2024-06-28 00:36:27
Twelve-year-old McKay Everett disappeared from his Texas home in September 1995. His father Carl returned from an Amway meeting to find the back door ajar and the telephone ringing. On the line, a woman with a raspy voice demanded $500,000. Over the next week, the FBI played a game of cat-and-mouse with the kidnappers, who used inside information to stay one step ahead of the investigation. Ultimately the FBI uncovered a series of crimes that started long before McKay was taken. Most shocking of all was the suspect. McKay had been betrayed by someone he trusted – a pillar of the community hiding a dark secret. But decades later, McKay’s mother, Paulette, still isn’t satisfied with the official story. She doesn’t think everyone involved has been brought to justice. Ransom: Season 1 - Position of Trust is a story of greed and betrayal and how one’s outward appearance can be dangerously deceiving.
Hi producer Ben Kebrick, here, this bonus episode is an extended cut of our interview with psychiatrist and gambling expert Tim Fong. Dr. Fong is co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at UCLA, which is one of the few programs dedicated to studying gambling and gambling addiction in the United States. Dr.
Fong discusses the massive increase in gambling in recent years and how we might be seeing the early stages of a gambling epidemic. Especially with the rise of retail investment, day trading and investments like cryptocurrencies, which effectively mimic gambling in many ways.
My name is Dr. Timothy Fong, I'm a professor of psychiatry. I'm the co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, located here on the campus of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles.
So there's a number of different terms, like, I think I've seen problem gambling, pathological gambling, gambling disorder, gambling addiction. What's kind of like the proper term, or what are the distinctions between those terms?
The scientific term that I use is gambling disorder, that's inside the handbook of diagnostic criteria that we use DSM-5. So that's consistent with the other addictions tobacco use disorder, alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, so that's the scientific term gambling disorder. Synonyms are going to be things like gambling addiction, problem gambling, impulsive gambling.
For a long time, there was debate, is it even a disorder? is it just an excuse, you know, what exactly is it? So the Big Sea change happened in 2013, where gambling disorder was put into the same chapter of addiction as all our other substance use disorders. And now gambling is the only non-substance addiction that's listed in the DSM-5..
So why do you think gambling addiction was the first behavioral addiction to get recognized?
Gambling has been recognized as an addiction in clinical practice for a long, long time. You know, Sigmund Freud recognized it. People would, oftentimes, when they're in desperation from their gambling, enter treatment. But really, it started with Gamblers Anonymous forming itself in the late 1950s. So that's been around as a 12-step support group.
But the real thrust of it came in the late 70s and early 80s. With a number of researchers who were interested in studying gambling, and they formed gambling addiction research groups, they formed various societies, a national council on problem Gambling. I think that's kind of how these things started to get national attention, but then you think about that backdrop of gambling expansion.
And that's really where the story takes off. In the late 80s, early 90s, we had slow gambling expansion, but it really wasn't until the turn of the century. Now where you see massive expansion of brick-and-mortar casinos, tribal gaming, online gambling, and now mobile sports betting. And a society in the last 20 years that has basically said gambling is part of the culture. I'm really not aware of that.
Many anti-gambling groups, I'm not aware of that, many states that have shrunken or gotten rid of gambling. In fact, we just see more and more states building more casinos, expanding the outreach of the lottery and now mobile sports betting in 30.
States now in the United States, as gambling has been expanding, have we seen the prevalence of?
These disorders going up. Truth of the matter is, we don't know. It's an under-recognized addiction, it's considered the quote hidden addiction. Because you can't see it, you can't smell it. People don't overdose on it, I think even more so.
Of all the other addictive disorders, it's the one that people don't recognize they have. So when you have a gambling disorder, you don't think you have an addiction. You think you have a problem with luck, or you have a problem with an angry spouse who doesn't understand what you like to do. Or you have a problem with just money, you're like, I'm not good with money, but you don't recognize that. What you actually have is a disorder that has neurobiological and psychological changes. Again, many people with this condition just don't even know they have it.
