Quantum TikTok + Memecoin Mania + Chris Hayes on the Attention Wars

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Casey, what’s going on with you?

Well, let’s see. My boyfriend is away for a week for work, and so I decided to entertain myself by buying electronics.

You went on a shopping spree.

I did. I went to the Apple store. And I said, I’m going to get a new iPad Pro with the fancy keyboard. Have you seen the fancy keyboard?

No.

It is like these Mac keyboards, but slimmer. And it is way more than I need, but I just thought it looked so cool.

And what are you going to do on that? Just play Balatro?

Yeah, mostly just check emails. Yeah, it turns out, no matter what — every year, oh, there’s a fancy new laptop, and the battery life is incredible, and the processing power, you wouldn’t believe it. What am I doing with it? I’m checking emails.

Yeah.

Yeah. Am I responding to them? Mostly no. But, oh, boy, can I read an email?

No one has ever checked email and ignored it faster.

No. [MUSIC PLAYING]

I’m Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at “The New York Times.”

I’m Casey Newton from “Platformer.” And this is “Hard Fork.” This week, how TikTok died and came back to life, and what it means for how tech does business with Donald Trump. Then, why meme coins are on the rise and how the Trump family is cashing in. And finally, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is here to discuss his new book on “.” Kevin, let’s ask him a few questions while we play Subway Surfers on our phones.

Can you say that again? I’m watching YouTube. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Well, Casey, big week in Washington obviously. We had the inauguration of President Trump for his second term in office.

I noticed you weren’t on the dais. Did you not give him a million dollars?

No, I only gave half a million. So I was watching it from the subway down the street.

Sad.

But we did have a lot of news coming out of the tech world in relation to the first days of the Trump presidency. Monday, obviously, at the inauguration itself, we had Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, all of the titans of tech standing right behind the Trump family. Elon Musk was also there, of course. It’s being reported that he’s likely to get an office in the West Wing.

And we also have had some announcements coming out of this first wave of executive orders. The Biden administration’s executive order on AI was repealed. There’s also been an announcement of a new major AI-infrastructure project, which we’ll talk about in a second, called Stargate.

But I think what is the overriding story of the past week is that we are starting to see how Silicon Valley wants to do business during the Trump administration. And where I want to start this discussion is with what’s been happening with TikTok because it has been a wild ride. Obviously, last week, we gave our TikTok update where we called TikTok V12 final final use this. But that was not the end of the TikTok story.

No, there was yet another final final V to be issued, Kevin.

So what is going on with TikTok? Catch us up.

Well, Kevin, it goes like this. TikTok was banned, and then it went down for about 12 hours. And then it came back, but only sort of. And so it is now both alive and dead at the same time, existing in a state of quantum superposition with itself. It is Schrodinger’s app.

So people who use TikTok opened their apps over the weekend — I believe it was on Saturday —

Yes.

— and saw a message. And Casey, what did that message say?

Well, Kevin, when people opened the app, they were greeted with a screen that said that TikTok quote, “isn’t available right now.” But it added, quote, “we are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned.”

So I want to ask about this message because I thought it was very interesting. But first, Casey, what did you do during the 12 hours that TikTok was down? How was the outage for you?

I learned Mandarin. It was incredible. I never realized that was all that I needed.

But Duolingo really did me a solid. No, I’ll tell you what happened, Kevin. I was on my way to a friend’s house. And he was having a house warming. And I did pull up TikTok because a friend had messaged me saying, oh my gosh, it’s already down. This was sort of Pacific time. I had expected that the app wouldn’t go down until Sunday morning Pacific time. But it was already gone. And I got to the party, and people were buzzing about the fact that TikTok was no longer there. And I suspect that’s because that some of them were playing King’s Cup, and they were hoping to upload some highlights to TikTok, and they were prevented from doing so.

King’s Cup, of course, is a drinking game. But go on.

Yes. So in addition to TikTok, a bunch of other ByteDance apps disappeared from the Apple and Google US app stores, including Lemonaid, CapCut, and the one that you actually texted me about with a very alarmed tone over the weekend. Marvel Snap disappeared.

We have made passing jokes about Marvel Snap over the years. It is a mobile card game. It is so fun. I don’t actually have it on my phone anymore because it is the thing that is too addictive for me to be able to get my hands on. But I still watch tons of content of creators playing this video game. And there was never even a hint that it would be in any way implicated in this ban. But it turns out that the publisher of Marvel Snap is owned by ByteDance.

So it just disappeared along with all the other ByteDance apps.

It just disappeared. It was like a Thanos snap. Marvel Snap was snapped out of existence. And it took a couple days for it to snap back.

