Panic World - We are living in a casino

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

First they came for our mobile apps, then they came for our videogames, and now, it seems pretty much every aspect of our lives is being re-oriented around gambling. Who are the players — inside and outside of tech — that have spent the past decade building out “Casino World”? Edward Ongweso, Jr. joins us to talk about why we should be panicking about a world where everything is gamified, and what’s in it for the people trying to run the floor. Our guest Edward Ongweso, Jr. writes the Tech Bubble newsletter, and you can check out the piece we referenced, “Trapped in the Maw of A Stillborn God,” here. He also hosts This Machine Kills, which you can find wherever you listen to podcasts. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here:      http://multitude.productions/ads. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To start things out, what's like the craziest bet you've ever made? I mean, maybe like, you know, little bets if, like, a friend is going to do something or not do something. But I really don't have any... Any you're willing to share now? Maybe, like, the equivalent of parlay is and, like, trying to predict someone's exactly what someone is trying to do. Okay. And it was a friend who was kind of spiraling. And so they went on, you know, two, maybe three dates.

it felt like almost every day. Okay. And that's about how each date would go, basically. If they're going to bring them home, if they were going to leave in the middle of it, if they were going to see this person again. I think that's maybe the only time I've actually done some real actual gambling and kept like a running tally and involved multiple people in the pool for this bet. Oh, there was like multiple people in the pool.

Yeah. You're a very good friend. That's good. That's really good. I'm Ryan Broderick, and joining us, unfortunately, because he can't stop interrupting our shows, is our producer Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And today, we're talking about a reality warp that has sort of hit every part of life and is also kind of difficult to describe because of that, right? There's a lot of ways the world is bad and changing, and we talk about those things all the time. But there's this other thing that's totally happening off to the side that's so pervasive.

It doesn't even really have a term, but we're going to call it casino world. Today we want to explore how our whole economy and our lived experience is now either centered on gambling or meant to feel like a casino. Joining us is Edward on Guaso Jr., the author of the fantastic subsdeck, the tech bubble, and I mean this in the best way. He is a vicious writer, and I am so excited to have him on the show. I want to start by running something by you. Would you say the last, I don't know, decade has been defined by tech companies running worldwide social experiments, using our data and surveillance to essentially kind of like keep us inside of a digital casino. Does that feel correct to you? I'd say that's the best part. It's the best part?

It's the best part? Yeah. Well, the reason I ask you is because you've written pretty extensively about this. You've written about sort of like how gambling has infected most of the technology we use. and you put a lot of these thoughts together into a piece that, I mean, the title is like one of the best titles of anything I've read in a long time, which was trapped in the maw of a stillborn god. So first, can you explain that metaphor for our listeners who may not have read your piece? Yeah, I mean, I think one way to think about it is a lot of the technology today is being delivered in ways that are its private profit and socialized losses. And we're told that, you know, even though these technologies are corroding the social fabric, or the environment, our politics, cultural production, people's livelihoods, that you have to

commit to them because they're on the brink, they're on the verge of a breakthrough that will make all of our lives immensely better. Right. And so it feels like we are being constantly told that, you know, we're about to give birth to this God that will, you know, save everything, it'll consume the entire world and birth it out or shit something out that's entirely new. But instead, it's just, it's still born. It never actually comes.

It's, and it is grotesque, you know, grotesque, you know, half dead, have a live thing that I feel like is consuming and not actually birthing or renewing anything. So I think every tech moment promises us ease or fun, but ends up really only gamifying something that doesn't need to be a game. In fact, oftentimes it makes it feel like this insidious attention or money suck. For the normal person who may not even notice that they are living inside of a perpetual casino, like what bothers you the most? I would say the idea that everything would be better off if there was a market for it, whether that is, you know, a microtransaction, whether that's like something that might have otherwise been a favor or, you know, maybe that's something that you would have delayed gratification of because you didn't know you could get it instantaneously.

Like Klarna payments for DoorDash. Yes, which are now turned into financial security. So I just bought like a ton of Klarna DoorDash debt. Like I bought like a hundred million and I'm trying to offload that. So if you want to buy it, like we can just keep passing the Klarna debt around for food delivery. There is nothing I'd rather a stay away. I touch less. You know, there are few things in this world.

and then burrito debt and studios on burritos. Right, right. Wait, wait, for the, for the offline, can you guys explain what this horrible thing is? Yeah, I mean, it is as horrible as it sounds. Klarna, the sort of delayed payment processor, has teamed up with DoorDash.