So even if you ask them, Do you have a problem with gambling? they'll say no. What we have seen is that when you expand gambling, if you then expand gambling. Addiction Treatment and prevention, that could keep the incidence and prevalence rate of the condition right around 1. So that's a good thing, and we know that that's what happens. Is that when these casinos expand, there's always more money and more resources to go back and do responsible gambling or gambling addiction treatment.
I think, though, when you look at other addictions, like alcohol, that's like 13 of the United States population. Tobacco 13, but tobacco used to be as high as what? 30 35. And there are a lot of public health measures that pushed it down, but it never went down to zero.
And I think that's the same thing with gambling disorders that we're finding that there's always going to be a small, but very significant percentage of the population that's the most vulnerable to this disorder. And even if you expand more and more and more and more, you know you're always going to develop more cases. But hopefully we don't press that up to 3, 5, 10 of the population. All we know is that gambling revenue in 2022 is at an all-time high across all the boards, whether it's mobile sports betting, brick and mortar casino. But again, population is growing.
And again, gambling as a form of entertainment has become something that the American public has said. This is no different than going to the movies, this is no different than going to an amusement park. Go back to the late 70s, where let's say, you and I said, Oh, let's go out for a night of gambling. That would be probably to an underground or illegal place that would not be seen as something acceptable or allowable by family and friends.
Yeah, so kind of going back to that, you know what percentage of the people are addicted or have a gambling disorder? How do we define a gambling disorder?
So there's a set of nine diagnostic criteria that are listed in the DSM-5 handbook for psychiatric disorders. And a lot of these criteria would be things like tolerance, withdrawal, chasing losses, gambling more than you intended, inability to stop gambling despite harm. But when people say to me, Do I have a gambling addiction? Dr. Fong, I'll say very simply. Does your continued gambling create harm or does it make your life better? If it creates harm in your life physical harm, psychological harm, financial harm, social harm, and you continue to gamble, then it's probably in the zone of gambling disorder.
If you gamble and maybe you lose some money, but it doesn't harm. And you say, Yeah, I spent more than I should have. But I really enjoyed the trip to Vegas with my friends. That's not harm, and if there's no ongoing, continued gambling for long periods of time, then that's just entertainment. And I think that's really the definition I look at is when gambling creates harm, and instead of stopping, you continue to gamble regardless.
Yeah, but I think you were saying before that. Sometimes people aren't even aware that it is causing harm, right? That they think the problem is their wife, or they're just getting unlucky or whatever. So how do you deal with that? So, most of the people who come to see us in.
Treatment here at UCLA, whether for gambling or any other substance use disorder. By the time they see us, things are pretty bad, things are really severe. There's significant financial damage, there's significant physical problems, there's a crisis at home.
There's a job that could potentially be lost. There's a why now moment. And I think when people don't realize that, it takes several years for an addiction to develop, whether it's substance or behavioral. And those early signs, those tend to be the ones where, again, they're in denial. Oh, I don't really have a problem. And then we go through the diagnostic criteria and it turns out they meet several of them.
And then we educate. We say, well, based on my interview of you and the history I have here, you are meeting criteria for addiction, for gambling disorder. And it's just like hypertension, you don't know that you have high blood pressure until you actually have someone check, so it's the same way.
And oftentimes, we have patients who say to me, Oh, now I understand why. I have a gambling addiction and I don't have a problem with luck. I had a case just recently of a woman who, for years, would gamble $3,000, $4,000 a week and she could still do her job. She had friends, she had money on her table, she didn't have a lot of distress or guilt or anger about the gambling.
But when her job found out she was gambling the job's money, then it becomes a crime. But once we educated her that what you were doing is a crime and you were feeding a gambling behavior. Then what it was was that she was living in a state of denial. And that actually was one of the symptoms of gambling addiction. So that's what makes it so hard is that people don't realize that what they're doing is a sign of addiction.
But they have life problems. And is that kind of like a quality of addiction? That kind of your brain plays tricks on you like that and kind of tries to rationalize? Yeah, I think so, I mean.
