“Deseret Voices” host McKay Coppins got first-hand experience with the lure of gambling when The Atlantic gave him $10,000 to bet on sports.
He had even talked with recovering gambling addict Craig Carton about the signs of problem gambling and was surprised to find himself ticking each one off the list.
Carton joins the podcast to cover the widespread nature of this addiction, from casinos to parlay sheets in elementary schools.
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Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins
McKay Coppins: Craig Carton, thanks for coming on.
Craig Carton: Yeah, good to see you again. How’s everything?
MC: I’m good. So I want to start this conversation by kind of framing it with how big the problem is of compulsive gambling, gambling addiction. You run through some of the stats since 2018 when sports betting ban was overturned by the Supreme Court. Internet searches for phrases like “am I addicted to gambling” have spiked by 25%. Calls to gambling helplines from young men in particular have surged. Gamblers Anonymous has reported young men showing up in droves. There was one recent survey, I don’t know if you saw this, that found that nearly one-third of 11-year-old boys had gambled in the past year. So you’re like the boots on the ground here, you’re the one talking to recovering gambling addicts every week on your show, you’re counseling with young men who are at risk of becoming problem gamblers. Anecdotally, what are you seeing? How big of a problem is this?
CC: It’s a significant problem. And what scares me the most is that the fastest growing segment of the population that is now gambling for the first time are kids between the ages of 18 and 22. So if you recognize that the far majority of states that have legalized online wagering, you have to be 21 years or older to do it yourself. That tells you that these kids are getting access to the legal sites through a relative — maybe it’s an older brother, a dad, an uncle, or a friend’s, you know, relative, dad, uncle, brother, that type of thing — and are starting to wager without a collective pair of concerning eyes watching what they are doing. So that’s my biggest concern.
You could kind of play a game with the math if you want, where only about 2% of anyone that ever gambles are going to present as problem gamblers. So a lot of people say, “Well, if it’s only 2%, you know, what are we worried about?” What we’re worried about is the fact that there are tens of millions of people gambling for the first time now. So if you start doing the math on the total number of people that are wagering in this country, it doesn’t take a math genius to figure out you’re going to have millions of people that present with a problem. So then take that one step further. How many states right now have gambling-specific therapy centers or rehab centers? The answer is four. So you have 40 states in this country that have legalized online wagering and only four of them actually have gambling-specific rehab centers. So we’re creating a problem, and we’re not doing anything to help those people out that present with a problem. And that’s a big issue.
MC: Can you just explain for people who are watching this, listening to this, who don’t know that much about gambling — how are 11-, 12-, 13-year-olds, 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, people who are not legally permitted to gamble, how are they doing it?
CC: They’re doing it the same way our relatives did it over a drink. So you’re at Thanksgiving, your dad’s like, “Come on over here kid, you know, have a sip of my whiskey,” and that’s the introduction to drinking for a lot of kids. It was my introduction, I don’t know about yours. So now what we’re having happen is dads are trying to find new ways to bond with their sons. Now, women gamble as well, not the same rate as men, but just let me do a father-son comparison for you. So a dad doesn’t know how to connect to his son, right? Because the son’s on his phone, he’s on the computer, it’s not like it was when we grew up. And all of a sudden the dad goes, “I’ve got a great way to bond. We both love sports. We both sit on the couch together as a family watching Sunday football. Son, you know what we’re going to do? Dad’s going to open up a legal account and you and I are going to put 25 bucks on the Jet game today, the Knick game today.” I’m obviously speaking as a New Yorker here. And what a great experience, father and son sitting next to each other with money on the line. And it’s great, and it is bonding, and it does connect the father and a son, a mother and a daughter as well.