Yes. So let’s talk about what is going on with these apps because many of these apps are now working again, but still not available in the App Store. So is TikTok banned or not?

Yes. So —

Here’s the thing. So TikTok was banned by a law — PAFACAA —

PAFACAA.

— that we’ve talked about on the show before. And the law did not leave any exceptions. What it said was, the president can issue a 90-day extension for ByteDance to find a deal to divest the app. President Biden chose not to do that. And this banning of TikTok happened as Biden was leaving office, but before Trump had taken office.

This weekend, Trump said, no, no, no, there is no need for you, the app stores and all of the ByteDance service providers, to take TikTok down. You can leave it up. I have got your back. I’m going to signed an executive order on Monday. And I promise you there will be no legal liability.

And so when it gets to Monday, Trump does actually do this. And the companies involved have different takes on this. So Oracle, which provides all of the hosting infrastructure for TikTok in the United States, they say, we believe you President Trump. We can go ahead and flip the switches on.

Akamai, which is what they call a content-delivery network that Oracle uses to make sure that you can get your TikTok fix no matter where you are, they say, we believe you, President Trump. We’re going to go ahead and flip the servers on.

Apple and Google are a little bit more nervous about this whole thing. They’re reading the part of the law that says that not just President Trump, but a future president could hold them accountable for enabling this app, which, again, is banned under the law that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. And that fine, by the way, Kevin, $5,000 per user. TikTok has something like 170 million users in the United States. These fines would stretch into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Yes, these would be ruinous fines if this law were actually enforced according to the letter of the law at any point in the future.

Yes. And so that leads to the wild situation that we’ve been in this week, where if you had already downloaded TikTok onto your device, you can use it essentially as normal. But if you didn’t, and you’re just hearing about TikTok for the first time on “Hard Fork” today, and you want to go check it out, you cannot download the app.

It literally is not in the App Store. There is no way to get it onto an Android device or an Apple device.

Absolutely not. And by the way, the same holds true for Marvel Snap, and some of these other apps that were affected.

And what about updates to existing apps? Like, can they update the app without going through Google or Apple?

No, they can’t. And this is one of the big questions that we’re all going to have our eyes on is, how badly does the quality of the TikTok service degrade? Because I don’t know about you, but I’m looking at my app updates more or less every day because sometimes you’ll actually find news in there. An app I cover has added some feature, and they’ll just disclose it right in the release notes.

And what you will notice if you do that is that apps like TikTok are updating certainly every week, sometimes every few days. And included in those updates are various bug fixes. Sometimes security vulnerabilities are identified and patched. New features get added. Other features get removed. And now ByteDance is going to be in a situation where into April, unless something changes, they’re not going to be able to ship updates to American users.

Yeah, so that is the current state of TikTok. It is wild. I don’t think we’ve ever had an app of any size that existed in this limbo state where it is technically illegal under the law, but the service providers, some of them are making it possible to access. But also, the app stores are not letting you get it. We’ve never been here before.

No, we really haven’t. And just to really underscore this, we are in a position where the Congress has passed, the previous president signed, and the Supreme Court upheld a law, and the incoming president said, no, no, no, that law does not apply because I say so. And I have the executive authority to say that this law does not apply. In the TikTok case, it feels fairly silly and benign. I can imagine other cases where that would be a huge problem.

Yeah. I mean, it does call into question the sort of efficacy of checks and balances. If a president can just come into office on day one and declare that a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court and signed by the previous president is invalid, like “Schoolhouse Rock” would have something to say about that.

Yeah, seems bad, as they say on Twitter.

But let’s talk about — so that’s where we are today as of this taping. What happens next? So President Trump comes into office. He signs a bunch of executive orders. He issues a bunch of declarations. One of the things he says is that he is going to extend the deadline for the sort of enforcement of PAFACAA by 75 days to give the companies involved a way to try to make a deal.

Yeah, that’s right. And specifically what he says, Kevin, is that what he wants to see is for ByteDance to divest TikTok through some kind of joint venture between the United States and TikTok’s current owners. There is not a specific plan. It’s also not clear what it means that the United States owns 50 percent of TikTok. Like, are we turning TikTok into a public utility?

Yes, let’s actually play the clip because I think what you’re saying as characterizing his remarks is actually much more clear than what he actually said, which was — I just struggled to make heads or tails of it. So let’s play Trump’s comments when he was asked about the delayed enforcement of the TikTok ban.

So the Larry that Donald Trump is referring to throughout that clip is Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, which is a provider to TikTok and maybe also a potential bidder. But like, what is he talking about with permits and a deal and this thing being worth $1 trillion? Like, can you translate what he’s saying?

