Well, I mean, listen, like you I see this thing very, very long term, but let's just step back and talk about some things that have happened. And so, you know, you know this and I know this, but what, what does happen is whatever you think is not going to happen will happen. So the trade, the trade was set up for, we're going to 150, 200. We had an explosive post Trump election number in November. You know, we were in the 60s. We shot right up to 100. And then, you know, we, we had our little correction in April. Then we shot back through those numbers into the 120s, you know, and so people were like, okay, well we're set up and we're on the march to go higher. But, you know, what happens is the unexpected. A lot of OGs in the space sold and I don't know the exact data. We could go over it together, but there were OGs that said, yep, I've owned this thing since 2008, 9, 10, 11, whatever it was, I'm going to buy a yacht or a piece of a sports team. And so we were absorbing that. But on the road to absorbing that, there was some over leverage in the system. So when Trump came out with that China tweet where he said that he was upset with the rare earth deal, it pulled a pin in crypto. And that happens when you have too much leverage in the system. And so you had the massive deleveraging. I watched the Tom Lee interview yesterday with Brian Sullivan three times last night because I really was trying to understand what he was saying. And I think he's generally right, but I think Tom got stung by some things. He was a little flat footed yesterday. But if I took out the mooch decoder ring and I said what Lee was trying to say is that there were operational difficulties. If it really feels like to me that a group linked to trade fight, I don't know who, but a group linked to trade fi got hurt. They began a process of systematic liquidation of inventory and clearing out things alongside of OG selling, which led to whether people like me saying this or not, it's a garden variety Scott crypto correction. It's a garden variety bitcoin correction. The altcoin stuff is separate. Okay, so my opinion on the altcoins, and again, some people in crypto who love Donald Trump are not going to love me saying this, but I think he crushed the altcoin market. And I'll tell you how he did it. He entered the altcoin market with a meme coin prior to the inauguration. It sucked a Lot of liquidity into that meme coin. Then that meme coin busted or combusted like other meme coins want to do. And he, he caused a regulatory slowdown. If you had said to me, after November, what's going to happen in crypto? There's going to be a bipartisan, particularly younger people in the Congress who don't want to go up against crypto PACs or crypto billionaires are going to give up the ghost. There's no non crypto voter, Scott. And so, you know, they're going to give up the ghost. They're going to be pro crypto or find propitious regulation pursuant to crypto. But I think the Trump meme coin stung, that it stunted, that a lot of Democrats have dug in and we've made crypto a little bit more partisan than I would have expected, which is why you don't have both pieces of this legislation that we expected to be out already. So I think that's created some uncertainty and it certainly hurt the altcoin market. So those are my comments on all this. And the question is, am I right? Are we going to 150 or is Peter Schiff right? Or are we going to zero? Okay? And so what I love about Peter, every time something happens, he comes out of the woodwork. Even though he had the chance to buy Bitcoin at 10 cents, it's now 84,000. He's right, everyone else is wrong. And so that's part of his marketing shtick. And I get that. But if you tell me what do we got going for. It's just three quick things. Cause I wrote these down. If you don't mind, I'll just share them with you. Digital assets are becoming a core institutional allocation. That is happening. Talk to Robbie Mishnik at BlackRock. Talk to financial consultants, financial advisors. That is happening. Okay? The blockchain, if you, if you follow Larry Fink around, he is literally on a bully pulpit standing there talking about the tokenization of assets. And so again, the blockchain is quietly going to replace the financial plumbing that's going on. We're already seeing things like tokenized treasuries. We're seeing things I tokenize. They fund on Avalanche, okay? And I think you've got Avalanche and the subnets of Avalanche Solana, you've got things like Ton. Even Ethereum are going to be part of the infrastructure and the financial rails, whether people like it or not. And let's talk about Bitcoin for a second. The supply shock in Bitcoin in my opinion is now structural. Okay? You've, you're at 19.7 million mind. Okay, so you've only got one two point, sorry, 1.4 to go. Okay. ETFs are being bought by sovereigns. The having again, we're, we're gonna, gonna have another having before you know it. I think that's gonna also help the supply curve of Bitcoin. And so for me, I don't know, I'm, I'm, I'm watching deleveraging and I'm watching a little bit of a tech wreck for crypto, which is ahead of the tech wreck for stocks. And I like it. I'm not really mused by it. I'm not really plussed by it. I'm not ready to pull the alarm bell yet. And since I am Italian milker and I've said one last thing four times. Let me say one more last thing. If you and I were on this program together and it was January of 2023, and let's say you took out a crystal ball and you looked at me and said, mooch, November, it's going to be the 21st of November, it's going to be 2025. And this sixteen thousand dollar Bitcoin that we're looking at is going to be eighty four thousand BE5X. I'd see it in my crystal ball. I would have given at least one testicle for that, possibly two and a kidney. Okay, and so for people to get crazy about this, what are they talking about? Okay, well, you and I were underwater getting our asses kicked less than three years ago. Okay, so, so. Oh, but Mooch, it was at 124, so we should now be in a depression. So, you know, that's how I see the whole thing.
