Just 50 days before his reelection, Donald Trump took the time to hawk a new crypto platform.

If the country does not build out its cryptocurrency ecosystem, “we’re not going to be the biggest, and we have to be the biggest and the best,” Trump said on a livestream on X. “It’s very young and very growing. And if we don’t do it, China’s going to do it.” The livestream was sponsored by World Liberty Financial, which has given Trump the title “chief crypto advocate” and his sons, Barron, Eric, and Donald Jr., that of “Web3 ambassador.”

World Liberty Financial is the brainchild of Zak Folkman (the creator of an advisory firm called Date Hotter Girls LLC) and Chase Herro (an affiliate marketer who previously sold colon cleanses). It is a get-rich-quick scheme, and not one that seems designed to enrich its customers.

It is also an emblem of a financial world that Trump’s election seems set to supercharge, populated by young men who have seen their economic prospects stagnate, their faith in the United States falter, and a champion in a baggy business suit and a red baseball cap emerge. Think of it as the bro-economy: a volatile, speculative, and extremely online casino, in which the house is already winning big.

[Christopher Beam: The worst of crypto is yet to come]

Its first major market sector: day-trading. I don’t mean old-fashioned, small-dollar equity investing done at the kitchen table. I mean hyper-speculative betting done with borrowed money on mobile apps, as investors shitpost and infinite-scroll. Market-moving rumors come not from corporate conferences, but from sites like YouTube and the Subreddit WallStreetBets (tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”). Users at times coordinate to buy up a certain stock with the explicit goal of screwing over a hedge fund that had bet the stock would go down.

That’s what happened four years ago with GameStop: Redditors helped to push the share price up 8,000 percent. Now so-called meme stocks are resurgent. GameStop spiked this spring. Tesla climbed when Trump won. (Tesla is both a blue-chip stock and a meme stock; Elon Musk, the company’s founder, is one of Trump’s biggest donors and closest advisers, as well as being a storied internet troll and the owner of the social-media platform X.) “This rally seems unsustainable, even if you believe in the long-term growth story for the stock,” David Wagner of Aptus Capital Advisors told Bloomberg. “It makes no sense.”

As noted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, this trading behavior is in part driven by market democratization. A decade ago, the fintech firm Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading, allowing individuals to buy stocks or other financial assets without paying any fees. Today’s apps also allow users to purchase fractions of a stock and do not set minimum balances, ushering in less wealthy investors.

The barriers to entry are low, yet the risks are high. Today’s young day-traders tend to make frequent transactions and gravitate toward exotic trades, when research shows that investors generate the best returns when they make simple investments infrequently. The apps encourage the piling-on of risk through push alerts, promotions, and other gamifications.

The second crucial market sector: sports betting. In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a 1992 law banning commercial sports betting outside of Nevada. That paved the way for more than three dozen states to okay the practice; 30 states also allow residents to make wagers online.

It would be hard to overstate how much this has changed pro sports and the fan experience over the past half decade. Commentators talk about fantasy leagues and prop bets as much as they talk about the game; advertisements for sportsbooks are ubiquitous; millions of spectators keep DraftKings and FanDuel up on their second screen. An estimated two in five American adults engage in sport betting. One in four online bettors has wagered more than $500 in a single day. Americans staked $120 billion last year, double what they did in 2021.

Many die-hard fans love the rise of sports betting: It’s entertaining, engaging, a way to support your favorite players and dunk on your friends. Still, in a survey, 37 percent of online bettors said they “felt bad or ashamed” for losing money. Nearly 40 percent said they bet more than they should; nearly 20 percent said they lied about the extent of their betting, and the same share said they lost cash that was meant for their day-to-day financial obligations. A strong majority supported the federal government “aggressively” regulating the market, “to specifically protect customers from compulsive gambling.”

Third and last is crypto, which boomed into the mainstream a decade ago. Today, roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto. Sites such as Robinhood and Coinbase make purchasing easy. (Buying bitcoin used to take significant know-how and days of waiting.) The most recent bust, in 2022, seems to have done little to deter crypto’s most ardent fans.