I’m glad you asked me this because I have a feeling this is going to come up a lot over the next four years. And so I just want to say, from here going forward, the answer to, what is Donald Trump talking about? I truly do not know. And I will not speculate. It would be so irresponsible for me to say that I knew.

All we can imagine is that there is going to be some sort of deal, maybe, that looks something like what he proposed during his first administration, which was that he really wanted TikTok to go to one of his supporters. So in the first Trump administration, it was either going to be Oracle or Walmart, which had donated a lot to his campaign. Or this time around, it’s going to be Larry Ellison of Oracle or Elon Musk, who is his new favorite donor. But what does the actual shape of this thing look like? I don’t know. And it is all starting to feel very silly.

Yeah, and I’m not even sure what mechanism would allow the US government to get 50 percent of whatever trillion-dollar deal Donald Trump is imagining. I mean, there’s a universe in which you could nationalize TikTok or partly nationalize it and have literally the US Treasury become a 50 percent shareholder in the new, spun-off TikTok. But I’m not sure that’s what he means.

But I mean, can we just say, that is crazy. In particular, it’s crazy for a Republican to propose nationalizing TikTok. I don’t even know what that means. Although, presumably, if the US government did own TikTok, then Donald Trump would have a lot to say about how content gets moderated there and maybe what sort of posts get promoted or not.

Right. So now they have this 75-day grace period, this extension via executive order. Do you know what is likely to happen in the next 75 days? Like, are there deal talks going on? What do you think is going to happen?

I mean, a couple of really important things have happened over the past few days, Kevin. And I think chief among them is that the Chinese government has signaled for the first time that it would be OK with ByteDance divesting TikTok. This is huge.

And the entire time that we’ve been covering this story, so like going back five years now, in almost every story, there’s been some line about the fact that China likely would not allow this to go through, that this would hurt their national pride. It would set a terrible precedent. You can imagine all the reasons why China would not want the United States to say, hey, you have to divest that app.

But all of this discussion is happening against the backdrop of Trump threatening to place massive tariffs on Chinese goods, which could hurt the Chinese economy. And Trump has explicitly linked, in conversations with reporters, TikTok’s fate to the tariffs that he is thinking about placing on Chinese goods. So TikTok has now become a chess piece in helping Trump and the Chinese figure out, what are the tariffs going to be? What is China going to be OK with? And so presumably whatever negotiation is about to take place is going to involve those things.

That’s really interesting. I’m also curious about the shifting politics of all this. One thing that’s been very strange to me over the past week or so is that I have just not been able to predict with any accuracy which politicians from which parties are going to feel which way about whatever’s happening with TikTok.

So just before inauguration, we had the Biden administration, which, remember, signed the law forcing the sale of TikTok, trying to distance itself from the ban, saying, oh, that’s up to Donald Trump to decide what he wants to do about TikTok. So that was confusing thing number one.

I was truly so exasperated by this, Kevin. You think about the fact that this is truly the only piece of tech regulation that Joe Biden moved and actually got signed into law during his entire presidency. And just as it is taking effect, his press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre called TikTok’s threat to go dark on Sunday, quote, “a stunt.” And she also said, we see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump administration takes office.

I was like, you see no reason? You passed a law saying it’s illegal and that you will find anyone who ignores this law and up to hundreds of billions of dollars. So yes, the fact that Biden tried to disown his own law, I found profoundly embarrassing.

Yeah, it was super weird. The other confusing thing is that some Republicans who would normally go along with Donald Trump and saying, let’s make a deal, are coming out against the extension and the possible reprieve that Donald Trump is considering offering to TikTok. In particular, Senator Tom Cotton posted on Saturday on X, basically saying to the tech companies that are the service providers to TikTok, you better not let this thing back, or you’re in trouble.

He posted, quote, “any company that hosts, distributes, services or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law.” So basically, some Republicans, even as Donald Trump is expressing interest in making a deal, are saying, there will be no deal. This is good law. It stands. And god help you if you offer this app in your app stores or through your services.

So that’s true, Kevin. But I think it’s notable how few people actually said what Tom Cotton said, right? Remind yourself why Congress passed this law in the first place and why Joe Biden signed it. They said TikTok is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States, that they believe that ByteDance might be using this app to spy on Americans, to misuse their data, to spread propaganda and sow dissent in the United States. They painted this picture of TikTok as this true menace.

And then they finally manage to pass a ban. And then just as it goes into effect, everyone all of a sudden either says, no, don’t actually enforce it, or they just throw their hands up and say nothing. So that, again, I think it is so embarrassing that Tom Cotton was really one of the only loud voices saying, hey, remember when we passed a law?

