Nothing Stops This Bet: Leveraged Long Degeneracy

What does a guy lighting himself on fire for money have in common with a young person trying to buy their first home?

They both feel increasingly desperate.

And desperate people do desperate things.

If you’re looking at your options as a young person in Australia about to have a family, your choice is basically save for a million dollar dogbox and accept you’ll be a debt slave for life, or, as they say in Uncut Gems:

And many people are indeed doing just that.

They’re betting like their life depends on it.

Because for many, it does.

And honestly, why wouldn’t you?

If your choice is between taking a big swing and either winning big or getting zeroed out, or buying a rundown overpriced dogbox and trying to convince yourself it’s valuable, only one of those options has ‘escape this rigged game’ as a possible outcome.

Better to go down swinging than never even step up to the plate.

After all, if you lose you still end up in the same place: a corporate drone and a debt slave.

Across the world, we are seeing increasing numbers of people deciding to step up to the plate and have a swing, in ways that are becoming more degenerate over time.

Perhaps the most prominent recent examples of this have been on Pump Fun, which is a crypto marketplace that allows anyone to create crypto coins.

People have been livestreaming on Pump Fun in an attempt to pump their memecoins.

And what we’ve seen so far is that people are willing to go to very extreme lengths ‘for the pump.’

Like this guy who lit himself on fire and suffered burns to 30% of his body in an attempt to pump his memecoin.

For the record, I’m not advocating you start a memecoin, nor join Pump Fun…

I’m making a very specific point:

People are doing increasingly extreme things because they are desperate for money.

This is what happens when there are very few stable paths for your average Joe to pursue that can lead to a normal middle class life.

People are getting married later, they can’t afford a house, religion has been declining for decades - people lack meaning, and they lack money.

They’re being forced further out onto the risk curve - forced to take extreme risk to ‘make a fat bag’ of money - just to afford the lifestyle their parents afforded through working a normal 9-5 for 30 years.

Many boomers never even had to think about the concept of investment.

They just bought a house and worked a job.

Now most of them are rich, because the currency has been debased into oblivion thanks to central banks.

But if you’re a zoomer growing up today, your investments, and how you think about what bet to make, is now the only thing that actually matters.

You’re not going to have a stable job (AI will make sure of that), and you’re unlikely to get access to the same social welfare benefits old people today do (most Western governments are on a path to structural insolvency).

So you’ve got to bet on something that is not the traditional path of yesteryear.

This trend of people doing extreme things for money is not unique to Pump Fun, and it’s only going to accelerate.

In Mr Beast’s most recent Youtube video, titled ‘Would You Risk Dying For $500,000’, the contestant is literally tied to a chair in a burning house and has to rescue himself in order to win the money.

We should expect to see this trend of extremism and degeneracy continue, because it’s not only being driven on the consumer side (the person making the bet), but also on the producer side (the person supplying the bet).

What I mean by this is, producers are incentivised to provide increasingly extreme avenues for the degen, because they make more money from it.

How?

Because the more extreme it is, the more attention they get, and the more attention they get, the easier it is to monetise on social media (more clicks, longer watch times, etc).

This doesn’t just apply to content producers, it also applies to many businesses.

Crypto exchanges, for example, are increasingly giving retail degens access to options trading, and leverage trading.

In many ways, humans are already working for AI in this sense.

Producers are forced to generate extreme avenues to capture attention/monetise, and consumers are forced to take extreme actions just to not be poor.

There is a scene in Uncut Gems where a broker says to the degen gambler:

“That’s the dumbest f**kn bet I’ve ever heard”.

The degen responds: “I disagree”, and walks away grinning.

And I think that’s a good representation of where we are today:

Young people are making extreme bets that old people likely disagree with.

The old people disagree with them because they grew up with stable institutions, stable jobs, a comparatively stable economy, and could afford to buy a house.

Young people today have none of that.

So they have to disagree - with the system they were born into, the people that occupy positions of power, and the best ways to make money.

They have to make the bet - on what the future looks like next.

If they don’t, they’re screwed from the moment they are born.

And so they have to step up to the plate and swing.

Nothing stops this bet.