Locked In with Ian Bick - Gambler Reveals Ingenious Bank Tricks for Funding Online Casino Bets | Rob Minnick

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

A seasoned gambler exposes the clever tactics he used to outsmart banks and secure funds for online casino betting. Hear the inside story of his ingenious methods, the risks he took, and the unexpected consequences. But the story doesn't end there—he also shares his journey to recovery from gambling addiction, detailing the steps he took to regain control of his life and finances. This episode dives deep into the world of high-stakes gambling, the lengths some will go to fuel their addiction, and the inspiring path to recovery. Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Connect with Rob Minnick: https://hoo.be/rob_odaat Creative direction, design, assets, support by FWRD: https://www.fwrd.co Buy Merch: https://lockedinbrand.com Use code lockedin at checkout to get 20% off your order Timestamps: 00:00:00 - intro 00:04:14 - Growing up and Career Aspirations 00:08:26 - Reflection on College Education and Career Path 00:12:29 - Starting Out as a Sports Bettor 00:16:38 - The World of Bookies 00:20:54 - Dealing with Bookmakers 00:25:08 - The Thrill of Live Sports Betting 00:29:32 - The Discovery of Gambling at College 00:33:53 - Trust issues and constant lies 00:38:07 - The Feeling of Losing Everything 00:42:29 - The Danger of Normalizing High Stakes Gambling 00:46:47 - The Compulsive Gambling Cycle and Deceptive Practices 00:51:14 - The Evolution of Banking Systems 00:55:33 - Attending Gambling Addiction Meetings 00:59:52 - Misconceptions About Gambling Addiction 01:04:13 - Changing the Messaging of Addiction Awareness 01:08:27 - Unique Perspectives on Struggles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants to switch you to MintMobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available.

Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mintmobile.com. If you deposit to a casino with Venmo, now that's not credit, it's your debit, but say you have $500 in your bank account and you make a $500 deposit on a Friday. That $500 deposit won't clear until Monday. So if you try to make another $500 deposit, when they check to see with your bank, if you have the funds, they're getting a screenshot of your bank account from Friday. So you could keep depositing $500 until you've hit the deposit limit on that book over and over again, even if you only have the initial $500. Welcome back to the Lockton with the InBIC podcast. On today's episode, we have Rob Minnick, here to reveal his struggles with a gambling addiction

and how he was able to overcome it. I think this is the first gambling addiction story we've had on this show, and it hits close to home, as I've had issues with the past with gambling. Thank you to all the listeners who tune in week after week to the show. Remember to leave us a review on Spotify or Apple and hit us with that follow and subscribe. button on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify. And remember to follow me on my Instagram at Ian underscore Bick. We have some really exciting things coming down the pipeline, and I can't wait to share

it with you guys. Now, without further ado, sit back, relax, and get ready to lock in with Rob Minnick. Rob, welcome to Locked in. You're coming to us from New Jersey today, right? Yes, sir. Awesome. Did you grow up in New Jersey? Yep, down south.

So if you drew a line between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, right in the middle. It's a little town called Washington Township. Ah, right near Atlantic City, huh? Yep. I guess that didn't work out so well. Not at all, no. So I would say you are our first on the show that, besides myself, because I was like borderline, you know, having a gambling addiction, big risk taker, that you yourself had a gambling addiction. And you're very open about it on your social media.

You've built like a brand talking about it. Yeah. I appreciate you calling it that. I don't think anyone's called it that. Yeah. Calling it a brand? Yeah, I think that, you know, people see it as, you know, just sharing stories, which at SpaceCore, that's what it is. But, yeah, I share my story of gambling addiction because for a really long time, and as you just mentioned, I'm the first one to come out and say it on here.

No one knows, you don't know who around you has a gambling problem. So I thought I was the only one in the world. And of course, that's not true. But for a really long time, I felt isolated, didn't know what to do. and then when I was experiencing all the negatives, the bad behaviors that I was doing and suffering the consequences, I had no idea where to get help for it because I didn't think that existed. You're also very young.

So to be young and open about talking about it, I don't think that's very common. I read books, especially when I was in prison, about some celebrities that had gambling addictions, landed them in prison or guys that went to prison for fraud. Gambling is usually a big factor because they're using the fraud to propel a gambling lifestyle and those are all guys in their 40s, 30s or 40s. So to be young and open about it, I think that's like a very unique perspective. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think it's honestly a reflection of online gambling now and the speed that you can really screw things up for yourself because it used to be, I mean, you got to drive in, you got to hide it from everyone, what

you're doing on a Friday or a Saturday. Now you can roll out of bed and just light your life on fire. And I pretty much did that repeatedly over a six-year period. But just the speed of it, I felt it getting worse and worse. And I mean, I'm sure we'll dive into it throughout the episode, but it had gotten to the point where I could not have had it get any worse and been able to stay sane. Yeah, you could literally lose everything in seconds on the app. Yeah.

Before I gave up gambling completely, I just did like a few things on the phone. And it's like, you can literally lose everything and continue to wipe yourself out on these phones. Like, it's just so dangerous. It's not anything like what it used to be. Yeah, man. I mean, I don't usually like to compare between different addictions because every addiction is addiction.

But when you look at a gambling addiction, there's no overdose. You can keep going. They'll take any money that you offer them. There's no money that's good versus bad. It's all the same to the industry. So if your money's coming from your checking account or from your mom's savings drawer, it's all the same to them. So you can really overextend. So growing up, did you come from a two-parent household?

siblings? What was that like? Yeah, mom and dad, brother. Everything was really status quo, really good. I never felt like I was struggling. I mean, we weren't super well off, but we weren't poor by any means. And it was just always normal, natural, nothing too high, nothing too low. When I think about gambling, looking back, it was always present. Like, family would play little card games. Parents would take us to Atlantic City for dinners. They'd play a couple hands of blackjack. But it was never anything besides entertainment for anyone around me. But yeah, thinking back, it was just very normal, at least to me. Yeah, did you go to public school, private school?

Yeah, public school the whole way. How would your friends describe you if we had them here today? Loud. You loud? You look very quiet. No, I think it's because I wore a sweater. It's always a sweater. No, man. I think I've always been a very outgoing person.

I did well in school, went to a good college, did it all, but never felt like I was pleasing myself. It always felt like I was just trying to maintain this image of being the guy that always made the right decision. Of course, those closest to me would know I don't always make the right decision at all. But yeah, I would say an outgoing person. What was like your aspiration career-wise in high school if you had one? It shifted a few times, but I think that if I was to guess the one that I held for the longest time, it was probably to be a lawyer until had some like minor legal trouble in high school, just like a drinking ticket, like underage drinking ticket. And I saw the mundane lifestyle of a local lawyer.

And I thought, well, I don't want to do that. I wanted to be like the lawyers on like suits, like Harvey Spector. But so I guess that being a lawyer was there for a while. But I never had a strong conviction to be anything specific. You know, speaking of suits, one, I just finished it because I just got into it since it's been on Netflix. Amazing show. Oh, yeah.