Right. There’s just this collective amnesia setting in. Oh, we did that?

Yeah. And it really makes you wonder like, was this app really that big of a problem, if even after banning it, it seems like nobody actually has the will to enforce the ban?

Yeah. I mean, one interpretation is they’re just scared of backlash from TikTok users, many of whom are of voting age. And they’re sort of watching the freak out over the possible disappearance of TikTok and saying, I actually don’t want to take that on as a liability.

I mean, that makes sense to me logically. But you remember during the discussions about banning the app, when TikTok users flooded the phone lines in Congress and said, don’t you dare do this. Congress was enraged. And they said, how dare you exercise resize your freedom of speech in this democracy? Now we’re going to ban you extra hard, TikTok, for daring to challenge us.

It is so messy. I was trying to explain to someone in my life recently what the latest on TikTok is. And I just found myself, like, twisting up in knots because I truly — like, what is happening now, I have no prior precedent for. There is no roadmap for. We are in completely uncharted territory.

But I want to just broaden out beyond TikTok a little bit because something else that has been catching my eye over the past week or so, as we enter into this new administration, is that I think we are starting to see tech companies learn a lesson about how to do business during a Trump presidency. And that is to basically do whatever you can to allow President Trump to take credit for things that you were already planning to do or that maybe were already in motion, frame it as a win for the Trump administration, obsequiously fawn and praise the president for his role, however big or small, in doing this.

We saw this in the TikTok announcement, that they put on their app about, President Trump is going to has a plan to bring us back, even if it’s not technically true. And then wait for the moment to pass, wait for the spotlight to shift, and just go about your business the normal way. So we’ve seen this a couple times now.

But the most stark example was something else that happened this week, actually in that very same conference where President Trump was asked about TikTok, which is the announcement of this thing, Stargate, this new $100 billion, possibly up to half a trillion AI-infrastructure project.

Yeah, tell us about Stargate.

So this was announced at a big White House press conference this week. It was attended by Sam Altman from OpenAI, Larry Ellison from Oracle and Masayoshi Son from SoftBank. And they announced this major infrastructure project, basically spending $100 billion up to $500 billion building AI infrastructure data centers, et cetera, for the use of open AI in a way that they framed as kind of a national AI project.

Yes. And this is a separate company from OpenAI, but OpenAI is expected to be the major customer.

Yes. So if you watched this press conference, if you heard any of the coverage of it afterward, this was framed by the people leading these companies, leading this project, as something that President Trump had sort of decided on and could take credit for. Sam Altman literally got up in front of a microphone and said, we couldn’t have done this without you, Mr. President. This is false. This is a lie. This project was going to happen anyway.

Wait, are you saying that Sam Altman is not being consistently candid about whether Stargate was possible with or without?

I mean, I don’t know of any other way to characterize what happened here because they had already broken ground on this project. All the money for this project comes from private-sector companies. There is no government funding slated to take part in Project Stargate. This is purely a private sector business project. But it is something that they have managed to recast as a win for President Trump.

And I have two things to say about this. One, probably very effective. We know from watching the first Trump administration that this is a tactic that worked over and over again during the first Trump administration. So probably very effective. But I just think this is bad in the long term because what we now have is kind of a constructed fiction that all of the biggest companies in technology are now participating in co-writing along with President Trump, where everything bad is the fault of one of Donald Trump’s enemies, and everything good is something that he had a major hand in creating.

And I just think right now maybe that’s relatively harmless because everyone’s doing it. There’s kind of strength in numbers. But I think over time — I’m a person who believes that lying creates bad karma and that somehow, at some point, in some way, these CEO’s willingness to just blatantly lie about their projects and their connection to the federal government is going to come back to bite them. What do you think?

Oh, for sure. I mean, go back to the first administration and look at the half life of Donald Trump’s relationships with his closest allies. They were not typically longer than a year or two. So I expect we’re going to see a lot of churning and thrashing in these relationships over the next few years, Kevin.

But I also think it’s worth maybe elaborating a bit on what in particular OpenAI and other AI companies are hoping to get out of Trump and why they might have been willing to give him some credit for this Stargate project. And that is, as we mentioned at the top of the show, one of Trump’s first acts was to repeal Biden’s executive order on AI. And that order essentially just tried to place some very light guardrails on the development of AI, maybe make it move just a little bit slower, maybe ask these companies just to do a little bit more about safety.

