It’s a trick question. The answer is ALWAYS! But sadly, not everyone sees it that way. Jody Bechtold, CEO at The Better Institute, joins the show to discuss how various generations respond to the proliferation of gambling access in the US. Jody’s experience and expertise in gambling disorder treatment is well respected and she is recognized internationally as one of the leading experts on gambling addiction.

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Are You Really Winning?

Jody Bechtold Tedx Talk: Luck, Skill, and The Rise of Gambling

The Better Institute

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Transcript:

Speaker 1 (Shane Cook)

Everybody, welcome to Wager Danger, a podcast where we explore gambling and the harm that occurs when it becomes more than just recreation. I’m Shane Cook, Gambling Disorder program director at Gateway Foundation. And on this episode, we’re very pleased to welcome the one and only Jody Bechtold. Jody is the CEO of the Better Institute located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is dedicated to helping individuals better themselves.

Jody and I explore the proliferation of gambling apps and how they affect the behavior of people who use them, most notably the younger folks who’ve grown up with legalized gambling. Gambling has become so normalized to our younger population that they fail to recognize that sports betting is actually gambling. This normalization shouldn’t be a surprise either, considering that about 20% of all advertising during broadcast sports is promoting sports betting. From baby boomers to Gen X to millennials to Gen Z.

Every generation handles the stigma and shame of gambling addiction differently. But the most important thing is to have the conversation, because it’s important to realize that everyone has a different idea about what constitutes problem gambling. As a follow up to our episode. I’d encourage you to have a look at Jodi’s TEDTalk, luck, skill and the rise of gambling.

We’ll have a link in the show notes below. But now we’re thrilled to have her here with us on Wager Danger. Jody, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 (Jody Bechtold)

Thanks, Shane. Really excited to be here.

00;01;43;09 – 00;02;09;16

Speaker 1

And we’re excited to have you here. Had the opportunity as as well as maybe some of our listeners have had the opportunity to listen to you in the past. And I can say every time that you’re at a conference and I listen to you speak, I one, Just amazing the content and the experiences that you’ve had. And two, I always learn something.

00;02;09;17 – 00;02;37;23

Speaker 1

So one thing that I thought might be interesting, especially for our listeners, is to provide a little bit of background on how you gravitated towards gambling disorder in particular in terms of, yeah, that particular field in behavioral health and maybe kind of walk us through the progression of how you got there and what it is you’re currently involved in and what you’re doing today with the Better Institute.

00;02;37;25 – 00;03;06;11

Speaker 2

Yeah, sure. Some people might have seen my TEDx talk and that kind of gives a little preview. I actually started in substance use disorder treatment space, and I’m located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it was when Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania decided to do expanded legalized gambling and bring in casinos across the state for the first time. I was like, Maybe I want to learn a little bit more about this.

00;03;06;11 – 00;03;27;27

Speaker 2

You know, I’m in the addictions field already. Maybe I can, you know, this will be new to me. Might not be new to everybody else. I didn’t know. So I went to go take a training and I learned that I had to go to three different states to take all these trainings because Pennsylvania didn’t have any trainings on, you know, gambling disorders.

00;03;28;00 – 00;03;53;27

Speaker 2

And I started to meet people in what I call this really small but mighty space of problem gambling treatment. And it was I was like, wow, these are my people. I really like this. And I just got focused on the training, focused on what it takes to get certified. And I started to work with my clients in substance use disorder and talk more a lot more about gambling.

00;03;53;27 – 00;04;20;27

Speaker 2

And that’s when I realized they were doing a lot of gambling and we were never, ever taught how to screen for it, how to talk about it as a co-occurring or a cross addiction or anything. So it was really early stages, given that this was, you know, 27, 28, which really wasn’t that long ago. So from there, all of a sudden I was like, I really like the problem gambling space.

00;04;21;00 – 00;04;46;12

Speaker 2

And I decided to do private practice by myself. And, you know, it’s kind of like, be careful because you don’t really hang a shingle that says Gamblers come here because you really you know, at that time wouldn’t fill up your caseload with just gambling disorder. So I just kept doing more public speaking. I was doing a lot of public awareness talks.

00;04;46;15 – 00;05;14;17

Speaker 2

I was talking with clients that came to me for other reasons. And little by little, the word got out that I was, you know, the clinician that knew about problem gambling. I was fortunate enough to meet with some individuals that are members of gay. And, you know, I’ll never forget when I went to a G.A. meeting and the gentleman said, I want to introduce you to Jodi.

00;05;14;19 – 00;05;44;13

Speaker 2

She’s a clinician treating problem gambling. She needs us and we need her. And it was just it was just very powerful to realize, you know, how important doing problem gambling as a clinician, but really understanding the self-help and the self support side of things and really coming together. And so I never looked back. I have never looked back since, you know, just constantly doing lots of trainings, education, advocacy work.

00;05;44;16 – 00;05;56;25

Speaker 2

And people are really surprised to know that as the CEO of the group practice that I have now, I still carry a full caseload too. It’s kind of shocking for yeah, I still.

00;05;56;27 – 00;05;59;12

Speaker 1

I just I didn’t realize that.

00;05;59;14 – 00;06;21;04

Speaker 2

Yeah, about 20 to 25 people a week in addition to all the other things that I do. So I want to stay current and relevant to what’s going on. I think that’s really important in, you know, doing any of the trainings or the public speaking that I do as well. But you asked me about kind of the better Institute, right?

00;06;21;06 – 00;06;49;17

Speaker 2

I was in private practice for by myself, and I was realizing that I had to, you know, make referrals for a family member because I was treating the individual with a gambling disorder or I was making a referral for couples or relationship counseling at one point or family counseling. And a colleague of mine came to me and said, you know, I really want to own a private practice someday.

00;06;49;20 – 00;07;22;26

Speaker 2

And we don’t even remember now how it happened. It’s kind of one of those conversations where you meet and you have a a brainstorming session on the back of a napkin at a restaurant and write stuff down. And that becomes the thing you want to frame forever. And we just said, let’s let’s create a group practice and let’s add clinicians or trained clinicians to really be able to treat problem gambling so that for the majority of referrals that we get, we can satisfy all their needs throughout their journey.

00;07;22;29 – 00;07;44;25

Speaker 2

So we kind of have a saying now that for every one referral we have three because we help the family member or loved one, the individual themself with a gambling disorder and ultimately if there’s family or or relationship counseling. And our motto is to save one family at a time. So that is really kind of where the better institute came from.

00;07;44;25 – 00;07;46;17

Speaker 2

It’s where you go to get better.

00;07;46;19 – 00;07;55;05

Speaker 1

That’s great story. So how long has it been since you transitioned from private practice into the Better Institute?

00;07;55;07 – 00;08;13;00

Speaker 2

We made the transition in 2018. I’ve actually had a private practice since about 2005. Okay, So I was kind of doing that in a solo for quite some time, as well as doing a lot of teaching at the university level and things like that.

00;08;13;02 – 00;08;23;09

Speaker 1

So it sounds like the Better Institute is, is really a concept that allows you to cover a lot of ground instead of being in one particular area. Right.

00;08;23;12 – 00;08;45;24

Speaker 2

Yeah. It wasn’t, you know, obviously we treat the whole person. And so when people come in maybe for a gambling disorder, we’re able to help them in many other ways. So all of our clinicians are, you know, trained with, you know, the standard mental health and addiction background as well as in a different interventions for other potential disorders.

00;08;45;27 – 00;09;09;19

Speaker 2

But what’s really been shocking to me is how many referrals we get on a weekly basis, specifically saying I have a gambling problem or my loved one has a gambling problem. Can you please help us? So, you know, a lot of a lot of practitioners you would talk to might say, I don’t see that many people with gambling disorder.

00;09;09;22 – 00;09;20;13

Speaker 2

You know, I have to screen for it. I have to look for it. But we’re really seeing a lot more people just straight up saying, I know I have a problem and I’m ready to get help.

00;09;20;15 – 00;10;01;22

Speaker 1

So that’s interesting know, I want to explore that a little bit more because that’s really a topic of conversation I have with with some of my colleagues when I’m out at these conferences and things. Do you find that maybe that differs state by state or are you starting to see that that’s that’s becoming the norm just across all the states where gambling has enhanced legalized legalization of gambling, whether it be online sports betting or, you know, having slots available at the corner grocery store, so on and so forth.

00;10;01;22 – 00;10;05;02

Speaker 1

I mean, what what would you attribute that to?

00;10;05;04 – 00;10;33;17

Speaker 2

I think there’s a couple of different ways to look at that. Pennsylvania, near where I am, is one of the first four states to have such expanded legalized gambling after the Supreme Court overturned the professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. So we were ahead of many states. I know Illinois also has a lot of online and, you know, many forms of gambling and see that some other states might be further behind.

00;10;33;19 – 00;11;18;24

Speaker 2

And so they haven’t felt that momentum growing yet is is one way of looking at it. Again, we’re already up at 38 states and D.C. that now have sports betting in some form, whether it’s brick and mortar online or both. So we’re going to we’re going to see these trends across states for sure. The other thing is, I think we’re doing a better job at marketing and getting into the social media side of things, getting making sure that our SEO is really good with our website because this is a younger generation that is asking for help and they tend to do it first and foremost through Google and, you know, using technology.

00;11;18;26 – 00;11;32;07

Speaker 2

And and so I think just even that technology or digital presence is helping to get people the care they need faster or, you know, point them in the right direction sooner.

00;11;32;10 – 00;11;53;29

Speaker 1

Right. Well, I know here in Illinois, we’ve done a tremendous amount. There’s been a tremendous effort to get the word out. Our campaign for Illinois, at least, is are you really winning? And it’s it’s front and center. It’s become front and center over the last year, year and a half. And I think people are starting to catch on to it.

00;11;54;02 – 00;12;20;24

Speaker 1

The branding is very similar to the gambling operators or at least some of the online sportsbooks. So I think that helps bring in some recognition and just being out anecdotally, having conversations with people out in the public areas that I visit, people are more aware of it. I was just curious, you know, from your perspective, how much of how much is driven by that awareness?

00;12;20;24 – 00;12;35;29

Speaker 1

And what what I’m hearing you say is at least your experience in Pennsylvania has been that that helps drive it. And then, you know, to a certain extent, I would believe that word of mouth has something to do with it as well.

00;12;36;02 – 00;13;03;18

Speaker 2

Yet word of mouth is big. The more individuals are professionals across both, you know, mental health and study treatment, they’re getting trained in problem gambling, not necessarily to treat it as a primary, but to understand that it could be, you know, a secondary addiction or, you know, a way that people might get into gambling, as you know, because they’re not drinking or doing substances anymore.

00;13;03;21 – 00;13;29;03

Speaker 2

So there’s a lot more awareness across all of the professions compared to how siloed it used to be between mental health and addiction. So I think that’s a big key. The campaigns are an interesting one. Certain states are really hitting it just really well, like you’re describing with Illinois. Other states not quite there yet, not ramped up quite enough.

00;13;29;06 – 00;13;52;18

Speaker 2

You know, if you talk to younger people and you’re trying to screen and you’re using the word gambling, they’re going to say no. But if you say sports betting, they’re going to say yes. So I think some of the the, you know, advocacy and getting the word out, we have to be really careful of our vocabulary and who are targeting as another way to spread the word.

00;13;52;21 – 00;14;17;17

Speaker 1

Yeah, that’s a good point. And you’ve mentioned that before. I’ve heard you talk about this. Can you help people understand what you mean when some of the younger population that we come in contact with, there’s maybe a there’s a reluctance to classify some of these activities as gambling among young people? And why is this?

00;14;17;17 – 00;14;42;25

Speaker 2

Yeah. YOUNGER Well, because they’ve grown up, you know, with with fantasies, sports. They’ve grown up watching, you know, their peers, their their parents, their aunts, uncles, what have you talking about? You know, daily fantasy sports teams and things like that. So they’re they’re really focused on the sports side of it, not even realizing that it’s considered gambling in some regards.

00;14;42;28 – 00;15;14;00

Speaker 2

And so the words matter part. My partner, he did a survey of young athletes, 14 U. Hockey players. And the very first question was, are you you know, do you participate in any type of gambling and list of things? 0% said yes. And then the next question was, you know, have you ever done any sports betting on, you know, on an app like DraftKings or FanDuel?

00;15;14;05 – 00;15;21;14

Speaker 2

And 46% said yes. Like, that’s a crazy number, right? And they don’t recognize.

00;15;21;15 – 00;15;30;24

Speaker 1

But but but I’ll be honest, I, I find that lower than what my expectation would be. I would think it might be higher.

00;15;30;27 – 00;15;33;06

Speaker 2

Well, this was 14 year old.

00;15;33;09 – 00;16;03;29

Speaker 1

Right. And I. I understand that. I’ve raised two boys, though, and and those who are. But and maybe, you know, they were both involved in sports. So I think if you’re involved in sports, you probably have maybe a little bit like higher likelihood of being involved in that, at least on some level, whether it be filling out a bracket during March Madness or just participating in some group activity among your buddies.

00;16;04;01 – 00;16;06;07

Speaker 2

And the different fantasy leagues.

00;16;06;10 – 00;16;20;20

Speaker 1

Yeah, exactly. So so my perspective could be skewed that way. But yeah, you’re you’re hitting almost 50% at 46%. So that’s you know, the alarm bells are going off at that point.

00;16;20;22 – 00;16;21;24

Speaker 2

Right? Right.

00;16;21;25 – 00;16;47;26

Speaker 1

So understanding that youth population is a vulnerable group. I suspect one of the one of the ways to have an impact there is to get in front of or get messages to the parents. Have you had any experience or what has been your experience in reaching out or doing that particular outreach to the parents of students or youth of that age?

00;16;47;28 – 00;16;55;24

Speaker 1

And having this discussion about potential problems with gambling in that age demographic?

00;16;55;27 – 00;17;33;16

Speaker 2

Yeah, we found that it’s it’s a difficult conversation to have at the current state of where we are with problem gambling or gambling in general. In sports betting, we’re finding that if we do more of a passive approach or getting better buy in. And so an example of that would be that if you’re talking to, you know, the youth that are involved in any type of schools for sports, talking to them about how to have better performance and mental performance, they’re really clued in and they really want to become, you know, better athletes or better players.

00;17;33;19 – 00;17;58;07

Speaker 2

And then adding to that whole conversation, things that make them more at risk or vulnerable and then being able to talk about gambling is one of the key things that would make them more vulnerable. That tends to get more buy in from the youth than, shall I say, the the Don’t do drugs campaign approach. That really didn’t work where they said, you know, this is your brain on drugs.

00;17;58;10 – 00;18;33;05

Speaker 2

And with parents, what’s really interesting that I did not anticipate where parents were calling worried about their child or, you know, teenage you’re saying I’m worried that my teenager might have a gambling problem. And I would say, okay, well, what makes you say that? And they would say, well, they spent all the money. They won gambling already. And I would say, okay, so how how how are they gambling if they’re underage in their youth?

00;18;33;06 – 00;19;14;18

Speaker 2

Right. And then they sheepishly say, well, we created an account on the app and let them use it. So there’s this, you know, lack of understanding. And at the parent level that gambling still has to be of legal age. So that’s how much we’ve normalized it. Unfortunately, with this this younger group and parents are then saying, I’m worried only because they, you know, rapidly spent money that they won gambling or we’ll see parents that literally are, you know, sitting with their their their youth saying, hey, what do you think about the game this weekend?

00;19;14;18 – 00;19;40;18

Speaker 2

What should we play? What should we bet? And so they’re talking to their kids and doing it together, right as a as like a family thing. Now, we’ve heard this, you know, decades ago when people would talk about I you know, my grandfather taught me or my uncle taught me how to gamble. This is just on a very different level given the way we can gamble today.

00;19;40;21 – 00;20;10;03

Speaker 1

Yeah. The access to it alone is is very different. If you, you know, just thinking back to, you know, I’ll use myself as an example. When I had an uncle that was that enjoyed playing cards, and whenever we go to visit, we’d sit down to play gin gin rummy for points and things like that. So but that was a very different that didn’t always have access to that.

00;20;10;05 – 00;20;37;10

Speaker 1

So, you know, we play for a living and I kind of forget how to play when I wasn’t around until the next. Right, Right. So it’s not something that’s readily available, whereas today you’ve got it in your pocket and you can pull it out. And just if you’re aware, you can do it. So really crazy. What are some of the other ways that we can get to the youth, to this youth population?

00;20;37;10 – 00;20;52;01

Speaker 1

Then I said, targeting the teachers in the schools, the coaches, maybe for those kids that are engaged in activities who are. And have you seen in your programs that are have been successful at that?

00;20;52;03 – 00;21;19;19

Speaker 2

You know, it’s really hard to get into the schools unless you’re already in right. And so I think we’re really challenged right now with having the right messaging or the right programing for maybe the groups that are already in the schools. They might be trying to say gambling when you should be saying sports betting. There’s a program called Stacked Deck that is used.

00;21;19;21 – 00;21;52;27

Speaker 2

It’s met with mixed results. You know, I would really like to see some more funding put around better programing for this particular youth demographic to figure out how can we really get to them and get them to talk about these things and get to understand how they might be at risk when they’re seen that everywhere? You know, most people are doing streaming on their phones or they’re watching, you know, a game or something on their phone and the sports spread is going across the bottom of the screen.

00;21;53;02 – 00;22;38;22

Speaker 2

The whole time. I just read an article from the U.K. that they figured out both, you know, active advertising plus the passive or subliminal advertising with all the sponsorship that any sporting event. One fifth of it is gambling advertisements. All right. So we’ve got to find a way to combat that. We’ve got to find a way to even, you know, do some better policy around limiting some of that because we can’t just have it so socially acceptable and out there and normalized in such a way and then have this tiny little programs that we’re trying to say, hey, but we want to talk about this and can we get in with the teachers?

00;22;39;00 – 00;22;51;05

Speaker 2

Can we get in with the coaches? Can we get in with the teams? Right. We’ve got to find a way to to do even more than that if we’re going to really be successful at this next generation that’s going to age into adulthood.

00;22;51;07 – 00;23;15;14

Speaker 1

Yeah, it’s yeah, I agree. I think it’s I think it’s a challenge to get there. And I know there are some programs like you mentioned the stacked deck and that that there’s a couple of agencies within Illinois that have individual programs that are targeted at youth as well, and they’re starting to make a difference in their local communities and starting to branch out a lot.

00;23;15;14 – 00;23;29;02

Speaker 1

So I it’s going to take a groundswell at some point to to really have an impact and and start making a major impact, I should say, or at least that’s my opinion. Yeah, but.

00;23;29;04 – 00;23;33;25

Speaker 2

And we need we need the research the research dollars behind it to also.

00;23;33;25 – 00;23;34;25

Speaker 1

Say exactly is.

00;23;34;25 – 00;23;45;08

Speaker 2

Effective. It always seems that the research and the treatment is delayed now until everybody says, wait, we might have we might have overstepped, we should do more of this. You know.

00;23;45;10 – 00;24;30;14

Speaker 1

And so so youth, I think is is a particular target of of interest where if we can arrest arrest some of the thinking early on in the development cycle can pay dividends down the road. But as you move up that the food chain there or as you progress up the scale, the age scale, if you want to call it that and you get into that early twenties to late twenties individual there, I see that we’ve got a big challenge there, especially among male population that are engaged, I mean, fully engaged in sports betting right now.

00;24;30;17 – 00;24;40;03

Speaker 1

And that seems to be the the target demographic for all of the advertising is that even though everybody’s being exposed to it, I mean, that’s that’s the target.

00;24;40;05 – 00;25;11;18

Speaker 2

Yeah, the research there’s a lot of research that’s supporting the average ages 26 male sports bettor tends to be educated so college degree and disposable income, which I always would love, you know, to understand that. But what that really means is they don’t have a lot of those life expenses yet. They’re not coupled up. They’re not, you know, raising a family yet, but they have a good income because they’re educated.

00;25;11;18 – 00;25;42;25

Speaker 2

And so to them, they have a lot of money to do whatever they want with because they don’t have all those expenses. And that’s the group that I see the most right now coming in for care is that they’re like, What the heck happened? So how did this happen to me? Most of the comments are I was doing okay, just doing, you know, daily fantasy sports here and there or a sports league with my friend until it went online.

00;25;42;27 – 00;26;17;05

Speaker 2

So we know there’s something about being online because then it’s on your phone, it’s on your computer or tablet or what have you. And that group, that age group is so comfortable with technology that is I call it the crack cocaine of gambling at this point, you know, 26 to 32, the amount of financial devastation that is caused by the gambling for these individuals and oftentimes their families, because many of the families will rescue them or bail them out the first time.

00;26;17;08 – 00;26;53;01

Speaker 2

And only after the second time of getting into financial devastation do they then come to someone like me for professional help. So that is absolutely a group that we’ve got to have a lot more prevention and early intervention. You know, public awareness, marketing, whatever, because they’re seeing so much of it in the gambling space. Many don’t even know how to watch sports without having gambled on it because they’ve been doing, you know, some form or for such a long time.

00;26;53;03 – 00;27;17;23

Speaker 2

And while I’d love to help people return to being a fan, right. Some of these individuals were never just a fan. They always knew there had to be some discussion about, you know, points over under who’s on what team, what are their staff, does that make them better? All in a way to, you know, feed into what ultimately now is the sports betting world.

00;27;17;25 – 00;27;22;29

Speaker 2

So it’s it’s an interesting group and it’s it’s it’s difficult. It’s sad.

00;27;22;29 – 00;27;31;25

Speaker 1

Yeah. Do you feel like we’re making some progress there? Is there too early to tell or are we reaching everybody in that space?

00;27;31;28 – 00;28;07;22

Speaker 2

Yeah, good question. I think it’s too early to tell. I’m a little frustrated that the research is showing mostly white males sports bettors are the ones that are coming in for help. Because I want to know what about everybody else that isn’t a white male? Where are they going? What are their struggles? We do know that a lot of some of the advertising that’s coming out of like a DraftKings, FanDuel barstool kind of organization is now starting to target minorities in a different way with the free play and things like that.

00;28;07;24 – 00;28;28;20

Speaker 2

So we want to make sure, you know, are we reaching them? Are the campaigns, you know, awareness campaigns are resonating with them? Do they say, okay, I’ll go too, you know, go get help because they look like me or I feel that they’re relatable. I think it’s too early to tell. But I think I think we need to put a lot more emphasis on this right now.

00;28;28;22 – 00;29;02;17

Speaker 1

Yeah, I would tend to agree. I think, about how here in the U.S. we’re a little bit behind, say, Europe and Australia and the introduction of online sports gambling and the accessibility to it. But have you seen anything that shows a direct correlation over time between access to it and the growth? Like is there a two year or two and a half year, three year lag to the number of people there reporting a problem gambling or a gambling disorder?

00;29;02;20 – 00;29;07;05

Speaker 1

And and does that continue to rise or does it level off at some point?

00;29;07;07 – 00;29;10;19

Speaker 2

Yeah, I think it’s too early to tell.

00;29;10;21 – 00;29;11;25

Speaker 1

Okay. Still.

00;29;11;27 – 00;29;12;26

Speaker 2

Yeah.

00;29;12;29 – 00;29;13;13

Speaker 1

Okay.

00;29;13;14 – 00;29;52;19

Speaker 2

It really is. Because again, you have states, you know, legalizing this different you know, years. So you know what what the first four states to look like is very different than what you know, states 35, 36 and 37 and 38 look like. Right. What we’ve what we do now, like it just came out recently in my state that one of the highest revenues of, you know, since the expansion of legalized gambling I think it was 7.7 billion for the year last year, which are crazy, staggering numbers.

00;29;52;21 – 00;30;22;15

Speaker 2

And we’re also seeing the help line calls increasing exponentially. So we definitely see states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey are reporting their help line calls are really increasing. Illinois did a really good study released, I think it was last year, you know, talking about how many individuals are endorsing gambling and all of that. So the problem overall, though, is we need this to be at the federal level.

00;30;22;17 – 00;30;46;25

Speaker 2

And there’s no federal oversight for gambling disorders like we have for mental health and substance. And without that federal oversight, we can only talk about, you know, this research or that researcher, this state or that state. There’s nothing that’s happening at a national level time and time and time and time again that we can say, here are the trends.

00;30;46;25 – 00;31;24;20

Speaker 2

It’s, you know, stabilize and it’s increasing. You know, we’re constantly comparing apples to oranges. And it’s very frustrating when you think about how much revenue is really generated from all this. So, yeah, I know the National Council on Problem Gambling has the GRIT Act in legislation they’re proposing, which would bring this to a national level and it would allocate some of the revenue, you know, earned from gambling to go to research, to go to treatment across the board, you know, and other programs.

00;31;24;22 – 00;32;01;09

Speaker 2

Then we don’t have 48 states that do things slightly different because I think that’s a huge problem because we really don’t have that longitudinal information. And our country’s very big. Right. You know, sometimes I say to people, we have 50 different states making decisions where when you compare it to UK or Australia, it’s still very centralized in a way they’re able to pass in a legislation and it applies to the whole country immediately.

00;32;01;11 – 00;32;02;00

Speaker 1

Right.

00;32;02;02 – 00;32;19;06

Speaker 2

And we don’t have that. Ours is still, you know, one state does this, another state does that. And I my favorite example is look at self-exclusion programs. There’s literally like 48 different self-exclusion programs across the country.

00;32;19;08 – 00;32;20;09

Speaker 1

Right.

00;32;20;11 – 00;32;28;18

Speaker 2

Just, you know, really unnecessary at this at this time in 2024 of this recording.

00;32;28;20 – 00;32;53;21

Speaker 1

Yeah. Because as as a constituency we’re mobile. Right. And so we can, you know, we can move from one state to the next. And what I mean by that is you can sign off of an exclusion document, right? And, and self-exclusion yourself in Illinois. But then you could just drive to Pennsylvania and play there, right?

00;32;53;27 – 00;33;24;12

Speaker 2

Yeah, we see that definitely across so many states. You know, when people live in, you know, near a border. My most recent challenge was somebody that was in Philadelphia that needed to self-exclusion in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and New Jersey because they were also easy to drive to. And the the sportsbooks operated in all those states. Do you know how cumbersome it is to tell someone to do that in five different states?

00;33;24;15 – 00;33;29;14

Speaker 1

Well, yeah. And not only that, each states process is different, I’ll bet.

00;33;29;17 – 00;33;30;13

Speaker 2

Very different.

00;33;30;13 – 00;33;43;26

Speaker 1

And it’s just an additional burden on the individual who is willing to self exclude, probably with the idea that if you make it easy for me, I’m ready to do it now. Right.

00;33;43;28 – 00;34;12;06

Speaker 2

Yeah. If you take if you take Pennsylvania, you can self exclude from your computer on all forms of gambling, both brick and mortar and online. You can do the same thing in New Jersey. And then if you go to Delaware, you can’t do the same thing that way. Or even Illinois. You can’t do it 100% online. Right. You still have to go and meet with somebody.

00;34;12;13 – 00;34;39;13

Speaker 2

Right. So there’s got to be there’s got to be a, you know, a push in the future, ideally in the near future, to standardize self-exclusion across the country. You know, so I know that at the national level, there’s a lot of talk of these types of things. You know, a national one 800 number national self-exclusion, you know, national legislature for, you know, research.

00;34;39;15 – 00;34;42;19

Speaker 2

But nothing’s actually happening yet.

00;34;42;22 – 00;35;07;05

Speaker 1

Well, I, I kind of feel like at some point we’ll get there. Hopefully it’s sooner rather than later. I think most most of us that are in this space and working from a a preventative approach or an outreach approach to get the word out are kind of kind of recognized. This is one of the steps we need to get to.

00;35;07;07 – 00;35;18;20

Speaker 1

And I think people working it at the state levels also understand the need for a consistent approach. So hopefully working together, yes, we will get there.

00;35;18;23 – 00;35;43;12

Speaker 2

When you think about it, you know, before 2018, we really wanted to have federal oversight. We wanted to have a lot of this consistency. And but, you know, it was a harder conversation to have with 38 states and counting. It’s really hard to not have this conversation and get the attention. So I really feel like the time is now way more than it’s ever been before.

00;35;43;14 – 00;35;52;23

Speaker 2

And, you know, it’s up to us to really push our states and the national entities to really keep moving forward with this.

00;35;52;26 – 00;36;34;23

Speaker 1

So I want to go. There was a topic I what I had intended for us to explore a little bit. And I wanted to get your thoughts on this. And and we’ve covered some of this already through our discussion, but just not overtly talked about this. And the only reason I want to bring this up is I do a lot of community outreach activity throughout the state, and I’ll go to different events and and set up a space where I can actually talk to people among the public and talk about gambling disorder and, you know, potentially treatment options for that if you and it may involve doing some light screening with an individual there so

00;36;34;23 – 00;36;56;18

Speaker 1

we can have a have a deeper conversation about it. But doing that over the course of the last year and a half, two years, what I’ve what I’ve seen is an overall indifference in some cases to gambling addiction, where a lot of people think, it’s not that big of a deal. You know, everybody kind of I hear the comment a lot.

00;36;56;20 – 00;37;23;29

Speaker 1

Everybody gambles a little bit every now and then. And to me, that just highlights that, you know, some people look at this as something they’re very indifferent about. Do you do you feel like that that’s consistent or that you’ve had consistent experiences or do you feel like the tide is turning and people are starting to recognize, hey, you know, this is this is something we need to take a closer look at.

00;37;23;29 – 00;37;28;26

Speaker 1

This is something that we need to focus and develop programing for.

00;37;28;29 – 00;38;07;29

Speaker 2

Yeah, great question. Again, I appreciate that because there’s two answers to that. There was some recent research from I forget who came out. I think it was came out of Canada and they were looking at stigma and the research did a really you know, and I apologize to anybody who’s listening to this if I mess it up a little bit because I don’t have it in front of me, but it was really looking at how do people view something like schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, alcohol use disorder and gambling disorder?

00;38;08;01 – 00;38;30;13

Speaker 2

And they would ask, you know, the individuals that were being surveyed did they think that people had control over these things? And so they didn’t feel that it was that people had control over whether or not they got schizophrenia, whether or not they had OCD, a little bit on the fence about whether or not they could control whether they had alcohol.

00;38;30;13 – 00;38;56;26

Speaker 2

But it was overwhelming. Of course, they had control whether they had a gambling disorder. And you can really feel the difference with it’s not your fault that you have this disorder to its absolutely 100% something you could have avoided. And so, you know, we have to think about that stigma and it’s very real. And then we have to apply that to different age groups so, you know, the different generations.

00;38;56;29 – 00;39;23;00

Speaker 2

So we’re definitely going to see baby boomers, maybe the Gen Xers really feeling like it’s your fault if this happens to you, because they they didn’t grow up with as much discussion around mental health and addiction and getting help these things. Then you’re going to see something different with millennials and Gen Xers in terms of they really do love their mental health services.

00;39;23;00 – 00;39;42;29

Speaker 2

They want mental health services just to be preventative in many ways. And so they’re more likely to see this as it you know, they understand why people get into trouble with gambling. They don’t see it as you should have been able to control it as much. And they want to make sure that they’re supportive and that there’s help.

00;39;43;02 – 00;40;20;11

Speaker 2

So lots of generalizing in that. In that statement I just made, you can always find exceptions to it, but I think the generational characteristics better, this indifference or this tide is turning and we’re more aware and we want to make sure that people get help. And I see that at a at a clinical level when I have some of these younger individuals where they say, Well, I sent an email and told all my friends or I sent a text, I should say, and told all my friends that I have a gambling problem and I want I’m out for the season.

00;40;20;11 – 00;40;39;06

Speaker 2

And, you know, as was the phrase, and I couldn’t believe the overwhelming support that I got from all of my friends, They said, We’re here for you. You know, we understand that’s a very different story than some of my clients that are older that would say, I can’t tell my friends any of this. I can’t share this with anybody.

00;40;39;12 – 00;41;06;03

Speaker 2

I have to be careful who my, my, my family and my loved ones are allowed to talk to about this because we don’t want this to get out that I have a gambling problem. Right. So that stigma becomes self stigma for many people. And sure, you know, then perpetuate, you know, what that that there should be, you know, individuals should know how to control this and there must be something morally wrong with them if they can’t.

00;41;06;06 – 00;41;35;25

Speaker 1

Wow. That’s that’s great. I’ve never heard it characterized that way, but it makes complete sense to me. And it reflects the conversations I’ve had, too, with baby boomers, maybe even before the baby boom era, all the way down to current youth. So I think that makes a ton of sense. So I appreciate that. I’ve never really I’ve never really taken the time to kind of compartmentalize it and put it in in each of those as generational response.

00;41;35;28 – 00;41;37;29

Speaker 1

But that makes a ton of sense.

00;41;38;02 – 00;42;00;12

Speaker 2

Yeah, there’s a lot we can learn. Looking at the generation all characteristics for sure. What what’s their world perspective and what makes them think certain ways? And that, again, would be really important and very impactful in raising awareness. You know, is the message targeted to the right age group in a way that really resonates with them?

00;42;00;14 – 00;42;25;14

Speaker 1

Yeah. So I really appreciate the conversation here today. I just want to. One thing I wanted to wrap up on is where do you see yourself spending more of your time lately and where do you find yourself gravitating towards as you move forward into the next five years as it pertains to disorder gambling?

00;42;25;21 – 00;42;50;04

Speaker 2

Well, I still want to work with individuals. I still want to have a caseload and, you know, help anybody. I just I really believe that we are here to save lives. And I. I never want to get distracted from that mission. I do still want to do a lot of training and public speaking. I’ve expanded a lot recently to even more global.

00;42;50;06 – 00;43;12;07

Speaker 2

I do some work with the Phil in the Philippines right now and in Iceland, and it’s really, you know, it’s all the same. Everybody’s struggling with it because it’s online, because, you know, families are impacted so much from this. So I just want to, you know, keep being a voice for those who don’t quite have a voice yet and work.

00;43;12;07 – 00;43;31;05

Speaker 2

You know, I train as many new and emerging clinicians to learn about problem gambling, to want to treat problem gambling and really, you know, focus on the workforce development side of things as as part of my mission as well. So, yeah, it’s a great question. Thanks for asking. Yeah.

00;43;31;07 – 00;43;58;13

Speaker 1

Well, it’s great insight too. I appreciate you sharing. I do know and I want to give you an opportunity to talk about this as one of the areas where you have a particular interest in is the financial literacy side of recovering from gambling disorder. What are some of the things that Better Institute has been involved in in terms of advancing the financial literacy?

00;43;58;15 – 00;44;00;08

Speaker 1

Post gambling disorder?

00;44;00;10 – 00;44;25;01

Speaker 2

Yeah, it’s great. You know, we do a lot with working with finances. It’s so important because many people come in for care thinking that they don’t have a gambling problem, they have a money problem, and that’s really where it starts. And so part of being trained and certified to treat gambling disorders is to be very comfortable getting into people’s business about their finances early and often.

00;44;25;04 – 00;44;53;09

Speaker 2

And I know not all clinicians are as comfortable with that. And so I’m just really excited that I got to team up and work and advise. And you had them on one of your other podcasts, Alex DeMarco from GAM Fund, and I think Garmin is a fantastic program. It’s it’s mostly for providers to really, you know, be teamed up with a certified financial planner and to bring their client into it.

00;44;53;15 – 00;45;17;01

Speaker 2

And the key to that difference is that providers like me get to talk with a financial advisor and everything that we learn, we then carry with us for any future client. So it’s very different than just referring a client to go talk to someone. And we really don’t know what they talked about or what’s happening. We’re able to really keep it as as a as a main focus of the treatment.

00;45;17;03 – 00;45;48;27

Speaker 2

And so we’re seeing a lot of a lot of change around, you know, the financial literacy side and good good focus, good emphasis on helping individuals have a better relationship with their money. You know, I’m just I’m so fortunate I’ve been able to work with people long enough to see them from, you know, total devastation to almost, you know, hitting their goal of being out of their gambling debt and just had a session last night with a couple.

