This is episode 43 of the After Gambling Podcast, and this is a what-the-hell-are-we-doing rant.
Hey there, and welcome to the After Gambling Podcast.
My name is Jamie. I am a compulsive gambler, and I’m also the host of this show.
The last time I gambled was July 15th of 2010.
Now, before I get into my rant, I just want to put a disclaimer up front and say that this is going to be a bit of a selfish episode, and also that it’s going to be one of the most difficult for me to do because I’m going to try to do it in a PG manner when I’m feeling very R-rated. But I have a four-year-old, I have a soon-to-be six-year-old, and someday they may listen to this, and it’s going to be hard to have that conversation of, “Why can you say that if I can’t?” So I’m going to try to keep it very PG. But you can fill in the blanks and imagine what I would really like to say in this episode.
So, what the hell are we doing?
The last few weeks have just been mind-boggling to me to watch because I’ve seen things personally that I’ll get into later, but I’ve also seen just things out there on Twitter. I see infighting among people that have similar goals. They may have different methods to get there, which is fine. I think we should have different methods to get there because we don’t know what’s going to work. But why are we fighting within ourselves? Why are people that are all trying to fight to help problem gamblers or to help eliminate harm, why are they fighting, period? Why are they fighting over that same goal?
There are different ways to get there, different ways to do anything. And I think the more ways that are out there, one of them might stick. And hey, maybe we all need to cast our egos aside, myself included, and say, “Look, I know in my heart what I believe.” And that’s why on this podcast, I try to share what works for me. I don’t share anything outside of what works for me. I’ll gladly have people on to talk about what works for them. And I encourage that. I encourage things that I would say, “You know what? I don’t know if that’s going to work.” I’ll share those.
But when I do, I’m going to say, “Look, this isn’t something I’ve tried,” because all I want to do is be kind of honest and true to you and say, “Look, this is something I do. And if it’s not something I do, it’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s just that I don’t know anything about it. I can’t tell you that it works for me. And so if I can’t tell you it works for me, I’m not going to encourage it.” But I will listen to somebody else say, “Hey, this is what really works.”
So why are we fighting? What’s the deal? I don’t get it. I think this is something we really need to all kind of take a deep look at ourselves and say, “Yes, I have my own opinions, but other people’s opinions are just as valid, and I need to listen to them.” And maybe they have something that I can cherry-pick from and learn from and incorporate into trying to help everybody pull in the same direction for the greater good.
So that’s the first one. And then on this same one… and this is really the part that’s really gotten me the last couple of weeks. As you know, I share the podcast. I share it a lot of different places, share links to it, and had some pushback on doing so in some newer places, some older places, a little bit of everything. And I just wanted to share why I do it, but also just kind of push back on the censorship because I think—and I see it a lot of different places. It’s not just on me. It’s other people with other things.
I’ve seen comments in groups saying, “Hey, nobody should talk about religion here.” Like, that’s not something that should be brought up. This is only about gambling. People can’t talk about religion. And personally, religion isn’t a big part of my recovery. And so while I could be like, “Oh, hey, it’s not a big part of my recovery. Don’t talk about it.” But the truth is it’s a huge part of a lot of people’s recovery. And going back to what I just said, why, if it’s something that really, really works for somebody and is working for them, why should we censor? Why should we say, “Hey, you can’t, you can’t be talking about religion here because it may offend somebody. It may upset somebody.” No.
Take the pieces that really you like. Try it all. See what works. Hell, if waking up in the morning, looking at your cat with one eye and juggling three pineapples in your right hand works for you and you say, “I’ve done that for 365 days or five years or 10 years. Every day I wake up, that’s the only thing I’ve changed, and I don’t gamble anymore,” then fantastic. I think that’s awesome. And tell other people, say, “Hey, this is what I do. I wake up, I look at my cat through one eye, and I juggle a pineapple in my right hand every morning, and I don’t gamble anymore.” Share it. Why are we going to stop people from saying what works for them? Makes no sense to me. Makes no sense to me.