Even started watching the Pearson spin-off, but they canceled that after one season. Did they? Yeah, that was all right. It was kind of slow, and they leave you on a cliffhanger after they canceled it. But the brother of the, you know, the roommate, his roommate and the one that's like the drug dealer, the guy that plays a brother has been at the studio. He's a big documentarian. He does like stuff for Netflix, produced the HBO one that they did about me. Oh, wow. So he's been working here at the studio. We're working on a couple projects. And he looks exactly like his brother. brother who plays this role. And he was like, yeah, my brother's played this role in suits. I was like, wow, that's incredible. I knew you looked familiar from somewhere.

He was good. He was a good actor. And, I mean, one more suits reference, I guess. My parents were poking fun to me because we're up in Danbury. I don't know if you say where the studio is on the feet or not, but that's where, you know, Mike gets sent to prison. And they were like, oh, stop in and say hi to Mike Ross while you're up there. Yeah, that's so funny. I mean, and that federal prison depicted in the show, looks nothing like, because I was in Danbury for a little bit, it's nothing like what was in the show. It looks like they probably did go to a federal prison, but it wasn't what the Danbury one was. But it is funny that he goes to SCI Danbury because they were in New York City.

So that was the closest fed prison. That was a camp that where Mike would have went. But yeah, it was interesting to see that dynamic. What they had on the show was kind of a mix between like a holdover facility and an actual low security prison. Oh, well. So did you graduate high school? Yes, sir. Okay. Went to college? Where do you go? Georgetown, down in Washington, D.C. Oh, fancy. Yeah, it costs a lot of money. What do you go to Georgetown for?

I ended up, well, I got in to go for business school. I took one accounting class, recognized that I was not going to make it through business school with my sanity intact. And I switched to anthropology with the intention of going to law school. And as college would go on, I mean, I was gambling the entire time. My focus was never really strong enough on the academics that I felt, you know, good about it. So, I mean, I took the classes, but I couldn't tell you a thing that I learned, really, this point. Did you graduate college? I did. So you went through the whole four-year degree and it's not even really what you're doing now?

Nothing to do with what I'm doing now. I could have skipped it completely. When I think about it, I always would have graduated. but I think it did a little bit of cosmetic work that it was during COVID and all the classes got rid of the GPA. So it was just you passed or you failed and did enough to pass. I was even reading some of these Ivy League schools that were getting rid of the SATs, but I guess now they're bringing it back. I think what was it, Harvard or Yale or something, tried that.

I think a lot of schools kind of dropped it as a requirement, but they allowed you to send it in optionally. And then they kind of picked and choose from there. I don't know what the intention is maybe to try to get specific. demographic more or less, I'm not sure. If you could do it all again, would you go to college? Knowing what I know now, definitely not. Had I kept the intention of actually following through to law school, I would have done the same thing.

But, you know, knowing that I'm now, I make content about gambling addiction, I definitely could have skipped the bill. What about your kids when you have kids down the road? If you want kids, would you send them to college? It would be very situational. I mean, there's professions where you have to go, you know, science, doctors, lawyer, things where you need the advanced degree to qualify to do the job. But for the most part, I think you can pretty much learn most of the things you want to learn without going to school for it.

I mean, you've got a news level set up in here, and I don't know if you went to production school for it, but it looks like you're doing good. You learn on YouTube. Exactly. You can learn so much on YouTube. Oh yeah. It's insane. So everyone in addiction or even people that went to prison, and they always have kind of like that one defining moment where something triggered them to try the thing that they would later become addicted to. What was that for you? I think it was a reflection of growing up in the Philly,

near the Philly area. So when we think of our sports teams, it's the Phillies, Flyers, Sixers, Eagles. Every event in that area is gathered around a sporting event. So if you want to have a family gathering, it's going to happen on a Sunday, it's going to start at one because that's when the Eagles kick off. If you're going to hang out with your boys on a Friday,

you're going to meet up for drinks at seven because that's when the Phillies game starts. And naturally, watching all the games, you think you're developing this really intense knowledge of the sport. Like, the more I watch, the more I should know. And you get this belief once, you know, you see all these ads of, if I know a lot about this sport,

maybe I can make a lot of money gambling on it or at the time that I was doing it playing fantasy sports on it. So I thought to myself, wow, I can keep doing what I've always done, with my friends and now I can make money while I do it. Like, it was a no-brainer at the time. Working jobs like working at an ice cream shop, you know, you're making $8 an hour. Now all of a sudden you could do a $5 entry and you could win, say, $100, just doing what you perceive to love to do. And I think that was my defining kind. It wasn't necessarily one moment. It was one opportunity

of I can take my daily routine, my daily schedule and take it to a level where I can make money doing it. When people talk about what they want to do for work, like, what's your dream job? It's to do something you love and get paid for it. At the time, I loved to watch sports, and I thought I could get paid for watching it. So when you first started out gambling and putting your feet into it, were you just winning all of the time? Because I feel like if you start gambling and you start losing, you're not going to have that mentality of, oh, this could be a potential business. Absolutely. So when I started the daily fantasy sports, it was more or less breaking even. But when I shifted into sports betting, just a couple months after that,

that was the period of time where Kevin Durant was on the Warriors. And I think they won 72 games out of the – 73 games out of the 82 that they play. And I kept betting on the Warriors. So it was like I kept winning. And I thought to myself, oh, it's because I have this advanced knowledge of basketball or I'm great with statistics. Like I knew they would come back and win this game. they just happened to have statistically one of the best years ever

and I used that to reason with myself to say I was a good gambler because I saw that opportunity. And what was your tactic? Are you betting the money line? Are you playing points? What are you looking at? Where are you getting your information from? It would delve into everything by the end of it.

But looking back at them, it would be to wait until halftime because statistically, I believe this is verifiable. They were the best third quarter team ever. And they would always somehow find themselves in a, close game or slightly down at half time, seemingly from what I would watch. And so I'd bet the money line when it was live and it was, you know, a better price I perceived it as. And what was your typical bet? At that time, you know, it was smaller amounts because it was still really early on. And as we go a little bit deeper into the story, I'll kind of get a little bit

more vague as to the amounts, not out of necessarily embarrassment, but I find that with a addiction, people are always looking for a reason to keep going, and I certainly did. So when I would hear that people lost huge amounts of money, I'd say to myself, oh, well, that's what addiction is. My addiction is not an addiction. Mine's just, I'm on a cold streak, or I'm losing. They lost real big amounts of money. And so I just don't like to give people, you know, that reason to continue justifying their gambling, because it might not be as long as mine got. Now, when you first started out, are you doing it on the phone? Are you going into a casino or are you going to a private bookie? What did that look like? So when I first started out, I was 18 and then, you know, 19 was when I got into a regular sports betting.

So I couldn't go to an in-person casino because here, you know, it's 21. But I was doing a little bit with a bookie and a little bit on a site called Bavada or most of it on a site called Bavada, which kind of operates in a legal gray area and it's out of Latvia. in certain jurisdictions in the U.S., like Washington, D.C., at the time, where I was going to school, you could use Bavada legally. There was nothing illegal about using it, even though I was 19, and it's regular sports betting. It was casino games, slots, blackjack, like everything, all online. And I used the bookie for larger bets because I was gambling money I didn't have. And he would extend, you know, the standard credit line that you'll see with a bookie. It's not like you have to make a deposit like you do at an online casino, and you gamble with that.

that, they'll say, yeah, you can wager up to, you know, $2,500 this week, say, for example, or $1,000, whatever it might have been at the time. So it was a mixture of high-frequency online and bigger bets. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft.