00;45;49;04 – 00;46;14;14

Speaker 2

And I just was so excited for them because they have eight months to go after this very long and painful process. And they just kept saying, we’re never getting into debt again. We’re not I’m not gambling. We’re going to raise our family. We’re very focused. We never thought we would be thankful that a gambling disorder and all the devastation would ultimately put us to a better place.

00;46;14;16 – 00;46;40;00

Speaker 2

And we see all of our friends don’t have the greatest relationship with money, and we just feel that we’re so much better equipped and prepared to, you know, raise a family now that we’ve learned all of this. And so, yeah, finances is a is a really, really important component of recovery. And I just talk about it all the time because I just think it’s just so helpful for everyone.

00;46;40;03 – 00;46;47;19

Speaker 1

Yeah, it’s great to This has been great. Jodi, I appreciate everything. Any final thoughts before we wrap it up?

00;46;47;21 – 00;46;51;02

Speaker 2

I could probably talk for hours. So, Shane, I know we currently have.

00;46;51;08 – 00;46;52;01

Speaker 1

You know.

00;46;52;01 – 00;47;23;22

Speaker 2

A few limits in a few minutes here. I you know, there’s a couple of messages that keep coming up, you know, to parents if they’re listening, you know, be involved, become educated, you know, be involved in what your teenagers or your youth are doing or your young ones or even your adult children. And if your adult children are struggling, you know, be involved kind of, you know, help them to to find, you know, their path to treatment or to recovery.

00;47;23;25 – 00;47;49;16

Speaker 2

I think that’s so important to be able to talk about it. And, you know, my TEDx talk is is kind of old now. But my message there was have the conversation. And I still think that is a critical one, you know, with anybody, you know, family, friends, coworkers have the conversation because you don’t realize that you know, somebody you know and is close to you might be struggling, you know, in silence.

00;47;49;16 – 00;48;08;28

Speaker 2

And if you’re able to have the conversation, you might actually be able to help them open up and get care and stop suffering. Because we also know that this is a very high suicide, you know, disorder. And the more that we can have that conversation, the more that we can save someone’s life. So thanks for having me on this podcast, Shane.

00;48;08;28 – 00;48;09;21

Speaker 2

I really appreciate.

00;48;09;21 – 00;48;17;07

Speaker 1

It. I really appreciate you coming in and having the conversation with us. So I always learn a lot.

00;48;17;12 – 00;48;20;08

Speaker 2

Yes, I love doing this stuff.

00;48;20;11 – 00;48;47;16

Speaker 1

All right. Jody Bechtold, the Better Institute. We love hearing from you. So please take a moment to like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly via email at Wager Danger at Gateway Foundation dot org. Look for us on Facebook and Twitter at Recovery Gateway on LinkedIn, at Gateway Dash Foundation, or through our website at Gateway Foundation dot org Wager Danger is supported through funding in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance Abuse Prevention and Recovery. And remember, recovery is a lifelong process. If you are a family member struggling with a gambling problem, call Gateway at 8449753663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment.

This episode takes a look back at some interesting moments from very important conversations we have had over the last 12 months.

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Are You Really Winning – areyoureallywinning.com 

Transcript:

Bob Ness: Welcome to Wager Danger. I’m Bob Ness, the producer of the show. We have a 2023 end-of-year wrap-up for your listening pleasure. Shane has had many interesting conversations with a wide variety of guests this year, highlighting the many aspects of problem gambling. As the producer of the show. I get a front-row seat to these conversations and always learn something new with every guest.

This first clip is from January when we went to record remote out at Morton College in Cicero, Illinois, for the Latin Gambling Awareness Conference. Shane had a number of conversations out there, and here are a couple of highlights that stick out. The first is regarding a prevalence study of gambling in Illinois. And Shane got some sobering details from Jim Wilkerson from the State of Illinois about how much people gamble in this state.

Shane Cook: The biggest piece that I usually get asked around this is what does prevalence look like in the state of Illinois? And it’s 3.8% of the state has either a problem gambling disorder or is at risk of having a problem gambling disorder. And so and when I say percentages, a lot of times people will look at that and think, well, that’s not a huge percentage, or what does that really mean?

What does that look like? Ultimately, that means about 1.1 million individuals across the state either have or are at risk of having problem gambling. Right. And obviously, that’s a lot of individuals that are in need of our services and in need of the resources that we’re providing.

Jim Wilkerson: Yeah. And it’s shocking, really, that it was as high. It came back as high as it is, and that’s 3.8% that are that have a problem gambling or a gambling disorder.

Shane Cook: Yessir.

Jim Wilkerson: And then another 7.1, 7.2% that are at high risk of developing a gambling disorder.

Shane Cook: Right.

Jim Wilkerson: And that’s when I tell people that I tell people that that works out to about 1.1 million people. They’re shocked.

Shane Cook: Yeah, it’s shocking to kind of get that number and see that number and really understand what the potential impact is. But that is, of course, why we’re here. And that’s that’s what we’re trying to do is help those individuals. And really, when you look at the services that are provided by organizations such as Gateway across the state, you know, those types of services are really engaging these individuals that have or at risk of developing this disorder, engaging their family members and engaging their community at the same time to really address this from that holistic point of view.

Shane Cook: And that’s what we’re really excited about, is to be able to take that information that came out of the needs assessment and take that and turn that into actual services and activities that can really help this disorder in the individuals across the state.

Bob Ness: Shane also had a very interesting conversation at the conference with Dr. Celeste Napier, who is a keynote speaker at the conference as well. She highlighted the fact that the urge to gamble is so strong that they could get a rat to recreate gambling habits in a lab.

Dr. Celeste Napier: Then the question was, could we show in a rodent model of a gambling like task that as the animal continue to progress in these gambling behaviors, could we show that they perform these tasks in a manner that was very similar to the profile that seen in human gambling behaviors, especially when those who suffer from gambling disorders actually take the same kind of task.

And what we were able to show that the profile was very, very similar. And that was very useful to us because one of the questions that Sandy asked was if we treated the animals with a drug, the generic name of the drugs is from a pixel that we know in human studies actually can promote risk taking behaviors, including promoting gambling.

If this is an organic, brain-derived phenomenon, if you will, then our rat should show that to okay. And indeed, Sandy showed that they did when we treated the rat chronically like it occurs in humans that these rats started to increase their gambling-like behaviors until it became very obvious that they were now making very unhealthy choices and the profile was mirroring those that you see in the human that has disordered gambling as well.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Dr. Celeste Napier: So then the conclusion is, of course, that is biology, right? That these gambling-like behaviors and the propensity to continue to gamble resides in very specific parts of the brain.

Bob Ness: Shane also spoke to John Harris from a five marketing and consulting about the state of Illinois. His new campaign called Are You Really Winning this campaign is a great way to bring awareness to people who gamble that they’re probably not winning as much as they think they are.

Dr. Nathan Smith: We don’t know as an agency how people are really feeling or thinking or what they’re doing or what’s motivating them. All we know is that this has taken hold and taken root somehow, so that so the idea of are you really winning was if you because all of the platforms out there, the gaming betting, gambling platforms are all about you as that winner.

We said well, okay, if you can’t stop betting nonstop, if you are thinking about gambling off the time, if you are spending too much time, say at the slots, and if you find yourself having trouble with your relationships with your job and you find yourself losing more than you win, then are you really winning? So it’s a process and it’s an educational process.

With that effort of are you really winning? The visual, the associated visual is of this a badge or a shield? Are you really winning the words encased in a badge or a shield? So it looks we wanted to also visually be in the game with the gaming betting platform provider. So we needed to make sure we didn’t look like a nonprofit, a low budget operator, and that we looked like if you put it next to all a DraftKings, Caesars FanDuel, that it looked like it was part of the same sort of environment or lexicon and in that way and take it very seriously and do it in a very professional and educational way.

And as you know, as a provider and working with people who are in need of help, it’s also about starting that conversation and destigmatizing this. So it’s okay to it’s okay if you’re if you’re there, then you’re there. And to your point, if you can recognize the signs or we can educate people, friends and family, then they can say, because I don’t think this, you know, gambling disorder, you know, it’s it alcohol issues have been around a long time.

Drug issues have been around a long time. This is really starting to take hold because of the the proliferation of gaming and gambling. And by the way, nobody’s saying that gaming, gambling, betting is wrong or bad, But if it does start to take over your life, if you can’t stop betting non stop, if you’re obsessing, etc., and you’re losing more than you win, then yes.

Are you are you really winning? Right. And that becomes the self-reflective part, the self actual self awareness part that, like you said, is really critical.

Bob Ness: And this brings Jane spoke to Dr. Nathan Smith, the executive director of the Cambridge Research Institute, about gambling’s effect on military veterans. Nate brought up a lot of information about how gaming is available to active duty soldiers and bases, and they are sanctioned by the Department of Defense. But oddly enough, there isn’t any problem gambling assistance available to soldiers if they become addicted.

Bob Ness: It’s a pretty eye-opening conversation backed by data and peer-reviewed research.

Dr. Nathan Smith: The strange thing about once you get into this field and start looking around as men, that it’s everywhere. There are problems everywhere. When you starting to look at what’s happening with the veteran community. So just a couple of a couple of high points. So the on O’Connor bases, which are mostly the overseas bases, you know, the US DOD run 3000 slot machines that bring in about $110 million a year.

Right. So this is happening. So active duty soldiers and their families, contractors and anybody who lives on base has access to it. These are the folks who are who are sitting in $110 million a year. And that probably is low or for being honest, because that number is from 2016 and they haven’t released the numbers again. So when you work at military, you know, sort of outside the military on military projects, you can only work at the data you have, right.

Whatever in you and you can’t really ask for anything and you can’t really get anything. But that’s what we know. We know in 2016 it was around $10 million a year. So people are developing problems on base and then coming home and not having the support they need for treatment. And that’s you know, that’s as you look at the field, it’s just you have to say that’s unacceptable.

We do not accept that what we offer them is just a way to overcome these barriers. And once you do that, you know, the sky’s the limit because, you know, we’re taking people we’ve got in this class, we earned, what, two Navy SEALs. We’ve got a Navy rescue swimmer which is in the sea in other movies where there’s, you know, the guy jumping out of a helicopter, Right.

You know, into the ocean. That’s a Navy rescue somewhere Like these are incredibly talented, smart, hardworking people. They just need a little bit of help with these weird barriers that get in. So that’s the that’s the military research associate program with a MRF. And then finally, as we were going starting these programs, we started getting calls from people who are in active duty or veterans and saying, I need help today and I can’t get into that for whatever reason or I need help today and I don’t have access to the VA for whatever reason.

And so that’s that’s another thing that, you know, we needed to in addition to help five years from now or in ten years, these people need help today. And so we have the military treatment fund. So the military, too, and find us in somebody comes to us and needs help today with their gambling disorder. We can get them treatment paid for by by Cambridge Research Institute.

You know, it’s not forever. It’s not. And it’s, you know, a nice set of at least eight meetings with a high quality person who’s trained, licensed, you know, experience with military folks. And we you know, we pay the bills for that. And that’s what’s been really that’s been really rewarding.

Bob Ness: She and I also had a conversation with Tanya Bibbs Smith, the regional outreach director at Task. Tanya’s grandmother ran a gambling house, which she was growing up. So Tanya didn’t realize that there was anything wrong with gambling because it was so socially accepted and normalized in her community.

Shane Cook: I remember my grandmother run an Aquino house and it’s probably, you know, called a gambling house. But the big is game. You know, that was play was keno. And it’s kind of like, I guess bingo or whatever. So I remember as a little girl, you know, maybe about seven, eight, nine, I remember getting these little small glass bowls for everybody to put their coins in, you know, dimes, nickels, quarters.

And they and I remember, you know, people coming in and paying the house, which was my grandmother. So they would all give her five bucks to participate, you know, in playing these games. But as a young person, it never, never, ever dawned on me, you know, about the gambling that it was gambling, because in my community, I guess especially even back then, it was a way of survival.

You know, it was a way to make extra money to pay your bills. So, you know, my grandmother would have people come in and pay the house. They would be able to come in a play space and keno and be with, you know, all the games that we played, you know, in the community. They will also, you know, be able to shoot dice in her backyard.

She had a nice little area back there. You could go back there and shoot dice on this, me And, you know, those people also had to pay a fee. But she would cook food. So on Fridays it was fish for our Friday and gambling. On Saturday, it was spaghetti and chicken, you know, dinners and gambling. And then all Sunday it was church.

So for Sunday and then it was gambling was like, you know, maybe the Lord on the stairs, I don’t know. But it it was just so interesting. You know, as to when I was a younger person, it never dawned on me, you know, that my grandmother and even my uncle had a gambling issue.

Bob Ness: Dr. Joshua Grubbs enlightened Shane and our audience with data and statistics showing us that knowing more about sports does not necessarily make you better at gambling, and you should probably concentrate more on odds and statistics.

Dr. Joshua Grubbs: Sports bettors. We see this in other action based games as well. So things like poker or even blackjack to an extent as well. There’s this belief of if I can get good enough, I can definitely win enough and then I won’t have a gambling problem anymore. And it’s this idea of, you know, gambling as a career versus gambling as an addiction is based on how much you win versus lose.

And that’s a lovely thing to believe, I suppose, if you’re dealing with it. But the reality is it’s just not true. If you can’t stop, if you’re chasing your losses, if you’re making bad decisions, if you’re finding yourself in debt that you’re not, you’re not going to get better. One, I mean, that’s just not going to happen. But to that predictive control belief that that belief that you can see the future before it’s going to happen is just going to get in the way of you getting the help that you need to get over this problem that you do.

I am not sure that there there’s any evidence to suggest that actually knowing about a sport makes you better at gambling on it. In fact, I would almost bet, pardon the pun. Right. That the people that do the best at sports gambling are not the ones that have the most knowledge of how sports work. It’s the people that have the most knowledge of how odds lines work and statistics work.

And even in that situation, though, there’s a lot of chance that’s involved. And if you talk to professional sports wagers, people who make most of their income off of sports betting, they’re not talking about massive life changing wins or they took the 1 to 1000 odds, right? That’s not what they did. They bet large volumes of money on, you know, basically minuscule odds lines that if you do enough, eventually you win just enough to make a little bit of profit.

Right. And so it’s not the glamorous you know, you had the sleeper pick that beat everyone kind of life that people seem to think it is. It’s more of playing the statistics game in much the same way that we see the stock market working right or things like that. And so it’s not it’s messy. And this notion that just because you’re a skilled athlete or that you have a history with sports or used to coach high school football or whatever, is not necessarily going to make you any better at all at actually placing bets.

Bob Ness: Shane spoke to an Army Veteran podcast host and author named Dave Yeager about his new book called Fall in A Veteran with a Gambling Addiction. Dave describes Shane how he flew to Korea after 911 and discovered slot machines and small casinos on the Army bases. This led him to find comfort and solace while playing the games. It also led him into a deep gambling addiction.

Shane Cook: So tell us about the experience there, Korea and being introduced to the slots.

Dave Yeager: Yeah, So I get on the base, I get to the hotel in Seoul on Yongsan base, a very, very, very nice hotel. I get settled into my room. I find some dinner. I’m tired, but I’m not necessarily sleepy because I’m stressed. I’m walking around the hotel and as I’m walking around, I’m seeing like a little shop here and a restaurant there.

And then I start to hear noises that I’m like, Wait, what is this? So I turn and look in the room and it’s it’s not a full blown casino, but it’s a room full of slot machines, much like a casino, you know, dimly lit with the fun lights in it and all that, all that sort of thing. So I’m like, You know what?

I gambled when I was younger. This looks like it could be fun. It’s a great way to kill time. And still I can actually sleep because I’m not ready to sleep. So I took some money out of the ATM. You know, I went. I sat down and I started to play. And the first thing I noticed as I started to play was that my shoulder started to relax a little bit.

So I’m like, okay, maybe I will be able to sleep now. But then I made and I always call this the biggest mistake a budding compulsive gambler can make. I won, okay? And it was not I didn’t break the bank. I did not strip the Republic of Korea and the U.S. Army of all their money. Right. But I won enough war in that moment.

Just in that moment, all of the stress, all of the tension, all the fear, all the things that I had been experiencing up until that point were gone. They literally in that moment were gone. And it just felt good, you know, that moment felt good. Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that on that day in November in 2001, I became a compulsive gambler.

What I will say, though, is the seed was planted because, you know, I went through the rest of getting processed in and they got me all signed in and they got me signed and I got picked up by my unit, which was all the way at the southern end of Peninsula, about 4 hours away. I was in a Pusan, which is at the southern end of Korea.

So they picked me up, they took me there, they got me settled into my house. I was a noncommissioned officer, so I was in a house with four other noncommissioned officers. I got settled into the base and it was probably a couple of days until I was walking around and I walked into the community club there, happened to walk to the back of the community club.

And lo and behold, here’s another one of these slop rooms, much smaller, you know, much less glitz to it. But it was still one of the slot rooms. I’m like, you know what? I had fun doing this up in in Seoul. Let me go ahead and try it again. Well, over the course of the next several months, that went from maybe going on a Friday to going on a Friday or Saturday to go on Friday, Saturday, Sunday to now wanting to go Monday, Tuesday and within probably 2 to 3 months, I was going 6 to 7 days a week to this room because it was my little escape because I didn’t feel like going back to my room at night because I was there all alone. I really didn’t have anything to do. I was bored and by the way, this seemed like it was fun and felt good.

Bob Ness: Shane also had three conversations about tactics to handle problem gambling with teens. Teens are a very vulnerable group and having access to gambling on your phone 24 seven is a dangerous recipe for young people whose brains aren’t ready to handle all of that weight. Emma and Allison from Chestnut take a very clinical approach directly to the students to let them know what gambling is and how to temper their emotions.

Speaker 5: Well, first of all, I think that all youth are at risk because of their brain development and their brains not being fully developed. They’re just more at risk for problem behaviors. They’re more at risk at taking risks because that part of their brain, their prefrontal cortex, doesn’t quite completely develop. So their decision making is not lacking. They’re more impulsive.

And since we’re not just talking about gambling, as we go into the curriculum a little bit more, it’s about life skills. And everyone can use these kind of life skills that will help them not only to make good decisions regarding gambling, but also any other risky behaviors that they might be challenged with. So, yeah, so we you know what, primary prevention we do the analogy of the river where we have people down river that can fish people out of the river of the river being problem gambling.

But what we do in primary prevention is put those guardrails in place before they get into the river and everyone, every student can benefit from that. And the theme of lesson two is to help them become more thoughtful decision-makers. And we’re very careful not to say good or bad decisions. It’s always careful, thoughtful, low risk decisions, maybe less impulsive.

That’s something we try to talk about as well, but we’re trying to help them become more thoughtful decision-makers from start to finish. So in this lesson, we talk about brain development throughout the teen years and those things that we talked about. Now, prefrontal cortex is still cooking. So is the logic isn’t always 100% there to hold that knowledge of my brain is absolutely developed.

So that means I’m more at risk. But we really try to talk about it a lot and explain it in different ways. How their brain being underdeveloped can affect the way that they react to things, can affect the ways that they make decisions more impulsively, and then we give them tools, first kind of tools that are more grounding, like, okay, let’s take some deep breaths, let’s box free, let’s do something grounding to get my emotions and my brain in the same place and try to make a really thoughtful decision here.

Bob Ness: Chris Ward From the way back in, talk with Shane about the stacked deck, which is an evidence based curriculum for students and the danger of gambling games and apps.

Shane Cook: It really is true that any sort of anxiety, isolation and social issues, issues within the family only got worse during the pandemic. So if you don’t really understand what gaming is, what gambling is, and how susceptible you are and how much you really don’t know about it, it goes from a light escape mechanism to kind of alleviate that anxiety or stress caused by all of those issues in a way to unhealthy escapism where someone could actually be developing a problem with gambling, even though they’re only 15.

I know that imagine a slot machine and the lights and a casino and everything and the sounds and all the fun right here in your hand in a phone. Even if it’s not a casino type game, you actually don’t have like, you know, a seven, seven, seven or Jerry, Jerry Cherry But you’re getting all of that stimulation for your brain.

I could easily see how that would tie to gambling because your brain doesn’t really know what’s going on on the outside and it all lights up the same areas and gives you that dopamine rush. And I did better than I did yesterday. I got a higher score than my friend. I’m using it to not feel so bad about myself.

You start getting all of these rushes with it.

Bob Ness: Last, Shane had another conversation with Elizabeth Thielen from Makassar, who had a very interesting story about a youth who is addicted to gambling, and she wanted to express herself and her addiction to gambling by writing a song. It’s extremely moving.

Speaker 3: I believe he also had another individual who also took this to another level in terms of expressing what they’ve learned through this program. Do you want to talk about that one?

Elizabeth Thielen: Yeah, I would. I love to talk about this one. So like I said, we share the information, we share the research, and then we say, what would you like to do with this? And this young woman in our program said, I would like to write a song. And I, I was like, okay, that’s interesting. You do it, you though.

And so we were actually at an event. All the young people were walking in a parade and she said, I wrote my song, Do you want to hear it? And she just belted it out, you know, a cappella. And it was literally made you know, it gave me goosebumps. And so as a part of this second year project, we were able to get her to a recording studio in Chicago, where she was able to record her song that she wrote and sang professionally.

And it’s called Make Things Right. In this, you have 45 seconds. I like to just play a clip for you.

Unknown
That you it’s hard for me to say that I think.

Speaker 5
I need some help for the day. This kind of struggle to admit when I’m a fan of my songs, family to the Passion and trust me, all of that is overwhelming. And so I.

Shane Cook: Said, How.

Speaker 5
Do I need to find.

Shane Cook: It? What I love is making.

Unknown
My money looking to take that if I do find if I give everyone.

Speaker 5
Isn’t that enough?

Speaker 3: That is fantastic.

Bob Ness: We’ve had a great year here, Wade, your danger and we want to thank you for listening. We’re looking forward to educating and inspiring everyone more in 2024. We love hearing from you, so please take a moment to like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly by email at Wade Your Danger at Gateway Foundation dot org.

Look for us on Facebook and Twitter at Recovery Gateway and LinkedIn at Gateway Dash Foundation or through our website, A Gateway Foundation dot org Wager danger is supported through funding in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance Abuse Prevention and Recovery. And remember, recovery is a lifelong process.

If you or a family member are struggling with a gambling problem, call Gateway at 8449753663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment.

Gateway Foundation Gambling Treatment

Call Gateway Foundation: 855-723-0963

Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER

wagerdanger@gatewayfoundation.org

Transcript:

Shane Cook: Welcome to Wager Danger. I’m your host, Shane Cook. Gambling Disorder program director at Gateway Foundation. Our guests today are Alison Donoho Donohoe and Emma Bowen Bowen from Chestnut Health Systems, a mental health service provider located in Granite City, Illinois, with offices located throughout the state. We discuss their curriculum entitled Not A Chance a Problem Gambling Prevention Program that’s being introduced to high schoolers throughout Illinois.

Educating high schoolers about gaming and gambling can be a challenging endeavor, and making a lasting impression requires thoughtful and continuous improvement. Alison Donoho and Emma Bowen discuss how not a chance integrates social-emotional learning strategies to increase the students engagement throughout the learning process rather than a just say no approach. They focus on creating positive experiences and connections, highlighting life skills with interactive teaching methods and changing behavior by exploring shifting attitudes as a result of healthy dialog.

Shane Cook: It’s great to have Alison Donoho and Emma Bowen join us today. Welcome to the show.

Emma Bowen: Thanks for having us. We’re glad to be here.

Shane Cook: Well, Alison Donoho, why don’t why don’t you give us kind of a background on Chestnut Health services? Let us know what what it is you do for them. And, Emma Bowen, we’ll hear from you as well.

Alison Donoho: All right. Thank you for having us. I am the lead and friends prevention services coordinator here at Chestnut Health Systems. Emma Bowen and I are located in our great city location, which is in the metro east area of St Louis. But we have facilities all around the state in some in Missouri, and Chester itself is behavioral health care and primary health care.

We focus on addiction services for adolescents and adults, mental health services, primary health care and prevention and community education, which is the department that Emma Bowen and I work with.

Shane Cook: Okay. Emma Bowen.

Emma Bowen: Hi. So I am a community health specialist at Chestnut and I am entirely on the gambling project. So that is both the curriculum. And then we also have outreach that we do. So that is my role.

Shane Cook: Okay, perfect. Well, we had I had an opportunity to be sitting in on a meeting that you all were a part of. And you introduced this new program at the what’s called. Not a chance, a problem gambling prevention program. And as we as you all were leading us through that conversation and through the discussion about the program, I thought, hey, this would be a great topic for wager danger.

So am I reached out to you? We got it set up and in relatively short order. And here we are. So it really appreciate your taking some time out today and leading us through and leading the listeners through a little background on this gambling prevention program. So if you would, could you just one of you at least tell us a little bit about the program to get started?

Again, it’s called Not a Chance How you got to this, Why it’s important, things like that.

Alison Donoho: All right. Yes. Thank you for having us. We’re excited to be able to share what we have been working on for a couple of years. So we have several grants through the Illinois Department of Human Services. So in 2021, they approached us about a need for a curriculum aiming to prevent problem gambling and youth. So chestnut health systems provides youth prevention education for a lots of different topics.

And so they asked us to kind of take a lead and through our research, we decided to develop our own curriculum, which is called Not a Chance Our Problem Gambling Prevention curriculum, which is a mouthful. But we researched, surveyed, developed and piloted, and now we have a six session curriculum. And this program works for students and early high school.

o freshmen or sophomores is what we’re aiming for. And we piloted this program in three high schools so far.

Shane Cook: Okay. So you’ve piloted this program up to this point. You’ve gone back and we’ll get into this a little bit more in detail later on. But you’ve made some adjustments for the program and now you’re going to be rolling out the second installment of this over the course of the next year.

Alison Donoho: Yes.

Shane Cook: Okay. So, Emma Bowen, what is your involvement in this program?

Emma Bowen: Oh, well, so it all started with getting hired on to the gambling program for me. So from the beginning was getting hired into this writing and researching role. So I will say I didn’t have a background in gambling specifically, not that I don’t love any topic, but my draw to the role was prevention. That’s always been my goal and I kind of fell into this position because it was a really interesting opportunity.

And so I’m researching writing, also helping implement and pilot. So little bit of all of it.

Shane Cook: Okay, So, so you’re both just headlong into this program and doing whatever it takes to get it up and running. And just to clarify, Alison, you mentioned the funding for this, and that’s coming through the Illinois Department of Human Services, right? Yes. And the Division of Substance Use, Prevention and Recovery. Yes. Oh, yep. All right. So in in planning the curriculum, you are targeting this program to high schoolers in particular.

What’s unique about this particular age group and demographic? How is it affecting how you’re developing the program? Things like that? Because we all know that’s that’s a tough I’m going to I’m going to use a bit of a play on words here. That’s tough nut to crack. CHESTNUT Not true.

Alison Donoho: Oh, there you go.

Shane Cook: But, you know, it’s a tough group to get their attention to, get buy in from them, for them to listen, so on and so forth. I mean, or take it seriously, I guess, is probably a better way to put it.

Emma Bowen: So like you mentioned, we are working with teenagers, which is a tough age, a generally all around, lots of expectations, lots of things going on. So we really do have to make sure we’re playing to our audience. I mean, even Alison came from a role where she was teaching middle schoolers more so. And just the difference of just teaching middle schoolers to high schoolers, there’s so much difference whenever we’re talking about teenagers.

Emma Bowen: So we’re always trying to play to our audience there and get as much buy in as we can because that will make or break the experience. So we try to make that as engaging as possible. We start each session with an activity that leads into the larger theme of the day, and as we work through the topic, they’re given different kinds of opportunities to engage and apply the materials.

Emma Bowen: So like listening and then games and activities, different ways to engage with it, we also give them places to doodle and color in the workbook so they have something to do with their hands really playing to the attention kind of thing that we’re seeing with high schoolers and plus times kind of giving them something to do with their hands.

Emma Bowen: But most of all, we try to impart skills that are tangible and applicable to their lives as soon as possible. So dealing with feelings, decision making, finding balance and being financially stable are skills that they will want to learn if they can see how it will help them and when it will help them.

Shane Cook: Okay, So and I want to dive into the curriculum a little bit more as as we progress. But there are other programs out there that attack this group. Right. Or this demographic, I should say. How does this differ from some of the other programs that are out there?

Emma Bowen: Well, our.

Alison Donoho: Audience is the universal population, which means we target all of the certain grade, like if it’s all the freshmen or all the sophomores with this curriculum and not just an indicator population that might be more at risk. We focus on primary prevention.

Shane Cook: Okay, let’s explore that. Why is that important to cover that entire population rather than zero in on students that are at a higher risk, maybe for problem gambling? What’s what’s the difference there?

Alison Donoho: Well, first of all, I think that all the youth are at risk because of their brain development and their brains not being fully developed. They’re just more at risk for problem behaviors. They’re more at risk at taking risks because that part of their brain, they’re prefrontal cortex, doesn’t quite completely develop. So their decision making is not lacking. They’re more impulsive.

Alison Donoho: And since we’re not just talking about gambling now, as we go into the curriculum a little bit more, it’s about life skills. And everyone can use these kind of life skills that will help them not only to make good decisions regarding gambling, but also any other riskier behaviors that they might be challenged with. So, yeah, so we you know what, primary prevention we do the analogy of the river where we have people down river that can fish people out of the river of the river being problem gambling.

Alison Donoho: But what we do in primary prevention is put those guardrails in place before they get into the river and everyone, every student can benefit from that.

Shane Cook: Okay, so maybe State stated a different way. This program is is comprehensive in that you’re building lifelong coping skills and it just happens that gambling or problem gambling is a vehicle during this process.

Emma Bowen: I’ve got one thing to add on that why the universal population. So it also this going for a universal population also goes towards our list of goals that we’ll be talking about later. But one of the things that we know about change is that when we can talk to all of the students in a grade, it is a lot more likely to create environmental change rather than if we just talk to the people who are indicated to be gambling or indicated to be at risk for whatever reason to start gambling.

Emma Bowen: We’re just taking a chunk and we’re just changing their minds. Whereas if we can have the entire freshman class for each year, by the end of four years, the whole high school has had the program and had a chance to play with those ideas. Think about what that means for them, and that leads to environmental change in the whole school.

Emma Bowen: So that’s the the real drive of universal population programs.

Shane Cook: Okay. All right. And then in terms of the theory, theoretical backing for this program, what are what were some of the important factors that you looked at? Were you focus on? Were there certain things from a theoretical perspective that you thought, hey, this is very important here when we’re thinking about this program?

Emma Bowen: Absolutely. I think that I can speak safely for both of us and saying that we started by researching everything on problem gambling in youth, but we also had to take that step back and say, okay, we need to understand gambling and how we’ve gotten here and where it’s going. And we also need to understand problem gambling and what that looks like.

Emma Bowen: And we need to understand prevention programs and curriculums and not just teaching them. We need to understand what it means to write one and to develop the parts that go along with it. So the first thing that we did was really try to learn everything we could about each of these subtopics before we started our approach. And that kind of led us naturally to these theoretical backings that we have based the curriculum on.

Emma Bowen: So I’ll go ahead and list them and give you a bare minimum one ish sentence on those theories.

Shane Cook: So perfect.

Emma Bowen: First, we have the social emotional learning which asks us to work with them as whole people rather than just sharing new information with them. So this means we work to learn communication skills not just to them, but helping them learn how to communicate with each other as well as regulation, emotions, decision making, all of these pieces. As for humans, they need those skills.

Emma Bowen: And they’re not just students in a health class and that they’re involved in the process. So then we also have positive youth development theory, which tells us that providing positive experiences and connections rather than trying to predict or stop negative ones can be very effective in making youth more resilient. Then we have the life skills approach, which aims to combine didactic learning traditional like lecture learning with skill development and interactive teaching methods to really help them work that into their brain.

Emma Bowen: Not just hear it, but hear it, think about it, process it, apply it, really understand the whole topic. And then we have theory of planned behavior, which basically tells us that if we can change their attitude, we can change their plans, and then eventually that will change their behaviors. And then our favorite theory and the most unofficial, of course, is goes into our conversation earlier as the we work with high schoolers theory.

Emma Bowen: So you will never hear us say this is how it works. This is and this is what you should think. Don’t ever because it will work. We’re talking to teenagers, Right. Are in that brain development process and they want to think about those things and they want to form their own opinions on them. And our job is to help them facilitate that learning with facts and doing what we can to approach the things where they have cognitive dissonance or where they don’t know the things that we know and helping them figure it out for themselves.

Emma Bowen: So that’s our we don’t make decisions for them. We help them guide internal assessment on their own to make those changes themselves. So that’s all the backings that we have that we use to guide how we would write the program.

Shane Cook: Okay. And so I want to jump into the curriculum itself and kind of look at a little bit more closely. But since you’ve gone through it and run a pilot through here now, have you confirmed your approach? I mean, on some level, I think you’ve probably received enough feedback to say, Yeah, this was the right strategy for us.

Shane Cook: We picked the right areas to focus on. Or did you have to make some adjustments?

Emma Bowen: Yeah, well, we can talk about this even more in-depth when we get to evaluations later. But we really we saw with our first pilot the things that we wanted to see. We saw more negative expectations after gambling, lowered intentions to gamble and higher knowledge around gambling and gambling terms. So these are all things that we want to see.

Emma Bowen: But we also asked them themselves about what didn’t make sense to them and what they would like to see more of and where did Netflix for them. So we used all of that to kind of come together. Ultimately, the biggest change was adding another lesson because we just felt like we needed a little bit more time to bring it all together.

Emma Bowen: But we’re going through it with those changes. And I think this next implementation cycle in the spring and post that it’s going to be a lot more tweaks. So we’re like, we’re getting closer and closer.

Shane Cook: Okay. So continuous improvement is part of the plan here, which I think is always important. And you’re taking direct feedback from the students. And I suspect that that’s going to pay big dividends as you roll through roll through and roll this out again in the spring. So let’s go ahead and dive right in and talk and start talking about the curriculum itself.

Emma Bowen: So one thing I’ll say before we move into the curriculum is what we’ve base it around and just kind of get one thing on the table. So we use that resource that we did to compile a list of risk factors and protective factors.

Shane Cook: Right?

Emma Bowen: Yeah. Yes.

Shane Cook: Thank you.

Emma Bowen: No problem. We use these to build a list of goals. So we took the the changeable risk and protective factor. So there are some things that are outside of their control. But we took the things that we could have control over. So, for example, like income, status and gender, those are risk factors we can’t change for them. So we took the things that we could change or that we felt we could have some power in helping them be more protected and facing less risk.

Emma Bowen: So that was really how we decided every single thing that would go in here was we found a risk factor, wrote a bowl to correct it, and then went from there. So an example is increasing self-regulation. So if they have self-regulation skills in place, they’re less likely to struggle from problem gambling in the future. So we have written in opportunities to learn and engage with self-regulation tools, coping skills, those kinds of things.

Emma Bowen: So that’s kind of the baseline of everything. We decided, even if at the moment we’re not saying gambling is when you even if that’s not necessarily the sentence that we’re saying, all of the topics and the things that we’re learning are rooted in the risk factors and protective factors of gambling. So that’s kind of how we knew where to go.

Shane Cook: Okay. All right.

Alison Donoho: Yeah. So we’ll go ahead and dive into, like, the kind of the overview of the lesson.

Shane Cook: Yeah, absolutely.

Alison Donoho: Let’s do it. So lesson one is all about gambling, because one of the risk factors is that students don’t know what gambling is or some of the fallacies that come along with gambling. But it also is a foundation of the the lessons. And so and that’s first lesson we do some get to know you things we have them do name tense because we want to be able to get to know the students by name, call on them by name.

Alison Donoho: We also do a class agreement and that’s part of it, of we want to treat them as adults. We want them to be included. It’s not something that we are going to tell them what the rules are. So we come with a class agreement together so that they feel like this is their class and not just somebody coming in talking to them or teaching them.

Shane Cook: And I suspect that’s a good way to get them to begin to open up and really have real dialog where you’re creating a safe environment to have these discussions.

