The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Primed To Pump As Gold Rallies To New Highs? | Peter Schiff & James Heckman

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

As gold smashes through $4,200 to hit new record highs, the question dominating global markets is — can Bitcoin keep up? With investors fleeing risk assets amid rising tariffs, inflation fears, and mounting debt, the gold vs. Bitcoin debate has never been more relevant. Today, Scott Melker is joined by Peter Schiff, a legendary gold advocate, and James Heckman, to debate what’s really driving this historic move. Will gold reclaim its throne as the ultimate store of value, or will Bitcoin prove it’s the future of money?

Gold made yet another all-time high above $4,200 as the debate rages on as to whether Bitcoin will follow, whether Bitcoin is a risk-on asset or digital gold, and which asset is better to own with the burgeoning debasement trade, the new narrative of the end of 2025. If you want to talk about Bitcoin and gold, I bring on my close friends James Heckman, and of course, Peter Schiff. We're going to break it all down right now. Let's go. Good morning, everybody.

Happy Wednesday, welcome to the show. In honor of Peter, I threw on two gold chains. I want you to know that I'm one of you guys, and we just want you to be one of us, Peter. All right. How are you doing, Scott? I'm doing good. James, welcome. Peter, welcome. So listen, we've got, we're going to start right here. Obviously, this is the gold chart. This looks more parabolic than an ICO in 2017. We've got the silver chart also making new all-time highs. And of course, the Bitcoin to gold ratio, clearly Bitcoin breaking down dramatically over gold against gold for all the technical analysts. And Peter, we have a whole slew of tweets we can bring up, but we have you hear in person. The debate rages on, right? A lot of people show charts that say gold goes up, Bitcoin follows. It seems that your opinion at this moment is gold's going up and Bitcoin's done. So where do you put them together and we can talk about it?

You know, listen, you know, Peter's the expert. I think one of the things to think about for Bitcoin is, you know, for the people have been loyal to Bitcoin for a long time, Bitcoin really was seen early, you know, as an inflation, you know, hedge, as a parallel economic system, as a parallel currency. And I think what's happened, you know, I think if you look at it, you know, not possibly in dollar value, but in percentage of owners of Bitcoin, most of it is now controlled by, you know, major banks, the opposite of what I think the vision of the original Bitcoin holders were. I think the ironic thing is inflation goes up, inflation scare goes up. People are looking and the economy goes bad.

The original vision was, hey, this is going to be a hedge against a bad economy, going to be a hedge against inflation. And Bitcoin's just basically acting like a tech stock. I mean, I don't think it's, you know, that's what it's become. Yeah. You know, I think this is really kind of a put up or shut up moment for Bitcoin because, you know, for years it's been hype. up as digital gold, as a edge against dollar debasement, inflation. And Bitcoin is now in a pretty

big bare market priced in gold. It's down more than 25% as we speak from where it was in August. And so gold is making record highs. Silver is breaking out to record highs. The world is de-dollarizing, massive deficits as far as the eye can see, a Fed cutting rates and the rising inflation. All this is very negative for the dollar. And central banks are getting out of dollars, but they're buying gold. Bigger investors are now starting to look for hedges, and they're buying gold. And what's Bitcoin? I mean, if Bitcoin is not a store of value, if it's not a safe haven, if it's just a tech stock, well, what kind of tech stock is it when it has, not only does it have no earnings because there's some tech stocks that also don't have earnings, but it has no

prospect of ever having earnings. At least when you buy a tech stock, you're betting on the potential for future earnings. Bitcoin has no potential to earn anything. So I think it's going to collapse. I mean, I'll steal this a little bit. I love you, Peter, but you've been saying that for the last 10 years. I've been right for 10 years. Well, I mean, Peter, to be fair, if we take a look quickly. Sorry, James. I just want to show the Bitcoin to gold ratio. Yes, it's down in a bare market since here, but if you go back to 2023, it's a 3X. So it's kind of cherry-picking time frame.