So now you can pay a multiple interest-free installments of your DoorDash meal. It's really beautiful. It's actually going to save the world. And you should, you know, there's nothing wrong here. There's nothing that could possibly go wrong, I think. I am sad to say that I used Klarna recently for Airbnb, and I was like, this is so good. I should never, ever do this again because this feeling is dangerous, actually.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of how they get you because of the lack of friction, right? I think that's also another thing that I really do think is part of the problem with the introduction of these apps. There's a confusion with, like, making something better or more optimal or efficient with, lack of friction. You know, there's sometimes there needs to be, sometimes you need to drive 50 miles to get to the casino instead of having it in your pocket. No, this is something we've talked about on the show a lot, which is like sort of the difference between, you know, a dumb rumor you hear at a bar or like, you know, when

you're in high school versus a mass panic or like a witch hunt online is the friction. And I think a lot of the things that we sort of complain about the internet, you know, creating. They're not new, but the frictionless environment that we're now experiencing them is completely new. And that is sort of the heart of it, I think. Yeah, I definitely do. I mean, that's part of what happened during the pandemic with the rise of these financial tech firms and with crypto. I mean, you had people who were not just being unloaded into platforms and apps that were allowing them to trade crypto or to participate in

pumping up coins or to participate in stock trading. But you also had the first. friction being removed in terms of being brought into communities. I would encourage you to go deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole. Advertising those a bit more direct and encouraging you to, you know, try and 100x an investment by putting your life savings into it or believing that you guys were smart enough to organize like your own sort of pump and dump scheme. So you're not holding any fart coin right now? No.

We're going to talk about sort of how the pandemic did absolutely escalate all of this. But I want to start at the very beginning of, I guess, like the modern sort of start to this. Because obviously America and gambling go way back, right? We've always sort of had this social issue that we don't really know what to do with. But in 2018 is when things really get started because that's when the Supreme Court makes mobile sports betting legal. And after seven years of this sort of environment, here's where we've ended up. So last year, sports betting apps spent $400 million on ads. and brought in about $14 billion, according to ESPN.

In the states that allow app-based betting, bankruptcy is increased by 28%. I don't think that's good, right? That seems bad. In Oregon alone, $57 million was waged just on ping pong. Seems bad. And speaking of bad, there are obviously a ton of downstream social ailments that come from the increase in gambling. So intimate partner violence increases with mobile sports betting by about 8 to 9%.

And our researcher tried to sort of like create a, our researcher Adam tried to create like a total for like lives ruined by the expansion of digital gambling. And the estimation we have is about 7 to 10 million people have ruined their lives every year since we made mobile betting legal. Sounds right. Yeah. It seems fucking staggering. Gambling is an activity, whether it's physical or digital, that is designed to try to get you into a flow state. A lot of researchers will call it where your sole concern is not winning, but playing constantly, right? I heard this where like, so yeah, I should say up front, like, I do not, I always phrase it this way, I do not have the gambling brain shape.

It, like, it stresses me out and I actually don't enjoy the flow state. but I had read this incredible thing where like a study was done where gamblers actually start to feel physical like anxiety or even like physical pain in certain senses when they win yes but the losing flow state is like if you were to sort of say like you know you're at the table or you're at the machine and you're pulling the slot machine like that feel that feels better winning interrupts the flow and that is actually what's really I think uh like hurts people yeah and that is and that is and I think it's worth thinking about the design of the place as you're getting into the flow and the design of the game once you win, right?

The design of the place when you get in the shape of the seats, the feel, the lights, the You've got your diaper on. You're just crushing it. You're just cranking it. You're just cranking up in your diaper. That should be their slogan. They should put that on there. Come crank it in your diaper.

Yeah, no, I'm with you. And I am with you. Yeah. No, exactly. But when you win, right? Disrupt it. It's immediately disrupted. Incredibly loud siren, incredibly bright and flashing lights.

And part of that is to attract other people so that they're like, oh, you know, they may think going in consciously it's about winning, but then realize as they get into it, it's not about winning. And the act of gambling is to, you know, kind of train you so that you care less about winning and more about gambling in of itself. I think that this is even more dangerous if you have it in your phone and not like, you know, a few dozen miles you have to drive away to reach. Yes. And one other thing that we sort of discovered as we were putting this episode together is that not only does like the easy access of gambling on your phone just make it just impossible to separate yourself from that flow state.

Because of the way the internet is structured, it has had a bizarre domino effect where people are now trying to essentially make other things feel like gambling. So one of the, I think the most important developments, you know, in let's say gamble world, I don't know, we need a name for what this is by the end of the episode, but would be Reddit's Wall Street Betts. Yes. Which was created by a guy who literally has admitted he wanted to make day trading feel like gambling. And in your piece, you quote New York Times writer Jay Caspian King, who wrote, the creator of Wall Street Betts could no longer really tell the difference between buying cryptocurrencies, betting on. sports or trading stocks because they've become part of a mega gamble with payouts that could change your life. And I think this is key, like the complete flattening of any kind of financial gamble into one

thing that we don't even have language for. One of the, I think probably we'll look back and see one of the more destructive developments was the creation of these of these fintech tools. whose goals are ostensibly to democratize finance, right? And the argument is that, you know, if you want to be able to trade a stock, if you want to be able to move a bunch of money, you should be able to do so without interference from the federal government, without interference from regulators who are being paternalistic, right?