Emma Bowen: And this is rather that social-emotional learning, this is where all of that comes in and how well we treat each other.

Shane Cook: Okay.

Alison Donoho: Yeah. So Ethan included an environment where they feel like they can share. We do talk about confidentiality and it’s, you know, better to say I know someone than to talk about their brother or something like that. So yeah, that’s all a part of kind of setting the stage that we’re going to be for the not a chance curriculum.

Alison Donoho: And then maybe it’s just talking about gambling and we start talking about like what is when you think about gambling, what do you think about? And we write some things down and then we have like, what do you think about this definition? Do you agree with this definition? And then we talk about the three R’s of gambling where in order for something to be gambling, it has to have risk reward and random.

Alison Donoho: And then we play this game called Weights. Is that gambling? And then we have a little spinning wheel and it lands on some different things. And some of them are very obvious, like slot machines or casinos. Yes, that’s definitely Emily. But then we get to things that may be a little bit borderline of like a 5050 ticket for charity.

Alison Donoho: And so sometimes people think we also introduced this saying called Sway, which stands for some people think this, other people think this. You need to decide for yourself and so for those kind of things we talk about like, you know, we know what I think about 50, 50 drawings, even if it’s for charity. But some people might think it is gambling.

Alison Donoho: Other people don’t think it’s gambling because it’s charity. You need to decide on your own what you think. So we let the students decide on those things. Then we get a little bit more iffy with like claw machines and like, you know, carnival games and things like that.

Shane Cook: Now, how robust is that discussion? Because I can imagine there’s a lot of competing ideas that come out during that discussion about what is gambling, what is not.

Alison Donoho: And what when. We also something that we introduce in this first lesson is that we give them a handout that talks about respectful sentenced partners. And so you can disagree or agree with somebody and still be respectful. So even if you disagree with somebody about something, you can say it in a respectful way, which is something we all need to learn how to do.

Alison Donoho: So we what we let everyone have their, you know, their say and we talk. And if somebody is kind of be a little bit disrespectful, we’ll come like, okay, remember, first of all, our agreement is that we’re going to be respectful to each other. And is there a way you could start that sentence that would be a bit more respectful way?

Alison Donoho: But I think that mostly what I see is just eye-opening to a lot of students that were like, I never thought about that big gambling, even like loot boxes and games. No, I don’t think that’s gambling. A lot of them think it’s not gambling because they do get something at the end. It may not be what they want, but they think of that, Well, we do get some reward.

Alison Donoho: They keep talking about the loot boxes. We get something for those. So therefore they think it’s not gambling. And I’m like, okay, you know what? But what happens whenever you don’t get what you want? Are you wanting to buy it again? And so we talk about that a little bit more than I really it’s just to get them to think a little bit more about what they do, think about gambling.

Shane Cook: Right.

Emma Bowen: And with the three R’s, it helps us to ground, like we said, it’s risk reward and some amount of random chance it helps us go through. So Spinning wheel says stock market. And what do you guys think? Gambling, Not gambling. And they kind of share their thoughts. And really the takeaway isn’t just is it gambling? Is it not gambling, it’s what’s the danger level?

Emma Bowen: And the thing that I’m doing, being able to know when you’re gambling is the first step in knowing if you’re at risk. But we could fight all day about if a 5050 raffle is gambling or the stock market is or not. The point is, and the grounding feature is always if you’re doing it and it’s causing risk. So when we’re talking about a 5050 raffle where most of the time the winner donates the money back to the cause, that’s a low risk situation.

Emma Bowen: But if we’re talking about parlay betting on sports, that’s a high-risk kind of thing to do. So kind of getting them to not just say is it gambling, is it not gambling? How do we know and how do we know the risk involved, too?

Shane Cook: Right. Very interesting. I got to imagine that this to kick off the curriculum here, this has got to be just a maddening at times discussion. But also a very rewarding one because I believe this starts to set everything else in motion. Right? The light bulbs are coming on your audience or this group of students is, you know, you’re changing their perceptions of what they may have thought were absolute truths.

Shane Cook: Right? The oh, no, that’s not gambling. But hey, wait a minute. There is an element of risk involved in this. And I got to believe that’s somewhat rewarding standing there and having that conversation with them. So then what comes next after that?

Alison Donoho: So then we.

Shane Cook: You’ve equipped them with some with the ability to start recognizing these. And then on the heels of that, you go into, okay, how do I make better decisions?

Emma Bowen: Yes. So let me take you as called decision making. 101. And the theme of lesson two is to help them become more thoughtful decision-makers. And we’re very careful not to say good or bad decisions. It’s always careful, thoughtful, low-risk decisions, maybe less impulsive. That’s something we try to talk about as well. But we’re trying to help them become more thoughtful decision-makers from start to finish.

Emma Bowen: So in this lesson, we talk about brain development throughout the teen years and those things that we talked about. Now, the prefrontal cortex is still cooking. So is the logic isn’t always 100% there to hold that knowledge of my brain. Is that fully developed that so that means I’m more at risk. But we really try to talk about it a lot and explain it in different ways, how their brain being underdeveloped can affect the way that they react to things, can affect the ways that they make decisions more impulsively, and then we give them tools, first kind of tools that are more grounding, like, okay, let’s take some deep breaths, let’s box breathe, let’s do something

Emma Bowen: grounding to get my emotions and my brain in the same place and try to make a really thoughtful decision here. And then we work them through something that’s a step-by-step decision model. And so helping them make a process where, okay, I need to know when I’m making a decision, when I’m making that decision, I need to be prepared for it.

Emma Bowen: And here’s the steps that I’m going to take, whether that decision is what I’m going to have for breakfast, because what you have for breakfast impacts your day. Or if that decision is where will I go to college, will I go to college? What do I want to be when I grow up? All these decisions we’re making, we’re making a skill of decision making.

Emma Bowen: And if you practice it a lot and all of these little thoughtful decisions throughout your day, whenever you go to make those big ones, you’ll be ready. So we work them through that step-by-step model in a group setting. So we do a group decision where we all kind of work through an example and then they get to take a moment to practice on their own, a decision that they’re going to make in the coming weeks and work through that step-by-step method for themselves.

Shane Cook: Okay. And is is that individual activity then? Do they come back and share that or is it does it stay personal to them that they can take with them? Carry it?

Emma Bowen: You’ve stumbled upon one of my favorite topics, which is voice and voice. So there are always opportunities to share and there are students who do like to share, even when it’s more personal things. But it’s always, especially I know when I will get into the next lesson. It’s more feelings related. So they also have an individual activity where they do a check-in with themselves.

Emma Bowen: And whenever I say, does anybody want to share, I also say, I know this is a more private experience. So if you don’t want to know pressure, does anybody want to share their experience with this? Does anybody want to share their decision that they’ve made and the thought process that went behind it? And I find that whenever you come at it from that approach, people are more likely to share, even if it is more private.

Emma Bowen: But it’s never like you.

Shane Cook: Tell me, Oh no, that you would be you would breach the trust that you had established the previous week and the previous lesson to do that. That’s why I was curious if if there are individuals who are willing to share some of those more personal things that they’ve written down when it comes to decision-making, because that’s a brave soul at that age that can get up and talk about something as personal as that, whatever it may be.

Emma Bowen: And never underestimate the power of sharing on your own to encourage someone else to do it. So something that I do, we have games where they can volunteer, but we have backups. If nobody wants to volunteer, I can be in this role the whole time. But even in the shire classes where, oh, they don’t want to volunteer for this game, how about I go first and just show you how it works and then you keep asking in between if nobody wants to, you keep going, but you’ll find that the more you do it, the more comfortable they feel doing it, because not everybody gets the role to a thing.

Emma Bowen: Whenever you just hear it out loud. Some people need to see it. Some people need to build their confidence a little bit on how it’s going to go. So never underestimate the power of like sharing a little bit on your own. Like today, I’m feeling exhausted because I’ve had like three presentations this week and I am still happy to be here with you, but I’m tired or something like that, you know?

Emma Bowen: Right, Right. Like we’re all human together and that helps them feel more comfortable to share.

Shane Cook: All right, Good point. Good point. So then what comes next after decision making?

Alison Donoho: So then we get into talking about feelings and we do a game that’s about gassing different feelings, which is really difficult because we all experience feelings differently, react to feelings differently, and we want the students to understand that however you’re feeling is fine. You know, you don’t. Your feelings are your feelings. And if you cry when you’re mad, that’s okay.

Alison Donoho: If you cry when you’re sad that’s okay. Your feelings are your feelings and we just need to be able to kind of understand them in case it’s to those intense feelings where you are changing your behavior or reacting differently. So we talk a lot about feelings and naming your feelings, but we also talk about how to deal with intense feelings such as sadness and anger and anxiety.

Alison Donoho: And we go through, well, how have you seen other people deal with this, whether it’s, you know, in person or on social media or you’ve seen it on movies, and then what would be a healthy way to deal with these emotions? And then we also do a guided reflection story about a fictional student who was gambling to deal with their emotions.

Alison Donoho: And then through that, we stop every once in a while and they answer some questions on their own about how they would be feeling if they were in this situation or if you were her friend, what would you be doing? So that’s also a good time to do some reflection, but also talk a little bit how people gamble to deal with their feelings.

Shane Cook: Okay. Yeah. I noticed in the outline that you all had provided prior to the show, there was there was a point here on dealing with feelings called the Vibe Check. Did it that interested me. What is the vibe check?

Emma Bowen: So the vibe check is just an opportunity for them to check in with how they’re feeling that day. Okay, things we’ve mentioned, one thing we’ve mentioned is trying to give them creative outlets, or this is one of the changes from our first pilot. We kind of look through the worksheets to see like, where are people confused? What can we learn from this?

Emma Bowen: And we saw that. I mean, more than anyone. Like if six people said gambling, the first thing they thought it was money, 17 people doodled on that page. So we really found that there was this like artistic, creative need and something to do with their hands. So they have a little emoji opportunity to like draw with their mom.

Emma Bowen: Their mood is that day, try to name that feeling and explain where those feelings are coming from.

Shane Cook: Okay. Do you find it that the students are more willing to approach it that way rather than just kind of going around the room? How are you feeling today? How are you feeling? How are you feeling about this? Which almost seems like it could be a little aggressive? Yeah, In that scenario. Whereas if they’re if they’re kind of using the emoji check, that’s a feeling, a safe feeling that that then kind of gives them the opportunity to open up and talk a little bit more.

Emma Bowen: Yeah. And they have the opportunity to keep all these worksheets after. So that’s never something that any one of their teachers or peers would get a hold of. It’s for them. And if they choose not to share, it’s private. So it gives that kind of effect of a journal, a journal entry.

Shane Cook: Okay. Yeah. I like. Yeah.

Alison Donoho: I also think the vibe check is an opportunity for them to, like, reflect like, oh, you know, some of them I think will just put, Oh, I’m feeling some people’s like I’m feeling neutral, I’m not feeling sad or happy or whatever, but some of them like I’m like, try to get a little deeper than sad or a little deeper than happy.

And it might be, you know, I’m anxious about this test coming up or something more a little bit deeper than just some of those general emotions. But what is causing those emotions as well and then be able to help you in a healthy way deal with those emotions? Because we know if we don’t deal with the emotions, that those can cause risky behaviors, right?

Whether it be like, you know, yelling at your friend or something like that or other risky things like you know, using substances or something else to make yourself feel happy.

Shane Cook: Yeah. All right. Good stuff. So after you go through the feelings discussion, then, where do you head from there? Because this all sounds like it’s all lay and foundation.

Emma Bowen: Yes. So lesson four comes as probably our most conceptual of all of the lessons and this lesson roots back to problem gambling being a process addiction. And I’ll just touch on that for just a second. Gambling being a process addiction, we don’t see a lot of prevention programs for process addictions. We at the most generous we could say sex and kind of sexual health, relational health, those kinds of things get kind of close to a process addiction prevention program.

But really, when we talk about prevention programs, we think of substance prevention programs and the way that a substance functions versus the way that a process addiction functions is very different. And the way that we approach those two things, yes, there’s a lot in common, but there is this fundamental difference of it’s in their brain and it doesn’t take any kind of outside substance for it to be triggered.

So this lesson tries to kind of broach that. How do we know? Like a process, Addiction usually has something that can be used at a normal level. So like a shopping addiction or something to that degree, you can’t get rid of shopping forever. If you’re experiencing addiction to shopping. You can’t just nix that and just knock your groceries anymore.

We’re not there for a process. Addiction. It’s not just abstinence. And we have to ask that question of how do we teach them how to make decisions about processes that can become harmful but can also be healthy, regular behaviors for adults, for adults.

Shane Cook: Right.

Alison Donoho: Yeah.

Emma Bowen: So let’s kind of give it an idea lesson or is called a balancing act. And we talk about the balance in your life and how to know when you’re out of balance. So we all know what it feels like to wear multiple hats or B multiple things to other people or to yourself, like a student, a sibling, an athlete, a best friend, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, whatever your roles are, managing all of them is also a role.

And knowing whenever you’re out of balance is also one of those roles. You’re the keeper of your balance and you have to be aware of when you’re out of balance. So what we do to try and teach them how to do that is we talk about what it means to do things in your free time, why we do those things, and then we talk about how do we know when something we’ve done in our free time has gone from something that can help us do, something that can harm.

And an example that we give is we can probably all agree that reading is a pretty. This is an audio recording, but Air quotes says air quotes healthy thing to do. Reading is safe and healthy. However, if you’re staying up all night reading, skipping work, skipping school, not doing your homework, it is very obvious that something that’s healthy air quotes safe has become hurtful or harmful.

And so how do we know when that’s happening? How do we try to teach them to do that is we give them the opportunity to make a list of their goals and a list of their priorities. And then we kind of do this thing where we’re like, okay, is this thing I’m doing in my free time? Getting in the way of my goals is this thing I’m doing in my free time, stopping me from achieving my priorities or priorities, doing the things that I want to get done first.

And if the answer is yes, you might be out of balance. And then we try to teach them how they can restore that. So we get into this conversation about limits and boundaries and we give them examples to kind of think about. So we say, for example, and this is based on my own life, so not lying when I say it, but I find that I scroll at the end of the night because I’m kind of like reclaiming my time and then I want to go to bed, but I want to scroll a little bit longer.

So I find that I don’t get as good sleep those nights. So what can I do? And that’s what we ask them. What could I do to help myself get set up for success to not because I’ve identified that I want to use my phone less at night. How do I make that happen? What are some ideas? We could charge your phone on the other side of the room.

You could put screen time limits on your phone. You could do not disturb. You could put a bedtime of when you’re going to use your phone. And then we kind of work through other examples, even one that’s like, I’ve done too many sports. I’ve signed up for too many sports. I’m in soccer and baseball and wrestling and swimming, and now I’m exhausted.

And like we said, that’s a healthy thing to do is participate in sports. But now you’ve done too many and you don’t have time to be a person. So whenever you make that list of goals in your list of priorities, if soccer doesn’t make the list, maybe we need to let soccer go. Or maybe we need to set limits with those friends who are causing drama in our lives.

Or maybe we need to set limits on our electronic use or our social media behaviors. And that’s what we kind of try to teach them how to do in this lesson.

Shane Cook: Yeah, well, man, this has got to be, I think all the lessons are great. This has got to be one that really starts to hit home because I think a lot of us today and and I would I would take that all the way down to probably even grade school kids. Seems like everybody’s over scheduled to do a lot of different things today.

So this is this has got to be a good topic of discussion, especially with this age group. Just all the pressure is outside pressure to perform at a high level in so many different areas and to take a step back and start to realize, hey, you know, I’ve got all this stuff going on and without writing it down, you probably don’t even recognize how much you’ve got going on.

So light bulbs have got to be popping off during this lesson, too, and beginning how to identify that risk. How does how does is is gambling discussed during this time or during this lesson, how it how it could be pulling them away from what their true goal is for where they want to get to.

Emma Bowen: So we actually end the lesson for similar to lesson three, how we had a guided reflection story where we read a little bit the questions we have that as well for lesson four and then lesson four it’s a fictional freshman. First moving to a college a couple of hours from their hometown, and this person is facing a big change.

They don’t know where their friends are. Their friends are going different places and they are they’re no longer playing football, which was they’re kind of like youth hobby. And now they’re on a campus where they don’t know anybody and they’ve decided to join a fantasy league to get connected with people in the area, which turns to sports betting, which turns to problem gambling.

So we kind of give them an example of what this can look like just generally as as a base level phone use. And then we go, okay, what about a little more complicated? Add a little complexity to it, and then we take it home to gambling. Once they’re really comfortable with the base level skill, we take it to that and let them think about where are they following on the problem gambling continuum?

We asked the question, are there sports betting behaviors getting in the way of their goals? Because their goal was to be a sports commentator. So if they’re not making it to their classes, which they’re not and they’ve been dropped from their classes, then sports gambling is getting in the way of their goal. So giving them a chance to practice that balance on a fictional character as well.

Shane Cook: Okay. All right. I also noticed that kind of kicking off this, you start with the telephone game or a version of the telephone game. Yes. What how does that how does that get set up? So and is it the same idea where you whisper it to one person and then by the end, it’s something totally different.

Emma Bowen: So last year we had just such a huge success. And this speaks to playing to our audience. It’s one of the things we brought up then. But our decision making lesson, it kicked off with a would you rather game and there was a couple in there that are like, Would you rather have $1,000 every month forever or $10,000 right now?

So kind of this gambling ask decision. Okay. But it was one of their because we started with would you rather they don’t know why we’re doing it and then we get into the category and they’re like, oh, decision making. And it was really their favorite part. So that’s how we came to this kind of okay, they really like it when we have kind of like a teaser game at the beginning that leads them into the ultimate point of the day.

And so how this one works, and we’re still kind of workshopping it to make it as as good as it can be. Again, this is the most conceptual lesson, so it’s very hard to even find an example of anything like it. But it’s the telephone game classic. We put them into teams by Rose either way, and then there are three rounds.

So the first round has like just like a phrase, so like they’re all tongue twisters and it’s like bright blue sky or something like that is the first round and they have to get right blue sky from one end to the other. And then the second round is something like the Swift Swans swam swiftly or something like that.

It’s a little bit longer and it’s harder to get it from one piece to the other, to try to try and carry that whole message all the way to the end. Things start getting lost, and then whenever we get to the third round, it’s a full sentence. So the Risky rascals ran by the rugged rocks, I think is one of the sentences.

So it’s a whole sentence that’s a tongue twister. And once it starts trying to carry down the line, we lose pieces. And that’s just kind of leading into the topic of once we start adding too much to our plate, we lose pieces of the thing that we want to do. Yeah, we’re working on getting it connecting as best as possible, but that’s that’s the outline and they do, they do understand it and they I think that they just really like having a fun way to bring in what we’re going to talk about and start our class with high energy and involvement because it’s all games where they are all involved.

Nobody is left out. It’s not like one person doing something like the whole class is playing the whole time. So just a really good, engaging way to start things off.

Shane Cook: Okay, great idea.

Alison Donoho: I had students during that time, like all I said was a telephone game, so I had students that I saw write down and I just let them write it down. Or I had other students who were like, Oh, can you repeat that? Let them repeat it. And then as the lesson gone, I was like, you know, and you have a lot of things to do.

Sometimes you have to write things down and sometimes that helps you to remember. And so that was fine that you wrote things down. I didn’t say you couldn’t write things down, but that helped you to remember it so that that’s what you have to do when you have a lot of things going on in your life. Yeah. Or you might have to ask somebody to repeat what you thought they were saying because you didn’t get it all the first time.

And that’s just being responsible and making sure that you understand what they’re wanting from you. So there was other like learning moments during that game as well, rather than just the it’s difficult when you have a lot of things going on. Things.

Shane Cook: Right. Right. All right. So then your final lesson is planning your future. Yes. Is that how I understand it?

Alison Donoho: Yes. So this is our fifth lesson we actually have. This is not our last lesson. We have one after this one. But this fifth lesson is one of the favorites of the students. And it’s one of my nice favorite, which is really surprising because it’s all about budgeting. But we found that the students really like it because they real life things that they know that they’re going to have to use in the near future.

And so basically we have them search a career on a on a website. And, you know, we only give them a little bit of time, but we give them at least the tools that they can come back to this website and do a little bit more research if they want, but they get to pick two that they might be interested in.

And on there it tells you what the median income would be like. What is the year that you have to be in school, those kind of things. So then we use that annual salary to make a budget and we give them very minimal selections. On some of them, we don’t. We make them pay our savings, we make them have some savings.

They get to choose how much to save, but we do make them have some savings, but then we give them some options between some housing, food, transportation. So they make this budget and so then they fill it all out and we, you know, do all of it with them because it looks like a very complicated worksheet. And then at the end, it just basically, how much money do you have left?

And then we have this discussion about once versus needs. And if there are things we then talk about like, you know, we didn’t talk about getting clothes, we didn’t talk about getting furniture. What about if you have pets, What if you have medication that you need to have? So you need also like a account for those things as well.

But what are some things that you could do to save money? So we talked about maybe having a roommate. Maybe you’re going to have to move in with mom and dad, right after you get out of college because that’s the makes the most sense. Maybe you’re going to have to, you know, use public transportation or maybe you’re going to have to use you get a used car, whatever it is.

So they talk about like ways that they can save money. Also, we talk about other ways that they could save more money and for, you know, retirement as well. And then we always end it like, okay, so with this money, how much money are you willing to give up for a chance and willing to give to gambling? And, you know, some of them will say $20.

And I’m like, okay, well, that’s a good limit to say that you’re going to spend $20 a month on the gambling. Yeah. Oh, or in some of them, like, I don’t even know how my parents do it. Like, how do they pay all the bills? Then I’m like, Well, maybe you should ask them and see how that, you know, because when it’s fixed, when it’s not their money, even though this is like fictional money, also, when it’s not their money, they can easily standard.

And like, you know, you know, it doesn’t mean anything to them. But when it’s like their money, even though it’s fictional money, they’re more like apt to like, hold on to it. Like, no, I’m not going. I’m just for entertainment. I’m going to go to the library, get free books like, okay, great. They have free movies there too.

My great go the library then, you know. So it’s a very everyone can use this information and I don’t know that they get to use that as much. And it’s also like treating them as adults. They like to be treated as adults. And this is an adult thing, even though they’re not quite adults yet.

Shane Cook: Right. Yeah, it’s it’s crazy, isn’t it, that this isn’t baked in more frequently into curriculum.

Emma Bowen: Yes.

Shane Cook: Everybody goes through. So I’m glad you all touched on this because it’s an important life skill that not many people get. And they have to, you know, unfortunately, go out on their own and they’re forced to deal with it at some point without having that formal mortgage that you all are applying in this situation. So I think that’s a great one.

What what is that? What’s the following session? And then to planning for your future, What’s what’s the additive?

Emma Bowen: Lesson six So our last lesson is called putting it all together. It’s kind of our review lesson, but not really just a review. It’s got some more to it. We kind of com all of that we’ve learned so far into this day. And we start by recapping all the things that we’ve done so far going lesson by lesson, like, Hey, what do you remember?

emember our dice game? You remember our weight? Is that gambling and kind of going through refreshing, reengaging with that content, reinstalling it in their memory. And then we have them do a hoop game and they work through questions of some of them. Our reviews of topics we covered, some of them are more like, how many people do you think are at risk of gambling in Illinois and these kinds of like community based questions.

And then finally, we lead in with some questions about advertising and that kind of how we close is looking at a couple of advertisements, but really just content pieces from the Internet. They’re obviously mock ups because we can’t use real versions, but we look at a print ad and break down who is making this ad, What are they trying to get you to do and how are they trying to convince you to do it?

And then we take that and we also apply it to a mock kind of like an article that you would see that was like top ten tips to gamble your way to $1,000,000, something like that. That’s one of the articles that we kind of mocked up to look at. And we break down who made this ad, who paid for it?

What are they trying to get you to do, and why do they want you to do it? Because it culminates that decision making piece. It culminates our emotions, our decision making, and how we balance our lives and knowing whenever something’s become a problem, it all kind of comes in together there. And then we thank them for learning with us because it’s an awesome experience.

Shane Cook: Right? Right. So throughout the throughout the curriculum that that you all have delivered during the pilot, what what’s been the most surprising thing that you’ve come across or what did you what did you take away from it from the pilot series and you thought. I didn’t think about that from the beginning, but this was really cool. What happened?

Emma Bowen: I think what we mentioned earlier, the biggest changes we needed one more lesson and then the activities that we mentioned, like having that like fun engaging style of starting with the game, that was one of the big pick ups from the first pilot. And then I’d say the last piece was the success of the fifth lesson really helped us go back and that’s the life skills approach was recently added in.

We kind of did the lesson and realized, Hey, why do they love that lesson so much? Because it was so applicable and tangible to their life. So then we kind of went backwards, not when we added in like, okay, so we have the decision making model now. They need a chance to use it and apply it to their life.

And so that was a guiding piece to give them the information, let them apply it in like a group setting and then let them apply it to their own lives in an individual setting. And that has, I think, gotten us a lot more success and a lot more stick ability in their brains. Like they more likely to remember that lesson because of the.

Would you rather leading into the decision making are that.

Shane Cook: Right.

Emma Bowen: Now you know all of those like fun pieces help them re remember the content and the overall lessons and it helps it reengage too.

Alison Donoho: Yeah I think one of the biggest takeaway is that I have is the varying degrees of what students know about gambling. And that’s okay. And because there are some that, you know, we do not go, you know, we do not ask anyone if they’re gambling, but they buy how they answer some of the questions. You’re like, I’m pretty sure that you have done something to people.

Be like, This is not at all a problem. This is not a problem. And I’m like, okay, well, and then I started talking about like, do you see these sports betting, you know, FanDuel and those kind of ads on TV? Oh, wait, that’s gambling. Yep, that’s gambling. Or even some of the things that happened on video games and where it’s different between when we’re talking about substance use is that students usually overestimate how many students are using substances because people are talking about it so much and they think that everyone is doing it.

But I think they underestimate how many people are gambling, because I don’t think it’s as obvious that the students are doing gambling. I don’t think it’s talked about as much among the friends. I don’t it’s not you can’t see it. You can’t you don’t hear talk. People talking about what they did on the weekend while they you know, that they were gambling on the video game.

You don’t hear people talking about that versus them using substances.

Emma Bowen: And why? Because they might not use the word gambling to describe the activity that they’re doing. They aren’t going to call a loot box gambling. But after they’ve spent $300 trying to get one skin and a box for whatever game they’re playing, Mike, might you get a little closer to the word gambling we might need to re discuss then.

That’s why we do the what weight is that gambling in the 3 hours? Because in the chart this is something I don’t think we really got into. But this is another way that this program is unique is that we are designing it specifically for the changing landscape of gambling nationally, but also specifically in Illinois. So those pieces of sports betting, legalization, advertising, the numbers that we use for the budgeting activity are all based on averages.

In Illinois, I used real numbers from Illinois, statistics to use all that. It’s all specifically tailored to Illinois and also the ways that gaming and the convergence of gaming and gambling and sports betting, legalization and all these changing pieces. That is one of the ways that it is unique as well, because we look to those things and those changes as they go along and try to really write those in.

Because like you, like we’ve said, you might not see that as gambling because they’re they’re young and they don’t they haven’t been to gambling and the app isn’t going to tell them they’re gambling because they know what gambling is. Whenever we say what’s gambling, they write death, they write sad, they write money, no money in loss and those kinds of things.

But they don’t know that the things that they might be doing are gaming and they’re actually gambling because of that purposeful divergence of the words and the language of gaming versus gambling. So that’s one of the things that’s really influential.

Alison Donoho: To.

Shane Cook: Yeah, I think that’s what a great distinction there, because on one hand you’re having this discussion with people that are obviously or with this age demographic that are not all of them, but that there’s a fair amount that are engaging in gambling behavior without really understanding it. So having this process to go through all the lessons and start to click the light bulbs on in their heads, hey, this is I’d never really thought about this as gambling.

What a great life lesson for them, number one. And in terms of prevention, you know, you’ve cracked the code to get in there and get to first base with them. So from here on out, it’s it’s an opportunity for them to have that recognition going forward. This lesson is tailored towards the freshman class, right. The incoming class each year are there check points with the previous class at or do you have, I guess, a better way to state this?

Do you have plans to check in with the previous class to see how it’s going for them? Does that make sense? Because you’re because you’re starting at each new freshman class, right? And you’re having this curriculum on. But I would think you’d probably want some follow up with them along the road. You’ve got you’ve got three more years that they’re going to be there and then they’re lost to the wind, so to speak.

Right. Be hard to corral.

Alison Donoho: Yes. So we’re working with Lighthouse Institute, which is our research department of Chestnut. Do all the evaluation work. Okay. So in following the students throughout the high school is one of the things that we have talked about or we did do one group of students and, well, the whole semester of students last semester. So that might be something that we are looking to follow up, but it might be more with this group that we just started because it’s somewhat of a different it’s somewhat different than what we did last spring.

It might be the group that we are going to be following, and we had some issues trying to find evaluation tools that would work and be actually our tool to to study what we’re wanting to them to learn about and not so much about gambling, but also more about regular their emotions and those kind of things that we are more interested in talking about and evaluating.

Shane Cook: All right, perfect. So your curriculum is primarily targeted to in classroom, right? So I’m curious if you have any plans to expand the scope of this and look for opportunities to reach outside the classroom, to reengage with students.

Emma Bowen: So like we mentioned previously, that environment change is a really big piece of the success of prevention programs. So we do try to build and things outside of the lesson. So for example, we have optional home learning opportunities. So they’re also game based, but their educational game centered to those topics that they can explore those topics further in their free time if they want to.

We also have newsletters that go out to the parents because the parents having education about gambling and problem gambling is also one of those protective factors. So connecting the entire environment and trying to reach parents, reach the teachers in the schools, change their environment and not just talk to them in classes. We try to build those pieces and as much as we can.

Shane Cook: Okay, great. And then ultimately, let’s let’s think long term here for this curriculum. What’s the overall vision on once you once you’ve gone through your second round with the curriculum, what is the vision to, you know, ultimately get this in every high school in Illinois and how do you achieve that?

Emma Bowen: So for our short term right now, after this implementation cycle, we want to do we want to finish and evaluate this implementation cycle. And we hope to see the trends that we mentioned for last implementation. So those expectations of negative experiences when gambling and lower intentions of gambling, we hope to see these hold and increase. And we also want to get evidence based evidentiary classification, which is a whole long process that, you know, it goes into that we want to check back in four years and make sure this is holding in eight years, make sure that we can’t say that this is evidence based until we can say that we can confirm that it holds up over the long term. So that’s one of our goals as soon as possible. And then immediately at the end of this implementation cycle, we’re going to have something prepared to train and equip other agencies to implement the curriculum in their service areas so we can start getting more data. And that’s, I think, what we’ll start building in that long term evaluation piece now that we’ve got the content down and then we can start exploring, we’ll get a lot more data when it’s not just the two of us running this.

So that’s our short term than Alison’s. Our long.

Alison Donoho: Term, yes. So after this fiscal year or after June, we’ll have something to share with other agencies that we will be a part of our research as well. So Emma Bowen and I need to figure out how we train other people to think like we’ve been thinking about this, to be able to put on paper how to implement the curriculum.

And so then we’ll be able to help with training other agencies, our schools around the state to do it. Then also we would like to do a virtual version of the program because we know there is some inequities in some rural areas that maybe don’t have services, that there are ways that we could maybe virtually do this program as well and then maybe actually end up more audiences, maybe a middle school, maybe college.

We would like to also do we know as a comprehensive primary prevention focus is to have more than just the curriculum, but also have a communication campaign that would be talking about with posters and other ways of getting messages out and then also getting parents involved as well to have more of a environmental change going on and then also have maybe an alternative experience for Spanish speaking students as well.

So that’s long term.

Shane Cook: Long term, yeah. But and I appreciate that. I think that I love the curriculum the way it’s the way it’s designed, the way you explained it. It sounds like it’s very impactful. It’s I mean, you’re having an effect on an age group that you can really start to make a difference with. Right? You’re at the front edge, so to speak, of the next wave.

So anything I think that we can do this brings about a great deal of change just in the thought process overall, not just to gambling, but to a lot of different things where these lessons can be applied. So I appreciate that. What has been I’m curious, though, what has been the response from you? This is a two part question, actually.

One, who do you target at the schools to get this implemented? And I guess the follow up to that is what has been their feedback on the the pilot that’s been done and this current iteration.

Alison Donoho: Yes. So one of the things that we talked about early when we were doing this curriculum is like, we can write this great curriculum, but if schools don’t want us and it doesn’t make any difference. So we brought schools in right away to be like, what can what can we do to make this something that you would give up five or six sessions of year of your day?

And so we aligned our lessons to the Illinois State standards so that we can help them to reach their standards as well. But we did, as we have, we went to schools that we had relationships with, that we’ve already been doing substance use prevention and just asked them if they would be willing for us to come in. And usually we’ve been going into their health classes and so we kind of reached some of those standards that they have for that.

And I mean, I right away when we started talking about it, they, you know, we had teachers say, oh, yeah, we need we need this. We I had a principal, you know, say, Oh, yeah, we just caught some kids that were doing some gambling. And so, you know, this is something that’s topic that we that needs to be talk about.

They don’t and they don’t understand how it can be so harmful to them. And then I think afterwards the teachers are very receptive and thinks that is a great program. I think it’s one of those things that like to your kids that a lot of adults don’t think this is a problem, does it doesn’t see it as a of youth having a problem.

I will admit that before I started talking about this or learning about this, I was like, I don’t even understand. Like, how do they how do they get access to gambling? And then realizing how much of it online? It’s like, Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. I understand now. So, you know, we’ll a lot of what we’re doing too, is educating even our own coworkers that are in the substance use prevention field to be like how this is an issue as well.

So we do we talk a lot about it. So because it’s, you know, something that we’ve passionate about and think that a lot of people don’t know about. So we’re excited that we’re able to put this curriculum together. We put a lot time and effort into it, and I think we probably have it at a good place right now.

It’s always we can always improve. We’re always making improvements.

Shane Cook: Absolutely. And it will, right? And you will. I have no doubt about that. And at some point, you just got to go, Right? Right. You got to go. And then feedback loop and continuous improvement from there. So really appreciate the work that you all are doing out in the communities and and trying to trying to take it one person at a time.

That’s right. Is often what it takes. Any final thoughts from you, Alison or Emma Bowen give you each an opportunity to have a final thought here.

Alison Donoho: Yeah, I don’t really have anything. I just want to say that thank you to both Shane and Emma Bowen. Emma Bowen’s in such an amazing job with all of this stuff. She’s done so well, and I just think this is a fascinating topic. I hope that there are, you know, schools and adults out there that see the need and know able to have a discussion about gambling and just have more awareness of what their students are or children are doing.

So hopefully this is something that will give some light to all of that.

Shane Cook: Yeah, Emma Bowen.

Emma Bowen: I’d say the same thing, just very happy to be able to get the word out and have something we’re so proud of to share and be able to talk about it in this detail and that other people are finding it as interesting as we are. We really tried to make sure that every single thing went into it was something that maybe like I would of in high school really like to have known or to have been taught.

And I think that guiding Light has been the main thing for us, and we’ll just keep doing that and keep trying to make it better and better for the students that we’re talking to. First and foremost. So thank you for letting me share.

Shane Cook: Absolutely. I have no doubt that it’s going to be wildly successful and I look forward to hearing all the progress as as you go through and perhaps maybe even at some point having the opportunity to pick up the curriculum and implement it myself. Yeah.

Alison Donoho: That’d be great.

Shane Cook: That would be a lot of fun. So yeah, not a chance. A problem. Gambling prevention program. Alison, Emma Bowen, thank you so much for joining us today and walking us through the curriculum and and the program. It’s great work that you all are doing there. Chestnut And it’s really great having you on the show.

Alison Donoho: Thank you for having us.

Emma Bowen: Thank you.

Shane Cook: We love hearing from you. So please take a moment to, like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly via email at Ouija Danger at Gateway Foundation dot org. Look for us on Facebook and Twitter at Recovery Gateway on LinkedIn, at Gateway Dash Foundation, or through our website at Gateway Foundation. Dawg Wager Danger is supported through funding in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance Abuse Prevention and Recovery.