I think the thing to think about, and I'm kind of in the middle in that, Peter and I have both, you know, we're both living here in Puerto Rico are huge fans of gold. I mean, I think at the end of the day, digitized gold is, you know, is a great, not alternative.

And I think the problem is these arguments are binary. I think, you know, Peter probably is disgusted, as I say, he's probably the greatest voice for Bitcoin in the world because he doesn't want to be, but he's the great attacker on the dollar. He's the great attacker of inflation. He talks about the stupidity of the explosion of the military industrial complex, certainly even on Trump. Trump's the biggest spender in the history of the world.

And so what this does is people go, yeah, I need to go someplace. Unfortunately, he doesn't know he's sending a lot of people to Bitcoin and then saying, hey, by the way, what about gold? I love gold. I think it's fantastic. I think digitized gold is important. You know, I think stored in Singapore, not Switzerland. But a thing to think about Bitcoin right now, just to get kind of political, is that it's political.

We started as political. You know, it'll continue to be political. And all you need to know is that Eric Trump has a Bitcoin treasury company, right? And so, you know, I love you, Peter, because I understand the philosophy, but there's a mighty wave. You've got Black Rock. You've got Goldman. You've got Bank of Israel. I've got Bank of England.

you've got J.P. Morgan, and you have the Trump family loading up on Bitcoin. So what I'm saying is, you know, look, in the long run, Peter's always been saying this. I don't want this hour to be the classic debate using the same words that you have over and over and over, love the gold, understand your view about the lack of value, but there's an army behind it. I think there's zero chance with the Trump family accumulating gold and Black Rock accumulating gold. I haven't seen and I've been around investing for a long time. Sorry. Yeah.

Well, they're doing both. Digital kind, Peter. The digital kind. That Bitcoin, the idea that the people who control our monetary system, our stock market of the White House, who all are accumulating Bitcoin, are going to let it crash. I think it's beyond naive. Yeah. I mean, one point, two, actually two points on a digital, digitized gold.

the good thing about it is it's actually still gold it represents ownership of real gold and what digital gold does is it improves on the monetary properties of gold it makes it more fungible more portable and better to use as a media of exchange right so that's what bitcoin is talking about actual tokenized gold and not the the nickname of bitcoin is right i'm talking about real gold that you own but you own it out through a token that you can exchange with other people but yeah I get it that the Trump family has taken a big stake in Bitcoin. That's another problem I have with the Trump administration. But, you know, I think that the biggest consensus trade right now where you have the most

can't lose, only can go up attitude is in Bitcoin for the reasons that James just mentioned. It seems like everything has gone right. There's nothing that can possibly go wrong. And that's when the market goes in the other direction. And I would say that given all that Bitcoin has going for it as far as hype and the politics behind it, with all that, why isn't it going up now? Why is it going down? Why is it collapsing? I think that's a warning sign that the bottom's about to drop out of this.

Yeah. I mean, I've heard that 80 times. First of all again, I support. We were at an all-time high a week ago. Yes, and now we're way down. I know, but it just sounds kind of a day. draw the line where we are today and where we were last year, draw the line today where we were two years ago,

draw the line where we were, you know, three years ago. Here's why Bitcoin fluctuates like it does and why it is right now. Okay. So if you look at the last three years, and I know I'm more political or you either hold back your political thoughts, Peter. Here, let's just hold the microphone here in the middle. I'm joining Peter's studio today. Thank you so much here in lovely Puerto Rico.

