Hi, producer Ben Ki-Rick here. This bonus episode is an extended cut of our interview with

psychiatrist and gambling expert Tim Fong. Dr. Fong is co-director of the Gambling Studies program at UCLA, which is one of the few programs

dedicated to studying gambling and gambling addiction in the United States.

Dr. Fong discusses the massive increase in gambling in recent years,

and how we might be seeing the early stages of a gambling epidemic,

especially with the rise of retail investment day trading and investments

like cryptocurrencies, which effectively mimic gambling in many ways.

My name is Dr. Timothy Fong. I'm a professor of psychiatry. I'm the co-director of the

UCLA Gambling Studies Program located here on the campus of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles.

So there's a number of different terms like I think I've seen problem gambling, pathological

gambling, gambling disorder, gambling addiction.

What's kind of like the proper term or what are the distinctions between those terms?

The scientific term that I use is gambling disorder.

That's inside the handbook of diagnostic criteria

that we use DSM-5.

So that's consistent with the other addictions, tobacco use disorder,

alcohol use disorder, tobacco use disorder alcohol use disorder

opioid use disorder so that's the scientific term gambling disorder

synonyms are going to be things like gambling

gambling addiction problem gambling impulsive gambling.

For a long time there was debate,

is it even a disorder?

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