Asmongold TV - NO ONE saw this coming.. | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: February 1, 2026

NO ONE saw this coming..Asmongold podcast for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. --------- ------- Keywords: game criticism, gaming commentary, gaming opinions, asmongold, gaming content creator, streamer podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Big Tech is betting on gambling and scams. Big Tech is building a dystopia proudly and in the open in a way I've never seen before. It used to be tech companies would pretend like they were trying to do a good thing for the world. Now they're just openly investing in hyper-gambleification products in order to squeeze every last dime out of you. Introducing ladies and gentlemen covered, which was invested in by A16Z's speed run. and they say we disrupt personal finance through gamification starting by letting people bet against their bills guys you can now gamble on your credit card balance what ladies and gentlemen cover which was invested in by a 16 z's speed run and they say we disrupt personal finance through

gamification starting by letting people bet against their bills guys you can now so you're using your debt as collateral in order to to... Wow! This has to be a scam against where... This is nuts. Gamble on your credit card balance.

If you're lucky enough and you win, you may get out of debt. If not, they're going to drive you further into it. Welcome to Cover. Where everyday finances become fun and rewarding. Okay. First, link your card through Plaid. Next, pick a transaction in game for a chance to win it back.

Win it back. No way. So chasing losses is their business model. They figure out the most corrosive, damaging, bad element of gambling. And they say, hey, I've got a good idea. It's a fun way to make money management feel more like a game. Yeah.

And less like a chore. I cannot even start to explain how gross and disgusting this is. This user puts it best and was retweeted by the official cover to account A16C backed covered lets users to get up to 100% cashback on credit card purchases by offering fun and interactive games of chance. I downloaded the app. It's just gambling. And the worst part is you can't even use the old. So it's actually it is it's literally just gambling. Okay. I mean like yeah. I mean what does this look like? It's like a pepper pepper grinder. But instead of grinding up pepper, it's grinding up your savings account.

Oh, don't invest what you can afford to lose or whatever the gamble people say because you're literally investing money. You. Why can't you just say that you like natural selection and you're adding gambling in to help the human race in the long term? Why can't you just say that? I hate this dog and pony show that we do. Just let them know. Just, just, Beau, just let them know the way it is because it sounds bad. I think it sounds worse when you do something like this.

I do. They can't afford to lose because by definition you're already in debt if you're using their app. if you're gambling money on that's smart yeah that's like basically saying that like really this is like opening up a pharmacy at a rehab center i mean talk about fishing where the fish are they're fishing with grenades that you otherwise couldn't pay normally like it's like hey am i going to pay rent this month or am i going to try to just kind of risk it all for a quick flip uncovered i mean this product is straight out of a dystopian

sci-fi novel where people are flipping a coin on their rent. We're one step away from that. I think, well, we're more we're one step extended from that. Because I think this could even be worse. Like, I've been seeing people putting it all on black

on rainbed or steak. Like, I've been seeing Instagram ads like this for like five years. Like, I like watching gambling videos because I enjoy watching people destroy their lives. I think it's funny. And I do. I think it's funny. And so whenever I see this, I will watch it and see the decline and all of this stuff. And people will gamble their UBI. Yeah, I know. That's why you need to have it. What's no matter what time period, gambling hasn't died out. It's insane that people are so stupid that they still do it. Yeah, they're just stupid. This is the reason why you're never going to have class consciousness. This is the reason why there's never going to be a political revolution. This is the reason why

by there's never going to be a point in time where people stop being racist. This is, this is where we're at. And we're not leaving. And this just proudly invested in. But of course, it doesn't stop there. You also have cheddar, the TikTok of sports wagering. This is cheddar.

We're building the TikTok. I thought that was a cat. Legal and 20 more states than draft kings. Wait, so the advertisement is that it's legal. Oh wow Accessible for 18 to 21 year old Fuck yes I remember didn't he show this before

I think he did I remember this Yeah so again What we really need is gambling That's accessible for 12 year olds I don't know if you're noticing the pattern here It's just innovating on gambling Making it better

How can we Gambling on sports And then we have gambling on politics Now we have gambling on news How about gambling on credit card debt? Okay, gambling on gambling. That's going to be the next level. This is the next level.

I'm going to give away the game. There are going to be public streams that people can bet on whether a person will win a bet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. More into consumers. Oh, they're in debt? Well, let's just let them gamble on their debt.