Can you hear me okay, Scott? Sounds great. When are you going to move here, by the way? Hey, so, you know, let me just say what actually happens. Okay, if you look, when Yellen came out and said Bitcoin was a tool of criminals and, you know, drug dealers, Bitcoin went down. And then the people who own the Fed, Bank of Israel, Bank of England, J.P. Morgan, BlackRock, they started accumulating. and then they accumulated on the dip and then it went up when cz got arrested those same people were accumulated and then it went up when rogerger got arrested uh same thing happened last week i had

like 10 of the biggest bitcoin holders in the world say hey heckman it's going to go down again get ready to buy we actually predicted it you know it crashed on cue trump made a big announcement and then of course his family buys the dip so the idea that oh it's an imminent collapse at these literal orchestrated dips so that BlackRock and J.P. Morgan and Goldman can go accumulate more. So this whole thing is obviously orchestrated. The stock markets orchestrated. We shouldn't be naive. For sure, if you look at, you know, ETFs, Goldman, etc., I think their basis is somewhere between 15 and 30 when they really started to accumulate. I've never seen them buy big where they don't get a 20x. When they start buying Tesla, you can bet it's going to

go 10 to 20x. And because we don't control the stock market, it's not organic, it's not natural, the people who control the economies do so. But hey, I would love to pivot because Peter will talk about gold and how he doesn't like Bitcoin for an hour, but I totally understand your point of view. You're a great friend. And I really love to see gold coming in this year because it means everybody understands that our budgets a disaster, right? I mean, one of the things I'd like to point out as we kind of pivot, Scott, if you don't mind. Under Trump, okay, and I'm not, you know, saying there's a better, better alternative to a zombie controlled by other people, but from 26 to 2020, you had a president who was claiming to be anti-war, right? And when America was anti-war under

Clinton, they cut the military budget and balance the budget, right? It's like, hey, we're anti-war. We don't need a big, big war budget. It's called a peace dividend, right? you and I remember the teeth peace that yeah peace dividend guess what Trump took the war budget from 500 billion to 750 billion as the peace president okay hey let's look at what we're doing remember it's the war department now oh it's the war department yeah yeah that's cool and then we have the space department too and then at the and then under covid within two weeks he knew i talked to the doctors who talked to in the white house they had COVID cured you know with a cocktail drugs that he personally took that cured him in three days, 10,000 patients cured

immediately. He shut down the economy and spent $5 trillion. So needlessly bankrupted our country by, I think it was like $5.6 trillion just on COVID while the military budget went up and the deficit went up. And so inflation became just a total disaster. And then Biden goes in there and, of course, and runs up fuel prices. So inflation's out of control. So we put a Republican in and what does our Republican do? He spends more than LBJ, Obama, all the time and the bill chain. I think, of course, gold's going up.

Of course, Bitcoin is way up over the last year, year and a half. And I think, you know, inflation, we need to face the fact that our deficits completely out of control. Yeah, you know, and I think, you know, Bitcoin and gold going up for, I think, different reasons. But, you know, I was just listening to Scott Bessett was interviewed just before we started talking. And he was asked about the rise in gold. And if he's concerned about it, and he completely brushed it off and says, there's nothing to worry about. Do you like gold?

Well, of course, but let me finish my point here. But Scott Bessett, basically, no, we don't, it does, it's not a warning sign. Everything is great. We're cutting government spending. The The U.S. economy is great. Inflation is gone. So gold's going up for reasons having nothing to do with inflation or loss of confidence in the U.S. I mean, completely dilutional. And then he went on to praise Alan Greenspan as the maestro as a great Fed chairman without even realizing that Alan Greenspan is the main reason we had the 2008 financial crisis.

It was his reckless monetary policy that fueled that housing bubble and the mortgage finance bubble. and yet he doesn't even get that because he wants the Fed of Reserve to do the same thing that Greenspan did. He wants rate cuts and more money printing, and he has no idea that the crisis that's coming is going to be much worse than the financial crisis that the Fed helped create before. This is going to be a sovereign debt and a U.S. dollar crisis. And I think what's happening in gold right now is very reminiscent of what happened in subprime in 2007, which really, was foretold the 08 crisis, and when that warning bell went off, nobody believed it, nobody on Wall Street, nobody at the Fed. Ben Bernacki said, don't worry about subprime, it's contained.

