years they’ve had their daily fantasy sports leagues, on Sunday they’re watching Sunday Ticket with four different games, when all I want to do is actually watch my Buffalo Bills.

BERMAN: A bit of a masochistic endeavor.

HOWE: I know.

BERMAN: Fair enough.

HOWE: But you understand why fantasy sports, and now sports betting, are so powerful, because everybody knows everything about the players’ stats and they’re following every move each of the different players makes. So before prop bets were even a thing in the U.S., the daily fantasy sports business was really paving the way for the business that we have today.

BERMAN: The court issued the ruling it did in 2018. What did it unleash?

HOWE: That was the moment when real-money wagering — sports betting and iGaming — was now legal, and it was up to the states to decide. There was no longer a federal ban on online sports betting. So state by state, you could decide if you wanted to legalize sports betting and iGaming. There were early advocates like Gov. Christie. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and a number of states legalized quite quickly. What we found was that there was phenomenal demand. For us, we had a huge advantage because we had a very engaged set of users who were already using our daily fantasy sports product, so we were able to migrate them beautifully to our online sports betting product. Now fast-forward to 2026. We’re sitting here on Super Bowl weekend. There are 25 states where 50 percent of the U.S. can bet legally online, but 50 percent can’t.

Copy LinkHow FanDuel and DraftKings compete and cooperate

BERMAN: And there are loopholes being exploited all over the place, which I want to get to. But that created a dynamic where it emerged that there was effectively a duopoly in the marketplace. It was you all and another company that starts with a D, and we’ll leave it at that.

HOWE: A company we collaborate with all the time. We’re part of a sports betting alliance, and that’s one of the great things about this industry: We work together to safely open up and regulate it.

BERMAN: Well, you’re in “co-oopetition”, right?

HOWE: Yeah, exactly.

BERMAN: The rising tide will lift all boats with a more permissive regulatory framework, so that makes a ton of sense. But you came in when it was still, functionally, a duopoly. What was it like coming into a marketplace where you’re going head-to-head with a competitor, where, if I’m remembering 2020 and 2021 correctly, customer acquisition costs in your category were astronomical? What was that like for you?

HOWE: It’s interesting, because you’re right. In the early days, there was a lot of money spent on marketing. But there were also a lot of learnings along the way. We were trying to figure out what league deals you need to do, what teams you want to partner with, what media stations you want to align with, and how to think about the role of TV versus digital. I think we brought a lot of sophistication and discipline to that in the very early days, and that served us well over the years.

BERMAN: You referenced the emergence of prediction markets. There’s been explosive growth over the last year, year and a half. How is that changing, first, the competitive landscape and, second, how you’re leading FanDuel?

HOWE: I think the important thing to remember is that the North Star is still to legalize and offer our industry-leading sports betting product in every state we can. It’s a superior offering. We love prediction markets in the states where betting isn’t legal because it gives us a nice complementary offering. But yes, it has shifted the landscape. As a CEO, it’s a constant reminder that you have to be able to be agile and pivot as the landscape evolves. One of the things that I think FanDuel has done a very good job of is navigating uncertainty. As we’ve been talking about throughout this conversation, there’s been uncertainty for well over a decade, so we know how to navigate that. We’re in a volatile business to begin with. The nature of what we do is uncertain and volatile. There’s a certain DNA that we have, but you also have to figure out how to build agility into your business model and the organization.

Copy LinkWhy sports betting is illegal in California

BERMAN: We’re having this conversation in the great state of California. I cannot use your core product in California. Why not?

HOWE: California is a very ripe topic. To contextualize the question, think about this: There is easily a $10 billion illegal market in California. The demand is there. You’ve got 13 percent of the population, and that’s probably a conservative number. The reason you can’t use our product is that it would need to be legalized. We tried to get it on the ballot in ’22, and we weren’t successful. We are working right now with and through the tribes. At the end of the day, the most important driver of legalizing sports betting in California will be working with the tribes to make sure that we can protect tribal sovereignty. There are well over 100 tribes in the state of California, and we learned our lesson in the ’22 election. We tried to align with them, and we weren’t successful.