B (14:10)
Yeah, I mean, listen, I mean that's, that's, you know, I've seen a lot. Listen, this is my ninth bear market in life. I started in this issue in 1988. So I got 37 years into the industry. I guess what I would say to you is the market less the Mag 7. I get that number. Okay. Because if you pull out the Mag 7, the market has broadly seen the S&P493 Scott has underperformed and there is fear there. And so then you're looking at the Mag 7 and you're saying, Whoa, will the Mag 7 present a problem for us? You know, meaning are there pockets of bubble activity, AI bubble activity, et cetera? I think they're somewhat connected, but not 100%. I think the disconnection really was the leverage in bitcoin and the leverage in the crypto market, which caused a cascade last month and we're getting the aftermath of this month. But if you said to me, let's say I just landed from Mars, have been out of the market for five years and you were debriefing me and you said, hey, we've got an administration that's pro friendly to crypto, likely to get some legislation passed. There's two, there's 11 ETFs that cropped up. Blackrock having the largest one. Bitcoin went from 16 to 126. Anthony, it's now back at 84. And the fear, the fear index is seven. Okay. And the overall aggregate index, if you marry the stock fear index, Scott, with the crypto index is 14. These are literally all time lows. I'd be looking at you saying, okay, I gotta, I gotta raise some cash here and I gotta buy some bitcoin. And so that's what I'm doing. And so again, you gotta step back from these things. And, but listen, you know, if I bought because I had my first bitcoin, I bought at 126, let's say a 125. My message, those people is, okay, if you have some dough average down here, this is a good opportunity. But you know what happens is people buy and then if it doesn't go in their direction, they get skittish or they get nervous.
B (18:23)
Yeah. So, I mean, I've read the Fourth Turning. I read the new book Neil Howe put out. The Fourth turning is here. A lot of fourth Turning things are happening. But one thing that the fourth turning doesn't fully factor is the exponential rise of technology and the exponential enhancement of, of productivity as a result of that technology. And so, you know, you're on the cusp of, if Elon Musk is right, you're on the cusp of robotic helpers, you're on the cusp of better logistics, you're on the cusp of automated cars. You're about to crack the codes in drug discovery. If we stipulate that there are compounds on planet Earth that can help cure our illnesses, you're going to have situations now where you're going to be able to run a trillion permutations of those compounds over AI, which will lead to faster and faster immunotherapy benefits, faster drug therapies for different diseases that people have. And if you just think of what we've done recently, whether they're GLP1s, peptides, other things that we're using, we're making ourselves healthier, we're making ourselves more prosperous. I think one of our issues is political, frankly. I think we've got to figure out what we're going to do politically. Okay, in terms of, like, making sure that people have opportunity and making sure there's not. I mean, I'm for equal opportunity, Scott. I'm not for equal outcomes, but I feel like we have to figure out a way to help people that are in disadvantaged situations. You know, the mayor elect won on an affordability message. He got a, yeah, 2x the turnout. Now. I didn't want him to win. And I was. I was with Andrew Cuomo. I grew up with Andrew. I supported Andrew, but he won and he won on a resonating message. And I just want to make sure that we help people and stay capitalist. Okay? And if we do these things, the Fourth Turning is not going to be that consequential. Okay. I just think we're gonna once again our human innovation is gonna out match our policy miscues or policy missteps. And by the way, you know, Bitcoin, in a age of fiat currency uncertainty, Bitcoin I think is gonna be an even more important part of this story. Because the beauty of bitcoin is you don't be by relying on nobody and seeking the value of hundreds of thousands of people in nodes and networks to purify transactions. It's one of these beautiful stories. We've got drunk driving central bankers that have run our currencies off the road. And now we can have a robot which is a software base of this technology that can offer us a hard currency solution for all of our policy mistakes. I don't know, I'm all about that. And by the way, we don't have to have 100% acceptance. All we need is 20% acceptance globally and you're going to have a 500 to a million dollar coin.