And I was saying, nope, this is the tip of an iceberg, get ready for a major financial crisis, and it hit the following year. I think gold surging like this every day going up, this is the best year for gold since the 1970s. This is not a coincidence. you know what happened in the 70s. And so I think this is a warning sign. The real crisis could hit next year when we see a big collapse in the dollar against other fiat currencies and a big break in the bond market, meaning much higher interest rates

at a time where our debts are exploding. Jimmy Carter, it feels like not necessarily 2008. I mean, I think the criminality and the lack of transparency of what's really happening in the economy is definitely like 2007. I actually really do like your canary in a coal mine, you know, gold coming up. I mean, I think that's actually a really good point. But it really more feels like Jimmy Carter. You know, I mean, I think our economy is being run, you know, like that, just out of control, total out of control spending. The thing that bothers me, and you're obviously a world-class economist. I'd love to hear your point of view.

Part of the reason why retail investors don't understand what's going on is because our government lies about inflation like it's a crazy lie and i'd love to hear your point of view like i go into the store unless you're buying complete poison um you know i go and get pound a hamburger costs you know like more than gold um you know housing is totally out of control um everything's out of control and then you look and they go hey you know inflation's at what six percent or whatever and foods except for food shelter and fuel yeah okay well what what we're What in the world? How do we figure out what actual inflation is? Have you ever thought about this? The government creates inflation. It nurtures it.

Inflation is the government's baby. I mean, it's their silent partner. But the government never wants to come out and tell the public that it's causing inflation. Because obviously, the consequence of inflation is that prices go up and the public doesn't like that. But government creates inflation. The definition of inflation is an expansion of the money supply and credit. Who expands money and credit? The government does that. So the government creates inflation, the result is prices go up. But why do they create inflation?

Because they don't want to raise taxes to pay for all the deficits, so they print the money. And the public doesn't realize that they're paying the cost. But instead of paying it in taxes, you're paying it through higher prices, through inflation. Plus also, inflation makes everybody think they're richer, right? The numbers, look at the stock market today. Everybody is talking about the record high stock market. The stock market in 1999 was worth 45, the Dow was worth 45 ounces of gold. Today it's worth 11.

So the stock market in 26 years priced in real money because once upon a time when you bought the Dow, like if you bought the Dow in 1920, you paid with gold dollars, you paid with real money. So measured in real money, the Dow Jones has dropped 75% in 26 years. But, you know, the people don't realize that because they're measuring the Dow with inflated dollars. And that's why it's, you know, 46,000. Here's the real sad part. And, you know, Scott, I can't believe you can't get a word edgewise. I'm not trying. I'm just watching the show. And we're fighting over there. But listen, here's the sad part. Okay. And you guys all know that, you know, I was a big supporter of, you know, of RFK. You know, I think he represents an awakening of the

political movement, understanding the Republican Party are bigger spenders than the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party are communists. So I don't even know what Trump's a socialist too. Look at his policies. I mean, like, it's unbelievable. But here's what Kennedy said. And it really breaks my heart, right? So even your point that the stock market on a real money basis is down, you know, if you were to say versus gold, and I think that's, you know, probably, you know, 5,000 year old currency. I think that's probably a good way, a great standard. The poor are the ones that pay. Like, here's the part that it, and it, they pay the tariffs too. It, it infuriates me. So, you know, Clinton chased all the manufacturing jobs when he was, when he basically took

illegal money for the communists to become president, saved, sent all of our manufacturing jobs. So now we've got a workforce dependent on government money, right? The wealthy, we're, buying equities, whether we're buying gold or we're buying equities or we have nice homes. The price of my home right now, I never dreamed that I would have a home that's worth that. But to your point, there's every other house in my neighborhoods, you know, has a stupid ridiculous price. If you're talking about here in Puerto Rico, this is a complete aberration. No, no, no, no, no, no. I am talking about. No, no, no, yeah. Yeah, well, Canada is just completely. But the inflation is the same in Canada as it is. I mean, it's maybe about 20%