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I've heard of Bavada because in prison, that's what guys would use to sports bet on their burner cell phones, but their boost mobile sports, uh, um, boost mobile phone plans on these burner phones because Bavada used to be one of the first, uh, sports gambling, like online in the country. Yeah, that's interesting that you say that because I think of that viral video clip of the guy that was placing a parlay from, uh, I guess what would it be called a conjugal visit when, I don't think that's what it's called. There's not conjugal visits in the feds. I don't know how it is in the state.

I'm not sure what it was called necessarily, but he was talking to someone, and he was giving them a list of things to bet on, and he was getting recorded while he did it, and then the parlay hit, and people were saying, like, oh, this guy just got himself bail or something with the parlay from prison.

Sports betting is huge. Really? Like, it is one of the biggest hustles if you have the ticket. I got into it. That's where I first started to learn out of sports bet, or I don't even know if learns the right word, but just I would go show up. My bunk mate was like the bookie at one point.

I would show up with like 30 or 40 pouches of fish or books of stamps and they would have so much commissary, especially during football season. I almost, my first bet was like a seven or eight pick and I almost hit it, but then the suns blew it at the end. I was just picking random stuff. It was all luck. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't even watch the games.

But those, like, everyone's writing down their ticket. The bookies would go to the library, print out the spread, pass it around. And then everyone would fill it out on a little thing, submit it. And it was just like this whole big thing that guys are keeping records and a notebook. Guys are making thousands of dollars being the bookie. It's just like this whole, it's crazy. It's amazing. It's kind of surreal to hear that because I don't have much knowledge at all regarding prisons.

But you don't really imagine that's happening as someone on the outside that's never been in there. It's everywhere, man. Maybe you make some content talking about bookies versus in the real. world versus bookies in prison or something. Yeah, I think this is going to be a clip for sure. Definitely. So break us down how it works with a bookie because I feel like America has a general idea from movies of what it's like to deal with a bookie.

Like we see the movie The Gambler and everything like that. What's a real life experience? How do you find them and how does it work? I mean, I'm sure that there's those big-time mob boss type bookies. But my guy was a guy I worked with at a golf course and he was not intimidating at all. Essentially, they become agents of a larger bookmaker, and the larger bookmaker funnels it down to the next set of agents. And essentially what an agent is is a bookie, and they're given certain amounts of credit they're allowed to assign. They can ask their higher-ups, for lack of better word, for more credit to extend to their players.

And then they get a percentage of the losses, then it trickles up, and the high man collects the biggest of it. But essentially, you say, okay, I want to gamble. Maybe it's a guy you work with his friend of a friend who's a manager at a restaurant who happens to be an agent. And the agents will assign you credit on the site. So say it's $1,000 you get weekly. You'll start playing on, say, a Monday. And then as soon as Sunday comes, whatever your amount was, it could be negative 1,000. You could have lost it all.

Or say you won a little bit, and it's plus 500. At Sunday it cuts off, it resets back to that regular credit line, and you either send them what you've lost, or they would theoretically pay you what you want. And it typically functions on a one-week cycle, which actually, now that I think about it, led to a problem for me. And it was a very early sign of my gambling addiction, was that I had won one week, and then there was some type of delay. Like, I was away.

I had to come pick it up as cash, and I couldn't get it for a week. So in my head, you know, I had, say it was $500 to play with. I was like, oh, I can gamble this week more because, you know, I can lose that. It's whatever. It kind of gave me extra reasons to continue to play because I hadn't collected the money. I didn't have it yet. So it didn't feel like it was mine. Yeah, you're always with addiction, especially gambling, you're kind of always looking for an excuse as to why to double down on that bet or whatever move you're going to make next or why you need to take this money to.

put it onto this or there's always some kind of psychological aspect that comes with it. The human brain is incredible. And we can talk ourselves into doing almost anything, given the right set of circumstances. And when your brain becomes adapted to get it such a strong thrill from gambling and all you want to do is gamble because everything else feels like subpar, suboptimal, you will find a way to talk yourself into placing that next bet. Even though, you know, you lost your last 10, A week ago, you're in debt, you were getting texts from a bookie saying you had a money. Your mom's disappointed with you. She's crying because you just lost a bunch and you told her about it.

And then a couple days go by and you're like, I want to feel good again. You know, oh, it's fine because this settled over here or this guy owes me this. I can use this to place about mental gymnastics, but you find your way right back to it. So these bookies are sending money electronically too, like PayPal, Venmo, cash app? Yeah, it's very low security. I mean, they might VEMA you and say it's for like lunch. So what do they send out 1099s at the end of the year too? If they're putting a paper trail?

I mean, I have to imagine the majority of it's done in cash. I lost much more that I won. So most of it was to be sending it, yeah. But I imagine on their end, though, like they're getting all those transactions. Like from their standpoint, they're getting if there's 10 of you sending them money, that adds up. Yeah, there's probably. certain thresholds that at certain points they would say, you know, I can only accept cash or a crypto payment. Like they probably vary it, I would guess. But I never was on the bookmaking side.

Yeah. So these guys, what would have happened if you didn't pay them? At this low level, probably just a lot of complaining. But, you know, if things got a little bit more intensive, if the prices started to go up, the amounts wager would go up. Then, you know, you hear the stories in support groups, especially from like the old timers that really did the majority of their gambling with bookmakers that they would threaten to break their car or they would threaten to break their leg. Like the things that you see in the movies probably aren't very far off from reality. But again, it's at the level that I was using a bookie.

It was just, hey, man, can you please send me a VEMO? Because it's a couple days late. And are they charging interest or have they gone that at all? I didn't get down far enough, but I would imagine that there was probably interest. I was actually very fortunate that, well, I mean, not fortunate, but the times that I went into debt, I had someone bail me out in the sense that they paid it and then I paid them back. So I didn't have to deal with shady characters or even on the banking side, like high interest rates. I got off very, very lightly on that, but I wouldn't have if I continued.

So when you're like a normal person off the street and you go to, say, a bookmaker, no matter what level, how do they set the credit line if they have no idea who you are? word of mouth. I'd say, you know, when I met the guy that was my bookie and we were working together at the golf course, he knew how much I was making because he was working the same job. There's probably a realistic degree of certainty you can have about the lines that you extend to know that you'll actually get paid with him. And I'm comfortable sharing that amount back when I was first gambling. I had a $2,500 line of credit a week, which was probably about $4,000.

four times more than I could have paid if I had maxed it out every week. And eventually I did, you know. And 20, if you lost $2,500 a week consistently, that's a lot of money. And as an 18-year-old working for $15 an hour, it becomes, it starts to feel like an insurmountable amount of money at a certain point. Was there ever a time where, you know, maybe felt for your situation and said, hey, I'm going to cut you off, or are they just looking to keep having you get deeper and deeper and deeper. I actually did have that happen once. And then a second time the site had a glitch.

