By the time I stumbled into the Affiliate Takeover Vegas event that evening, the cognitive dissonance had reached operational levels. Different venue, same hustle, new faces selling old dreams with updated jargon.
The main stage featured a presentation on sweepstakes campaigns, which is how you say "online gambling for people who can't admit they're gambling" in polite company. The speaker was enthusiastic in that particularly American way, the way that suggests either genuine belief in the product or a truly heroic habit. Probably both.
I sat in the front, half-listening, half-cataloging the business opportunities. New business was on my mind. The partnership I am building. The connections between adult entertainment traffic, sweepstakes operations, and the eternal American appetite for something-for-nothing schemes that technically are legal.
The math was simple: I had relationships with major adult brands. They had traffic. Mountains of it. Sweepstakes needed traffic. Premium traffic. The kind that converted because the users were already comfortable with mild shame and financial transactions of questionable wisdom.
It was beautiful, in its way. Grotesque, but beautiful.
"You working the social media angle?" Someone had materialized next to me. Young guy, probably not even thirty, already talking about "the meme market" like it was pork bellies.
"Among other things," I said.
He wanted to talk about attribution models. How to track clicks across platforms, prove ROI, optimize the funnel. The eternal questions of our degraded age. How do we know what works? How do we prove we're not just setting money on fire and calling it marketing?
I had answers, technical answers, practical answers, answers refined over thirty years of watching business models rise and fall like hemlines. But I was tired. The kind of tired that comes from spending a day pitching infrastructure for activities that exist in the gray zone between innovation and fraud.
Somewhere in the blur of business cards and rapid-fire conversations, someone floated the idea of a social media account recovery service.
"Think about it," they said. "How many people get locked out of their accounts? Influencers, businesses, regular people who built their whole identity on platforms that can ban them for any reason or no reason?"
"So we'd be...Recovery specialists. White hat. Premium service. Charge whatever the market will bear."
I wrote it down. Added it to the list. Another opportunity in an evening full of them. The hustle never stopped, not in this room, not in this city, probably not anywhere anymore.
The meeting I'd been trying to arrange, with someone leaving the next day, someone important enough that I'd been juggling schedules and playing calendar Tetris, never materialized. They were busy. Everyone was busy. The conference operated on a temporal logic where 48 hours felt like a week and every conversation was simultaneously urgent and forgettable.