Coming out of that, we completely rebooted our strategy. I hired folks who came from the tribes, and they’re working alongside us. But we know we need to spend a lot of time listening. We were on an extended apology tour, and we’re working with them right now to figure out how to safely open up California in a way that works for them. Ultimately, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll get there, but we’ll do it on their timeline.

BERMAN: I’m just not sure that it’s intuitive for everyone why legalizing online sports betting would be a threat to tribal sovereignty.

HOWE: If you think about it, their primary business is brick-and-mortar casinos. One of the eye-opening moments for me after we weren’t successful in November of ’22 was realizing that COVID was an existential threat to their business. It was the first time that brick-and-mortar casinos were, I think, ever really shut down for an extended period of time. As you think about that, and you think about the role of the tribes, it’s to make sure that they can provide for future generations. They rightly, although we have lots of data to refute it, view legalizing sports betting as a potentially slippery slope to legalizing iGaming, which they worry could cannibalize their brick-and-mortar business. We do have lots of evidence that online gaming does not. However, at the end of the day, they’re the most critical constituent in California, so we’ve been working very closely with them. That’s really the core reason. Not only do we have to get the tribes comfortable, but it also has to win a majority vote in the state of California.

BERMAN: When you’re working on something like this, which really is not just a FanDuel challenge but an industrywide challenge, how are you interfacing with the other players in the space so that, ideally, your interests can be aligned and you can work with the tribes for the best outcome for everyone, including the tribes, your business, your customers, and Californians?

HOWE: It’s a very unique industry, because there aren’t that many industries where you are competing head-to-head with a number of different operators, but at the same time, you have to collaborate to safely open up the market. We have an organization called the Sports Betting Alliance, and most of the legal, regulated online operators are part of it. We work as an organization to lobby safely and work with key stakeholders. Those key stakeholders may vary state to state, but the role of the SBA is to make sure that we can provide the necessary support and infrastructure to legalize and open up a state.

For the audience that may not understand why it’s important to legalize sports betting, because this habit has existed for years, I’d say a few things. One is, as a legal online operator, I’m licensed in every state we’re in. We have to verify that you are who you say you are. You can’t engage in real-money wagering until you’re 21 years old, so we’re protecting against underage gambling. We’re providing safeguards to consumers and tools for responsible gaming. But importantly, we’re also providing revenue for the states. Since PASPA was repealed, FanDuel has generated more than $6 billion in tax revenue for the states. That goes to causes that are important to the states, whether it’s first responders, mental health, or education. That’s a meaningful number. If we were to open up the remaining states, there’s easily another $1.6 billion per year that the states could generate.

Copy LinkBalancing growth with responsible gaming

BERMAN: We each have three kids. They’re roughly in the same age range. My youngest is now 16. He’s my avid sports fan. He obviously cannot have his own account.

HOWE: No, he cannot.

BERMAN: But I have one, and I would rather work with him on what I don’t believe is an oxymoron — responsible gaming — but it does give rise to a serious conversation here about the risks. We’ve got huge risks with addiction. We have risks of people way overspending their means. We’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic in this country, and taking these behaviors online only contributes to that. I’m curious, first, when you took the job, or when you were considering taking the job, how that factored in. How do you handle that?

HOWE: I actually thought a lot about it before I took the job, and I had a conversation with my husband. As a female CEO who has three boys, I could see that, at the time — they were obviously quite a bit younger; they’re now teenagers — they loved daily fantasy sports, and you could see where, ultimately, this might go. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that we are building a business for the long term. If we don’t continue to earn the trust not just of our core customers but of all of our stakeholders — the state regulators, the leagues, the teams, everybody who works in this ecosystem — we’re not going to have a successful business in the long run.

I’m really proud of what we’ve done. I truly believe that we’re not just the market leader from a commercial perspective, but that we are leading the market from a responsible gaming perspective. If you look at our global parent company, Flutter Entertainment, we’ve spent more than $100 million a year on responsible gaming tools and on education and awareness around this. And I will tell you, as the mom of three boys, I feel an even greater obligation, because I go to college campuses. You go to Texas, which also is not legal, and betting is rampant.

