The The Profitable Art of Dumb Meme Coins: Nicholas Anthony on Trump's $636M Gain & His Fans' $3.8B Loss

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Saturday, August 22, 2026. Earlier this month, Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded an SEC investigation of Donald Trump's meme coin, she believed — not “mean,” but “meme,” M-E-M-E — as an illegal scam. I guess all scams are illegal. I'm not quite sure what — where the illegal element was necessary. Certainly, Trump's done very well out of this. Financial Times reported that he netted $350 million from his so-called presidential meme coin. It makes him look very good. He certainly lost a lot of weight when you look at the front page of his meme coin [unclear] page. Of course, most of you won't be particularly surprised, and I'm not a big fan of Trump or his meme coins or anything else. But I was intrigued that many conservatives are also troubled one way or the other by some of Trump's crypto dealings. The Cato Institute is a conservative libertarian institute, which has crossed swords with Trump. I think in broad terms, it's quite sympathetic to much of what he's done. And as I said, I was rather struck with the fact that, Nicholas Anthony, who's Cato's research fellow and author, expert in all matters crypto, made a statement suggesting — and I'm quoting him here — that Donald Trump's decision to launch a meme coin has unnecessarily complicated efforts to enact meaningful cryptocurrency legislation. Coming from Washington DC. That sounds like a hard no on Trump's crypto policy. And I'm thrilled that Nicholas Anthony from Cato is joining us today. Nick, am I putting words into your mouth? Are you troubled by Trump's antics on his own meme coin?

00:02:45 Nicholas Anthony: Yes. It was completely unnecessary, and it's caused so many problems. He came in. Many people in the cryptocurrency space were excited to get representation, somebody who seemed to understand the industry, this new emerging industry, and what it needed. And instead, by creating his own cryptocurrency, this meme coin, and making millions of dollars and doing it in a very questionable fashion by leveraging his position as the president, it's only created new problems for the industry. It's held up legislation. It's caused a number of investigations. It's caused ethics concerns. It's really been a problem for everyone but Trump.

00:03:37 Andrew Keen: How would you explain it, Nick? Critics of Trump, like myself, would probably think that it's just another manifestation of him being purely self-interested. What's behind the Trump meme coin from Donald Trump's point of view?

00:03:57 Nicholas Anthony: I think that's really a fair way to think of it — this is him being purely self-interested. He got in touch with this industry. He learned about cryptocurrency, and he saw an avenue to enrich himself. I think that really does boil it down. And the problem we get into though is the question of did he actually break the law or did he do something illegal? It doesn't really seem like it. It just seems like he did something that was very questionable and frankly, unnecessary. But because it's on that gray area, that legal gray area of did he exert his influence as the president over this, did he scam people, did he rug pull people — it's held up everything else that the industry is trying to accomplish because it's being used and, frankly, weaponized to hold up legislation. And, really, we have no one to blame except for Trump for that because he did not need to do this. He knew better than to do it, but he saw the opportunity and ran with it. And I think that's really unfortunate.

00:05:14 Andrew Keen: He couldn't resist. You're sounding very critical, especially from Cato. I mean, I know you're not the official spokesman of the Cato Institute, but you're a fellow there. So, presumably, you're representing also some sort of position. You're beginning to sound like Elizabeth Warren, Nick. I shouldn't probably say that in public. You may even have to shave your beard off. In all seriousness, though, my understanding of Trump and you know a million times more about this than I do. My understanding of Trump — that he, before coming back to office, he was always a crypto skeptic. He always thought it was a scam himself. Is that fair?

00:05:51 Nicholas Anthony: I don't know if he necessarily thought it was a scam, but he did have problems with it challenging the status of the dollar and being competition to the dollar. That was something he had voiced on many occasions during his first administration, and he was very critical and even pushed policies that were harmful to the space, trying to make certain activities illegal. And that was something that I very much worried about from a liberty point of view when he was coming back into office. But it seems that he really changed his tune because he started talking with this industry. Now I think part of that was the amount of lobbying money and campaign money that came from the cryptocurrency industry. I'm sure that swayed him to a degree. Another part of it was he saw the opportunity for himself to make money. And then I think another piece of this was the fact that the cryptocurrency space was born out of libertarian and conservative values. And so those three different branches each exert their own pull on it, but I think that's what swayed him.