And by getting rid of that order, President Trump ensured that now there is essentially no regulatory infrastructure that is governing the development of AI anymore. And so if you can somehow get together half a trillion dollars to go build data centers and plug it into OpenAI’s models, there is now nothing that says that you can’t. And I suspect that that alone is more than enough to make Sam Altman want to stand up and say, thank you, President Trump, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Yeah. Casey, maybe let’s end this part of the conversation with a prediction. 75 days from now — 73 days from now, when the extension period for TikTok is over and PAFACAA finally is slated to come into effect and be enforced. Do you think the TikTok will have a new owner?

No, I don’t. I think nothing could be funnier or more likely than something happening, but just not being wrapped up in 75 days, leading to another extension that is required to make something happen.

Can he just keep extending it indefinitely?

I think he’s just going to keep trying because, again, if he finds out that he can just rule this country through executive order and never needs to pay to any laws passed by Congress, I think that would be really interesting information for him.

Yeah.

What do you think is going to happen?

I’ll take the other side. I think there will be a deal.

OK.

I think that because TikTok is now a bargaining chip in these overall conflict with China about tariffs and everything like that, I think that the Chinese government will say, it’s better if we can eke out a better deal on tariffs that won’t wreck our economy. It may be it’s worth letting go of TikTok, especially if we can sell it to someone who we have some influence over, like Elon Musk.

Interesting. Well, Kevin, Elon Musk many folks believe was radicalized in the lead up to and after his purchase of Twitter. The more that he looked at it, the more he sort of transformed into a kind of “Die Hard” poster. I’m wondering, do we think something similar will happen to him if he acquires TikTok? And what sort of person could TikTok turn Elon Musk into?

I don’t know. Maybe he could become a better dancer, or something like that?

I think he could become one of the great dancers in this country. And I think that would be a beautiful thing to see.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Well, Casey, we’re going to go from TikTok to trick stocks.

That’s what I call meme coins.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Well, Kevin, we’ve said before that a big consequence of Trump’s victory is that crypto is once again on the rise. And this week, it was President Trump himself and his wife who decided to get into the action.

They sure did.

So tell us a little bit about what happened over the weekend with the Trump family and cryptocurrencies.

So it’s been a very chaotic few days. But basically the story is this. On Friday, several days before taking office, Donald Trump announced on a post on Truth Social that he was launching the Trump Coin. This was basically a meme coin issued by gettrumpmemes.com under the ticker symbol Trump. And Casey, I know you’re saying this sounds like a very valuable asset. I wonder what buying this token entitles me to?

Yeah. What does it entitle me to, Kevin?

Absolutely nothing.

Oh, no.

It’s a purely speculative instrument. It did not entitle you to — I don’t know — a seat at inauguration or an invitation to an inaugural ball. All it did was say, you now own some Donald Trump coin.

That’s unfortunate because I would think, at the very least, if you acquired a certain level of Trump Coin, you would be allowed to eliminate at least one regulation of your choice.

Maybe that’s for V2.

Now, was the president the only Trump who issued a coin this weekend, Kevin?

Well, I’m glad you asked because it turns out he was not. On Sunday, Melania Trump went on social media and announced her own coin as well. And this currency, the Melania Coin, was also going to be issued on the internet, and people could go buy however many they wanted.

Now, Kevin, meme coins come and go pretty regularly. Not all of them hit great heights. How did the Trump and Melania coins do over the weekend?

So over the weekend, both of these coins surged in value, actually becoming some of the most valuable cryptocurrencies in existence. At various points this week, these coins were worth well over $10 billion. And obviously, that’s just a paper valuation. That does not mean that anyone actually made billions of dollars. But it does mean — and I saw posts on social media over the weekend from people saying that they had made millions of dollars speculating on these meme coins.

Wow. OK. Now, Kevin, this is not the first Trump-related cryptocurrency that I’m aware of. Some of our listeners may have also heard about World Liberty Coin. So what’s the difference between that one and these new coins?

Yes, there have been lots of Trump adjacent crypto projects. He had an NFT that he sold earlier. There was this World Liberty Coin. These were sort of loosely affiliated with the Trump family and the Trump business. But these new coins, to the extent that we know who is behind them, they appear to be linked to entities controlled directly by the Trump family themselves.

So obviously these meme coins, they don’t have a lot of transparency. They’re not required to disclose everything about their ownership structure. But we know and people who have been reporting on this have discovered that Trump and his affiliates own something like 80 percent of the total supply of these Trump Coins and 35 of the supply of Melania Coins.

Got it. And so lots of folks, myself included, have been referring to these as meme coins. When does a cryptocurrency become a meme coin exactly?

Well, there are some people, skeptics, who would say all of these are meme coins. They don’t have anything fundamental underlying them. I am not one of these people. I think that there’s a stark divide between crypto tokens that are supposed to provide some utility, whether it’s being useful in paying for things, whether it’s being used in smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, whether it’s money laundering —

Money laundering or drug dealing.