And then what happens — and a lot of these kids that I’m counseling now have experienced and it’s a similar experience — which is, that’s great on Sunday. Now the dad goes to work on Monday, but the kid has full access to that gambling account. Well, my dad has already blessed me with the ability to gamble, so he’s not going to mind if I put a couple bucks on the Monday night game. He’s not going to mind if I put a couple bucks on the Wednesday night basketball game because we do it together. And then without the father knowing about it, the kid is now gambling on a regular basis. And that kid, when he loses, never experienced losing because the account is connected to the dad’s bank statement or his credit card — and I know credit cards are going away most of the legalized sites, but it’s still being paid off by the father. So the kid wins, we all celebrate and maybe the dad gives him a couple bucks for ice cream. When the kid loses, the father’s paying the bill. So the kids never experience the lows of losing. That is the quickest way to create a problem gambler. That kid only experiences wins. The father doesn’t say, “Hey son, go take five bucks out of your piggy bank because we lost that Nick game bet last night and I want my money back because you need to experience losing.” That doesn’t happen.
And then a lot of those kids who are now indoctrinated into gambling, now find another way to gamble. And that’s offshore accounts, you know, bad actors on Twitter and Instagram that promise them credit beyond what their father would ever agree to. And now you’ve got kids gambling on black market sites. You have kids that are racking up significant debt that they can’t pay, that their parents know nothing about. And invariably, their parents get a phone call. And that phone call is from somebody they didn’t know existed who says, “I want my money.” “Well, what are you talking about? I don’t owe you any money.” “Yeah, you do, because your son borrowed money from me to gamble.”
I’ve talked to high school loan sharks, I’ve talked to high school bookies, I’ve talked to kids that have lost thousands and thousands of dollars to kids like that. I had one kid tell me he was a loan shark, high school kid, graduated high school, went to a well-known university on a sports scholarship. And there’s another kid that I’m counseling that owed him money. So I reached out to the teenage bookie to let him know he’s going to get his money, but he’s not getting his money today because the kid doesn’t have it. And the kid said, “Well, I’m going to get my money, I’m going to charge him interest and oh, by the way, my dad’s proud of me. My dad supports what I’m doing.” And that’s the mindset of some of these kids, they’re being supported by their parents and they’re going down a really bad road.
MC: I mean, it’s astonishing to hear, you know, words like “high school bookie,” “high school loan shark.” But to me, that kind of underscores how much the gambling culture has sort of changed generationally, because when I was growing up, I don’t know about you, I mean, there was always gambling, people would bet five bucks on, you know, the Celtics game or whatever, I grew up in Massachusetts. You talking New England sports betting, but like —
CC: Was it there? When you were in elementary school, did you have that one kid in class that had those parlay sheets and you could try your hand at a parlay? Because I grew up in the ’70s and there was always that one kid in class that on Fridays would hand out parlay sheets. You’d give him a buck or two bucks, you’d try to win 10 games and win a hundred times your money. So that’s been going on forever.
MC: But it is so much more widespread now, right? And, like, the thing that really struck me in reporting this and hearing the stories of problem gamblers is, like, how much everybody around them now knows about gambling. Like, there might have been always the kid with the parlay sheet, but, like, I’ll be honest, in elementary school most of my friends did not know what a parlay was, right? And they didn’t know what a point spread was, or they kind of did but they weren’t fluent in gambling language. Now it’s all — it’s on every commercial when you watch a game, it’s on your — it’s being blasted into your algorithm on social media. Like, it’s just kind of almost omnipresent in the sports culture, at least.
CC: Yeah, but I think it’s a two-sided coin. So I think with the bad there actually does come some good. The bad, of course, is that we’re indoctrinating kids with commercials and marketing, even though, you know, the sites claim we don’t market to kids, kids watch sporting events and you cannot watch a sporting event or go to a sporting event without being inundated with ads for all the different companies. So obviously that’s the bad because, you know, immature kids who don’t know understand the value of money or how to plan financially are now making really bad, stupid financial decisions around gambling. And by the way, the far majority, over 90% of the people that gamble regularly, are net losers. There are not a lot of net winners from people that gamble on a regular basis. There’s a reason for that, it’s very hard to be good at it, one.