It's definitely part of the experience, and the experience is that addiction is a general rule, not just gambling, but all substances. Psychologically, it's about avoidance, it's about connection, it's about handling and trying to soothe internal emotional distress, depression, anxiety, trauma, misery.
It's about seeking escape, emotional numbing and safety, and that's psychologically where you get a lot of it. But addiction, physically, is also about dealing with urges and craving. So there's always this interesting combination between biological and psychological signs and symptoms, yeah.
By the time you get a diagnosis.
Do you know kind of like statistics about, like, how likely? Someone has committed some sort of illegal act to fuel their addiction, or has lost a partner or lost a job? In the old days, some.
Criteria Committing an illegal act of finance gambling was an actual symptom of gambling disorder, so committing a crime was actually a symptom. No different than, say, chest pain for a heart attack, or shortness of breath for asthma. They removed that criteria because what was a crime in one state may not be a crime somewhere else or in another country. So it wasn't universally attached.
What I can tell you from our patients who enter our State of California gambling treatment program is that. About a quarter of them talk about wanting to kill themselves. About a quarter of them have actually tried to kill themselves. About 15 percent of them have committed some crime to finance their gambling. What kinds of crimes? Things like stealing your husband or wife's credit card, insurance fraud, embezzling from work, robbery, prostitution, a lot of fraud, a lot of taking out a loan with no intention of paying it back.
That's a crime, so a wide range of things that they never would have committed had they not developed a gambling disorder. So we're seeing that in patients that come through treatment. I do a lot of forensic work, so I get a lot of cases where the crime is committed. And then, in the course of the lawyer understanding how and why that crime happened, picks up that. There was a gambling problem that fueled that crime, so again, it goes back to Were it not for the gambling disorder, the crime never would have been committed.
Is lying? Is that also a symptom? It is so lying about, and it's not just lying once, it's repeatedly lying about your gambling behavior. So that could be, Did you win? Oh, I won.
And you lost, don't lie, or where were you last night? I was watching the game with Ben when you in fact were in the casino.
When you ask patients, Well, why do you lie? Well, I just don't want to create conflict, it's just easier that way, or, you know what, it's just automatic.
But what we all know that repeatedly lying inside of any relationship is going to create problems.
Inside that relationship, what do you kind of say to people who don't think that gambling is an addiction? They just think it's kind of a series of bad decisions. So this is an area we get.
A lot of where people are trying to understand what gambling disorder is. And again, oftentimes they do think, Oh, it's just who Johnny is, or Johnny's just greedy, or he's impulsive, or he doesn't, you know, very well. Disciplined. We get that a lot. That's not what this is, I think.
For family members, I often say, you know, you look at how your loved one is acting. If they're acting in ways that create conflict and damage, or they're stalled in their life development. This is not because they want to, this is not because they don't care about you or about their lives, this is about their mind and their brain not functioning in a optimal way. So, for whatever reason, they're having difficulty containing their thoughts about gambling. And then they're doing behaviors that really go against their own better judgment, or go against their, you know, their health and wellness.
And when families start to understand well, why do they keep doing that? And we explain to them that there are now structure and functional changes in their brain. And that helps explain to patients and families why someone will continue to lie. Why they would just stay inside a casino despite losing, why they would sit at a blackjack table for eight to ten to 12 hours. Even though they're not having fun, you know? And that's how we explain some of those.
Behaviors Yeah, I think, maybe, you know, with drug addiction, you know, you think, well, there's. They're under the influence of the drug, or then they're under the influence of, like, withdrawal from the drug. And maybe it's kind of easier to understand some of the irrational behaviors from that framework, you know, maybe that's just not the right way to think about addiction in general. But can you talk about kind of what the equivalent would be with gambling addiction, or what the misunderstanding about addiction in general is? Yeah, so we get.
That a lot with gambling disorder is when patients say I wasn't intoxicated, I wasn't high, I wasn't under the influence of anything. But behavioral addictions are non-substance-related disorders, like gambling. The drug or the substance that's being altered is our own internal brain, so it's our neurochemicals, dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline. That's what's different.
