- January 20, 2026
- Gambling
Sam DeMello turned his pain into purpose. He’s pioneering gambling harm reduction through Evive, a digital therapeutic app he created to help beat the odds of gambling addiction.
You can download Evive for free on the iOS or Google Play App stores, or learn more at getevive.com
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SAM DEMELLO
If gambling is accessible in your pocket 24 hours a day, support should be too.
SHANE COOK
Hello again, everybody, and welcome to Wager Danger, a podcast where we discuss gambling addiction and recovery. I’m Shane Cook, gambling disorder program director at Gateway Foundation.
And on this episode, we’re joined by Sam Demello to talk about his recovery journey. And his new digital therapeutics app for gambling recovery called Evive.
Sam’s recovery came after a long battle with gambling addiction that started when he was
12 years old, and watch Chris Moneymaker win the World Series of Poker on ESPN.
This became a multi-year battle that cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars and consumed his life.
Now that he’s in recovery, Sam wants to give back. And he is revolutionizing how people struggling with gambling addiction find help through a digital health app he has created called Evive. And it’s changing gamblers lives everywhere.
He realized that gamblers need to be met exactly where they are, because some are seeking complete abstinence, while others are seeking moderation.
His vision is a future where technology can predict relapses before they happen,
And where the gambling industry competes based on who takes the best care of their players.
We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Welcome to the show, Sam.
SAM DEMELLO
Thanks so much for having me, Shane.
SHANE COOK
Absolutely, we’ve had the opportunity to get to know each other a little bit over the last few months. And, I’m really excited to have you on the show today and talk about your journey.
Tell us a little bit about what Evive is, and then we’ll peel it back from there?
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah, that sounds great. Evive is a digital health application that is available on iOS or Android, and it is really designed from my personal experience and a bunch of clinical research. And the goal is to help people build a better relationship with gambling, whatever that means for them. If they need recovery support because they never want to gamble again.
That’s what Evive does. If we want to moderate or reduce their gambling, it helps them do that. And if they want to prevent gambling related harm so that they don’t go, you know, down the road that I went down, it helps them do that as well.
SHANE COOK
Okay. So, this really is a tool that’s being put in the hands of people all across the US or, at least in various locations throughout the US, including Illinois. That allows people to it’s an assist or a support to their current recovery. Or it may just give them, an early head start on understanding their relationship with gambling.
SAM DEMELLO
Exactly.
SHANE COOK
Okay. So let’s kind of roll it back again and and kind of, if you don’t mind, kind of share your story. Sure. And, and your relationship with gambling and how that evolved into this app that’s designed for people called Evive.
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah. Of course. So professionally, I’ve been working in the technology sector for the last 16 years or so.
And for the vast majority of that time, I worked for commercial tech companies, and I loved it. I loved the growth and the pace and the innovation.
And then things really changed in 2020, when I moved to Boston with my wife, and I took a job at a digital therapeutic company called Akili, and they made one of the first FDA approved mobile video games to treat ADHD in kids.
And I just was totally blown away, right? This was a company that was taking technology that is designed typically to extract as much money as it can from the person playing the game, and they turned it on its head and they said, how do we use this technology to support people and and make them better? And I got very involved in the digital therapeutics world. Personally,
I’m six years into recovery from my own gambling addiction. Right. And it’s always funny for me to say that on a podcast, because up until Evive, that that was the biggest secret of my life. You know, I have what I think is a pretty common story for, for men of my generation in the US. I’m 38 years old today.
I started gambling for the first time when I was 12, when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker. Oh, yeah, and it was televised on ESPN.
I know this is audio only, but for listeners, I’m about five foot six, and I kind of pudgy and, you know, not very coordinated. And so as a, as an adolescent, you know, I was looking for a pathway to, to be one of the guys, right, to, like, compete.
And I couldn’t really do that on the basketball court. But I was always good at cards. And poker for me was was totally natural. Right?
SHANE COOK
Sure.
SAM DEMELLO
And so I started playing home games with my friends. And, you know, I loved it. And my parents loved it. Right. We were in their basement maybe losing, you know, 10 or 20 bucks in a game. And they thought, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? Right? This is better than, you know, being on the street. Sure.
And and in retrospect, there were massive warning signs that I was going to have a problem. Like from the jump. Right. I, I couldn’t set a limit on the time that I was spending playing poker. It’s all I wanted to do, I couldn’t set a limit on the money. I just didn’t have any money. Right. Because I was really young. But if I lost my five bucks, I was definitely going to borrow five bucks to keep playing.
And I continued playing poker from age 12 all the way through through high school and and college. And I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, which is beautiful campus. Beautiful, right? It’s on the beach. Like, you know, it is a place that you dream of being.
And in the first year, I met some guys in the dorms that like to play poker.