The flip side of that coin, though, which nobody talks about maybe other than me, is that the more we mainstream the conversation about gambling, the more gambling conversation is regular dinner table talk for American families, it’s going to make it easier for a young person that suddenly has a gambling problem to actually say, “Hey Mom, hey Dad, hey somebody, I’ve got a problem.” You know, when I had my problem — and I’m now eight years into recovery — you know, there was a shame involved with admitting to anybody that I was a compulsive gambler because it’s an addiction and who wants to raise their hand and say, “Hey I have this self-inflicted addiction, I’ve got nobody to blame but myself, but here I am, I put myself in harm’s way.” I didn’t want to have that conversation because of the shame involved with having to admit it. So the more we normalize and mainstream the conversation about gambling terms and gambling itself, my belief and my hope — and maybe today it’s just a hope and we’re realizing it in my lifetime — is that young people, anyone really of any age, that do have a problem are willing to recognize they have a problem and actually raise their hand and ask for help. And that’s to me the only upside of the mainstreaming of this.
But I have a question for you because if I remember the last time we chatted, I think The Atlantic was giving you a fund of $10,000 to gamble with, right? Over a great investigative —
MC: Let’s talk about that.
CC: So my question for you is, even though it wasn’t your money, you’re now trying to live the life of a regular, maybe even daily, sports gambler, maybe casino gambler as well, albeit online. And I’m wondering if you now feel any different when you go to place a wager or when you’re getting ready to watch a game, having wagered maybe every day or every week for sure since you started your research.
MC: I was shocked by how quickly sports betting in particular, gambling in general, kind of consumed my life. I’ll be honest. Like, I went into this pretty self-aware and this was a journalistic exercise. It’s not my money and I had not been a gambler at all before, right? And so I went into this as a sports fan, but somebody who had never really placed any bets. And, you know, The Atlantic gave me $10,000 to gamble with throughout the NFL season to kind of experience what it was like to be a gambler. And even as a reporter who went into it understanding all the data and science and research about compulsive gambling, somebody who talked to recovering gambling addicts, talked to people like you, I still found it kind of taking over my life.
I remember there was a moment when I was talking to you and this was last fall, it was pretty early in my gambling experience and I asked you, “You know, what are the warning signs that a potential problem gambler should be aware of?” And you started ticking them off and I don’t know if I totally kind of made it clear to you in the moment, but I was, like, squirming in my seat a little bit because almost every one that you ticked off I was hitting. I was staying up late at night scrolling through the apps, you know, putting together ridiculous parlays. I was watching games that I knew nothing about because I had money on them. I was hiding from my family in, like, the pantry or in the bathroom to put bets in because I didn’t want my wife and kids to know how much time I was spending on this. It even, as it got kind of progressively worse, it would affect my mood. Like, when I lost a big bet, like, it would kind of ruin my day. I, you know, I was constantly looking for opportunities to get back on the apps. I started chasing. Like, it was literally like almost a stereotype of the problem gambler.
And I’m curious if you are surprised to hear that? I mean, obviously, maybe I’m in that 2%, right? But talk about, like, what you saw from the other end of that interview when we started talking last fall.
CC: Yeah, I was interested in what your experience would be like because you were not a gambler prior to this assignment from The Atlantic. So I think the fact that they staked you was a really interesting exercise. Um, because you could always have leaned back and said, “Well, I’m not risking my money, so I’m not doing anything bad. If I lose the 10 grand, it’s The Atlantic’s money and c’est la vie.” But everything I said to you that was possible to happen to you, happened. Because there’s nothing unique about the addiction. Recovery is unique. The addiction’s not unique at all. So being a loner, hiding in the bathroom, hiding your phone from loved ones, not being emotionally present while you’re physically present in a room, deciding because you’re up late at night, I’m going to put money on a San Diego Aztec basketball game and you can’t name a player on the roster — all those things are what we’re so afraid of in the responsible gaming world because you’re not even risking your own money and you started to fall prey to all the signs that mean you’re going down the road of making irrational decisions. And you clearly just said, from a gambling standpoint, you were now making irrational decisions. You didn’t sit on your couch with The Atlantic’s money and say, “All right, I’m going to put a hundred bucks on a one o’clock game, a hundred bucks on a four o’clock game, and I might put a couple bucks on the Sunday night game.” You started that way possibly, but two months later, all of a sudden, you know, you’re changing who you are, your relationships are changing and your relationship with wagering starts changing.
