Feb 7, 2025 · 1h 10m · more-or-less
#85: The $250M Meme Coin Experiment · More or Less Podcast
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In this Jackson Hole edition of the More or Less podcast, hosts Sam Lessin, Jessica Lessin, Dave Morin, and Brit Morin unpack the chaotic $250 million viral launch of their experimental meme coin, examine shifting cryptocurrency regulations, and debate the implications of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.6 Guest teaching 3.0 Guest disagreement 2.1 The hosts pushing back 3.2
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 15:53 Sam challenges the premise that meme coins lack legitimacy
Sam flatly reframes Brit's skepticism by asking why retail-dominated tokens like Fartcoin are not already considered legitimate alternative markets.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 44:15 Jessica confronts Sam over rug pull allegationsJessica bluntly halts the abstract financial theory discussion to directly interrogate Sam on whether his sudden token launch constituted a rug pull.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 17:50 Sam explains why retail constructs institutional-resistant assetsSam educates the hosts on why absurd tokens like Fartcoin exist, explaining that ridiculous names keep institutional funds out so retail traders can access early upside.
The host holds their own ▶ 1:00:55 Jessica dismantles the tech-turnaround justification for DOGEJessica counters Dave's citing of Twitter EBITDA metrics by arguing that Treasury oversight involves profound geopolitical conflicts of interest that cannot be solved by private tech metrics alone.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| More or Less Official Podcast Title Sequence | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Introductory banter recapping a weekend ski race in Jackson Hole and friendly poker disputes. The tone is casual and playful with no substantive debate or policy analysis. | |
| Conception of Jelly Jelly and Accidental Launch | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Sam explains the origins of Jelly Jelly and the impromptu meme coin launch, while Jessica probes the product thesis, jokingly comparing it to an episode of Silicon Valley. | |
| The Pump.fun Subculture and College Party Dynamics | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Sam describes the mechanics of Pump.fun and draws an analogy between meme coin momentum and college dorm parties, while Jessica presses for exact numbers on retail participation. | |
| Fartcoin, Economic Nihilism, and Retail Investor Access | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Brit challenges the legitimacy of meme coins like Fartcoin, prompting Sam to counter that ridiculous branding is a deliberate, rational defense mechanism keeping institutional capital out of retail's lane. | |
| Crypto Task Forces and the Shifting Regulatory Horizon | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Dave lays out an extensive technical and historical monologue covering SEC crypto task forces, Hester Peirce's statements, David Sacks' timeline, and the evolution from 2017 ICOs to tokenized assets. | |
| The Severed Floor: Balancing Startup Utility and Memes | 5 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Dave challenges Sam's assertion that the meme economy strictly wants pure narrative, pointing to the Vine coin smart contract lockup mechanism as evidence of architectural differentiation. | |
| Venture Capital Strategy and Solana Infrastructure Scalability | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Dave and Sam compare venture LP expectations and token exposure, highlighting why Solana's throughput enables high-velocity trading behaviors that Ethereum's gas costs historically prohibited. | |
| Exchange Curation, Telegram Hype, and Addressing Rug Allegations | 6 | 3 | 3 | 6 | Jessica bluntly interrogates Sam over whether he rugged buyers on his meme coin, while also skepticism toward the notion that crypto markets will expand unfettered without heavy regulatory oversight. | |
| Market Realities, Personal Liberty, and the Hype Treadmill | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | The hosts review the SEC commissioner's libertarian stance on speculative risk, review Jelly Jelly's drop from a $200M peak to $12M, and explore the exhausting treadmill of maintaining online Telegram hype. | |
| Instrumenting Government Spending and the Politico Subsidy Controversy | 6 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Jessica corrects common misconceptions regarding Politico's government subscription revenues, while Dave compares DOGE's auditing mission to Dustin Moskovitz instrumenting early Facebook metrics. | |
| Privacy Risks, Sensitive Treasury Data, and Government Employee Oversight | 6 | 3 | 4 | 6 | Jessica forcefully challenges the assumption that Silicon Valley engineers should have unfettered access to sensitive Treasury data and SSNs without clear public oversight or transparency. | |
| Elon Musk's Track Record, Geopolitical Motivations, and Clean-Room Oversight | 7 | 4 | 4 | 7 | Jessica pushes back against Dave's defense of Elon Musk's corporate turnaround record, arguing that geopolitical ambitions and deep electoral conflicts of interest demand strict accountability over blind trust. | |
| Moving at Internet Speed: Government Bureaucracy vs. Structural Incentives | 6 | 3 | 2 | 4 | The panel debates DOGE's operational pace and discusses the risks of disrupting mission-critical government infrastructure like FAA air traffic control systems. | |
| Super Bowl Commercial Trivia: AI Companies Spend $332 Million | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Brit quizzes the group on Super Bowl ad expenditures by AI firms, followed by Sam pitching his tongue-in-cheek highway billboard idea depicting burning piles of capital as an AI moat. |
Statements from this episode (41)
Lessin: Met weekly for 18 months with Venmo co-founder on Jelly Jelly
“And we've been meeting weekly for 18 months to go over this company that he's been working on, Jelly Jelly, where I've been an investor. I was an investor of the previous company. I have, like, I'll always back Ikram. I believe in Ikram.”