And very quickly it separated from the guys that wanted to play all the time for more and more money that I was a part of. And the guys that were just kind of casual. And when I turned 18, I was able to go to the local tribal casino called Chumash, which was about 45 minutes away. Okay. And I spent most of my four year college career.
You know, in a place on the beach with beautiful people and waves and sunshine. I spent most of that time in a smoky, you know, tribal casino card room.
But, you know, I graduated from college, I got my degree, and, you know, I didn’t see my gambling as particularly problematic.
And then after college, I moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil.
And I ended up living there for about three years. And when I got down there, I actually didn’t speak nearly any Portuguese. Sure. I mean, poker was actually kind of my lifeline into making friends because it was universal. You know, I could I met guys that like to play.
And again, I was playing in person and I, you know, didn’t have very much money. And, you know, it was pretty social. And when things really changed for me was when I moved back to the United States at around age 23.
I moved back home to Oakland, California, and I was living in my mom’s basement, and I felt really behind my friends that had graduated and went straight to, you know, careers and jobs and had their own apartments.
And one of my good friends introduced me to, Bovada the, the offshore sportsbook, okay, at a bar watching a basketball game. And he said, look, I just put ten bucks on the Golden State Warriors to win. And it was instantaneous for me, right?
Everything that I experienced as a 12 year old.
Right. This, like, feeling like one of the guys and being part of the action just immediately came back. And, you know, I had something to talk about with my friends. And we were all connected. And it probably took 30 days, maybe, for me to go from $5 on the Golden State Warriors socially with my friends, to $200 on Ugandan professional basketball on an application at two in the morning on my phone.
SHANE COOK
So you made the switch fairly easily between poker and online sports gambling then it sounds like.
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting, I, I have never been a massive sports fan, and most of my close friends just coincidentally are. And many of them work in professional sports now. So I didn’t really get excited about the prospect of watching football for 12 hours on Sunday. For the love of the game. But I love to gamble and I knew how to gamble and I got a rush from it.
And so all of a sudden we were doing the same activity. But I was having a pretty different experience right?
And so around that time, you know, 23, 24, I started my career in the technology sector and very quickly my career started to grow and I started to make, you know, more money than I had ever had in my life. And all of that money went to gambling, right? I, I have been someone one of the ironies for me is that I’ve always been pretty good about a budget.
And the way that I looked at it was I pay my rent, I pay my utilities and buy food, and everything else is fun money. And it doesn’t matter if that’s going to gambling or that’s going to hobbies or that’s going to traveling. It’s all the same bucket, right? But it all went to gambling. And at first it might have been a couple hundred bucks a month, but pretty quickly it was a couple thousand dollars a month, you know?
SHANE COOK
Yeah.
SAM DEMELLO
And between 24 and 30, I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it wasn’t $75,000 weekends in Las Vegas, right? It was a steady drip of $2,500 a week out of my bank account into an application. Just constantly.
SHANE COOK
Right.
SAM DEMELLO
And like my poker, too. You know, it started with. I’m only going to bet on sports that I genuinely enjoy. Okay, I’m only going to bet on games that I watch, okay? I’m only going to bet on teams that I know something about. To, obviously. You know, I’m betting on, like the German pretzel cutting Championship, right? It’s crazy.
And I think the other thing that online gambling did for me, especially as a poker player, is poker is a game of skill. The way that I saw it. Right. And other casino games that the house has the edge. They’re kind of suckers games, right? So if I went to the card room with my friends and I sat down in front of a slot machine, my friends would find that embarrassing, right?
What are you doing, man? Like, you know, you don’t play that. But nobody knew what I was doing on my phone. So as I started to, you know, disrupt my dopamine system and really start to fall into this addiction, it very quickly went from sports betting to, you know, online blackjack to, to slot machines to, to all of the things that I had access to.
SHANE COOK
Okay.
SAM DEMELLO
And it took me years to recognize what was happening to me. I did not know that gambling addiction was a thing. Right. The way that I would look at it is, well, yeah, I went and I gambled too much last night, but it’s because I went out drinking and I made a bad decision. Right. Okay. Where I was stressed at work and, you know, I lost control when in reality it was the gambling that was causing me the stress and the anxiety and these feelings of, you know, shame. Because as I kept gambling, I kept losing, you know, even if I won, I couldn’t hold on to it. It would all go back. And it got to a point where I was, you know, 28, 29 years old, and I had worked for 5 or 6 years, you know, 70 hours a week and really working hard. And I had nothing to show for it.
You know, I just got to this point where I said, I need to stop. And I and I tried. I said, I woke up and I said, I’m not gambling anymore.
SHANE COOK
Yeah.
SAM DEMELLO
And I couldn’t do it. I could string together maybe 24 to 48 hours of abstinence, but it was just white knuckle misery for me. I probably tried and failed to quit gambling on my own 50 to 100 times. And every time it would make me feel more shameful and more powerless, you know, and just worse about myself.