MC: Well, and that was the other kind of frightening thing, was, like, when I started out, I was trying to, you know, follow best practices, right? I had $10,000 to start with, I was choosing six or seven games every weekend, I would study the lines, I would, like, look at the rosters, I would try to be responsible about it. And I limited my wagers at the beginning to like a hundred bucks a game, right? But pretty quickly, and I’m sure you recognize this, I realized, like, the hundred dollars wasn’t enough to keep me invested. So then I had to bump it up to 200, then 300. By the end, I was putting down 500 bucks a game.
You know, there was a moment around Christmas time where I was — I think you would call it “on tilt” where like I was fully chasing. Like, I had a series of bad beats, one in particular that just kind of, like, knocked me off my axis a little bit and I became obsessed with winning it all back. I was putting massive amounts of money down on games, convinced that, “No, no, this is the one I’m going to win.” I think in 10, 12 days, I lost like $2,500. And so it was a kind of a startling glimpse into the psychology of the problem gambler because I felt it kind of consuming me in a way that I didn’t expect.
CC: Have you been able to separate it out now where you don’t have the desire today to make a wager?
MC: Well, you know what I did? You were the one who actually first introduced this to me and I subsequently learned a lot more in my reporting. At the end of the Super Bowl, which I lost basically everything. I mean, not to spoil the story for people who haven’t read it yet, but spoiler alert, I, in my last kind of effort at chasing my losses and winning it all back, I put everything I had left on the Patriots money line. Because it was 2-to-1 odds and it was, like, my only chance to come out ahead at the end. I’m also a Patriots fan so I kind of deluded myself into thinking like, “No, no, they’re underrated, it’s going to work.” Obviously they lost, I lost everything. I think I won one prop bet and that was it. But the morning after the Super Bowl, I sat down, actually literally in this room at this desk, and Googled “Virginia self-exclusion.” And actually, Craig, you’re the one who told me about it, so tell the audience, what is the self-exclusion for?
CC: Yeah, it’s the greatest tool of all if you’re concerned about going down a bad road or if, like, you start feeling a certain way and you knew it was taking over your life. Now, it’s a little convoluted, it shouldn’t be but it currently is, where you can self-exclude from online wagering, you can also self-exclude state-by-state from bricks-and-mortar wagering. And it just means essentially that you’re filling out a form that says they cannot take your action. So you’re preventing yourself from being allowed to wager. Now, I say it’s convoluted because on the non-predictive market sites — you know, FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Fanatics, etc. — that is a state-by-state deal. So if I’m in New Jersey, I have to go to New Jersey’s website, you know, the Gaming Commission’s website, and I can go online and I can prevent myself from wagering online in the state of New Jersey.
Now, here’s the rub on that: I did that. A week after I did it, I got a letter from a New Jersey Atlantic City casino saying, “We see that you have self-excluded from online wagering, why don’t you come in and gamble in person, we’d love to have you.” And to me I’m like, I’m trying to be responsible, I’m trying to stop gambling, and they’re marketing my decision to self-exclude back to me to tell me, “Come on in, you know, we’ve got a suite for you, whatever you need, if you come in person.”
Now, here’s what’s exciting though, and while I think the predictive markets are gambling and I think state-by-state and even federally that’s going to have to be controlled and maybe even banished state-to-state because if you’re the state of Texas or California and your residents have voted that we don’t want legalized gambling in those two states and there’s eight others as well, then to me, how do you allow Kalshi and Polymarket and the other —
MC: Well, let’s just talk quickly about what those are for people unfamiliar. Kalshi and Polymarket market themselves as predictive markets. So rather than gambling, according to them, you’re taking a position, you’re investing in a position as though it was like a derivative market on a future outcome. And so you can bet on things like who’s going to win the presidential election, what will Donald Trump say in his next press conference, but you can also bet on sporting events, games, right? It’s gambling, it really is just — I totally agree with you, it’s just gambling. But for some reason, the way that they have defined their model and marketed themselves and, frankly, the way that they’ve kind of played the political game in Washington, they have been able to operate freely in all 50 states even in states that have outlawed online sports betting.