00:07:08 Andrew Keen: It's interesting that you claim as a, shall we say, a right libertarian or certainly a reflection of Cato. You claim intellectual ownership of crypto. I know I'm talking to you from San Francisco. There are liberal libertarians or perhaps progressive libertarians who might disagree. Explain to me why, for you and for Cato, crypto is an important issue.

00:07:41 Nicholas Anthony: Well, really, cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin, was born out of cypherpunk and libertarian ideas where people were concerned about the overreach of government, the entanglement of government with big business in the banks, and seeing the fallout of the global recession motivated that creation.

00:08:07 Andrew Keen: Which recession? The '08 recession?

00:08:10 Nicholas Anthony: Yes. The '08 recession. The global financial crisis. And that was something that really motivated this push. And part of that was looking at early history of things like free banking in Scotland and the pseudo-free-banking experience in America where you had banks issuing their own currency, their own bills before the creation of the dollar, and that highly influenced this creation. And so for Cato, it's a very interesting experience because we're looking at really for the first time in over a hundred years, the challenge to the idea that central banks have complete and total ownership of what is money. We have once again a private offering in a way that's offering competition into a pretty stagnant space. Banking and finance has been dominated by a few select groups for a very long time, and so to see new innovation in this space as well is extremely exciting.

00:09:22 Andrew Keen: What is money, Nick? You're suggesting that, we need to rethink value money in our networked age. Is there something for you that doesn't work about central government authority over money, the Bank of England, the Central Reserve [as spoken]. It's always seemed to have worked, at least from my point of view or my understanding, which obviously isn't as thorough as yours. But, didn't they save us in 2008, the Federal Reserve, haven't they saved us in the past in the twentieth century? What's wrong with centralized financial control associated with national governments?

00:10:04 Nicholas Anthony: So there's a lot of different layers to tackle that from. The smallest — or, for some people, the biggest — is the issue of hyperinflation, which has been a central bank problem for countries around the world where currency mismanagement has really decimated the value of their currency to the point where I have friends who have lived abroad and experienced it where they got in line to get food, and they could no longer afford the food when they got to the front of the line.

00:10:37 Andrew Keen: Give me an ex— I mean, that sounds like Weimar Germany. I mean, can you give me an example?

00:10:42 Nicholas Anthony: Yes. So, case in point, being in Zimbabwe, that was the experience that many people had gone through. And you don't even have to get to that level of hyperinflation, though, to see problems. $10,000 in 1970 could buy you two Corvettes. Today, that's equal to about $80,000 in the United States. So it might not be that —

00:11:05 Andrew Keen: — probably Trump's tariffs [ed.: opening words unclear in raw audio]. We can blame that.

00:11:09 Nicholas Anthony: Well, this has been a long-standing issue. It's been a steady increase over many years even though, as you say, in recent years, it's been felt much harder. And so one thing I would like to see is that governments across the globe, you know, from the United States to Zimbabwe, will feel competition. Not that they have to be completely taken off the chessboard, but that they feel competition in terms of there being alternatives out there that people can get to. And through that, they'd be better stewards of currency. They have more pressure on them to behave accordingly instead of where we see countries going into more and more debt without any consequences that politicians actually have to feel.

00:11:59 Andrew Keen: Are you suggesting then that if your crypto utopia came about that America wouldn't have its current debt?

00:12:09 Nicholas Anthony: I don't think that there would be any utopia, by any means. I don't think people switching to Bitcoin or Tether or what have you will fix all the problems under the sun. I don't think it would erase the debt either, but it would introduce a much-needed incentive, a missing incentive for government officials to have some accountability in terms of how they're spending and where they're spending. So I don't think it would be fair to say or claim that it would eliminate the debt or anything like that, but I do think it would create an incentive that's not there in terms of the monetary space to lower the spending and recoup some of that.