That is a utility. It’s not a legal one, but it is a utility. But what separates s these meme coins is that they are purely speculative instruments. Not even the most hardcore crypto boosters are arguing that these things serve a function in the crypto market. They are just essentially little bits of code that you can buy and sell. And if you happen to buy at the right time and sell at the right time, you can make some money. And if you don’t happen to be that lucky, you lose your money.

All right. And Kevin, it does seem like a lot of people wind up losing a lot of money when they buy and sell meme coins. Why should we care about these coins in particular, given that they might be meaningless within a year?

So one of the reasons we should care about this is because it personally affects me and a prediction that I made on this very podcast several weeks ago.

Remind us about that.

So this was one of my predictions for 2025 in the tech industry, was that a newly-released crypto meme coin would briefly reach $100 billion in market cap before crashing. Now, that has not happened yet. The Trump coins have not yet reached $100 billion in market cap. But I feel confident that before the end of the year, one or more meme coins will reach that threshold. And I will be proven right. And I’ll get bragging rights.

But more seriously, one reason to care about these meme coins is that they open up a new and worrying avenue of political corruption. It does actually mean that if you are an overseas investor who wants to do business in America during the Trump administration, you can just go buy some Trump Coins, and you can do so anonymously because of the way that these transactions work.

And many ethics, lawyers, and other experts have been condemning these meme coins, saying, this is literally allowing people to cash in on the presidency. And it’s giving people who want to transfer money to Donald Trump and his family a way to do so without leaving any trace.

Well, can President Trump cash in a big way right away?

So it’s a little complicated because there are basically two ways that you can make money by starting a meme coin. And I know you’re interested in starting a meme coin, so this might be directly applicable to you.

OK, I’m taking notes.

So one way that you can make money through a meme coin, selling a meme coin, is by doing what’s known as a rugpull which is that you reserve some portion of the coins for yourself and entities connected to you and your family. You hype the coins so that people start buying it because they think they can get rich. And then at a certain point, when you decide that you’ve made enough money, you sell your coins to the highest bidder. And if the price of the thing collapses, you wash your hands, and you walk away.

Wow, that seems like a great deal for me.

Yes, it is a great deal. Many people have done this to great profit. But in this case, the Trump Coin specifically, there are some protections against rugpulling in this case. So according to the people behind the project, the 80 percent share of Trump tokens that Trump and his affiliates directly control can’t be sold all at once. They are actually doled out over a period of about three years.

And more relevantly, if they tried to actually sell all their coins at once, it would immediately tank the price of the coin. And they just wouldn’t be able to do it. So there are some practical considerations that make it hard for them to directly profit from a rugpull right now.

All right. So you heard it here from Kevin. This is a safe and good investment. And you might want to move your retirement savings over immediately.

No, don’t do that. But there’s another way that you can make money, which is on token fees, when tokens are bought and sold. So even if the Trump family never disposes of their stake in these coins, they can make a little bit of money every time a Trump coin is bought and sold. And we don’t know exactly how many fees they’re making on these transactions. But because of the popularity of these coins among people who like to buy and sell meme coins, a director at Coinbase recently speculated that as of Saturday, the Trump family had already made an estimated $58 million in fees, just from other people buying and selling these coins.

I’m curious what people in the crypto industry are saying. Is this a sort of validation for them? That, oh, well, even the president has a meme coin now. We’re really off to the races with crypto in Trump 2.0.

I think some people in the crypto industry see this as a good thing. This is more people talking about crypto. Maybe a rising tide lifts all boats. But the majority of people I’ve talked to and heard from and seen posting on social media about this in the crypto industry are very worried about what this means.

So Nick Carter, who is a Trump-supporting crypto investor, called the meme coins preposterous and said that the people behind the coins were plumbing new depths of idiocy. That was a great quote. Another popular crypto podcaster, Scott Melker, called these coins a gratuitous cash grab. So there were just lots of people in the crypto industry who said, this is not how we envisioned crypto blossoming during the Trump administration. Could you please lay off the scams a little bit?

I mean, it’s interesting to hear them say that. And yet, I find myself wondering, if that is the case, what kind of crypto coin is not a blatant cash grab? Are there a bunch of virtuous crypto coins out there that are just like raising money to fight climate change or something?

Well, there are, but they’re not the popular ones. And they’re never going to go viral. And you can’t use them to bribe the president. So I don’t think there’s a bright future for them. But Casey, more seriously, I’m someone who believes that there is a potential that something good does come from crypto once all is said and done.