Okay. And I, I also saw it as like a moral weakness. You know, I looked at myself as, I know that I want to stop gambling and I can’t do it. And that’s because I’m weak and I don’t want it bad enough.
And after a year or two of really struggling on my own and not telling anybody, not telling my friends, not telling my parents, not telling anybody because I, I was ashamed about it. Yeah. I finally got to the point where I said I, I need to get some professional help.
SHANE COOK
Okay. So just want to explore that a little bit more. So on the outside, there was no indicator among your family friends that any of this was going on.
SAM DEMELLO
The worst days of my addiction were the days that I was the most successful externally. Right.
SHANE COOK
Okay.
SAM DEMELLO
As my addiction progressed and I felt really ashamed about it, I started trying to take control of my life in other ways. Right. So I got really into going to the gym and working out and and started running. And I thought if I could exhaust myself in the gym, I won’t have the energy to stay up all night and gamble.
And I started running marathons and I did like an ultramarathon. And so all of these people around me would come to me and say, man, you’re really doing well in your career. And you lost a bunch of weight and you ran a marathon. You must be so proud. And I thought, wow, if you knew what I feel like on the inside, right?
I am fraudulent and broken and stupid. And I’m losing all of my money. And it just made me feel so isolated. I didn’t want to let them down. I didn’t want them. I liked that they thought that I was successful, right? It was my ego. I didn’t want to let them down. And if someone is coming to you from a point of hey, congratulations, it’s pretty tricky to to go.
Well, actually, my life is on fire and I need help.
SHANE COOK
Right? So what was it that broke that cycle for you?
SAM DEMELLO
You know, it’s funny because I cannot remember a pivotal moment. Like a particularly bad experience at the casino or like, losing a massive amount of money. It was just, you know, on attempt number 50 or 60 of trying to quit. I couldn’t do it. And I just got to this point where I was like, okay, I need some help. Like I give up.
SHANE COOK
Okay.
SAM DEMELLO
And at that point, I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a certified gambling counselor, right? I didn’t I didn’t know that this was it was an issue. And so I just found a therapist in the back of psychology Today, and I called them and I and I went and I said, hey, I think I have a bad gambling habit because, you know, I wasn’t using addiction at that point.
And the therapist recommended that I go to Gamblers Anonymous, which at that point I didn’t know existed. I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous, but no way there’s other people like me like that seems crazy. And unfortunately, I was really young and immature and I was in crisis. But I went to my first G.A. meeting and I didn’t recognize myself in the room.
Sure, I didn’t look hard enough, but I didn’t see it. And I felt like I’m here talking about gambling on my cell phone with cryptocurrency and, you know, doing this stuff at my tech job. And the next guy is 30 years older than me, and he’s talking about his experience at the horse track in the 1980s. Right. And so I forced myself to go to therapy, and I forced myself to go to GA meetings, and I was really miserable.
And ultimately it got so bad that I was going to meet with my therapist. I was paying them $150 an hour out of my pocket. I would leave my therapy session and gamble on my cell phone, in the elevator, on the way out of the building.
SHANE COOK
Yeah.
SAM DEMELLO
And I just thought, this is crazy. And probably the worst decision that I ever made was I thought, this is crazy. I now recognize that I am an addict, but this is my identity. This is who I am, and I’m never going to be able to fix it. And so I’ve been hiding it from my friends and
And they think that I’m successful and I’m just going to keep doing it. I’m just going to really keep doing it.
SHANE COOK
So you really got to a point where you were like, okay, I’m giving up on even trying to solve this. So something in there happened. Yeah. That that changed. Changed your tact. Well, what was that?
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah. I spent about 18 months in the most miserable condition that I had ever been in. Just sleeping like, an hour a night and gambling all day, and, you know, moving money around and drinking heavily because I felt so isolated. And ultimately, what happened is that I started dating a wonderful woman, and I proposed to her at the end of 2019, in October.
And when I proposed to her, I said, you know, if she says yes, well, then I got it right. I can I can function and like, I can hide this forever. And she said, yes. And I was like, great, we’re good. And two months later she came.
SHANE COOK
She had no idea at this point.
SAM DEMELLO
No idea.
SHANE COOK
All right.
SAM DEMELLO
And she came back to me two months later in December, and she said, look, I want to marry you. And 80% of the time you are awesome. And I, you know, I love you, but 20% of the time, I don’t understand. You’re secretive and you’re irritable and you won’t let me see your cell phone. So you need to tell me what’s happening or we’re not going to get married.
And if you would have asked her at that point, she had lived with me for for a year or so at that point. Right. If you asked her, what is Sam’s confession going to be? Gambling was not on the list of possibilities. Okay? It wasn’t even there. And I made a very conscious decision. I said, I’m going to tell my fiancée, and I’m going to quit.