So the brain of a person with gambling disorder has a different kind of structure and functioning their neurochemicals work differently than those who don't. How those changes came about, that's a really interesting story. Is it? Through genetics they're made differently?
Yes, is it through early life experiences that their brain development changed? yes, is it through the gambling games themselves that are altering how people's brains are functioning? yes.
And so, yeah, we had talked.
About kind of, like, you know, I guess it's not a criteria anymore. But that with the gambling disorder, committing crimes is very common. So how should the criminal justice system treat someone who's committed a crime? You know, that may have been influenced by their gambling?
Every judge, every court has a different view on these things. I've had some judges that say it doesn't matter if a person had a brain tumor. And if they committed a crime that was against the law, etiology of that crime does not matter. I've had other judges that are, wow. Now that I understand that explanation for the criminal behavior, that'll help me with sentencing. I worked on a number of cases where it was clear there was just one disorder, it was gambling disorder.
I've had other cases where it's a mixture. There's antisocial personality, there's depression, there's substance use disorder, there's trauma. And all those things potentially could lead to, you know, opportunities and crimes of opportunity. But I think that's why it gets very, very complex, because it isn't always sometimes just clear. Because of the gambling addiction, this is why they committed a crime. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times it tends to be a much more.
Complex story. And do we see other disorders co-occurring with gambling disorder?
Absolutely so that tends to be the rule, rather than the exception. Depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, other substance use disorders very common. And that's true for all addictions, because, again, addictions are all centered in around the same central region of the brain. That also are very close to mood disorders and anxiety. And so many reasons why people start using substances.
Is to deal with depression, anxiety, or ADHD first, you know, kind of like a self-medication hypothesis. So that's why I think these two things tend to go hand in hand. And you also think about as addiction continues, you know, there's a lot more misery, a lot more stress, just intense difficulties that also then fuel ongoing depression and anxiety.
After the break, Dr. Fung discusses how sociopathy can co-occur with gambling disorder.
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People with gambling disorder. When their money runs out, you have two choices either a you stop gambling and try and walk away from it and try to rebuild your life naturally, or with treatment. Or b. You seek out other sources of money. And in the modern day age, if I ran out of money, where am I going to go get it?
You know, credit cards, online loans, borrowing from friends. The question is, when you seek money from other people, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to get more money to get back to? Even are you trying to get money to pay off? Other people you owe that you're afraid, are actually going to hurt you or damage your reputation. Or, you know, are you just going to get in? And you spend it on a bunch of different things? Which then says, maybe it's not about gambling, but it's about power and control.
So if someone gets a big chunk of money from someone else. And they spend a bunch on gambling and a bunch on clothes, and a bunch on fancy cars and fancy trips. To me, that may not be exclusively a gambling disorder, it may be someone who tends to be more sociopathic and is just willing to take advantage of others to get money to benefit themselves. And is that something you see co-occurring with gambling disorder? Absolutely, yeah, you do.
And I think that's where sometimes it gets mixed up. Because, you know, if you're truly sociopathic and you really don't care about the rights of others, then gambling is a perfect activity because it's for you. But vast majority of the gamblers I treat do not have antisocial personality disorder. There is a thing with.
Sociopathy, and like, thrill-seeking and kind of super physiological stimuli or things that a lot of people would find unpleasant, right? Yeah, the whole kind of risk-seeking.
Sensation-seeking? They also have what we call kind of very low loss aversion, meaning they can tolerate a lot of losses and not really be like, they're like, whatever. So you think about a lot of gambling, why it persists? It isn't just urges and cravings to gamble, it's that losses you just sustain, don't hurt.
They hurt, but then a couple of days later, a week later, that hurt is erased. To say, Well, you know what? I'm feeling more optimistic, I want to go back. So that's where, you know, there's a lot of confusion because you see this again, repeated pattern, just going back. Even though it's creating harm. That people mistake that as just greed or lack of self-discipline, or lack of self-control, when, in fact, it's just not bothered by the losses at all.
Yeah, so this guy.
