Whoa Little Fella, You're Not Speaking My Language

Explain it to me like I'm five years old is valuable advice, particularly when the conversation isn't widely understood, like responsible gambling.

There’s a scene in the Chris Farley movie Tommy Boy where Richard, played by David Spade, starts listing all the specs for Callahan Auto’s new brake pads to a potential customer. Richard is quickly cut off, with the potential customer saying, “Whoa, little fella, you're not speaking my language.” Tommy, played by Farley, jumps in and says, “What my associate is trying to say is that our new brake pads are really cool.”

It’s a Farley-Spade movie, so it goes sideways from there (with smashed model cars and fire). Still, it’s an illustrative moment as the potential customer (a successful business owner) gives Tommy, not Richard, his full attention.

The point is, “Our new brake pads are really cool” is a better selling point than “the spectrometer readout on the nickel alloy cadmium mix…” The latter will draw attention from about a half-dozen experts, but no one else cares, not even the person buying the part.

That’s a lesson the gambling industry has yet to learn.

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In another scene, after giving his spiel, Richard is told by another potential customer that the problem is, “I don’t like you, and probably never will. You’re a smug, unhappy little man, and you treat people like they were idiots.”

It’s not that Richard was wrong; it’s a message and messenger problem.

The gambling industry’s messengers have the same issue—smug, technical, and off-putting.

Just listen to Matt Schuler, the executive director of the Ohio Casino Control Commission, who told ESPN's Outside the Lines, how he views the industry’s policy claims:

"When I get that feedback, whenever I see, 'Oh, we can't do that, they're going to have to go into the black market,' it comes across with the sincerity of a shark being concerned about the welfare of the smaller fish being taken out of its tank."

In the RG/PG space, we get a double dose of Richard-speak from RG/PG advocates and the industry, with the industry giving off butcher reasoning with cattle vibes.

There are random, wonky statistics (advocates’ statistics usually contradict industry statistics) and ever-evolving academic jargon that most people don’t have time for.

Let's examine these and explain why I believe they are slowing innovation and progress in responsible gambling and problem gambling.

Starting with advocates’ use of statistics.

You Have Your Numbers; I Have Mine

We often hear about the percentage of people who are at risk or meet the criteria for problem gambling. But no one has ever plainly explained (in Tommy’s, not Richard's language) what the baselines are or even what they mean by a problem gambler. It’s a nebulous term.

Consider the recent revelation that less than 2% of bettors set limits. I keep hearing, “Just 2%,” but I don’t know if that number is good, bad, or somewhere in between. How many people do we expect to use these tools? I have no idea what the number should be or if it’s increasing, decreasing, or stagnant.

The National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) claims that 16% of sports bettors meet the criteria for clinical gambling disorder. Setting aside that the problem gambling or at-risk prevalence rate varies widely across studies (even in the same locales), nobody ever explains what the criteria for “clinical gambling disorder” are, or what it means, in real-world terms, to meet the requirements for a “clinical gambling disorder.”