And I was like, you know, oh, if the site didn't glitch, like, I would have won because I would have picked this and this and this. He was just like, all right, man, forget it. Like, just don't talk to me anymore. And he cut me off. I was down. So he kind of, uh, he was like maybe an $800 bailout. So these bookies, these private bookies, they have sites that you can physically go on and place your bet? Well, they use sites like bet online. And, they do paper bets. So like if you think of paper trading with the stock market, they will give you an account where you would theoretically make the bets

using the odds that are generated by the actual bookmaker, but then you're betting with fake money that they credited you in there, and then they send it to you in real money or you send it to them. So you're playing monopoly money on as far as the book is concerned, but as far as the agent is concerned, that's the amount of credit that you were given. Now, when you place your bet, are you like obsessing over the game? To the minute.

What does that look like? It looks like you would imagine it to look, it looks like you would imagine it to look when you think about watching the game, but the real desperation comes when the game's not televised. Like if you're betting on a women's tennis match, right? Because you have to win your money back before tomorrow

or you're going to be owing money that you don't have and you're feeling that desperation, you're getting an app and you're swiping the app just waiting to see 15, 15, 15. 1530, 30, 30, like you're watching the score go up. And there's nothing there except in animation. It's like if you pulled up the ESPN app and you were checking scores, that's kind of how I would watch the sports. You know, the ones that were on TV that would watch the game and I'd be watching it intensely.

But when I think of which situation looked the most desperate, it was like the late night bets where the games weren't on. You had to either find like an illegal streaming site to find it on or you had to just swipe up on the score to refresh. constant obsession. Yeah, and I see there's always a delay between the live game and what's on the phone. The phone updates quicker. So you can kind of tell, like, what's happening, and then it's different than on the screen. So, like, when I see when my friend's sports bet, they're constantly refreshing their phones while watching the game, and it's very down the last second.

And then there's the whole concept of hedging your bets, where you're just betting random stuff, and that's where you get into a deeper hole. Because if you lose the hedge and your original bet, you could be seen. screwed. Absolutely. And it comes back to that speed too. Like the amount of bets that you have access to has grown to just a monstrous amount. Even if I think back to like the early Bavada days, there was like four bets that you could place live. It was, you know, the spread, the money line, the totals, or, you know, an alternate line. Now there's live player props. There's live, if you look at tennis, who's going to win the next point in baseball. Will the next thing be a ball or strike? Will there

be a throw for over 10 yards on this drive and a football game. Like there's a bet on everything that didn't exist just in 2018. You know, in the last six years, it has morphed into you can gamble on anything at any time from anywhere for any amount. Walk us through how your moods and emotions would be pre-bet and then when you won after and then versus pre-bet and then when you lost after. Yeah. It's actually pretty interesting to think about how I was feeling before and during

the bet because it was almost the same feeling. The real rush for me was that period of time before or right as I was placing a bet. So it was excitement. It was, you know, anticipation. It was completely forgetting everything else that had ever happened to prove what would happen next. Just kind of like a delusional I'm going to, it's going to be different this time. So excitement, then this intense like nervousness, anxiety between the time that I placed it and the time I found out the result, a win would feel fine because I expected to win. Every time I placed a bet, I expected that that bet would win, even though it wasn't supposed to. It didn't many, many times.

So a win would feel fine, but it wouldn't feel like this intense excitement because I was just, status quo was supposed to happen. Whereas a loss, I would feel as if I was gyp, like I was robbed, like, oh, it was the ref's fault. Like it wasn't me placing a bet I shouldn't have placed it was this player had the worst game of their career what's happening It was kind of that mental gymnastics again of trying to figure out Why I was right and what happened in real life didn't live up to my didn't live up to what it was supposed to And then it would be panic trying to figure out how to pay down either pay down debts or get more money To try again to pay down the debts your first like jump into gambling was it so was a focus to make money or was it entertaining? Was it that thrill aspect of it? What was it for you?

It was entertainment for about three days. And then once I found out the earning potential of, you know, a big sweepstakes win if it was a fantasy thing or if it was sports betting like a big parlay, then it was like, oh, this could be my full-time job. I could be professional. This is where I can prove that I know sports, that I can beat this supposedly unbeatable system. And I could prove myself correct. I think it's that a lot of people with addiction, specifically with gambling addiction, have very high IQs. We're smart people, but we try to outsmart ourselves because of our egos. And we try to outsmart a system that was designed specifically to defeat us, to beat us. You're not going to beat the casino in the long run, but if you're someone that perceives themselves

to be smart and you have a high ego, you're going to view it as a challenge rather than a warning. So you're in college doing this. Are your roommates, anyone around you, kind of seeing that you're starting to become obsessive with gambling and what you're doing? So, again, it was like I was placing these bets and people around me were gambling as well, but never did I feel like anyone was on that same extent that I was on. And, you know, at my school specifically, it wasn't as big as it is at some of the big state schools today. like I've seen reports of, you know, Michigan State is literally sponsored by Fandual.

Or I think it was Fandul and they send emails directly to students. Do they really? Yeah, right to their student emails. That's insane. It's not good. But, you know, I was placing these bets and people were involved. Like, they were like, oh, dude, I hope you win. Like, this is great.

But somehow, like, one day I walk into a class and I sit down and this kid I'd never talk to in my life goes, oh, you're that guy with the gambling addiction. And I was like, who are you? What are you talking about? And he's like, oh, yeah, my friend, who's your roommate's friend? He's like, he said you were gambling on Lamarcus Aldridge to get eight and a half rebounds last night. I'm like, how do you know that?

Like, so it wasn't like it was widespread, but amongst like the small groups of people that I was around, I was already being viewed as someone who gambled way too much. And I hadn't admitted I had a problem. So to me, I was like, dude, shut up. You're wrong, but he was totally right. How'd that make you feel hearing that? In a weird way, popular.

And I think it comes down to the reasons why I was gambling. You know, you asked, was it about money? Certainly it was. But beyond the money, what the money represented was the ability to prove worthiness, to prove that I could do something, that I was correct. And so when this guy that I'd never talked to knew about my gambling, I was like, oh, I must be doing something unique, something different that people just don't understand. Even though he obviously viewed it as a negative, which it is, at the time, I viewed it as like, oh, well, no bad press.