00:12:57 Andrew Keen: One of the reasons I think that Trump's crypto project is so troubling for his critics is while he was netting $350 million after the second inauguration, he also appointed his friend Elon Musk to decimate government. He created a group called DOGE. Of course, there's also the Dogecoin. Doesn't that reflect financial accountability for better or worse, Nick? But what's — I mean, I'm not sympathetic to DOGE, but isn't that a better way of tackling government expenses and expenditure and waste than this rather wild experimentation with cryptocurrency as an alternative or even a replacement for centralized currency?

00:13:46 Nicholas Anthony: Oh, I think they're not mutually exclusive. I do think that is a very important way to go about it. I think every government agency should have been doing similar activities over a longer period of time so that it didn't have to be so rushed and so haphazard at times. But I think that is a good way to keep track of what's going on, where the money is being spent, how it's being spent, and evaluating whether or not it could be used in other places more effectively.

00:14:21 Andrew Keen: Isn't this all theory? I mean, you — I'm sure you go to many seminars. You author yourself white papers. You even have a book on this. But the practice is the behavior of somebody like Donald Trump, a financial opportunist who saw an unusual opportunity to make a lot of money, and he jumped on it. So isn't that the reality of the crypto world beyond the seminar and the white paper?

00:14:52 Nicholas Anthony: Yes and no. It's part of the experience. But in terms of the theory of cryptocurrency being used as money, we also see the practice around the world where it's effectively being used in places like Argentina, Brazil, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Russia, and elsewhere where people are using it as an active alternative. And we've seen how before the creation of central banks where private banks issued money for decades or actually centuries rather, and it worked as a decentralized system as well. Case in point for the United States before the Federal Reserve existed, banks issued their own money, and you would transfer money between banks as a sort of currency exchange, and that system was able to clear through clearing houses. And we saw that was a pretty effective system. And so we have practice that exists in many different forms, and Donald Trump's element in this is just one piece of that story, certainly not the whole story.

00:16:07 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Russia, perhaps the greatest launderer of cash of one kind or another. Isn't crypto the ideal vehicle for laundering money, for essentially stealing?

00:16:21 Nicholas Anthony: Not so much. The US dollar is definitely the ideal vehicle for laundering money and continues to be the currency of choice for criminals around the globe.

00:16:33 Andrew Keen: Explain how and why, and in comparison with crypto, which is much harder to trace.

00:16:40 Nicholas Anthony: So it depends on which cryptocurrency. Many cryptocurrencies operate on public blockchains. So you can, and I mean, you yourself and anyone listening can go online and see the transactions happening on the Bitcoin blockchain, for instance. And so, forensic accounting firms use this all the time to track criminals. Right now, I believe the current estimate is that somewhere between 0 and 1% of all cryptocurrency activity has been identified as being illegal activity. In contrast, about 5% of the US dollar is used in illegal activity. And the reason for that is it's accepted in far more places. You can use the US dollar around the globe. It's universally accepted, usually without too much of a discount on it, even in illegal circles. And also cash is much harder to trace than most cryptocurrencies. Once it leaves, it's gone. And so many criminals still turn to that. There have been some criminals who have tried to use cryptocurrency, but many of those have been caught because they didn't understand how blockchains work, where it preserves this permanent record, so to speak, of the activity of where it's going and where it's been and who's had their hands on it. So that's been a tough thing for a lot of them to reconcile, and that's why in many countries, you still see dollar bills, popping up across the board because it still gets that demand.

00:18:27 Andrew Keen: Is a meme coin, Nick, is it by definition absurd, ridiculous, the less serious side of crypto? I mean, it wasn't just Donald Trump who launched the meme coin. It was his wife, Melania, too. There's been —

00:18:48 Nicholas Anthony: There's been countless meme coins. You're absolutely right. And I will say I'm not a big fan of them. They are very much the kind of absurd, comical, loony side of this where it's, for lack of a better term, a trading card of sorts.