And remember, recovery is a lifelong process. If you are a family member struggling with a gambling problem, call Gateway at 8449753663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment.

“Sports gambling itself is not inherently risky but sports gamblers are!”

Dr. Grubbs and his students at University of New Mexico are conducting research on the gambling habits of sports bettors and the results may surprise you. Their research has gathered data that show why sports bettors are more likely to engage in more forms of wagering, and why that behavior is a strong predictor that these gamblers are statistically more likely to develop a gambling addiction.

Gateway Foundation Gambling Treatment

Call Gateway Foundation: 855-723-0963

Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER

wagerdanger@gatewayfoundation.org

Transcript:

Dr. Grubbs: I’m not sure that there’s any evidence to suggest that actually knowing about a sport makes you better at gambling.

Shane Cook: Understanding how and why sports betting introduces unique harms to individuals is a messy and complicated subject. Thankfully, our guest today is here to help us sort it out.

Dr. Grubbs: There’s this belief of gambling as a career versus gambling as an addiction is based on how much you win versus lose. And that’s a lovely thing to believe, I suppose, if you’re dealing with it. But the reality is it’s just not true.

Shane Cook: Welcome to another episode of Wager Danger. I’m your host, Shane Cook. Problem gambling program director with the Gateway Foundation. And today, our guest is Dr. Joshua Grubbs. Dr. Grubbs comes to us from the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico and is researching what separates sports gambling from other forms of gambling. Sports betting is fundamentally different today than it was just five years ago.

Micro betting in game wagering and unique parlays dominate the mobile sportsbook and create enhanced action while the game is unfolding. Dr. Grubbs helps break down what’s happening in the minds of some of these gamblers and why they might think that gambling more will actually make them better gamblers. Dr. Grubbs and his students offer a glimpse of the research they’re conducting, including why sports bettors demonstrate a higher likelihood to engage in more forms of wagering and how these attributes become strong predictors of why sports gamblers are statistically more likely to develop a gambling addiction.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Grubbs.

Dr. Grubbs: All right. Thank you so much for having me. I’m very pleased to be here.

Shane Cook: Yeah, we’re excited to have you. We had we had an opportunity to meet up with each other recently at the ICR conference out in Las Vegas and had the pleasure of sitting in on one of your presentations. Loved it was, well, sports betting and sports gaming, gambling and thought, man, that would make a great show for wager danger.

So thank you very much for agreeing to come on today. I’m looking forward to it during that time. During your presentation, you noted that you had a particular interest in the social construct of addiction, in particular with gambling. And I’m wondering if you can kind of unpack that for us.

Dr. Grubbs: Yeah, Yeah. So broadly speaking, you know, the when I’m talking to other professionals, other psychologists or addiction researchers, we always have these over elaborate and complex ways of describing what we do in really scientific terms. So so that that version for me is that, you know, I am an addiction researcher who is particularly interested in the social context of addiction.

What that means in just normal people speak is that I’m really interested in what makes people think that they have an addiction, right? So there’s often a gap between what our behaviors are and how we perceive them. For some things, like certain types of substances, we might see, Hey, this person clearly has a reading addiction to alcohol, but yet they think they have it under control.

Or maybe they have out of control gambling behavior, but they’re like, no, no, no, that’s not an addiction. For other behaviors, things like sexual behavior, we actually sometimes see the opposite where the person would be like, yeah, I did this sexual thing one time and I really regret it. I must have a sex addiction. It’s like, maybe not.

And so one of the things that we that we do in my research lab is getting into what are the contextual factors, what’s going on in that person’s life that leads them to say, yes, I definitely have an addiction. And so we extend that to gambling now. So gambling we don’t often see people saying, you know, I gambled once, I must have an addiction.

What we tend to see are people that are, you know, on that bubble, on that edge of maybe it’s an addiction, maybe it’s it’s not quite there. But there say, no, I’ve got it under control. No, I’ve got it under control. And we look at, you know, what are some of the factors that lead them to realize maybe this is creating a problem, maybe this is ruining my life.

And so that’s what we mean when we say social construct of addiction.

Shane Cook: Okay. Very interesting. So you’ve had the opportunity to work with many different process addictions through the year. And lately a lot of your research now has shifted towards sports gambling in particular, or at least that’s the impression I came away with after listening to you speak out there. Yeah. And I’m just curious why sports gambling, what what types of things around sports gambling make it particularly interesting for you?

Dr. Grubbs: Yes. So there’s an extremely long version of that story. And the slightly shorter version. So I’ll try to kind of split the difference. Right. So I come to gambling research by way of pornography research, which sounds like a weird, weird thing to say. But I actually got into the behavioral addiction space by researching compulsive sexual behavior and people that were compulsively using pornography.

And that led me to a training opportunity during I was when I was in graduate school working at the Cleveland VA. And so that’s an in Cleveland, Ohio, which at the time was the only residential treatment program for people with gambling addiction that were veterans. And I trained there with Dr. Heather Chapman and she’s like, Yeah, you know, the stuff that you’re doing is interesting, that you should be interested in gambling too.

And so I started treating it clinically and getting involved in veterans health and gambling. But one of the really enduring passions in my work is that I really like seeing how are studying how technology in particular changes our interactions with behaviors, particularly behaviors that can become out of control. So pornography is quite simple, right? You know, the philosophy of today looks very different than it did in the seventies, you know, magazines versus cell phones.

There’s a huge difference. Sports gambling is actually a pretty decent analog there. Right. So we used to see that gambling was you know, you had to go to the casino, you had to know where the you know, off the know under the table sportsbooks, where you had to know where the illegal casinos were, those kind of things. Right.

The Internet has changed that. So now we’re in the situation where a type of gambling that used to be just between friends or you really had to know where to make your bets has become. I can do this from my phone in the privacy of my own home. I can keep updating it. I can keep going back to it.

There’s no accountability around it. There’s no barrier. And so when when technology allows us to reduce the friction between a potentially problematic behavior and the person engaging in it, that’s one of the things that I’m really fascinated by. And so sports wagering is a really good example of that, right?

Shane Cook: So if I recall, you kind of walk through the history of this, right. And how we got to the the uber accessibility that we have with sports gambling, and it’s been in a relatively short period of time. Right. Right. So the history kind of goes like up until 2018. And you do a really good job of stating this.

We had we had essentially two different places where we could go legally and. Right. And place wagers for sports. Right? Right.

Dr. Grubbs: So essentially, yeah, before 2018, Right. You could wager on sports in Nevada and there were a few tribal casinos that allow that as well, but they were very few and far between. It wasn’t a very substantial revenue booster even for those casinos. So it really was if you wanted to gamble legally, you went to Vegas. I mean, theoretically, you could have gone to other parts of Nevada, but you went to Vegas, right?

Or you gambled illegally, whether with friends with the sportsbook. In the era of the Internet. Right. Since the Internet has existed, there has been increasing amounts of illegal gambling available via. So so people were finding it there as well. But again, accessibility is is a function of how legal something is as well. So, yes, you know, it’s there.

If you knew where to look is very different than saying it’s literally everywhere. You don’t have to ask. And so that’s what we’ve seen over the past five years with Murphy versus in CAA, the Supreme Court decision where the Supreme Court said that states get to choose whether or not sports wagering is legal within their borders and then they can regulate it in whatever way they see fit with that decision.

Sports wagering has spread to over 35 states at this point in time, and then among the majority of them, they have allowed for sports betting via cell phone, via the Internet. In states like Ohio, you have that. You also have sports bars, gambling kiosks in them, and then you have the traditional sportsbooks and those have their sportsbooks. And so it’s literally everywhere in a lot of states now.

Shane Cook: Yeah. And we have talked about it on the show before, but there’s a sportsbook at Wrigley Field now. And their plan, they’re planning to open one up at what it’s now called Guaranteed Rate Field, where the Chicago White Sox play. Right. So I can anticipate and I believe they even have a sportsbook now at the United Center where the Chicago Bulls play.

So you can almost anticipate that these arenas are going to start building out more and more sportsbooks as well.

Dr. Grubbs: So certainly, I mean, you see this at all, the sportsbooks all over the country now. I mean, there is an irony that we see right in that you have folks like Pete Rose, who I think most listeners are probably familiar with. Right. We’ll never make it into the Hall of Fame in baseball. Not granted. The he gambled on his own games, but he committed an unpardonable sin, an absolutely on cardinal sin by being a gambling professional sports manager player.

Right. And that’s bad. He’ll never make it in the Hall of Fame, despite many Hall of Fame talent, too. Now, all of the stadiums are like, yeah, yeah, we have a sportsbook in the stadium. You know, we have the King Fantasy Center within our stadium. We have this particular sportsbook within our stadium, and it’s a pretty, pretty massive cultural shift over the past few decades.

Shane Cook: Sure. I mean, you can even go back to the beginning of the century or the previous century. And what comes to mind for people in Chicago was the Chicago Black Sox. I mean, that was another scandal that revolved around fixing a game and the outcomes. Right. And Shoeless Joe Jackson is banned for life from entering the Hall of Fame as well.

So right now, we now we’ve essentially opened the doors to live gambling right on premise.

Dr. Grubbs: It’s now.

Shane Cook: It’s interesting.

Dr. Grubbs: Very much to.

Shane Cook: Say the least. So what was the big draw then for you when it came to gambling and you decided, hey, I want to I want to focus some research here. I know there’s parallels to what you’ve done before, but there there I’m sure there was another piece of that that that really kind of drew you to sports in particular.

Dr. Grubbs: Yeah. No, I mean, for me, it is the novelty of it isn’t. And not to say, I mean, sports wagering has existed as long as sports have existed, but we’ve gone from essentially over unders and the odds line for wagers rights are wagering on the total points being scored in a game and wagering on who’s going to win or who’s not going to win.

You know, to now we have this highly interactive, highly engaging form of sports betting where you can bet on the individual plays, individual players, and you can string players together and you can do parlays, which are right when you bet on multiple outcomes all at once. And you have to have all of them hitting. And it’s this technological explosion of of accessibility but also novelty within it.

It’s just to me, it’s just a fascinating point in our in our development in how we approach things. I think, you know, to be quite honest, in my research career, right, electronic gaming machines of slot machines, the electronic slots pre-date my entry into the field. Like those really started to take off in the late nineties and early 2000s.

And then my understanding of talking to people that have been in the gambling research field for four decades is that was an absolute kind of revolution in the space of like, okay, we need to wrap our heads around that. And I think, you know, Internet enabled gambling, but specifically sports wagering has arrived at the exact same point where something new has entered and it’s altering what we think we knew.

Right? Research on how sports gamblers gamble. That was published in 2014. Read some really great research. I know it was published 2014, not even a decade old, but at this point it’s almost obsolete because everything has changed in how people can do it. So, so generally like, well, who’s betting? And you know, how do people make bets? Well, that might apply.

But the reality is, is it it didn’t look like in 2014 what it looks like now because the mobile that the the parlays that are available, the in-game betting that’s available things are different now than they were even then.

Shane Cook: So how so how did that progression take place or what what does your research start to tell you in terms of, you know, what’s different about the sports better today than previous? Is is it the opportunity or is it the types of games that are available?

Dr. Grubbs: Those are the things. Yeah, there’s there’s a few things going on there. I mean, one of the major differences. Well, let me step the first. The people that are most likely to bet on sports now and the people who are most likely bet on sports maybe ten, 12 years ago, even 20 years, you’re probably roughly similar. What I mean by that is sports gambling is disproportionately men and disproportionately younger men and tend to be men that have, you know, the access to and from our own research.

Now we know that sports voters tend to be higher edge, higher educated individuals, higher income, younger men. Right. So some of those things, I think probably held in the past. But I think when we’re again, more thinking about kind of what has shifted, that accessibility is so key. I mean, one of the best predictors of whether or not you’ve bet on sports in the past 12 months is whether or not you live in a state where betting on sports is legal.

So the accessibility alone is bringing people into the space, people that maybe wouldn’t have thought to do it before. I mean, the other piece is, is the way that it has become so integrated into the game. Right. So we again, even if you were betting on sports and say even 2015, you would never have sportscasters talking about odds lines between plays.

You wouldn’t have commercials for sportsbooks between plays, you wouldn’t have the odds lines and the different outcomes rolling across the ticker at the bottom of the screen. But that’s what we have now. And similarly, you know, with, you know, online sportsbooks that were maybe operating illegally before 2018, some of them had some pretty impressive reaches, but nothing compared to what we see today.

You know, I can bet on sports going on globally, Right. I can bet on table tennis that’s happening in Russia and tennis is happening in Australia. I can bet on, you know, what’s going on right now in the NFL season as well as the start of the NBA season. And then, you know, we can also bet futures on what’s going to happen next season.

And so there’s there’s all of these different types of gambling that are available and it’s constant. Right. You you can’t you could gamble for 24 hours straight, making nothing but live gambling bets. And because of how globally interconnected the sport scenes are, now you can go to one Sportsbooks app and keep betting for 24 hours straight and be betting on live games the entire time.

And that just didn’t exist, you know, ten years, right?

Shane Cook: Yeah. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, you start thinking about how the availability of that type of betting a person could get sucked in and and really find themselves in financial trouble really quickly, Right?

Dr. Grubbs: Yeah. No, I mean, I think any time we you know, this is a term that we talk that we see operators use rates of sportsbooks or casino operators in general. They talk about friction points in the process and generally speaking in the industry is largely motivated to reduce friction between the consumer and the gambling behavior, because the less friction, the more they do, the more the gamble.

Right. And so as we’ve reduced friction and we have consistently reduced friction as we’ve seen these reductions, I mean, that that’s exactly what’s happening. When it used to be, you know, you had to find your bookie and go make a bet with him versus now I get my bookies in my phone and always updating like that. That lack of friction, if you will, just means that you’re able to spiral more quickly.

Andrew Able to start engaging in more problematic or dangerous behaviors, if you will, simply because if you’ve got, you know, the line of credit open, if you’ve got cash, I mean, most most gambling activities, you’re required use debit or some sort of cash reserve or something like that. But if you have any access to it that you can just keep going until it’s all gone.

Shane Cook: It reminds me of something that stuck with me out in Vegas. You threw out this phrase Sports gambling itself is not inherently risky, but sports gamblers are. And what is it about the individual sports better that makes them more prone to take that risk?

Dr. Grubbs: Right. Right. So, yeah, you know, one of the the catch phrases that we’ve concluded from the research we have going on is that sports gambling itself, right, is not inherently risky. Sports gamblers are risking what we mean by that is, you know, all gambling is inherently risky to some extent or another is sports. Gambling itself doesn’t seem to be, you know, inherently more risky than, say, slots play or blackjack or roulette or craps or whatever.

Right. The need the nature of placing a bet on a sporting event is not inherently worse than one of those things. But when we look at the people that are most likely to be heavily engaged or even casually engaged in sports betting, they’re people they tend to be younger men, and younger men tend to be more impulsive. Right.

But even controlling for them being younger and being men, the people that are betting on sports are more likely to be the type of person that’s drinking to excess, that’s more likely to be experimenting with different kind of substances, more likely to be the type of person that’s trading speculatively with cryptocurrency, the more likely to be the type of person that’s making impulsive and rash decisions on a regular basis.

And so sports betting, you know, I don’t think sports betting is taking these really good, thoughtful patient individuals and turning them into absolute impulsive gamblers. Right. I think that it appeals to the more impulsive people. And so it’s it’s a matter of, you know, is the target audience for sports betting, people that are more likely to make problems.

I mean, to have problems with people that are more likely to make poor decisions. And I think our research is consistently pretty showing. Pretty clearly showing that, yeah, that’s that’s exactly who is being pulled into jumping into the sports wagering scene.

Shane Cook: Yeah. And what are you seeing in terms of the problematic behaviors with sports bettors versus other types of gamblers? And what’s the what’s the difference there in terms of how many people are more likely to exhibit problem gambling behavior versus a slots player, for example?

Dr. Grubbs: Yes. So we certainly are consistently saying that sports gamblers compared to non sports gamblers. So. Right. So imagine three categories of people. There’s people that don’t gamble at all. There’s the people that gamble, but never on sports. And then there’s the people that gamble on sports. Well, so when we compare those those two groups, just the two games, the ones that are gambling on sports are the ones that are gambling, but not all sports.

What we consistently see is that the sports gamblers are gambling more often. They are gambling with a greater breadth of play. And so breadth of play is again, I mentioned earlier, we researchers like to use overly convoluted language too to make ourselves sound smarter, but breadth of play just means different types of gambling activity. So sports wagers are all quite likely not to just say, Oh, I gambled on sports in the past year.

They’re likely to say, Yeah, I was playing at Daily Fantasy football. I was playing regular sports wagering, hit the slots a couple of times, and I was also playing blackjack at the local casino, right? Or things like that. They’re more likely to say they’ve done more or different activities over the past year, and both of those are extremely concerning.

Playing more frequently and playing more different kinds of gambling are both very strong indicators or predictors of problems of symptoms of gambling disorder or symptoms of gambling addiction. If you are into sports, wagers are more likely to be higher on both of those metrics, which just tells you, like these are people that are already more at risk. They’re engaging in riskier behaviors, they’re doing more problematic things that are more likely to lead to developing real problems down the road.

Shane Cook: Okay. So one of the things that I recall you had mentioned during your your presentation, too, was this concept which I had not heard of before, but the fallacy of predictive control all. And I think I get it, but I’d really like to hear that explanation. Yeah.

Dr. Grubbs: In gambling research, one of the factors that we’re often quite interested in as people that are researching people with gambling disorder in particular, is the degree to which gamblers exhibit what we would call cognitive distortions or cognitive fallacies, which again, fancy word. But what it really breaks down to is gamblers often exhibit a lot of erroneous or just wrong beliefs about how things work with gambling.

So maybe it’s a misunderstanding of statistics. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding of how chance works. Maybe it’s a belief that there’s that they can control the outcome of a game. You know, you the classic example would be the slots player that says, I can predict when that slot machine is going to happen. It’s like that algorithm is just impossible, right?

So predictive control is one of those cognitive fallacies, right? A predictive control is the idea that you can predict an outcome before it happens. Now, it’s easy to see why that’s a huge problem for something that’s truly random like slots or the lottery or whatever, when there’s just nothing but chance going on. And so if someone says, Oh, I can predict when the slot machine is going to hit or I’m going to predict what the Powerball numbers are going to be, well, we can easily say, well, person’s wrong or right, But but sports are tricky, right?

So sports gamblers demonstrate a lot of this belief. Well, no, I can predict the outcome. And and part of that is that that’s the entire premise and allure of sports gambling is is that you’re betting on your ability to make that prediction. Right. And so there’s this belief that, well, I can do that. I can come out ahead in media, and especially when we look at the different, you know, oddsmakers and tip sellers and different I hesitate to use the word educational because I hope I get to use the right word.

But the gist of the industry that’s built up around advising people on the type of sports bets that they should make, you know, my sure picks for winning when you look at that that industry, it’s all built on the idea. Yes, you can get better at this and you can predict the outcome right in And then that’s that’s a tricky problem.

Right. For for a gambler to have especially someone that has a gambling problem, because if they genuinely believe that they can get good enough to predict the outcome, it’s a lot harder to than convince them. Maybe you need to step back and stay away from this, right? Yeah. You know, oftentimes sports bettors, we see this in other action based games as well.

So things like poker or even blackjack to an extent as well. There’s this belief of if I can get good enough, I can definitely win enough and then I won’t have a gambling problem anymore. And it’s this idea of, you know, gambling as a career versus gambling as an addiction is based on how much you win versus lose.

And that’s a lovely thing to believe, I suppose, if you’re dealing with it. But the reality is it’s just not true. If you can’t stop, if you’re chasing your losses, if you’re making bad decisions, if you’re finding yourself in debt that you’re not, you’re not going to get better. One, I mean, that’s just not going to happen. But to that predictive control belief that that belief that you can see the future before it’s going to happen is just going to get in the way of you getting the help that you need to get over this problem that you did.

Shane Cook: Right. Well, I could see, too, and I think to some degree, some of the prognosticators out there, some of the people that are that are laying the odds kind of play to this idea that, hey, if you if you’ve been an athlete if you played the game, you know what we’re talking about, you know, it kind of plays up to the to the ego side of somebody who may come at this having played football, maybe collegiately, maybe semi-pro even, or professional for that matter.

And they really have this idea that they can predict the outcomes with it fairly certain. Right. That they can but rarely take into account the the event that nobody saw coming. Right.

Dr. Grubbs: Yeah. I mean the chance is always there and that’s the nature. And one of the things we have to realize, whether it’s slots, blackjack, craps or sports, right. The house is always going to come out ahead. Right. So the ability to to make sports bets, there is an understanding from the industry itself that that this can be a profitable endeavor for them.

Yeah chance at random events are constantly happening to the bet you know you can have an amazing prediction for a game. You can’t predict too that your star player is going to blow his ACL. On the third play, I just, you know, Aaron Rodgers going down in the Jets greatly this season is one of those examples. And so that that’s a huge part of it.

And I think another part of it is this belief that understanding how a game works is going to make you a better sports game when I think and so one of my students is actually doing a lot of research in this space because this is a a desert in the research community, which by that I mean we really have not studied this enough.

So one of my students is actually doing his dissertation on this topic is I’m not sure that there there’s any evidence to suggest that actually knowing about a sport makes you better at gambling on it. In fact, I would almost bet and pardon the pun, right, that the people that do the best at sports gambling are not the ones that have the most knowledge of how sports work.

It’s the people who have the most knowledge of how odds lines work and statistics work. Okay? And even in that situation, though, there’s a lot of chance that’s involved. And if you talk to professional sports wagers, people who make most of their income off of sports betting, they’re not talking about massive life changing wins all they took a 1 to 1000 odds, right?

That’s not what they did. They bet large volumes of money on, you know, basically minuscule odds lines that if you do enough, eventually you win just enough to make a little bit of profit. Right. And so it’s not the glamorous you know, you had the sleeper pack that beat everyone kind of life that people seem to think it is.

It’s more of playing the statistics game in much the same way that we see the stock market working right or things like that. And so it’s not it’s messy. And this notion that just because you’re a skilled athlete or that you have a history with sports or used to coach high school football or whatever is not necessarily going to make you any better at all and actually placing those bets.

Shane Cook: Right? Well, we see that every year in the office, in see a pool that people put, right? Yeah.

Dr. Grubbs: I mean, March Madness is the classic example of this, of, you know, it’s easy for someone to predict which teams are going to make it to the big day because you’re using this is a basic principle of statistics. You’re not looking at the outcome of one game. You’re looking at the outcome of an entire season, get lots of data points.

But when it comes to these split-second kind of decisions that are associated with last minute shots and things like that, we’re looking at one data point. It’s actually immensely hard to predict that. And so, you know, oddsmakers are often really good at the beginning of a baseball season of saying who’s going to make it to the playoffs?

What’s going to happen in a given game? They have no idea. And so it’s that’s just the nature of how statistics work. And again, I think that knowledge probably makes people that are sports wagers, but that’s certainly not what’s being marketed to the public. Yes. That’s saying, hey, if you get an advanced degree in statistics and probability and you understand how odds were you can improve your odds of coming out ahead, more often than not, that’s not a very common selling point.

Right. What they what they tell you is like, you know, bet here, get some skin in the game. How fun that kind of thing there. Sell the experience.

Shane Cook: Be part of the action.

Dr. Grubbs: Be part of the action, not not study the odds line, be part of the action. And that’s that’s not a message that’s going to be associated with maybe winning more.

Shane Cook: Yeah. You see, at that time in the World Series going on right now in the playoffs, the league championship series and divisional playoff series, who would have predicted that we’d end up with the teams? We ended up with this, right?

Dr. Grubbs: Right. I mean, right.

Shane Cook: Well, what one of them. One of them they probably would have predicted. Right. But but the Diamondbacks.

Dr. Grubbs: This is one of the things that. Yeah, I know that I’ve talked to friends about is like, you know, how do you statistically adjust an odds line to account for the fact that Houston doesn’t know how to play baseball at home right. Like, how do you do that? And so it’s it’s this messy kind of thing. And so on the one hand, like, you know, it’s kind of fun looking at how those things fit together.

But you can imagine if you’re a gambler in that space and you’ve got X amount of dollars on Houston coming and pulling it out against apparently against all odds of winning a game at home. And it just becomes this absolute. I mean, it takes what is kind of a funny observation or a weird thing and turns it into this very critical experience for somebody that can be absolutely devastating.

I mean, we know that in the UK, which is the U.S. sports gambling, long before we did that, you know, they have dealt with, you know, spikes in suicide after major matches that a team loses and not because you’re just so devastated your team lost, but you’re devastated your team lost. And also your mortgage payment is for the next three months is also gone to.

Yeah. And so it does have this really kind of a catastrophic effect for some people because they overleveraged themselves. They get overconfident, they get too deep into a hole and they don’t know how to do account for it. And so, you know, we know I’m sure you’ve talked about this before, that suicide in gamblers is a real issue and it’s often quite high compared to other addictive disorders.

And that debt in the devastation that that wreaks on people’s lives is is a huge part of it. And there’s no reason to think that sports wagering would be indifferent. I mean, looking at countries that have been dealing with this longer, we should we should be expecting that to be an issue here over the next several years.

Shane Cook: Yeah, And I’m glad you brought that up because I did want to explore that a little bit more. Sports wagering or the legalization and multiple states adoption of legal sports wagering here in the US is relatively new compared to the European countries that have legalized it. Australia comes to mind. What do you see when you look out across those two countries in particular?

Let’s go with the UK and Australia because I think there’s quite a bit of research out there that has studied this. In terms of trends, are we tracking the same way here in the U.S.? It’s still too early to tell, but if you could just kind of walk us through some of the trends that have emerged in Europe and Australia and if you can look out into the future and rights and say, hey, we need to be on the lookout for that here.

Dr. Grubbs: Yeah, no, certainly. So for right after I really started getting into this research space, I was doing an interview with an NPR station and they asked me, they said, you know, in the UK where they’ve had this legal for over a decade now, what is the U.S. learning from the UK’s example? And my response was kind of tongue in cheek, but also serious.

And it was that, well, the US has a 250 year history of not learning from the UK. You know, that’s, that’s kind of part of our national identity is not listening to what the UK has done. But, but the reality is there’s also a fair bit of truth, and that is I think our approach to a lot of, you know, public health kind of things in the US is kind of the the let it rip, let it go and then we’ll figure out what’s going on instead of, hey, let’s take a very thoughtful and careful approach.

And I think that this is something we see in the sports wagering scene. So one of the huge differences between the UK and Australia and what we have going on in the States is that in the UK and Australia there’s federal or the equivalent of federal right, there’s national government regulation of sorts, sports gambling. And I’m not the type that says, Oh, we need the Federal Government jumping in and all of our business.

That’s not what I’m advocating for it. But in the US, tobacco is federally regulated and alcohol federally regulated and a lot of other substances are federally regulated. A lot of other activities are federally regulated. So it seems to me that gambling maybe should be in that same category. Now, there’s obviously lots of reasons why folks may not want that to happen, especially folks that have vested interest there.

But because of this, you know, learning lessons from the UK in Australia is hard because in the US we don’t have one set of regulations on gambling. We have 35, 37 sets depending on what you know, what state or where you are and things like that. And so how game is accessible and how sports wagering is affecting the lives of Mexicans.

Where I live, where you can only gamble on sports in one of six in-person tribal casinos is very different than what the people in Ohio are experiencing or the people in Illinois are experiencing. Right. And so I think that makes it hard to generalize. Now, having said that, you’re absolutely right. The UK and Australia in particular have really done amazing work over the past decade of digging deeper into what’s going on with sports wagering and what we know from Australia is similar to here, right?

Younger men with more income are more likely to gamble on sports people that are gambling on a bunch of different activities instead of just one or more likely to have problems. People that are gambling more frequently, that are more likely to have problems, and in theory, that allows a country that has more nationalized regulation to impose safety guidelines on people.

Right. So right now the UK is in the middle of revisiting all of their gambling legislation because they think that their gambling legislation is out of date and they’re using an evidence based in a scientific approach from mental health professionals and researchers to understand where they need to go next to prevent harm while still allowing access to an activity that lots of folks from the UK enjoy engaging in.

And the Australia has their own regulatory approach. So in the States we’re not taking an evidence based approach.

Shane Cook: Right? I want to explore that a little bit more. So if I’m hearing you correctly, then yeah, in the UK they’re actually working with health mental health service providers who are on the front line, who are dealing with people with gambling addictions and taking that to affect policy. That sounds like a novel idea.

Dr. Grubbs: It’s wild, isn’t it? You know, this is currently happening right now in the UK, has been happening for a few months. Where were the directors of the national problem? Gambling groups there and researchers. So there a research psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Henrietta Boulton, just an eminent in her field in so many regards who who’s got is spearheading a lot of these efforts.

But they are they’re dialoging with researchers and mental health professionals, people that have witnessed gambling harms to understand what’s happening and make policy recommendations based on that. And what’s cool about it is that because there’s a national authority on it, it allows them, you know, if if regulations are adjusted, if guidelines are changed, if recommendations are made, and then Parliament decides, yeah, we should do that, well then that that affects gambling throughout the UK in its entirety.

Whereas in the in the States at least at this point, you know, we might be able to convince one state to engage in more evidence based recommendations. But getting 35 or 37 states, you know, is becomes a lot harder.

Shane Cook: Yeah, and I can see that because each state here is incentivized different ways. And terms are right. The different tax rates that are imposed on revenues that fall back to the state, depending on how how I, I don’t know any other way to say this, but depending on how well you negotiate your deal at the state level with the gaming operators is dependent on how much money you’re going to get.

Right? Yeah. And somehow some states got hoodwinked along the way there.

Dr. Grubbs: And it is I mean, there are states like I believe Ohio’s tax rate is something around something around 10% of the profit that the that the sports operators are making goes back in taxes, which is I mean, 10% is not anything to sneeze at, but there’s other states that are closer to 50%. And so it’s it is this type of thing where you see this massive these just massive differentials in how it’s approached and how difficult it is to operate as a sportsbook in that state.

And also the funding that is then available for research and and prevention and treatment within the state. Now, I will say, you know, I mentioned Ohio, 10% doesn’t sound like that much. Ohio is investing in gambling related research. They are extremely invested in prevention and treatment. You know, if you have if you have gambling related problems in the state of Ohio, you can find treatment for free.

Yeah, which is great. I mean, that’s amazing resource. And a lot of that is because of what’s been negotiated across the casinos and the lottery. And and this as well. So.

Shane Cook: Right. And fortunately we have that same we have have the same availability through Illinois Department of Health and Human Services. If somebody needs to find a gambling problem, gambling treatment. Illinois has funding set up for somebody to get that same that. So I think that’s at least a step, a positive step in the right direction right now.

Dr. Grubbs: I agree. I mean, so I am a licensed clinical psychologist myself, and I firmly believe that we need to have well-funded access to treatment in states like Ohio. Actually, the bigger problem is not having the funding for treatment. I mean, we have that. It’s that we need more qualified professionals didn’t know how to treat it. And so access is a two is kind of both financial resource to get the treatment and and the professionals to provide it.

And then again, you know, Illinois is the same way. Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts. There are several states that are really good examples, though, of offering opportunities for people to get training, offering opportunities for people to get more, more skilled in dealing with this, which is great because we do have to have the providers and be able to pay for the providers.

And and that’s happening now. Having said all of that, I still believe. Right. And ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Right. And we do need to be doing more to prevent harms because treating harm is great and we absolutely should. But the best treatment is preventing the harm from happening. And so whether that’s education, whether that’s regulation, whether it’s combination of all of those kind of things we need to be doing more state to state and nationally to try to step in and prevent people from developing these problems.

Because getting your gambling under control when you’re $100,000 in debt is better than not, but it’s still not as good as getting it under control when you have the $10 in debt. Right. So right there, there is that piece, I think prevention is huge.

Shane Cook: Yeah, that’s a great point and certainly one that we try to underscore every day by being out being out among the public can talking about problem gambling and exposing people to the potential harms that exist within that come along with gambling. So I we’re going to run short on time here. And there’s one thing I wanted to add. It’s a fascinating topic. I think we could probably do another show and maybe once you get the next round of your research complete, right, maybe we come back together and do this again. But one thing that I always like to ask everybody, what is what is the one thing that you have learned throughout this process of studying gambling that, really shocked or surprised you?

Dr. Grubbs: In my career of studying gambling, one of the one of the biggest shocks, but then has made a lot of sense with me is that we’ve done a lot of work linking trauma and PTSD to again, so that’s a more global one. But with sports wagering in particular, I knew that sports wagers were probably a little bit more impulsive, that they were probably making a few more rash decisions.

I can assume that just because sports wagering was appealing to young men and young men are dumb. I used to be a young man. I used to do dumb things, right? So like, I kind of thought that would be they’re.

Shane Cook: Kind of wired that way.

Dr. Grubbs: Right? I didn’t expect to see it as dramatically as we did. I mean, these guys are binge drinking more and they’re smoking weed more and they’re they’re smoking cigarets more. They’re using other substances more. And it’s not to say that every sports wager is doing all these things, but it is a really dramatic set of effects. And some of the strongest effects I’ve seen in a lot of the research that I do and that that has been shocking and also concerning because in general, you know, that’s not a demographic young, educated men with higher income are not the type of folks that are likely to reach out for help.

Right. You know, that, you know, strong will they don’t need help is more likely to be there. So I do have concerns over the next several years of just, you know, what what are we going to see? You know, what’s it going to take for these groups of people to start saying, no, I’ve got a problem. I need help?

You know, how bad will it have to get? And so it may not be as bad as I’m worried. But given how strong some of these effects are that we’ve seen in our research, I do have a lot of kind of concerns moving forward.

Shane Cook: Well, you had to lay out some big areas there to be concerned about. Well, Josh, I really appreciate you joining the show today. It’s been a fantastic conversation. Again, I hope we do have the opportunity to come back together. Yeah, definitely. You’re invited anytime. If you’ve got something you want to talk about giving now, shoot me an email.

Okay, I can I’ll do the same, but we’ll plan to catch up down the road here and. Yeah, follow up to this.

Dr. Grubbs: Yeah I was going to say, but probably this time next year we’ll have results from our two year study all wrapped up and we’ll be able to talk not just about who’s gambling, what’s going on. We’ll be able to talk about how that gambling behavior has affected those people over time and what has happened to them specifically. And so I think the date of that can be a really fun conversation.

We’re maybe not fine, but a good conversation.

Shane Cook: Good conversation.

Dr. Grubbs: Here.

Shane Cook: Again, this is all about creating awareness for people and the more aware, more educated everyone is about the potential harms for gambling, the better. And that’s what we that’s what we strive to do here. So again, I certainly appreciate the conversation.

Dr. Grubbs: Right. Glad to be here.

Shane Cook: We love hearing from you. So please take a moment to like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly via email at Wage of Danger at Gateway Foundation. Talk. Look for us on Facebook and Twitter at Recovery Gateway on LinkedIn, at Gateway Dash Foundation, or through our website at Gateway Foundation. Dot org Wager Danger is supported through funding in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance to Use Prevention and Recovery.

And remember, Recovery is a lifelong process. If you are a family member struggling with a gambling problem, call Gateway at 8449753663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment.

Today we’ll be discussing a unique gambling awareness program that Nicasa behavioral health services brings to high school aged students in the Chicagoland area. Nicasa recently won a second round of grant funding from the National Council on Problem Gambling, which is supported through donations from the NFL Foundation and fan duel.

Nicasa is using the funds to support a teen problem gambling peer group. This talented group of teens are applying their creative abilities and art and music along with their social media savvy, to bring awareness to harms the gambling can cause to their peers. They’ve also begun work on a virtual reality platform designed to help teens build skills that allow them to steer away from unexpected gambling, be it a spontaneous poker game at a party being handed a scratch off or even downloading a gambling app on their phone.