Yeah, there's no such thing as bad press. Right. So when you're in college and you have a loss, or you can't have much of a high-paying job, do you? Are you calling home? How are you getting the money to cover the losses? Yeah. So the first time that I had a really significant loss and I needed to pay down a debt with the bookie. he, I called home and we're not super well off again. So this, this amount, it was, you know,

in the thousands. She, my mom helped me pay it. And I spent the next summer working two jobs to pay her back every single dime. I will say like, no one's ever given me a bailout and I didn't pay them back. But bailouts kept me gambling for years longer than I would have if I didn't. And I had to deal with the consequences. So my mom, well-intentioned, great thing in her eyes to help me with this amount, it probably kept me gambling for, you know, much longer because I thought in the back of my head, no matter how bad it gets, I always find my way out of the situation. But yeah, I was working like 70 hours a week hosting at Applebee's and driving Chinese food. So that was my summer that year where at Georgetown, a lot of my classmates were very, very wealthy. So they were

flying around to Tokyo, Paris, and I was at the Applebee's on Route 42 in Washington Township. Did you say what it was for when you called home? Yeah, I had to. It was, there were certain times where I would have small jams, small debts that I could say, hey, like I overspent at a party or I overspent at a restaurant. I need you to spot me a couple hundred bucks. Those you can get away with. But when you're talking about, you know, double, triple what your rent would have been,

you need an explanation. And I had to eventually, you know, tell them I think, yeah, I was 19. I didn't admit that I had a gambling problem. but I admitted that I made a mistake, that I gambled too much. And, yeah, that was the first of six times that would happen. What was their reaction? And how would their reactions progress? It started as just shock.

You know, I would say almost devastation, but my physical safety wasn't in question. My mental health wasn't necessarily in question either. It was, oh, he's a kid, he made a mistake that he shouldn't have made. I'm mad with him, but I'll help him out and he'll pay it back. Then it became, this is a pattern, how can I help you? Then it became, you know, I was lying to them and hiding it at a certain point. And it became just like a trust issue.

Like, I don't trust him with any money at all. And they shouldn't have. At the time, I would spend it all on gambling. I even remember, you know, trying to desperately trying to find something to do with my time and trying to make like a side business. It was during like the Web 3 boom with crypto. And I was like, yeah, I need $1,000 to build this website. And then they sent it because they were like,

all right, he's going to try to do something good with his life. Like, let's invest in our kid. And within a week, that was gambled. Like, I didn't have, like, real investors. It was my parents. So fortunately, they didn't press charges. But, you know, it was just, it was constant lies for years. Was there ever any attempt of, like, an intervention to sit you down

and address the issues head on? No, because I was such a good liar. I it's not like I would like intentionally emotionally manipulate like I was pretty sad when I would go through these situations too I was pretty depressed about it but I would show that intentionally to arouse empathy to arouse understanding on my parents side then I'd say listen I'm working on it I'm seeing a therapist and I'm doing better like things are good but I knew that I was still gambling and that I didn't even at this point consider that I had to a gambling problem. I thought I was a bad gambler. Did you ever do anything other than sports bet or was solely sports betting? So yeah, it started out of sports betting, but by the time I was 20, I had actually moved to Australia for a semester abroad. Oh, that's awesome. Well, it turns out Australia has the highest rate of gambling addiction in the world. And I had no idea before I moved there. So I actually landed around five in the morning, and by seven I was at a casino. That's, because I knew it was

legal for me there. I think it's 18. So that was kind of the start of casino games. And then I would move to online slots. When I came back, I was 21, online poker. So then that was online casino games, in-person casino. It spiraled to everything by the end. What was your go-to game when you were playing the online games? The online games, I would say sports, this is my reasoning when I was doing it online. Sports was where I could make money and casino games is where I could enjoy myself. both were places where I lost money and did not enjoy myself in the end. But my go-to game when I got to a casino was craps because I really liked being at a table where everyone was rooting for the same thing to happen.

It's kind of like when you're at a sports bar and you guys are betting on the same team and you're rooting for your team every single play. Like there's a certain aspect of gambling that can feel like camaraderie, community. But then you lose and everyone hates each other again. And it's this false sense of like a family almost. And I had convinced myself, you know, oh, crap, so much fun. Everyone wants to win. Like, this is great.

But it never really was great. Now, a part of you was looking at this as a business. Did you create certain rules for yourself? Like, I'm going to cash out at this amount. I'm not going to do this many hands. I'm going to follow this pattern. Did you have that at all? There was definitely times where I set like quotas that I would cash it out.

But the problem was that I'd just put it back in. in the next day. You know, there was no long-term perspective to it. It was, oh, man, I just tripled my money. I'm going to cash out half and play with the half that's left. Then you would lose the half that was left eventually. And you're like, well, you know, I'm up. I can put a little bit back in. And so basically you go through a cycle where there's a win, followed by a little loss. So you want to get back to where you were at the top, which causes you to lose more. And then you end up inevitably spiraling. For a gambling addict, that spiral doesn't just go to zero. that goes through to owing money, going into debt, borrowing.

I've been through a lot of shit in my life, and I would say the most heartbreaking, like worst feeling I've experienced is when you're winning big, when you have like maybe say $10,000 and you're going up and up and up and up, and you don't stop and you end up losing it all. And you have to live with that.

Whereas like you're like five minutes ago, I had this money, which I needed, which I needed that to pay a vendor, or to pay off someone I owed during the nightclub days. And literally it was in my hands five minutes ago. And I fucked it up. And going to bed at night after spending hours at the casino and having to wake up facing those problems again,

that's what I compare things to now. I'm like, I don't want to experience that feeling because it's like the sick pit in your stomach. Oh, it's awful. And you were a backerat guy, right? Yeah, backerat was my go-to. I played a little roulette on the phone in my later years, not anything like addiction or anything like that,

just like, you know, a quick spin. Or if I'm occasionally in a casino here and there, you know, you do a quick one, but not nearly to the level that I was at before. And I saw, like, how crazy in today's world those apps are like we were talking about. You could, on a game like Backra, it's so fast pace on those electronic things.

So I would always go to the slower machines because on the faster ones, you could lose so quick, like just insanely quick. I know, man. And the feeling you describe, it's almost like if you view it as work, if you view it as a business, that you did it for free. And no one likes working for free. And that's how I used to feel when I was paying down debts. When I was working to pay off the debts the whole summer, I wasn't like saving that to buy myself something nice.

I was just giving it all back to my parents who had bailed me out. It's just this feeling of why am I even going through this? Why am I doing this to myself? And it's the same feeling you describe of waking up the next day, just like, what the hell just happened? Why did I do that? It's funny you bring up the business aspect because I was literally sitting in solitary in prison,

writing down in my notes. I still have the notes about how I would get out and my plan was to be a professional gambler. I figured if I drove to the casino every day and just won $500 a day, that would be my income. And it wouldn't take much. I would just have to learn how to pull out the five,

like stop after the 500. And obviously I never went through with that business plan. But a good decision. Yeah, that was my whole structure and idea because I had always gone to casino and I'd win 500 seconds. But looking back on it now, if I lost that 500, all it takes is one loss to put you down and go, you know, start chasing the losses and you take good money and it turns into bad money. Absolutely. Do you feel like this is what I experienced? It was like the money that I would make from gambling felt like I had earned it and the money that I had made from.