There might be more of them soon. For years, Trump was anti-crypto. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he wrote on Twitter five years ago. He added: “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”

Today, he’s not just promoting shady crypto start-ups. He’s promising regulation that would allow banks to offer crypto assets to clients, making the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” Industry-friendly rules would lead to a flood of cash entering the crypto markets, enriching anyone with assets already in their wallets, but also increasing volatility and exposing millions more Americans to scams, frauds, and swindles.

Day-trading, sports betting, and crypto are three floors in one bustling, high-stakes casino. Many folks trade crypto and meme stocks on the same platform, thumbing over to a second app to keep their sports bets going, thumbing over again to post their wins and losses. Apps have made the experience social. They have also made staking money as frictionless as ordering Uber Eats.

[Charles Fain Lehman: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake]

The players in this casino are overwhelmingly young men, roughly 40 percent of whom are into sports betting and crypto. (A smaller minority is actively trading.) No surprise, Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me, when I called to ask about the bro-economy. “Risk skews male, period, for good and for ill,” he said. “There’s this greater willingness, appetite for, vulnerability to, tolerance of risk.” He appreciated how the activities gave guys something to do together and talk about with one another. He also noted how many young men felt shut out of traditional wealth-building strategies, such as homeownership.

Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.

Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.

Death was in the discourse leading up to Friday night’s boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. Marketing the fight, the two combatants repeatedly threatened to kill each other; a Netflix promo documentary referenced the bitten and bloodied ear Tyson left Evander Holyfield with in a 1997 match; social-media chatter reveled in the possibility that Paul, one of the internet’s favorite villains, would be murdered on air.

But once the match began, streamed from a packed arena to 60 million households, it felt morbid in an unexpected way—in the way of a retirement home, not a slasher movie. Paul, a 27-year-old YouTube star, jabbed and jabbed with the precision of a piston. Tyson, the 58-year-old heavyweight legend who retired nearly two decades ago, hobbled around the ring and gnawed his glove anxiously, only occasionally returning fire. He looked his age, and at times quite a bit older. Six rounds into the eight-round match—which ended in a unanimous decision for Paul—the commentator Rosie Perez, a longtime friend of Tyson’s, dropped any pretense of being entertained. This was, she said, “a hard story to watch.”

As I took that story in, I thought not only about how old Tyson is, but about how old the internet is—how far we are into the process of reality being hollowed-out by digital forces. The ropes advertised tech products: Meta Quest, the VR headset; DraftKings, the gambling network repopularizing one of humankind’s oldest addictions. Paul cut an imposing figure, his neck as thick as a ship’s mast, his tattooed legs swathed in diamond-draped shorts. It was breathtaking to remember that, a little more than decade ago, he became famous as a happy-go-lucky teen goofing around online with his brother, Logan. Now he’s an emblem of a generation of men—and a wider culture—starving for purpose while gorging on spectacle.

To trace the Paul brothers’ career is to trace a few epochs of the internet. They got famous on Vine in 2013 by doing boys-will-be-boys stuff: tasing each other, jumping on strangers’ backs, talking to pineapples in the supermarket. These hijinks were like a last flare of the internet’s OMG-so-random era, when logging on felt like an escape to a fantasy world of cat videos and violent stick-figure cartoons. But soon, the Paul brothers came to represent a new paradigm, in which distinctions between the online world and the offline world became more blurred. They were some of the first influencers, leveraging their lives into clickbait.

Which means that, suddenly, they needed to figure out what to do with the eyeballs they’d attracted. They began to augment their antics with charity efforts and self-help content. Jake joined a Disney Channel show as an actor but left halfway through its second season, then rebranded as a rapper. Logan founded a podcast that now has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube. The continual search for the next gimmick also subjected the Pauls to plenty of internet outrage. They earned backlash for offenses as varied as insulting Kazakhstanis, publicizing shady cryptocurrency ventures, and filming a dead body. Their cockiness grew with each attempted cancellation; they tended to apologize and then bounce onward.