CC: Now, they’re losing a case in Nevada right now. And Nevada might be the first state that actually outlaws anyone from using those sites, so there’ll be 49 states after that that still allow it. And obviously this is going to wind up in front of the Supreme Court possibly and it’s going to be a big fight: do the feds have the authority over the states to allow these predictive markets? But what’s interesting about it is that the predictive markets are this close right now — and I would not be shocked if we don’t have an announcement next week — where they’re instituting a nationwide self-exclusion list. That would be a very positive step in the right direction because the current landscape is that you have to do one for every single state. Now, I don’t plan on being in Missouri anytime soon, so there’s no reason for me to go to the Missouri Gaming Commission site and self-exclude. But for people that travel a lot, that do like to gamble, that are going down a bad path, unfortunately, they’ve made it very hard.
And another example of how crazy it is state-to-state: there was a push about a year and a half, two years ago, to make 1-800-GAMBLER the national number for the gambling helpline, and states shot it down because they thought it was unfair that New Jersey would have the rights to the nationwide gambling help hotline. Which is why 1-800-GAMBLER today is not the national line that you can call. So politics gets involved, of course.
But I find it interesting your experience because now that the money’s gone, but you spent six months of your life as a compulsive gambler, certainly towards the end, if you wake up in the morning today, did you have a desire to gamble? Did you think about gambling? Was it on your mind? Do you miss it? Do you want to do it?
MC: Um, not every morning, not every minute. There are definitely moments. So, like, you know, March Madness is coming up, right? I would lie if I told you that I wasn’t looking at the lines, like just, you know, just perusing, right? But I’ve self-excluded in Virginia, so I can’t do it on, you know, DraftKings, FanDuel, the main sports betting apps. I’ve also deleted the apps from my phone just, again, as kind of to stop me from following up. I think that I have it somewhat under control, but there are moments where I want to play blackjack, for example. I got a little into blackjack toward the end. I went to Vegas with one of my colleagues at The Atlantic and was introduced to all the kind of floor games. And, like, there are moments, like — I actually at one point I was up late working and just felt that itch, and so I, like, went to one of the websites where you can play blackjack but for free, you know, not really gambling. And, like, I found that just playing that, it didn’t totally satisfy the kind of impulse, but it was enough to kind of scratch the itch and I moved on.
CC: Yeah, and what’s interesting now, even though it would now be your money, my gut is that you couldn’t make a $10 wager right now, emotionally. You couldn’t, because it wouldn’t mean anything because you were betting hundreds of dollars.
MC: Oh, definitely not. Ten bucks? No, definitely not. I mean, it’s funny, like my — some of my editors and fact-checkers who worked on this piece, as kind of like a stunt as we were finishing the piece, they all put down a couple bets on the Super Bowl, right? But the amounts were so small that I was like, “That’s not real gambling. You put 20 bucks on the — come on, that’s not real.”
But no, I totally agree. Like, and that’s part of the danger here, that like you know, when you described the situation with the dad and the son, you know, kind of opening an account together and the dad covers the losses but splits the winnings with his son, like, that was kind of a microcosm of the arrangement I had with The Atlantic, right? They gave me all this money, covered my losses, but the idea was that we would split the winnings if there were a, and it ended up being a moot point. But, like, I think that that kind of arrangement can be really dangerous because it does teach you to believe that there’s only upside in gambling. It’s all fun, there’s no loss. And like, I had that experience.
CC: Now imagine doing that to a 15-, or 16-, or 17-year-old kid. Which is why that’s the fastest growing segment of the population. Like, look, I speak, it’s funny — when I first came back to WFAN in the fall of 2020, and then in 2021 we announced that I was doing “Hello, My Name is Craig,” the weekly public service show about compulsive gambling, and then partnered with FanDuel as their responsible gaming ambassador worldwide for them. You know, a lot of high schools reached out because there were some kind of pro-forward thinking principals of high schools that recognized it was a growing problem in their schools. But back in 2021, PTAs got involved, superintendents got involved and they kind of put their heads in the sand and said, “Well, the kids are too young to have those kinds of conversations. You know, I don’t want Craig to come into the school and talk to them about something.” So really the first year or two of it, I was only speaking on college campuses. I can tell you in the last year, year and a half, I’ve spoken in more high school arenas and gyms than I have college campuses because all of a sudden, three, four years later, parents are starting to realize that their kids are now gambling. And the parents may have never gambled. So all of a sudden, what they didn’t want to admit or have conversations about in 2021, they’re now begging guys like me to come into their schools and have a — kind of like a TED Talk with those kids.