working felt like I was supposed to get it. It didn't feel like an accomplishment to me. Like a big win felt like I was proving my knowledge, proving my worth, and collecting it, whereas the job is just like, oh yeah. That money's just like it was going to, it was always guaranteed to be there so it doesn't feel as good. I don't know if you ever. Well, I didn't have a real job at the time. I owned the club and that was just bleeding money and I just had money from investors coming in. But the wins felt like that. And that was, you know, I was working. I looked at that as a job going to the casino, just like a part of my life. I would pencil that into my weekly schedule to go there. I would take ticket money and just go there because that was once it worked

once. It was programmed into my mind. Like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing and this worked before, so it'll work again. And it did work for a while, but where things went south was when it stopped working. And that's when you get into a dangerous zone. And you see these guys that win all the time and they're great, like the professional gamblers, whether it's a skill or luck or whatever you want to call it, they're winning, winning, winning. But what people don't show is that could very easily be swept around to losing, losing, losing. And a lot of the world is losing, losing, losing, losing, losing, because those guys that win, win, win are one of a kind. Yeah, you see, everything you see online now is just, it's glorifying gambling, but more

it's just showing like it's supposed to be normal to win, and it's not, you're not supposed to win. But when every video you see is like big win, jackpot, crazy blackjackhand, or God forbid, the guys that are streaming for three hours of them putting $10,000. thousand dollars on a slot bonus every single five minutes that go by that becomes the new normal and it's just like it's the extreme yeah and you see celebrities like drake betting easily a one million dollar bet here dave portnoid bet that college basketball ticket the other day 600 000 got two million like that's just normal but there when you look at it in their eyes that's what we

equivalent like a few hundred dollars to when you have millions of dollars you know bets like that don't really aren't that big of a deal to them. Exactly. But it could give people the wrong idea and the wrong direction. It's a scary thing to look at. And then it gets even scarier when you think about where casino profits come from. And it's the 86% of online profits come from 5% of players. The 5% really closely matches up to the estimated amount of gambling addicts.

And you start to think, this is getting really dangerous for the group of people that can't stop themselves. because no one's going to stop them. Wow. Where do you learn those stats at? Did you look into it afterwards or you learned that as you were going? All afterwards, I'd learned nothing what I was going through.

It was mindless, just habitual every single day. I'd gamble for like six to eight hours a day. Everything I know now is what I try to share with my content and try to help other people avoid, you know, I'm not going to talk someone down that doesn't want to quit gambling, but to someone who's like, you know, this has been a problem for a while now. maybe it's that extra kick to get them, you know, thinking about help.

Describe what it's like to chase a loss. Like when you're losing and you have to keep doubling down and putting bad money with good money. Have you had moments like that before? Absolutely. No one that I know likes to admit when they're wrong. Me specifically, I can think back to when I was even very young and I would change the rules in a wiffle ball game,

even though everyone had the same rules. I was like, no, no, no, no, it was different because I couldn't bear losing. anytime that I would lose anything, I would throw a tantrum, I'd be upset, and that morphed into eventually when I was an adult and I was gambling, I could never stop because then that was admitting defeat. That was admitting that this was the wrong decision. So when I would lose, I would look at it as unrealized losses like you would in the stock market.

It wasn't that I lost $200, is that so far I lost $200. And I'd try to win that back to get back to the even mark. but the number of times that I said to myself, I'll quit after I get even. I'll quit after I win this amount back. And then I would win it or get even and say to myself, oh, well, now that I'm here,

there's no pressure anymore. I can continue doing what I was doing is just endless. And it was always going to end the same way. How does it progress and how does it get worse? Yeah. So when you look at most people that have a gambling addiction,

it starts with very small amounts or just gambling on the things that they truly love. So for me, it would have been the Eagles or the Sixers. Eventually, if your brain gets to the point where you're craving dopamine only from gambling, then you're going to keep getting this intense spike every time you go and place a bet. But as you continue to do that, that spike doesn't feel the way it felt in the beginning. It's like how in alcoholism, right?

You could usually, when you're very young, get drunk off of one drink. But then as you get older and you develop a tolerance, it might take you six drinks to get drunk. It's the same with gambling. You might start with what is one unit, and then eventually you could gamble, say, 10 units is your new one unit. And you're spending more and more money to get that same hit that you got in the beginning, but it's progressive. So it keeps going up and you either have to gamble higher amounts or higher frequencies

to continue to get that high. Because I think that what addiction really is is like you're either seeking a thrill or you're seeking normalcy. You want to feel like you perceive everyone. else around you to feel. And to me, I saw wealth, success, happiness in social media, the people around me, everyone seemed good. And I just felt empty. And I thought to myself that I could get it from gambling. And it progressed to the point where, you know, one loss could wipe out all the previous winnings that I had if I was lucky enough to have winnings during any given cycle.

When you were at the bottom, what did the gambling look like? Is it every day? Is it a few times a week? What did your life look like? It was six to eight hours every single day compulsively gambling, and the rest of the time was either thinking about the next day's gambling, thinking about how to cover debts, or actively literally borrowing money and lying to people around me. It was constantly on my mind. It reached the point where I could go to the gym,

and I still held a normal routine. I still went to school, went to the gym, hung out with friends, but all the while I was gambling, so I was never really there when I was present. I was always in my head thinking about, I wonder how this is going. I wonder how that's going. But it got to the point where I could go to the gym and I could be spinning slots on auto spin in my pocket

listening through my AirPods. And based on the sound that came out of the AirPods, I knew what that bet had won or lost. And it would be 100 spins, you know, going on in my pocket. So even at like low amounts, you know, that could be $100 in just a couple of minutes. Now, we see a lot on the show and in the world addiction, oftentimes leads to criminal behavior.

Did you ever encounter, you know, getting into that gray area or have thoughts about it? I think that a lot of my, what would have been criminal behavior was against friends and family. And luckily, that was the case. Like, I didn't defraud any credit card company, but I lied to my friends about why I was borrowing money from them. So I guess it wasn't quite illegal, but it was definitely immoral. I've paid everyone back, of course, at this point. But, you know, I think the lies where my form of criminality, it wasn't criminal in the legal sense,

but it was terrible as a person, unethical. Now, these online sites and casinos, how does that work with credit cards and credit in general? So there's a lot of interesting workarounds. Most sites don't take credit cards. But casinos offer you cash advances. I've seen casinos that sell gift cards in gas stations. now. So you can just go and buy a gift card on your credit card. Or you can do a workaround where you

could, you know, say it's a cryptocurrency casino. You could buy an NFT with your credit card, sell it and send the cryptocurrency over to the casino. There's lots of easy workarounds. If you want to do it badly enough, most people who get hooked today are very tech savvy. And they're typically a younger demographic. So the borderlines or the obstacles that were in place before, like the regular banking system just doesn't really help anymore. And one example is like Venmo. When you look at Venmo, if you deposit to a casino with Venmo, now that's not credit, it's your debit, but say you have $500 in your bank account and you make a $500 deposit on a Friday, that $500 deposit won't clear until Monday. So if you try to make another $500 deposit,

when they check to see with your bank, if you have the funds, they're getting a screenshot of your bank account from Friday. So you could keep depositing $500 until you've hit the deposit limit on that book over and over again, even if you only have the initial $500. So you can dig yourself into a huge overdraft over a weekend, which is when most people typically are gambling, just because the banking system's not keeping track you fast enough anymore. And then sometimes your bank will even pay that overdraft.

