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I was a gambling addict for most of my life and took the opportunity to try a psychedelic retreat in Cape Town, South Africa with the intention of curing my addiction. The results have been unbelievable and I have been clean for five years. I gambled from the age of 12 and I'm now 61. This is the only time that I have managed to overcome the addiction and I now live with no fear that I will ever relapse. That was a quote from somebody who had been through treatment for gambling harm through the use of psychedelic drugs. One of the Subject Matters most prominent researchers is Pedro Romero, Chief of Safer Gambling Partnerships at BetBlocker. Pedro joins us today on iGamingDaily's Road to Lisbon series to talk about who takes responsibility for being responsible when it comes to player protection. iGamingDaily is brought to you by Optimove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. But first, I think it's important to highlight his background in research, so Pedro. Thank you very much for joining us today. Really looking forward to digging into this. Could you just talk a little bit about your background and your research that you've done? Yeah, I got a bit of a mixed background. Originally, I train as a psychologist and a therapist and I end up working in the gambling industry because if you're a therapist, most of the time you need a real job. If you're not wealthy or anything like that, which I'm not. I did really well in the gambling industry, being like a manager and all that. Very soon I realized that people were needing help. So I developed an interest on safer gambling. And for the last 15 years, I've been working in different aspects of safer gambling. work for the Gordon Moody association for three years at the head of gambling therapy. And one of the things that, you know, in gambling treatment in general is that the treatment options that they're up there, they're not great. A lot of relapse, a lot of people abandoning treatment. So about four years ago, I read a book from Michael Pollan. He normally writes about food, but this time he was writing about psychedelics, to change your mind. And I read it and was like, and the guy was discussing how helpful is psychedelic assisted therapy for depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, a lot of... comorbidities, co-occurring disorder that you normally find in people affected by gambling-related harm, know, problematic gambling. So I thought, okay, I'm a therapist, you know, and I know, you know, I don't know about this, so maybe the book is not very good. So I went directly to the research papers and I was amazed with the results that they were getting. So I thought that, okay, if psychedelic assisted therapy, it works really well in all these co-current disorders and also in a lot of addictive disorder, it may work well for gambling. So I started emailing different universities, Berkeley, Imperial College, NYU, where they were doing this type of research. I said, look, I have been... researching and doing treatment for gambling disorder for a long time, do you think that psychedelic assisted therapy may work for gambling? And they say, it's very likely, but it's going to be really difficult to get the funding, to get the fix approved and to get people to participate. going forward five years, You know, I got the funding, I got the ethics approved, and we're planning to have the first psychedelic retreat for people affected by gambling-related harm in October, from the 6th till the 12th of October, with the collaboration of the Heroic Heart Project, which is a non-for-profit that helps normally veterans with PTSD and other disorders to access. psychedelic assisted therapy. My other big role is working for Bed Blocker. I'm the chief of Safer Gambling Partnerships. we're doing amazingly. Thank you to the support of so many people that they are really appreciative and very helpful with our charity. What we do is we provide free and anonymous blocking software. for people that they want to block the devices from accessing gambling websites. mean, there's national self-exclusion, but those, don't protect you against black market top rate. So I think I have gone on a little bit. No, absolutely. think we're... plenty of our readers will be aware of the work that Bet Blocker does and I'm sure we've got some interviews with yourself and Duncan Garvey who runs Bet Blocker with you and I'm sure we can link some reading material into the show notes. I'm really intrigued by the research that you do with psychedelics and I guess you mentioned that it's a little bit difficult to get funding and you have to go through lots of ethical considerations because guess we were only a few years outside of the so-called war on drugs and there's a lot of maybe hesitance to fund that kind of thing. How difficult is it to get the sort of acceptance and the green light to do these kind of tests? Very, very difficult. I remember I had a meeting with the gambling commission because they have funding for research. you know, a few years ago and, you know, I mean, good on them, you know, that they, you know, they agreed to have a meeting with me and I was with all the papers telling about all the research trying to get funding, but they were looking at me like I was completely mad, you know, for all it was worth, it was worth, I could have just rubbed my head with tin foil. So it's, it's not, it's not easy because it's a bit counterintuitive. What? Do you want to give an addict drugs? You know, that's terrible. know, and people, they have a lot of preconceptions from the 70s, 80s, you know, this is your brain in drugs, know, fried eggs and, you know, Nancy Reagan approach. Luckily, there's a lot of people that they are actually uh, you know, very supportive, know, have found people that they were really empty, you know, the research that I wanted to do and other people that they were very, very helpful, like senior directors from charities and stuff, you