So I've been doing research. Real research. Primary sources. Wikipedia.
And I've come to a conclusion that's going to upset approximately half of finance Twitter: memecoin culture needs to be led by the young (people younger than "Boomers"). Actually led, decisions and all, the whole steering wheel. And I have historical evidence, which means you can't get mad at me. Getting mad at me is getting mad at history. Take it up with Alexander the Great.
Speaking of which. Alexander the Great started his conquest of the entire known world at age 20. Twenty. At 20 I was arguing with people in a Discord server about whether a fighting game character could beat Goku. Which, in hindsight, is basically the same thing. Both of us were laying groundwork for empire, one of us just had a horse.
Genghis Khan gets brought up a lot as the "old leader" counterexample because he became Great Khan at 44, and to that I say: read a book. The man had been leading his clan since he was a teenager. He spent twenty years grinding tribal warfare like it was ranked queue, and THEN went on his conquest arc. The 44 was his power spike, and the character build started at 13. Caesar? Politics at 30, Gaul at 41, already twenty years deep in the game. Babur was a king at TWELVE. The pattern is embarrassingly consistent. Every great conqueror in history started young, adapted to change, stacked experience, and then went on the warpath. You know what history lacks entirely? A guy who became king at 60 with zero experience and then conquered anything. That guy doesn't exist. I checked. He's simply absent from the record.
Now let's talk about the technology thing, because this is where it gets brutal.
Every generation gets one technology that separates them from the previous one. When smartphones came out, an entire generation of adults was reduced to holding the phone at arm's length, typing with one finger, and calling their kids to ask how to attach a photo. And look, that's just what happens when a tool arrives after your brain has finished setting like concrete. Nobody's on trial here. The concrete simply set.
AI is that moment again, except worse, because this time the tool actually matters.
The absolute ceiling of the older generation right now is "prompt engineering." That's the peak. That's their Everest. Writing a nice paragraph to ChatGPT and calling themselves an AI expert on LinkedIn. Meanwhile the tech-savvy ones, the elite of that cohort, the special forces, have discovered fine-tuning. Congratulations. That puts them roughly eight months behind a 19-year-old who's chaining MCP servers and CLI agents together to make the AI do things the AI company didn't even know it could do. Young people skipped the "using the tools" stage entirely and went straight to building on top of them. That's a different sport. That's the difference between riding a horse and inventing the cavalry charge.
And memecoins are an attention war that is more competitive than any other branches in crypto. So tell me again why the generals should be people who need help attaching a photo. People who thinks minions pictures are the peak humor. People that does not understand sarcasm in a group chat? People that thinks throwing money to people will make a memecoins bigger?
Here's the part where I get briefly sincere, so brace yourself
Older people leading everything is actually the historical anomaly. It's a recent development. And how's it going? Look around. An entire generation that can't afford houses, can't afford rent, watching policies get written by people who will not live long enough to experience the consequences, who got theirs and pulled the ladder up behind them, and who now can't even retire properly so they're STILL in the seats. The young generation looked at that deal, looked at their savings account, looked at the S&P, and concluded, rationally, that a cartoon coin was a more honest financial instrument than the system that priced them out of existence. Call it degeneracy if you want, but a whole generation reaching the same conclusion at the same time is a market signal, and markets don't lie. The memecoin IS the youth's response to the world the older generation built. You cannot outsource leadership of that response to the people it's responding to. That's like putting the final boss in charge of the speedrun.
Okay, sincere part over.
The culture argument is even simpler. Older people do not know what is cool. This works like gravity, or Genghis Khan winning, in that it applies to everyone equally and takes no offense at your feelings about it. They can't tell cool from lame, they don't know what attracts people, and they fundamentally cannot feel the specific desperation that makes memecoin culture funny, because the humor IS the desperation. You can't write the joke if you don't live the setup. Every time an older person tries to lead internet culture, it produces content with the exact energy of a brand account posting "how do you do, fellow kids" and we all have to look away out of respect.
So here's the actual proposal, and it's older than all of us: the emperor model. Every young conqueror in history had a council of old wise men. The advisors advised. On life. On patience. On not executing your entire cabinet in year one. Valuable stuff. But the decisions, the campaigns, the direction of the empire, that was the young leader's job, because it was his era to conquer and his world to understand.
Same structure. Old people: life advice, wisdom, "don't spend your rent money," genuinely useful, thank you for your service. Memecoin culture decisions: made by people under 40 who've actually lived in the trenches of this industry, because experience in THIS war is the only experience that counts, and the under-40s are the only ones who have it.
The young lead the culture. The elders advise the person. Everybody plays their role, SPX wins the culture war, and history books get written about us by some kid skimming Wikipedia at 2am.
That's the blueprint. It worked for every empire that ever mattered.
And if you disagree, that's fine. You're just disagreeing with Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and me. Bold move. Historically, it hasn't gone well for your side.