But I think a few researchers have kind of talked about how the advent of fintech is actually part of a larger struggle where financial firms and, you know, well-capitalized individuals who start these firms have been trying to figure out, okay, how do we get rid of the regulations that have been in place since the New Deal, which makes certain kinds of levels of profit-making illegal? and which if we were able to tap into, we could then create new businesses, new ventures, new relations, new platforms, new products that would realize even greater returns than some of the things that we do have today. And part of this comes to us, that's, I think, really the real core and the bleeding heart of these, or the beating heart of these fintech firms, right?

They are asking, how can we make it so that the relationship you have, with our platform is one that used to be illegal, but is much more profitable, either because we get more access to your funds, or either because we can put you in a more exploitative position, or because we can offer you a product where you're going to take the bath on, you know, that we're going to rinse you on, but we're going to make out like bandits. How is it that we're able to structure that? And a lot of the times, it's by putting responsibility on the individual, but spending lots lots of money designing something that is as appeasing and is appealing and as flow-like as possible

for someone to use. And I think a lot of the financial, you know, gambling experiments have been attempts to figure out what is the, how can you take X, Y, or Z and turn it into that? How can you turn stock trading and turn it into that? How can you turn art trading or art viewing into this? How can you turn experiences as we saw them try to do with making NFTs of like proof that you attended concerts. Yes. You could trade them on secondary markets. You know, how can we take more things that in of themselves are not an asset,

not a commodity or are, but figure out how to make it so you gamble on them in one way or another? It's funny you brought up the new deal, the 100 years worth of financial regulations. Because I do think it's part of it and something that's really overlooked when we're talking about crypto, because crypto, to me, is like a very uniquely American thing. In the late 2010s, I was living outside of America and I was traveling around Europe. And I remember trying to explain what something like Venmo was to Europeans. And they were like, what the fuck are you talking about? Why can't your bank just do that?

And I do think that it's a really crucial point here because our banking system was so old and so unable to digitize that a lot of private entities got involved. This is why Bitcoin was so exciting for people because, you know, you'll talk to Bitcoin, Max, And they're like, oh, yeah, you can trade money on the internet. And the rest of the world's like, yeah, we do that all the time. You know, there was even a service, you know, in Brazil that everyone was using when I was living there called Peaks. Like, every country has something like this. And it works usually really well.

And because our regulations could not keep up with the internet, they fell by the wayside, which I think is why we're now seeing American, specifically American capitalism, turn into unregulated gambling because our regulators could not keep up. And at a certain environment, you know, it's like that old saying, you know, you let a Nazi walk into your bar, it becomes a Nazi bar. If one casino enters your unregulated financial system, your unregulated financial system becomes a casino. Yeah. And after the break, we're going to be talking about this entire concept of the internet as Las Vegas, capitalism as a casino, and how that plays into the Manosphere culture, which means, yeah, we're going to be talking about Dave Portnoy again. But first, a word for my sponsors.

Fucking some kind of brewery in the North End or something. I don't know. Some fucking plate. Oh, look at me. I'm a fucking Boston brewery and I'm going to sell a Detroit-style pizza. Ever heard of this before? Oh, my God. Fucking, here's your IPA, you fucking douchebag.

So we talked about Dave Portnoy on our episode about whether Trump's base will continue to support him. But honestly, we've just been talking about him way more than I want to. I swear to God, I don't want to keep bringing him up. but he has unfortunately become the, like, main character of our current moment. But I do think, I do think, aside for my personal obsession with this man, that his rise does really tie into this episode. And it's all about how he turned betting into a identity. You know, I know he's a colorful guy.

I know he does this thing where he rates a bunch of pizzas that he eats. Yeah. Does bars stool sports? That's the limit of my knowledge about him. Okay. Great. You're going to learn all kinds of things about him now. I should also say here that I was born in a town next to Swampscut.

My hometown has a 100, 200-year-old rivalry with his town. So I hated him even before I knew how much of a piece of shit he was. So I want credit there. But also my family unfortunately really likes him. and we have it multiple times watched his pizza videos like at the table. Anyways, he's a big deal in Massachusetts, unfortunately. And every time I go home, I have to hear about him. But the major thing about Dave Portnoy is that so he is the CEO and founder of Barstville Sports.

For a while, it was quietly one of the most influential men's spaces online and managed to not have, you know, direct ties to like a burgeoning neo-Nazi movement in America. But that was up until recently when Portnoy discovered. that he does have actual Nazis in his audience and is now fighting with them. But on the whole, it is something, like, Barstool to me is something from a very early era of the internet. It feels very still kind of untouched by the modern culture war in a way. And they're very important, Barstool and Portnoy are very important because they found this banner that they can put sports app gamblers, video game gamblers, crypto bros, all under. Do you know sort of like what his business?