know, they come, uh, they have come to me, uh, off the record, or, you know, I went to a retreat and it changed my life or my son was really struggling, we didn't know what to do, that was the last option and it was really helpful. And sometimes I look, would be so, it be great if you could speak up and come out because there's other people that they, like a live experience story could be really, really helpful. But there's a big big stigma. It's like people need to get out of the psychedelic closet. Yeah, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence. And we had the quotes at the top of the show as well that supports the idea. But is there any sort of empirical data or some sort of results from your research that you could share with us in supporting- opinion paper, but this is based on what has been done in other areas about, know, comorbidity, which is not gambling addiction, it's other mental health issues, but there's nothing yet. know, Imperial College is also working on research for, you know, psilocybin and gambling. I think they are a bit more of a having a bit more of a clinical setting. What we're having is a bit of retreat that is the sort of real life or closer to what people are accessing now. Yeah. mean, it'd be fantastic to hear about some of those results when we have them. It'd be great to get you back on the podcast in the coming months. or negative, but if it works for other issues, it's likely also to work for gambling. That's what I'm doing. I thought that it wasn't going to work, probably I wouldn't be here. Again, this sort of research takes time because, okay, do the retreat and then I need to do a follow-up for 12 months, be collecting data. you know, at the beginning before the retreat and then comparing all those questionnaires, those interviews. And after, you know, 12 months, I'll be able to say, okay, you know, they have lower anxiety, they have lower cravings for gambling. They have, you know, and then I need to translate that. And on top of them, then you need to get a paper journal that you know, are okay to publish it and go through peer review. So people that probably they know more than you and they're going to pick on all the stuff that, oh, why you didn't do this? Why you didn't do that? So it's a, it can be complicated. And this is something that it won't happen fast, but I believe that maybe more people will be open to talk. you know, once research is out there. For example, like in the US with the veteran community, you know, psychedelic assisted therapy, you know, they're moving really fast, know. Texas just approved $50 million for research for ibogaine, which is a different psychedelic. And this is because a lot of special forces operators. like military, they're fed up of conventional medicine that just dampen the symptoms and they want to have treatments that they're different and they may have maybe a longer or more effective outcomes. But again, it's early days and we need to do more research. Absolutely. Well, Pedro, that's really interesting. We'll take a quick break and then we'll talk about the panel that you will be appearing at in Lisbon. Welcome back to iGaming Daily's Road to Lisbon series. joined by Pedro Romero, Chief of Safer gambling partnerships at BetBlocker. Pedro, you will be appearing at SBC Summit next month. I'm sure everybody is really intrigued by this panel because it's titled, Who's Really Responsible for Gaming? And it's all about player protection and who takes the responsibility for responsible gambling. My initial thoughts on this is that it should be a collaborative cross-party approach and rather than playing a blame game, you will, different stakeholders should be working together in terms of player protection. What are your initial thoughts with this? mean, it's not rocket science. You all need to work together, operators, charities, the government, the players. Anyone that just point fingers, it's only the operators or it's only the players or it's only the regulator. Like this, we're not going anywhere. I think for the last couple of years, have been a very a divisive environment. And I think, okay, look, we just need to start everybody working together, you know, as close as we can speaking to each other, even if we don't agree, because at the end of the day, what nobody wants to harm people and for the gambling industry. It's about sustainability. Look, if they don't take care of the customer, the customer stop being customers, so we'll go somewhere else. For charities, we need the help of funding. We need help of operators because most of the people that seek help, that have gambling problems, the shortest route is from the footer. If you're in the footer of the operator and you're accessible, people don't need to... do their own research or anything like that. They will just go there, safer gambling section, read and seek help. So unfortunately, I don't have any magic insight or anything. Look, we all need to work together and we need to keep collaborating. And yeah, there's no secret recipe or anything like that. No, absolutely not. It's a complex issue and requires research for a reason. But I just wanted to have a little whistle stop tour of some of the stakeholders and get your thoughts on their responsibilities in this collaboration. I guess some people maybe on one side of the argument would say that players should take responsibility for their own actions. everyone has the right to spend their money on whatever they like. Is there any sort of academic research to back this and I guess leaving players to themselves might be a little bit more on the dangerous side? What do you think about that? mean, I think again, you know, this is a joint task. You you cannot just say, oh, you know, people are free and they should do whatever they want. Look, I'm a liberal person. think people should have freedom, but people also should have education. So people need to know, okay, when you drive, you need a driver license to start driving. And then there's