And I remember I was at a private school in New Jersey about a month and a half ago. And part of the deal I have with the schools is I’m going to talk to the kids; we’re going to interact. And if a kid admits to something, you can’t hold it against that kid because we need the kids to be honest, right? And I tell that to the kids and the principal stands up and says, “Whatever happens in this room stays in this room. We’re good. We’re here to support you guys.” And there’s 460 kids in this private high school in New Jersey. And I said, “Show of hands, how many of you either are gambling or know somebody sitting in this room right now that is actively gambling?” And 460 hands went up in the air. And that’s — if that’s not a problem for people, then when you wake up to the problem, it might be too late for some of those kids. Because our kids are immature, don’t have financial responsibility, and what’s exciting now can become a nightmare tomorrow. And again, I’m not “sky is falling” type of guy, but I think if we just put our heads in the sand and don’t recognize that, you know, we’re driving our kids down a bad path, much like our parents said to us about drinking or maybe smoking marijuana back in the day.
I remember vividly in high school in New Rochelle in New York where we showed up to school one day and there’s a car that was in a terrible car accident and that was kind of to be the shock value of “don’t drink and drive,” right? So all of a sudden all the beer and liquor companies got together and started talking about designated drivers, right? So in the 1980s, being a designated driver was like a loser thing to do — “Oh, I can drive, I’ll get home.”
And because of their marketing, all of a sudden it became cool to be the guy with the keys that’s not drinking that night. And we’re going to take turns, to be fair. You know, companies like Uber and Lyft made it a lot easier to make a better decision about driving while you’re drunk. We don’t have that in the gambling world now, but I think that’s the goal of these gambling companies and why I do what I do. We want to make it cool for you to look at a friend and say, “Hey buddy, I know you got a problem, why don’t we talk about it?” Or “Hey, if you have a problem raise your hand and ask for help,” and then hopefully we’ll get to a place where there’s help available. But right now New Jersey’s got one, West Virginia’s got one. I went to the only one that exists in Arizona and I think Minnesota has one. Louisiana might have just built one, but when you’re talking about a hundred-plus billion dollar business model nationwide and states that are now making tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue that they never had before, I don’t think it’s asking too much to build a center or to educate people that want to go into therapy as their chosen profession to actually become gambling therapists. We have it for drinkers, we have it for drug addicts, we don’t have it nationwide for gamblers and we’re addicts just like they are.
MC: Craig, could you tell us your story, you know, how did you start gambling? How did you realize it was a problem and, and how did you overcome it?
CC: Um, yeah, without taking an hour and a half of your time.
MC: I know that’s a long story, but —
CC: Look, I’ve been exposed to gambling since I was in elementary school. There was a console video game called Intellivision that came out and it came with a casino game built into it. So I started playing. Now, my father doesn’t gamble, my mother doesn’t gamble, my siblings never gamble, but I was hooked as like an 8-year-old. I loved it. You know, the sound of the cards shuffling, you know, the action, all that type of thing. I’ve been gambling one way or another since I’m 8 years old.
I owned an offshore casino in Costa Rica and wrote the “bible” for fantasy gambling, called betonfantasy.com. That was back in 1997 before, you know, the DraftKings and FanDuels of the world when they were originally just fantasy companies existed. So gambling’s been a part of my life since elementary school. It didn’t become a problem for me, though, until I was an adult. And it was all ego-based. So I started gambling bigger numbers on blackjack. In certain circles, I became known as one of the better, if not the best, blackjack player on the East Coast. And people started offering me money to gamble with because I was so good at it that I would guarantee them a return, which is obviously a foolish business model. I did it on the radio once with my former radio partner and I won. I guaranteed him that I would take his 10 grand and turn it into $25,000. I did, in a very public radio bit. And then all of a sudden I had people in my life come to me who had money say, “Hey, if you turn 10 into 25, I’ll give you a hundred grand. Will you give me a buck and a quarter tomorrow?” And it just fed my ego.
