Extra: Craig Carton's Crusade Against Gambling Addiction
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This is the Fox News Rundown Extra.

I'm Chris Foster. More than $3 billion will be bet legally on this year's NCAA basketball tournament games, according to the American Gaming Association. Now, that's not counting illegal bets, including technically all those bar and office bracket pulls. Most people earn it for fun and a shot at a few bucks. But March Madness season makes this a good time for Problem Gambling Awareness Month.

the FanDuel TV streaming show, the comeback with Craig Carton's About That Awareness and Avoiding and Overcoming Gambling Addiction. Carton was a high roller addict, eventually costing him his freedom, his marriage, and his dream job as one of the most popular, highest paid sports talk hosts in the country. He's back on the air now, co-hosting Breakfast Ball on Fox Sports 1, also a podcast and a radio show, and this new streaming show about problem gambling. We've

We spoke just as March Madness was getting started. Too much to include in our weekday podcast and radio show. Weekend extras like this are where we play the whole thing. Thanks for listening, maybe giving us a follow. Now, Craig Carton on the Fox News Rundown Extra. Craig, we'll get into your story in the taped introduction to you, just biographical stuff for people who might not know you. But for listeners who might be unfamiliar with this story, can you give them an idea of just how insanely bad it got for you a couple years ago?

Yeah, well, for a full decade, I was part of the most listened to sports talk radio show in the country called Boomer and Carton on WFAN. And while I was living out my best life career-wise, I was also living a double life and a secret life as a compulsive gambler. And the more I gambled, the more I wanted to gamble. The more I gambled, the higher the stakes got. And without bastardizing the story too much,

I started making bad decisions around gambling. Those bad decisions then led to bad decisions in life and who I associated with. And for me, what started off as a recreational hobby, something I enjoy doing, something I did since I'm literally eight years old, really took over my life and all rational thought. And I risked everything I'd worked very hard to build from a career standpoint, a family standpoint.

And wound up making one bad decision after another, which ultimately led to my incarceration, losing my job, losing my house, losing all the money I had saved up and earned over a lifetime of work. And made me restart life as a 50-year-old, literally with a couple of quarters under a couch cushion and nothing more than that. I mean, and you're...

Luckily for you, you're talented enough and you're well-liked enough that you're back on TV. And so you didn't slink off completely into the sunset. You mentioned gambling early. You want to bike off a kid playing video game cards in the 80s. That Intellivision system was sick, though. I only had Atari, so you were lucky in that respect. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Look, my parents didn't gamble, but I loved it from the minute I was exposed to it. In television, I had a built-in casino game, had a blackjack game, had a craps game. I turned that into being a local casino in elementary school as the house, and I've gambled my entire life from then up until about seven years ago. I haven't gambled at all in the last seven years. So for someone like me,

where gambling was such a big part of their life, even before it became problematic, to now, A, not gamble at all, and be able to use my story to help other people navigate the world of gambling is a pretty unique story.

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maybe a casino every few years for some cards, but I'm fine betting $1, $5, $10, maybe $100 before a Super Bowl, and I just don't need the escalation like the addicts do. I guess I'm lucky in that I can enjoy it like people like FanDuel would want you to do.

Yeah, look, you represent the majority of people that are going to gamble, whether it's first-timers to the app or people who are seasoned gamblers in bricks-and-mortar casinos. You represent the majority. I represent the minority. But the issue with the minority is that the more and more people who now are gambling for the first time ever because of the widespread legalization, by default means that there's going to be more and more people

albeit a small percentage of the total, but there's going to be a lot more people that now present as compulsive and problem gamblers. So, you know, what FanDuel decided to do, you know, about five years ago, which is counterintuitive to running a casino and running a sports book,

is to make sure that their customers and by proxy, anyone who's now going to gamble for the first time or now become a regular gambler, whether it's your football only or casino only or whatever the case may be, big events only, that they're at least armed with confidence

you know protections to put in place the reality of what problem gambling looks like and are more educated customers which is really great because very few to know of none of the other operators take it as seriously as fanduel does

I mean, like you said, I mean, yeah, it's sort of a conflict of interest. You have a vested interest financially, if not morally, in people betting over their heads a little bit. But the line is from the industry is, look, treat it like entertainment. It's like going to the movies or whatever. Enjoy winning when you win, but assume you're going to lose every time and don't bet more than you can afford. But, you know, what are some of the tools to help people not do that?

Yeah, so what Fandle created, which I think is really unique and really great from my perspective, it's not even the old cliche that you just referenced, you know, bet with your head not over it.

Because no one listens to that line and then acts accordingly. You know, the majority of wagering becomes emotional for most people and not well thought out or well researched. So the three tools that I lean on the most when I counsel people who are maybe not problem gamblers but are concerned about it, I want to make sure that they're protected against the possibility that they might go down a bad road and might have an addiction that they never thought they would have.

is number one, deposit limits.

You can control how much money you can ever deposit, which protects you against yourself because if you make a certain deposit and you lose and your reaction is, well, let me make another deposit for more money to get my money back, you could be prevented from doing that. So you control potential losses. Wager limits. A guy that comes in and makes a deposit of $500 shouldn't have $500 on a single game.

So you can control the maximum amount you have at risk on any one individual game. It's almost like treating your gambling the way a hedge fund operates, where one bad loss doesn't kill you and allows you to slowly but surely continue to gamble in a responsible manner. And then the third one is time limits.