So now you get a fresh start with the casino, which has already seen a pattern of building some credit. So they'll let you run it again. Meanwhile, your bank account is overdrawn. Exactly. And another thing with Venmo is you could literally take your credit card, send money to someone, and have them send it back to you. And that converts it from a credit card to cash. Yeah. I hope that the viewers don't view this as a how-to guide.

But that was definitely something that I did as well. I've seen on YouTube like a lot of the scam people that use Venmo or PayPal, because it was a lot more laxed back in the day to use PayPal and Venmo in fraudulent ways. All of those get so many views because people are fascinated with it. And I remember when PayPal first came out, you could literally, because I had done this before, back in the day, you could literally pay something, hook it up to your bank account and they'll pay it. like when they had e-checks or whatever, because they didn't have the verifications,

like the authenticators like they do now. So they were just paying things, and then it would eventually bounce and go back, and then your bank account would be overdrafted. You can't do that now, but it's just crazy how it would work. It's really not too far developed from what you're talking about.

It's still something that I think America specifically is very behind on. If you look at the UK, they actually have things where you can block certain transactions on your bank. You have a lot more options. They know about that workaround and they put things in place to deal with it. Here, I mean, I think we're like five, ten years behind Australia and the United Kingdom on dealing with problem gambling.

What would you say was rock bottom for you? Rock bottom was a couple of times probably. But the most severe and what eventually led to me finally hanging it up was the last day that I gambled, I had actually gotten a period of sobriety of about eight months. I was going to a 12-step meeting. I'd gone eight months, and then life felt stale again, and I just couldn't find anything to use my time for. I felt meaningless. And of course, working a regular job, being used to the highs and lows of gambling, the money didn't feel like it was enough.

And with all these things, I eventually realized that, you know, I had moved from New Jersey to Philadelphia for that time. I hadn't self-excluded, which is, you know, telling the casinos to ban you from play. I hadn't done that in Pennsylvania. Once I realized that, it took me about 20 minutes before I had placed a sports bet. It started in the morning. I felt an intense guilt after I placed that bet. So I wanted to cash it out. But this was with a casino called Parks Casino, and they didn't have automatic withdrawals like some of the other operators.

You had to wait, I think it was 24 hours. I wanted to get it out so bad that I was like, okay, I'll drive to the casino and try to reason with them at the cash window. and I'll say, you know what, I want to get this out so that I can stop gambling it. Of course, that didn't work. They said, oh, yeah, it's still a 24-hour delay. But now I was in a casino, which was not a good decision on my end, of course. I would spend the next 12 hours doing all types of mental gymnastics to keep gambling. Because I said, you know, it was eight months, but now it's only been a couple hours.

I might as well just keep going and start tomorrow. I can lose this amount that I had won on the sports bet this morning and I'll break even. It'll be fine. Oh, and then it was, you know, I took a cash advance. Oh, well, I have to recover the first cash advance that I took, and I eventually maxed out a credit card. And in 12 hours, I created enough debt that it would take me the next six months to pay it off, working two jobs.

And those were now 24-year-old jobs. So they were like real. Not that every job is real, but, you know, it was like my full-time income was not enough to get me out in six months. I had to get a second job bartending, working 70 hours a week. And I thought, I did that in 12 hours. What's going to happen the next time? Because I'd gone into debt before where I had to work second job.

I did it when I was 19. I did it five other times, six times total throughout the six years. But I did it in 12 hours. The next time it'd be six, then three, then one. And eventually it would be one bet would put me into debt for that long. I couldn't continue going down that path. And I sought out help. And that's kind of when my life started to turn around.

triggered you after those eight months to jump into that. Yeah, it was the lack of meaning. It was that I had focused my recovery on just not gambling. My entire purpose in life was to not gamble. And when that's your purpose, it's like, what is your tangible metric of meaning, your tangible metric of success? It's days clean. But walking down the street with a shirt that says, I'm 200 days clean from gambling, right? Like, I just felt like I was working such a boring job. I was so bored. with my life, I had nothing to aspire to other than not doing something that I perceived to have loved. And once I talked myself down, I got myself into just this mental rut of almost feeling depressed about my situation. I said, I can solve this with some excitement. And as soon as I realized that I didn't have

the obstacles in place, I went back to it. What are these 12-step meetings like for gambling addiction? Yeah, I have to imagine they're quite similar to any other addiction, though I haven't personally attended a meeting for anything else. But essentially, it was the basement of a church, walked in, everyone was a little bit old. And I said, hey, my name's Rob. I'm a compulsive gambler, made my last bet. Now it's November the 12th of 2022. You go in, everyone kind of goes in more or less a circle of, you know, when's my last bet? Why am I here?

What's been going on? What have I been doing to keep myself away? People talk about urges that hit them. It's more or less just a big share. And then we read through the pamphlet. The pamphlet is the same as the AA big book, except they change the word alcohol to gambling. And there's a few minor differences,

like the dream world of a gambling addict that dives into that. And essentially it's saying that someone with a gambling addiction wants to avoid mature responsibility, and they should seek help for that, obviously, but the gambling addiction is stemming from a lack of purpose and a lack of discipline, essentially. And that's fair. So it's more or less a big slap in the face wake-up call,

but it's a community as well. How long did it take you, if it ever did, to get those feelings and urges out of you to want to gamble? It definitely was really rough the first three months. And that is what's supposed to be. Around 21 to 90 days on average, your brain begins to kind of reset its dopamine levels to what it was before you started gambling. But yeah, it took me about three months. I remember the Eagles were in the Super Bowl that year.

It was 2023. They were playing the Chiefs. And I was living in Philly. And so we had a bunch of people over. Of course, everyone was gambling on the game. But I was like, all these people are about to lose their money. even if the Eagles win, they were expecting them to win by more, or they were expecting a certain total.

And I was like, for the very first time, I was like, I don't want to do this. And that was three months in. Of course, they did lose. And all my friends were very depressed. But I would have absolutely taken it to a different extent. So three months, I would say. Are you able to be around in the same room as friends

when they're watching sports and gambling and talking about it? Or does that kind of drag you back into it and give you ideas? At first, I couldn't be in the same room as people because it felt like a temptation, but then I told them that I had a gambling problem and it morphed into a different problem. It felt like when you would be watching a movie with your parents and there would be a sex scene and all your friends would look at you when like a fan dual commercial came on like, oh, is he watching this commercial? Like, is he okay seeing this?

And it became just like an annoyance almost to be around gambling because everyone knew I had a problem and they were walking on eggshells around me. At this point, doing what I do now in making gambling edition content, it's become almost comedic if gambling's mentioned at all because they're like, oh, we're with this anti-gambling guy now. So I can be around it. It's no problem because no one's doing it to the extent that I was. Yeah, something I realized about gambling is that when I add up all of my wins

and then minus it by all my losses and then, you know, you take the gambling aspect out of it for a second, you make so much more long-term just by working a job and not having to deal with that emotional and physical stress of gambling because you're going to have losses. That's a part of it. You're not going to win every time. So if you just take the gambling idea of it out of it as a whole,

you're better off long-term. And I always gambled for thinking I needed that money in the moment. And had I just taken a break and put a pause on it and said, I'll figure out another way to get this money or it doesn't need to be paid right this second, I would have been way better off because in those times when I thought I needed the money immediately, I'd end up losing and it would just be deeper in a hole.