It was that helped him kind of like become the face of consumer investment, consumer gambling. No. Is it something related to Robin Hood? Yes. It is eventually. But it starts with just being a specific kind of guy. You know, all right. To wrap your head around this, let's play a clip, which I think really paints a picture of his personality.

If you don't like me, I'm going to not like you back 10 times harder. If you hit me with a feather, I'm going to try to hit you with a sledgehammer. He's essentially like a like a like a like a like a like a like a W. Yeah. Yeah. I mean he could I could seem being a heel. I could see it. Yeah.

He is he is the the he looks the way the Boston accent sounds. Yes. That's sort of his vibe. So in 2003 he starts barstool sports as a gambling tips magazine in the Boston area. Sick. Yeah. It blows up. Yeah.

Super sick. In 2007, it. pivots into a blog, focusing more on lifestyle, and it's kind of like in that era with like the chive. Do you remember the chive? No. Keep calm and chive on. No?

They would do like lists of like the hottest babes on Reddit this month. Oh, yeah. That kind of thing. Okay. Barstool had their own version where they would steal random women's photographs from Facebook, and they would call them the local smoke show of the day. Oh, yeah.

Okay. I do know this. My roommate's sister was on. on that. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. I feel like I should, hold on, I might not be conveying the attitude, right? Let me, um, the local

smoke show of the day, dude. Yeah. That's a fucking lulley, dude. Um, so, they they kind of recreate the idea of like what a jock is in the 2000s in 2000, very Tucker Max. In 2011, they have a blog post titled Kobe

better not have raped Alex Morgan written by David Portnoy, who wrote, it's one thing to stick your dick in a random, Grant, do I have to read this? I don't want to read this. This is disgusting, actually. Basically, he's just argue, he's a, he's a, he's a guy who doesn't think that women should come forward with sexual allegations. He's tracking. This is tracking.

Yeah, yeah. In 2011, he, God damn it. So in 2011, he posts naked photos of Tom Brady's two-year-old son, writing, quote, check out the howitzer on Brady's kid. Oh, my God. What the fuck? In 2012, they start these parties called blackout parties. And he's like defending them being, and he says, just to make friends with the feminists, I'd like to reiterate that we don't condone rape of any kind at our blackout parties

in mid-January. However, if a chick passes out, that's a gray area, though. So it's like this is the exact kind of guy that is, unfortunately, perfect for the environment that's created. It's all under the umbrella of betting on sports. So they come for the betting, but they stay for the wrestling personalities and keep funding the operation through betting. And over time, when we think about crypto bros or guys getting, you know, massive parlayes

that they're betting on, which I think I understand what that is. We're even talking about somebody who could be like obsessed with credit card points. Barstools mentality, their politics, their overall shittiness is now attached to that kind of guy. the kind of guy who's always trying to win big. And it's hard to describe how huge they've become because they created their own ecosystem. And in a lot of ways, you can't really measure it against the rest of the internet. Right. So in 2017, ESPN plans to adapt a barstool show into an actual broadcast.

It's canceled after one episode because of what they were saying on air. And that's when they go all in on podcasting, which, as we know, had no political impact on this most recent election. It's not like this one moment eventually creates the entire media landscape of now. And that's when we get to the Robin Hood stuff, because in the COVID, like early pandemic lockdown, Portnoy gets a Robin Hood account and a Twitch account, and he just starts streaming his terrible Robin Hood investments. Let's play a clip.

And finding himself with a lot of money and a lot of time, Barstool Sports founder, Dave, Portnoy took to the Robin Hood app and started a revolution. I realized that stock market has no effect on the real world and vice versa. That it's its own universe, that the wise guys on Wall Street, the pinstripe suits, has the thing all rigged for their benefit. And once my brain adapted and was able to figure it out, quickly, I realized stocks only go up. I will probably revert back to sports gambling.

But to be honest, it's not very different. They're both forms of gambling. Wow. That's new. I didn't know anyone was doing that. Yes. So in between the pizza reviews and all the other kinds of content he was creating, he gets, like, I remember, like, I was at home in Massachusetts during the pandemic. And, like, my dad would be watching Port Noyes' bets and, like, using Robin Hood alongside him.

Oh, my God. He starts going on CNBC during this time as, like, a financial expert in consumer trading. Are you serious? Yes. Yeah, we got Twitch streamer Tim Portnoy on. That's okay. Yeah.