Not because I deserve it. Because I don’t, right? I am this terrible person, but she deserves it. She doesn’t deserve for me to ruin her life too. Right? So I’m going to quit and I’m going to do it for her. And if I can’t do it, I’m going to take my own life. You know that there is no point in me being around anymore.
And my fiancé, to her credit, was incredible. She basically said, I don’t know anything about this. I did not expect you to say gambling. I’ve maybe pulled a slot machine once in my life. Like, I don’t even know what this thing is. Right? But people figure this out, and we can figure this out, and we’re going to do it.
And we did. And I think opening up to somebody else really was the pivotal moment for me, because I felt so alone and so isolated and so ashamed. And the fact that she met me with compassion was it was just life changing for me. And I think the other piece was, you know, we started talking about the logistics and I gave up financial control.
Right? And all of a sudden I didn’t have fuel for my for my addiction. And I started reading about the neuroscience of gambling. And it totally reframed my perspective. Right? Instead of me thinking like I am this morally bankrupt, terrible person. I started to think, well, when I gamble, I’m putting drugs into my brain and those drugs are changing my perception.
They’re changing the way that I operate as a human, the same way that I’ve drank too much. And I don’t like the way that I am when I’m too drunk. Right. So it was this moment of removing gambling addiction is my identity to gambling addiction becoming a disease that I was struggling with. Right.
SHANE COOK
Okay.
SAM DEMELLO
And, And, yeah, I stopped gambling, and and I didn’t go to GA, and I didn’t go to therapy.
SHANE COOK
And but you did have means of support, and I I’ve heard you tell the story before, and I’m kind of transitioning into a bridge to how we get to where Evive starts to take a role. Yeah, totally. If I recall the story correctly, you turned to Reddit as, at least a forum that you could visit and, yes, ideas have conversations with.
SHANE COOK
So it’s almost like an, a virtual GA session.
SAM DEMELLO
100%. So my my real support was my fiancé. And then I started looking for ways that I could, you know, keep myself sober because I would find myself after a couple months being like, well, maybe I could have a gamble, right? But I knew that I couldn’t. So the first thing is I started listening to podcasts. I just typed in gambling addiction and I started to hear some of these early podcasts, like Brian Hatch and Jamie Salzberg and Christina Cook.
Sure. And I found the problem gambling subreddit, and I didn’t interact, I didn’t post, I didn’t comment, but I would read people’s stories and I would say, oh, yeah, like, I don’t want to end up like that or I’ve been there or that’s what’s going to happen if I don’t stop, right? And that was basically what worked for me to stop gambling for the first three years or so of my recovery.
And then, you know, we moved to Boston and I got this incredible job at the digital therapeutics company, and I married my my wife, and we had our first child, and I felt like I had superpowers. Right, right. I was 80% of my brain that had been going to gambling and hiding it, went to my life, and my life got way better, right?
SHANE COOK
Sure.
SAM DEMELLO
And then in January of 2023, on January 12th, I got laid off unexpectedly from my job, and an hour later, my wife got laid off from her job and we had a one year old and my wife was newly pregnant or just about to be. And I lived in Boston, where I could see a casino from my apartment window, and I just thought, I’m in trouble.
I still have urges to gamble. I’m. I have access to a casino. I have all of this free time, and now I have financial pressure in my family. I’m going to relapse. And I started looking for a way to enhance my my support. Right. And and to, you know, do something. And I ended up posting my story on Reddit in March of 2023, just anonymously.
It was the first time that I’d ever interacted in that forum, and it was very cathartic. I, I laid it all out in gory detail and I thought, I feel better now. And then I woke up the next day and I had all of these people messaging me, oh my God, I’ve never thought about it that way. And what did you read and what did you look at and how did you talk to your wife about it?
it was this really pivotal moment for me where for the first time, I went, oh my God, I’m not alone in this.
Like there are other people that are feeling the same things that I’m feeling and they need support. And it sent me down this rabbit hole of what happens in the United States if you have a gambling problem? And I started doing all of this research, and what I learned was, if you have a gambling problem in the United States, it’s very challenging.
There is no federal funding for gambling addiction the way that there is for substance use disorder, right. And it is all up to the state that you live in. And if you live in Massachusetts like I do, there are tens of millions of dollars to help you. And if you live in Texas, there is literally zero, right? So you have this massive problem with access and these states that are providing these amazing programs like treatment and peer support.
The programs are there, but they’re not engaging people like, you know, it’s very hard. The typical state engages less than a couple percent of the target population of that state. And I thought, man, we’re looking at a problem where the issues are accessibility and engagement and data. The solution to that could be a digital therapeutic, just like the one that I spent the last three and a half years working on.
