Nick Navis
speaker
139 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nick Navis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, me too. Although I'm already schvitzing. You're schvitzing already? You're schvitzing in mid-March? I don't know what climb my people evolved around, but I still haven't found it yet.
Yeah, it's okay.
Yeah, it's like about the other branch of the internet butterfly effect of the Doge meme. Who would have thought that that would be the meme that has far-reaching legs into American culture? I know. That changed world history? I didn't expect it.
I'm so glad that we're still managing to explain the bewildering moment, even if it's as silly as meme coins. Yeah. It feels like it's becoming more and more impossible to avoid, even if you want to.
This whole question behind crypto the whole time is whether or not there's actual utility to it, whether or not it's actually a kind of utopian world building project, or it's just a kind of nihilistic, irreverent cesspool. And I feel like this moment with meme coins is really like getting to the heart of that question.
On the night of November 19th, 2024, this baby-faced kid, he looks around 13 years old, used a new online platform to launch a brand new cryptocurrency into the world. We're not using his name because he did all this anonymously.
The cryptocurrency he created is what's known as a meme coin, which is a kind of joke currency, something that doesn't hold any inherent value besides what other people on the internet are willing to pay for it. The kid named his coin Gen Z Quant. He spent a few hundred dollars to buy up about five percent of the total supply of his new coin.
And then he also started live streaming on the platform. Somebody else recorded the live stream, which is why in the video you can hear the kid and a couple other voices.
In the video, you can both see the kid's face and a chart showing the coin's price. Within seconds, the list of people buying the coin starts to stream in, and the little green price line on the chart starts shooting upward. Like a rocket ship trying to reach escape velocity on its way to the moon. At first, the kid seems surprised.
Wait, I'm so confused. But then he gets this kind of devious grin on his face. His cheeks start to get a little flushed. He moves his cursor over to a sell button on the website. And with one click, he cashes out the entirety of his holdings in Gen Z Quan. Some 51 million tokens for a cool $20,000 or so. There's a murmur of surprise from other people watching the live stream.
In the chat, a little burst of fire emojis starts popping off. And the price of Gen Z Quant then immediately collapses. The green line on the price chart turns red and takes a nosedive. And for a moment, the kid again seems shocked at what he's been able to do. And then the kid makes it clear. He is not, in fact, so confused. He seems to know exactly what's happening.
He extends both of his middle fingers to the camera and utters a line that's become kind of infamous in the crypto world. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks, in other words, for the $20,000 or so that this group of total strangers on the internet had just transferred right into his account.
The kid then stands up, starts tugging at his hair, and just takes a moment to revel in what he's pulled off. Yo, yo, yo, yo, what the fuck? And I think maybe the most absurd part of all this is that the kid then goes on to pull this exact same move two more times with two other meme coins he created that very same evening, betting over $50,000 in total.
And when you take a step back and just think about what's happening here, it's kind of wild, right? We're living at a time where a 13-year-old can create his own cryptocurrency, successfully hawk it to a bunch of strangers on the internet over livestream video, and then rip them off for tens of thousands of dollars. Not once, not twice, but three times in one night.
All from the comfort of his own home. And all before bedtime. If someone pulled this move on a market like the New York Stock Exchange, they might have had government regulators knocking on the door. But meme coins are kind of a Wild West. And the thing is, what this one kid did is just a tiny glimpse into this much bigger economic story.
Just one example of a transformation rippling across the Internet. There are thousands of these meme coins being launched every single day now, involving everyone from literal children to social media sensations like Hoctua or Mudang the pygmy hippo to the President of the United States. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder, how in the world did we get here?
Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, and I'm joined by freelance reporter Nick Navis.
Today on the show, the story of the meme coin casino. How a few technological leaps and cultural shifts helped turn a seedy internet backwater into a giant cryptocurrency gold rush. OK, so in order to tell the story of how we got to this moment where we are constantly awash in new meme coins, we have to begin at the beginning.
But in the years after its launch, there was also this whole wave of often sketchy new Bitcoin copycats. And this is where you start to see this pattern develop that's characterized the world of cryptocurrency ever since. A cycle of grand utopian promises followed by a period of frenzied speculation and outright fraud.
The story starts back in 2013 with a guy named Jackson Palmer. Palmer was an Australian product manager at a tech company, and he believed that there was something fundamentally useful about what crypto promised to do. But when he looked around at some of these speculative new cryptocurrencies, he saw that people seemed to be using crypto as a kind of cash grab.
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