And he obviously has a litany of all kinds of scandals. And we could go on and on. But what I think is really important about Portnoy is that we've talked a lot about kind of like the larger social diseases that come with gambling the gambling represents. But I do think Portnoy is important because he represents this new world of gambling's connection to the what I think some people have been calling the masculinity crisis in America. The idea that like there is this cohort of men for whom their identities are off, to put it academically, all super fucked up.

And now you have these men like therefore, no, who are sort of connecting the risk taking behavior of gambling with a new sense of masculinity. Is that clock with what you've seen? Yeah, you know, that's interesting because I think the way you articulate that, that I feel like I'm seeing an iterative version of that with like Nate Silver's book on gambling, which is trying to, say, actually risk-taking behavior is not just throwing money at things, but it's constantly calculating where you have an advantage, where it makes sense for you to invest money, and that this can, should, and is increasingly becoming political behavior. And if you

think about the world in this way where you might be maximizing risk or considering different risk, then maybe you can come out ahead in a world that's becoming increasingly casinified. And thinking about on the other end, risk-taking as a way to rediscover older forms of masculinity makes sense, you know, makes sense, I guess after the fact that's like a move that was made. I mean, our president is a casino owner. And it's very easy to see Portnoy as the next iteration of him. You know the type of guy I'm talking about here. Yeah, I mean, that's also the other thing, right?

Trump is like a perfect, Trump is almost, you know, history only gives you one of these people every generation. He's like, you know, he's been on WWE. He's, you know, casino guy. He's a reality star, a real estate tycoon. That's like, you know, four different tentacles of the hydra coming back home. Part of the reason I wanted you on to talk about this is because there's this. idea that I've had a really tough time articulating for months, if not years at this point,

about this sort of like connection between gambling and the unreality of our current political moment. And I don't totally understand how they connect. But you know, you're talking about sort of walking around Las Vegas. If anyone's walked the strip, it is a facsimile of a facsimile of a facsimile in a way. actually because it's it's it's modern Vegas trying to look like older Vegas trying to look like other parts of the world right like and when I think about like the the current like sort of hypercapitalistic fascist movement that we're seeing a rise in American politics it feels inseparable in a way where it's like you are I this is the this is this is this is as far as I've ever gotten with this idea so I'm really hoping you you have thoughts here I'm going to start

rambling but no there is something there there is something there is something there's some sort of connection between financial risk-taking for the thrill of it and the willingness to believe in a political unreality that is toxic and authoritarian, and I don't understand why. I think part of it, kind of like what you were talking about earlier, with the rolling back deregulation of capitalism leads to unspooling and destabilizing effects of it to the point that it's just all gambling. now. I think about how so much of the reactionary movement, especially coming out of Silicon Valley,

you know, when you really press them down to it, they're essentially saying, we need to return to a different political economic order because that would yield more profits and lead to more prosperity. And that political economic order needs to be liberated of democracy. It needs to be liberated of minority rights of liberalism, of feminism, of environmentalism. These are things I get in the way of capitalism moving along. And so we're actually defending and impurifying it. And under that umbrella project of we're defending capitalism and purifying it to go back are attempts to envision weird futures of capitalism that resemble nothing like the past, but maybe have technology grafted onto it, as well as attempts to make the future look very much like an imaginative.

version of what the past used to be. Okay, we're cooking. All right. Hell yeah. Yeah, we're doing it. It's happening. Dear listener, it's happening in real time right before you. This is so exciting.

Yeah, the idea, I think, is best exemplified by Trumpism, right? So Trump, literally a casino owner, he is obsessed with nostalgia. He's obsessed with the past, make America great again. He is selling you this facade, this fake memory of America. And he's doing it to distract you. it is the same idea as like sitting in the Venetian and being like, wow, I'm in Venice. It's like, oh, wow, I'm in this fictitious version of America. And I don't care what happens as long as I can live in the fantasy of America that was

created by like 1950s co-cads or whatever that, like Trump is selling back to me. But while he's used, but beyond that, you know, behind that, you have his intense desire to deregulate the economy. You see this with his own personal enrichment. I mean, he's selling, he's selling Trump branded cell phones right now. He has his own crypto coin. Like, it couldn't be more obvious that Trumpism is a multi-level marketing scheme. It is a casino.

And nostalgia is the lifeblood of that. And I wouldn't even say it's nostalgia. It's almost like this fake reality in the exact same way that you can, like, dress up a casino to make it feel like this fun, expensive place that you've never been before. And you can continue to live in that fantasy as long as you keep pulling the slot machine. You keep putting down money on cards. Like, that is the idea is you can live in this fantasy bubble version of America if you keep giving me money to do so. What is it going to take to get it so that, you know, you just get the herd out of the way. You get them into some sort of flow state where they distract them, yes.

You know, they're doing opioids. They're doing gambling. Okay. Don't thread me with it. All right. I feel like there's something there between the goal of gambling, which is to, like, kind of engineer this sort of walking dead state. and the goal of these reactionaries to figure out how can we figure out some sort of status quo where it's stable, stability built on very deep and intense inequality.