And I said, wow, someone must be building this for gambling. I’ve used it for, you know, weight loss and diet and exercise. I’ve used it for running. I’ve seen people use it for alcohol. Where’s the one for gambling? Yeah. And I started trying to find the company, and I wanted to go work for them, and I couldn’t find it.
And I just said, man, this thing has to exist. And so in about, you know, probably a month after that, in April of 2023, I got to the point where I just said, I need to build this for me. And if I’m the only person that it helps and it keeps me sober, it’ll be worth it because it’s going to protect my wife and my kids.
And I reached out to the researcher who had written this big survey on the problem gambling system in the United States named Doctor Jeff Marotta. And I just cold called him because I used to be a recruiter, and I have no problem talking to
SHANE COOK
Right
SAM DEMELLO
Strangers. And I said, hey, I have this crazy idea. I think we need to build a digital app to help people that are struggling with gambling. And he he came on board. You know, it took a couple of months of convincing. And I found an amazing developer on a founder matching program who was really interested in the space.
And the three of us got together and we said, we’re we’re going to build this thing.
SHANE COOK
Yeah. Interesting. So, you’ve used the term digital therapeutics for people that can’t wrap their mind around that just in general, you give a definition for folks to get their head around what a digital therapeutic really is? And maybe some other examples?
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah. Totally. I think about digital therapeutics as just, you know, digital medicine, right. So when I think about digital therapeutics, you know, I have used an application called Noom when I was trying to weight. Right. And it teaches me a little bit about, you know, the science of weight loss and nutrition. And it allows me to track my exercise.
And it helps me build this, this better relationship. Right. There’s some great apps for alcohol. One is called reframe. One is called Sunny Side. And it is just this concept of using software as a therapeutic intervention.
SHANE COOK
Okay. So that’s what set in motion the whole idea behind Evive then. So, give us, give us a sense of kind of the early days, then you’ve got your team together now. Yeah. And you’re starting to launch into this digital therapeutic world, and you’ve got a vision of what you’re bringing to the table.
SAM DEMELLO
So at first we said, okay, we need we want to build this thing. We should go in and raise some money and try to build it. And I had a really hard time fundraising when I went to venture capital firms who I had some experience with for my career. They all told me gambling is too niche. You cannot build a business around gambling addiction.
Show me that this app is for all addictions and this is something that we would invest in, right? The other opportunity seemed to be us, you know, taking money from someone affiliated with the gambling industry. There are some, you know, funds and investors there. But I didn’t want to do that. I felt like.
SHANE COOK
So when you say from the industry, there’s there’s really you know, I think in our position we look at a couple of different areas for funding. There’s public health funding that’s available on one side, generally coming from a state program that exists that’s going to fund public health care solution. There is also some funding that’s available through the gambling operators on that side of that house where they have some funding that they’ve set aside, or they have to set aside for enhanced education about the harms that gambling can potentially bring.
So when you’re talking about the funding for this, which pie are you talking about or which pot are you looking at? Accepting funding from?
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah. So, we tried the private route with the venture capital investors, and then we considered going after, you know, the gambling operators themselves who sometimes make contributions to things and like the responsible gambling space or problem gambling. But I was uncomfortable with that in the beginning because I wanted this product to be built by the community, for the community of people that were struggling with gambling.
Okay. And I didn’t want anything to get in the way of us leading with the research and the evidence. And so ultimately, we didn’t take money from anybody, and we bootstrapped the business. And I went to work for a construction company that was selling sewage tanks. And I did that for the first 18 months of Evive. And I built Evive in nights and weekends.
SHANE COOK
Okay.
SAM DEMELLO
And it took us from May of 2023 to January of 2024 to launch our initial product. Right. Just building it. And the first thing that we did was we went out and we tried to find some other researchers and clinical advisors to ensure that everything that was going into this app was really rooted in, in science and the research and the data.
And we we released the first version of the app in January, and I went on Brian Hatch’s podcast to promote it, and it was the first time that I ever shared my story publicly. And it was terrifying because before that, the only person that knew about me was was my wife. And then obviously the guys that I was working with, but my parents didn’t really know.
So I had to call my mom the night before the podcast and say, hey, I got something to tell you. And it’s pretty heavy. And I had a bit of a panic attack on that podcast, but I got through it, and then the cat was out of the bag, you know. Right. And I think that first month we had 19 total people sign up for service.
And I thought, oh my God, this is amazing, 19 people. And then around April of that year, we got in touch with the Oregon Public Health Department, the Oregon Health Authority, and we said we would love to pilot this with you. We would love to have you give this to people that are engaging with the state system and generate some data.
And it was great. The folks at Oregon Word were amazing. We very quickly set up another pilot program with the Illinois Council. Obviously one of my favorite people. And, you know, by the end of 2024, we had about 1200 users using Evive, which is not huge in the tech app space. But we had no marketing and no money and no budget, and it was all word of mouth.