00:19:10 Andrew Keen: Right.

00:19:11 Nicholas Anthony: It's meant to get on this hype that memes have on the Internet of spreading virally and garnering all this interest, but not actually having much underlying value except for people find it funny or interesting in the moment. And so long as people continue to find it funny or interesting, it'll have value, sometimes, astronomical or absurd values. But just as quickly, it can lose value, and that can disappear. And so while some people have made money in this space by being, I guess, maybe great tastemakers in understanding where that would be, many others have also lost money. And it's also been a space where people have pulled scams, where they've tried to do something called a rug pull, where they will try to garner interest. They'll get others to say they're very interested in it when they're really not. And once other people perceive interest and invest their money, then the insiders run. They pull the rug out from under everyone because they were never interested in the first place, and they end up making their money off of others. And so whether the interest is genuine or whether it's not, I think it's a very risky space for anyone to be delving into.

00:20:41 Andrew Keen: Nick, you're sounding like Elizabeth Warren again. Again, in all seriousness, there were all sorts of pieces about how Trump made, whether it was $500 million or a billion on crypto, where most of his meme coin investors lost money. Coming back to Congress, I know you're a Cato. You're libertarian. You're not a big fan of, excessive government regulation. Maybe for you, all government regulation is excessive. But the way you're describing a meme coin, surely there should be some regulation. You're a sophisticated guy, so you're not gonna get done by this. But what about your mom or your grandmother or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your kids — who don't understand this stuff, who spend half their lives on TikTok or YouTube or Facebook where people are talking endlessly about not being able to lose in this situation. Surely, there needs to be some regulation protecting people, often rather ill-informed people, to put it politely, who tend to have less money from being essentially fleeced by these influencer scams.

00:21:58 Nicholas Anthony: Yes. I think that there is a role for government. I don't wanna see full bans across the board. That's been something that's been talked about in Congress of banning things like stablecoins or meme coins. Just because I think something is dumb doesn't mean I think it should be illegal. But at the same time, I think there should be a role of government. In case of there being fraud, that should absolutely be illegal. It should be illegal if someone is coming in and tricking other people and stealing their money. I don't care whether you're doing that with some snake oil potion with a cart on the street or you're doing it with a meme coin. If you are deceiving other people to take their money, then that should be against the law. And that's something that many people in the libertarian space agree on is a very clear line of there shouldn't be deception, and there should be clear disclosures about what's going on, how something's actually designed. So I worry when I see, some members get sort of a flash reaction and say that the whole thing should be banned or everything should be halted. But I do think there is a role for limited government in the space, and that's part of what Senator Warren was actually calling for was for an investigation to see if there was a rug pull. Now I will say from what I've seen, it doesn't really appear like it's a case of fraud. It seems like the president, yes, exerted his influence over his many fans, but it doesn't seem like he tricked them. They knew that he was behind this, and it was essentially a trading card, a digital collectible of sorts. He didn't say that it was gonna replace the dollar or that he was gonna invest all of the country's money into it or anything like that. But if it turns out he was doing something behind the scenes, then I think he should be prosecuted for it.

00:24:10 Andrew Keen: Wow. So if Elizabeth Warren's party comes back to power in the midterms, you think that there may be an investigation, or — you think there perhaps should be an investigation of this?

00:24:25 Nicholas Anthony: I think it's reasonable to have an investigation into it. I don't think it needs to be in terms of, whatever party is in power, although that is, how it seems to go. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to have an investigation into the sitting president and seeing what's going on with this activity. Whether or not it happens under this Congress or the next Congress, time will tell. But as long as it's pointed at the facts and not turned into a political witch hunt, I think that's fine.

00:25:04 Andrew Keen: But that's unavoidable. I mean, Trump's pitch on his meme coin is join the Trump community. This is history in the making, and he talks about, having fun. I mean, it's clearly — there's clearly been some marketing thought gone into this in terms of convincing people that they've got nothing to lose here, even if they have everything to lose.