If you go against the sort of general theory that gambling is financial risk-taking, which obviously it is. But if you think of it more as a flow state or if you think of it as a flow state with the sort of perpetual promise of, like, like aspirationalism. It is politically exactly like Trumpism. It is this sort of like, come into the big rally.

It is all glitz and glamour and we're going to hypnotize you and we're going to promise you a better life over and over again and we're going to use motifs and themes that you recognize and we're going to sort of allow your brain to fill in the blanks of how those create

a different future for you based on an imagined past. In the same way that when you're cranking it in your diaper and you're looking at a Miami, semi-vice, you know, slot machine. Like, there is that connection to it. And we're going to talk more about that after the break.

But first, a word from our sponsors. They got a great new app for gambling. It's called, I'm just kidding. In the same way that I sort of feel like unregulated gambling within capitalism turns capitalism into just gambling. I also think that at a certain point of unregulated internet consumption, everything kind just becomes porn. So now these apps

lure in younger people trying to entice them in ways that I do think are not dissimilar to maybe not sex workers but definitely like porn platforms like Porn Hub to me has the exact same mechanisms

behind it as YouTube, behind TikTok. It is trying to keep you in this aspirational but never satisfying ecosystem of content of urges of desires. You know about state?

Yes. Oh, God. Yeah. So I first noticed steak because of their marketing campaign that literally made me gasp where they have people watermarking memes. Have you seen these? Yes. Okay. So talk us through steak. How did you first discover steak? So I was looking at crypto casinos and which are there are these weird casinos that, you know, are not really allowed to operate in a lot of places, but they're island countries where they are allowed to operate. And steak companies. attention because it had a very interesting, before the meme strategy, they had a Twitch strategy where they would have influencers and streamers gamble house money for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on end. And they would target streamers and influencers with audiences that were skewed pretty young, as does the demographic for the app, you know, and not disclose that they were giving these people house money to gamble with, not disclose

that the streams were basically advertisements resulted in some of it being reported out, but also some of these people just kind of like leaving the country, you know, like XQC, you know. So I learned of stake because I was like, basically they were using really ingratiated influencers and streamers targeting children to bring them onto this gambling website where you could basically do online slot machines. You know, slot machines are just some of the worst ways to gamble. And they were basically just doing digital slot machines all day. for hours and hours and hours.

That's right. They were founded in 2017 by two guys who met playing RuneScape. So you know, you know, good dudes. They operate in Carousal, as you alluded to. They basically are only accessed in the U.S. by VPN, which I think is fascinating. I'm glad that at least some goods coming out of this is that the average gambler is learning about the importance of a VPN. Yeah, right. You know, maybe they have, they get Drake.

as a spokesperson? And Drake's, the ads, you know, are ridiculous. Just him gambling all day or gambling in that club all the load. Oh, the one where he's playing, like, Candy Crush in a club or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Just gambling on his phone on a big screen. I hate it.

Yeah, that's like the dark. That's, I think that's darker than being called a pedophile at the Super Bowl. Yeah, I do. I think so, too. I think it's a way sadder. Wait, wait, these were, where were these ads run? Yeah, after he got called to pedophile at the Super Bowl, he looked his phone up to a giant screen at a nightclub. It just, like, gambled for a while.

Empty nightclub also. Totally empty. Nobody's in there. There's like a couch in there for him. Yeah, he put a couch for him in there, yeah. But what starts to become really fascinating is how aggressively sort of, like, unethical they are about all this. So, like, in 2022, Stake creates their own live streaming site kick, which is sort of like the, I think is now sort of just thought is, like, the far right version of Twitch. Like you go there if you get banned from Twitch.

And they made $2.6 billion in 2022. They also sponsor a Formula One team. And to bring us back to the top of the section, they have an insane strategy where they will just pay random users on X to post memes with a watermark on that meme that says steak, which I just, that to me is the final straw here. Yeah. That's too much. Get that shit out.

Get that shit out of there. But I think what's also really fascinating and to sort of loop back again to like the porn idea, which is that like they are doing the same strategy as I think a lot of like sex workers on the internet, which is like they are using sort of this like tip of the iceberg idea to get you onto the site, to get you to pay money, to get you into the flow state, which is why my producer grant really wanted me to ask you if you find any similarities between gooning and gambling. You know, not that you asked me, I mean, part of the thing with gooning, right, It's supposed to be...

It's not even about coming. It's about, like, just doing it for hours and hours and hours. Our listeners have begged us to stop talking about good. And we took, like, a month more time on it. It's like, people are, like, double the gooning or they're like, you need to stop. But it's really 50-50. Honestly, that's the gooners dilemma, really. Really, everything.