SHANE COOK
This is all grassroots.
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah, totally. And the feedback was really positive. You know, the people that were using the app were saying, this is really helping me. I feel like I can be honest with this, with this application in a way that sometimes I can’t be honest with my friends and family, and I feel like I’m learning things about gambling that I didn’t know from the education, and it’s helping me and the therapists, the clinicians were saying, the people that are using this are showing up. You know, they’re they’re more engaged. When I ask them how last week was, instead of saying it was kind of tough, they go back into the Evive app and they pull up their data and they say, yeah, last Tuesday I was feeling really anxious and I was really struggling and this is what was going on. And we thought, man, we’re we’re really on to something now. We are constantly talking to our users, and we’re getting their feedback and we’re just, we’re, we’re we’re working on it.
The other thing that that really happened is originally we thought that this was going to be an app that we sold directly to consumers, and I didn’t really like that because a lot of people like me that struggle with gambling, they experience financial harm and they don’t, you know, have a lot of money. And I don’t want to take that money for my product.
And so through this partnership with with Oregon and Illinois, we recognized maybe we could make this application be the digital infrastructure for the public health system. And we developed this business model where we started partnering with, you know, councils on problem gambling and public health departments, and they would subsidize the cost of Evive so that it made it completely free to whoever needed to use it.
And what they were really interested in was not so much the help that we were giving people, although they they loved that they were interested in all of the data that we were collecting. Right? Right. We we reached demographics with, with our application that you don’t see super represented in the treatment system. You know, we have a lot of women that use our application.
We have a lot of kind of minority communities that aren’t as comfortable reaching out for help outside of their community, but are willing to engage with this, you know, more anonymous approach to getting help.
And so that really became our business model. And at first it was very hard for me to to sell this concept to states because, you know, okay, it’s an app, like what is an app? Or this is going to take away from the things that we want to promote. If we give people an app, it’s going to be a replacement for therapy or it’s going to be a replacement for peer support.
But the data shows that that it’s absolutely not. This is an amplification of everything that is happening. And it was built that way.
SHANE COOK
Right.
SAM DEMELLO
You can come in to Evive and if you find everything that you need in the app, amazing like that, that’s great. But if you come in to Evive and the only thing that you do is find out that there is a a counselor in your state that offers services or a peer support group, and you use it as essentially a digital helpline.
That is great too. I am agnostic, like if there’s 100 people in a room that need help with gambling, there are a hundred different methods to help them. I’m not about telling you what the right way is. I’m about giving you the options and letting you figure out you know, what works for you.
SHANE COOK
Yeah, for sure. And I think, based on some of the stories that that I’ve heard you tell in the past, it’s it’s essentially the way I interpret it. It’s a bridge that somebody can utilize in between sessions. If they are engaged in, in a therapeutic program with a provider. This is just one way to keep a daily tab of your thoughts.
Your feelings. It’s a daily resource for them to access, so on and so forth that bridges that gap between sessions.
SAM DEMELLO
Absolutely. I mean, you know, I think a couple things, like one, in all of my experience with gambling addiction, I never once called the Problem Gambling Helpline. And it’s not that I don’t think that that is important, but the way that that was marketed to me was this is a crisis resource, and this is for people that are really, you know, at at the end and you know, they’re in catastrophic debts or and for a long time I didn’t feel that way.
Right? I didn’t feel like that was a resource for me. I think the the other piece is when I was going to therapy, I was in therapy one hour a week. I was on my phone 167 other hours. Right? I was struggling at two in the morning. I wasn’t going to call a friend. I wasn’t going to call my therapist.
But I would pick up an application, you know, I would read something or I would go on Reddit. So ultimately, like, I believe in the power of human connection, if the outcome of addiction is isolation, the antidote to that is, is connection. And I just see Evive as this digital bridge to pull people into the system and make them aware of everything that is accessible to them.
SHANE COOK
Yeah. So can you can you paint kind of a visual for the listener here in terms of the Evive app and. Yeah, provides and and what people will find if they sign up for that service. And then, and then we need to talk about how it affects people in Illinois because.
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah, totally.
SHANE COOK
It’s our demographic that we’re trying to go after here. But we also want to explore and expose people outside of Illinois to it, too. So yeah, it has some value for all of our listeners.
SAM DEMELLO
So as a starting point, Evive is completely free. There is no subscription cost, there is no in-app purchase. It is completely free for for everyone. It is available to anyone in the United States, in Canada, across the European Union, in Australia and New Zealand and the UK. So it is out there. It is accessible. You can download it right now and and get help.
SHANE COOK
Okay.