And the more I played, the higher amounts I played, the more my ego grew and grew and grew and it got to the point where I was now borrowing millions of dollars to play blackjack. And had people that I’ve never met fund me to play blackjack, all with the guarantee of a significant 10 to 15 or even 20% return on their money. I was full on an addict. I just wanted to find money no matter where I could get it from to feed this insatiable beast inside me that A) thought I was the greatest card player on the planet and now I had the means to back it up. The more money you have, the more money you can gamble with. The more money you’re willing to lose, the more free money the casinos will give you. Problem, of course, is that’s not free if you lose it, you gotta pay the casinos back.
So in 2016 and 2017, I was gambling three to seven hours a day, seven days a week. I would gamble in person, I would gamble on my phone, I would gamble in underground card games like the movie “Rounders.” Any chance I had to gamble, I was in 100%. And then because of that, and because I started associating with not the best people in the world — because how many people do you know that are good guys that are willing to give you a million dollars in cash on a street corner of New York City? — I started making other really bad irrational decisions in my life. Investing in multiple companies at the same time, hanging out with bad people at the same time. And ultimately, I got caught up with someone who was running some type of scam that I knew nothing about, but I was associated with them and was doing business with him and got snarled up in an FBI investigation surrounding something that he had started, but I then became a party to. And I was doing all of this to feed my gambling addiction. I needed access to money. And like you couldn’t bet 10 bucks on a hand, while I can’t bet 5,000 bucks on a hand. I was betting $20,000, $30,000 on every hand of blackjack. I wasn’t a guy that, like, people thought I was counting cards because I had a great run for about a year and a half before it all came crashing down, and I wasn’t. I was an all-or-nothing bettor.
MC: You told me, I remember I asked you about kind of your rock bottom moment and you told me a couple stories, but one of them that I’ve thought about ever since you told me was on a chairlift, right? Can you talk about that and, like, what happened in the emotional state you were in?
CC: Yeah, so I guess — look, the two rock bottom moments for me: obviously being arrested at a quarter to four in the morning on a New York City street and being handcuffed to a park bench is my rock bottom. So let me just be clear about that. And that was a result of the FBI investigating my business practices and me using money that was meant for one thing and using it instead to gamble with it. So that’s my rock bottom moment.
But prior to that, about six months prior to that, my wife and I were on an adult-only four-day vacation in British Columbia, in Whistler, in the summertime. And she liked to go hiking, I’m not a big hiker and wasn’t at the time. So we agreed this one day in Whistler, she was going to go hiking with a group and I was going to kind of off and wait for her to be done, and we’d meet together and have lunch. So I had an edible, I got on a ski lift, which takes you to the top of the mountain even though there’s no snow, and I had lunch, I had a couple drinks, and I was by myself kind of taking in the scenery and I was well aware that my world was already caving in on me. And I can’t tell you why I had this moment or this epiphany, but it all kind of hit me at once.
I was all by myself, I had an edible, so I was stoned and I was drinking and I’m by myself on the top of this mountain. Now I know I gotta go down the mountain to go meet my wife for lunch. And I get on a ski chairlift and I’m on it and all of a sudden it just all hit me at once. All the pressures I had financially, emotionally, what I was putting my family through, the trouble I knew I was in. And, I’m not a crier, and all of a sudden tears are rolling down my face and I’m starting to have an out loud conversation and I’m going to jump off this chairlift about 150 feet down to the ground. And I lift up the bar to the chairlift and I’m crying, and I’m not a crier, and I’m saying out loud, “You’re better than this. This is not how you’re going to go out. You’re not jumping,” but as I’m saying it, I’m scooting my butt to the edge of the seat and there’s no doubt in my mind I’m going to jump off this chairlift and I can’t guarantee I’m going to die but I’m certainly going to be hurt because it’s about 100 feet down to the ground.