00:25:30 Nicholas Anthony: And that is a tough part about this in terms of assigning whether something was brilliantly marketed or fraudulently sold on the public. And that's why it's important to have investigations into these issues to figure out where that line is drawn. Again, it, to me, it seems like this is something where his diehard fans really bought into, but it doesn't seem like he promised something that didn't exist. Now I will say, I don't really see this as history in the making, but that's a very subjective thing. And so that's why it's very tough to sort of assign that. But if they could prove that something happened behind the scenes, that they were manipulating the market or they were, fraudulently writing the code, then there's something else to it. Then you might actually have a case to dig into.

00:26:32 Andrew Keen: Alright. You're gonna get a call in the morning from Elizabeth Warren. What about the architecture of the meme coin? It was offered or operated off the Solana blockchain platform, which is perhaps not the most respected platform. Is there a kind of meme architecture? The Trump coin is the tip of the iceberg, but when you get beneath the iceberg and you see how it operates, are there troubling players in this outside Donald Trump and his wife, the platforms which seem to be designed for one kind of scam or another?

00:27:15 Nicholas Anthony: It's a little tricky to say because there are so many different blockchains that you can build a meme coin off of. And, frankly, I think the more concerning piece is not so much the technical architecture with this, but rather the individual or the group that is behind it. So when you have people who have histories of running questionable marketing campaigns, questionable events and merchandising options, that's when you get into, okay. This is something that I should be careful about. This is something that I should really do my due diligence on because those are really the factors that matter the most. Now you can get some safeguards with some code where if you have something like Bitcoin that is fully decentralized and you don't have anyone who's in control of it, that acts as a hedge on some of those concerns about an individual being behind it. But even then, if it's a small project, there's still a lot of questions that come out of it. If it's not open source, if it's a small project with only one person behind it, one big name who seems to only have the information and is feeding everything out, or if it's something that really no one has heard of this person before, but they're claiming it's the next big thing, then some questions need to be answered. And I think everyone should be careful of that.

00:28:55 Andrew Keen: Yesterday, Nick, Bitcoin jumped. Sometimes it jumps. Sometimes it falls. Some people are gonna be listening to this and thinking, well, this guy says that the meme coin is a scam, that there has no value behind it. But isn't that true of all crypto? Why does Bitcoin you've mentioned Bitcoin as respectable crypto, or you've implied it's respectable crypto. Where's the value in Bitcoin versus the dodgy element of, the Trump meme coin and other meme coins? How would you explain where the value is in Bitcoin?

00:29:35 Nicholas Anthony: So value at all times is subjective. When it comes to meme coins, it's usually people value the person or the group that's behind it, and that can change rapidly. But Bitcoin has something that is much more set in stone that's being valued. People look at it and value the fact that it is set at 21 million, no more, no less will be created, that it's censorship-resistant, and that anyone is free to use it. You don't have to be part of some special club. You don't have to be an elite. You don't have to be from a specific country. Anyone can come on board and use it. And the fact that any —

00:30:22 Andrew Keen: But, anyway, I mean, excuse me jumping in, Nick. I mean, you don't have to be part of an elite to use a dollar bill. I mean, you might need to be rich to have lots of dollar bills, but anyone can use it.

00:30:34 Nicholas Anthony: Well, for a lot of people in the world, it is very hard to get dollar bills. It is —

00:30:38 Andrew Keen: Harder than getting crypto? You go to the computer. You gotta have Internet access.

00:30:43 Nicholas Anthony: Yeah. It's very hard to get dollar bills across the globe. There's many countries that have bans on using foreign currency, and then also just getting the physical dollars in place can be extremely difficult. We see cash shortages even in official home currencies around the world as well. So you're absolutely right that Internet, electricity, computers are barriers that are there and exist. But even just getting physical cash, that could be very difficult as well.

00:31:16 Andrew Keen: You mentioned that queue in that line in English. People call queues. Americans call lines in Zimbabwe where by the time you wait in line, the price of whatever you're trying to buy has gone up. People have often referred to Africa as the ideal platform for one kind of digital revolution or another. Is crypto particularly popular in Africa?