Despite his losses, or, you know, it seems impossible that he wasn't losing a bunch of gambling. But he kind of continued to insist that overall, he was a winner. He did a lot of betting on kind of sports and horse racing, where he thought he had insider knowledge. Or he was smarter than the average person, and therefore he could win. On average. Is that a thing that's common?
You know, it is, I mean, with gambling disorder again, the line I'm winning and winning and winning, but you're not. That's one of the diagnostic criteria. You know a lot of this, covering up how bad the damage really is. And also not recognizing how far behind you've fallen in life. Not having a sustainable career, not having additional hobbies, not having, you know, social connections outside of gambling.
You know, oftentimes, when patients come in, they have very few friends anymore. Or they have no career prospects, or they're really struggling with their close personal relationships and they'd rather avoid them. So you end up getting a lot of people not spending time with their families and just vanishing for days on end, and that creates difficulties. So again, you know, kind of the story, what he's describing, you know, he's covering up the truth. He's covering up a lot of the facts. Which are the gambling behaviors, not adding to the quality of his life. It's taking it away.
It's hurting it in many ways.
So he ends up eventually kidnapping some family friend's son, trying to ransom that son, and the child ended up dead. He confessed to his involvement in it, but he could never really explain why he did it. Obviously, this is a very rare kind of crime, but is that description of behavior something that you've encountered before? Well, we know that people with gambling disorder do.
Not have an increased rate of committing violent acts, that doesn't happen. We know that the predictors of people who commit violent physical acts are going to be things like past history committing violent acts. Sociopathy, antisocial behavior, substance use disorder while intoxicated, things like that, trauma, exposure to violence and things like that. So I think, at least in my experience, that's the sort of thing with just when it comes to gambling disorder, they're not likely to commit crimes of anything.
They're actually probably more likely to be victims of crime, domestic violence and things like that. Classically, people would think about gamblers for many, many years in the 50s, 60s and 70s, like, Oh, if you develop a gambling problem, you're going to be a victim. Think like, Oh, the bookie's going to come break your arm and things like that. Things that are shown in the movies, that doesn't happen either.
You know, that's very dramatic, it doesn't happen that often. The threat of violence can happen, particularly with underground, unregulated kind of operations. But not in folks who are gambling in brick and mortar and regulated casinos and things like that. I think in the stories, I've certainly seen stories in the past that have resulted in homicide or domestic violence, or suicides. Of, you know, things that are physically very violent and very tragic. I think in anything like this, without knowing the details, it's hard to opine. But basically that. It would be highly unlikely that just having a gambling disorder would then lead someone on to do these other very complex behaviors and schemes all around the idea of getting money.
So again, the vast majority of folks I work with who need to get money, they don't resort to kidnapping schemes, they do banks and loans and robberies and things that don't require a lot. If I were interviewing the client, I'd say to him at the time you committed this act, what was your intent to do with the money? I had a guy once who robbed a bank, he committed a bank robbery.
He got the money, he got his card. He literally drove from the bank straight to the casino, and the police picked him up while he was at the blackjack table. Gambling stolen money from the bank. That story clearly tells you that's not like someone with a really severe gambling disorder.
That wasn't a masterminded plot. To get money to do other things with. That was not a crime that well mapped out. That was an impulse driven by untreated gambling disorder. So that's how I think about that relationship. I don't know how that helps in this particular case.
Again, I don't usually like to opine on specific cases, but in general, yeah, that's kind of how I think about.
These things, yeah, this guy, I mean, so. He said he had a lot of shame about kind of borrowing stuff from family, friends and people like that. And you know, being so far in debt, he couldn't repay it. And you know, kind of this was going to be that job to correct these things he'd done in the past.
But then I think there was also evidence that he was like, shopping to buy a new house. And um, and some of this stuff that you're mentioning when maybe there's more of a sociopathic.
Kind of right, right, yeah. And again, it's always the question is, and I think about in a forensic world, is, can gambling disorder explain the behavior better?
It's not an excuse for the behavior, but it's an explanation so that the court, the families and the victims of the crime can.