I mean, people with a gambling addiction typically aren't the most patient people. Absolutely not. I know. I get that feeling. It's kind of like a stock chart, you know. If you look at the S&P, it rises over the course of many years, but you zoom in too close. You could lose big dip in one day.

It's the same with your gambling results, except they trend the other way. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions options about a gambling addiction? That it has to be someone who's older that develops one, that you can't get a gambling addiction the first time you gamble, because you absolutely can. Though it's typically a progressive thing,

you could be instantly hooked to it in an unhealthy way. That it has to be a certain amount before it becomes a gambling addiction, because if you're experiencing any negative emotion as a result of your gambling, you're probably gambling for the wrong reasons, and that's stemming from a problem. And that it's a real addiction. It functions in the brain the same as a substance use addiction without an actual substance being ingested. Though there's different effects on the body, of course, with alcohol and drugs. In the brain, it's all a dopamine problem.

And it's something that you can get better. Your brain can reset itself, but you need to give it some time. And how did you get into making content about gambling addictions? Yeah, so I don't even know if I've told the guy this, but basically at those 12-step meetings, the average age is probably like 60, 70 years old. Like I was one-third the age of the group leader, and he's a great guy, he's great things to say, but, you know, that does change the discourse, the dialogue. And the next closest guy, I think he's about 35, so we became friendly. and one day, just briefly after I had relapsed on November the 12, he stopped showing up and then he wasn't at the next meeting.

So I gave him a call, went through a bad situation, breakup, the whole nine yards went back to gambling. And I said, man, I just did that a couple weeks ago. And let me tell you, I'm miserable. I'm working two jobs to try to pay it off. Everything is trash. Like, please don't keep going down this path. It won't end well and you know that.

Something I said, snap something in him. and he went back to the meetings. From that point until now, he's been clean. He's doing great at his job. He's getting himself a house. He's doing awesome. And from the time that I started gambling until that point, that was the first time that I felt like something I did mattered to someone that wasn't myself.

That I had done something to, without even really having the knowledge of anything, just out of like my own experience saying, this is a bad idea, gotten someone to make a decision that yielded. positive benefits in their life. And I was like, I could easily just say, if you have a gambling problem, go get help online. And so I started to do it. And those videos sucked. They really did. I was putting them out on YouTube. I sounded like a robot. I was staring at the camera. And I was like, gambling addiction is growing, like real monotone. But my girlfriend said, start putting them on TikTok and make them more exciting. And I did. And they started to get a little bit of traction,

which pushed into everything else, as I'm sure you know from a social perspective, social media perspective. And it's kind of blossomed into this point where I get to share what are the worst experiences of my life, but in a positive light, to try to help other people avoid making those mistakes.

How do you keep fresh content? Because couldn't it get repetitive only talking about you? Yeah, it absolutely can. I try to mix in some interviews, but for the most part, I think that what a lot of people I think that in this niche specifically of gambling addiction,

no one makes content. So all the content is by default pretty fresh. I tried to bounce around between awareness content, what I'm doing to get help, and then some wider branching content like how casino streamers make their money, or why is gambling addictive, the psychology of gambling.

I've done some interviews with doctors. I've done a lot with actual people with lived experience. I'm trying to do more of that. But really, it's just, I try to be honest and I try to listen to what the audience wants because people will say, well, how did you quit? What do I need to do to quit? I'm in this much debt. How can I pay it off?

Like, the questions are there to be answered. Where do you want to evolve it to? Well, right now, it's very disconnected between, without, you know, name-dropping the groups and all. It's like the groups that are supposed to be helping people are very disconnected. They're filled with people doing great work, but they're going about it in a way that I don't think will work. Like the PSAs of like drugs turn your brain to mush, like that's not going to connect with today's generation. And so I'd like to evolve my message to the point where I can help these groups to kind of steer their messaging to reach people like myself.

because, I mean, just look at the difference in gambling from 2018 to today. Imagine it from 1976 when they opened Atlantic City until today. The messaging that's getting put out is trying to help people from 1976. And it's just, it's missing something. So I would love to be a part of that. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot like drug addiction. It's all about lived experience. That's what's changing lives because people who are battling addiction could see firsthand.

What's on the other side of that from someone that's been, standing exactly where they came from. Exactly. I think we're most qualified to help the people we used to be. I mean, as you do with the content you put out, it's a beautiful thing. And people think they got to go and become a doctor to give advice to someone.

If something happened to you a year ago, you have authority to give advice on that. Absolutely. So is this your full-time gig making content? It is. I'm fortunate that it is. And you can make money from it. Enough to support myself.

I mean, it's much more lucrative to push gambling than it is to push gambling addiction awareness. But within this niche, there's groups that are doing great work that aren't getting a lot of eyes on their content. So teletherapy groups, rehabilitation centers for gambling-specific treatment. And these groups aren't really reaching the audience that they could reach with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. So they've kind of been piggybacking off of my videos.

Are you giving like talks? Are you working on a book or anything like that? I'm not working on a book. It's always been something that I'd love to do, but I can't get my brain to slow down enough to sit in front and work on it. But I've given a few talks. I'm going to be speaking at the National Council on Problem Gambling's Conference. But basically those conversations are about how therapists, treatment providers,

can reach this audience. There's millions and millions of people that have gambling tendencies, gambling addiction tendencies, that aren't seeking help. Only 8% of people with a gambling addiction will ever seek help for it. So there's 92% of people that we can reach

if we can kind of meet them where they're at. What would you say to your teenage self before he gambled for the first time? If you could be in the room with him before that teenage self of years made that bet, what would you say to him? That gambling addiction is real. I mean, it'd be easy for me to say,

don't gamble. but had I not gambled, I wouldn't be at this point in my life where I have the chance to help people. I mean, I went through a lot of crap. I put myself through a lot of crap, but I came out on the other end and I want to help people avoid that.

So in lieu of just saying to never gamble, to know that when it stops feeling fun, there's actually a reason for that. It's not that you're bad at gambling. It's not that you're on a cold streak. It's that your brain is sick and you need to figure out how to get that help.

Well, Rob, thank you for coming on the show today. You're very bright. You're young. You have a lot of energy, and you have a lot of knowledge of what you've been through and what you've overcome and kind of what's next. And that's how we create change in the world. I really appreciate it, man. And thanks for taking the time to talk about this topic. Because, again, it's kind of flying under the radar.

You're seven times more likely to have a substance use problem in America than you are a gambling problem. But funding for substance use is 338 times greater than for gambling. It's an under-talked-about issue because most people, again, they don't know who has a gambling addiction. And I'm just happy that you're helping me to spread the message that people aren't alone in this battle. They're also not actively promoting using substances where they're actively promoting to gamble. Yeah. So that does fall through the cracks too. Absolutely.

It's definitely a fascinating perspective and it's a unique perspective. And hopefully that this helps, this conversation helps some of our listeners. because I'm sure there's a lot of people that are silently struggling out there with this. Yeah, millions. Awesome, man. Well, thanks, and safe travels back. Thanks, sir.