Yet to call these guys pure trolls isn’t quite right. Every time I see Jake speak, I discern something searching and sad within his boastfulness. In a video endorsing Donald Trump before the 2024 election, he delivered familiar MAGA talking points in a tone of puppy-eyed desperation. “I don’t come to you to make this video to create more division,” he said. “I believe love is the key to the universe and that we should all love each other more and more and more.” The video made me think less about his politics than about his soul. He seemed like a man looking for a cause, and finding it—as so many others have—in Trump’s promise to transform everything.

At first, boxing appeared to be just another stunt. In 2018, Logan booked a match against another YouTuber, and Jake fought on the undercard. In the years after that, Logan—whose intense, reptilian demeanor belies presidential aspirations—moved into the scripted battling of WWE. Jake, who has more of a crazy-fox kind of personality, stuck with boxing. In both cases, picking up an athletic side hustle was savvy. Combat sports have experienced a renaissance of cultural relevance over the past decade, driven by legalized betting and the popularity of MMA. Trump has deep links to the world of wrestling; just this past weekend he went to a UFC match. If you’re a man making entertainment for other men these days, chances are you have some sort of relationship to combat sports.

[Read: Can a boxer return to the ring after killing?]

Even so, Jake’s boxing career has been more durable and significant than anyone would have predicted in 2018. His fight with Tyson produced his 11th win out of 12 bouts. He says he wants to become a bona fide champion, and followers have been treated to footage of him sparring, ice-bathing, and scarfing hamburgers to bulk up. He started his own promotion company; he even tried (unsuccessfully so far) to get fighters to unionize. Why is he doing all of this? Aren’t there easier ways to make money? In a 2023 Netflix documentary about Jake, Logan explained, “He definitely found something with boxing that I think gave him worth”—worth that he didn’t get from “making stupid little insignificant vlogs on YouTube.”

Those stupid vlogs were, in some ways, quite significant, helping rewire the aspirations of an entire culture. A Morning Consult survey last year found that a majority of Gen Z—and 41 percent of all American adults—want to be influencers. Trump waged his presidential campaign by enlisting online entertainers in the Paul brothers’ model, such as the prank-pulling Nelk Boys. (He also joined Logan on his podcast.) Yet for all the growth of the influencer economy, the career path can be hellish, involving constant hustle, relentless criticism, and existential meaninglessness. Mugging to the camera for views certainly doesn’t fit neatly with old ideals of masculinity. In that 2023 documentary, Logan remarked, proudly and disgustedly, “We’re fucking media whores.” Jake explained his turn to boxing like this: “I was sick of not being respected.”

In this context, the popularity of combat sports is more than just a fad. Today’s American dream tends to involve virtual pursuits—influencing, making a killer app, getting lucky with crypto—but the gladiatorial ring is a macho, meat-space proving ground. No wonder Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. In the case of the Paul brothers, winning substantiates their right to do what they’ve always done: peacock. As Norman Mailer wrote of Muhammad Ali, reflecting on his tendency for trash talk, “The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little bit insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God.”

The problem for Jake Paul is that he really doesn’t have anywhere near a claim to “toughest man in the world.” He’s widely seen as an interloper, a clown, disrupting and degrading a sport that’s supposed to be meritocratic. His fights have almost all been novelty bouts against influencers and stars from other sports (his only loss was to the most qualified professional boxer he’s previously fought). The respect he’s seeking still hasn’t been found. In publicity leading up to Friday’s fight, he played up the idea that defeating the legendary Mike Tyson would shut up his doubters forever. “I want him to be that old savage Mike,” Jake said at a press conference. “I want the hardest match possible Friday night, and I want there to be no excuses from everyone at home when I knock him out.”

But as probably could have been predicted, Tyson turned out to be a 58-year-old man whose body has taken a lifetime of abuse, facing a wealthy 27-year-old who’s devoted his past few years to training. Jake set out to prove he was something realer than a media whore, but he showed only that he had the clout to overhype a terribly unfair fight. Coming so soon after an election partly decided by highly online men who feel their status to be under threat, this outcome seems like an omen: Old systems may soon be torn down, with little to replace them but bluster spun as redemption.

“There’s a shift in the world, and good is rising,” Jake said, sweating and panting, in the after-match interview. “The truth is rising. I’m just honored to be a part of America. It feels like we’re back, baby.”