Understand how it occurred? Yeah, I think at the top of yours, I'd seen something that, you know, you feel like a lot of your patients. They're kind of like, missing meaning or purpose. Yeah, yeah.
I.
Mean, it's, it's again. The core of all addictions is the feeling of lost connection, a feeling of avoidance, a feeling of worthlessness. And the antidote to a lot of that is for us. Not just to have structure, but to have a feeling of usefulness, to feel like I'm worthy and to be part of the world. And oftentimes, many of these addictions are so easy as an opportunity to say, well, I'm hurting so much psychologically and physically, I just need an escape. I need to use this as a way to manage how bad I'm feeling about myself or about the way the world is going. That's a simplified version, but that's what I see.
All the time is, people would say, well, of course, I would stop gambling if there were other things in my life that were much, much more meaningful, but there isn't. So how do I get those docs? how do I find those opportunities?
That's really where it's very, very, very hard. Yeah, yeah, so it's almost like they feel like.
They have nothing to lose anyway. Yeah, and it's even more. It's an experience that, well, my life doesn't matter, I'm not worthy, it doesn't matter whether I'm alive or dead.
I've already burned bridges or I have no one around. There's no really reason for me to live, or I've done so much damage to my life. My family would be better off if I'm dead because at least they can cash out insurance. You can't reverse addiction until people actually value their own lives and are willing to do the work to create a life of health and wellness.
What do you think is the best way to raise awareness about pathological gambling and the problems it can cause, while at the same time not contributing to the stigma?
Yeah, we're doing more and more of this kind of work, and I think just having an open discussion and just humanizing it, just recognizing that. We now have clear scientific evidence that gambling disorder is a psychiatric condition that has the same neurobiological changes as amphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, substance use disorders. I think the antidote to all stigma is empathy and understanding, and humanizing what people are going through. I still think there's a tremendous degree of when people hear so-and-so gambled excessively, so-and-so had a gambling problem. That our first immediate link is where that person does not have good self-control. Or that person was greedy, or that person was selfish, or that person didn't care about the rights of others and only wanted to have fun for themselves.
That's where I think automatically a lot of people are still going in their head, whether they want to say it or not. That's the stigma that comes to it. Instead of thinking, Wow, this person lost a tremendous amount of money and they continue to gamble and all of these horrible things. Wow. Could it be that they had a really severe gambling disorder that was never treated?
I think until we can correct that where it gets to the point where we are with heroin or fentanyl. Wow, that's a person really struggling with opioid problems. What can we do to get them into treatment? what can we do to support them?
Are you starting to see patients now that are day trading on apps or losing their money through?
Crypto and stuff like that. Oh, absolutely, there's no doubt. I mean, that's probably, I think the greatest, fastest space that we're seeing. It's just gambling.
It's just a different form of gambling than we know it. Instead of calling it slots or video poker or sports betting, it's options or day trading and crypto coins and things like that. But people don't think about it as gambling, so they don't tend to call it a gambling helpline. What happens is that people end up losing large amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And now their family member says, you need to see this guy, because the family member sees it as gambling. They see the same things the chasing, the desperation, the inability to stop, the arguments, the lying, the hiding.
And they're like, Oh, it's gambling, and so the family member recognizes it as gambling. They'll look for help, they'll see a gambling addiction treatment program, then they'll get them coming in.
But oftentimes, when I talk to the person, I'll say, Do you think you were gambling? They're like, No, I was investing, no, I was day trading, I was putting money on options. We just reversed the term.
And I say, you were gambling on options? No, I wasn't, I was investing. And you start to get these debates and I'll say you don't have a special license.
You don't have special training, you lost a large amount of money, you have a lot of emotional problems, financial problems. That sounds like gambling to me. You don't know what's going to happen to your money.
You weren't investing and saying, I'm putting my money in and I know I'm going to leave it in there for two years, three years, five years, that's investing. To me. A seven-day option expiry doesn't sound like investing to me. I'm not a finance guy, but that sounds like a seven-day gamble. But the truth of the matter is, what I'm seeing is, yes, people are starting to come in with these problems.