Let's just kind of push it one layer forward. I mean, eventually it's like, like, hey, gamble your kidney. Hey, you can't get out of debt. We'll let you finance it with an optional operation. Of course, we can't forget the Y Combinator app called Chad, which is an IDE that embraces the idea that they're just putting steak and TikTok and Tinder inside of your code editor, you know, just in case you're being too productive.

Now you can gamble. I don't even understand. Does Big Tech have any more good ideas? Is it just like, hey, well, they do have good ideas. the good ideas give you a rate of return of 2x and this idea gives you a rate of return of 167x. That's the reason why they do this one instead. It's because it makes more money. How do we make gambling more addictive? How do we get into more people's wallets with gambling? I don't understand when big tech stopped pretending to have, you know, some utopian view and we're like,

I think that it happened after COVID, actually. I think it's, very easy to tell because COVID and the way that they handled COVID really kind of damaged, I think, a lot of the trust that the public had with big tech. And now it's like now that the trust is broken and there is no trust, the next thing to do is to maximize the abuse. That's the way you do it. Too hard. Let's just do the dystopia where we make a lot more money. Of course, it's not just A16Z either. I also wanted to point out this Reuters report showing that meta, aka Facebook, 10% of their revenue, which is like a huge chunk of it, supposedly comes from ads for scams, like straight up.

There's no way it's only 10%. Ads for scammed and banned goods. This is their internal reporting. Yeah. They were going to make $16 billion for running advertising for scams. Now I should note, these are from accounts, which Meta's own system has flagged. report is the problem is that really this is a big issue that happens with a lot of these different ad programs is that this is the same issue that google has google has this problem too they don't have a

manual approval process so you have a lot of people that are basically just approving anything like if you want to run an ad you can do so without any sort of genuine authentic human approval and that sounds like a pretty bad fucking idea i would say Sounds like a really bad fucking idea. Absolutely staggering and shows the extent to which Facebook's like, hey, fraud? Our platform. Make sure you're using our platform. We do that.

I'm happy to say that in their own internal reporting, META said that you are less likely to be able to advertise scams on Google, although that definitely happens. I think that's true, actually. I mean, I don't really go on Facebook a lot, but like I know on Instagram, I mean, they own Instagram, and so the ads are going to be probably kind of the same. I see way more scam ads on Google. I think Google is unironically. I don't know why I even say that. I think that they are the, it's not even ironic. I think everybody agrees with this.

They are the worst actor. They are the ones that execute and exercise the smallest amount of discretion. And they have the largest amount of scams. Reddit too? No, I, well, Reddit, who does Reddit's ad placement? But they say it's, it's, easier to advertise scams on meta platforms concluded an internal meta review. So, like, their own people are like, yeah, it's super easy to scam with us. We got the scammers on our platform.

And if you've been on Facebook, you know this to be true, of course. But I want to... It's hard to say because Google's the biggest. I would say that by percentage, like, so you're, like, I get what you're saying. I don't know if you're saying the same thing. Like, if I was a scammer, I would prefer to advertise on Facebook because old people are dumber than young people because they don't understand technology. And so it would be easier to take advantage of old people and there's more old people on Facebook. So like, you know, it's like there's basically bigger fish in this pond. So that, I mean, to me, I would be scamming on Facebook personally. But, grandma, Saj, you got to get her off, bro. Yeah, you got to get her off Facebook.

I mean out that the company says that they do ban advertisers, but only if it's automated systems, predict the marketers, are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, which is like really hard to be that certain. But if the company's less certain, but still believes the advertiser is likely a scammer, meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty.

All right, if you're going to scam our guys, we can't be letting you get away with only $100, You're going to have to give us like maybe 180 bucks if you really want to scam our fucking users. You got to cut us in on this. Man. They're squeezing the scammers for more money. Instead of getting rid of the scammers, they want to cut themselves in.

