## [# An Investing Generation Raised on Financial Nihilism ](/sections/tech/investing-generation-raised-financial-nihilism)
# An Investing Generation Raised on Financial Nihilism
Dive into the "cheery" topic of financial nihilism with Matt Zeigler, Cameron Dawson, and Dave Nadig. From Robinhood's absurd $100K cash delivery service to the $15-year flatline of non-tech earnings, the group explores how markets became "just a game" for a new investing generation. They analyze the revenue extraction economy driving tech monopolies, the true cost of the "eyeball tax," and the critical challenge diversified investors face when "world ex-tech is flat."
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[By Dave Nadig ](/contributors/dave-nadig)
Nov 17, 2025
Edited by: ETF.com Staff
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Another month, another opportunity to sit down with Matt Zeigler (Sunpointe/Perscient), and Cameron Dawson (NewEdge), to try and make sense of markets, politics, news, and just in general, living through the now. This month's lead-off topic was the cheery topic of financial nihilism!
Here's the Vid!
And here are my Too Long;Didn't Watch takeaways:
### Everything's a Gamble
> "I have kids in that generation and I think they're avoiding those things, but I see it around them. It's just embedded in that culture at this point." -- Dave @ 00:09:00
The normalization of gambling among "youths" gives me a stomach ache. On the one hand, I'm generally in the "don't tell people what to do" camp politically and not a fan of passing a lot of laws regulating individual behavior. It is in fact true, that if someone wants to blow their life savings at the craps table, it doesn't make my life immediately worse. But ... at the same time, it's hard to come up with any reasons why endemic, 24/7 casinos in every 21 year olds pocket is actually good for society or the country as a whole. We all know who wins – the bookies. I suppose thats economic activity of a sort.
The bigger, more interesting question than "right/wrong" here (because I'm not in charge), is how this will impact this generation as investors. Will they get their fingers burned and become hyper conservative in middle age? Will they know how to put on a box spread in their sleep?
---
### The Revenue Extraction Economy
> "All of the innovation that has happened in things like social media and in search has not come by making the product necessarily better. It's come by getting more revenue out of each individual." -- Cameron Dawson @ 00:12:00
Cam nails why tech monopolies have maintained such extraordinary margins: they created addiction machines. The question then becomes: if innovation has shifted from product improvement to revenue optimization, can these excess returns persist? AI does amazing stuff already, and the amazing will only get cooler. But nobody deploying all these billions on Nvidia chips and cooling systems is running a charity. They don't have your or my best interests in mind at all, unless that happens to correspond with our willingness to pay for something.
---
### A Different Meaning Crisis
> "...Dmitri Kofinas, when he was talking about financial nihilism originally, was talking about just the 'we have the price of the thing and it's just devoid, detached, completely unrelated to it having any meaning at all.'" -- Matt Zeigler @ 00:12:32
(For a banger discussion with Dmitiri discussing this coined-phrase, check out [this podcast](https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/financial-nihilism-grant-williams-podcast/))
This disconnect between price and value is probably the defining challenge of the last 5 years at least. When younger folks see home prices requiring 50-100x their annual salary or watch some meme stocks moon, traditional valuation frameworks feel irrelevant. Jokes about the meaningless of markets are as old as the hills, but "number go up" isn't actually a great long term financial plan. How do we – western democratic capitalism – bridge to make meaning a part of the process? I'm not so sure.
---
### Paying for Innovation
> "Using Perplexity for search feels infinitely better than Google because I've been using Google since the nineties... And now all of a sudden somebody's innovated and I'm willing to pay for search. Like the idea that I pay two separate AIs for different functions in my life for a version of something that I got for free." -- Matt @ 00:16:17
For all the dooming here, Matt really shook my frame with this one. While there's plenty to wring our hands about in AI deployment, it's worth remembering how incredible this all is. The capabilities of the FREE tools right now are mind boggling, and yes indeed, I too am paying for whole categories of activities (at small dollar amounts), that I used to just ignore ads for. This may in fact have amazing unintended positive consequences. It certainly changes the math on eyeball and attention capture.