B (21:51)
Yeah, well that and gold is old, okay? Don't forget that gold is old. If you're a 100 year old fossil, okay, you're buying gold, you're not buying bitcoin. If you control a central bank, you're not the 25 year old controlling the central bank, you're the 65 year old. You're buying gold. You're sniffing down still at bitcoin. But remember, there are people younger than you, Scott, that are someday in 15 or 20 years going to be in their mid-40s and they're going to love bitcoin more than they like gold. They're going to say, wow, gold is good but bitcoin is way better. And they're going to be shifting into bitcoin and you and I are early, I don't want to miss that. But gold is definitely trading on the macro topic of currency debasement. People are looking around saying whoa, unsustainable deficits everywhere. There's only, look, look, take this to the bank, Scott. Deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. So anybody who says otherwise, they don't know what they're talking about. There's no free lunch. You want to borrow the $2 trillion, absolutely no problem. You're going to have to pay it back somehow. And so we've decided that the way we're going to Pay it back is through the most pernicious and the most regressive form of taxation. That's inflation. We're chicken shit. We're not going to tax the people at a level that they need to be taxed at to give them the services. But what we're going to do is we're going to inflate and destroy and debase their currency so that we can pay it back with dollars that are worth less than the ones that we borrowed. But that kills the middle class, it kills the lower income people because those people typically don't have any assets. And so you're taking their time and their energy. That's why they're turning towards populism and that's why they're turning towards, you know, they're turning towards the politics of envy. But to me, bitcoin solves that. Bitcoin is a potential solution for that. So any which vector you want to go fourth turning, you know, macroeconomic depression, currency debasement, bitcoin sitting there and bitcoin is something you're going to look at and say, okay, I got to own some of that.
B (30:58)
Well, first of all, it's absolutely terrible. And I think the best framing I can provide is that a lot of these altcoins are down to or below where they were during the FTX crisis. You know, Bitcoin's at 16,000. I get, we have ambers and flaming flamed out altcoins, but Bitcoin's at 84,000. And you go look at these prices, these prices are FTX crisis prices. And so you got to ask yourself a fundamental question, what does that mean? And I get down to utility. And so what I would say to you, and I would say to your viewers and listeners, is there utility in Solana, yes or no? I'm going to say yes, obviously. Is there utility in Sui? I would say yes. And I go down the list. Avalanche, yes. And so then the question is if there's utility in these, will they come back? And I believe that they will. I think that there's platforms of tokenization. I think it's a lot like the cloud where you don't have one company providing the cloud. There'll be a multitude of layer ones that provide real world asset tokenization and real world utility. If I'm channeling my Tom Lee, maybe Ethereum will have a lot of stable coins on it which will boost the Ethereum network. But, but if I'm looking at 20,000 coins, Scott, could this be a body blow to a lot of those coins? And I think the answer is yes. You know, and I'll bring up, I'll bring up a coin, probably upset the founder, but I had a, I had a position, I don't have it anymore, but I had a position in this gaming token called Vulcan Forged. You know, the token got to 10, I'm looking at it here, it's trading at 60 cents now. We, we, we exited the position a long time ago, but I think it's very hard to recover from that. I don't, if you're telling Me. And I hope he does, by the way. He's a great guy and I hope his ecosystem recovers, but I mean, these are body blows to these names. You know, I could go through a whole list of names with you and I could say to you, okay, which ones do I like? I, I think Ton does recover. I mean, Ton got hit by the, the French government abduction of the founder. When Durav got sent to away for a few days during the summer two years ago by the French government, I think people said, okay, there's now a back door into Telegram, but there's billion users on there. Could that token have utility? I believe it could, you know, will Solana have utility? I believe it does. But having said all that, this has been a bone crushing situation for people. You know, I mean, this is, you know, you're back to April lows for a lot of these things. And again, I think it's going to be answered by the binary question, is this useful or not useful?
