 Perhaps the standout Irish business story, success story that is of the past three decades, that of Paddy Power, who have gone from sort of cheeky high street bookmaker to a billion dollar business because their own other parent company is Flutter Entertainment, the largest gambling business in the world. And I mean, the success of Paddy Power can be seen everywhere. Shopfronts, bus shelters, to sporting arenas. There's a new book by Aaron Rogan, the journalist, Aaron Rogan, news correspondent at the business post and was senior reporter at The Times Ireland, but has been writing about Paddy Power for years. And the book is called Ponters, how Paddy Power bet billions and changed gambling forever. And Aaron now joins us. Aaron, good afternoon to you. Good afternoon. This book is about the success, the continuing success of Paddy Power. But it's also about much more than that. It's about the story of how modern business collects and uses personal data for profit. Yeah, very much so. I think Paddy Power is a really strong illustration of the transformation that bookmaking and the gambling industry has had over the last, I'd say 15, 20 years with the advent of online gambling and how these sort of, what was once a chain of bookmakers shops around the country or occasionally on tracks and things like that is now, basically it's like a tech company. It's a lot of data harvesting, a lot of mathematicians and scientists going through it. It's all computerized, it's all modernized. And it's at a sort of a reckoning now because it was sort of an innovative industry and Paddy Power in particular was quite an innovative company. It may be if it had its excesses where problem gambling really became a big driver of profits and new customers and turnover on accounts and things like that. So it's sort of, the industry's at a point now where it's trying to battle for its reputation by showing it does want to be a sustainable and safe sector, but it's had a rough 10 years of its practices being exposed. And they have been exposed and the damage that, not just Paddy Power, but other big bookmakers are doing, especially with online gambling, are now well known. But back when they started up in 1988, it was really just to take on the sort of British bookmakers like Carl and Ladbrooks, initially. Yeah, it was basically those guys that come over, Carl's, Ladbrooks and Mecca, which is gone now, and William Hill had come over and bought up independent Irish shops and created big chains that the independent shops, even if you had three or four dotted around a county or a city couldn't really compete with because they were corporate giants really. They had a lot of cash. They were tied to other companies such as the Hilton Hotel Group was part of Ladbrooks for a little bit. So John Corcoran, Stuart Kenny and David Power came together and started Paddy Power by linking up their shops. They started with about 20 shops and just tried to, the first goal was get to 100 shops and then you could compete against the British bookmakers. But it wasn't long before they were buying up shops that the British bookmakers had only maybe a decade before bought themselves, because it was just, they really got that Irish gamblers were quite different to British gamblers. They wanted different products. They wanted to have a different sort of brand around it. It wasn't just a transactional thing. They liked spending an afternoon having a cup of tea or going between the pub and the bookies and getting to know people. So they built a very strong customer base and eventually sort of surpassed the British bookmakers in Ireland before hopping across the water to go and have a go at them over there and they've succeeded in that as well. Yeah, absolutely. Well, they've changed with the time. So they rolled with the changes and I suppose you would say they were innovative in certain ways, albeit at a cost along the way. But we still like to see them or some people would see them as sort of that cheeky high street bookmakers. And a lot of that is down to their marketing, their gorilla marketing and the sort of the tongue-in-cheek marketing. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the Paddy Power brand is one of the most recognizable Irish brands up there with Guinness and Ryanair. I think for a lot of people when they think of the part of the national conversation people talk about Paddy Power all the time. They really did during the sort of the internet age they tapped into that gorilla marketing that sort of irreverent, sometimes controversial often controversial really and often quite offensive thing that younger men in particular really liked. You know, they liked seeing those sort of jokes that were politically incorrect or were making light of serious situations. And they really did that in a way that other big corporations would be far too scared to do. You know, you see a lot of companies now getting involved in politically correct campaigns and things like that and the Paddy Power's Flutter Entertainment does that now as well. But for a long period, they were doing things that advertising agencies would be too afraid to even raise at meetings with other companies. Paddy Power was doing them. You've been writing about Paddy Power for years and in fact, it goes back as far as a time when a lot of your friends were working for Paddy Power in Dublin. And I suppose you might have had a bit of an insight in the early days, but over time, the whole thing has changed. It's become, well, you know, since the advent of online gambling, the whole thing now from a business point of view has become more sort of more corporate. Oh, absolutely. I mean, Paddy Power and our Flutter Entertainment can tell within a few