---
### Winner-take-All Capitalism
> "I think that capitalism, where the people who win then change the rules so nobody else can win, is not capitalism. But there's obviously a lot of that in the US kind of capitalist structure." -- Cameron @ 00:17:06
These days if you mention anything bad about capitalism on social media you're immediately called a communist, which I find funny, given my entire career has been in market capitalism. So it's nice to have Cam say this, not me for once. The problem with capitalism isn't big and complicated, it's the [Farmer's Fable](https://www.farmersfable.org/). In an unconstrained system, raw capitalism yields runaway winners. Don't get mad at me, it's just the math. There seems to be almost no appetite to actually do much about how the capitalism part works (that would require a level of industrial policy and anti-trust enforcement we haven't seen since before Reagan, and believe me, I get how screwy things can go on that side of the pendulum swing too.) So consider this observation of Cam's less a "and thus we should tear it all down" and more of a "and so we should understand and help ameliorate the consequences."
To beat the dead horse: Yes, Virginia, [it is a K-shaped economy](https://substack.com/inbox/post/178921397).
---
### Tech vs. Everything
> "There's incredible chart... which showed the earnings growth of tech and world ex-tech. And since 2007, world ex-tech is flat. Flat. And then world tech is a straght line up." -- Cameron @ 00:23:03
I chased down this chart from a [recent Goldman report](https://www.goldmansachs.com/pdfs/insights/goldman-sachs-research/25-years-on-lessons-from-the-bursting-of-the-tech-bubble/redaction.pdf):
This single chart encapsulates the entire challenge facing diversified investors. If non-tech earnings have been mostly flat for nearly two decades, traditional diversification hasn't just underperformed – it's garbage. The question advisors must answer: is this concentration of growth sustainable, or are we witnessing the final chapter of an unprecedented boom before mean reversion? The next 15 years are unlikely to mirror the last 15, yet many portfolio models are built on the assumption that they will.
---
### Markets as a Game Without Rules
> "When I talk to younger folks who are investing in the market, they see those numbers and they realize they're ridiculous. They realize there is no basis in reality, so it is just a game. Right. I think that's where that nihilism comes from." -- Dave @ 00:25:00
When the S&P 500 goes up over 20%, year after year after year, younger investors draw the correct conclusion: markets have become detached from most people's lived economic reality. This isn't cynicism – it's pattern recognition, and younger folks are in general phenomenal at this. Gamification get's tossed around like an evil marketing term, but "gamifying" is also precisely why "gamers" are good at all sorts of things. Learning the process-and-reward cycle for a given level of effort is, essentially, competitive gaming. And what do you do in a video game when you don't know what to do? You explore and look for clues.
That's what Robinhood's doing. That's what Kalshi and Crypto and Polymarket are: they're exploration platforms for a new generation to suss out the ruleset.
---
### The Eyeball Tax
> "Because effectively we are all effectively paying a tax for you to continue to earn super normal profits off of our eyeballs." -- Cameron @ 00:32:38
Whether it's the cost of electricity or the ads we can't avoid, I think consumers have finally started getting the message that we are, in fact, the product. We're both the thing being consumed, and the ones paying for it. This isn't new – I remember my first AOL earnings call where I heard the phrase "eyeball stickiness" for the first time. Anyone young enough to have had to stay with their parents during the pandemic got a really good object lesson in this (at the cost of their mental health) – the platforms are not your friends, they're your jailors.
That's it for this month. My fondest wish is that next month, we find more things to celebrate and be cheerful about! Until then, stay safe out there.
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[ Dave Nadig President & Director of Research ](/contributors/dave-nadig)
Prior to becoming chief investment officer and director of research at ETF Trends, Dave Nadig was managing director of etf.com. Previously, he was… [View Bio](/contributors/dave-nadig)
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