00:31:43 Nicholas Anthony: It has been very popular there. I'm hesitant to say it's wildly popular, but there are hubs across Africa in Nigeria, in South Africa, in Kenya, where using cryptocurrency has become very popular for people there, especially as they experience things like hyperinflation more than other countries often do.

00:32:11 Andrew Keen: What about the conservatives? I appreciate the fact that you are not shy to criticize a president who, perhaps, in other ways, you admire. Where are conservatives on this? Are they, like you, very critical of this Trump meme, which to many, particularly Trump critics, seem like a simple scam?

00:32:34 Nicholas Anthony: Sadly, many conservatives have been swept up by Trump. They feel or at least they say the president can do no wrong, and so they have not criticized this in any way.

00:32:49 Andrew Keen: Do we have any examples, Nick? Who comes to mind?

00:32:53 Nicholas Anthony: Frankly, people like Senators Ted Cruz or Mike Lee —

00:32:58 Andrew Keen: Ted Cruz? I thought Ted Cruz was a brave man who stood up to Donald Trump.

00:33:02 Nicholas Anthony: He stood up on many issues, but I — to be —

00:33:05 Andrew Keen: — a brave man. He's even got a beard now. [ed.: passage garbled in raw audio (“I haven't even got his beers now”); reconstructed from the beard exchange earlier — verify against tape.]

00:33:08 Nicholas Anthony: Yes. It's something that unfortunately has caught a lot of people, and they don't wanna see any type of retaliation, consequence, or investigation, any level of, doing what could be seen as wrong to the president happened when I think having checks and balances in our system is what makes it good. It's what makes it strong that we can criticize our enemies and criticize our allies to make sure we're all doing the best we can. Yet, many don't wanna see that, and that's part of what's held up a lot of legislation in Congress right now is that there's legislation in place to regulate and set rules of the road for cryptocurrency. But at the same time, Democrats wanna see ethics language be put in to steer what the president's allowed to do around his meme coin and other projects. And Republicans have sort of allowed some things to happen, but have really prevented most of it. And it seems like they've really wanted to protect the president more than anything.

00:34:25 Andrew Keen: So if Cruz is an example of an obsequious Republican who follows Trump, probably has aspirations of his own Cruz coin, although I don't think anyone would buy that. Are there Republicans, Nick, who, like you, are willing to tell the truth on this, though?

00:34:46 Nicholas Anthony: Well, someone who has been very principled on the issue of cryptocurrency is Senator Cynthia Lummis, and she's been —

00:34:56 Andrew Keen: Of Wyoming.

00:34:57 Nicholas Anthony: Yes. Of Wyoming.

00:34:58 Andrew Keen: Not a senator who's particularly prominent, certainly not as a Trump critic.

00:35:04 Nicholas Anthony: Yes. I — and to be clear, she has been very supportive of President Trump. I would not say she's holding the flag against him or anything like that, but she has been very principled on the issue of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at large. She's been very willing to hear the issues and look at it from a principled stance of what does this mean, looking at it in terms of limited government, of being fiscally responsible, and the like. And that's something that is welcome to see. It's not just touting headlines or listening to lobbyists from Coinbase and the like. And, certainly, they're probably a fan of her, but she actually understands the issue, which is something that has been very rare in Congress. And I'll be fair. I'll say it's not easy to understand the world of cryptocurrency. It's been around for a while, but it's only gotten big in the last decade or so, and it's a very technical space. You're talking about issues of monetary and financial policy. You're also talking about the latest in technological development. So that's not easy for a member of Congress to get up to speed on, but she's one of the ones who has taken the time to try to understand it both from a principle and technological point of view. And that's something I very much appreciate.

00:36:39 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Coinbase, very successful trading platform, I guess. Maybe that's the wrong way to describe it. Public company. How is the industry, particularly the Web3 industry of companies like, Coinbase, how have they responded? Have they — are they nervous about the way in which crypto perhaps is getting a bad name from things like the Trump coin?