different. But North American inflation, is there any economist? And have you done an analysis of real inflation, right? So for Americans, not inflation of people buying, you know, ships or jets, because I have no idea what the government is measuring inflation, but in actual things that people need. Food, housing, fuel. Have you done an analysis? I haven't done the analysis, but I know whatever the government claims, you have to at least double it. So if they say it's three, it's at least six. I don't get the data now anyways. We're shut down, so we don't have to make it. But everything, look, you can see anything that I look at where I can compare the price

that I'm paying now. Look, I just had to fix a swimming pool in Connecticut. Oh, my God. The cost to repair the pool is the cost to repair the pool. We need to do something about this. My point is the cost to repair it is more than it cost to build it in the first place. I mean, and they're just fixing it. And I asked a pool guy and he said, yeah, everything about pools in the last four or five years has doubled in price.

So what is what is the cost? And every real look at the streaming services. I mean, these, they're raising their prices like 10, 15% a year. Every one of them. You can see that because I keep getting a email, you know, Netflix going up, you know, Hulu going up. But I see people on the internet. They post, they went to the supermarket and they bought a bunch of stuff and they show the same receipt for the same stuff a year ago. and it's like 20% more expensive.

So the government is lying to us deliberately that prices are not rising anywhere near as fast as they are. I mean, the government is not honest about anything. But they are saying out loud, we're going to grow our way out of it. And the only road is- They've said that my whole life. Look at all my gray hairs.

That literally just means, that literally just means money printing. But what I always find interesting about these conversations is that we literally agree on everything. We just stumble at the finish line over whether Bitcoin is, is a hedge against it or just a tech stock. And we know we're not going to get anywhere on that. The place that we do agree is obviously on the debasement trade. We can argue over which asset is the solution to the debasement trade. But Peter, listen, you've been saying this forever.

Bitcoins have been saying this forever. Now we have JP Morgan, Paul Tudor Jones, Ken Griffin from Citadel, all on mainstream media talking about the debasement trade, the dollar inevitably going down. This is the first time that I think we've had such loud voices from the top who are agreeing with the crazy ones like us. I mean, honestly, though, I mean, here's the part. There's a couple things that I think we need to point out, these people aren't stupid, okay? And they're not just weak. They are weak because they don't want to tax their personal friends who are at your pool party in Connecticut, okay? It's not a party, but it will be when it's fixed. Yeah, when the pool's thing. But they don't want to tax their rich friends. They don't want to tax people who are

donating, you know, to their political campaigns. They just want to tax the poor, right? They want to print money so that food costs more, fuel costs more, you know, people got to lease cars. They get to rent cars. Now they have these, you know, fractional leasing of cars right now because, you know, look, 50 years ago, you know, I went to high school in a, in a manufacturing town, a logging town, right? You know, where my dad grew up. And, um, Everybody had a brand new Toyota 4x4. They had two cars. They had a well-kept home.

They had a fishing boat. And these were blue-collar workers. Everybody in town had that, right? And now they got one car. Their wife is working. It's a used car that they have to fix. And that's what's happened is we basically, you know, the W.A.F. is true.

The poor now own nothing. the working poor own nothing. The middle class doesn't even see their kids because they have to work to pay the taxes because they don't have tax breaks. They're getting paid on regular income. And we're, you know, on capital gains. If you're in Puerto Rico,

we might not be paying much at all. We've got our tricks. We've got our bag of tricks. We're buying gold. We're buying land. We're buying Bitcoin. It doesn't even matter. And the only part that I think that we need to educate the public on

is that our government actually isn't printing money. 99% of the people don't even understand that a private company owned by descendants of a few families control our money supply. It's not backed by anything. It's way worse than Bitcoin. They just print paper that's worthless crap, right? And they want us to deficit spend because they charge us interest on money that you don't even base us in.

Right. But they didn't earn it. The government causes, I totally get it. But they're colluding. Well, of course. They're colluding. They're friends. Trump wants to make it worse because Trump wants to completely control the Fed from the Oval Office.