Sam Lessin: Young users are totally over filters and want raw content
“We also know that the youth are totally over filters. They don't give a shit. We've gone through the game of how do you make yourself most beautiful? People just want good raw content, right?”
Sam Lessin: I launched the JellyMyJelly meme coin on pump.fun
“So I launched a meme content on pump.fun called JellyMyJelly. I posted it on Twitter being like, we just launched this meme coin. And then it went bananas.”
Lessin: Solana has become the center of meme coin energy
“Solana has become the place where almost all the energy is around us and specifically there are apps like something called pump.fun”
Lessin: I have never sold and will not sell Jelly-My-Jelly
“I have not ever sold a jelly my jelly and I won't.”
Morin: Jelly-My-Jelly reached 40,000 to 50,000 holders in 24 hours
“I believe the number of holders of this coin went from zero to around 40 or 50,000 within 24 hours.”
Lessin: Meme coin launch drove tens of thousands of app downloads
“There's also like this drove like tens of thousands of downloads of the app and trying the app.”
Brit Morin: Fartcoin is pump.fun's top coin at $451M market cap
“The number one coin on pumped up fund by market cap that was launched four months ago and still has a market cap today of four hundred and fifty one million is... Fart coin.”
Sam Lessin: Institutional investors stripped retail upside from Layer 1 crypto
“What happened in layer ones is that basically it became too obvious and all of a sudden all the fancy investors with lots of money figured it out and they started bidding up and taking all the value appreciation in the private markets pre-token launch. Right. …”
Sam Lessin: Ridiculous meme coins intentionally keep institutional investors out
“Fartcoin is serious specifically because of what you said, right? Which is, it's an asset that is so ridiculous and named in such a way that institutions will never touch it. And what that means is that retail can play, right? And so there's this really intere…”
Morin: Regulators should focus on dollar-backed stablecoins before other crypto assets
“Which I think is also really smart because, you know, we should definitely start in the place where the dollar is the backed, you know, is the, is, is backing the crypto asset that we're looking at before we move on to the you know things that move people away…”
Lessin: Team Plans to Build Real App Utility for Jelly Meme Coin
“We have ideas about how the coin works as a utility in the app. We're going to build those. That's why it's an interesting thing to us.”
Morin: Vine Founder's Coin Contract Locked Up 20% Over Three Months
“The smart contract that he wrote locked up 20% of the developer wallet or 20% of the float into the developer wallet over a three month or so time period.”
Lessin: Meme Coins Typically Drop to 10% to 25% of Peak
“If you look at all of these, right, the general trend, and you can talk about like mini pumps in between or whatever, is that they've all like traded like a 10th or a quarter of where they peaked out briefly, right?”
Morin: Offline was a seed investor in Solana, believes it is superior
“I think you and I and all of us here on this pod have always thought, you know, that Solana is the superior technology. It's the most scalable. We were seed investors.”
Morin: Trump coin on Solana processed $40 billion in transactions
“The Trump coin, which was built on Solana was, you know, doing forty billion in transactions.”
Lessin: Ethereum's high costs dictated NFTs, while Solana enables high-velocity trading
“The medium is the message and Ethereum is slow and expensive. Right. And so if you think about like the NFT thing was primarily ETH and ETH derivative based, right? It's slow and expensive. So like you had a different set of behaviors. Solana is fast and effic…”
Jessica Lessin: Circle wants to go public and still cannot
“Look, there's a big backlog of companies like Circle, You know, one of the more as established crypto companies that wants to go public and still can't.”
Sam Lessin: I bought 2% of Jelly Jelly to establish it
“We launched this thing as a fair launch. I bought, I put it out. I bought two percent of it for almost nothing to just establish it.”