Everything isn't gambling. Everything is gooning. That's really what it is. It is possible that in a totally unregulated digital environment, everything is gooning or gambling or both. You know, like Magdalene Taylor's talked a bit about it, and you had her on the pod, and also, you know, from reading that I've seen from her and from some other sex culture writers, it's a lot of overlap here with the gambling. I feel like, yeah, not pursuing orgasm is not even the goal. It's like kind of just like going into a flow state. there's a lot of like emphasis on or explicit talk about that flow state and about just like losing yourself for hours.

Yeah, gooning and gambling themselves are not about no longer about like coming and winning a jackpot. It's just about like betting, betting, betting, and jerking, jerking, jerking it for hours. And I also, and I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, I feel like there's also an increasing algorithmic, you know, mediation of both, right? you know, they're, you know, the porn being dominated by, you know, close to a monopoly with Mind geek owning like a big chunk of the website's distributors and studios and using insights that they gain from people who visit, from, you know, similar to Casino, casino doesn't need to hire a bunch of experts, behavioral economists and so forth.

They have such a massive data set of users that they just tweak things here. there and decide what they like and they decide based on test what works best. And then that is sufficient. And that ends up being a more scientific, more evidence-based thing than doing any other sort of controlled experiment. And similarly with porn, I do feel like as the algorithmic mediation increases and as this concentration of the market is increased, right, that you are seeing a similar sort of dynamic where you can just kind of experiment in Porsche and try to see if you can drive consumer interests or what types of porn people might be interested in similar directions or experiment with influencers and people outside of the actual website itself but on other

platforms doing this sort of tip of iceberg strategy, right? Yeah, and I think the usurring in on the flow state is correct because I think in a lot of ways the story of the internet of the last 15 years or so are these companies becoming massive and trying very hard to figure out how to make the internet feel as gratifying as the physical world. And like the computer can't touch you. It can't feed you. You can't smell it. Like there's, it doesn't do a lot of senses.

But one thing that like the computer we figured out can do is put you into a flow state. One that it can be quite addicting. And I don't think it's an accident that like a lot of the oldest vices have found. new homes online, but you can sit in your house and you can just sort of just be sucked into your phone and not think about it for hours and hours and hours. I should also say, I enjoy going to Vegas. I don't want to be, I think that town is really weird and I enjoy old Vegas is really weird. And I like old downtown Vegas a lot.

But I guess this is where in a normal administration, I would ask you like, how do we fix this and make it better? But like that seems completely stupid to even think about. But like I, so I guess what I would tweak it to say is like, you know, where does this go next. Like, how do you sort of see the future of casino world? I talked a little bit in the piece about how we have a tendency in this country and, you know, in the world at large, I think, of just doing regrettable substitution, which is where you, you know, you take some incredibly toxic or hazardous product and you say, fuck, man, I'm so sorry. Well, first you deny that it

does anything wrong and then you apologize and then you replace it with an near identical compound that is produced at no inconvenience to you. I think the path of smoking of cigarettes is a really instructive here, right? You go from smoking, you go to you experiment with smoke less. Then you start to get into vapes and zins. And I think that similarly with gambling, I think there's so little interest, I think, already in handling things that are poisonous or toxic or, you know, obnoxious to the public, combined with the fact that when it comes to gambling, the lobby is so fucking good at figuring out how to co-opt almost any regulation, right?

My concern, I talked a little bit about casino world, a hyper commodified casino capitalism that Nate Silver talks about where he kind of imagines that everything is gambling in the future and the only people who get ahead are those who like figure out how to mix both like savvy risk-taking with artificial intelligence to eke out advantages incrementally. That must hit so hard if you're in an airport. Yeah, I know. That must be like, fuck, yeah. AI and casinos?

Hell yeah, dude. Yeah, man, nobody knows. You know, with your little fucking, you could have like a Google smart glass. Yeah, there you go. Pretend your mission impossible. I think that is actually naive. I think it will be probably worse. And I don't think there's going to be people using AI to get their little advantages.

And I think that the casinos are going to be. offered as like a way to escape in an increasingly depressing world where we're going to see much more violence and commitment to segregation, to roll back of property rights and voting rights and, you know, kind of the threadbare protections we've gotten over the past hundred years to loop it back to the new deal, right? So much of this is, how do we get rid of that and then just shove everyone into a casino in one way? So you sort of touched on this. And this is the part that I'm really worried about when it comes to specifically gambling online, which is that in America, we obviously have been very moralist

from the beginning. We are a country that is very strange about our vices. We allow like a vice zone. You can go do it in. But we are very much sort of like if I see it, it's a problem. And I think one of the problems, one of the biggest issues with putting a lot of vice industry online or let's say even. like with the example you use like sort of the switch from cigarettes to vaping,

like people don't really care if you vape unless you're like really milking those clouds. Yeah. Like there's a there's a real problem I think in America with like unseen vice. Which I. So the idea that, you know, someone could be in their apartment right now losing tens of thousands of dollars a week on, you know, an app based in Kurosau that they're using a VPN for.