Gateway Foundation Gambling Treatment

Call Gateway Foundation: 855-723-0963

Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER

wagerdanger@gatewayfoundation.org

Transcript:

Shane Cook: Welcome to another episode of Wager Danger. I’m your host, Shane Cook. And today we’ll be discussing a unique gambling awareness program that Nicasa behavioral health services brings to high school aged students in the Chicagoland area. Nicasa recently won a second round of grant funding from the National Council on Problem Gambling, which is supported through donations from the NFL Foundation and fan duel.

Nicasa is using the funds to support a teen problem gambling peer group. This talented group of teens are applying their creative abilities and art and music along with their social media savvy, to bring awareness to harms the gambling can cause to their peers. They’ve also begun work on a virtual reality platform designed to help teens build skills that allow them to steer away from unexpected gambling, be it a spontaneous poker game at a party being handed a scratch off or even downloading a gambling app on their phone.

This teen peer group is proving that messages from teens to teens can be way more effective than the same message delivered by adults. Joining us today from the council is Elizabeth Thielen and her colleague Robin Czapla We’ll start with you, Elizabeth. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Nicasa.

Elizabeth Thielen: Well, I am the senior director here and I oversee our gambling outreach prevention and treatment program. I’m actually a certified problem gambling counselor. I’m also a former athlete and a person with lived experience with gambling harm. So it’s really close to my heart to try to reach out to people who might have an increased risk for developing gambling problems and do anything that I can to provide them the education, awareness and support to make healthier decisions.

Shane Cook: And you’re also an alum of the Wager Danger show. This is the second or third time you’ve been on. Robin, tell us a little bit about you.

Robin Czapla: Yeah, I’m Robin. I’m the outreach specialist for problem gambling at Nicasa, and I am a U.S. Army veteran. I just got out in April and got the job as the outreach specialist. And I really like to focus on veterans and problem gambling because that is where my heart lies.

Shane Cook: Fantastic. Robin, it was great meeting you in person when we were at the Education Session up in Mundelein. Yes, not too long ago. I wanted to say that was just last month, but I know it was a few months ago.

Robin Czapla: Time feels like it.

Shane Cook: Yeah, absolutely. Glad to have you both. You know, one of the things that we had talked about preshow, Elizabeth, is the opportunity to talk about the National Council on Problem Gambling, an initiative which is the Agility grants. And Nicasa is now a two time recipient of this funding, this grant. And I wonder if you could spend a little bit of time just talking about that, what the process is for applying for this grant, how you’ve been able to be awarded this grant two times now in the past, what, two years?

Three years?

Elizabeth Thielen: Yeah. So we the process to apply there’s if you go to MCP gambling dot org, there’s information I think under the programs tab it says agility grants and it has all the information about the applications and they have different pillars that will probably talk about that you can apply under. But it’s a pretty I think it’s a pretty easy process to apply.

And I think that we were successful in obtaining our first grant in part because we have such incredible teens who are very energetic and creative to start with. But it was just such a small little project. It really started out with the responsible gifting or the Gift Responsibly campaign. It started out with that and we had a couple of teens, I shouldn’t say a couple like a handful of teens from our teen court program.

So it’s a youth diversion program that we reached out to. And we just said, hey, you know, young people are getting caught up using scratch lottery tickets. Sometimes adults are giving them to would you like to, you know, participate in some way of educating adults and teens about this? And they got real creative and they made a little educational video and then they expanded that just to do some other stuff surrounding discouraging underage gambling and making sure that young athletes understand the effect of sports betting on eligibility as an NCAA athlete.

So we just had had a few things that they had done already. They were involved in the Problem Gambling Awareness Month as well. Right? And yeah. And so it allowed us to say, hey, there are doing pretty cool stuff, but with some resources we could really expand on this.

Shane Cook: Okay, so, so the grant that Nicasa received is focused around teen problem gambling, creating peer groups, going out in the community, talking about it, or maybe I should say maybe they are going out in the community, but they’re also focused on maybe the high school that they’re a part of and doing running some programs there. Is that correct?

Elizabeth Thielen: Yeah, They’re definitely in their home schools, sharing information, even in their own families. One of the things that the young people created was a video and we got it put up on YouTube. They enlisted their family, so they had them like reenact that. They were watching a football game together and there’s betting happening. So, you know, they’re bringing it into their homes, but they are showing up to events in the community like resource fairs and that sort of thing.

Shane Cook: Sure. And I would imagine my experience with my own teenagers has been they’re very adept at utilizing social media and all of the electronic means of communication. So I would imagine there’s a fair amount of that that goes into this program as well, or that they utilize those channels to get the message out.

Elizabeth Thielen: Absolutely. And actually, the second round that we were in allowed us to kind of take it to the next level and not just use cell phone videos, but to purchase a 360 camera and a platform that has a lot of functionality up through using it for VR. So we’re able to do some really cool stuff now even more than what they were doing already.

Shane Cook: Yeah, that sounds like it. So let’s take a step back then and talk about the funding that’s available that the National Council on Problem Gambling is is able to provide through this agility grant program. That’s part of the funding that the NFL, through the NFL Foundation provided. And I believe they provided millions of dollars to support awareness type activities around problem gambling and this fits under that banner.

Is that correct?

Elizabeth Thielen: Yes, that’s correct.

Shane Cook: And FanDuel also participated in that.

Elizabeth Thielen: Yeah, I believe there were.

Shane Cook: They provide some funding as well. I think that’s really incredible that it has such high visibility. These grants are pretty competitive, as I understand it. And I’m just curious, when it comes down to the selection criteria for the grant, what what are the types of things that they’re looking for in your proposal?

Elizabeth Thielen: Well, I think they are really looking for innovation. They’re looking for things that maybe haven’t been done before or that are just really new and promising, expanding on things that might already be showing some minimal success. But with support could do more. And they really want to see that you’re addressing at risk and priority populations like, you know, young people, high school, college athletes, communities of color and, you know, the work that we were doing and wanting to do on a larger scale was really hitting all of those markets.

Shane Cook: Okay. All right. Well, again, congratulations. I know you all are doing some great work at No Castle Behavioral health. So this just allows you to pursue an additional avenue or expand on a on a channel that you already had in place because no cancer has has had a history of focusing on this age demographic through some of your other programs.

In addition to this, this peer problem gambling group. What are some of the other programs that you have that are tailored towards adolescents, high school age kids or things like that?

Elizabeth Thielen: Well, I think the the teen program that I mentioned, the teen court program that some of our volunteers came from is one of the programs that I think is just so important here that focuses on young people. You know, young people can make decisions that aren’t all that great and how we as adults and just the system around these young people respond can either, you know, help empower them to make better decisions or it can unfortunately make things more difficult for kids who might be already in a vulnerable state.

And so our teen core program is a model where we we leverage teens to help encourage other teens to make good decisions within a structure that follows a peer court model. So there is an adult judge, but the jurors and the attorneys are teens that are actually trained in juvenile law. And the act is mentors and models of making decisions that, you know, would help them to hopefully reach their goal someday and not take them further from their goals.

And that model has just been so successful. Our teens that come through the program really show a rate of recidivism that is so much lower than just going through the traditional juvenile court system. I wouldn’t say juvenile court, but that traditional criminal justice pathway in some of these youth that come through as offenders go on to become volunteers, and now they’re the role models in their communities.

Right. Which is really cool. Some of our volunteers have gone on to become attorneys. We we get word from them from time to time. Some have become, you know, assistant state’s attorneys. We have had one of our volunteers go on to become an attorney, then to become a judge, then become a chief judge. It’s just really Well, yes, it’s a very cool program.

And so it’s not surprising to me that some of the great ideas and momentum and energy for this problem gambling prevention came up out of that group. But that’s just one example. We do provide mental health and substance use services for adolescents. And, you know, we have supportive services for families who might be experiencing some sort of crisis and we help to connect them to community resources that will help them to navigate those crises in a healthy and a connected way.

So it’s really you know, it’s it’s a real core value of us to help empower people to make healthy choices. And so this just fell right in line with what we already do and what we’re passionate about. And we’ve been a gambling service provider for over 20 years. So it’s really exciting that we’re now marrying two parts of our program that are just so important to us and we’re seeing like a real synergistic results.

Shane Cook: Okay, great. So the number of the number of high school students that you have participating in this group, about how many people do you have? How did it happen? Where did you start and and where are you today in terms of the growth of the program?

Elizabeth Thielen: Well, we started out, like I said, with a handful that were really came from our teen court program, which was a variety of local high schools, but that has expanded in the first year. I think we ended up having 24 official volunteers and now we’re upwards of over 40, almost 50. And they’re from all over. They’re from Lake County, Kane County, Cook County.

We’ve even got some from over the border and Wisconsin and, you know, the use of technology, one is just really facilitated information sharing among these teens. Some of these teens will never meet each other, but they are just working in collaboration. You know, one who’s really good at graphic design type stuff and ideas will come up with something and then, you know, kind of pass it over to other members of the group and they will turn it into some sort of video campaign and get it on social media or, you know, get it printed and take it out in the community and go to actual events.

So it’s kind of neat the the coordination that’s happening among these youth that are from just all different areas.

Shane Cook: Sure. And it sounds like it casts a very wide net here. Are these students, are they engaged at their local high schools as well to recruit other members, things like that?

Elizabeth Thielen: Absolutely. I was telling Robin that we’ll have events and I’m like, who are you? Like? Some of our young people are recruiting their peer group and just saying, This is really cool. You need to come and do this. And so it really just helps to to again, you know, I’m almost 50 and I can go out there and I can have what I think is really compelling information.

But when it’s coming from these young people in a way that they know that other young people will be responsive to, it’s so much more meaningful than just having somebody like me out there sharing that information. So, yeah, and Robin actually is. Oh, sorry.

Shane Cook: Go ahead. Go ahead.

Elizabeth Thielen: Yeah. So Robin is working with a group that is pretty exciting. Something coming up that I wanted her to be able to share.

Robin Czapla: Yeah. So I went to an outreach event in June connected with this other nonprofit organization, and they are a soccer youth soccer team. And so I connected with their youth director and we are planning to do a commercial that, you know, kind of relates to gambling and betting on sports. So we’ll have some soccer action shots in there.

You know that the team player is playing, and I’m pretty excited to see the final result because I think it’s going to be pretty cool.

Shane Cook: Yeah, that sounds cool. What can I ask which soccer club dress.

Robin Czapla: Shirt there called Heart of the City? They’re based out of Waukegan here in Illinois.

Shane Cook: Yeah. Kudos to them for stepping up to partner with you all to do that.

Elizabeth Thielen: One thing I’m excited about and that is that the intention is that the commercial will be available both in English and Spanish because we have a large amount of Spanish-speaking community members. The hope is that their they themselves are going to help to identify what kinds of sporting events might be coming up that we can utilize that ad and get it airing during the live broadcast of these different events.

We had actually hoped to get in during the Women’s World Cup. That was what they, you know, wanted to do, and we sure wanted to do it too. But we have a slow production and stuff to get done. But those are the kinds of events that this commercial that they’re putting together will be airing during.

Shane Cook: Yeah. Excellent. You know, kind of tagging on that. We talked about the sports, all these peers working with their other peers, how much how much outreach is actually going back into other segments in that high school demographic, if you will. I mean, athletes are, I think, a good target area, but there’s there’s a broad stroke area here that also needs to hear the message.

So are there other creative things that some of the group has paired off or, you know, knocked out a little piece that they could go after another type of demographic in that age group?

Elizabeth Thielen: Robin, do you help the outreach numbers? We we actually don’t limit ourselves to any one group, the college athletes, the high school athletes are important demographic. We’re just high school students in general as well as middle school students, but also the adults in these young people’s lives because we are at a place where awareness about the exposure of young brains to gambling is not there.

It’s not there the way that it is alcohol and drugs and so our young people are actually coming to events that are largely adult attended and they’re sharing information about not giving our young people access to sports betting apps or not giving them lottery tickets. And I’m actually really heartened and somewhat surprised at how receptive the adults are to hearing these messages from the young people.

But yeah, we’re reaching a real broad range of people.

Shane Cook: Yeah, I think that’s. Oh, go ahead, Robin.

Robin Czapla: I was just going to give you the numbers. Since May, we’ve done 30 outreach events and when they total out of 2100 and roughly 2100 people at those events.

Shane Cook: Very nice. So your message is getting across to quite a few individuals. I think it’s I think it’s interesting and enlightened that the message is going to the parents of teens because and I think parents in general are very receptive to hear from other teens, things that they may not be hearing from their own teens. It gives them a sense of, okay, I know I have a better sense for what’s going on with my own teen and their peer groups because I’m hearing it from other people their age.

So I think that’s fantastic that you’re able to reach out and and that the kids themselves are intentionally going out and speaking to these adults because that’s no small feat to get teenagers to communicate with adults.

Elizabeth Thielen: Yeah. And they’re real. You know, we had one event where we did like a pop up kiosk in a mall, and it was it was pretty cool. I mean, I think it had almost ten volunteers who showed up. And it wasn’t just one day we were there for, I think, four or five days, and they’re just standing there and they’re trying to hand out information and engage.

And they actually created an interactive quiz. So they’ve got a laptop set up and they’re inviting people who are walking by in the mall to come and learn about underage gambling and take this quiz. And, you know, we had to really support and process with our teens those interactions, because I can go to those events and have, you know, nine out of ten people passing by ignore me.

And it’s kind of annoying because I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’m actually going to give you stuff. I’m going to give you quizzes and stuff. But for a young person, especially when a number of the people who are not receptive and do just walk by might be different, you know, from a different demographic of them. There’s a there’s a question and and a wonderment like why why won’t they come talk to me?

Is there something about me that, you know, there they don’t like, you know, and they’re feeling they’re feeling a little confused and a little especially they’re volunteering their time. Their friends are probably at home, you know, playing video games or whatever. And they’re volunteering like eight or 9 hours in a day to do this. So we really have to support them and let them know that this is very common.

And and it’s it is hard to just like in a cold call type situation, to share information when people can be very guarded, they’re just guarded anymore about interacting with people that they don’t know and that every person that they do talk to really just has a potential of spreading something that is so crucial, a message that is so important that, you know, we really appreciate them making themselves vulnerable to do that.

Shane Cook: No, I think that’s that’s a great point. So I appreciate you mentioning that. As we’ve been talking about this, I’m reminded of a recent program that was released and there was some training on. We even talked to Chris Ward at the way back in about this was a program called Stacked Deck, which is a program that’s targeted specifically at high school age students to to bake that into the curriculum.

Has this group thought about ways that they can help bring that to their high schools, maybe have it as part of the curriculum in the health program, something like that?

Elizabeth Thielen: We definitely are interested in that. Robin is actually trained in this stack, a stack deck, and we know that that curriculum did need some updating and the some of the language and in forms of gambling, you know, definitely don’t wouldn’t resonate with young people. Now I believe a lot of that update has happened, but it is challenging to get curriculum into schools when there’s already so much that is that needs to be fit in during the academic period.

So we definitely are interacting with middle schools and high schools, getting in at least, you know, in in a health class. I’m doing something in a few weeks with a class that helps people to look at different careers and, you know, any opportunity for us to get in there, we’re making sure that we’re sharing information about this field and about these efforts.

But it is something that would likely require some advocacy, a higher level to advocate for that to be allowed in. And we’re all made for it. The wonderful thing about underage gambling prevention is it really pairs very well with all of the other important prevention efforts. So substance use and and taking care of oneself, one’s mental health, all of these things really are not incompatible there.

It actually makes more sense to bring this in to existing prevention efforts. And so we’re kind of at that stage, all of us are on how do we allow something like this stack deck or other ideas to to come in to the existing prevention efforts.

Robin Czapla: Of a school?

Shane Cook: Okay. Well, one thing about teens and having them involved, they can get very creative and different ways to to kind of bring this in. If it’s not formally, I’m sure they’ll figure out a way to spread that message informally. What in working with this group, what are some of the things that you’ve noticed from their own, let’s call it their own journey about learning of problem gambling and gambling addiction?

What are what are some interesting things that you’ve learned from this group?

Elizabeth Thielen: Well, one thing that I’ve learned is that you can provide the information and we provide research to these young people. Anything that there is available, like, you know, the high school gambling fact sheet from the National Council, some of the information from I think it’s youth youth gambling dot com or there’s a lot of research out there you can share it with them how they process it and kind of repackage it in a way that would be most well received by their peers and by adults in their community is really cool to me.

It’s they’re taking the concepts and they’re making them very palatable. It’s not something where anybody is trying to take like an anti-gambling stance, but it’s anti problem gambling, and part of avoiding or preventing problem gambling is preventing underage gambling. And, you know, I think of one of our young people so creative, so talented as an artist, and he decided after reviewing all this research, he didn’t even want to write anything.

He wasn’t creating like a worksheet or anything. He drew a picture of what he pictures problem gambling to do to somebody emotionally. And it is so compelling, the expression on the face that he drew and what we did was we had that put on t shirts and were used as giveaways in communities to get people to come and learn from the teens and hear what they were doing and why.

And we even had this young person work with a local graphic design company to learn how do I take this and then turn it into an actual message. And we got that message put up on a billboard. So we talk about the reach, the 2100 or whatever that Robin was sharing is that actual people encountered interacted with. But there are so many more that are indirectly, you know, everybody who drives by this billboard, whether they’re driving a car, they’re writing on a bike, they’re walking by it, they’re on a bus.

And this billboard actually had a picture of this young man’s artwork. And it actually had a picture of his hand with a pen in it. And it said, your parents would rather pay for our school than for a gambling debt. And the message was really one of don’t gamble underage and whoever is gambling don’t gamble beyond your means, like don’t accumulate debt as a result of gambling.

So it was a very you know, there’s the term like responsible gambling, you know, not gambling underage and gambling within your means are two facets of that. And so that one billboard said a lot. And it was also a really cool opportunity for that young man to interact with somebody who is working in in possibly his chosen field.

So to get that kind of networking and learn like what does it look like to be an A graphic designer? So that’s kind of an unexpected side effect of this program. Is the teens actually getting to connect with people who are doing important stuff in their different fields and and them getting to see what that would look like and help them to hone in on what their future career goals might be.

Shane Cook: Right. Is is that a great story? I think that’s there’s a lot to that that we could unpack there. Just the the learning process, the realization that this young man came to. We’re going to take a copy of that and include a link or if not, the artwork itself will include a link to so people can get out there and see that.

But I believe he also had another individual who also took this to another level in terms of expressing what they’ve learned through this program. Do you want to talk about that one?

Elizabeth Thielen: Yeah, I would. I love to talk about this one. So like I said, we share the information, we share the research, and then we say, what would you like to do with this? And this young woman in our program said, I would like to write a song. And I, I was like, okay, that’s interesting. You do, you know?

And so we were actually at an event. All the young people were walking in a parade and she said, I wrote my song, Do you want to hear it? And she just belted it out, you know, a cappella. And it was it literally made you know, it gave me goosebumps. And so as a part of the second year project, we were able to get her to a recording studio in Chicago, where she was able to record her song that she wrote and sang professionally.

Elizabeth Thielen: And it’s called Make Things Right. In this, you have 45 seconds. I like to just play a clip for you.

That you it’s hard for me to sing that I think.

I need to know for the day kind of struggle to agree when I’m on.

My family. Leave the passion. And trust me, all of that is overwhelming. It’s all I sing. How do.

I lose my mind when all I do is make.

My money working and you take the things I give me like.

Elizabeth Thielen: Isn’t that. Enough? That is fantastic.

And actually what is so clever, I mean, so creative and so clever. She was 14 when she wrote that, by the way, you know. But, you know, she knew that the funding for this program came from the NC PG agility grant with funding from the NFL Foundation and from additional funding through FanDuel. And she did choose to bring in the the language about, you know, if I gamble, I will fumble just to kind of tie that in.

I just thought that was so cool. So what a clever creative young lady and, and her and the other group has done some really cool stuff, but I could just go on all day talking about But.

Shane Cook: That is so great. I mean, that that’s a true opportunity for her to to shine and utilize the talent that she has to bring about this message. Show Are we okay to say at least our first name.

Elizabeth Thielen: Huh? Yeah, for sure. Her name is Alicia, and I will share the the file. I also can share a link to We’ve put it on YouTube. But what we hope to do, and it all depends on can we make that work? We would love to see a music video created to really just, you know, see this through to all the ways that it can be used.

Now she’s gone to many events and actually just gotten on the mic and and sang it live, which is it? Actually, every time she sings it, she changes it up a bit. She’s a true artist and I think it’s so cool. And I find myself just like singing this song. And thankfully nobody’s around me to hear how poorly I do it in comparison to her.

Elizabeth Thielen: But you know, I played this actually for a family member and they cried and they said, I have nothing to do with gambling or problem gambling. And this just hit me. And so, yeah.

Shane Cook: Yeah, that’s that’s so great. Robin Elizabeth, you all are having such an impact on on these youths lives and potentially their future careers, as well as spreading a very important message about the dangers of gambling for some people in really creative and unique ways. So I love this program. I know you all do too, that the National Council on Problem Gambling adores this program too, because they’ve continued to fund it.

And I hope that continues each and every year and that the program continues to grow at the pace that it is.

Elizabeth Thielen: Thank you.

Shane Cook: Absolutely. And thanks for sharing these stories. Before we break, I just want to ask you, is there anything else that that you want to add about the the program itself, where do you envision it heading into the future, some future ideas that you have in mind, so on and so forth?

Elizabeth Thielen: Well, one thing I’d like to share that the youth are already doing, even this young lady who made the song and the one who do the artwork, they’re getting involved, They’ve got other volunteers. What they’re doing is they’re using that 30, 60 camera that I mentioned before to create scenarios where young people might be exposed to opportunities to gamble.

And so they’re recording them. Like, for example, one recording was of of somebody going to a sleepover and they walk down the stairs and instead of a sleepover, there’s a basement poker game and they’re being invited. Come on, sit down. I hope you brought your money. And what it does is they record different potential responses and it becomes like a choose your own adventure type thing where you can click on make an excuse and leave, make an excuse and go sit on the couch and and they actually record themselves doing these things.

So you can, you know, the user of this program can actually learn how to successfully navigate some of these scenarios that might come up in their own life and get practice and get some skill building. We’ve already rolled it out. We piloted it at what was it? It was on and I’m losin with the event that we were at, but we were at a large community event and we had a laptop and the kids were there and they were showing the community members how to use the program and it was just so cool.

So where we see that going, all of the equipment, the platform that we’re using has the VR capability. And so that’s our next step, is to use that program in a way that really, really replica meets the experience for young people who might be, you know, handed a card that has the scratch lottery ticket in it or past a phone that has a sports betting app on it and saying, hey, pick, you know, you know, place a bet, you know, something like that.

And it will actually prepare them to respond in a way that is safer than what they might if they were caught off guard. So we’re so excited about the app.

Shane Cook: Yeah, that sounds very creative. Implement and that type of type of approach. And I’m sure at least for this, for the teen demographic, that’s something that can really pull them in to spread that message. So high marks for creativity there for sure.

Elizabeth Thielen: We can’t take any credit for it.

Shane Cook: Oh well, no, it all comes from them, right?

Elizabeth Thielen: Yep. Right.

Shane Cook: Yeah. And that’s, that’s why I think it it’s it’s going to be very successful because of that. And yet it does no good for you and I to try and reach out to teens with a message. It’s much better served when it comes from their peer group.

Elizabeth Thielen: Absolutely. And one thing that I want to say is these these young people are so not about self-promotion in any kind of way. Last year, when we were going to be going to the national conference and talking about the program, I actually reached out to some of them. I said, Hey, you know, if we can make it happen, do you think you’d like to come and present and talk about your program?

It’s it’s in Boston. And they’re like, no, just to go sign and they’re not they’re not trying to brag on themselves or anything. They’re just moving on to the to the next project that they want to do for this. So it’s really cool. The other thing I do want to say, because you mentioned like they’re very adept at getting messages out there.

One of the things that they did together was one had created an idea and a campaign. It was called What’s Your Big Win? And they kicked it to some of the other group members who created a video promoting that young people will make social media posts, particularly Instagram posts, showing what their hobby is or their interest or their sport.

Anything that’s incompatible with gambling, calling it what’s your big win and using the hashtag, what’s your big win? And so they created this social media campaign to really, you know, normalize and validate doing activities that are not underage gambling. So that was pretty neat.

Shane Cook: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well, like I said earlier, you all are changing some lives through this program. They’re helping each other change their own lives and the lives of others. So, um, yeah, fantastic job and great idea that grew out of the programs that you’ve had in place at No Castle for several years, sort of focused on the teen age demographic.

And this is just an extension of that. So congratulations once again and keep up the great work.

Elizabeth Thielen: Thank you so much. And thank you for the awesome podcast. We’re finding the young people really late podcast. And so sometimes this is just a way for them to learn about something or to feel like, Hey, it’s not just me that’s going through this. So, you know, podcasts like yours are really making a big impact on a real wide variety of people.

So thank you for having this.

Shane Cook: Absolutely. I appreciate that. All right. Well, enjoy the rest of your day. I appreciate you taking a little time out to sit with us in the virtual studio and and record the latest episode for Way True Danger. And look forward to seeing you again soon.

Elizabeth Thielen: Yes, definitely.

Shane Cook: And we love hearing from you. So please take a moment to like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly via email at Wager. Danger at Gateway Foundation dot org. Look for us on Facebook and Twitter at Recovery Gateway on LinkedIn at Gateway Dash Foundation or through our website at Gateway Foundation. Dot org Wager Danger is supported through funding in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance Abuse Prevention and Recovery.

And remember, recovery is a lifelong process. If you are a family member struggling with a gambling problem, call Gateway at 8449753663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment making.

After initial recovery and relapse, a subsequent recovery leads Dave to live each day OUT LOUD as he shares his incredible story of hope with others.

Recovery advocate, podcaster, husband and father Dave Yeager shares a deeply personal story of his recovery journey after developing a gambling addiction while serving as a non-commissioned officer in the US Army. Dave talks about the progression of his gambling addiction, fueled by an early win, as it spiraled into daily gambling, borrowing money from subordinates, lying and eventually stealing from his unit in order to satiate his gambling need. Ultimately, it’s his fortitude and character that shines bright in his endeavor to share his recovery with others.

Gateway Foundation Gambling Treatment

Call Gateway Foundation: 855-723-0963

Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER

wagerdanger@gatewayfoundation.org

Transcript:

Shane Cook: Hey everybody at Shane Cook with another episode of Wager Danger. Our guest today is Dave Yeager, an Army veteran, joining us to talk about his recent book, Fall in A Veteran with a Gambling Addiction. It’s Dave’s personal story of gambling addiction and his journey through ongoing recovery to remain gambling free. Dave shares with us is early childhood development and the role it played in his addiction.

He also talks about his two military enlistments, his first stateside, where there was no access to gambling and a second enlistment in South Korea, where access to an on base slot machine room and an early win fueled his addiction. Dave’s message is a story of hope, where he credits his struggles, therapists relapse, and the support of his family all combine to give him the strength to live his recovery out loud.

Welcome to the show, Dave.

Dave Yeager: Thanks, Shane, Really appreciate it.

Shane Cook: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve had the opportunity to sit together here for the last couple of days. We’re in Washington, D.C., in the nation’s capital and attending a conference that is sponsored by the National Council on Problem Gambling. Good opportunity for us to break away for a little bit this afternoon and talk about a book that is coming out that you have authored.

One thing I learned reading through this book, this is actually your second book.

Dave Yeager: Correct?

Shane Cook: And I did. And I want to touch on that one a little bit when we get into our discussion. But, you know, I actually had the opportunity to hear your story at other conferences that we’ve attended together. We’ve had some side conversations about your background. But what was the time that you kind of figured, okay, it’s time for me to write this book?

And what was what was it that made you decide to write it at that particular time?

Dave Yeager: A good question. I wrote the first one in starting in 2008 and actually finished it in 2009, and it was after I had gone through a treatment program for gambling addiction. When I had gone to I went to I’m a veteran, a veteran of the Army and had gone to Cleveland, to the Department of Veterans Affairs Gambling treatment program.

And when I got out of there, I felt so good. I decided I wanted to write this first book as well.

Shane Cook: And the name of that book.

Dave Yeager: It’s called Be Happy with Crappy A Journey through Trauma, Addiction, rock Bottom and Recovery. And if I can, I just want to give you kind of the meaning behind the title. If. Sure. So when I was in that first treatment, my therapist, who is a very, very, very well-known therapist within the gambling treatment field and I can say her name because she worked there was Lori Rugal.

Dr. Lori Rogel was my first therapist and we were sitting in a session and I was learning kind of how to deal with my feelings because a lot of what I had dealt with and growing up and some of the things I dealt with was kind of compartmentalizing, hiding my feelings. So we’re sitting there and she goes, Well, how are you feeling today?

And I said, You know, I got to be honest, I don’t know. She goes, What do you mean? I said, Well, I feel really happy today. I said, But at the same time, I’m kind of sad because there are some things happening over here. And I said, I’m not sure which one to feel. She goes, Well, why don’t you just feel both?

I said, You can’t do that. You can’t feel both. She goes, Why not? I’m like, You can. She goes, Yeah, you can. I said, So I can feel happy and crappy at the same time. She goes, Yes, you can feel happy and crappy at the same time. And that’s where the title came from. It was honestly a pivotal moment in my recovery.

That first time through, I learned something about myself and about kind of experiencing emotion that I had. Honestly, I had no clue. I had no clue that I could feel two distinctly different things at the same time. I was just learning to feel one thing at a time. Let alone two. So. But long story short, that happened. And then I got into recovery.

I slowly but surely that recovery kind of faded over time. And I’ve got to be honest, for part of that time, I didn’t even really know it was happening. So then I relapsed and in 2020 I went back into treatment and it got pretty intense the second time around. I think the first time that I got into recovery, I knew I had a problem with gambling.

The second time I got into recovery, I knew that I was powerless over it unless I did something about it. So what what I chose to do about it was kind of fully immersed myself into it. And I did that through getting myself into Gamblers Anonymous. I did that through joining an online problem gambling support group. I did that through going back to the gambling treatment program in Cleveland for five weeks with follow up care.

I also then when I got out of that, I had been part of that group that I was involved with online. I got connected to a podcast, which was all in the Addictive Gamblers podcast. And one of the things that they did was they did Sunday groups, right where we actually did group therapy as a podcast. Now we all agreed to it.

We all said that we were speaking out loud. We knew it was in the public and we chose to do it anyway because I’m not afraid, you know, to live my, my recovery out loud. So as I got involved with that, I started to think, Man, I can do more with this. And I got with the host and said, Listen, I would love to start one of these things for myself, specifically for military service members and veterans.

And that’s where I started my own podcast. But then an outgrowth of that is I started to think, you know what? I think it’s time for me to rewrite my story. And my initial idea was to rewrite, be happy with crappy. But as I got into writing it, it molded into something of its own, right? It’s a much, much deeper version of what I told in my first book because I was willing to go much, much deeper than I realized.

I had been willing to go my first time around. So that’s kind of where the book grew from, was that desire to tell my story in as much depth as I was starting to explore myself?

Shane Cook: Sure. And it comes through in your new release Fall in a veteran with a gambling addiction. That’s that’s the name of your new book. And it really comes through that the first time through treatment. It didn’t really seem like you were totally committed at the time or stepping gingerly through treatment, which is probably a better way. That’s the way to interpret it.

And then the second time it was, okay, now I recognize it’s done X for me. You know, it’s been I’ve had some success. Now let’s figure out how we take it up to 100 or turn it up to 11, if you will, to, to use a a reference there from that crazy.

Dave Yeager: Model that.

Shane Cook: First by this is Spinal Tap. Mike God, what can I come up with that. But anyway, yeah, I think, you know, that really comes through in it and if you wouldn’t mind, this might be a good time for us to kind of focus in on fall in this newly released book. We were fortunate enough and you were generous enough to share with us an advance copy so we could go through it and at least get your story out today.

And I’m glad you mentioned your podcast, which is also titled Fall In. And this is a great opportunity for two people that are out in the out in the community telling stories about gambling addiction and sharing information with people. You’re geared towards the military and people that have served our country, which are dangerous. It’s a little bit more general in nature.

We cover a lot of different topics on any given week, month and, you know, it’s a good opportunity for us to just share with each other. But turning back to the book here, I took away from your book and mentioned this pre-show that it really kind of falls into three components for me, early childhood development, where you were your time in the military, which was a very formative time period for you, and it’s where you were introduced to gambling while you were in the middle military.

And then it focuses. The third part is on your journey. So if a coach just kind of chunk those out and go back to the beginning and talked about early development, and now that you’ve had time to go through and process this on your own, maybe highlight some things from early develop in years that you recognize now, Hey, this really was a pattern that started developing very early in my childhood.

Dave Yeager: Yeah, absolutely. And just to encapsulate what you just said is, yeah, the book is broken down into several sections. You know, the first section is called Before Gambling, and a lot of it focuses on my childhood. And within that it was basically a story of growing up in a broken home. So my mother divorced at a very early age.

She remarried, and the person that she remarried was an abusive alcoholic. So we spent most of our years and I describe this in both of my books as a terrorist state. So there was a lot of you know, there was a lot of disciplinary beating, There was a lot of yelling. There was a lot of screaming. There was a lot of working.

We were constantly put to work. And through all of that.

Shane Cook: Not easy work.

Dave Yeager: Now, that is correct. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And one of the things that I learned through all of that, without really realizing that I’d learned it till later in life, was that was the concept that emotions were bad. So if I expressed sadness, if I expressed anger or if I expressed whatever it was, usually I got beat for it.

So I learned at a very early age to kind of, you know, kind of capsulize and, you know, take all those feelings and tuck them away because they weren’t, quote-unquote, useful to me at the time. What that turned into was as I was, you know, got into high school and all that. And I was I was socially interacting with other people.

I was quirky and I used my sense of humor as a mask. So my job was to be funny so that people would so people would like me, you know, that’s and I was a people pleaser. I always wanted to please other people to make them happy so that they didn’t have to experience what I did. That’s a lot of as I got into an especially this recovery, the uncovering of the depth of that, I knew it was there right?

I knew that that was there. But to start to really uncover the depth of what that did to my belief system was really eye-opening for me, you know, and the damage that it did in my adult life up until I really started to untangle it and deal with it. You know, it did a lot of damage. It’s it’s a lot of what led to my gambling issues was the was the inability to face uncomfortable situations.

Right. Right. Because I didn’t want to feel it. I just did not want to feel it. So, yeah.

Shane Cook: And I think that happens with a lot of us. You know, it’s interesting. We’re roughly the same age, you know, give or take a year here and there. But we are a product of a generation where the men in our lives really didn’t share our emotions very openly. So I can I can relate to that on a on a level where we just didn’t show emotion, you know, German descent on my side, which was very, you know, we’re we’re going to go march forward and heads down, nose to the grindstone type of attitude.

Right. And it it plays a role in our development and how we interact with others. So I appreciate that. Sure. Now, as you go through high school and graduate, then you get out and you decide to go into the army, enlist in the Army. Is that correct?

Dave Yeager: The first of two times, yes.

Shane Cook: Yeah.

Dave Yeager: I actually when it got into the Army, when I got out of high school, I graduated high school, I went to college for a year, didn’t really do well in college. I kind of floundered. I was lazy and just left after the first year trying to decide what to do with my life. So I decided, you know what?

I’m going to go ahead and go in the Army. So yeah, I went in the Army at the age of it was 20 years old when I finally got into the Army.

Shane Cook: Sorry.

Dave Yeager: Yeah, that was my first time in the Army. And I was in then for, I want to say it was four and a half years.

Shane Cook: Okay. All right. And that was before your time. You had a you had a period then after that, four and a half years where you reentered the civilian lifestyle at that? Yeah.

Dave Yeager: During that period, in between my stints with the military, I reentered the civilian world, got a job, got married for the first time, and I brought my two kids into the world during the period between the two times in the military.

Shane Cook: Okay. Yeah. But now it’s your second time that you entered the military where you had the experience of being introduced to gambling.