And similar, GA. I see people say, “Hey, look, all these people talking about, you have to go to GA, you have to go to GA.” And you know, I’ve said, I go to GA. I think it really works. I would encourage people to. Do you have to do it? No. I’m sure you can recover in a different way. And that’s why I say I’ll share what I know, what I know works for me, but I’m not going to stop other people from sharing what works for them.
So why are we doing that? And even within GA, and this has been one of those things that it’s a bone that I could pick with GA, which is inside GA, it’s, you can only talk GA stuff. You can only talk GA stuff. You can only share GA literature. And I understand that literature that’s shared has to be GA because that’s a way to regulate. Otherwise, you’d have all sorts of stuff coming in. But to have somebody at the meeting and say, “Hey, look, I did this and it really worked for me,” to kind of poo-poo that or trying to get people to not share that, I think it’s crazy. It’s absolutely crazy. Why wouldn’t you have somebody share whatever’s working for them?
So obviously—and that’s come to the final part of this, which is I’ve had people talk about, “Hey, I don’t know if you should share your podcast and share the link.” And as you know, in recent weeks and months, I’ve started to share the link a whole lot more. And I’m going to touch on that next—why I do. But it’s just one of those things, if the podcast works for people—and I get messages all the time that it seems to work, and it’s not the solution, it’s not the whole big picture. I think it’s a bridge to recovery. It’s kind of the starting point.
So if I think it works and I’m in a group and somebody says, “Look, I’m desperate for help,” which is always the cry—”I’m desperate for help. What works? What can I do?”—am I being honest to that person? Am I helping that person if I say, “You know what? Hey, I’m going to share this. I’ve been there before,” which is good—that will help them. But then I say, “Look, that’s it. I’m not going to share a resource. I’m not going to tell them about GA. I’m not going to tell them about free counseling from their state. I’m not going to tell them about the podcast. I’m not going to tell them about all these other things,” which I do through the podcast.
Am I really helping that person, or am I just holding back to appease other people and to appease everyone? And when we try and do that, it’s not going to work for anybody. Because, I mean, if you put everybody that is offended by religion, everybody that’s offended by GA, everybody that’s offended by my podcast, everybody that’s offended by you sitting there looking at your cat through one eye and juggling three pineapples in your right hand—guess what? We’re just going to say, “Hey, you know what? It sucks, man.” And we’re going to leave you in the dark because we don’t want to offend somebody, or we don’t want to upset somebody by sharing a resource. What sense does that make? Literally, what sense does that make?
Now, I ran through this in my head and I said, you know what? Okay, is this an ego? Jamie, is it just your ego that’s saying, if you can’t share the podcast, you’re not going to go and help out people in the group. And I get that, and I understand that. I started to dig into it really deeply and no, I’m going to still continue to go and try to help out in any way I can. Because it’s still—even just posting is going to be one of those things that people can do their own digging and find the podcast if that’s not the accepted way to share it in those groups.
And it’s not that I don’t want to help, but again, it just goes back to the why make it hard for people. And the best way I can explain this or kind of visualize it is darkness, right? We’ve all talked about when you’re in the throes of addiction, it’s like being in pitch black. It’s dark. We’re alone. And when we’re in the dark, we’re stuck there, and we go to seek out help. And that’s what these people are doing. They’re coming to seek out help because they’re in the darkness, and they don’t know where to turn.
And the reason they can’t find a way out is because they don’t know where the doors are. They don’t know where the exits are. So they come, they show up, whether it’s GA, whether it’s an individual counseling session, whether it’s Reddit, Twitter, a therapist, whatever it is, they come to this place and they’re in the dark, right? So you see they’re in the dark and they don’t know where it is. And maybe they do find that one door that opens up, and they go in there, they try GA, they try therapy, they try the podcast, they try Reddit, they try Twitter. It’s one door that starts to add a little bit more light to the room.
