The Cost of Money

It’s Tuesday morning and the Oakland Athletics just broke ground on their new $1.75 billion stadium in Las Vegas. The ceremony marks the end of a 57-year relationship between Oakland and its baseball team, but that’s not the real story.

The real story is what we’re building for the next generation.

Here’s what happened.

In 2017, the NFL approved the Raiders’ move from Oakland to Las Vegas. In 2020, they opened Allegiant Stadium with founding partnerships from MGM Resorts, Wynn, Boyd Gaming, and Caesars Entertainment. Formula 1 arrived in 2023, turning the Strip into a racetrack and adding another layer of high-stakes entertainment to the ecosystem. Today, Las Vegas has become the testing ground for how deep sports betting can penetrate American culture when you remove all friction and engineer the entire environment around gambling.

Yes, Oakland is losing its cultural identity. Yes, we’re watching systematic extraction of community assets. But the much larger conversation—the one that’s going to define the next 20 years—is what we’re doing to an entire generation’s relationship with money, risk, and reward.

The numbers should terrify anyone thinking about generational impact.

Americans have bet over $220 billion on sports in just five years since legalization. One out of 10 college students is now a pathological gambler, far higher than the 2-5% of the general population estimated to have a gambling problem. Sports gambling addiction rates have grown by 30% in the three years following 2018 legalization.

But these aren’t just statistics. They’re early indicators of what happens when you engineer an entire generation to associate entertainment with financial risk. And the marketing makes it clear exactly who the target is.

Turn on any sports broadcast and you’ll see what I mean.

Joe Budden’s face selling PrizePicks to his young audience. Drake promoting betting platforms. Social media influencers whose primary demographic is 18-25 getting paid to normalize gambling as part of sports consumption. The marketing isn’t subtle about its target demographic—it’s specifically designed to reach late teens and early twenties, the exact population that’s most financially vulnerable and most susceptible to developing addictive behaviors.

We’re not just creating gamblers. We’re rewiring how young people understand money itself. Research from UCLA and USC found that access to legal online sports betting led to lower credit scores and higher rates of bankruptcies. Another study found that legalized sports betting drained household finances more than other types of gambling and diverted money from saving and investing.

Think about what this means for a generation entering adulthood with student debt, housing costs, and economic uncertainty. Instead of learning to build wealth, they’re being systematically trained to view money as something to bet rather than something to accumulate.

At least eight major universities have entered partnerships with sports-betting companies.

Michigan State signed an $8.4 million deal with Caesars. LSU sent emails encouraging students to “place your first bet” before gambling was even legal in Louisiana. The University of Colorado accepted $1.6 million to promote sports betting on campus, plus $30 for every app download using their promotional code. These aren’t just marketing partnerships. They’re educational institutions teaching students that gambling is a normal part of college experience. We’re paying schools to recruit 18-year-olds into addiction during the most financially vulnerable years of their lives.

The Las Vegas model proves this system works exactly as designed.

When the Athletics open their stadium in 2028, Las Vegas will have four professional teams operating alongside Formula 1 races, major fights, and entertainment events, all in an ecosystem where every major resort has partnerships with sports betting companies. Young people visiting won’t just be exposed to gambling—they’ll be immersed in an environment where sports, entertainment, racing, hospitality, and betting have been systematically integrated into a single experience.

The city has become a proof of concept for making financial risk culturally inevitable for anyone who wants to participate in sports culture. Whether you’re there for the Raiders, the Athletics, Formula 1, or any major event, the path leads to the same place: the sportsbook, the app, the bet.

And here’s what people don’t understand about why this matters so much.

All of these things that seem unrelated—team relocations, Formula 1 races, university partnerships, influencer marketing—they all have one common destination. They all bring people to the stadium or to watch the game. And once you’re there, whether physically or emotionally invested, you’re in an environment that’s been systematically optimized to make betting feel like the natural way to engage with what you’re watching.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening while student debt has reached $1.7 trillion nationally, housing costs have made homeownership impossible for most young adults, entry-level wages haven’t kept pace with basic living expenses, and traditional paths to wealth building have been systematically dismantled. We’re teaching financial desperation to gamble its way out of financial desperation.

27.5% of college students have already bet on sports using mobile apps, while 58% have participated in at least one sports betting activity.

Internet searches for gambling addiction help have increased 23% nationally, corresponding to 6.5-7.3 million searches for help-seeking. The most immediate psychological effect of gambling addiction is shame, but the long-term economic effect is devastating. Young people are learning to see money as something to risk rather than something to protect and grow. They’re developing relationships with money based on hope and excitement rather than planning and patience.

This is generational wealth destruction disguised as entertainment.

Every dollar a 22-year-old bets on their phone is a dollar that’s not going toward building an emergency fund, learning to invest, developing financial literacy, or creating long-term security. But more than that, every bet is training them to see money as a tool for instant gratification rather than long-term planning. We’re engineering an entire generation to have a fundamentally dysfunctional relationship with wealth building.

The cultural physics here are devastating and permanent.

This isn’t about betting being inherently bad. People have always made wagers on games, and occasional gambling can be harmless entertainment. The problem is what happens when you apply nervous system manipulation tools to make betting the primary action rather than secondary entertainment.

Sports teams create emotional investment. Gambling companies monetize that emotional investment through systematic behavioral manipulation designed to bypass conscious decision-making. When you use rhythm, repetition, social pressure, and algorithmic feedback to make financial risk feel like the natural way to engage with sports, you’re not just creating gamblers—you’re manipulating people’s perception of what sports consumption actually is.

This is cultural manipulation at scale. We’re engineering an entire generation to believe that watching sports without betting is incomplete, that entertainment without financial risk is boring, that being a fan means having money on the line.

Las Vegas is the completion of this experiment. The city demonstrates that when you optimize an entire environment for gambling and apply sophisticated nervous system entrainment techniques, you can make financial risk feel inevitable, social, and fun. Young people aren’t choosing to gamble—they’re being systematically programmed to believe that betting is how you properly engage with sports entertainment.

And the implications extend far beyond individual financial harm.

We’re creating a generation that views money as something to risk rather than accumulate, associates entertainment with financial anxiety, makes financial decisions based on excitement rather than analysis, and has been systematically trained out of long-term thinking about wealth. This affects everything: housing markets, consumer spending, retirement planning, economic stability, family formation, and generational wealth transfer.

We’re not just watching the Athletics move to Las Vegas. We’re watching the systematic engineering of financial instability for an entire generation.

The Athletics’ groundbreaking ceremony represents the completion of a model that shows how to monetize young people’s emotional investment in sports while simultaneously destroying their capacity for wealth building. Every sports betting partnership with a university is a wealth extraction mechanism targeting people who can least afford to lose money. Every mobile app is designed to make financial risk feel effortless and social. Every Las Vegas stadium, every Formula 1 race, every major event is optimized to make gambling feel like the natural way to engage with sports.

This is what industrialized perception manipulation looks like.

We’re not just creating entertainment. We’re systematically altering how an entire generation understands the relationship between sports, entertainment, and money. The tools being used—rhythmic audio cues, visual triggers, social proof, algorithmic personalization, reward schedules—are the same ones that create any behavioral conditioning. But instead of being applied to help people build healthy habits, they’re being used to make financial risk feel like authentic fan engagement. And we’re doing it to the generation that will inherit climate change, housing crisis, and economic instability while having been systematically trained out of the financial habits that could help them survive it.

The house always wins. But now the house is an entire economy, and an entire generation is being taught that playing is the only way to participate.