Dave Yeager: Yeah, I was introduced to gambling actually, many years ago. I’m from eastern P.A., so I’m not that city. So I had gambled, but it was only very periodically. It really was. I would go down there with a certain amount of money. If I blew that money, that’s great. I went home. If I won some money, I might spend it, but I might not spend it.

But I still always kept my gas money to go home. It was more or less responsible, but it was only every now and again. I had gambled maybe a handful of times before that second time in the Army and that second time in the Army. It was it was 2001. It was about a month and a half after the events of 911.

I had come down on orders to go to Korea. At the time, my children were both under the age of five. I had been arguing with my first wife, then got on the plane, flew over there. I was stressed, I was tired, I had anxiety going on. There was all of these different things happening. I got settled into the hotel in Seoul, walking around and lo and behold, I look in a room and lo and behold, there’s a casino-style slot room right there.

Shane Cook: Right. So let’s set this up a little bit more, because I think you touched on something that that’s really important here, that the timing of this on the heels of 911, you’re shipping out to Korea right next to one of the named axis of evil. Uh, that was just to your north. Tensions had to be pretty high there.

Dave Yeager: I would say. Was it? I want I don’t want to go as far as to say tensions are high. I want to go as far as to say my stress level was high.

Shane Cook: Okay.

Dave Yeager: So I know what to expect when I flew into that country. Right? I’m flying. I’m flying 12 hours away, time zone-wise. Right into a country I had never been into. And as I’m flying into the into the ocean air base, you’re watching Patriot missiles pointing right at you, you know, and everything was barricaded off. When you get there, we, you know, flak vests, the whole nine yards.

So for me personally, it was very, very stressful.

Shane Cook: I’m sure that would induce a level of stress that many people don’t experience. Yes, I would agree. I mean.

Dave Yeager: There were no active hostilities, nothing like that. So it wasn’t like I was walking into a firefight, but I I didn’t know what I was walking into. And that’s what that’s what stressed me. Yeah. Plus, I was leaving a situation at home that I did not want to leave. I had two young children I didn’t want to leave behind, and I did not leave my first wife on the best of terms when I got on that plane.

So I flew in there with a lot of stress.

Shane Cook: Yeah. And it’s it’s it’s interesting having gone through that, uh, that 911 experience. And I think all of us to a certain extent experienced trauma on that day because we we’ve seen the videos and it, it lived with us for a while and it created a ton of uncertainty for everybody. Sure. We all had that heightened anxiety that came along after the 911 experience.

So I just want to give you the opportunity to at least say, yeah, you’re experienced me, you’re you’re a level of stress may have been X, but you know, here I am going into another country that’s, you know, potentially we don’t know exactly what’s going on. But right now we’re going close to the fire here in. Right. So tell us about the experience there.

Korea and being introduced, introduced to the slots.

Dave Yeager: Yes, I get on the base, I get to the hotel in Seoul on Yongsan base, a very, very, very nice hotel. I get settled in my room. I find some dinner. I’m tired, but I’m not necessarily sleepy because I’m stressed. I’m walking around the hotel and as I’m walking around, I’m seeing like a little shop here and a restaurant there.

And then I start to hear noises that I’m like, Wait, what is this? So I turn and look in the room and it’s it’s not a full-blown casino, but it’s a room full of slot machines, much like a casino, you know, dimly lit with the fun lights in it and all that, all that sort of thing. So I’m like, you know what?

I gambled when I was younger. This looks like it could be fun. It’s a great way to kill time. And still I can actually sleep because I’m not ready to sleep. So I took some money out of the ATM. You know, I went I sat down and I started to play. And the first thing I noticed as I started to play was that my shoulders started to relax a little bit.

So I’m like, okay, maybe I will be able to sleep now. But then I made and I always call this the biggest mistake a budding compulsive gambler can make. I want. Okay. And it was not it didn’t break the bank. I did not strip the Republic of Korea and the U.S. Army of all their money. Right. But I won enough war in that moment.

Just in that moment, all of the stress, all of the tension, all the fear, all the things that I had been experiencing up until that point were gone. They literally in that moment were gone. And it just felt good. Sure. You know, that moment felt good. Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that on that day in November in 2001, I became a compulsive gambler.

What I will say, though, is the seed was planted because, you know, I went through the rest of getting processed in and they got me all signed in and they got me a signed and I got picked up by my unit, which was all the way at the southern end, a peninsula about 4 hours away. I was in in a Pusan, which is at the southern end of Korea.

Okay. So they picked me up, they took me there, they got me settled into my house. I was a noncommissioned officer, so I was in a house with four other noncommissioned officers. I got settled into the base and it was probably a couple of days until I was walking around and I walked into the community club there, happened to walk to the back of the community club.

And lo and behold, here’s another one of these slop rooms, much smaller, you know, much less glitz to it, but it was still one of the slot rooms. I’m like, Oh, you know what? I had fun doing this up in in Seoul. Let me go ahead and try it again. Well, over the course of the next several months, that went from maybe going on a Friday to going on a Friday and Saturday to go on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, to now wanting to go Monday, Tuesday.

And within probably 2 to 3 months, I was going 6 to 7 days a week to this room because it was my little escape because I didn’t feel like going back to my room at night because I was there all alone. I really didn’t have anything to do. I was bored and oh, by the way, this seemed like it was fun and felt good.

Shane Cook: Well, sure, you’re getting the hits of that dopamine every time you go near misses that appear to continue to pull you in because you’re close to winning, right?

Dave Yeager: Correct. Yeah. And then and then what happened was this. It accelerated probably over the first couple of months, You know, it was okay, but then it started to accelerate. So now it started to accelerate to the point where I’m running out of money right? So at first, what I would do is I would I when I would talk to my first wife at home, I would tell her a reason I needed more money.

Well, we’re going on a trip this weekend, send some more money, which turned into, oh, I have one of my fellow soldiers who’s in trouble. Let me help them out until they can pay me back, which turned into God only knows what else. I gave her multiple, multiple different excuses to send me more money, which at first she did.

And then eventually she started to say, Wait a minute, this is this. Something’s not right here. I think you’ve covered everything you need to cover. I’m not sending you more money. Right. So when that happened, and I’m still having these desires, you know, as this is going on, I’m like, okay, well, now I can’t feed this need to go to this room anymore, except for what I have regularly.

So then I started to sell off the possessions I had with me. So I brought a bicycle over with me. I sold that I had some electronics, like a TV and a stereo and whatnot. So I sold those off. Right, Right. That of course, I went through very quickly because I didn’t have that much with me. I was only there for a year.

I brought enough to make sure I could get through, but it held me over for a tiny little bit. So then I started getting creative because by now the obsession was kicking in. By now, this need to go to this room. The desire to go to this room for fun is now becoming a need to go to this room because I don’t want to be without it.

So then it accelerates from selling my stuff and borrowing from home to now borrowing from my subordinates, which if you know anything about being a noncommissioned officer in the military, that’s a huge, huge no, no, you just don’t do it. And at first they were accommodating, you know? Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of you. And then eventually they’re like, Wait a minute, you make more than I do.

You’re a higher rank to me. You’re in charge of me, right? One of the things I was doing was I was I was impacting mission readiness because I was in charge of these people. I was in charge of their lives. I was in charge of their training. And here I am borrowing money from them like I’m the newest kid off the bus, you know.

So that went on for a little while. And then I did go back to my my ex-wife and, you know, was able to get her to increase amounts a couple of times. And but eventually I took probably the biggest mistake that I’ve ever made in the military. I stole from my own unit. And that’s where the trouble really began with the Army.

And that’s where the point where I knew something was going on beyond me because I felt like I couldn’t control it anymore. It was out of my control. Once that theft took place, an investigation started. As soon as the investigation started, I went right to them and I confessed what I had done because I felt horrible. You know, here I am living one life as this noncommissioned officer who is developing soldiers, who’s developing a training program, who’s making sure the mission gets accomplished while at the same time I’m degenerating into I don’t know what and I have no idea why it’s happening.

You know, it just it scared me, you know? So I did get pulled aside and I got immediately relieved of my position. Right. Got pulled up to Seoul to headquarters, because now I was getting close to my end of my time in Korea, got pulled up to Seoul and was just put up there and given the odds and ends duty until the until it was time for me to go.

But in the meantime, I was I was given my discipline there. Right. So my colonel, my commander pulls me in and he sits me down and he says, I got to be honest with you, I wish I didn’t have to do this because everything that you’ve done for this unit in a year, in your year here has been exemplary, with the exception of this character issue.

And that’s what he called it, the character issue. Right? So, you know, so they reduced me by one rank and they sent me on my way. Meanwhile, my first sergeant pulls me aside and has to do my noncommissioned officer evaluation for the year end. Well, I got just about the highest marks you can get in every category except character.

Right. Here’s the thing. Okay? Here’s here’s the thing that drives me to do what I do today. Not once during that entire experience did somebody use the word gambling with me. Not once. Yeah, right. Not once. Did somebody say you have a gambling problem. Let’s get you some help. Make sense.

Shane Cook: Yep.

Dave Yeager: So, you know, So my time in Korea ended with me losing rank, being sent home back to the States. Right. With really, in terms of my own addiction, Nothing to show for it except carrying the addiction back home to the States. So which did get quiet for a while because that reduction in ranks scared the crap out of me.

So sure, you know, it did quiet down for a while.

Shane Cook: Yeah. So there’s there’s a couple of things about this and I appreciate you walking the listener through your experience while you were in Korea. The first time I heard you tell this story was a year ago when we were in Boston for this same conference. Right? And I was sitting there and you kind of walk through your experience in Korea.

And my initial thought was, wait a minute, they have slot machines on overseas bases for enlisted military to go in and gamble while they’re on the base. And, you know, you have a lot of downtime, right in, you know, in in the service, you’ll have periods of just grueling activity. And then you have a period where you’ve got a lot of downtime.

It comes in cycles. So and I think you talked about that during that initial talk that I saw, but I’m still amazed that the slot machines are located in overseas bases. And this is really kind of given as an entertainment option without without with very little attention to, hey, this can cause some people can develop a gambling addiction just by playing these games.

And there’s not a whole lot that’s being done on the education side within the armed forces.

Dave Yeager: Yeah, and here’s the thing. Look, there there were one time I don’t know if there still are, but at one time there were over 3000 of these slot machines in overseas facilities. There are none in U.S.-based military facilities. Right. But an overseas facilities there are they’re hosted by morale, welfare and recreation. AMW are to be able to bring money in to provide other recreational opportunities to service members who are serving overseas.

Right. So from that perspective, I don’t necessarily have an issue with that because you’re because, as you know, 90 plus percent of us that are out there can gamble safely without an issue, just like many of us can drink without an issue. And there are bars on just about every military installation. Right. So from that perspective, no big deal.

Now, here’s the thing. These these 3000 machines have generated up to $100 million a year. Right. But not one penny of that had been turned around or has been turned around into education, screening or treatment of problem gambling. And and again, you’ve hit on a good point, because if you walk into that that slot room and there’s a sign on the wall that says these are the signs and symptoms of a gambling addiction.

Right. If you if you experience any of these, reach out to whatever the number is or whatever area you want to send these guys to for their particular unit. Right. Then at least maybe you’re not going to catch everybody. We know that already. But if you catch that one person who’s sitting in front of that slot machine for a couple of hours and all of a sudden things, you know, I just I am gambling with increasing frequency and I need to spend more money to get the same thrill out of it.

Right. Maybe this is something I need to think about. If you can plant that one tiny little seed to that one soldier, that one Marine, that one airman, you might help prevent that guy from getting to the level that I got to. And I’m not saying that if I walked into that room in Korea and saw that sign that I would have stopped gambling.

I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is it would have planted a seed and made me think about it. You know? So, you know, my one of the things that I try to speak for and one of the reasons I tell my story so often is to try to move in that direction, to try to give these soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines an opportunity to learn about the addiction before they hit the addiction, because many of them don’t even know it is an addiction.

So that’s a great point.

Shane Cook: Yeah, that’s been my experience, too, is there’s still a lot of people that are in the general population that don’t recognize gambling as a potential addiction. Right. Swipe at Gateway. We spend a lot of time out in our communities talking about problem gambling, talking about gambling addiction along with substance use, addictions, process addictions, things like that. But just to just to create that awareness.

And at least in Illinois, I think over the past couple of years as a statewide community of providers, we’ve done a pretty good job, I think, of elevating people’s knowledge about the warning signs when it comes to gambling addiction. So in this podcast, it’s just another avenue to reach a different audience that we might not otherwise reach.

You know, same with your podcast as well. So okay, so let’s turn back to the book a little bit and we’ll try to we’ll try to skip ahead to how you’re going through treatment. That’s kind of where we started our discussion today, but how you get through your second treatment phase that you would you had gone through. And here are the types of things that you’re doing today that keep you mindful about the continuing recovery.

Dave Yeager: Yeah, and let me say this. Leading up to that second time that my relapse state, if you will, that relapse didn’t happen overnight. That relapse happened over several years. Right. And the biggest contributor, the one single thing, if there’s one top thing that kind of characterized that relapse, it was dead lies. Right. It was the it was that need to hide the addiction and just tell lies to make sure that I could do what I wanted to do.

You know, I, I remarried in 2014 and I was already processing towards that relapse at that time. You know, and even from day one, even though I wasn’t doing it every day, I was lying to my wife. I lied to her about my finance, a you know, about credit that I had that it was out. I lied to her about, you know, where I was getting money from.

I lied to her about the money that I had. You know, I would tell her everything’s great. Meanwhile, I’m what I’m doing is I’m taking out one loan to pay off another loan to pay off another loan to pay off a credit card. And thinking the whole time with this gambler’s mentality, Oh, I’m going to find a way to fix it.

I’ll fix it all before she even knows what happened. And to me, if there’s someone out there that’s listening, that’s struggling with a potential gambling issue that is one of the biggest things to pay attention to. What lies am I telling to myself and other people? Right? Because if it’s going to reach a point eventually where that’s going to come out, whether you’re the one who says it or whether it’s the other person or people that say it, at some point those lies are going to come to the surface.

Right. For me, I just kept hiding it and hiding it and hiding it and hiding it. When I finally did tell her about it at the beginning, at 21, 2020 or 2020, Right. It was a blindside of epic proportions. Like she never, ever expected that this is what was going on with my life and with us. So when I got into this recovery, it was imperative of me to understand what was going on underneath of what I was doing, because if I couldn’t untangle what was going on beneath the surface and beneath the actions that I was taking, I was just I feel like I was dooming myself to repeating the cycle again.

Does that make sense? Yeah. So when I got into recovery this time, I made a commitment to myself that if I truly want to do this, if I want to stay in this marriage, if I want to have the relationship chips with my family that I have, if I want to have the relationship with myself that I want, right, then I better be willing to do the work to really start to dig in and uncover it and figure out what the heck is going on with me.

So that was my motto when I got into recovery. This time around, I sat down with my counselor the very first day that I got out to the VA treatment program and she said, What are your goals? I said, to unravel what’s beneath the addiction, because if I begin to unravel what’s underneath the addiction, then I believe I can start to better understand the addiction.

Dave Yeager: And I can I can take better control of myself within this addiction. You know.

Shane Cook: Essentially, you’ve got tools, right? You’ve got a better tool kit.

Dave Yeager: Coping mechanisms. You can’t cope if you don’t know how to cope. Right? So the first thing I had to do was learn how to cope, and then I had to be willing to apply those skills. So within this second recovery or what I call my kind of my major recovery at this point, you know, my life recovery, one of the things that I learned is, is that I have to be willing to get uncomfortable.

Right? If I’m not willing to get uncomfortable about things that are going on with me. And this goes way back to what we first talked about when I was a kid, right? If I’m not willing to get uncomfortable with what I’m feeling, I’m not going to deal with those feelings. And what I’m going to do is want to run from them again.

Right. And whatever manifests itself, it’s gambling is kind of my number one go to. But whatever manifests itself is going to be my grab on to to escape from that feeling. So rather than do that, what I try to do now is to admit that I’m uncomfortable. Right? So then I would I’ll say early on with my wife, I would say, okay, I’m uncomfortable saying this to you, but and I did that for myself because I knew I was uncomfortable, but I had to get comfortable with it.

And some of the stuff for many, many people that are out there listening, some of this stuff when I admitted to will sound kind of silly, like, how could you be uncomfortable with that? But I was I was sharing pieces of myself, was not comfortable.

Shane Cook: So yeah, yeah. And, you know, go back to the beginning, you were well-practiced at suppressing your feelings. Yeah. So, you know, you start talking about unraveling. You’re talking about unraveling 40, 35, 40 years of suppression. Right? Right. So that doesn’t happen overnight.

Dave Yeager: Right. And here’s the thing. I could tell my story before I relapsed, but I kind of told my story detached from my story. Right. So I could tell you the story all day long. But I didn’t I wouldn’t allow myself to feel it as I was saying it. Now, there are times when I tell my story where I genuinely feel what I’m saying, as I’m saying, and it’s very, very different because, you know, I don’t want to lie anymore.

You know, I don’t want to be a liar. I want to tell my truth. Because you know what? And we’ve said this before. You’ve heard this in recovery before. It’s easier to tell the truth because you don’t have to remember what you said. Right. That is so much easier of a way to live life. Plus, you know, when I talk to my wife, who is my biggest supporter, thank God, because I could have come home and found all my stuff on the front porch and still could someday.

Dave Yeager: I don’t know. But thankfully, as of today, that’s not happening because I find it incumbent to say to her when something’s going on to tell her what’s happening, you know, to tell her about how I’m feeling. And she’ll sometimes have to pry it out of me because my ego wants to hold it in still. But she doesn’t have to prompt me as hard as at one time she may have or even I don’t hide it from her.

I don’t lie about it. I don’t manipulate it. Right. I might say, All right, yeah, I am feeling this way or yes, I did do that or whatever it happens to be because it just feels so much easier to feels lighter after I do it. That’s what the second education process was about for me. The second recovery process was about and then the other part of that was getting connected to recovery and staying connected to recovery, right?

It is so important for me to talk to other people that go through this addiction because it’s the way that I stay anchored to. How do I get healthier? Well, I get healthier by remembering that I’m not going through this alone. I can remember a time in my addiction where I just sat there and thought nobody could ever possibly understand what’s going on in my head.

I remember that. But now I know better. Now I know it’s not true. And every now and again, you know, for me weekly, because I go to a G.A. meeting weekly, it’s great for me to check in and just hear that I’m not alone. You know, That’s great for me. That’s a that’s a healing moment.

Shane Cook: Yeah, That’s probably the number one thing I hear from people in recovery. Once they had an opportunity to participate with a group, to just have that realization that the experiences they’ve had are very similar to the experiences that I’ve had. Right. And I think that’s, that’s empowering on a lot of levels and really helpful on another level, right?

Because suddenly you’re you’re like, Oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one that felt that way. Yes. To find out that you’re not is comforting in one sense, but it’s also liberating on a whole another level at a time when you most need it right?

Dave Yeager: Right. Well, now, here’s I do want to add to that, though, because I think what you just said is very important for people to hear. You get a connection to somebody who gets at a time when you need it the most. Right? Yeah. But there’s another step to that. There’s another level to that that actually got me into trouble, my first time in recovery.

Now that you’ve experienced that sense of somebody gets it and that sense of connection, right now comes the important work of sticking with it. So week after week after week after week, you’re going to these AA meetings and yeah, you’re reading through a book and you’re doing all these different things and sometimes it might feel a little bit, let’s be honest, sometimes it might feel a little boring.

Dave Yeager: Okay, But the thing about it is some people can think, okay, I think I got this. I think I’m okay. I don’t need to go to next week’s meeting or, you know, I’m feeling really healthy right now. I’m going to go ahead and skip one week and just feel good about myself and then the next week comes up and I’m like, You know what?

I felt good last week. Let me go ahead and skip this one, too. And what happens is very, very gradual. As you do that, you might still feel healthy, you might still feel strong, but very slowly and very surely that addiction is starting to tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, I’m here, I’m here. You know, as you start to degrade back to where you were, I’m going to be ready for you when you need me.

I’ll be here for you. Right. So maintaining that connection is even more important than making that connection. Yeah, because my first time in recovery, that’s exactly what I did. I thought I got this. I feel good. I’m not gambling anymore. I don’t want to gamble. I’m cured. Right? Right. I won’t. And there are other people who will argue with me on this as far as I’m concerned.

For me personally, I will never be cured. Right? This is a lifelong disease that I need to take my medicine for, you know, on a regular basis. Now, for me, that’s my weekly meetings that’s doing this kind of work that I’m doing right now. For a while, I worked in a in a addiction treatment center and worked with gamblers in a treatment center, whatever it takes to keep me connected to this, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.

Shane Cook: Yeah, well, I Dave, I really appreciate you sharing your story. I loved reading through the book. It was very personal. I know it’s a very personal book because you get into you get into a lot of detail in there that that I know I can imagine it probably wasn’t easy at times to put that down on paper. So I really appreciate I applaud the courage that it took to to put this down on paper and to to release it and share it with others.

But I think it’s very important message, as I know you do, too, because you do this work every day and you’re you’re greatly reader and thought leader in this area of gambling addiction and gambling recovery. So I really enjoyed the opportunity meet you and I just want to take a moment to say that and thank you again for sharing this book.

And I want to make sure others have the opportunity to access this book. So is there some particular way that people should be on the lookout for how to acquire a copy of Fall In.

Dave Yeager: If you’re interested? First of all, if you’re interested in the book, fall in a veteran with a gambling addiction, you can email me directly at fall in podcast at gmail.com. Let me know your email. Let me know if you’re interested in knowing when the book comes out, and I will personally email you back when it’s out. But I will also tell you is, look, you know, probably within the next two months, start looking on Barnesandnoble.com or on Amazon.com.

Those are the two primary outlets where you’re going to see the book available. And it’s simply titled Fall in a Veteran with a Gambling Addiction. That’s the easiest way to find it by day, by date.

Shane Cook: Yegor Yeah, perfect. Well, we’ll make sure to include that in the show notes and we’ll keep an eye out the for the drop and make sure that we’re we have the links in there for a copy of the book as well.

Dave Yeager: I appreciate that. Thank you so much for doing that.

Shane Cook: So and before we step away and step out of the studio, I did want to mention that what I found delightful about this book is at the end, I think as a reader, you walk away with the sense of hope, Right? And I know that you were you were very explicit about that up front when you when you did the foreword to the book is making sure that you walk away with a a sense of hopefulness after reading the story.

And I think it really comes through, or at least it did for me, and I’m sure it will for others. So I wanted to mention that because I think it’s important. Any time we’re talking about an addiction, there’s got to be a message of hope at the end. It’s not it’s not a lifelong process of drudgery. There really is better days ahead and I think you did a great job of capturing that in this book.

Dave Yeager: Thank you for that. I appreciate. And the very first words of the book and the very last words of the book or that are this is a story of hope. And that’s what I meant it to be. You know, there’s so many of us out there that don’t feel like there’s hope. There is hope. There is hope. You just have to be willing to step into it and understand you’re not alone.

Shane Cook: Right. Last thing before we go here, anything that you wanted to cover that we haven’t covered?

Dave Yeager: I don’t think so. I think we got through it pretty well. We did an overview of the book. The only thing I would say is my biggest mission in life and doing what I do right now is covers exactly what you just talked about to make sure that people out there understand that they are not alone. So if you are somebody out there and I speak to veterans and military service members, but to anybody, if you’re out there listening to this and you’re someone who is struggling with not knowing where to go, with not knowing what to do, and with kind of feeling like there’s you know, there’s no direction for you, reach out to somebody, call, you know, I’m sure that Shane will make, you know, available places that you can go to find help. You know, he does it every single day. So, you know, go find that help. Go talk to somebody. Go say, you don’t have to go through this alone. I say this at every podcast episode that I do myself.

And I just felt that it was important to share it on yours as well. And I appreciate the opportunity.

Shane Cook: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Dave, good seeing you and catching up here over the last couple of days and in D.C., I look forward to our paths crossing again in the future.

Dave Yeager: And I’m sure they will.

Shane Cook: Godspeed to you, brother.

Dave Yeager: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Shane Cook: All right. We love hearing from you so please take a moment to like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly via email at Wager Danger at Gateway Foundation dot org. Look for us on Facebook and Twitter at Recovery Gateway on LinkedIn, at Gateway Dash Foundation or through our Web site at Gateway Foundation.

Wager Danger is supported through funding in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance to Use Prevention and recovery. And remember, recovery is a lifelong process. If you are a family member struggling with a gambling problem, call Gateway at 8449753663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment.

Chris Ward, outreach coordinator at The Way Back Inn, discusses a youth and young adult-oriented curriculum called Stacked Deck. Younger generations are growing up with simulated gambling embedded in video games. The Stacked Deck educational offering is intended to identify the potential harms present in video gaming products and how youth and adolescents can begin to recognize when they are being manipulated into gambling simulation.

The Way Back Inn

Gateway Foundation Gambling Treatment

Call Gateway Foundation: 855-723-0963

Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER

wagerdanger@gatewayfoundation.org

Transcript:

WAGER DANGER EPISODE 18: CHRIS WARD – APPS AND ADOLESCENTS

00;00;03;27 – 00;00;29;01

Speaker 1: Hey, it’s Shane Cook and welcome to another episode of Wager Danger. Today we have a returning guest, Chris Ward, the outreach coordinator from the way back inn. Chris has been working in the gambling addiction space for several years now. Most recently, he’s taken a deep dive into gaming, a gambling addiction among youth and young adults through a targeted learning program called Stacked Deck.

00;00;29;03 – 00;00;54;14

Speaker 1: This program educates junior high and high school students about the dangers of gaming, gambling and what to be aware of while they play. Our conversation covers a lot of ground. We discuss how games are designed to disguise the gambling aspects and how adolescents are manipulated by in-game advertisements, sometimes to the extent that they don’t even realize they’re gambling.

00;00;54;17 – 00;01;20;00

Speaker 1: Chris shares some excellent insights on how to teach kids about these tactics and emphasizes the importance of financial literacy. This is an important topic for anyone who’s paying for in-game purchases like skin O’s or loot boxes, but doesn’t understand the risks entailed with this seemingly harmless activity. Welcome back to the show, Chris.

00;01;20;02 – 00;01;22;25

Speaker 2: Hey thanks. it’s good to be back Shane. Nice to see you.

00;01;22;28 – 00;01;43;19

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah. Good to be back. Boy, it seems like that was quite a while ago. For those of you who have not had the opportunity to listen to our very first episode. Chris and I co-hosted that episode and we had a panel of guests on and quite similar in terms of the overall topic that we were talking about.

00;01;43;19 – 00;02;23;05

Speaker 1: Then as we were focused on the adolescent and youth demographic as it pertains to problem gambling. So we’re going to dive a little bit deeper today. And Chris, I know you had the opportunity to recently participate in an offering that discussed this demographic in particular and talked about ways to reach out to young students that might be in middle school or high school, even into early years of college, and really talk about some of the unique aspects of at least reaching that audience and having this discussion about problem gambling, what all that entails.

00;02;23;05 – 00;02;29;22

Speaker 1: So if you wouldn’t mind, could you just kind of give us an overview of what that was all about?

00;02;29;25 – 00;02;57;12

Speaker 2: Yeah. So we actually, through the Illinois Council of Problem Gambling all had the opportunity. They sent it out to everyone in the state, all the different providers, different education institutions, different cohorts of therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists to take part in what they called the stack that training. So the stack deck training was a way to kind of involve all the providers in the possibility of utilizing what they call the stack deck curriculum into different school systems in the area.

00;02;57;14 – 00;03;26;10

Speaker 2: So the training itself was one facilitator from North Carolina, and she walked us through how exactly we would take the stack the curriculum and implement it into the different school systems. So as you said, it could go anywhere from middle school to high school to young adults kind of entering that college age, because as we know with the statistics from the gambling needs assessments of Illinois, people around 13 to 14 up until age 24 are extremely susceptible to gambling, and that can lead to problem gambling.

00;03;26;12 – 00;03;48;21

Speaker 2: So after she kind of walked through how we would implement the stack deck training, we actually went through the stack deck training ourselves as though we were the students receiving it. So the stack deck curriculum itself is a 5 to 6 session actual educational curriculum that you would take and try to get into health classes and different health care systems in the schools.

00;03;48;23 – 00;04;12;06

Speaker 1: Okay. So the idea then is they’re training up a group of mental health care professionals in the Illinois area, and that those people who are participated in this training will then go out and make contact with schools, try to get the curriculum in there, and perhaps even go in and lead the course, the course within those school programs.

00;04;12;08 – 00;04;36;09

Speaker 1: Very interesting. I know at Gateway we had somebody who participated in that as well. So we’re looking forward to the opportunity to do that as well as I’m sure you have some targets in mind to go approach about this program as well. I think the more people we have out doing activities like this, the better we are. The more educated people become.

00;04;36;12 – 00;04;51;24

Speaker 1: What was interesting is I was looking through some of the materials that you shared with us from that training. Was there a particular age in that in that adolescent category or young adult category that was of particular concern?

00;04;51;27 – 00;05;19;11

Speaker 2: I think it’s kind of like a almost a double edged question because you want to start any sort of prevention education as early as possible because you would rather prevent something than react to something later. So the entire crux of the program is to reach the youth at a young age and young adults to really kind of seep education into exactly what is gambling, what is gaming, how does gaming tie to gambling, and how do I know that signs are leading to problem gambling?

00;05;19;13 – 00;05;55;03

Speaker 2: So from that, gambling needs assessment, I just mentioned that cohort of 18 to 24 was found to have the most lifetime prevalence of online or virtual gambling. So while the 18 to 24 would be a cohort I really focus on, that’s kind of what it’s leading into when it could actually become potentially more of a problem with gambling versus when you start to do the prevention education early, you probably want to target around 13 to 14 when people are really starting to play all of these different games and they’re starting to get involved in these different games in their schools and in their friend groups and just sort of that susceptibility that they might have

00;05;55;03 – 00;06;14;21

Speaker 2: and the propensity to actually gamble when they may not know what gambling is. Because part of the program dives into the history of gambling way back into eons when it used to be cavemen gambling and really what it means to wager or to bet on something and to really balance out the odds of wagering something to get a specific outcome.

00;06;14;23 – 00;06;35;22

Speaker 2: So I really feel like you’d want to focus really early, early teens to really get that gambling education out there, especially with all the new forms of gambling and and legal gambling and gaming and sort of the inner cross nationality and then continue it on through college. They do mention, though, that some of the sessions might be better geared toward certain age groups.

00;06;35;22 – 00;06;56;06

Speaker 2: So I know that they said the entirety of the program is super effective with grades 9 to 12, so that’s around the ages of 14 to 19. Right. But they did say that it’s flexible. They said it works best and most effective when you do all five sessions with the six follow up session. But they did say lessons 1 to 4 and five, which you could share.

00;06;56;06 – 00;07;17;03

Speaker 2: Maybe when you share the podcast, people can kind of see what the topics are, but they’re really appropriate for grades seven and eight while lessons one, two and three, which is kind of the history and a little more deep delving into the actual brain and the different circuitry that goes on with neurotransmitters and all that obviously is going to be more geared toward a university level when they’re actually is probably around like 18 to 22.

00;07;17;04 – 00;07;41;07

Speaker 1: Okay. That makes sense. What what the things that you mentioned early on is how aware this age age group is 13 to 24, how aware they are of gambling and their experience with gaming and gambling. How much of that was a part of this discussion? I got I imagine it was. Yeah, it was a key component.

00;07;41;09 – 00;08;14;15

Speaker 2: It was a key component. And I think that even us as therapists and as, you know, gambling, recovery treatment providers of varying levels of care and even just people who are doing therapy, who don’t actually focus on gambling or don’t have like a PC certification, they were seeing that they didn’t even necessarily realize how much gaming and gambling are intertwined and how much you would never know that because if you’re not high about gambling or gaming, you’re not taught about what really constitutes as gambling.

00;08;14;15 – 00;08;15;25

Speaker 2: How would they know?

00;08;15;28 – 00;08;17;03

Speaker 1: Right.

00;08;17;05 – 00;08;39;02

Speaker 2: A big thing about this, too, and I feel like I should have said this at the beginning, this is actually the first world wide gambling program to actually be evidence based as a prevention program. And they actually found with empirical evidence that it deters negative behaviors surrounding gambling and in turn also gives people away from problem gambling. Okay.

00;08;39;03 – 00;08;44;15

Speaker 2: So it’s an actual evidence based prevention curriculum. And there really aren’t any out there for gambling.

00;08;44;17 – 00;08;55;01

Speaker 1: So when you say help, help us understand what you mean by evidence based and why that’s so important to to make that distinction here.

00;08;55;04 – 00;09;19;25

Speaker 2: Evidence based, I guess, as an umbrella term really just means that they have studies and they’ve done studies with these different age groups and as an educational curriculum, and they actually have results that show and prove that this program actually works to deter different behaviors, which decreases gambling, and then also in turn decreases that problematic gambling. So they have different studies that they’ve done.

00;09;19;25 – 00;09;40;20

Speaker 2: And I believe in the curriculum. They actually show you the different doctors that have worked on this. Okay. There’s two doctors that are the main doctors that have done some studies. That’s Dr. Williams and Dr. Wood. But there was a huge cohort of different doctors that did studies on it. I don’t have an interest of the research that they did, but it’s evidence based and that it actually is real and actually works.

00;09;40;20 – 00;09;47;01

Speaker 2: You’re not just educating about gambling, but you’re educating based on facts and knowing actually.

00;09;47;07 – 00;09;49;13

Speaker 1: Real world results, right?

00;09;49;16 – 00;09;59;21

Speaker 2: So often that turn you’re right. We kind of throw it around evidence based modalities. We have evidence based practices. What does that really mean? It really means that people studied it and have proven that it works.

00;09;59;23 – 00;10;26;05

Speaker 1: Yeah. And somewhere somewhere along that timeline, there was an epidemiologist who was involved who was studying all that. And that’s a term we learned in a previous show that we did with Dr. Nathan Smith from the Cambridge Institute. Really good information in that surrounding our veterans, veterans community in particular. But same kind of concept, right? It’s based on evidence.

00;10;26;05 – 00;10;32;14

Speaker 1: And that evidence has been shown to yield x results. And that’s been it’s also.

00;10;32;14 – 00;11;03;15

Speaker 2: One of the best selling points, I would say, to get into schools throughout to saying, hey, this is a problem. We really think there should be involved in health curriculum, but we actually have proof that this works and here’s how and who gave and show them the studies, because people very often would never include something like prevention of gambling in their health curriculum, because I think we’re so behind on public awareness of knowing that gambling could be an issue and how it actually can affect youth because their brains are still developing that schools will be hesitant because they don’t quite know what the issue really is.

00;11;03;15 – 00;11;14;18

Speaker 2: I think we all know about phones and social media and technology, but tying that gambling and gaming to a technology involving in an actual school curriculum I think has some advocacy work to be done.

00;11;14;25 – 00;11;49;02

Speaker 1: Sure. Well, and and the thing with this age group, there are so many things that this age group deals with consistently, whether that’s anxiety, depression, you could probably name the list that this this cat, this age category adolescent to young adult is typically dealing with. And on top of that, we’re we’re throwing in gaming and gambling which can in some in some ways exacerbate all of those situations.

00;11;49;04 – 00;12;09;08

Speaker 1: And people don’t recognize that. So there’s an education effort that needs to be done, I think within middle schools, high schools and to some extent even in college, that this is a vulnerable population that we need to take notice of.

00;12;09;10 – 00;12;43;25

Speaker 2: Yeah, I actually completely agree, especially when it comes to this population, because add on top of you mentioned exacerbation, I know we love to use that word when it comes to COVID as well, but it really is true that any sort of anxiety, isolation and social issues, issues within the family only got worse during the pandemic. So if you don’t really understand what gaming is, what gambling is, and how susceptible you are and how much you really don’t know about it, it goes from a life escape mechanism to kind of alleviate that anxiety or stress caused by all of those issues in a way too unhealthy escapism where someone could actually be developing a problem

00;12;43;25 – 00;12;45;24

Speaker 2: with gambling, even though they’re only 15.