that person's not going to get the help or or experience the regulatory sort of protections they need because no one can see it. Everyone complains about the fentanyl users on the corner, but they're not complaining about the person at home who's, you know, taking opioids or whatever. And then people kind of laugh it off. I mean, you know, like take, you know, take a friend's vape and see how long, you know, that lasts. They'll probably go, you know, maybe you took a cigarette from someone. They'd be a lot of upset. Like, why the fact you take the cigarette? But would they kind of flip out the way that someone who's milken the vape 46 times a day would?

Probably not. Probably not. There's a reluctance to think through the moments where the unseen vices come to the head when there's almost no real infrastructure in this country to help people with addiction. And when there is, it's far, far, far less than what's actually necessary. Yeah. And it doesn't really matter how smart you are as an individual with it. how savvy are with it as an individual at scale, which is, you know, where these companies are

seeking to go, it's hurting immense amount of people and destroying a large number of people's lives. And as it gets personalized, it gets weirder. And I think that actually hurts people from getting help because it's like, it's like, okay, like you might, for instance, be really into trading fart coin. Right. But I might, for instance, be completely addicted to paying a virtual slot machine to give me, like, animate girls I can play with in my video game.

Right. And the mechanisms and the gambling mechanisms and the that we haven't even sort of talked about like the, the economics of the whale, the person who will spend a hundred dollars on your app a day. Those are the same things. But like, you know, I don't know if people were going to want to like give help me with my anime girl addiction the same way they want to help you with your fart coin addiction. Like these things just splinter and fragment. And so you don't get the same sort of social social help, I think, because there's just. no word for it. There's no language for it. I think that's also a part of the thing, right? That's why there's a big effort to not see a lot

of these things as gambling. Right. Hey, let me actually jump in here with my takeaway. Okay, Grant. Yeah, go for it. What this made clear for me is that this creates a fork in the road and either direction leads to fascism. Play video games or slot machines to a place where you're a zombieed out and you're passive and uninvolved. That's good. Or become a hustle bro and convince yourself, you can hack the Matrix, and then you're going to end up in the Manosphere cult or, you know, try to make a new one yourself. So either you become a fanboy of some toxic shit,

or you gain a habit that's going to take up your mind and, you know, resources. But either direction, it helps the right. The ascent of fascism has all these threats, right? It's not just driven by a bunch of white South Africans who didn't, can't get over the fall of a part. tied. Whoever could you be talking about? Good place to start.

There's a long-to-do list, but that might be a good place to start. It's a great place to start. Start there. But there's also, like you're saying, there's, there are a lot of other elements that are feeding into it and both connected and coming out of it, right? And I think of these sort of crises of like male identity formation. And think of it as like an oscillating wave that keeps coming in and out and in and out where intersects on a lot of points along this line. And I think similarly, you know, sometimes with gambling, it almost feels like when we try to talk about gambling.

And I think also what Ryan was talking about when we're trying to talk about a lot of vices in America, it's the Protestant and the libertarian kind of come out and fight with each other. And it's like, well, you don't want to like, you know, restrict your ability to. to do literally anything, even though we live in a country where increasingly you're not really able to do anything. But then also at the same time, like if people are going to do the vices, they go out and do them over, you know, somewhere out of sight. And maybe someone doing these might pine for a time where they could have done them elsewhere. And that could maybe connect with or dovetail with this desire to rediscover, redefine their identity and older, more brutal, more purified, you know, forms that lend themselves to fascism, I guess. You know what I compared to?

If you're someone who, like, enjoys, like, a drunk sick, you know, 1 a.m., you want a drunk sick. That's, like, poker to me. Now, that could be, you know, an avenue for a worse problem. Right. But if you're just, like, hitting a drunk sick, like, everyone wants to rip a fat dart, like at one of the morning, that's totally fine. It's great.

If you're sitting in your house all day long and you're just vaping nonstop, that is bad. And that would, I think, be the difference that we're sort of like circling here. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was fantastic. This was a very uplifting conversation about one of the darkest and saddest social diseases of our time. Thank you so much. It was really great coming on to talk about how gambling is good and is cranking. Yeah, it's all cranking at the end of the day.

If people want to follow you online, where can they do that? I'm a big black jacket on Twitter. Co-host of This Machine Kills, a podcast about tech. and I do the TAC bubble newsletter on Substack where I also write about TAC. Thank you very much. This was fantastic. Panic World is a Garbage Day production.

Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our derange logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com slash panic world.

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Touch grass while you still can. I think you both just convinced me that Portnoy is going to be president. I feel really certain about it. I mean, there's really no question in my mind.