I just think that what’s happening now, with the kind of open season during the Trump administration for crypto, is not going to benefit the long-term future of the industry because if you remember, during the Biden administration when there was this crypto crackdown, and all the crypto companies were complaining about how badly they were treated, the thing that they kept saying is, let us build. Let us cook. And we will show you how serious and transformative crypto assets could be.

Yes.

And then the floodgates open. And what happens? The president and his wife start a dang meme coin. So I just think there is this fundamental tension between the people saying, this is going to be a serious and transformative application of technology to the financial industry and the people who want to use it to get rich quick.

Yes. Also, those people didn’t build anything interesting over the past four years. And it wasn’t just for regulatory reasons.

And more to that point, the people who spent the last four years telling us about all these serious and beneficial crypto applications that they were going to build tended to come from companies like Coinbase and Kraken, both of which rushed to list the Trump meme coins on their platform and profit from the interest in trading these coins. So the same companies telling us how serious they were about their plans for crypto under the new administration are also rushing to be the first to benefit from the silly meme coins that Trump and his family members are putting out.

Wonderful. So Kevin, I’m left asking why now has been such a big moment for these meme coins. It was only last month that Haliey Welch’s Hawk Tuah digital coin spiked and made a lot of money for some people, of course, before immediately losing 95 percent of its value. And my understanding is that part of the reason that we’re seeing so many of these recently is because of something called pump.fun.

Yes, I’ve been dying to talk about pump.fun on this show because I think it is a platform that does not get nearly enough attention as a driver of the recent interest in meme coins and speculation and, essentially, gambling.

So what is it?

Pump.fun, it’s about a year old. It’s a platform that basically makes it super easy to create and launch a new meme coin on the Solana blockchain. It’s been possible for years to create meme coins. Dogecoin was created years ago. That’s a meme coin. But you needed a little bit of technical know-how. You needed to learn how to create a coin, maybe to fork an existing coin, maybe to hard fork an existing coin. And you needed to know how to code and do things, like, create smart contracts to govern the coin.

But now, with a couple of clicks on pump.fun, you can create your very own meme coin and start selling it on the open market. And as you might expect from the name, pump.fun, this is primarily an entertainment platform. This is a LARP. This is essentially like a crypto carnival, where the explicit goal is to drive as much attention as you can to your coin, pump up the value, and then get out before it all crashes.

I’m just visiting the website for the first time. And when you visit, there’s a pop up that contains a little information about how it works and some terms of service. And there’s a button that you have to click to access the site. And that button says, I’m ready to pump.

Yes. So they’re not exactly being subtle about the fact that this is all essentially legalized gambling and market manipulation and pump-and-dump schemes. And it is not even masquerading as a legitimate crypto platform. And yet, this is a very popular platform. And it is driving a lot of the interest in meme coins. So I’m glad we’re talking about it today.

So what sort of things are people doing to promote their meme coins, Kevin? Because President Trump has access to the bully pulpit, and he can go on network TV and tell people to buy his meme coin. But what are rank-and-file coiners doing?

So a lot of it is just what you might consider social media marketing. They’re posting on TikTok and X about this. Some of them have discords. I mean, there are these collective efforts to just capture as much viral attention as they can and direct it to their coin for some amount of time to raise the price. And then, as we’ve seen with meme stocks and things like that, once it gets a certain gravity to it, people just start piling in because they think they can time the market and basically get out before the thing crashes.

As you say, it’s becoming a form of entertainment for people who love to gamble.

Yes. And in some cases, people are making lots of money. Some people are losing lots of money. Probably more people losing money than making money. But, Casey, I think we should illustrate a little bit of the vibe of the pump.fun meme-coin ecosystem.

Oh, yeah.

And I want to do that by playing a game with you.

OK, let’s do it.

So I went on pump.fun this morning, and I looked up some of the leading meme coins that are being bought and sold on that platform. And then I came up with my own list of fictional meme coins. And so I want to play a game with you called Meme Coin or Dream Coin, where you take these descriptions of meme coins and guess whether they are real or fake.

All right. Let’s do it.

OK. Number one, Butthole Coin. This is a coin marketed as the foundation of flatulent finance. Casey, meme coin or dream coin?

I’m going to hope that that’s a dream coin.

No, that’s a real meme coin. Its market cap is $40 million.

$40 million?

Yes.

It’s a lot of butthole.

OK. Number two, this is Dad Coin, a utility token powered by dad jokes. Dad Coin aims to build the world’s largest blockchain verified dad joke database. Casey, meme coin or dream coin?

That sounds real. I’m going to go with meme coin.

No, that one’s fake. I made that up.

Oh, god.

OK. You’re 0 for 2. Let’s keep going.

Damn.