BERMAN: I’m grateful that you do that, and I really hope a male CEO would do the same and take that obligation equally seriously. I appreciate that perspective as a mom, but male CEOs don’t get off the hook on that.

HOWE: Fair. You’re absolutely right.

Copy LinkWhat sports taught Amy Howe about leadership

BERMAN: You are an athlete. You were a competitive athlete growing up. There’s remarkable data on the correlation, at a minimum, between women in the C-suite and having been involved in competitive athletics growing up. I’m curious how your experience as a competitive athlete has informed your professional career.

HOWE: It’s shaped me a lot as a leader, as a professional, and as a team member. I was a competitive gymnast growing up. I was a swimmer. I played tennis. I think you learn a lot from sports. It’s one of the things that my husband and I have instilled in all of our boys. I think there’s a certain humility you learn when you lose. I think you learn how to win with integrity and professionalism. You learn how to be a leader of a team. You learn how to build a high-performing team.

As we were joking earlier, you can’t create a team of all quarterbacks. That doesn’t work. And then, of course, when you grow up as a competitive athlete, you learn that you want to be No. 1. There’s a sense of competition and drive that comes with growing up as an athlete, and I think I’ve taken all of those elements into ultimately becoming a CEO. I never set out to be a CEO, but here I am, and I absolutely love it. I think those early days of being an athlete were actually quite instrumental.

BERMAN: Several years ago, at my last company, I was part of the team that helped launch a company called TOGETHXR, where Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Chloe Kim, and Simone Manuel are the much more important founding partners. We believed that this boom-bust cycle we’ve seen in professional women’s sports was ending and that we were entering a more sustained rise, which we’ve really seen over the last six or seven years. I’ve been of the belief that one of the things that can really accelerate the growth of women’s sports is gambling. One, because they tend to take place in the offseason for the most popular men’s betting sports. Has the Caitlin Clark effect been real for FanDuel? How have you seen the growth of women’s sports since you’ve been in the chair at FanDuel?

HOWE: The Caitlin Clark effect has definitely been real. In fact, I think we saw a several-hundred-percent increase in WNBA betting when she came on the scene. As you can imagine, this is something that was near and dear to my heart when I stepped into the CEO role. I think about it as having three different pillars. One is providing equity in the product. If you looked at our WNBA product years ago, it was not nearly as good as our NBA product. So we needed to make sure that we’ve got a betting product that is as good as the equivalent men’s product. Second, partnering with female athletes and leagues. We were one of the first sponsors of the WNBA. We’ve had a number of amazing female ambassadors who are part of our team.

I will say we still have work to do. If you look at the data, the NFL is a great example. Closer to 40 percent of NFL consumers are women, and we’re not nearly where we need to be in terms of the percentage of bettors who are women. Sometimes the sports betting product is overly complicated, not just for women but for men as well. So as we continue to advance technology and think about how we leverage AI and generative AI to personalize the experience and make it more intuitive and simple, I think that’s going to be a real unlock for targeting more women in the category.

Copy LinkUsing AI and prediction markets without losing integrity

BERMAN: That’s a perfect segue. As we sit here during Super Bowl week 2026 having this conversation, we almost have to talk about AI. You’re in an interesting position in that you can leverage AI to improve your business and improve your products. You also have to think defensively about the use of AI to game your system, I imagine. How are you approaching each of those?

HOWE: I think you have to approach it with a fair bit of humility, in that you don’t know everything, but also with a significant amount of intellectual curiosity to make sure that you can provide the right environment for your team to embrace it, learn, and get up to speed. Some of the areas that I’m most excited about are how we can use this technology to really improve the fan experience, but also build more trust into the product. As one example, we’ve got a product called AceAI, which is effectively a betting companion. Consumers used to leave the site or the app, do all their research on stats, look at odds, figure out what they wanted to bet on and what kind of parlay they wanted to build, and then come back into the app. Now you can do all of that within AceAI seamlessly and place your bet within that interface. That’s just one example.