To be advertising their scams on meta. That's right. So I just found this report. This reminds me of the old saying, if you're not paying for a product, you are one. or it's staggering and just further points to my whole hypothesis which is like maybe big tech is out of ideas and they've given up the whole idea of like hey maybe we're going to be this utopian we're going to push for a better tomorrow now i think that right now this is the new growth strategy because gambling is relatively

unregulated and it's becoming increasingly less regulated because of it's basically the like gambling there's like a degree of like it like kind of it deregulates itself in a way because the more people are doing it the more it's socially accepted and the more it's socially accepted the more people accept it

being even more ubiquitous than it is now. So what happens is that gambling gets more and more and more popular and people just put up with it because why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they put up with it? There's gambling everywhere. So it's fine. You know, we're saying, hey, let's invest in the future.

Yeah, and I think really like the companies that were taking advantage of crypto in 2021, NFTs in 2022, Metaverse in 2020, now we have Gamma in 2025. That's basically what's happened. This is the new growth strategy that a lot of money is being allocated to. Like A16 Z is like a, it's like a subsidiary smaller fund that's owned by Andreson. And so this is venture capitalist company. So like they very clearly are putting money into this stuff because it's going to give them money back. Like it's the biggest fucking VC firm in the world. So they obviously know that this works.

The crypto boroughs are so bad. Yeah. And my point is actually the opposite in the U.S. More gambling laws written in the last 10 years versus 60 years. More laws does not equal more regulation and practice. Just because you have more rules doesn't mean that there is an effective control on the behavior. You can write a million rules for gambling. Like, oh, you can't gamble near a church, for example.

Okay, you can make that a law. But does that really solve the problem of gambling? No, it's just you're basically rearranging the furniture and the chairs on the Titanic as it's sinking. Like, and you're doing that to make people believe that you're doing something that matters. Rules mean nothing about enforcement. And also, yeah, you're not enforcing the rules. So like, for example, steak is banned in the United States, but you have everybody that just uses a VPN.

So what's the point of a regional ban if you don't even, like, who gives us shit? You just use a VPN. It takes five seconds to use a VPN. And then you're automatically on the platform anyway. What is the future? The future is covered. The future is we're disrupting personal finance. I love that.

That's a great way to put it. Well, you are disrupting personal finance in multiple ways. disrupting personal finance are right by letting people bet against their bills that's their tagline oh my gosh that's right is our world coming to that with this these are the products we're pushing this is what we're making happen you know things don't just happen i don't think we're making it happen i think that people are volunteer volunteering and enthusiastically surrendering to it happening this stuff wouldn't be popular if people weren't buying it I think that at a certain point, we have to look at the fact that people buy this, they put crazy amounts of money into it.

And it doesn't seem to be going away. For no reason. Like, people have to do things. There's a view of the world, which is like some things are inevitable. And I get that. Some people view it that way. But there's also a view of the world that we collectively make things happen by investing in things. Yes.

By putting our time and energy towards things. And the very fact that we are apparently putting money towards cover. It's in a cohort. What do we do when the retards run out of money? They kill themselves and there's new retards. You just farm them instead. It's the same as anything else. Like, what do you do whenever the cows, you take the cows to the slaughterhouse?

Well, you've got a new crop of cows and then you kill them too. Like, that's the way it works. This has been going on forever. With A16Z for development, it's just like, it's just so sad. It's like, this is the future we're building. That's the crazy thing. This isn't just happening. We're building it.

We're making sure that cheddar, the TikTok of sports wagering has happened. We're making sure people are gambling on their bills. We're making sure that if you're going to scam, you're scamming on meta's platform. So they can make a few billion more dollars. Actually, not a few. 16 billion dollars more. So, yeah, unfortunately. I think they're going to make a lot more.

And keep in mind, this app isn't considered a scam to them. Fortunately, our future appears to be scams and gambling. Brought you by your big tech overlords, but at least they're making money, right? At least they're making more money. So, yeah, I just wanted to talk about this. It's a very sad pattern. Yep. And it should stop.

But it won't. But it won't. That's a fucking fact, isn't it? I think this is just going to continue to get worse and worse and worse. Do you think that this should be allowed? I think that people love to gamble. I do. I think that they love gambling.

And that's it. That's the end of the conversation. Like whether you think it should be allowed, like I don't like gambling. I think the world would be a better place if nobody gambled. But it's very obvious that I am not the prevailing opinion. The way that I think about it, the way that I see it,

is very simply not the majority. Soon parents will gamble on their kids. Yeah, I don't know. And you should have to qualify for personal gambling license. Well, I don't think it really matters. I mean, you're going to have a million ways that people are going to fuck their life up, right? I mean, it's pretty obvious how that's going to happen. But yeah, there you go.