Now, imagine if that door says, “Oh, by the way, there are 12 other doors in the room. Go and open them. Here’s how you get to this one. Here’s how you get to this one. Here’s how you get to this one.” And you continuously do that until you expose that person that’s in the dark to all the doors, and they crack them open even just a little bit. Guess what? That room’s going to be filled with so much more light. And then maybe they leave one closed. They go in one and they say, “Hey, this isn’t going to work.” They shut that. They open that door, but they can see where the other ones are, and they open them up. And the more that they open up, the more that the light comes in, and they’re not stuck there alone in the dark searching for answers all by themselves.
So I think this is something we need to think about when we are the person that’s helping somebody. Are we showing them the direction to other doors?
So I think this is something we need to think about when we’re the person that’s helping somebody. Are we also showing them the direction to other doors? Are we helping to open the door? Are we opening up those other doors or putting a little crack in those doors so that they can find them in case that that might be a better solution or another solution? Or are we letting our ego get in the way and acting as a gatekeeper that says, “Look, this is the only way out. All these other doors may take away from my attention, so we don’t want to show you to those. And we don’t want to upset people by opening up these doors.”
What good are we doing with that? What good is that going to do for that person that’s stuck in the dark and they’re doing desperate for answers? Look, this is the day and age of the internet. We need to stop trying to filter information and instead start leading people to all those doors that open up the light.
And then finally, the one thing that I want to touch on—and this is where it becomes very personal for me—is talking about my goals with the podcast. Because obviously, I get a little sensitive—I’m not going to lie—when people say, “Hey, we don’t want you to share that.” Yeah, of course that upsets me. It hurts my feelings a little bit. And like I said, I looked at, “Is it just my ego that’s getting in the way?” And so I wanted to take this time to share a little bit of information about the podcast, about the financials of the podcast.
Because that’s the one thing that’s come up several times is, “Oh, this is something you do to make money.” And I have a dirty little secret, which is the podcast hasn’t made a single penny. I haven’t collected a single penny. The only place anybody could even remotely support the podcast is on the website—there’s a link to a book, and it’s an Amazon affiliate link. So if they went and bought the book, I’d get like 3 cents or 6 cents or something like that. I don’t—I don’t know what it is because it’s never happened. That’s the only single way. There’s no financial benefit in this for me right now.
I’ve had people ask, “Why don’t you monetize the podcast? Why don’t you do ads?” I mean, if you listen to podcasts, you know that most podcasts have one, three, five different sponsors. It’s, “Hey, listen to this, go buy this product, and support the show.” If you’ve heard one of those on this podcast, you need to go back and listen again because there hasn’t been a single one of those things.
I do this fully out of my own pocket. I pay $15 a month to Libsyn to host the podcast. I pay a little bit for hosting of the website each month. It’s part of a bigger package, so it’s really not that big of a deal. I pay like 12 bucks a year for the domain name. Obviously, I bought all the equipment—the microphone, some of the other tools that I need to run it. And then I have hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of time into doing it because it helps me.
First of all, I’m not going to lie—this helps me. And because it makes me feel really good, and it’s also a part of my recovery. Do I love seeing downloads? Hell yes. By the way, the last two days were the largest download numbers for a day ever—back to back, the top two were in the last two days. Do I love seeing that? Yeah. And guess how much money I made from doing that? Nothing. Nothing. What I get out of it is a smile on my face and a little bit of joy in my heart, knowing that maybe this thing that I put together, this little thing, is helping somebody.
And will it be that way forever? Probably not. If somebody comes to me and they say, “Hey, this is a great product,” and I try it out and I say, “Yeah, this is something I use, I like,” I will share it. I will do advertising to help defray the cost. I’m not ashamed of that. If that comes down the road, I will do it. Also, I mean, I plan on doing some consulting work. I plan on doing other types of speaking events, and those will probably be paid. But guess what? They have no bearing on the podcast and the fact that the podcast is completely free and currently completely ad-free for anybody that wants to listen.
