You Can't Order Cigarettes on Amazon

It's never been easier to lose everything

My friend once told me a story about her grandmother that stuck with me. She would dip out of a family lunch and play some pokies (slot machines). They always wondered how she was so lucky because she would return to the table flashing her winnings and saying I told you so to all those who said she was stupid to gamble.

It turned out she wasn’t lucky, and she didn’t really tell them so. She was evaporating their inheritance every time she left the room, for years. She would just withdraw fresh cash out of an ATM to pretend it was her profits. The cash that was now in hand was even easier to justify going back into the machine, and alas that’s how she lost it all while being externally applauded for her talents.

She was performative before being performative was even a thing. But maybe she really believed she was winning, it’s easy to convince yourself when you really want it to be true. I remember trying to leverage trade for the first time and feeling like I was killing it, only to check my balance and get a harsh reality check that I was (absolutely) not.

That’s how the pokies work, for every dollar you gamble you are statistically likely to win a good amount back. I say win ironically here because, getting some of your own money back is inherently losing. Most machines are set to win rates around 85-90%. It means the house will keep on average about 10-15% of every dollar that goes through the machine.

The machine will make it feel like a victory with an adorable little jingle and some flashy colours to pair with it. You can become entranced by the dopamine hits, you can believe you’re winning, until you lose it all of course.

There is no edge, the house will make its 15%, but here you are anyway. Some even have auto-spins so you can just sit back and watch your money slowly fade away. Does it count as entertainment if you are just watching the screen?

Gambling is one of the fastest growing industries on the planet right now. The US supreme court in 2018 had a major ruling that expanded access to gambling, Brazil legalised it the beginning of last year. You can’t watch any sport now without gambling being shoved down your throat, because much like Joker and Batman, they need each other.

I used to work in professional sports and the enterprise behind the jersey is completely dependent on ad and sponsor revenue. Your sponsors are given statistics of how much airtime they get and how many impressions they likely received from that airtime.

The problem sports leagues have is fan engagement. Sometimes a game is not that interesting, or it is too one sided and people turn the game off. People tuning out means the team loses part of its revenue metrics. This is where gambling comes in. If you have a bet on a particular player scoring a goal or any number of specified bets that exist, you’re going to stay tuned in.

Sport doesn’t need gambling addicts to function, but it sure doesn’t hurt the bottom line to incentivise them to keep betting. One without the other can never reach their full potential.

About half of global online gambling volume comes from sports betting, I remember my brother telling me that the ones with the worst gambling addictions are the live bettors. If you ever see someone betting on point-by-point tennis, there’s a high chance they have an addiction.

Just like any drug, the quickest fix is the one most desired. The dream gambling sold was that you have some fun with your friends and you’re more interested in the outcome of a game.

You place your bet at the local organisation, then you head to the pub to enjoy with a little extra incentive to cheer. Unfortunately, that promise is now broken. People no longer believe they are gambling, it has been hilariously reframed to predicting. Wanna bet, mate? No way, I’d like to lodge my prediction in an outcome market.

Prediction markets are everywhere now and they have turned every market into point-by-point tennis. You can bet on the world cup of course, but you can also bet on war crimes or what word someone will say. This leads to a lot of problems.

But what interests me is that they have onboarded people to the worst form of gambling without educating them that they have done so. Prediction markets posture as a better version of gambling, and perhaps that is true on some fronts, but they are much more likely to melt your fucking brain.

The experience of betting has now become trading. Green and red candles, live pricing, buying and selling. These are familiar to the many of us who have tried their hand at day trading, but it is somehow masked as betting. Ahem, sorry… predicting.

Gone are the days you take a bet then enjoy the game, now you have to stare at your phone watching a PnL as the game is played. Instead of going to the pub at all, you might opt to stay at home and stare at your phone, there is no room for enjoyment as you watch the candles flicker up and down with each pass made.

Even the idea that the market is live trading is distracting. You have the ability to change the direction of your bet. It opens up the possibility of selling too soon, of becoming greedy, of panic selling. A whole swathe of worlds where you are disappointed, and poorer.

When I started looking into gambling statistics around the world it was pretty grim. It is growing about 10-11% per year and only appearing to accelerate. But I’m starting to believe there is more to the story than just people wanting to bet more.

We have once again done the thing where we have optimised the wrong things. As a society we have deemed it necessary to have friction in front of a vice. You can’t order cigarettes on Amazon. If you need prescription medication you have to go to a professional first.

My friend’s grandma had to get creative about her lie only because there was some social pressure to fight. If she could have spun the slots on her phone at home she may have just as well enjoyed that process far more. We need friction in front of addiction or we don’t stand a chance.

But this is part of a larger trend we see around the world. The privatisation of everything. Our pockets buzz and we can do everything from inside our bedroom, there is no place we need to go to or people we need to see. Any inconvenience has morphed into an impossibility.