B (39:37)
Yeah, I mean, I will, you know, there's no disagreement here. I agree with you. But listen, gotta ask yourself three questions. Question number one, long term, it's five years from now, am I going to be higher or lower? That's question number one. And I think the answer that's higher. You say higher. Okay. And by the way, if we asked ourselves that question five years ago, in 2020, at this time, the answer was higher. Look at what we've done, okay. And look at the growth. And then question number two, is the rate going to grow exponentially? And let me give you my best Example of this. Let's say you and I were back in 1998 and we did the hot tub time machine. Well, I'd be on a fat box computer. You're on a fat box computer. We have aol, we have a digital modem burping as this beep beep beep trying to get us onto the Internet. And if I buy a Pez gun from ebay or a book from Amazon, I think this is the brave new world. But nobody saw the prowess. Let's say I came to you from a time travel and I said, hey, I'm coming to you from 2025. And you see this rinky dink set up here. Someday in 2025 you're gonna have a George Jetson call with Scott Melker over zoom and you're going to have trillions of dollars traded, trillions of dollars traded on the Internet. There's going to be E commerce, there's going to be social media activity, there's going to be an explosion of economics on the Internet. Oh, by the way, there'll be billions of people downloading and streaming 4K videos on this rinky dink transactional thing that we're looking at here in 1998. And so I just want you to think about where we're going to be in five years, where we're going to be in 10 years. I'm sure my phone is going to have tokenized stocks, stablecoins. I'm going to have a wallet on my phone where I can go to Starbucks and if they're having a share repurchase and I own Starbucks shares, maybe they'll give me a discount, the barista will give me a discount for my beverage or my pastry and they'll lift my Starbucks shares out of my smart wallet. It's possible, you know, maybe every corporation in the world will have their own loyalty stablecoin, where you buy into their stable coin in their ecosystem, you get a 20% discount on the goods and services that they're producing. I don't know what it's going to be, Scott, but it's going to be very different than it is today. And it's going to be exponential and I don't want to miss it. And so I'm not gonna, I'm here. And if we, if we go to zero because you're a popular guy, you'll have a really good podcast. I'll be in a barrel with suspenders. Okay? And I'll be talking to you from a remote location because my clients at that point will probably want to kill me.
B (45:58)
Yeah, again, I think it's going to be hard. I think it's going to be hard for these companies. They're going to have to make a major adjustment. They'll probably have personnel losses. They'll probably be using lots of AI to replace labor to save costs. I mean, it'll be different, you know. But here's the thing I would say to you. The ones that are going to embrace the change more quickly are going to do better. You know, I'll never forget this because it left such a big impact on me, because I thought it was crazy, but it was absolutely the right thing to do. Steve Jobs ended the ipod. The ipod, you and I are old enough to remember, resurged Apple. And then he came out with a smartphone, and I guess it was by like iPhone 3 or 4. He shot the ipod. He said, the ipod's dead. And we put the app into the phone. And I remember him in an interview, I was like, why did he kill the ipod? It was such a cute little thing and everybody was buying it and using it. But he was like, no, no, no, that's going to get eaten. The software is going to eat that. It's going to end up in the phone. And if I don't kill it, somebody else is going to kill it. And I thought it was a brilliant move in hindsight that I didn't like in the beginning, you know, and this is what happens to people. They're like, I got the business. It's working for me. I'm not going to change it. Right. Jerry Yang, Stanford grad, created Yahoo, tells a great story. He's Meeting with the Pacific Bell executives and he says, I got this great idea. I call it Yahoo. You know, it's a cute nickname. You don't need 41 1. You're old enough to remember 41 1. I'm gonna turn on this computer. You're gonna give me the name of the place, I'm gonna give you the phone number. And these two Pac Bell executives, Pacific Bell, they look at them and say, well, that's stupid. What we do is we kill 4 million trees and then we make these 4 pound books dyed yellow and we ship them. And we've been doing that for the last 95 years to our consumers. Why do we need you? You see what I mean?