00:37:09 Nicholas Anthony: I think so. And they're also in a similar position as the politicians who don't want to offend the president, though, because they see the president as ultimately signing off on the laws that are going to regulate them. So I think they've been walking a very careful line in the public in terms of not offending him. But at the same time, they definitely see the harm that has been caused by the president's actions. They see how this has undermined much of the work they've done to gain legitimacy. And, frankly, I think it's added a few gray hairs to their own beards in terms of the stress they felt under it. But at the same time, they've been working for a long time, really since 2021, 2022, to get a presence in DC and make a name for themselves as Congress has taken a closer look at them. And they've had a lot of success, even success in terms of getting a president who is involved in this space for better or worse. But what ends up happening from here is really going to depend on where Congress lands in the next month or in the next Congress in terms of legislation.

00:38:31 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting you bring up graybeards. Of course, the Coinbase CEO, not only is beardless, but headless — not headless, hairless. What's his name? Brian Armstrong.

00:38:43 Nicholas Anthony: Yes.

00:38:44 Andrew Keen: He even banned the discussion of politics controversially, in the first Trump term. He's clearly sympathetic, I think, in some ways. Are there more responsible figures in Silicon Valley than Armstrong who are ready to call a scam when it is a scam?

00:39:04 Nicholas Anthony: Oh, that's a good question. And, frankly, one I don't have a good answer for.

00:39:10 Andrew Keen: Probably because there isn't one.

00:39:11 Nicholas Anthony: Yeah. I don't know who would be willing to — I mean, frankly, they put their business at risk in getting a target on their back from the president if they do it. So part of me is sympathetic. I have to acknowledge the fact that I'm in a very privileged position and that here at the Cato Institute, I can call balls and strikes, and I can do so across the board, whereas other people aren't quite as lucky. But I do wish more people were willing to do that.

00:39:46 Andrew Keen: How important is this in a bigger framework, Nick? Bloomberg last year talked about Trump meme coins being a disaster in waiting. They're certainly a disaster for the people who lost money on them. But are there implications for the broader economy, or is this just, in economic terms at least, a storm in a teacup?

00:40:11 Nicholas Anthony: I think that's a pretty fair way to look at it. There's ups and downs in the cryptocurrency space. Everything from meme coins to Bitcoin has its own volatility set where people are losing and gaining. But we haven't really seen that affect the larger economy, and I don't think we're going to see a major impact at least for some time. It's big. It's headline news, but it's not quite that big yet. And there are fears from smaller banks that have been in the headlines recently where they're concerned about they're going to lose money to things like stablecoins specifically. But at the same time, we saw a lot of those same concerns when PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and other payment apps first became a thing. Many banks were saying a lot of the same things, and we never saw those impacts really come to fruition. So I think some added competition will benefit us, but it won't really turn the tides in either direction for many years to come. Maybe in a future scenario where it plays a much bigger role in people's pockets, but not quite yet.

00:41:34 Andrew Keen: But where are we in that narrative, that greater historical narrative, Nick? Few years ago, all my shows seem to be about Web3, crypto, blockchain. I had friends like Don Tapscott who said that this was the new Internet. This was gonna change everything. And then, of course, OpenAI and generative AI came along, and now every show seems to be about AI. Has crypto missed the historical buzz, or is it part of the AI revolution in your view?

00:42:10 Nicholas Anthony: Oh, that is a good question. I think it's a little bit of both. I think it's a little bit of both in that first, the major wave, I think, is part of that story in terms of how it gets to its final resting place, whether that's success or death. And I say that because I think the wave we saw from really 2016 to 2023 was in many ways a first-mover sort of event where the masses were exposed to it. Many companies started up and started building in the space and started innovating and seeing what can be done, what can't. And so what we have now is less of that bubbling up and foaming over and more of people who are building core things. There's still some ridiculous projects that are going on, but there's more so legitimate and time-tested things that are standing. Whereas AI is now taking that foaming-over fever that's building up and is probably gonna experience a very similar cycle. Now I also said that cryptocurrency is part of that, and I say that because a lot of the AI models that are being built have cryptocurrency integrated into them, whether that's Bitcoin, ETH, or stablecoins in terms of their being used to pay for the models and run them in terms of tokens that are used for processing. And so if AI continues to grow, I think that'll lift up those pieces of the cryptocurrency realm as well. And there's some people who have predicted that Bitcoin will be the chief supplier in that space in terms of allocating tokens. There's some that say that it'll be completely new coins. What actually comes out of it, we'll still have to see because I think we're still very early in AI development. We're only really scratching at the surface in terms of figuring out what it can be or rather what it can do and where it's gonna go from here.