rules. You cannot drive 200 miles per hour, maybe in Germany in an autobahn, but not anywhere else. So, okay, there's rules, there's signs that you need to follow. And also you get like the cops, sometimes they stop you, they give you a fine and sometimes they just there and people don't overstep the mark because they know that, if you go too fast, you may have some consequences. The consequences could be like, okay, maybe an operator have a call with you, maybe encourage you to put limits. That's not, that can be an educational engagement or you can have someone that says, we are worried about you and we're going to enforce some limits. That's a different approach. I think always trying to help and cooperate and get the player to buy into doing what is best for them is better. Then you were asking, oh, there's research, look, there's a lot of oversight. Something that is very old in any psychology and maybe a lot of people will know is about locus of control. When a person thinks that, okay, things that are just happening to me, I don't have much agency. Normally these people, have worse outcomes when it comes to treatment or anything like that. So if you're a player and you think all the fault, is on the operator because if they send me an offer, I cannot receive. Maybe there's people that generally can receive, but most of the people, have some agency and say, there's a part that is in the operator, there's a part that is in me, and it's about both sides. cannot just say, I just let myself... on the strong currents, you know, or, okay, they should do whatever they want. I think, you know, you need to educate your players. You need they need to know the tools. They need to know what is good for them. They need to have clear stats. OK, how much I'm losing, how much I winning, how much time I spending, et cetera, et cetera. And then you need to have people that they are well trained. if they need to do an interaction because it's a very difficult job to have a conversation with someone and get some golden nuggets in the conversation so the person say, okay, hold on, okay, maybe I shouldn't play that long or maybe actually I'm not having fun anymore. Maybe you should take... a little break. Maybe you should set some limits or maybe you should be using some external tools like BedBlocker. Why? Because, okay, you have an account with a licensed operator, but you may also have an account with an unlicensed operator. it's important knowledge and that is included on the player's journey or this educational process. I think even some of the more ardent industry reformers would say that operators have improved on that front in terms of getting the tools out and getting them in front of players and making sure players are aware. see that in marketing materials and all those kinds of things. I think when people do start to reach those limits, then pop-ups appear in apps and that kind of thing. Let's touch on regulators now because we're in an era now where there's... lots of regulated markets and there's more and more cropping up. What role do regulators have to play in terms of player protection and is there more that they could be doing? I think, you know, it's about having open that conversation with all parties. I think, you know, you need to talk with researchers, you need to talk with non-for-profit organizations and charity. You can talk with experts by experience and you also need to talk with operators. You need to talk with everyone and say, okay, look, we have this issue. How can we solve it? Because what we've seen for many years is that if a market is over-regulated, then the black market, it takes those people that sometimes they are particularly vulnerable. So it's about, how can we make it? How can we find a balance where regulation is not excessive, maybe investing more in education, player education, also investing on support services, so people don't migrate to illegal markets where they don't have any protections. And then finally, I'd love to hear your perspective on... where charities and nonprofits like BetBlocker come into play because the tools are remarkable and they have a real impact on players, but are they kind of a last resort? And in an ideal world, if everyone's pulling together and doing their roles, then maybe players wouldn't have to resort to tools like that. Or do you have a more proactive use case for tools like BetBlocker? No, but the name said, okay, bed blocker, it blocks you. But okay, that's a bit like the last resort. But the blocker also have features like the calendar and feature. So imagine that after payday, it's a riskier period of time for you. Why? Because when you have money, gambling may be getting a bit out of hand. you can block yourself from the first that you get paid until the third. So during these days you won't be able to gamble or I don't know during holidays you're going to go 15 days on holiday, if you get a bit bored you may gamble in casino or whatever. I'm going to block myself during holidays so I can be focused on my family, the places that I'm visiting, et cetera. Or imagine that, okay, you like going to the pub. So you may want to block yourself on Friday because you know that you're going to have one too many and then you don't want to wake up with a sore head and an empty wallet. So, okay, so I only wake up with a sore head then. So you can also use it as a more strategic a way to do harm minimization. We're not for provision, we are a harm minimization tool. It depends on where people are in the journey, they can use one or other functionality. Will Pedro, that's great insight there from you. Really appreciate your time and taking the time to speak with us today. I would implore everyone to go and see Pedro and his panel in Lisbon next month. We'll put the details for that in the show notes. But again, Pedro, thank you for joining us and thanks to the audience for listening. Please join us next week for another Road to Lisbon episode and join us tomorrow for another episode of iGaming Daily.