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The Hollywood icon spilled the beans on his personal battles with gambling in his second appearance on Rogan’s podcast, which dropped on Thursday US time. Crowe has for the first time publicly shared that his great grandfather gambled the family’s house away, triggering a spiral of poverty across two generations. Watch the 2025 Rugby League Ashes LIVE with no ad-breaks in play on FOX LEAGUE, available on Kayo | New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1. The 61-year-old said he believes his great grandfather’s gambling-addict genes are “inside” him. “It really feels like it’s in me and I have to work against it,” he said. The Rabbitohs co-owner revealed the secret while divulging a dark moment where he nearly became stranded in Reno, Nevada, after losing money gambling at a casino. Crowe last year made global headlines after his first appearance on the Joe Rogan Experiment, where he discussed divisive American political issues and fossil fuel agendas. His comments made about gambling on Thursday’s episode are his most striking yet. It began with him telling Rogan about his incident in Reno more than 30 years’ ago. “I had an experience when I was a young fellow,” Crowe said. “It was the first time I was in America actually. And I’d had all these intense meetings and what have you. And I had a decision to make. I had 10 different people wanting to be my agent. “So I rented a car and I went for a drive and I went up to San Francisco along the coast and then I turned inland, thinking, well, I’ve heard of Reno, so I’ll go there, right? So I went to Reno, Nevada and I had X amount of money, right? “I was doing well in my career but I didn’t have a lot of cash so I had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket. That’s all, you know. So I went and had a beer and I started playing blackjack on a five dollar table and it was a single deck. This is how long ago this was, 1992 or something, right? “So I’m playing and I did pretty well, you know, amassed a few hundred dollars, feeling very cocky and confident about myself. And I probably just then had one beer too many and I went for a walk down the street and I saw a roulette table and I think that’ll be me, right? “Sucker and so everything I won, I lost. And by the time I sort of got my s**t back together, I had $25 in my pocket, I’m in Reno, I got a quarter of tank of gas and I gotta get back to LA (Los Angeles). I don’t have a credit card.” He said he needed to “sober up” before attempting to win some of his money back at the first casino. It was his only way out of Reno. “So I go back to the place I started, back to that same five dollar table and I just very carefully got to like $190,” he said. “I knew it was going to be enough to get me back with petrol and food and all that. So I stopped, I go out into the car park of this hotel. It’s like 11pm, midnight, something like that. And I just started vibrating and my whole body was like shaking, like I was having some kind of fit, you know. And it was just really weird. “I got back to the hotel room and I called my mum collect in New Zealand and I just said, I just did this, I went through this.” He told Rogan it was the first time he was told about his family’s problems. “She goes, right, darling, there’s something I’ve never told you,” Crowe said. “But your great grandfather was a professional gambler. And at one point in time he gambled his house away. He had to go and get his daughters, wake them up, get his wife and tell them this is where they no longer live. “And that one act kept that family, in relative terms, poor for another two generations. Wow. That one impulsive act to gamble his house. So I know it’s in me, so I don’t go anywhere near it.” He said the Melbourne Cup is now the only thing he bets on. He said the concept of punters pouring money into gambling organisations “drives me a little crazy”. “I don’t want to get involved in that,” he said. He has previously put his money where his mouth is. When Crowe and business partner Peter Holmes a Court took ownership of the South Sydney NRL club in 2006, one of their first moves was to ban poker machines. South Sydney is also partnered with the NSW Government’s Reclaim the Game initiative, a campaign designed to change attitudes towards sports betting. Many rival clubs have official betting agency sponsors. “I really dislike the way in Australia we have normalised it,” Crowe told Rogan. “You know, they’re doing a sports report on the news, the national news, and they’ll tell you the odds.” He said his two sons, Charles, 21, and Tennyson, 19, have also had their own experiences. “You know, I had an experience probably a year or two ago, and I see my two boys are talking to a mate of theirs and they’ve all got their phones out, and I realised they were checking up on their bets,“ he said. “So I had to have a big conversation with my boys and say, look, every single dollar that you have comes out of my pocket. If I give you a dollar, that’s not a dollar to gamble with. I had to have very serious conversation with them about it.” He went on to say: “So I just had to have a chat with them and they were probably looking at me going, how old is our father that he doesn’t understand that everybody does this? “But I just had to let him know from my point of view, I didn’t appreciate them taking my hard earned dollars and wasting them.” Rogan said children need to be “educated” before gambling. “The problem is, first of all, kids are addicted to apps as it is,” the former Fear Factor host said. “They use them. They’re always on their damn phone. And they’ll go from TikTok to Instagram to X to, you know, they’ll check this and then they’ll check that, and they’ll check their Snapchat and they’ll check the gambling app. “And then it’s like, you’re just addicted to this goddamn phone. So something on your phone that’s also addicting it’s like addiction on top of addiction, because you’re already getting your little dopamine rush just by looking at your phone. But then if you’re also getting a gambling rush on top of that. “Yeah, we got to educate people.” The entire conversation started when Rogan bluntly asked Crowe if there is “referee corruption” in Australian sport because of legalised betting. “There’s gotta be some corruption if there’s gambling,” he said. “If I was a corrupt person, a gambler, especially if I was a mobster, I would reach out to that referee and say, you know, it’s within our best interest to work together on this. Yes. Let’s.” Crowe responded: “It’s absolutely crazy the way gambling has become such a significant player. “I also read the other day that now turns out that 50 per cent of ownership of all the major gambling things are in the hands of sports teams.” A recent Australian Gambling Research Centre survey found around three million Australians are engaged in some form of harmful gambling. The 2023 parliamentary inquiry that formed the “You win some, you lose more” Murphy report found Australians lose $31.5 billion on legal forms of gambling each year, more per capita than anywhere in the world. Public campaigns pushing for major gambling ad restrictions have ultimately failed.