People used to do great things, now things are only great if there’s an app for it. The issue is that having constant access to things gives us an illusion of control. We think by having the casino in our pocket we have total control of when we interact with it, but what is much more likely to be true is that we have a trojan horse that is preparing for war.

The attention battle is waged far before you hit the install button, but once the app is on your phone the real war begins. Notifications, promos, bonuses, market updates, whatever it takes baby. Ever notice if you don’t use Instagram for a while it will start giving you notifications about what someone else posted rather than just interactions?

The smartest engineers on the planet are right on the other side of that 2mm glass, scheming for your mind. Access to everything is the headline of this decade. Gambling is a great example of this but the trend can be seen everywhere.

The things that are decreasing are basically everything that requires us to go outside. things like drinking, church, clubs, in-person socialising, friendship, sex, birth rates. Those that are rising in numbers you can probably already guess; screen time, gambling, AI companionship, time at home, loneliness, online porn.

What we have done is privatise everything. We have enabled a person to do everything in the comfort of their own home. Completely removed from the need of shared spaces. Instead of church we (not me) use whatever Mark Wahlberg called his prayer app, we replace friends with AI companionship and we can gamble on our phones instead of at the local TAB.

Sometimes I zoom out and ponder what our generation will be remembered for. In the great centuries of the past you had the stone age, the bronze age, the enlightenment. History is the exercise of looking back comfortably and pointing to exactly where things happened. What is happening to us?

There are many wonderful things to celebrate, but I think the single largest defining factor is the removal of all friction to vice. Of all friction. Our screen time continues to rise right alongside our want for our screen time to go down. We have lost the battle and continue to lose the war.

Reduced friction has a beautiful side too. We can now seek medical assistance without having to leave home and we call our family across the world. These are all things we as a society have been building toward for centuries, we have been progressing toward a future where these things are the ideal.

The opposite is true for our vices. We have spent centuries trying to add some friction ahead of things we know are not good for us. We introduced age limits to drink alcohol, we banned cigarette advertising, we taught sex education. These are things we know to be damaging and we have acknowledged their side-effects.

I want to be clear that I don’t intend on being preachy here. I want to be able to gamble and drink and do things that aren’t good for me, don’t even fucking think about taking my ability to drink a cold beer on a warm summer evening. What I’m saying is I’d like the trend of friction in front of things that are bad for us to continue as it has been, instead of doing a complete 180.

For some reason gambling and prediction markets have been swept up in the same conversations as gaming, sports and social media. But they don’t belong there. Coffee is a normalised drug because its addictive qualities don’t directly correlate with its ability to ruin a life.

Gambling operates very much in the same territory as opioids and cigarettes. It is absolutely necessary that they should be treated in the same way. Although I will agree it is very hard to draw the line between what is gambling and what is not. What is reduction of personal liberty vs regulating financial wellbeing.

I owe a lot of my success to what many would call gambling. Trading stocks and crypto. Buying and selling NFTs. Having access to these products gave me a chance to make money that I never would have had, but this is also just survivorship bias on my part.

For every me who was able to turn this into a great opportunity, there are many others who melted their savings. I think the difference with trading is that the same platforms you use to trade are the same you use to invest in good companies.

The issue these days is that they have also become a new funnel. Everything has become a funnel. The money is not made from the guy who invests a few thousand dollars and lets it sit for 10 years, the money is made from getting him into leverage trading or sports betting. One person with $1k can easily do $100k of volume with leverage, and they might pay their entire original balance in fees for doing so.

In an ideal world I’d have access to all financial products, but I’d put as much friction between me and the stuff I’m very likely to lose money on. I lost some money earlier betting on the world cup, I placed the bet in an instant and I felt pretty stupid for losing the money. I don’t want to bet on sports, but where do I turn to outside of self-discipline to ensure I don’t do it again?

My monkey brain is unlikely to win against pretty lights and catchy jingles. When I was a kid growing up in Australia I was always confused by the opening times of some pubs. We would drive past a weird looking venue in the middle of nowhere and I’d see a sign saying they were open until 5am, 7 days a week.

I remember thinking who the fuck would be at a pub until 5am on a Tuesday morning? But now I know it was just people gambling on pokie machines. I think about how many people have to go out of their way to be in a shared space, spinning digital fruit machines until 5am.

Then my brain turns to something much sadder. I think about how much friction is required to do this, and how many people turn up nonetheless. I think about how many people didn’t have the energy to make it to the pub. How many people were spared from gambling addiction because of the effort required to go to the required shared space.

Now I begin to think about how many people are marching to their own destruction, with zero obstacles in the way. How many children growing up right now will enjoy the seamlessness and optimisation of vices. How many children would have been spared if the trend stayed the same as the past centuries.