There’s an infinite opportunity to figure out how we leverage that technology, but we’re also really proud of how we’re using AI to build trust into the product. What I mean by that is we’re using what we call real-time check-in tools. We have built very sophisticated models that are leveraging large language models and a lot of data and science to say, “Gosh, I’m seeing some signs of behavior change that may not be normal. We ought to do a check-in and make sure that everything is OK.” When we talk about building a business that is sustainable for the long term, these are the kinds of things that are really important.

BERMAN: What about defensively? Are you worried about people almost weaponizing AI with regard to your platform?

HOWE: Listen, you always have sharp customers. The technology is very good for facilitating research and being able to compare odds more effectively across the platform, but we don’t think it’s going to give you a mathematical edge.

BERMAN: I want to go back to prediction markets for just a moment. Are there things that we shouldn’t be able to bet on?

HOWE: Yes, absolutely. When we set out to think about how we wanted to enter prediction markets, one of the important things for us was that we wanted to make sure we had a partner that was philosophically aligned and had the same core principles as us. That’s why we ended up partnering with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I can tell you, Terry Duffy, the CEO of CME Group, and I spent a lot of time talking about that. I’m not going to comment on what other players have decided to offer or not. What I can tell you is that we are bringing the same level of integrity to the markets we’re going to offer. If you offer a market that can be easily manipulated, we’re not going to offer it. We are consciously choosing to be a bit slower and more cautious to make sure that the markets that we do offer are legitimate and above board.

At the end of the day, the CFTC will determine these guardrails, and we’re very excited. We’re going to be meeting with the new chairman, Michael Selig. I think there’s a lot of value we can bring to those conversations because we’ve been operating in a market for a very long time, with proper safeguards for the consumer, but also with an ecosystem that can manage the integrity of sports betting. I think we can bring a lot of that thinking to prediction markets.

BERMAN: Right. I think the corollary to whether something can be easily manipulated is: What are the consequences of it being manipulated? Are there life-and-death consequences? Could a country lose its sovereignty? I appreciate that these are real conversations, and that the answer is yes, there are some things that we should not be able to bet on. Your oldest is in college. You go visit, and one of the classmates says, “I’m really excited about entering the workforce, and I’m also incredibly trepidatious because this is all changing really quickly.” What’s the advice you’re giving that young person when they ask you?

Copy LinkAmy Howe’s advice to young people

HOWE: It’s funny because I reflect on what it was like when I was graduating, and when you were graduating, and there’s a lot of pressure on kids nowadays. My advice is: Give yourself time to get exposure to a lot of different things. When you’re 19, 20, 21 years old, how do you know what you want to do? I happened to go into consulting really because it was a sliding-door moment. I thought I was actually going to go back and take over my dad’s family business. That was a terrible business, so I ended up going into consulting and, lo and behold, got exposure to a lot of different things. When you’re young, what you don’t have yet is exposure and pattern recognition. So find ways to give yourself some time to figure out what you want to do. For me, consulting was great because I got a lot of exposure to different industries and different types of problems. Your learning curve is very steep, but there are a lot of different ways to have a career.

The other thing I would say is that, for me — and I’m sure for you as well — my whole career has been sliding-door moments, those unexpected turns that take you in one direction. One of the things that’s been really helpful for me is that I was always willing to walk through doors that were open for me, that I wasn’t necessarily planning on walking through. But once I did, they opened up a whole new world. Sometimes you might know exactly what you want to do, and that’s great, and that’s the path you’re on. But a lot of times, you don’t know. So spend the time, be intellectually curious, and definitely spend time building a network, because as it turns out, careers are very long and you never know how those relationships will come back and factor in.

BERMAN: Those human connections cannot be displaced by AI.

HOWE: That is exactly right.

BERMAN: Great place to wrap. Thank you, Amy.

HOWE: Thank you.

BERMAN: Thanks again to Amy Howe for joining us. As more and more Americans bet on sports, play casino-style games, and wade into prediction markets all from their phones, smart money says this industry will continue its astronomical rise. That said, if we’re going to get through this without exacerbating existing crises, we will need experienced leaders like Amy who are poised to lead us into that future with a focus on creating sustainable, responsible companies. I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.