00;12;45;26 – 00;13;31;28

Speaker 1: Right. Okay. So let’s talk about that a little bit. Gaming and gambling. Give us some insight into what are the similarities and what are the differences when we talk about gaming. I know gaming can be used as a broad term to describe the casino industry and gambling in general. I think in general I think you hear that term a lot from the providers and when I say providers, I’m talking about the people that provide the games or the contests or the gambling outlets themselves tend to use that term gaming as opposed to gambling.

00;13;32;00 – 00;13;58;15

Speaker 1: Are we talking about the energy? Are they interchangeable in that way? Or when when we try to make that distinction, are we talking about, you know, video gaming on one hand for this particular audience? Are we talking about video gaming and how that can evolve or contain components of gambling? Just kind of help straighten us out on that.

00;13;58;17 – 00;14;19;00

Speaker 2: Yeah. So that that’s pretty loaded because there’s so much to that. I think you really hit the nail on the head that different advertisers and those different stakeholders in the gambling arena are, while within our world and even within our own state, has tried to move away from the term gambling because everyone’s starting to realize that the word gambling has negative connotations to it.

00;14;19;02 – 00;14;19;15

Speaker 1: Sure.

00;14;19;22 – 00;14;49;16

Speaker 2: But if you start to see gaming and all of these different mediums all of a sudden become gaming, which they kind of really are, then you’re almost saving yourself from negative press. And also people realizing that what they’re doing actually really is considered gambling. So you can define gambling in a lot of different ways, but really what it is, is you’re putting something of material value, whether that’s money or status or giving something that you own or have trained to win something in return.

00;14;49;16 – 00;15;08;13

Speaker 2: You’re trying to get something back. When you put something in. And the Deck deck program actually does a really good job at showing people that really you’re gambling in a lot of ways in life and in general, even if it’s not you playing a game or going to a casino or playing roulette or playing cards. But really, every time you leave your house, you’re taking a gamble on your life.

00;15;08;13 – 00;15;29;00

Speaker 2: You’re deciding, I want to go to work. My material value is me trying to go get money. So I’m actually putting something at risk, trying to get a certain reward in the end. So when you talk about gambling, it really is so fast that when it jumps and seeps into all of these different mediums and games and the virtual reality and everything that we’re kind of living in, it actually touches upon every aspect that you mentioned.

00;15;29;00 – 00;15;50;27

Speaker 2: So we do have video gaming, which has a lot of gambling components interlaced throughout it. Okay. And then we also have everything. So the actual casinos, I think for a youth and this cohort, a lot of the legal gambling that they would be doing in the state of Illinois, they’re not able to do yet. But that’s where the danger comes in because it’s so easily accessible on your phone in a variety of ways.

00;15;50;29 – 00;16;10;04

Speaker 2: So the different advertisements that people click on, there’s a lot of different gaming advertisers that show up when you’re loading a screen, watching the YouTube video or listening to a podcast, an advertisement will pop up and it’s talking about all these different games. So youth, without knowing are just clicking on these things and not really realizing that it actually constitutes as gambling.

00;16;10;06 – 00;16;10;27

Speaker 1: Okay.

00;16;11;00 – 00;16;35;23

Speaker 2: And within their video games, I would say there are so many different avenues that they can gamble that they’re not really seeing it as gambling. I know they’ll be able to go in depth at length about this, but when they mentioned loot boxes, you’re actually paying real money in your life or your parents money tied to an account on your phone and then you’re buying something in the game because you want to see if you’re going to get the good items and then you can even sell it to other people and then get real money back.

00;16;35;25 – 00;16;37;17

Speaker 2: And in real life.

00;16;37;19 – 00;17;28;04

Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ve talked about that quite a bit from here and there. And I still don’t think people really understand the concept of that, or at least a certain age demographic. And I put myself in that age demographic that doesn’t quite understand it. I understand how it works. But in terms of getting to that youth and adolescent and young adult population and putting it in the context of this curriculum, what is the approach to really kind of drive home that message that when you’re playing these games and you’re you’re paying for these loot boxes or skins or whatever they might be, that that’s actually a form of gambling, because for us, we know it fits the

00;17;28;04 – 00;17;49;19

Speaker 1: definition, right? You’re you’re putting up something of value with the hopes that you are going to get something of even greater value in return. But yeah, in terms of having that discussion with this age group, how do you get the light to click on that?

00;17;49;22 – 00;18;20;25

Speaker 2: That’s a great question. And I think one of the most important parts of this, a curriculum actually, is because you want to use a multimedia approach that speaks to the cohort that you’re actually administering this lesson to are facilitating these lessons because in 5 to 6 lessons, about 45 minutes each, you really want to make sure that you’re engaging and engaging in the proper manner to actually relay the information correctly and actually plan some seeds so that people can start to take this with them as they get older and as they start to play these games and do these different meanings of gambling.

00;18;20;25 – 00;18;43;20

Speaker 2: So we talked about 18 to 24. Once they’re done doing all the games on their phone and some people still do video games up until in their thirties, forties, fifties. But a lot of the majority when you’re in college, let’s say between that 18 to 20 2 to 24 hour mark, you start to do social gambling. So there’s even more at stake, if you will, because they’re actually potentially losing or gaining friendships while they’re doing all of this stuff.

00;18;43;22 – 00;19;09;09

Speaker 2: But the best way to engage, I would say, is to speak with the schools that you’re actually going to talk to and see what they’ve seen within the schools and what have parents have talked about with their children and in the schools to see if there’s somewhere where you can meet the students, where they are? The worst thing you’d want to do is just to go in and just start teaching something that may not actually be pertinent or meaningful to those students or to that community.

00;19;09;11 – 00;19;23;15

Speaker 2: But a great way to do that, I would say, is to ask the parents, ask the schools, and even ask the youth that you’re talking to in the young adults. What are you guys playing? Can someone actually explain the game that you’re playing? And have you had a blue box or what sort of other medium of gambling have you seen within that game?

00;19;23;15 – 00;19;40;08

Speaker 2: So kind of ask them if they can kind of go back and go into that game mode and think about what could have constituted us gambling, because some of them may not be playing the games that all of these studies were based on at first. Maybe loot boxes aren’t as popular anymore, but what is something similar to a loot box?

00;19;40;08 – 00;19;47;20

Speaker 2: Or what do you buy on the outside that you’re still getting on the inside that you’re kind of wagering on and hoping for a really good outcome?

00;19;47;23 – 00;20;16;10

Speaker 1: Okay, so let’s talk about Candy Crush. Does that kind of fit that profile as well? And I know that’s geared more towards adults, but my understanding is that’s there’s some gamification that is incorporated with that particular game, if you want to call it. And I’ve seen people talk about it and there they would readily admit that they’re addicted to Candy Crush.

00;20;16;12 – 00;20;36;25

Speaker 1: So but I’ve never played it, so I don’t know how it works. And maybe that was discussed during this time period as well. I’m sure some kids are. It’s appealing to kids probably. Yeah, I would guess younger kids might start with something like that on a mobile device. Well, take.

00;20;36;25 – 00;21;06;02

Speaker 2: The game model and make a younger version that’s more appealing to youth. Okay. The kind of theme, concept and idea that I may be going out on a limb here, but I could actually see almost any game where there’s any amount of chance involved or skill involved, where if you do a better job, you get more points or you get more money, that almost automatically every game, if they’re one of those two things, has gambling in it or has been, you know, gamified so that there is some sort of outcome that you’re trying to achieve.

00;21;06;02 – 00;21;29;04

Speaker 2: Do you want the highest score? You want to do better than you did yesterday? And then you tie into all these other things like the social isolation and the anxiety and the stress. Are you using this game that you’re like your people said that they’re basically they’re addicted to? Are you using it as an escapism tactic? Okay. Are you actually facing all these issues in your life or is this a way for you to kind of look at something else and clock out for a while and disassociate from your reality?

00;21;29;06 – 00;21;52;13

Speaker 2: Right. So I could see it in the chance aspect, in this skill aspect, if there’s any sort of monetary value A tied to doing the better job at the game, automatically Gambling for Candy Crush. I actually don’t know specifically. I haven’t played it myself, but I know that imagine a slot machine and the lights in a casino and everything and the sounds and all the fun right here in your hand in a phone.

00;21;52;16 – 00;22;07;28

Speaker 2: Even if it’s not a casino type gaming actually don’t have like, you know, a seven, seven, seven or cherry Jerry Cherry. But you’re getting all of that stimulation for your brain. I could easily see how that would tie to gambling because your brain doesn’t really know what’s going on on the outside and it all lights up the same areas and gives you that dopamine rush.

00;22;07;28 – 00;22;16;20

Speaker 2: And I did better than I did yesterday. I got a higher score than my friend. I’m using it to not feel so bad about myself. You start getting all of these rushes with it.

00;22;16;23 – 00;23;00;03

Speaker 1: Yeah, there are a lot of opportunities that are out there targeted to various age groups. In terms of your online games that can be played, that could really be a Segway or a gateway into playing this game and potentially experience some harm down the road. How savvy and I think I know the answer to this question how savvy are the people that are developing these games to understand what’s going to appeal to each of their intended demographic audiences, or if I if I start to break it down by demographics.

00;23;00;06 – 00;23;19;10

Speaker 1: Ah, I suspect that this age category that we’re talking about today is one of the holy grails for developers of games and and that gambling concepts come along with that to target. Am I am I correct in that assumption?

00;23;19;13 – 00;23;24;10

Speaker 2: You are and also youth are the target for anything I would say for.

00;23;24;12 – 00;23;26;18

Speaker 1: Marriage and always have been right.

00;23;26;20 – 00;23;56;29

Speaker 2: And will because they’re the future of people who are going to be spending money on it and they also have the ability to indulge in it at a later time in life. I think they’re really highly susceptible. I think that the people who work on these games and on different gambling mediums and have tied it all to be in your phone like during the COVID pandemic that we mentioned earlier and exacerbation of all these issues, sports betting came a thing and it kind of weaseled its way into Illinois as being a legal thing for a while, kind of dipping around the laws because it was virtual.

00;23;57;01 – 00;24;03;01

Speaker 2: But there really was not an immediate way to track how old people were that were actually waging on these sports.

00;24;03;01 – 00;24;03;24

Speaker 1: Right.

00;24;03;26 – 00;24;27;08

Speaker 2: So youth were easily targeted when it comes to like the science of advertising. And you mentioned demographics. Think about when you Google something as an adult or as youth or just go anywhere online and try to get any information, all of a sudden you start seeing ads popping up on all of your different mediums. If it’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, any of those different social media websites, you see what you searched there.

00;24;27;15 – 00;24;51;21

Speaker 2: If they’re able to target you like that and they’re able to target you by demographic and what you’re doing and what you’re thinking about and what you’re typing in and what sort of activity you’re using on your phone. They have all of the information that they need for anyone, for anything. And I would say that they do utilize that to really do smart, targeted, tactful messaging for these youth, to really draw them in and make it look fun.

00;24;51;23 – 00;25;19;26

Speaker 2: We live in such an immediate society and youth are just overwhelmed, I would say, with their phones and all of these different apps and just the expediency of everything you scroll through Tick tock and there’s videos that are 2 seconds long and you’re just in this really long thread and they had advertisements and games on the side. So they’re just inundated with so much all at once that there’s no way that the people who are creating this haven’t found even the just the most may new details to use to try to target you.

00;25;19;28 – 00;25;49;28

Speaker 1: Right so they understand what’s going to get somebody to click and yeah where where somebody who who might be at a later stage in life has been through been around the block a few times understands that hey, this is advertising and it’s probably a better offer than I’m going to get in return. As is often the case when you’re when you’re targeting at youth, they really don’t have the experience to understand that.

00;25;49;28 – 00;25;57;24

Speaker 1: That’s a marketing technique to get somebody to click and therefore they’re more susceptible, right?

00;25;57;27 – 00;25;59;04

Speaker 2: Yeah.

00;25;59;06 – 00;26;33;19

Speaker 1: All right. So let’s talk about social or social emotional learning. I know that is that is a concept that as I was looking through the the materials was a fairly new term for me to see in print at least. I’m sure I’ve heard it along the way. But based on what I saw, my understanding is that this is a method for which to have this discussion with this age group.

00;26;33;21 – 00;26;50;15

Speaker 1: Can you can you share a little bit more on that particular area that may have been discussed during that during this training and how it helps prepare this adolescent and young adult population to receive the message?

00;26;50;18 – 00;27;27;28

Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. Youth, as you mentioned earlier during that age, are going through so much. There’s hormonal changes, there’s physical changes, there’s friendship changes. You’re trying to kind of really sort through who you are and who you want to be. And a lot of that fits within the context of your social emotional well-being. What they show with the research for this curriculum was actually that any sort of social environment ships that are going on, especially when we’re kind of getting into more of a 100% virtual online gambling social gaming world that tied to that shift.

00;27;27;28 – 00;27;50;10

Speaker 2: You really also want to have prevention programing, but the the research shows that that prevention program actually does better when there are social environment shifts. So with this curriculum, they said it’s good to try to go into individual classrooms and do it to as many students as you can. So if you’re actually facilitating the program to a class of 12 to 20 students, that’s fantastic.

00;27;50;12 – 00;28;13;18

Speaker 2: But they found that it’s actually better to target the entire peer group and that the overall effectiveness of the program would actually be better when the entire age group gets that lesson. So instead of doing one class, you’d actually want to do the entire ninth grade level, for example, Or instead of going just to one senior class, you would want to try to talk to all the seniors at once.

00;28;13;18 – 00;28;18;12

Speaker 2: Because when everyone learns about it at once, the overall impact is higher.

00;28;18;14 – 00;28;21;02

Speaker 1: Okay. And I found that sense. Yeah.

00;28;21;04 – 00;28;42;19

Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes sense. But I also found it interesting because you’d think, oh boy, if you’re doing, you know, 20 students at once, maybe they get more direct contacts, they have more time to answer questions. But when you’re doing it as a full shift so that everyone is aware that this prevention programing in education is happening, the better it does and the more that they will all be able to talk about it and share what they’ve learned and start to implement it into their social emotional environments.

00;28;42;19 – 00;29;02;19

Speaker 2: So their friend groups, they can go back home and talk to their family about it. They can talk to their teachers about it or any other peers in any sort of group that they have. If it’s sports, if it’s their online video gaming community that they’ve made, the social emotional aspect is vital to facilitate the program and also for students when those environmental shifts are happening in their social circle.

00;29;02;21 – 00;29;27;23

Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it’s very interesting to me because that makes total sense. And I appreciate you explaining that and what the purpose was there, because I remember when I when I was that age, having some knowledge and being, you know, I’m in a rich rush, write out and talk to everybody about this great thing that I learned. It doesn’t always work that way at that age group, that there’s a lot of peer pressure.

00;29;27;23 – 00;29;54;19

Speaker 1: There’s a lot of social jockeying that’s going on at that age age level. So depending on your peers and your peers, willingness to accept a message, if they haven’t heard it before, that could take any discussion very quickly. So it makes a lot of sense that you would you would want to hit broadly and then let the let the conversation happen organically from there.

00;29;54;21 – 00;30;11;17

Speaker 2: Yeah, because it even touches upon even deeply socioeconomic status for a lot of people, especially when money is involved. Let’s say there’s a video gaming community and everyone else has, you know, affluent, well-to-do parents are able to give them a bunch of money on the outside to buy stuff inside the game. Their character is going to be leveled up real quick.

00;30;11;19 – 00;30;25;27

Speaker 2: Right. But then you have people who aren’t so affluent or come from a background where they really don’t get that much money. So now all of a sudden you’re doing less well in a game, but somehow in real life that makes you almost less of a person or you’re less cool to your friend group, or they look at you a different way because you’re not at the same level.

00;30;25;27 – 00;30;36;16

Speaker 2: So even though this whole virtual reality exists in this video game, it starts to seep into your actual social emotional environment. So the more students that you touch, the more they’re able to really talk about that.

00;30;36;16 – 00;31;07;10

Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s pretty heavy to talk about the impact of of the socio economic impact of of gaming and participating in these games and now how that has a potential bleed over. It’s just it’s one more avenue that like we have already discussed here, one more thing that this age group has to deal with and it’s and in most cases haven’t quite mastered the emotional intelligence to deal with it right now.

00;31;07;16 – 00;31;30;25

Speaker 2: And they really, in a lot of ways, they can start to garner that change in their emotional intelligence and kind of foster healthy boundaries. But it’s really something that’s difficult to learn when you’re younger. Your decision making frontal lobe, that’s part it’s not fully developed yet. That’s more around 25. So it is interesting that 18 to 24, right before you’re 25, have the highest level of lifetime online gaming than any other population in Illinois.

00;31;30;28 – 00;31;53;16

Speaker 2: But before you’re able to learn all of that, that’s why doing curriculums like this is key and it’s vital to actually get this implemented everywhere so that people are starting to learn about this as they’re getting older without knowing that they’re going to be involved. And so everything’s actually tied this to when we have started the gambling awareness campaign throughout the state and we started doing what are called activation events.

00;31;53;16 – 00;32;10;06

Speaker 2: I think you did one or two activations events for Gateway where you actually went to the college basketball game, right? So we started the table there and I saw it, especially Northwestern, which is a very affluent school. A lot of smart kids go there are young adults, but also there’s a lot of money flying around in that area.

00;32;10;08 – 00;32;27;23

Speaker 2: But a lot of the students even just passing our table, were making jokes about gambling and their sports betting and even betting on the game at hand. And you could see some friends poking fun at the other friend. And the other friend looked a little upset about what the other friend was saying. So then they’re like, Well, I’m going to, you know, bet on this player and I’m going to get a little bit better for this and this and this.

00;32;27;23 – 00;32;48;24

Speaker 2: And you are actively hearing that social dichotomy between people who are, quote unquote, good at their gambling and sports wagering and those who are, quote unquote, bad. But you can kind of see that social divide even in real life at these games. And it really spoke volumes to me to see actively right in front of me 20 to 22 year olds arguing about stuff.

00;32;48;24 – 00;33;04;29

Speaker 2: I don’t even think that 21 year olds are supposed to be gambling in sports betting, but they find their ways through their phones and those different mediums because it’s so much easier to kind of weasel your way through. Sure. I think they have some like I think they have some different mechanisms to lock people out unless they are a certain age.

00;33;04;29 – 00;33;07;09

Speaker 2: But I do think that there are ways to get around it.

00;33;07;10 – 00;33;15;14

Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t want to get into the details of how you sort of circumvent the rules, but I don’t know that they.

00;33;15;14 – 00;33;16;11

Speaker 2: May not be able to help me because.

00;33;16;16 – 00;33;33;01

Speaker 1: That age group can be savvy enough to figure that out. Yes, I think that’s the that’s the overarching point here is it’s not a foolproof system at this point, especially when it comes to online sports wagering. I’ll say that.

00;33;33;04 – 00;33;48;12

Speaker 2: Yeah. And another key point to to kind of talk about is the money doesn’t feel real when it’s on your phone. No, it’s a lot of what people are doing and they’re going through all these sports wagering websites and different things like, oh, you, you get 1000 free dollars for signing up for FanDuel, but it’s really more like Monopoly money.

00;33;48;12 – 00;34;07;00

Speaker 2: You’re not actually getting $1,000 credited to your account, but it’s a credit to start gambling that you start using your own money. But $100 when you have to drive to the bank, walk to an ATM, physically pull out your card, get the cash, get the receipt, see your balance is entirely different than when you’re just clicking a button that says $100, Right?

00;34;07;03 – 00;34;14;07

Speaker 2: There’s a disconnect that happens where it doesn’t feel tangible or real, like you’re not really using your own money, but $100 button. I just press a square.

00;34;14;12 – 00;34;41;11

Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yeah. And unfortunately, I think we’re at an inflection point here where a lot of people at the younger end of the spectrum are very comfortable with utilizing digital cash for purchases and things like that, where you don’t really understand how much you’re spending because you don’t see it. There’s not a tactile experience that goes along with it.

00;34;41;14 – 00;35;11;18

Speaker 1: I’ve noticed that in younger people that have have experienced that and they start getting their own jobs and they’re making their own money and and what I’ve seen from some of the friends in my kids peer groups, they’re starting to carry cash. So they have that tactile experience. They’ve they’ve learned through maybe some poor choices that. Right. Because the best experience often comes from a bad decision.

00;35;11;20 – 00;35;19;06

Speaker 1: They’ve learned that having that opportunity to handle that cash prevents from overspending on things.

00;35;19;09 – 00;35;38;07

Speaker 2: So it ties to really learning the value of money as well. So people who are young don’t really realize how important money is to them in all those different avenues. So let’s say they start gambling in a game or, you know, starting with these loot boxes or any sort of game that they’re using anything monetary. They don’t realize how far $100 really goes.

00;35;38;10 – 00;36;02;26

Speaker 2: People talk about economic crises and the living wages being low, but then the cost of living is high. And so they’re not really quite understanding. So the younger that they’re using money without really getting the value and all of a sudden they’re continuing to gamble and perhaps it turns into a problem with gambling, but then all of a sudden now they have bills to pay and school to pay off and families to care for and food to buy and utilities to pay for.

00;36;02;28 – 00;36;20;23

Speaker 2: They’re starting to see I’m actually putting a lot of money toward this thing that really isn’t helping me. But they still, since I started younger, have the semblance of an idea that they’re actually going to get something in return because they’ve always been trying to get something in return. So if they have a couple of early wins and they get used to that, they might continue that behavior without realizing that it can be a problem around.

00;36;20;26 – 00;36;35;10

Speaker 1: Right. Okay. And this particular curriculum, I’m guessing that there is a component to it that talks about that financial literacy. I spent some time around it as well for for this age group.

00;36;35;13 – 00;37;00;22

Speaker 2: They did. And they really focus on the fact that good decision making and problem solving skills are essential to curtailing problem gambling later. So they really hone in on that good decision making, which ties to financial literacy so that they really get as much of an educational, well-rounded curriculum to really understand what’s going to happen later on in life.

00;37;00;24 – 00;37;18;27

Speaker 2: So that teach us about gambling. The history of Yemen moves into the science of problem gambling and how I can veer toward it. But it also wants to empower youth in what good decision making looks like. So when you do $500 but you have these three bills to pay, how much really could you even do for gambling? They don’t say in the curriculum that people should not gamble.

00;37;18;29 – 00;37;34;10

Speaker 2: They just want to show youth that there are ways to do good decision making and problem solving where they can still participate in some of these activities while having that knowledge as a foundation. Okay, so that something bad doesn’t happen or a problem doesn’t develop.

00;37;34;12 – 00;38;10;03

Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it sounds like a fascinating program and I’m glad you had the opportunity to participate in it and hopefully have the opportunity to implement the curriculum and some of the local schools where you are and start talking about this because I just think it’s an important demographic, age, demographic to to have this discussion and is there anything your from your perspective as you as you went through this program that you were like, I never really thought about that or oh my God, that’s so great.

00;38;10;10 – 00;38;20;22

Speaker 1: I got to remember this. This is what I really want to take away from this this learning program, this training that I participated in.

00;38;20;24 – 00;38;40;07

Speaker 2: Yeah, two things really come to mind. The first being that youth and young adults as well as older adults, we don’t really necessarily think about the fact that it kind of goes back to what I said at the beginning, where almost everything in life is a gamble. So when you do get to your car, you’re hoping to get to work.

00;38;40;07 – 00;39;04;08

Speaker 2: There’s an outcome there. You’re trying to get material value of getting that compensation back for going to work, but you’re really betting, quote unquote, with every decision that you make, everything is sort of a barter with your life in whatever capacity it is for your life. So I thought about that and just how powerful it is and how much I’ve seen even some of the sports betting ads that I’ve seen with the commercials, they talk about believing in yourself and you got in the car.

00;39;04;08 – 00;39;20;05

Speaker 2: You made a gamble that day. There was one ad software, it was FanDuel or something. And I went, I know something bad about specific organizations, what they’re doing. But there was one where these friends were talking about getting in the car, and I said, Well, this is a gamble. So everything else is to believe in yourself and to show that you can believe in yourself.

00;39;20;05 – 00;39;36;14

Speaker 2: And somehow that makes you better at gambling your money and losing more often than you win just shocked me and. I didn’t really tie those two together as much. And am I correct, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. And when they put them in commercials like that, young people are going to be like, I’m invincible, I can’t get hurt.

00;39;36;16 – 00;39;56;02

Speaker 2: I am not affected by drugs, not affected by gambling. I could do whatever I want because I’m invincible. I’m young, so I just saw how targeted they really became in their ads so that was one key takeaway for me. And then the second I would say is just how far we have to go to really get this implemented into health curriculums at schools.

00;39;56;04 – 00;40;15;18

Speaker 2: Because I just talked to a partner that we work with named Thrive Counseling in Oak Park. I think they help people around our Cook County area and they finally were able to get into the schools. But it took a little bit of time and a little bit of fighting and really kind of deep advocacy to kind of really get through some of the stigma and ideas of suicide.

00;40;15;21 – 00;40;35;22

Speaker 2: So everything from suicide to gambling to alcohol to drugs, people don’t really want to talk about it because it could possibly be negative press for schools. So while this curriculum exists and it’s evidence based and people are starting to utilize it and as national, but it’s also worldwide and it’s the first one that’s evidence based as a prevention program worldwide for gambling.

00;40;35;24 – 00;40;52;16

Speaker 2: We actually have to get schools on board. I cannot even imagine back when I was in my sixth grade health class talking about gambling or gaming. So I feel like we’re just so far behind. I think we probably dabbled and touched on alcohol use and drinking and driving and, you know, don’t drink a prom when you’re in 12th grade.

00;40;52;16 – 00;41;15;29

Speaker 2: But I can’t even imagine that ever a ban being in our curriculum. So we had to educate the community and the schools and the parents and the students to really see that this is something that the vital for them that they should implement. Right. So It was kind of like a takeaway of getting passionate about the content and the concept and really seeing like, how can we get into the schools to actually start to get this program off the ground running.

00;41;16;02 – 00;42;17;05

Speaker 1: Yeah. All right, man, I appreciate appreciate your enthusiasm for this. I think it’s extremely important that we have this discussion with this age group, all age groups, for that matter, that are affected by gambling. But this is a this is an audience. And like the DARE program. And even though this is very different in its approach, it is an effort to get into the schools and at least start having this discussion to create the type of awareness to really help that group of students, adolescents and young adults to understand what’s happening to them from a marketing perspective, how they’re being marketed, to getting savvy on that particular aspect it and understanding the real risks and

00;42;17;05 – 00;42;35;25

Speaker 1: dangers associated with gambling and perhaps gambling without understanding your gambling and what that can lead to further down the road as they progress towards young adulthood and then into adulthood.

00;42;35;27 – 00;43;03;22

Speaker 2: Yeah, it really helps to teach them that good decision making and problem solving skills so that they’re well-rounded, healthy adults. While their brains are still developing. To make those sound decisions, you could still start practicing those tools as you’re younger. And I like the you mentioned the DARE program. This one, definitely the stack deck has a component of veering away from the doom and gloom and and the scare tactics, I would say, because the DARE program, while it was educational, kind of was like, don’t do drugs.

00;43;03;22 – 00;43;20;12

Speaker 2: Drugs are bad, kind of scary. Here’s an app. It’s new. You’re going to be you’ve seen the marijuana commercials where they’re deflated on the couch and their friend can’t talk anymore. So while that really kind of hits a point, this curriculum really tries to be more engaging and educational and show that here is what happens to your brain.

00;43;20;12 – 00;43;34;27

Speaker 2: But we’re not telling you, don’t do this, but more so you’re going to be doing this if you know it or not sometimes. But the more that you’re able to make those sound decisions and build that decision making toolkit, the better off and more healthy you’ll be in the long run.

00;43;35;00 – 00;44;04;21

Speaker 1: Right. And where I think it’s interesting, too, the correlation here, there is a parallel, but there’s there’s a very real divergence in these two programs saying, no. Yeah. And, you know, beating that age group over the head with messages that are, you know, don’t do this. This is bad for you. In some ways. It encourages that age group to go out and experiment because they’re curious.

00;44;04;21 – 00;44;07;00

Speaker 1: You’re by nature, right? You’re rebellious, are you?

00;44;07;01 – 00;44;09;27

Speaker 2: That’s generally someone. Follow me now.

00;44;10;00 – 00;44;37;05

Speaker 1: Right. You know, whereas coming in with a soft shoe approach and and having the discussion, treating this age group like adults and having that conversation and here are the choices in front of you. These choices may lead down this path, but here’s ways to recognize it. Here are here are some ways to at least deal with these situations when they arise.

00;44;37;07 – 00;45;12;28

Speaker 1: So I think that’s it’s interesting hear that it’s it’s hopeful. And I think in all of this I think as people who are out in the community talking about problem gambling, I always try to maintain a sense of hope about gambling. Yes. It’s not a doom and gloom scenario. It’s something that can be identified and overcome if it if it is a challenge, if it’s causing an individual harm in their own life, it can be overcome and we can veer away from the harm in the future.

00;45;13;03 – 00;45;22;04

Speaker 1: Yeah, but there is hope at the end of that at the end of the day, and it sounds like this has the same message to it.

00;45;22;06 – 00;45;53;02

Speaker 2: Read does it? It’s really, I would say, paramount to include the hope and recovery aspect into any of this because the main goal of this is to prevent and educate before and bring whatever turn into problem gambling. But if it dies, there is still hope, there is still recovery, there is still a life. After this, you can actually recoup some of the things that you’ve lost, especially if it comes to your relationships, finances, If you’re not gambling anymore, and just realizing that you actually can heal from something that could potentially be really traumatic.

00;45;53;08 – 00;46;08;08

Speaker 2: I do think that having that hope and that faith and belief piece is very important, especially if those ads are out there telling you to believe in yourself for gambling, you’d hope that treatment centers and providers like us doing programs like this can also instill that sense of hope in a different way for them.

00;46;08;13 – 00;46;18;23

Speaker 1: Right. Well, Chris, thanks again. It’s been a pleasure having you on Wager danger today. Anybody wants to get in touch with you, how can they reach you? Chris?

00;46;18;25 – 00;46;31;19

Speaker 2: They can go to WW Dot way back end with two ends, dawg. That’s way back in, dawg. Or you could also email. I don’t know if anyone be able to write this down or text it to themselves on.

00;46;31;22 – 00;46;34;10

Speaker 1: The in the show notes.

00;46;34;12 – 00;46;55;14

Speaker 2: That would be perfect so you could email WB. I am way back in accord with any sort of inquiry. If you go to the website you also find her phone number and we’re here to chat. Anything would be free and confidential. We could just talk to you about any situation going on or if a loved one struggling. And that’s a really key important piece too, is that even if it’s not you, it could be someone else and they might need that kind of help that you might be able to provide.

00;46;55;14 – 00;47;22;20

Speaker 2: If you start to learn how to ask for those really important questions. And another place to just a plug, because I think it’s really important is the Illinois Help Line website. Are you really winning? Okay. You can actually find a lot of the information that we talked about today. You can find the stack deck trainings that become available through the Illinois counsel problem gambling, as well as just seeing all the different resources that exist for you and your loved ones and for your community to actually take the gambling needs assessment, which is available on that website.

00;47;22;20 – 00;47;37;19

Speaker 2: But they give you really important infographics which are just like digital pictures of all the different facts that you could know when it comes to youth and adults in different populations that are more susceptible to problem gambling and just really gives you a good glimpse at that hope and that help that is available to you.

00;47;37;22 – 00;47;41;21

Speaker 1: Perfect. All right. Thanks again, Chris.

00;47;41;23 – 00;47;45;07

Speaker 2: Thank you. Say saying it was a blast. As always.

00;47;45;10 – 00;48;19;19

Speaker 1: We love hearing from you. So please take a moment to like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly via email at Wager Danger at Gateway Foundation and Talk. Look for us on Facebook and Twitter at Recovery Gateway on LinkedIn, at Gateway Dash Foundation or through our website at Gateway Foundation. Dot org Wager Danger is supported through funding in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance Abuse Prevention and Recovery.

00;48;19;21 – 00;48;35;19

Speaker 1: And remember, recovery is a lifelong process. If you are a family member struggling with a gambling problem, call Gateway at 8449753663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment assessment.

Tanya shares a personal story of growing up in an active gambling community and draws parallels to how that environment played a role in her development as a mental health professional.  We discuss her childhood growing up in Chicago during a time when active gambling houses were common within the community and provided a social outlet for family and friends.  Throughout our conversation we discuss how gambling as a group activity has evolved into a more individual (and potentially more easily hidden) model that is available to today’s gambler.

TASC – Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities

Gateway Foundation Gambling Treatment

Call Gateway Foundation: 855-723-0963

Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER

wagerdanger@gatewayfoundation.org

Transcript:

WAGER DANGER EPISODE 17: TANYA BIBBS SMITH – GROWING UP GAMBLING

00;00;03;27 – 00;00;17;12

Speaker 1: Hey, it’s Shane Cook with Wager Danger. Welcome to another episode. Happy to have back on the show with us. Joining us today in the Riverside Studio, Tanya Smith. Welcome, Tanya.

00;00;18;03 – 00;00;20;01

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. How are you Shane?

00;00;20;03 – 00;01;05;08

Speaker 1: I’m doing great. Couldn’t be better. It’s great to talk with you again. And we ran into each other last week and we’re reminiscing about our time in Bloomington and the time that we did a featurette on TASC, the organization that you work with. And one of the things that you mentioned while we were having that exchange was how you walked away from that and and really started to think back about your childhood and your relatives, your grandmother, your uncle, and you recognize that, Hey, I’ve been around gambling a long time, so I thought it would be interesting.

00;01;05;08 – 00;01;37;14

Speaker 1: Of course, just have a conversation about that and get some of the perspective that you take away from that and how it’s helping you. As someone who works in the field of problem gambling in general and helps you work with potential patients that may be experiencing a gambling addiction. So would you mind just kind of walking us through some of that and some of the history that you enjoyed growing up?

00;01;38;10 – 00;02;15;20

Speaker 2: Absolutely, Shane. I get an opportunity to talk with some aunts and uncles because from what I remember, I remember my grandmother running a a Keno house and is probably, you know, called a gambling house. But the big is game, you know, that was play was keno. And it’s kind of like, I guess bingo or whatever. So I remember as a little girl, you know, maybe about seven, eight, nine, I remember getting these little small glass bowls for everybody to put their coins in, you know, dimes, nickels, quarters.

00;02;15;27 – 00;02;44;12

Speaker 2: And they and I remember, you know, people coming in their pay, paying a house, which was my grandmother. So they would all give her five bucks to participate, you know, in playing these games. But as a young person, it never, never, ever dawned on me, you know, about the gambling that it was gambling, because in my community, I guess especially even back then, it was a way of survival, you know, it was a way to make extra money to pay your bills.

00;02;44;12 – 00;03;02;19

Speaker 2: So, you know, my grandmother would have people come in and pay the house. They would be able to come in a play spades and keno and beer with, you know, all the games that we played, you know, in the community. They will also, you know, be able to shoot dice in her backyard. She had a nice little area back there.

00;03;02;19 – 00;03;31;11

Speaker 2: You could go back there and shoot dice on this of me. And, you know, those people also had to pay a fee, but she would cook food. So on Fridays, it was fish fry Friday and gambling. On Saturday, it was spaghetti and chicken, you know, dinners and gambling. And then all Sunday it was church, Soulful Sunday and then it was gambling was like, you know, maybe the Lord understands.

00;03;31;11 – 00;03;58;25

Speaker 2: I don’t know what it was, but it, it was just so interesting, you know, as to when I was a younger person, it never dawned on me, you know, that my grandmother being and even my aunts had a gambling issue because they are soon after I turned 14. And so it was no she she stopped running the gambling houses because I also had health issues.

00;03;59;07 – 00;04;41;14

Speaker 2: But at that point, okay, I’m on my way to high school and a freshman in high school and I’m about to take driver’s ed Oh, by this time 15 years old. And I have a permit and I’m driving my grandmother to the casino with a permit. So it again, it just never dawned on me, hey, you know, my grandmother possibly has a problem, but it was also, you know, in my opinion, now that I do this kind of work, she was going through a loneliness, you know, one of those times in her life where she was lonely.