And I think it's just going to continue to get worse and worse and worse. Just about everything we have laws for, people are going to do anyway. Well, it's more than that. I'm not making an assertion that, oh, we should. shouldn't make any laws on it because there's, you know, people are going to do it anyway. Like, under that logic, you wouldn't have any loss, period. But the fact is that you're not going to make a change. And also, like, there is a tremendous amount of people that like gambling. That's what I'm really trying to get at is that they like gambling. It's not like, oh, yeah,

this is this bad thing to them. They think it's great. They think it's amazing. So, yes, absolutely. Now, how do you stop that? How do you get people to not do it? I think. think that why do we have so much gambling nowadays? I think that it's a combination of lack of financial literacy, lack of mathematical literacy. People don't understand statistics. So they think that they're just going to make their money. I think there's also a element of narcissism that gambling really takes advantage of. The idea that I'm special, I'm the one that's going to win, I'm smart, I'm the one that's lucky. And I think that they capitalize on that and then take it advantage of people. And then you also have a declining economy where nobody is able to make any money.

And so you have people that are absolutely hopeless. And their only chance to being able to, you know, have any semblance of dignity in their life is putting it all on black because they don't have any skills that people will give them money to do a job for. And so they end up getting addicted to gambling. Like, that's really what happens. And so like one big rush. Yeah, exactly. And so main character syndrome? Yeah, you won too much? Sure. So they take advantage of delusions of grandeur? Yeah, and they take advantage of people's hope. I think that's what happens in general. So yeah, they should tax the fuck out of it. Well, I mean, even if they tax the fuck out of it, why would that even matter? Like, taxing gambling a lot isn't going to improve the lives

of people that are gambling. It's not. Like, this isn't going to actually improve it because you're just going to have fewer places doing it at a larger scale. And they do already. Yeah, and they also do already. Somebody should just ban the gambling. I mean, even if you ban, I understand that, like, a lot of people want to have gambling banned, like, just entirely, like, all gambling banned. It's hard to know, like, where you draw the line there, right?

Do you draw the line at gotcha games? Do you draw them at trading cards? Do you draw the line at a lottery? Do you draw the line at slots? Do you draw the line at poker, for example, which is, like, kind of skill-based? Do you draw the line at horse betting? And so there are so many different types of gambling that I think it becomes so granular that it's really hard to actually nail down what is gambling and what isn't gambling.

All of them? Yeah, CS crates is another one. I mean, I would say also like I don't gamble on anything like that. I do not. And kind of, poker is pure skill. Well, it's not pure skill. I mean, the best players don't win every single hand. they probably win most hands.

It's the same as people that are really good at Blackjack. They win most, most cards, but you're not going to win every single one. Like, it's a matter of probability. Yeah, long term it is. Yeah, exactly. So if you're winning, let's say 60% of the time, that's really, really, really fucking good, right?

Like, what are we talking about? So do I? Yeah, poker is not pure skill. You fucking retard? Well, no, I mean, like, there's skill involved, and there's also luck. I mean, obviously, like, what are we doing? What are we doing talking about this? It's very obvious there's difference.

So how about a law that enforces a really terrible house ons for everything so it accelerates the problem? Oh, so people just know that they're going to lose all of their money? Well, then you have other things like prediction markets and things like this now, like with polymarket, and it's becoming even more prevalent in, you know, places like that. So, yeah, Blackjack's mostly luck, I thought. Well, it is mostly luck. But, like, again, if you're, you're. making your money back at 55% of the time, you will make a lot of money if you just play enough games,

logically, right? And so that's the problem is that, like, whenever you're playing a slot machine, this is one thing for people to keep in mind. Whenever you're playing a slot machine, it does not matter the amount of money that you start with. If you play it long enough, the ending amount of money that you will have will be $0.00. Because there is a, there is an edge fee, the house does have an edge, they are going to win, and over time, you will lose money. This is guaranteed. Now, there are people who play a slot machine, and they make money on the slot machine. That's true. Obviously, that's true. But in the grand scheme of things, if you play it enough times, you will lose all of your money, and it doesn't matter if you start

with a million, a thousand, a hundred, or a billion dollars, your ending number will be the same. It will be zero. So that's it.