And I think if we made that connection and talked about that openly, we'd find more and more folks who would come in to say, yeah. My life is hurt by my online trading and I need some help with that to keep that hurt to a minimum. I think we've talked a.
Lot about how gambling has been changing, what direction is treatment and how we deal with disorders. Where is that going right now? Well, gambling disorder treatment has always been.
Aligned predominantly within addiction treatment services, so other substance use disorder, things like that, so we don't have an F.D.A.-approved medication for gambling disorder. We have a lot of different kinds of psychotherapies that work very, very well, that also work for other addictions, so we know that treatment works.
Our State of California Gambling Treatment Program, we've been tracking treatment outcomes for nearly 12 years, and treatment works. People enter treatment, they get psychotherapy, they get counseling, they get 12-step support. By the time they leave treatment. Their lives are better, they're gambling less, they're happier, they're more functional.
So we know that individualized treatment, as it stands in a traditional sense, works. So we have residential programs, we have intensive outpatient programs, so all of those things seem to work, and they work pretty well. The real difficulty, I think again, is getting people with this disorder to enter treatment and actually look at their behavior in a really thoughtful way. To say, is what you're doing really healthy?
How do we get people in the earlier stage of this disorder?
To seek help. I think that's a very tough question. I think sometimes when I think about this stuff and how easy it is to gamble on an app, and then just how advanced it seems. Companies are getting. With kind of behavioral engineering and nudging your behavior in different directions, that it's almost kind of like a losing battle, that the human mind stays constant, but the technology?
Keeps getting better and better or something, yeah, you know, the way I think that I say a lot is that. The human brain hasn't changed that much in the last couple hundred years, but our society and things that can tickle that brain have. So the idea that our smartphones, which is really the biggest driver, can bring gambling to us 24 hours a day, you know? Whereas 10 years ago, that didn't even exist.
What implications does that have for the whole generation coming up and for all humans that are living on Earth right now? Will there come a time where these are too much? And they create what we might consider like a gambling crisis, where too much of our population is really falling aside and have developing problems? I don't know, I mean, we had the opioid crisis, you know where? Again, 15 years ago, many were like, we didn't even see this coming. So I don't know what the next 10, 15 years will look like when you have this much unfettered access to gambling and technologies.
I mean, we could see something like a gambling crisis, or we might see just the same thing that we've seen for many years. Which is that there was always going to be a small percentage of the population that had gambling disorder. And then you're just going to have more and more people who spend time on gambling as a form of entertainment, and other more traditional forms of entertainment are going to become less and less popular. Anything else, no. That's great just for anyone who is just curious about their own gambling behavior, or concerned about someone in their own family or social circle. That the first step should always be to just get an assessment, just get a consultation with a therapist or a gambling treatment specialist, just like you would. If you're worried about your weight, or you're worried about headaches, or you're worried about blood in your stools. That you should not wait to get a professional to weigh in and give you an opinion on what's actually happening, I think that's the real strategy is.
I wish I would see more patients who came in after, you know, enduring a gambling loss and it creating some concern, but yet not having full-blown gambling addiction. And I think that that would be important for anywhere in America. You can call 1-800-Gambler, 1-800-Gambler to get access to services or professionals, and that's an easy number to remember for folks.
For more information, including pictures, find us on Social at the Ransom podcast or visit our website ransompodcast.
Com Ransom is researched and written by Ben Kebrick and hosted by M.e. Art Rascone. production and sound design by Ben Kebrick. Aaron Mason and Trent Sell, who also did the mixing. Co-created by Austin Miller for Podcast One executive producer Eli Dvorkin.
For Workhouse Media executive producer Paul Anderson and for KSL Podcasts executive producer Cheryl Worsley, Ransom is produced by KSL Podcasts in association with Podcast One and Workhouse Media.
If you think you might have a problem with gambling, please call 1-800-Gambler. And if you're worried about a friend or family member, I hope the information in this episode can help you start a conversation.
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