So directing somebody to the podcast, the only goal is to help them. There’s no other revenue stream in it for me because I haven’t built a single revenue stream into it. So yeah, there are ways—there are ways that the podcast may help me financially in the future. Not going to lie about that. But it has no impact on my sharing it with somebody guilt-free because it’s a free resource. They don’t even have to spend gas. I mean, I guess the only thing you’d have to spend is bandwidth. I mean, so if you’re on WiFi at a cafe or something where you’re not paying for internet, it’s completely free.
And look, right now, it might feel like I’m trying to call people out and places out, and in a way I am, because I am calling them out on the fact that, look, if you’re trying to be the gatekeeper of information in the day and age of the internet, what the hell are you doing? And also, what is your goal?
And that’s where I go back to—everything comes back to, for me, what is my goal? My goal is to help somebody, either to help them prevent ever having a gambling problem and dealing with gambling harm, or if they have a gambling problem, my goal is to help them get the help that they need. Whether it’s through my podcast, whether it’s through GA, whether it’s through individual therapy—if you’ve listened to the podcast, you know that I call out all of these things and more.
So my goal is to help that person. And so if your goal is to help somebody, what good are you doing by censoring any type of information? What good are you doing censoring religion, censoring GA, censoring my podcast? And most of all, our favorite thing—waking up in the morning, looking at your cat through one eye and juggling three pineapples in your right hand—what the hell are we doing trying to censor ways of recovery?
There are many different ways. We need to expose people to as many of those. We need to open as many doors as possible to let in the light for that person that is stuck down in the darkness. And if you are against that, then I guess we just have completely different views of what it means to help other people and to help them in recovery.
So I know where my ego is. I hope everybody else checks their ego at the door also. And going forward, that we just focus on helping people through whatever means possible.
That’s the end of my rant. Thanks for listening. I’m glad I changed the podcast episodes up. I didn’t have this planned that I would be able to do things that were kind of ranty. And I apologize—this will hopefully be the longest rant I ever do. Most of them I was planning on doing like a minute or two. But this one, as you can tell, I’m a little fired up.
So thanks for listening. Thanks for your messages. And finally, on that note, I want to say the reason that I post the links—and I’ve started doing this a while back, but it was reconfirmed a few weeks ago when I got several messages—I got several messages on back-to-back days that said, “Look, the podcast changed my life. The podcast saved my life.” That listening to it led them to GA, led them to tell their family, led them to seek out therapy, led them to recovery.
And so I thought about it, and I said, you know what? What would have happened if I didn’t put a link on that post that they shared? Would they have gone and looked for it on other places? Maybe. But knowing me, when I was in that place, I just was so self-focused. I’d post it and I’d only look at what people would respond to me. So if it wasn’t there, they probably wouldn’t have found it. And it’s not to say that they wouldn’t have gotten to the place they are now, but hopefully I expedited the process. And either way, I’m confident and I’m happy with the fact that I posted the link so that they could find the resource and then do those things that are changing their lives and saving their lives.
So I’m not going to stop that. I’m going to continue on. If you ask me to stop posting the link, I will stop posting the link, but I’m going to sleep well at night knowing that I’m doing everything possible to help people. And I hope that you take a deep look and do the same.
That’s it for today. As always, the information here is for informational purposes. It’s an educational tool. Like I said in the podcast episode, this is to help you get to those professionals—whether it’s GA, whether it’s therapy, whether it’s your doctor, anybody. I’m none of those things. I am just a guy that had a gambling addiction and now has over eight and a quarter years of clean time, and I share my story. So please seek out the help of a professional—you deserve it.
And finally, music for the show is “Something Elated” by Broke for Free and is licensed under the Creative Commons license. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your messages. Thank you for your support. Continue to share the podcast—people can’t stop it from spreading. It’s going to spread if it helps people. If it sucks, nobody’s going to share the damn thing.
That’s it. I’m out.