Sam Lessin: Crypto creators cannot formally prove they didn't secretly sell
“Interestingly, I actually have no formal way to prove that, right? Because it's reasonable. And I was like, because he's like, could I have in theory created other wallets and been the one that made it moon and then sold it? In theory, I guess I could have, an…”
Lessin: Venture capital investing resembles meme coins with dubious value
“By the way, it sounds like venture capital investments. You invest in things of fictitious value on a story of questionable dubious, a dubious story. It's probably worth zero.”
Lessin: Meme coin Jelly Jelly hit $200M market cap on $500M volume
“Jelly Jelly, again, the crazy, crazy wild initial ride, it went up to two hundred million dollars in, in, on a five, something like half a billion dollars of volume, which is insanity. There's actually real liquidity on it.”
Lessin: Doubled Twitter follower count following meme coin launch
“It's just like the interesting experience I had is, you know, you end up, I like double the number of Twitter followers I have of these people who are interested in this economy.”
Lessin: Elon Musk is ultimate cult leader whose stocks behave like meme coins
“And maybe Elon, I would actually argue that Elon in a lot of ways, I've said this a long time is the ultimate cult leader. And in some ways, a lot of Elon stocks behave like this on absolute steroids.”
Jessica Lessin: Federal payments to Politico were subscriptions, not subsidies or grants
“One of these payments was to Politico, the news organization, and so instantly the narrative was that the government was subsidizing, giving grants, giving money, to Politico... So what it was, Dave, is that this agency bought a product from Politico through t…”
Dave Morin: DOGE's technical instrumentation will improve federal government decisions
“For maybe the first time in American history, we've got a really fantastic technical team going and just instrumenting things so that there might be a dashboard that we can all just look at and ask the question, like, what is that money going to over there? Wh…”
Jessica Lessin: DOGE workers self-police conflicts despite unprecedented data access
“You have, you know, employees doing this who have a special status. They are in charge of determining their own conflicts of interest. And they are getting unprecedented access to something that is incredibly sensitive and important.”
Sam Lessin: Post-internet tooling enables central management without middle managers
“Post-internet where we are today. All of a sudden it's pretty easy to crack open all these things and say, look, it's all government dollars. Like we probably should have a holistic sense of what is going on and where money is flowing and some sort of like ove…”
Morin: DOGE will release a metrics dashboard to the public
“At least what I'm reading from what's going on, it's that they're going in there to get metrics implemented into a dashboard that at some point they're going to show to the American people. And so you will get the transparency.”
Lessin: Elon Musk's end game is patronizing global conservatism
“Elon has an end game and it appears to be To basically become a patron of the next set of the conservative movement around the world for the next several decades, right? If you zoom out, like his support of Donald Trump, what he's doing in Europe and around th…”
Morin: Musk grew Twitter's EBITDA margins from 13% to 46%
“Today it's a 2.7 billion dollar company. Yes. It's worth half as much, But they're doing 1.25 billion and he grew EBITDA margins from 13% to 46%.”
Morin: DOGE Operates Dramatically Faster Than Traditional Government Agencies
“Like the sheer speed that they're moving is dramatically faster than we have come to expect from government agencies really.”
Jessica Lessin: Non-Bureaucratic Teams Can Effectively Jolt Government Systems
“So I think you can have these you know, these out of the normal bureaucratic things to jolt the system.”
Sam Lessin: FAA is relatively well-run and should not be DOGE's top priority
“The FA is actually pretty good. Like, there are certainly things you can improve, but it is actually interesting, because if you look across government agencies, they probably aren't the first people I would go plug into, because it's a pretty good system, act…”
Sam Lessin: Elon Musk's track record shows he shouldn't be blindly trusted
“Elon in his career does not prove to be the always upstanding white knight that you blindly trust.”
Brit Morin: A Super Bowl commercial costs $8 million in 2025
“We're up to eight. We're up to eight million.”
Brit Morin: AI companies are spending $332 million on Super Bowl ads
“Guys, three hundred and thirty-two million dollars from AI companies alone.”
Brit Morin: OpenAI is running its first Super Bowl ad in 2025
“Including open AI's first Super Bowl ad.”
Lessin: An AI company's moat is merely a burning pile of money
“The moat is a burning pile of money.”
Lessin plans to buy a $25k satirical AI billboard on Highway 101
“Instead of eight million dollars, I'm gonna spend 25,000 dollars and have a hilarious billboard. I'm very excited. It's one of those things, like, I'm gonna submit it as an expense to the venture firm, and if they reject it, it's okay.”