And you know, I’m a big spiritual guy now because, grace of God, I had my phone with me and had the ability to push a button or two and call the first person, that first name that popped up. And it was an old friend of mine named Charod Williams, who was my producer when I was on radio in New Jersey, and with tears rolling down my face and being choked up, I said, “I’m in trouble. I can’t tell you what’s going on. I just need you to talk to me. I have about 20 seconds till I get down. I’m on a chairlift. I’m going to jump. I need you to talk to me for 20 seconds.” And for 20 seconds, he just reiterated how much he loved me. And it’s the most powerful conversation I’ve probably ever had in my life.
While I’m crying, I get down, chairlift kind of lands mid-mountain. Now here’s the part that’s actually funny. I hang up on him immediately because I’m a tough guy, I don’t want to show my emotions, and I go, “Call you later, I gotta go, thanks.” Because I kind of come to. And now I recognize that I gotta get down another chairlift to get to the bottom of the mountain and I’m panicked about it. So I ask one of the kids that’s operating the chairlift, “Is there like an SUV, an ATV, can you get me to the bottom of the mountain?” He goes, “No, you can either walk down or you can get on the chairlift and take it to the next chairlift down.” Well I know I’m in trouble. If I get back on a chairlift, I’m going to want to jump off it again. So I also seen a family of bears on the way up. I did not want to get eaten by a bear. So I go, “All right, walking down the mountain” because I’m going to get eaten by the bears.
So there was this older couple in their 70s that it turns out were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. And they were in line in front of me getting ready for — they were going to take that mid-mountain chairlift down. And I said, “Pardon me, I’m having a bad time right now, I hate to interrupt your honeymoon, but is there any possible way you’d allow me to ride this chairlift down? I’m in a bad spot.” And it clearly, I’m sure I looked like I had been crying and upset, and these wonderful people said, “Yes, you can ride with us.” And then as we’re getting on the chairlift, the second chairlift down, I said, “Can I ask you one other favor?” And they said, “Of course.” I said, “Can I sit in between you guys because I might need to grab your legs or your arms so that I don’t jump off this thing?” And again, they were like, “Yes, no problem.” They saw that I was not making this up. And unknowingly, they saved my life. You know, I got on that chairlift, made it to the bottom of the mountain. And it was, unfortunately, about a month later that I got arrested and my entire world imploded on me.
MC: I think what makes you such an effective and important voice in this conversation about gambling is that you understand how all-consuming gambling addiction can be, how ruinous it can be, but also that there’s a path out of it. By the way, I just want to say that a small footnote in that story about the couple that I appreciated as a BYU fan and BYU alum is that it turned out that couple had some kind of BYU connection, right?
CC: Their son was the second-leading scorer in BYU basketball history to Jimmer Fredette. So we kind of had this basketball conversation on the way down the mountain.
But I do want to end with one thing because I know this has been a lot like doom and gloom and all the problems. So my last wager was June 30, 2018. So this June 30, I’ll be eight years in recovery. And I’ve met hundreds, if not thousands, of people that have conquered this addiction and have successfully navigated recovery and have these amazing lives to live. Doesn’t mean your problems disappear — financially, emotionally, relationship-wise — because we leave a wake of disaster behind us. But I do want to say that if you are committed to getting better, if you are committed to recovery, you can recover, you can beat this. And not everybody will, not everybody I counsel overcomes their demons and the addiction, I’m not batting a thousand. But I can tell you that I’m living proof that if I can find a way to live my life without gambling, then anybody can.
And I know that very first step is the hardest one for sure, but there’s an entire community of people here willing to let you lean on our shoulders to help you get through it. So I just want to put that out there because it’s important for people to know when the walls are caving in, the world is dark, and maybe your spouse found out or maybe you did get in trouble with the law and you made really bad decisions and you can’t imagine waking up with a smile on your face — trust me, I’m that guy. It’s seven-plus years since I last made a wager, and for two and a half years, I didn’t go an hour without making a wager. So if I can get there, you can too, you just have to want to. And nobody can make you want to.
MC: Well, congratulations on your sobriety. Thank you for all the work that you do. And thanks for coming on today.
CC: Appreciate it. Look forward to reading the article and appreciate your take on it.