00;04;41;14 – 00;05;10;03

Speaker 2: My grandfather had passed away, so she only had us, you know, her children and her grandchildren. So we all drive and, you know, and of all the things in the world, I promise you, I always feel like my grandmother could do everything in a world except drive. She refused to get her driver’s license. She refused to drive, but she never refused to get on a bus and go to the currency exchange.

00;05;10;03 – 00;05;41;06

Speaker 2: He gave change so people could gamble on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. So was just, you know, amazing to me the thought process of a lot of things in the later years then was actually happened. And now, you know, we have more technology now, Right? I just never put the pieces together until now, you know, that I literally grew up in a gambling household as well as a gambling community.

00;05;41;12 – 00;05;51;14

Speaker 2: So, you know, it was just a lot of different energies, you know, that I didn’t recognize then, but I really put it together now.

00;05;52;01 – 00;06;27;12

Speaker 1: Well, it’s interesting here. If I could go back a little bit, there’s a couple of things about it that that come to mind. When your grandmother was running the Keno house. It almost sounds like to me that she was organizing a social club where dinner was served. You had multiple games available that people could participate in. And I’m wondering if that was just kind of an opportunity to create a social environment when after your grandfather had passed.

00;06;30;09 – 00;06;58;24

Speaker 2: During the time that my grandmother was running the Keno house, my grandfather actually had a now let me say this. My biological grandfather had actually gone to the which I also wanted to mention, you know, back then they had pool halls. Okay. And that was a huge, huge way of gambling as well, because you can go you could go to the pool hall, you can play pool for money.

00;06;58;24 – 00;07;31;19

Speaker 2: You could also play the numbers. Anyway, my grandfather, he ran with the gangs, you know, more or less. And so he’s at the pool hall up the street. Well, my grandmother’s run in his keno house, and he’s playing pool, you know, trying to be these guys for money. And basically he get murdered at the pool hall. So, you know, is again, again Shane, you know, I’m older now, so I’m putting these events and these different things together.

00;07;31;19 – 00;07;57;16

Speaker 2: Like, you know, back then, gambling was so much more and way more dangerous than it is now. I’m pretty sure it’s dangerous now. But back then it was just so more close enough for it, more personal. Who I guess because you could actually go to, you know, the gangster or to the individual who was running the numbers. The numbers runner.

00;07;57;16 – 00;08;20;19

Speaker 2: So more or less then you would give them their your money and your numbers and, you know, they would take care of the business. And you had to trust that if your numbers fell, you know that they would be honorable enough to pay you. Sometimes it worked out for people in the community and sometimes it didn’t. But now we have legal running of the numbers, which is the lottery.

00;08;20;24 – 00;08;28;13

Speaker 2: We go, they are numbers. And when we when we take their ticket in and the government pays us so, you know.

00;08;29;00 – 00;08;35;20

Speaker 1: The more regulation there is ostensibly then the safer it is. Right?

00;08;36;05 – 00;08;37;03

Speaker 2: So they say.

00;08;37;16 – 00;08;38;27

Speaker 1: So they say right.

00;08;39;24 – 00;08;59;19

Speaker 2: I would say is more safer on a and hey, I don’t have a bookie, so I don’t have to worry about somebody coming to break my legs or having me sleep with the fishes, you know, that kind of thing. But, you know, more or less now it is these individuals are the ones that need to come and speak with us.

00;08;59;19 – 00;09;21;06

Speaker 2: You know, people who help with problem gambling, who help people who can’t stop because they go to the casinos and, you know, they go to gambling establishments and they see the bells and whistles, whistles and the flashes and the lights and, you know, coins flashing all across the screen is an exciting thing. Sure. You know, for a lot of people.

00;09;21;06 – 00;09;43;01

Speaker 2: And just the fact of, you know, hey, I’m going to win some money is also so, you know, a drawing for a lot of people. And then you have some people who go and say, hey, I’m going to take my $500 rent and I’m going to double it so I can pay too month’s rent. And a lot of times it doesn’t work out that way.

00;09;43;09 – 00;10;09;05

Speaker 2: You know, people need to always understand the house always wins and a lot of times they will give you a few peanuts in, you know, bags of chips and free drinks and things of that nature, you know, to keep you coming back, to keep you giving them more and more. So you as a I guess as an individual, don’t even recognize that you’re overspending at this point.

00;10;09;12 – 00;11;01;09

Speaker 2: It’s you’re over gambling at this point and that sometimes not all the time because some people have a I would say, a strong will to say no. But you have some who they don’t because they may be going through something, some type of mental health issue. You know, maybe they just lost a loved one. Maybe they just lost a very important job, you know, something that was going to take them over the top as far as income and longevity, you know, or maybe we have an individual who just doesn’t have any friends or, you know, or we might have a person who’s a professional gambler who thinks that, you know, they they just know blackjack

00;11;01;09 – 00;11;39;28

Speaker 2: so well that they’re always going to come out on top. So, you know, some people feel as though, hey, I do not have a problem, you know, but they do because they’re spending their rent, their car note and in utilities, in medicine, money on gambling, instead of the important things that they need to sustain life. So, you know, I even even though I recognize that my grandmother was trying to supplement her income, you know, her husband had been murdered and now she has five children, you know, my uncle and my four aunts.

00;11;40;00 – 00;12;03;11

Speaker 2: And so now, you know, I’m a single mother and I have never worked. Now I have to take care of this, you know. But now she’s working at a cleaners, cleaning clothes and ironing clothes, you know, for people in a community. And then that’s not enough. That’s not enough. Because now I’m only they’re not paying me a lot.

00;12;03;12 – 00;12;31;18

Speaker 2: They’re paying me. They were paying my grandmother under the table, so she was getting cash and they were only paying her $350 a week. So back then there was a decent amount of money, but it still wasn’t enough to pay a mortgage on a house. It still wasn’t enough, you know, to have food for five children. It still wasn’t enough to pay utilities as well as the other different household needs.

00;12;31;18 – 00;12;59;12

Speaker 2: You know, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, toothbrushes and things of that nature for six people. So, you know, I definitely understand why she did what she did. But then I feel like later on in life, it became not a way of sustaining life, but it actually became a problem there. She literally was a problem gambler, you know, That’s my my what I’m seeing in my head.

00;12;59;12 – 00;13;24;14

Speaker 2: And actually what I know, you know, from learning about problem gambling and and it’s this experience is more or less, you know, because after my second grandfather passed away, that’s when I became the person again, you know, to drive her to the casino to I would go to her house, you know, on Friday, Saturday or Sunday to spend time with her.

00;13;24;18 – 00;13;41;26

Speaker 2: And I’m at the lot. I’m in the lottery land on all three of those days, you know, And I met the off track betting all three of those days putting her bets here. And if you didn’t do it, you know, it was she was mad at you, you know, hey, you got to put my stuff in and blah, blah, blah.

00;13;41;27 – 00;14;10;20

Speaker 2: You know, she’s an older person now, so now she’s super set in her ways So you make these bets, you know, you know, play this lottery. So, you know, I definitely felt like I lived a fantastic childhood. But, you know, again, now that I think back, I definitely lived in an addiction community. I definitely lived in a problem gambling community.

00;14;10;28 – 00;14;36;07

Speaker 2: But I also feel like I lived in a loving, you know, community. It was just a different time, you know, and space. So but I definitely think about all the interest in I get a ton more stories, but I always feel like is so interesting to kind of pull in what happened then and what was going on now and you know just kind of relating to each other.

00;14;36;08 – 00;14;36;24

Speaker 2: Sure.

00;14;37;04 – 00;15;18;10

Speaker 1: Well, can you talk a little bit more broadly about what was the overall community like back then in terms of, you know, I know gambling wasn’t regulated back then and there have been some there been some powerful syndicates over the years in the Chicago area that were engaged in gambling activities. Did did you get a sense for that, the magnitude of that, or did you feel like this experience that you had seemed a little bit more sequestered than being part of a larger organization?

00;15;19;25 – 00;15;55;20

Speaker 2: You know that it definitely was. I felt like my grandmother was her own small organization, but out there felt like she even though maybe she didn’t know those individuals or what have you I often felt like she was still connected because, well, even though these individuals were gangsters and they still, you know, ran the numbers and this is their network, they would often be at my grandmother’s house, you know, enjoying playing keno and in paying as well.

00;15;55;20 – 00;16;19;08

Speaker 2: So it was more to me, it was more of a community thing in the beginning, you know, when she first started it, you know, definitely to help, you know, everybody knew everybody knew that Miss Chris would cook food. Everybody knew that, you know, she was going to have the big gambling house. Everybody knew that there was going to be music.

00;16;19;08 – 00;16;30;09

Speaker 2: And sometimes, you know, my uncle, because I only had the one uncle, he would put the the record player outside because back then it was a record player. We didn’t have CDs people, Right?

00;16;30;18 – 00;16;32;04

Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember and.

00;16;33;02 – 00;16;52;02

Speaker 2: I don’t want to remember, but yes, but you know, in the end he would put the the wooden speakers out so he would be back there deejaying and, you know, just playing the latest music of what everybody wanted or heard on the radio. It just seemed like an all in and now all out great time.

00;16;52;06 – 00;17;22;21

Speaker 1: That’s I was going to chime in because what you’re saying there is goes back to my earlier comment how you were talking about your grandmother having the Keno house. It seemed more like a social event to me and an opportunity, as you as you suggest, for people to interact with each other from the community, gossip, learn about what’s going on and that gambling happened to be a part of that, not necessarily the feature.

00;17;23;03 – 00;17;50;10

Speaker 1: And in today’s environment, it seems like the exact opposite. The idea is to get get people in to gamble, and it’s less of a social activity, especially when you’re sitting at the video gaming terminals that are available on every corner. It seems like at least in in Illinois. So there is I think there might be some truth in that.

00;17;51;17 – 00;18;18;24

Speaker 1: Yeah, probably would would take some people too, to really better understand it and lay it out there for us. But if I’m looking at it somewhat, trying to look at it objectively, I think having a social aspect to it where people are connected with each other has the potential to be somewhat self-policing in that, you know, to somebody who’s who’s losing more than they should.

00;18;19;04 – 00;18;47;19

Speaker 1: And because you’ve built a community around that, perhaps somebody feels a little bit more empowered to step in and say, hey, you know, maybe we should withdraw from this situation here and take a breather and just take a beat on gambling any more or spending any more money gambling. Whereas today it’s almost become such a solo event, which is very hidden in in many respects.

00;18;47;19 – 00;19;15;17

Speaker 1: And people don’t have that opportunity to kind of, you know, participate as a member of the community and with an individual because because we have withdrawn from each other so much, or at least I feel like we have and this is going much deeper than just gambling, by the way. But I think I think to a certain extent we have withdrawn from each other and and feel less connected than we maybe did in the past.

00;19;16;10 – 00;19;46;19

Speaker 2: Absolutely. You know, Tim, everything you’re talking about is all mental. Hill I mean, you pretty much know this. I feel like that, you know, even then and, and still now people have a lot of anxiety, you know, and they that’s another reason why they participate in gambling. Some have anxiety over gambling, some have anxiety, you know, because they want to gamble and they may have a fear or something of that nature.

00;19;47;23 – 00;20;17;12

Speaker 2: Now, I just feel like gambling is just so much more impersonal. You know, you made a a statement. Oh, just recent. And I just wanted to tap in on it in, you know, about it being so impersonal. And back then it was more personal Back then. I remember this. This young man used to come to my grandmother’s gambling house, and he he always liked to play dice.

00;20;17;24 – 00;20;39;15

Speaker 2: But back then, when they were run out of money, you could either ask the gangster at the party or grandmother was pulling you out. And it was always, you know, the community would always come together, Hey, you had no money, you got to go. So I always, you know, feel like, oh, that was so wrong. You know, we have having a community where, you know, let this person stay.

00;20;39;15 – 00;20;59;27

Speaker 2: Boy, if you want to continue, you can. She she didn’t have a problem with him staying. He wanted to continue to gamble. You can’t continue to gamble without money. Right. So, you know, at this point you have gotten free liquor. Well, not free liquor because you pay to get into the.

00;20;59;27 – 00;21;00;12

Speaker 1: The house fee.

00;21;00;12 – 00;21;31;12

Speaker 2: The house. Exactly. So the liquor is free. You know, you you you help yourself to a drink the food. So you help yourself to food. And you now have had a full experience and you can still stay and sit around and see, you know, the next big winner or whatever situation is coming around. Like, you know, if we if there’s going to be a tournament next week, you know, because these two people tied or what have you.

00;21;32;05 – 00;21;59;12

Speaker 2: So it, you know, is kind of just like the community came in to stop this person from having a super becoming a super problem gambler is what I’m getting at. And now you have it where they actually help you to become a super problem gambler. And what I mean by that is I was at the casino recent with my daughter.

00;21;59;12 – 00;22;23;13

Speaker 2: She just turned 21, wanted to go see the casino. Mom, Hey, let’s go to the casino. No problem. We go to the casino. I’m always on a budget, because I like clothes and shoes, so I like they’ll spend all their money, you know, at the casino. So, you know, my $50 when is gone, is gone. We go to the casino, I put my little $50 in the machine, and I win.

00;22;23;19 – 00;22;42;09

Speaker 2: So again, they give you peanuts to keep you, you know, coming back. So I take my few little peanuts to $300 and, you know, I’m just going around. Sticking 20s in the machine. Because when it’s gone. It is gone. I am not taking money out of the cash machine. Right. I dig it deep in my purse.

00;22;42;10 – 00;22;44;15

Speaker 2: None of that stuff. You know, you’re.

00;22;44;15 – 00;22;52;10

Speaker 1: Practicing the strategy right? Yeah. You set aside a certain budget for entertainment and.

00;22;52;10 – 00;23;19;28

Speaker 2: That’s right. And so as as we are done. So I actually did a pretty good I took my little 50 bucks and I left with $300. But in the same breath again, I’m cheap and I like to shop. So I wasn’t going to take my three hundred dollars and give it back to the casino. Who does that? Of course, there are people who do it, but it wasn’t going to be me.

00;23;19;28 – 00;23;39;07

Speaker 2: So as my my daughter said, well, you know, my let’s let’s you buy the lady’s room, you know, before we leave. No problem. Go to the ladies room. And next to the ladies room is like these desks set up like you’re at a bank. And then there’s a a a rope, You know, you go around the corner just like you at the bank.

00;23;39;27 – 00;24;00;10

Speaker 2: So the curiosity got the best of me, you know? And I go over and I ask, you know, what was going on over here after you have gambled away all of your rent money, your car note money, your medicine money, all that good stuff, you can actually go to the casino and get a loan. Oh, now they will.

00;24;00;10 – 00;24;24;12

Speaker 2: You can literally sit there and they will give you a loan. And do you ever. It was five deaths in and three of those deaths were senior citizens. And it just broke my heart. I’m just like, oh my God, this lady, they spent all her medication, money, probably her rent utilities or her her pension check. And now she’s over here taking out loans that she’d go back and gamble some more.

00;24;25;04 – 00;24;48;23

Speaker 2: You know, they said, I just feel like it’s a set up for failure, you know, to keep individuals coming back so they make it so convenient. You know, for you, that is is not is not a fun situation, I will say is not a fun situation. Back in the day. Those were funny situations. You know, you’re with the community.

00;24;48;23 – 00;25;10;11

Speaker 2: You have a fine cracking joke, you know, talking about your kids. They grew up together in the same neighborhood in blah, blah, blah. So now you’re on at the casino and you sitting at the machine, you’re not talking to anybody. You know, you are so focused on hitting a button. And then the two cherries in in the bell come up to you.

00;25;10;11 – 00;25;13;18

Speaker 2: Oh, I was so close. All I need one more cherry.

00;25;14;22 – 00;25;18;28

Speaker 1: And now you can go get a loan to continue.

00;25;19;08 – 00;25;19;23

Speaker 2: Well, get a loan.

00;25;19;25 – 00;25;29;28

Speaker 1: Because you were close, right? Yeah. The old gambler’s fallacy there. You’re. Yeah, Even. Even when you don’t win, it feels like you were close to winning.

00;25;30;09 – 00;25;59;17

Speaker 2: So if you don’t take that machine saying a little old people ready to beat you up, you know, it’s this is making its day, this machine. And they spend up all this money, then they lean the chair. The one on the machine have the neighbor, they sit next to their hey, You don’t let nobody take my machine. And then they go and they walk off and they’ve gone on for 30 minutes to an hour because they’re sitting at the casino’s loan tables getting another loan so they can go back.

00;25;59;17 – 00;26;18;07

Speaker 2: Because guess what? I had two cherries in a bill. All I need you to stick another 20 here and it’s going to be the I’m going to hit the jackpot. I really am. So my thought process is you’re going get this loan for $1,000. You come back, slap $500 in. They of course they’re going to let you hit the jackpot.

00;26;18;11 – 00;26;43;29

Speaker 2: What do you think is going to be the major, the minor, the medium or the major grand jackpot? What is a minor, major grand? Yeah. So nine times out of ten, If if you’re lucky, you might get a major. I have yet to see anybody hit the grand jackpot. And that would be the biggest one. Like, you know, a $21,000.

00;26;43;29 – 00;27;11;23

Speaker 2: $50,000. I was on machine. It had a grand up to $108,000. And I’m just like, Who wins that? You know, is it ever possible for a win that you have people sitting there and that’s their goal to win the jackpot? So they’re betting the max. The max is $3 on these were $3 on this machine. So if they do allow you to get a jackpot, nine times out of ten in all will be the major.

00;27;11;23 – 00;27;29;24

Speaker 2: I got an opportunity to actually talk to the eyes in the sky at some of the casino. Okay. And what was interesting to me is, is that they know they know where their if you go and get their card and put your name on it at your sticker, they that they know you’re there. They know how much you’re betting.

00;27;29;28 – 00;27;52;22

Speaker 2: They know which machine is your favorite because you sit there for hours and hours and hours every time you come back to the casino on different days and stick your card in that same machine, they begin to know that is your favorite machine. So at some point they allow you to win a few pennies here and there. But for the most part, they’re going to win your money.

00;27;53;01 – 00;28;17;14

Speaker 2: And every hundred dollars you come in there with that’s theirs and you come here with $500. It belongs to the casino. So, you know, either keep your money at home or give it to the casino. Take your pick. You’re not going to win every time. So you always have to remember and I tell a lot of patients this a lot of people that I run into when I’m outreaching in a community.

00;28;17;23 – 00;28;24;03

Speaker 2: The house always is wins. Sure, you can tell they give you a few pennies. They still winning?

00;28;24;11 – 00;28;32;05

Speaker 1: Yeah, in the long run. And they’re always coming out ahead. There’s a there’s a reason why all the buildings in Vegas are as big as.

00;28;33;03 – 00;28;34;05

Speaker 2: Vegas is the worst.

00;28;36;00 – 00;29;01;03

Speaker 1: Hey, I did want to I did want to kind of pop out a little bit here and talk a little bit about how you got involved in with not only TASC but other organizations where you have focused in on on gambling addiction as a means of service and giving back to the community.

00;29;01;21 – 00;29;29;12

Speaker 2: It it actually all started with me going to the military, joined in the Army National Guard and becoming a humanitarian that way. You know we would the National Guard is was made up, you know, by the government in order to help out with national disasters. Well, what they consider to be the real military, you know, the Army, Marines and the Navy individuals, they would go out to fight the wars.

00;29;30;07 – 00;30;02;02

Speaker 2: But now, you know, of course, that has changed. We go out as well to fight the wars as well, but we still help with national disasters. And so my very first national disaster was down in Quincy, Illinois, and we were down there helping a levee here broke and we were sandbagging and, you know, helping people who had been stranded, taking a boat down the river so that we can get people off the top of houses and everything.

00;30;02;09 – 00;30;27;23

Speaker 2: So it just put me in a different mindset where I always knew I wanted to help people. But at a certain point I felt like I really, really wanted to help people. And so when I came back from the military, I was actually on active duty tours and I see I was like, you know, I really want to work.

00;30;27;23 – 00;31;03;08

Speaker 2: I don’t have to, but I really want to work. And so she was like, Well, you know, you come work for me at this non for profit agency. And I’m like, I don’t you know, I’m not sure about this, but she actually gave me and so it kind of heavy. I started doing free HIV and AIDS testing as I start going around the city of Chicago, facilitating safe sex, talking about safe sex and different sex acts that, you know, I had actually went in taking some classes so that I could speak to not just heterosexuals, but to our LGBT.

00;31;03;08 – 00;31;32;05

Speaker 2: Q Plus community. Well, I. A you know, I know they get different ones for it, but, you know, and it just gave me I felt like a a sense of purpose, you know, to start working in a not for profit sector. But what led me over to the problem gambling was it was a pilot program. You know, they didn’t have it.

00;31;32;05 – 00;31;55;19

Speaker 2: And I had never worked under that before. Everything was mostly medical that I had worked under. So now I’m going into mental health, you know, where I was Definitely what I did before was part of mental health as well, you know, because different traumas that could have happened during sexual acts. However, this was something a little bit different.

00;31;55;19 – 00;32;26;19

Speaker 2: So I definitely wanted to dive into it and get a better understanding. And I’m glad I did because I actually get an opportunity to learn about my past, you know, history and you know, what is actually happening now in the present, You know, with me, my family are individuals who I think back who had gambling issues, you know, and just seeing where these individuals are now, who are my family members or friends.

00;32;26;26 – 00;32;34;00

Speaker 2: Right. Know and seeing where they are with this, with their problem gambling or, you know, how did they come out of it?

00;32;35;10 – 00;33;25;29

Speaker 1: Yeah, fascinating story, by the way. And I think what’s interesting is all through this work out, Adam coming back to this this idea of how is it being a social event early on and the evolution of of gambling has has there’s a divergence from a social activity into something that’s, um, that’s very independent. Um, and I’m not sure that’s a healthy environment for people to engage in gambling.

00;33;25;29 – 00;33;52;25

Speaker 1: I, I can see it on one hand in a social environment where it’s, it’s being a very social activity that the people are around you, you’ve got a support network around you as opposed to if I pick up my phone and I’m participating in gambling at 3:00 in the morning, that’s alone activity which nobody really knows about, or I can keep that well hidden.

00;33;53;28 – 00;34;27;05

Speaker 1: Whereas what you talk about early in in your childhood is an activity that was out in the open. People knew about it, people knew who was involved in it. So it provided some sort of a community policing activity. And I mean policing from the standpoint of people just taking notice and if if it was a family member or somebody that you cared about, you have that opportunity to step in because you see it happening right?

00;34;28;00 – 00;34;50;26

Speaker 1: Whereas today it’s become such an independent activity or the capability exists, I should say, for it to be such an independent activity that while we’re dealing with what could be what is often considered a hidden addiction, uh, an individual can hide that for a very long time if they choose to hide it.

00;34;51;23 – 00;35;18;13

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Which. Which kind of brings me to you know, back then I feel like and you hit it right on the head, we were able to police a person’s situation a little bit more back then. Now a days I totally agree with you is more of a first of all, gaming, for me. You know, this is just my opinion is more mechanical is more a blah, blah, blah, blah.

00;35;18;14 – 00;35;47;13

Speaker 2: Shane, you know, make your bet. Back then, I don’t feel like it was more mechanical. I felt like it was more, you know, just a lot of fun and, you know, just a lot of talking in smack talking, you know, And we are days a lot of people are going out in their game alone. And like you said, you know, we have the the caregiver type individual who cares for individuals, but, you know, is not caring for themselves.

00;35;47;13 – 00;36;09;28

Speaker 2: So how they care for themselves is they go out in a game or we have that the loner type who doesn’t have any friends, doesn’t have anybody, you know, or the widow or type the person who just lost a spouse or a significant other. And you know, they don’t know what else to do. So gaming is a outlet for them, right?

00;36;10;11 – 00;36;31;14

Speaker 2: Is a lonelier situation is is more of a mechanical situation. So people are more or less now just in for the win. They are no longer, you know, gaming for fun. You have a few select people that come out and gay for fun, but most literally are gaming because they see a different light at the end of the tunnel.

00;36;31;14 – 00;36;52;25

Speaker 2: They see, Oh, you know, I’m going to be a part of the rich and famous or I’m going to win $50,000. I can put down on this house. I’m going to win $100,000. I can go buy this trip. I’m going to win, you know, $1,000,000 on a car last will, you know, spin machine, because nobody has ever done it is going to be me and I’m going to be a millionaire.

00;36;52;25 – 00;37;01;03

Speaker 2: And they generally just does not happen. If there is, you are a very, very, very lucky individual.

00;37;01;11 – 00;37;08;15

Speaker 1: Right? Yeah. The odds really don’t favor the individual.

00;37;08;18 – 00;37;21;21

Speaker 2: A lot of times a win win situation. But more says is a win lose situation when you are dealing with casinos because their objective is the same objective that we have we want to win.

00;37;22;00 – 00;37;50;21

Speaker 1: Yeah it’s just some very interesting stories that you’ve had over the years. We like that you’re out in our community and you’re actually talking about problem gambling, especially with the experience, life experience that you bring to the table along with that certainly gives you a unique perch, a unique perspective on problem gambling. And I know you’re doing great work.

00;37;50;21 – 00;38;11;13

Speaker 1: That TASC and working with our younger, our younger, younger population. So I appreciate that. And I as as an individual, I feel very fortunate that we’ve had the opportunity to cross paths as often as we have, and I hope that we have many more ahead of us.

00;38;12;07 – 00;38;14;03

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Me also.

00;38;15;07 – 00;38;23;09

Speaker 1: All right. Well, thanks again, Tanya Bibb Smith with Task Organization here with us today on Wage Wager Danger.

00;38;24;14 – 00;38;45;09

Speaker 2: Well, thank you for having me. It’s always a great time, Shane, and it’s always a pleasure seeing you and meeting up with you. And I just love having an opportunity to share my stories because sometimes just telling a small story, you never know who you might affect. So just really appreciate that.

00;38;45;18 – 00;39;17;23

Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think the more we talk about it, the more we’re out in the in the community doing these podcasts where people may be picking it up for the first time and listening to it, If we’re striking a chord with somebody and it encourages them to take action, if they recognize some of these warning signs about problem gambling, then they’re taking some action with we’ve just provided at least another avenue to reach somebody.

00;39;17;23 – 00;39;23;22

Speaker 1: So that’s why I am so I’m so eager to get more stories out there.

00;39;25;09 – 00;39;49;19

Speaker 2: Well, they always can go to one 800 gambler or they have an opportunity to go to are really winning talk. And you know, there’s a small test there if they want to take a test to see if maybe they have a problem with gambling or do the test for someone else to see if they have a problem with gambling.

00;39;49;19 – 00;40;13;00

Speaker 2: And they’re able to also find the help that’s needed on the website. Are you really winning, You know, get all or you know, a lot of people don’t I as online savvy as others. So please, you know, definitely give us a call at one 800 gambler there’s always somebody there waiting, you know, to assist you to help you or give you any information that’s needed.

00;40;15;02 – 00;40;16;14

Speaker 2: Yes, for having me.

00;40;16;14 – 00;40;53;20

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Any time. We love hearing from you. So please take a moment to, like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly via email at Wager Danger at Gateway Foundation dot org. Look for us on Facebook and Twitter at Recovery Gateway on LinkedIn, at Gateway Dash Foundation, or through our website at Gateway Foundation. Dot org Wager Danger is supported through funding in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance to Use Prevention and Recovery.

00;40;54;01 – 00;41;10;02

Speaker 1: And remember, recovery is a lifelong process. If you are a family member struggling with a gambling problem, call Gateway at 8449753663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment.

Dr. Nathan Smith is the founding Executive Director of Kindbridge Research Institute, a nationally recognized scientist and science communicator, and a leader in the field of behavioral addiction research and theory.

In this episode we discuss the importance of understanding how gambling addiction effects various segments of the US population and how the Kindbridge Research Institute is laser focused on supporting our Military Veterans.  Nate’s passion for the study of gambling addiction really shines throughout the episode including: the importance of epidemiology and how it allows us to “get it right” and how the terminology we use to describe a gambling addiction needs clarification.  We’re fortunate to have an advocate like Nate who is championing the study of gambling disorders.

Gateway Foundation Gambling Treatment

Call Gateway Foundation: 855-723-0963

Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER

wagerdanger@gatewayfoundation.org

Transcript:

WAGER DANGER EPISODE 16: GAMBLING AND MILITARY VETERANS -DR. NATHAN SMITH

00;00;03;08 – 00;00;33;02

Speaker 1: Welcome to Wager Danger. I’m Shane Cook with the Gateway Foundation, and my guest today is Dr. Nathan Smith. Dr. Smith holds a Ph.D. in psychiatric epidemiology and is currently the executive director of the Kindbridge Research Institute, where he applies a scientific approach to the study of gambling disorder. We cover several topics in today’s episode, including a subject he is most passionate about, which is veterans and their addictions to gambling.

00;00;33;04 – 00;00;57;27

Speaker 1: He discusses how active duty service members are often exposed to gambling, but rarely receive information about it or any follow up after they’ve been discharged. So much information from an extremely knowledgeable and compassionate professional. It’s comforting to know that he wakes up every day with the goal of improving the lives of people with gambling disorder. And he’s definitely playing the long game.

00;00;58;07 – 00;00;59;13

Speaker 1: Welcome to the show, Nate.

00;01;00;14 – 00;01;02;03

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

00;01;02;12 – 00;01;24;24

Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we’re fortunate to have you join us. I’ve had an opportunity to speak and some of our pre-show meetings, and I’m looking forward to this episode, looking forward to hearing some of the some of the great research that Kindbridge has been involved in. And some of your thoughts and experiences along the way dealing with problem gambling.

00;01;26;01 – 00;01;26;20

Speaker 2: Absolutely.

00;01;26;27 – 00;01;40;16

Speaker 1: So I’d like to start off with and just kind of provide an explanation to the listener. What is epidemiology and what is what does that entail from a study standpoint?

00;01;40;29 – 00;02;04;00

Speaker 2: Yeah, So epidemiology is part of public health, right? So you can think of medicine. There’s, you know, when you go to see your doctor and take care of your individual problems, you can. That’s medicine. And so public health is when we’re thinking about not just the individual, we’re thinking about the health of the public. Right. Population model. So everything in epidemiology, you know, traditionally has been at the population level.

00;02;04;02 – 00;02;29;13

Speaker 2: So epidemiology is the foundational science of public health. It has to be somebody’s job to count the outcomes, both bad and good happening. And so with that counted, then then you can have public health. Right. So when you think about what does an epidemic do? So one of the classic studies would be the first time there was a connection made between lung cancer and smoking.

00;02;30;04 – 00;02;53;07

Speaker 2: Okay, that was an epidemiologist. It’s the only time you see X percentage in a population, you know, 40% of Americans are experiencing, you know, depression. Right. So anytime you see rates of cancer, you see rates of positive explains to. Right. Any time you see anything that’s population level that has to do with health, that’s epidemiology. And so there’s kind of two parts in epidemiology.

00;02;53;08 – 00;03;20;23

Speaker 2: One is chronic disease, which is kind of what I was just explaining and things like cancer, things like psychiatric issues like I worked on. But then there’s there’s also infectious disease epidemiology. So during the coronavirus pandemic, like you might have heard epidemiologist speaking about how the disease spreads to populations. And so we’re kind of two there’s kind of two halves to EPI and there’s, you know, we’ve got our cousins over who do the infectious disease side.

00;03;20;25 – 00;03;41;05

Speaker 2: So what we do in psychiatric epidemiology is so our job is to count the amount of mental health problems in the country at its most basic level. Right. So if you see you ever seen that stat, you know, one in one in five people, it’s mental illness at any given time. So the person whose job to go out and do that counting is a psychiatric epidemiologist.

00;03;41;05 – 00;04;05;11

Speaker 2: And it’s actually, you know, trying to count all the people in America with like major depression, you know, it’s it’s simple, right? It sounds simple, but it’s not particularly easy. Right? It’s a complicated seat. Sure. And so at its most basic, that’s psychiatric epidemiology. We’re looking at using epi tools to look at population levels of different disorders. And we’re focused on mental health, We’re focused on addiction.

00;04;05;25 – 00;04;21;13

Speaker 2: And then within that, you know, kind of the higher up your guard education, the smaller your field gets. Right. So as you go up there, it’s, you know, so I get bit, but then I focus on addiction. I focus on behavioral addictions. But my particular expertise is gambling disorder, which is we both ended up on this call.

00;04;21;18 – 00;04;51;04

Speaker 1: Right. Right. Well, thanks for that explanation. I feel like we’ve all got a crash course in epidemiology over the last few years. Not something that we sought, but it’s something that we at least have some idea of what that entails. So I appreciate the explanation there. In terms of the Kindbridge Research Institute and the types of activity that you’re involved in with gambling.

00;04;51;06 – 00;05;01;24

Speaker 1: What is it that Is there anything in particular that you look for when it comes to gambling and the study of problem gambling or gambling disorder?

00;05;02;20 – 00;05;29;24

Speaker 2: Yeah. So we look at both problem gambling and gambling disorder. So just to clarify, so Kindbridge Research Institute is a nonprofit research institute, and we focus on research improvements, creating new technology. So we also are associated with Kindbridge Behavioral Health, which is a clinical telehealth company that focuses on treatment for folks with gambling disorder. And so Kindbridge Behavioral Health is a is a nationwide.

00;05;29;24 – 00;05;54;11

Speaker 2: I think it’s, I don’t know, 35 states maybe now. So so KBH is the clinical side and then we are the research side, but we’re really addressing the same the same underlying problems, which is trying to improve outcomes for people who are experiencing harm from gambling. And just so there’s a lot of different you hear a lot of different terms kind of gets thrown around in the in the game sort of words of you.

00;05;55;09 – 00;06;15;24

Speaker 2: So when we talk about gambling disorder, that’s the DSM five clinical definition. That’s somebody with a Ph.D. in psychiatric epidemiology like me, when I see gambling disorder, all lowercase, I’m like, okay, I know exactly what that means and I know what it’s on. On the DSM. I can go and look at it. It has a specific meaning, a lot of times, and people are using that term.

00;06;15;25 – 00;06;44;26

Speaker 2: They don’t mean it that way. They kind of mean the broader purpose of problems associated with gambling, which is a much bigger thing. Media disorder is a very specific diagnosis. It’s a medical diagnosis, right. It’s created by a psychiatrist. So a lot of times that’s not exactly what we’re interested in, Right. We’re sort of interested in if someone is having a lot of gambling problems or a lot of problems with their gambling and their community, but it doesn’t meet that criteria for gambling disorder, we’re still interested in it, right?

00;06;44;26 – 00;07;04;08

Speaker 2: This is still something that’s harmful, that should be addressed, should be taken seriously. So I’d say right now there’s a really good word. The field has settled down for that. Okay. Has any sort of real meaning meaningful description? A lot of people use problem gambling and in that kind of universe of things, you know, harm is associated sometimes.

00;07;04;08 – 00;07;21;02

Speaker 2: Again, the related harm and what I’m speaking sort of to lay audience, as I just said, gambling addiction, because basically everybody knows what we’re talking about with gambling addiction. There’s that that’s not a definable thing. That’s not a medical thing. I’m not going to write a, you know, paper for a journal that’s a gambling addiction because it’s not definable.

00;07;21;23 – 00;07;39;01

Speaker 2: But I think it’s useful in that, you know, if I’m on a plane and somebody says, what do you do? Like, I’m a scientist. I focus on gambling addiction. Back like that gets it right to the heart. So it it really is it’s somewhat the language in this field still is chaotic like we’ve been it’s been chaotic since like the early eighties.

00;07;39;20 – 00;07;58;23

Speaker 2: And it is still chaotic. But I just I recommend to people, you know, pick something like my default is if I’m talking to lay audience, it’s it’s gambling addiction So they understand what we’re talking about. And if I’m talking scientifically or specifically, I use gambling disorder when that’s what I’m talking about. And then other times when we’re in between, I said gambling related harm.