Number three, Apple Dog Coin. This is a coin inspired by a viral TikTok meme of a dog holding an apple in its mouth.

I will say meme coin.

That’s a real meme coin. Market cap $14 million.

And they said that me watching TikTok would never benefit me. But that’s how I knew that was real.

OK. Next one, Shoggoth. This is a coin inspired by a 2023 “New York Times” column by Kevin Roose — I’ve heard of that guy — about how a tentacled creature known as a Shoggoth has become a viral meme in the AI community.

I’m going to say that you couldn’t think of anything else, and so you just started reading your old columns and coming up with them. So I’m going to go with dream coin.

No, that one is real.

Oh, my gosh.

It has a market cap of $31 million.

What?

I was sort of horrified to discover that this had been inspired by my column. I apologize to anyone who has lost their retirement savings gambling on Shoggoth Coin. Please don’t do that.

That’s crazy.

I had nothing to do with it, for the record.

Oh, my gosh.

OK. So that’s pump.fun in a nutshell, where everything is so strange that it might as well be made up.

Kevin, I have to say, as you’ve been very helpfully explaining a lot of important information to me, I’ve been having an experience of feeling horrified.

Yeah?

Yeah.

You want to say more about that?

Well, we’ve mentioned on the show a few times now that it seems vast swaths of American life are being converted into ways for people to gamble. And while, in moderation, I have no issue with people gambling, I worry about this much time, attention, and money going into just sort of crazy speculation.

Yes, it is gambling. It is certainly one of many ways that Americans can now do essentially legalized gambling on their phones or computers. But it also strikes me as the financialization of news. We are now seeing from people on TikTok to people in the White House, the thing that you can do very easily and quickly capitalize on a surge in attention directed your way. In the old days, you’d see people go viral, and then they’d start to link to their Patreon.

But now you can do such a more direct form of capitalizing on attention by just launching your own meme coin. And in fact, after the inauguration this year, we saw something like this happen where Lorenzo Sewell, who is the Detroit pastor who prayed at Trump’s inauguration, immediately after the inauguration made his own meme coin, Lorenzo, and said that all proceeds from it will support his church.

So I do think we are starting to see a new kind of financialization of attention, where the minute you get notable for something, the minute people are starting to look at you, you want to launch your meme coin to be able to rake in as much attention in the form of cryptocurrency as you can. I don’t think that’s a good thing for America.

I think we should go back to doing what we used to do with these news events, which was we would just create a novelty Twitter account for them. Do you remember this? Something would happen at the Oscars. And then it’s like, oh, that thing has a Twitter account now. Something to think about.

There you have it.

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When we come back, attention, please. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is here to talk about his new book on attention.

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Well, today on the show, I want to have a conversation about attention.

Kevin, ever since you put your phone in prison for the simple crime of being interesting, you’ve been fascinated by the topic of attention.

Yes, I am fascinated by attention and the various ways that we direct and misdirect our attention and the various apps and services that are trying to get our attention all the time. And today on the show, we are going to have a conversation about attention. And we are going to have on Chris Hayes. Chris Hayes is the host of MSNBC’s nightly news show “All In.” He just wrote a book about attention, called the “Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” It comes out next week. And I read an advance copy. It’s very good.

And Chris argues that attention has become a profoundly valuable commodity in today’s world. He argues that we are trapped in a system of attention gathering and maximization that we didn’t construct, that we don’t have a lot of choice over. And that has created a feeling of alienation among many of the people, who feel their attention being pulled in ways that they maybe don’t want it to be.

Yeah, it does feel like a condition of modern life that maybe even on most days, you will find yourself doing something and think to yourself, I don’t even want to be looking at the thing I’m looking at. And yet, I’m not sure how I can look away.

Yes. And obviously, this is a conversation that has a lot to do with technology and the ways that social media apps and other forms of technology have found new ways to harness attention. But I’m excited to talk to Chris about this topic because he is not just a scholar and a critic of the attention economy, he is also a participant in it, just like you and I are. He is a cable news host.

And he is in the business of gathering people’s attention. He is an attention merchant as well as someone who studies the subject. So I wanted to talk to him, not just about his diagnosis of our attention problem, but also what he personally does to harness his attention. I feel like that’s an area where I have a lot of trouble. And I know you do too.

That’s right, Kevin. And in addition to all of the questions we had for Chris, he turned the tables on us and asked us for a little bit of guidance as he attempts to navigate how AI will transform our attention environment. So that wound up being kind of a fun twist.

Yeah, very fun conversation with someone who, I think, has a lot of worthwhile thoughts about what is going on in our attention economy and how we might start to fix it. Here’s the conversation.

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