You know, if you're going to wager, go online, make your wager. Hopefully you put some thought behind it. And it's not just a blind pick where you're throwing a dart against a huge wall and get off the app. There's absolutely no reason to spend hours and hours a day on any of these apps. So if you consider those rules, which are set up,

really to protect you from you, I think there's a much greater opportunity for you to wager responsibly, recreationally, and not get bitten by the addiction that I got bitten by. You have this new streaming show with FanDuel on FanDuel TV, and it's on YouTube. The comeback of Craig Carton, it's a monthly thing, I guess. You talk to people about their gambling problems. What's Randy Livingston's story in this first episode?

Yeah, so Randy was an All-American high school basketball player, was a star in college and made it to the NBA and made millions of dollars. And all the while he's living this very public life as a Louisiana celebrity, he was hiding a terrible secret, which was that he was addicted to gambling in and out of casinos. And it wound up costing him everything, almost in cost of his marriage. And he's blessed to have an amazing woman, Anita Smith, by his side.

But he threw it all away because he couldn't gamble responsibly. He gambled beyond even his means, making millions of dollars as a professional basketball player. And the reason we're going to talk to not just celebrities who may have gone down a similar path, but average everyday people, the mailman, the banker, the real estate agent, the school teacher, the truck driver, the bagel store guy.

is because there's nothing special about me. You know, I'm everyone. And the reason we're doing this show is to do our best to a humanize addicts and to help addicts like myself. You'll live without the stigma of being an addict. You know, nobody wants to admit that they're addicted to anything.

When it comes to gambling, it's even more pervasive and worse than being a drug addict or an alcoholic because those people can't really hide when they're using. You know, if you lined up 10 people across the room and one guy's drunk, one guy's stoned, and one guy's a gambling addict, you have no way of finding out the gambling addict. But there's a pretty good shot you could pick out the guy who's drinking and the guy who's on drugs.

And one of the positives of the now widespread proliferation of legalized gambling is that when we get to a point, hopefully in short order,

We're talking about gambling is the nightly conversation at the dinner table. And we've normalized just innocent conversations around gambling. It'll ultimately make it easier for problem gamblers to ask for help without the shame or stigma associated with being a gambler. Yeah, that's interesting. The idea that the normalization of gambling,

gambling in general. I mean, the advertising is pervasive. Anybody in the majority of states now can just get it on their phone. One thing I was thinking about this, talking to you, one thing I wonder about gambling addiction, about maybe how it's maybe more insidious

in addition to being less detectable, with some other addictions, you get high, you get drunk, whatever the satisfaction is, and that's that. With gambling, you also... There's that, and also you can come away with money and the ego boost of winning. So you get high, plus these other tangible benefits, possibly. Yeah, so it's a very unique addiction in that what you said is accurate. It's the only addiction where...

you could potentially make money. Now, anybody that goes into this thinking that gambling is now my job, I'm going to support myself with it, you could drop that idea right now. It's fool's gold. There aren't 50 human beings alive on this planet who legitimately can make a living, a positive income, year after year.

based solely on gambling. The animal does not exist. Anyone that thinks they're going to be that guy, sorry to burst the bubble, you're not. You're not going to be that guy. So from that standpoint, yes, you have to fight that a little bit. There's the potential upside of putting money in your bank account, but that, of course, is short-lived for the far majority of people. Look, it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be...

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that it's one of our biggest concerns because there will be first-time gamblers that cannot control themselves, that can't stop after a loss, chase bad money, you know, good money with bad money, and find themselves very quickly in a hole financially that they can't get out of. But when it comes to the actual addict, when they're gambling, it's exactly the same as a drug addict getting high or an alcoholic needing a drink.

Because our brains and the endorphins in our brains process it the same way. And you can get to a point, and I did quite famously, where the amount of money you're getting is no longer relevant. You know, I'm betting $30,000 on a hand of blackjack. And win or lose, obviously you want to win, but it didn't matter as much as playing mattered.

And that's very similar to the drug addict chasing the high or the alcoholic chasing the buzz. It's very similar in that regard.

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You've also got this, uh, hello, my name is Craig on WFAN radio sticking with this, um, with this.

I guess I'll call it. And then you've got Breakfast Ball, Fox Sports 1, H10 Eastern. How's that working out? About six months old now? So, yeah. So Breakfast Ball started late August last year with myself, former Bronco, and at the time Redskin, Mark Schlereth, three-time Super Bowl winner, and Danny Parkins, who was a Sports Talk radio guy in Chicago. That's going great. We have fun every morning, probably more fun than most people. And in regards to Hello, My Name is Craig, a show that

You know, we started with FanDuel's backing back in 2021, January of 21, and WFAN is the catalyst behind that show.

It's been the most important content I've ever done. And, look, I'm blessed. I've had a 30-plus year career. I'm in the New York Broadcasters Hall of Fame, which is, you know, is a great honor based on my career. And of all the great things I've been able to accomplish and, you know, ratings, success, and all those types of things, the fact that I do this show and now the comeback with FanDuel, that's the most important content I've ever put out

because I'm using my story and the worst experience I've had in my life to help other people. And I get great satisfaction, and I'm quite proud of both, because I have a great platform to do it. The shows resonate with people now from coast to coast. And as long as FanDuel and WFN will allow me to do it, I will always continue to do it, because it's so important for it to be done. Well, Greg, it's good to have you back.

on the air. Craig Carton, again, host of Breakfast Ball, Fox Sports 1, and this new

streaming show with FanDuel TV to come back with Craig Carton. Craig, thanks a lot. Good to talk to you. Enjoy the tournament. Thank you so much. You as well. You've been listening to the Fox News Rundown. And now, stay up to date by subscribing to this podcast at foxnewspodcasts.com. Listen ad-free on Fox News Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts. And Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on Amazon Music. And for up-to-the-minute news, go to foxnews.com.

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