SAM DEMELLO
Essentially there are two things to understand about Evive. Number one, it is not just for people that are abstinent. I am personally abstinence, but that is my personal choice. That is not the only way to approach gambling. So when you download Evive, we ask you a couple questions about who you are and how you gamble and where you’re coming from.
And then there are two pathways that you can explore. The first pathway is stopping gambling and we will help you get abstinent and stay that way okay. The other pathway is manage gambling which is harm reduction. Right? Right. I am not anti-gambling. I am anti-gambling harm. And so you can use Evive if you are actively gambling and you don’t like the way that it shows up in your life.
We can help you with that. So that’s the first thing is Evive is for everyone. But no matter what pathway that you’re on, there’s basically four things that the application delivers. The first one is improving your self-awareness. So every day we ask you to do a daily check in and reflect on how are you feeling? What is your urge to gamble?
If your goal is abstinence, what is going on in your life? We have a rule that any question that we ask a user, we analyze and give back to them. So as you’re putting this data into the app on a daily basis of your urge and your mood, and whether you’ve maintained your abstinence, we’re able to analyze it and start giving you insights like, hey Sam, when you feel anxious, you’re urged to gamble is really high.
Maybe you’re using gambling as a coping mechanism. Let’s help you create some different coping mechanisms for your urge to gamble is really high in September. That’s probably because football season started. What are we doing about that? Right, right. The second fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is educate people about how gambling works, how it interacts with your brain.
How do you maintain recovery? How do you find support? How do you talk to your wife about your issues? So we have about 65 different educational modules throughout the app. They’re interactive. It is not in a set order. You can pull them out of the library as you need them. And they’re written by people like me. So it should sound like someone who has been there.
Pretty informal, but in conjunction with our clinical advisory board, which are these amazing people like Doctor Tim Fong from UCLA and Doctor Debbie Haskins from Maryland. It is really evidence based throughout the entire app. The third component is tools. If gambling is accessible in your pocket 24 hours a day, support should be too. So we have guided meditations and urge surfing exercises.
We have alternative activities to gambling. You can upload motivational photos. I just wanted Evive to be a place that any time you can open it, it’s safe and it has something that that can help you. And the last thing that it’s going to do is it’s going to connect you to your community. And there’s really two ways to think about that.
One is we have an online community. It has about 800 members in it right now. And there are forums and you can post and you can connect with other people that have shared, lived experience. And we try to break that isolation. The second part of that is that when we partner with an awesome organization like the Illinois Council on Problem Gambling, we customized the entire application for that state.
So if you download Evive in Illinois right now, you’re going to see that it’s co-branded with the Illinois Council. And every single resource that’s available in Illinois is available in the Evive app. We can help you find a certified gambling treatment provider in the state. We can help you sign up for self exclusion from the casinos. We can help you find outpatient treatment and inpatient treatment and financial counseling.
And so what we see is in states that we don’t have partnerships with yet, people hear about us organically. They hear me on a podcast like this, or they find us on social media and they download and they use the app generally as a support tool, right? In states that we do partner with, like Illinois. Not only do people use Evive as a support tool, but we are able to engage way more people than the traditional system, and we can bring them in and help them access these resources that the state is paying for that people might not know exist.
SHANE COOK
It’s fantastic. As a side note, what kind of interaction have you had with the gambling providers? Like, let’s say a DraftKings or Bet MGM for example. Has there been interest from those entities to figure out a way to kind of wrap this in as part of a bundle to their experience as well? Because I do know that they have some responsibilities to at least make some outreach attempts for people that might be struggling with gambling.
Yeah, it seems like that might be a good partnership.
SAM DEMELLO
Definitely. So we signed our first partnerships with DraftKings and FanDuel, in the fall of last year. And these are not commercial deals right now. Like, we are not, you know, engaged with with money with these organizations here. But they agreed to sign post to Evive, and make Evive available to players on their platforms.
SHANE COOK
Okay.
SAM DEMELLO
So if you go into the FanDuel or the DraftKings responsible gaming centers, you’ll find links to Evive. And you know, they’re helping drive a lot more awareness.
historically, they’ve only really had resources to prevent harm in the beginning. Right? Deposit limits and educational tools and these kind of preventative measures. And then they’ve had partnerships with telehealth providers or therapy for people who are really experiencing harm and need to stop gambling. But there’s this kind of gray area where how do you engage with someone that is just starting to experience harm?
They’re not clinically disordered. If you give them a free referral to a peer support group or a therapist, they’re not going to take advantage of it because they don’t recognize themselves as having a gambling problem. And that’s really where Evive comes in, right? Yes, we can support the people that come from DraftKings that are self excluding and need to get abstinence.
I’m there, like I’m there to help those people. Right. But it’s the person on DraftKings that I think about who is like, I’m having a problem here. I don’t like the way that this is showing up in my life, but I’m not go into a GA meeting. That’s the guy that I want to see Evive, right? Right.