00:44:40 Andrew Keen: It's always early, Nick, in Silicon Valley. Always very early until it's very late. There doesn't seem to be anything in between. I wonder also whether in crypto, a lot of mainstream financial institutions and bankers have jumped on board the crypto train recently. They used to be deeply skeptical saying the whole thing was a scam. Now many of them seem much more open.

00:45:03 Nicholas Anthony: Yes.

00:45:04 Andrew Keen: Does that mean that they're appropriating it, that the blob is acquiring crypto and it's just gonna become part of the establishment, or does that mean that crypto will eventually become the establishment?

00:45:19 Nicholas Anthony: Oh, I — I think it's a little bit of appropriating it. I think you're gonna have a divide between the two. So you're going to have, cypherpunks on one side, and you're going to have the bankers on the other. And you're absolutely right that it was not that long ago that bankers were pretty unanimously saying this is a scam. This is awful. This is a waste of time. And now you have pretty unanimously, banks are building their own cryptocurrencies. They're building stablecoins and tokenized deposits because they see the efficiency gains that they can incorporate from it. I will say slightly in their defense, part of that was the legal problems. They are one of the most highly regulated industries, and so it's tough to involve a new system. And now that they see that Congress is writing legislation, that regulators are writing regulation, that they can have a foothold in this space, but it's not gonna be what Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned in 2008 and 2009. It's going to be a very different form to say the least.

00:46:41 Andrew Keen: Are you Satoshi? We don't know who he is. How did you get into all this, Nick?

00:46:46 Nicholas Anthony: I got into this, gosh. I think it would have been about 2012. I was lucky enough to have a friend who was mining Bitcoin at the time, and I was a very, very young economics student, studying dollarization. And at the time, there were early conversations about what an alternative digital currency could be, how that could replicate some of the history we saw with free banking in the past. And so when my friend told me that they were looking into this, they were mining Bitcoin, it very much caught my ear, and I've been endlessly fascinated for many years now.

00:47:33 Andrew Keen: You didn't buy Bitcoin? You wouldn't need to work at Cato. You wouldn't need to work anyway. You could buy your own island.

00:47:39 Nicholas Anthony: Yes. I've been involved in the space for a long time now. I've had both my ups and downs, and I've gotten the gray hair from all the stress along the way.

00:47:52 Andrew Keen: Well, at least not as many gray hairs — or gray beards — as Ted Cruz. Finally, advice from you. You're the expert. There's the Trump meme. Should there be a Keen meme? Should I come out with a — I don't have the support or the following of Trump, but it has — it sounds good, doesn't it?

00:48:10 Nicholas Anthony: A Keen meme? I think it's more trouble than it's worth.

00:48:14 Andrew Keen: I can't sell you a Keen meme, Nick. You know what?

00:48:18 Nicholas Anthony: For a dollar, I will take a Keen meme.

00:48:21 Andrew Keen: I don't have any cash on me. I'll have to go in that Zimbabwe queue. Anyway, Nicholas Anthony, a research fellow at Cato, their crypto guy. Very interesting having your libertarian thought and your — your honesty on some of the things that Donald Trump's getting up to in the crypto space. Keep doing the good work, Nick.

00:48:44 Nicholas Anthony: Thank you.

00:48:44 Andrew Keen: Thank you. I'm sure the next time there's a big crypto crisis when it brings down the entire world economy, we'll get you back on the show.

00:48:51 Nicholas Anthony: I will be here.