Evive Live

Dr. Wiley Harwell has run the Oklahoma Association for Problem Gambling and Gaming for nearly two decades. When he started, Oklahoma had zero Gamblers Anonymous meetings and no certified gambling counselors. Today, it's one of the most respected problem gambling programs in the country.

He talks through how he ended up in this work after a career as a hospital chaplain and ordained minister, why the field's own neutrality to...

Kitty Martz, Executive Director of Voices of Problem Gambling Recovery in Oregon, joins Adam and Christina on this episode of Evive Live to talk about what she calls "ideological biodiversity" — the idea that no single recovery path works for everyone, and that the field needs room for all of the different approaches to coexist. 

Kitty also breaks down why she considers prediction market apps one of the most dange...

Adam and Christina are joined by Kriston Vanhorn, Program Coordinator for the Problem Gambling Help Network of West Virginia. Kriston shares what problem gambling looks like in West Virginia, why calls to the state's helpline continue to rise, and how their 24/7, human-centered support model is making a difference through treatment funding, peer support, financial counseling, and long-term follow-up. Beyond resources and recovery s...

Adam and Christina sit down without a guest this week to get into something that doesn't get talked about enough: the gap between what people expect recovery to look like and what it actually is.

They cover the fear of losing gambling as a coping mechanism, why stopping the behavior is just the beginning, what it actually takes to get to "one day at a time" and mean it, and why the people you meet in recovery rooms are often the gre...

Ronnie Wahkinney will be the first to tell you he's been a man of many faces over the course of his life. Growing up half Comanche in rural Oklahoma, addiction found him early and took him places most people don't come back from. Sitting down with Adam and Christina, Ronnie shares everything. The drugs, the arrests, the prison time, the son he missed growing up, and the twenty years of recovery that eventually led him to become the...

Brian Ward turned himself in to the police in 2017. What followed was weeks of waiting, panic attacks, houselessness, and the end of his engagement. What came after that was nine years of peer support work, SMART Recovery facilitation, a seat on the NCPG board, and one of the most articulate voices in the gambling harm space. In this episode of Evive Live, Adam and Christina sit down with Brian to talk about how he got there &mdash...

Most recovery conversations focus on stopping. Sal Guarino is more interested in what comes next. In this episode of Evive Live!, Adam and Christina sit down with Sal Guarino — co-founder of The Recovery Partners, Community Engagement Manager at Evive, life coach, writer, and someone who has been in and around GA since he was 18 years old. Sal grew up in Brooklyn in a family where poker and sports betting were social rituals,...

Mike Sciandra placed his last bet on December 14th, 2020. He knows the exact date because he tracks it on the Evive app — 1,998 days bet free at the time of recording. What followed that date was treatment, peer support work, counselor training, and eventually becoming the Executive Director of the Nebraska Council on Problem Gambling.

In this episode of Evive Live, Christina and Sam (filling in for Adam) sit down with...

Adam and Christina sit down without a guest to dig into one of the most important parts of recovery — support. Not the surface level version, but what it actually looks like in practice.  They talk through meetings, therapy, peer support, online communities, sponsors, and blocking software. They share what worked, what didn't, and why the first meeting you try might not be the right one. They also get into the harder con...

Matt Zarb-Cousin started gambling at 16, lost £20,000 by 20, and quit on his 20th birthday. What followed became one of the most impactful recovery journeys in the gambling harm space.

In this episode of Evive Live, Adam and Christina sit down with Matt to talk about how Gamban works, why it's nearly impossible to remove on iPhones, and why blocking software is one layer of a recovery ecosystem rather than a standalone solution. Mat...

Dr. Paulette O'Gilvie is a casino and gambling researcher whose 2023 study examined the effect of casino proximity on poverty levels in New York City over five years. In this episode of Evive Live!, Adam and Christina sit down with Dr. O'Gilvie — Faculty Chair, prevention specialist, and member of the Evive Scientific Advisory Board — for a conversation that moves beyond the individual gambler and into the communities s...

Melissa Macillus has been impacted by gambling addiction not once, but twice, and instead of walking away, she leaned in. As the host of Making Bets in a Burning House, she sits down with Adam and Christina to talk about what recovery looks like from the other side, why trust is the first thing to leave and the last thing to come back, and what she wishes every spouse and loved one knew before they spent years figuring it out alone...

Dr. Deborah Haskins has spent 30 years training clinicians, building treatment frameworks for underserved communities, and asking the question most of the field won't: what if the problem isn't the person with the addiction? In this episode she sits down with Adam and Christina to talk about the gaps in clinical training, the cultural barriers that keep entire communities away from traditional treatment, the complex relationship be...

Adam and Christina sit down with Recovery Coach Scott Meyer, who shares a brutally honest look into his 13-year battle with gambling addiction—one that unfolded in complete silence while he maintained the image of a successful professional, husband, and father. Scott opens up about living a double life, manipulating those closest to him, and the moment everything came crashing down. From the early wins that fueled the addicti...

Gambling harm is invisible — and that's exactly why so many clinicians are missing it. In this episode of Evive Live, Adam and Christina sit down with Katrina Arroyo, Manager of Clinical Programs at the Problem Gambling Network of Ohio, for one of the most candid and fired-up conversations we've had on the show.

Katrina pulls no punches on why gambling is consistently under-screened in behavioral health settings, why the initi...

The hobby world has a gambling problem — and almost no one is talking about it.
Alyx Effron, founder of Collectors MD, joins co-hosts Adam Lyons and Christina Cook to expose the gambling mechanics embedded inside the modern trading card industry — live-streamed breaks, sudden death auctions, influencer-manufactured wins, and casino-style marketing emails — all operating with zero regulation, zero age gates, and...

Before there were gambling recovery podcasts, there was Brian Hatch. A decade after launching All In: The Addicted Gambler Podcast — the first of its kind — Brian is now Community Engagement Manager at the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, running peer recovery groups inside a correctional facility and producing Connecticut's first gambling-specific recovery retreat. In this episode he walks through his return to...

Adam and Christina sit down with Dr. Tim Fong — Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, Co-Director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, and Evive advisory board member — for one of the most clinically substantive conversations the show has had yet. 

Dr. Fong traces his path into addiction medicine, shares his own relationship with gambling, and unpacks the emerging treatments reshaping the field: psilocy...

Adam and Christina sit down with Kim Freudenberg, a high school physics teacher, mother, and founder of Parents Standing Together, a nonprofit peer support community for parents of young people experiencing gambling harm.

Kim's son Kurt began gambling at age 11 — on video game skins, offshore casino sites, and everything in between — without his parents having any idea. What followed was more than a decade of esc...