So I’m excited about it because my job is to show up and help as many people as I possibly can. And DraftKings and FanDuel, that’s where millions of these people are. Right. So I need to be there, and I need to be there to help them. And we will continue to explore partnerships with the industry. And my only rule is, you know, we have control over what we say and how we say it.
And leading with the data and and the research and that, you know, we’re doing things that are in the best interest of, of the community. You know, that is what’s important to me. But if these companies are willing to support our work and and you know that they are like they’ve been very good partners, then we will continue to do that to to help as many people as we can.
SHANE COOK
Yeah. Well, it’s a it’s a fantastic story. And, Sam, I appreciate you sharing the story with us. As you look forward into the future, where where do you see this headed, man?
SAM DEMELLO
Can I give you a couple different answers to that?
SHANE COOK
Sure.
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah. So, from a technology perspective, my goal is to make Evive proactive rather than reactive.
SHANE COOK
Okay.
SAM DEMELLO
Right now, I think we do a good job of showing all of the different resources that someone could access. And we’re getting better about making recommendations to people that are really going to resonate with them. But as we get more data and we start to understand gambling behavior because we have tens of thousands of data points, I want to get to a point where I can say to a user of Evive, hey, based on everything we know about you, you’re susceptible to slip this weekend. Not in the past, but how do we prevent you from getting into trouble in three days? Like that is where I’m trying to take this technology. I think from a from a public.
SHANE COOK
So, so just just just to clarify there. So that would indicate to me that that you’re looking for maybe an active intervention can occur on Evive’s behalf with an individual who has been part of the Evive community and engaging with the app. Right?
SAM DEMELLO
Yes. So like that active intervention happens from the app. Right.
SHANE COOK
So that’s going to require a little bit of predictive analytics.
SAM DEMELLO
Exactly. That is what I’m talking about right. Predictive analytics. I can help you understand what’s happened in the past. But I want to be able to do is help you peer into the future. Right.
SHANE COOK
All right. That’s pretty ambitious. I love it, though. It’s.
SAM DEMELLO
Oh, it’s great, I am hyper ambitious. I think from a from a public health standpoint, I’ve really become a strong advocate for harm reduction. And it’s not that I don’t believe in abstinence. And again, I am abstinent. Right. But I remember how terrifying it was to consider giving up gambling. And the fact that I felt like it was all or nothing was kept me in addiction for a long time.
And so I would like to see the the country really engage more in how do we talk about intentional gambling? How do we show people what good looks like? Right. How do we start this conversation? Because the data is pretty clear. If you can get someone to set an intention around their gambling, even if it’s I’m going to only gamble six days instead of seven days this week, you can start them on a path that will eventually lead them where they need to be.
SHANE COOK
And I think and maybe you’ll identify with this, but whatever the addiction may be or the the the thing that is creating compulsive action on someone’s behalf, it often gets wrapped up so tightly with their own identity that that’s the hard part to break from. Right. So what you’re talking about is a slow departure from that identity and changing that identity and the way it looks with the individual.
SAM DEMELLO
Absolutely. Yeah.
SAM DEMELLO
So, yeah, you know, that is really what, what I hope to see. And I think from, you know, from the industry standpoint, again, like, I believe in the regulated industry and I am starting to see the gambling industry look at responsible gambling and player health, not as just a compliance check box that they have to check, but as something that can really differentiate their brands like I am.
I am waiting the day when the big marketing competition between the gambling operators isn’t who has the best bonus, but who takes care of their players the best, right? Like that is my dream because I think that until safer gambling becomes the the status quo, you know, we’re just going to we’re going to keep having challenges and more people that are going to go down the road that I went down and that road sucks. You know? I know how to do it.
SHANE COOK
Yeah. Sam, I really appreciate your thoughts and and engaging in this topic and having this conversation. Really appreciate the work that you’ve been doing. The Evive app that you’ve brought to the state of Illinois, and the partnership with ICPG that allows us all to make it available to our clients and really have a really great story to tell.
When we’re out talking about problem gambling in our communities. So thank you again.
SAM DEMELLO
Yeah. Shane, thank you so much. This has been wonderful.
SHANE COOK
Absolutely.
We love hearing from you, so please take a moment to like, share and comment on our podcast. You can reach out to us directly via email at wager Danger at Gateway foundation.org. Look for us on Facebook and Twitter @Recovergateway on LinkedIn at gateway-Foundation, or through our website at Gatewayfoundation.org. Wager danger is supported through funding, in whole or in part through a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Division of Substance Use Prevention and Recovery.
And remember, recovery is a lifelong process. If you or a family member, is struggling with a gambling problem. Call Gateway at (844) 975-3663 and speak with one of our counselors for a confidential assessment.