bets how profitable or they can, you know, they can, they have data that would indicate how profitable your account will be to them, whether they'll take 20% of all the bets, all the money you bet with them are 30% or 5%. They know how much it costs to win a new customer and how quickly they can turn that, you know, get that money back. They're doing that in the US at the moment. It was gambling's really opened up there. It's a real corporate activity. It uses every trick and tool available to us and it's got the data collected on the other end to show what works and what doesn't work. And they're very, very quick at switching to streams that do work away from ones that don't work. So effectively, they'll target you. They'll hone in on the sort of gambling that you might be attracted to or throw up bets that are likely to get you to spend money, is that it? Yeah, well, if you open a Paddy Power account, they'll know whether you opened it following an ad online or a social media post or an email, well, they wouldn't email you before you open the account, but you know, I don't know if you opened it on your mobile and they know mobile gamblers of a certain age are more likely to prefer certain types of bets. They might prefer betting in play and football, next gold score sort of thing. So they'll promote those bets to you. Then when you've placed a few bets, particularly in horse racing, if you place a few bets in horse racing, they're very savvy at finding out whether you're savvy yourself or if you're just picking the tips from the local paper. And then they'll sort of work to ensure that the risk on their end of being exposed to a very savvy gambler is reduced and people restrict accounts of customers who are doing too well. And they'll do all this through algorithms? Through algorithms and oversight by risk managers. There's still quite a number of people sort of hands on looking at that data as it comes back and saying, this is what we should do with this customer, this is what we should do with the other. Flutter entertainment are absolutely huge. They're the largest company of any kind on the stock market here. And what are Flutter doing about the whole problem of gambling addiction? If anything? They are taking steps now to make the product safer. They've started treating under 25-year-olds as a particular cohort of gamblers because it's long been said by academics and clinicians that the brain doesn't fully develop until after 25. So you're much more likely to take risks that you perhaps shouldn't or you don't calculate properly the outcome of the risk. So they've started capping the amount you can deposit at 500 euro a month for under 25s as a designation that younger people should be protected from themselves a little bit more. That's going beyond any regulation that's in place, but it's to head off regulations that are coming in both Ireland and Britain and undoubtedly in the US as well to show that they want sort of a sustainable customer base. They don't want to be dependent on guys coming in and losing their house to them. They want people who are punting steadily and readily and keeping going. And really, in a way, the ball is in the air court because the last thing they want to do is to end up like the tobacco industry. Yeah, and that's a real concern. I mean, Stuart Kenny has said to me, he's a co-founder of the company and really built the brand. I was part of a team building the brand with another guy called Fintan Drury. They're now actively campaigning to prevent addiction really destroying the industry. And they've, Stuart Kenny has said to me that the gambling will get a stench like cigarettes if they don't do something about it, it'll become heavily taxed by government. Investors will want less to do with it, although when it's making the profits it's making, that's unlikely to see ethics or morals come into it. And there is a real sense in the industry at the moment that it needs to act to prevent itself becoming the next tobacco. And fathers and mothers telling their children never to gamble as opposed to kind of maybe bringing them in for put a fiver on the Grand National. Where are we in relation to regulation? Say when you compare us to the UK or the United States? We're probably about 80 years, maybe 90 years behind the UK. We haven't updated our gambling laws in decades. They're due to be updated now in the next year or so with the proper regulator coming in that'll oversee online gambling companies and things like that. But it's a long time coming. The industry at the moment get to self-regulate in Ireland. They can impose their own code of conduct amongst members of the Bookmakers Association. So we're marching to their beat in that way. It'll be interesting to see who that gambling regulator is if it's someone who's gonna make the industry uncomfortable or not, or is it gonna be someone who's there to sort of facilitate the industry in Ireland? And obviously it's quite a big industry in Ireland. It's part of the horse racing grey hand industry as well. I mean, gambling provides quite a good amount of revenue to newspapers and radio stations and television stations. So restricting advertising and things like that might seem like a good thing, but it will have consequences and it'll be quite interesting to see how they're all balanced. Well, leaving the morals of what happened to one side, it's an exciting story about the rise of Patty Power and it's called Ponters, how Patty Power bet billions and changed gambling forever. Out now, written by Aron Rogan. Aron, thanks a million for joining us. Thank you very much. Nile lives on a hill, a very steep hill, which is great for the calf muscles, but when it comes to squeezing in and out of that