He basically, you know, he's stacking it with his people the way Roosevelt stacked the Supreme Court. In the 1930s, Trump is stacking the Fed. And that's one of the reasons that gold is $4,200 an ounce. And, you know, it was just a week ago that gold hit $4,000. It's up $200 in a week. If it keeps up this pace, it'll be at $5,000 before Thanksgiving. and over $6,000 by Christmas. But I don't want this to be a gold show.

But I think, and again, you could say since, you know, Trump took office, you know, Bitcoin was $16,000, it's now at $115,000. So if you wonder if the White House can drive both gold and Bitcoin, the answer is absolutely, and the Trump family has like 18 other coins that they've done as well. So just at the end of the day. James, maybe we have a scenario where the Trump family is driving Bitcoin and, and, everyone who's against the Trump family is driving gold. It's not necessarily both.

Central banks, not Trump specifically, but central banks around the world are buying gold because they don't want exposure to the United States debt. I think the other actually say that. And there are a lot of people, not most of them, who buy Bitcoin because they believe the United States is behind Bitcoin and pushing it. So they are kind of opposing narratives in that regard.

We all have our strategies. And I think the one thing, you know, a lot of us are on these economic chats, political chats, investment checks. Peter and I are, you know, on a chat with, you know, a lot of Bitcoin maxis. And I think the one thing that I've noticed that, you know, Peter has evolved, and that is portability. And I think it's really interesting.

You see all that green? The only thing red is Bitcoin. Well, again, it's... Isn't that good? It's over 110 since Trump took off as when it was 15,000. Stop. Stocks capped up, Bitcoin's still down, so you can't call it a risk asset. Maybe gold is just uncorrelated.

I think tokenization is a real thing. Blockchain technology is a real thing. Cryptology is a real thing. You know, portability, making gold portable, right? But also, people don't realize real estate right now is being revolutionized because of the blockchain. Right. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin, right? but the idea that these banks can take commissions for doing nothing, right?

I mean, I think real estate brokers is the next people who are probably going to get their commission reduced. Banks are going to get cut out. There's essentially, if people don't understand what tokenization real estate is, think about crowdfunding and smart, but with smart contracts where no human has to touch it. I think we'll probably have toggles where people could take higher risk for worse credit, But, you know, but a combination of Zillow, they'll be verified appraisals. There'll be, obviously, probably fidelity will confirm, you know, the validity of the title.

And basically, you're going to have these variables and people are going to end up funding all mortgages. Yeah, I mean, we'll see. I mean, I remember people talking about this 10 years ago when they were talking about how blockchain was going to change housing and change all. And it hasn't happened yet. In fact, we're no closer now, as far as I can tell, than we were back then. It's because you're not paying attention. Well, there are billions of dollars that are going into it. There's an IPO last week for mortgages.

Yes, money is going into the infrastructure and the companies, but what if it's just all hype? What if it's all just now? You know, driven by the Trump administration. Stable points are tokenized real world assets and those are objectively exploding. I mean, Peter, I think this is where you lose a little bit of credibility. I think the technology has advanced, right? This isn't 1980s.

We're not using big cell phones. And, you know, all that blockchain means is just an advancement of internet technology and efficiency. tokenization, obviously, just like you're thinking about for gold, is happening with real world assets, ownership of art, ownership of music. And, you know, just like the internet, I was one of the first, you know, soft bank CEOs. And, you know, I had an evaluation of a billion dollars for a company that had no revenue. And everybody made fun of me, right?

But I knew that the technology was here. I knew the scale was here. I knew the support was here. I knew that the investments behind the technology. And I had the vision to understand that the internet was going to change commerce, going to change media, going to change advertising. And so there were those naysayers. And Peter, you're too brilliant to be able to be one of those guys in 1996 who said,

hey, what are these incredible valuations for Amazon? Does it make sense? Of course it makes sense that as technology advances, banks, banking, real estate, tokenization of assets, tokenization of gold. And the idea, and this is the brilliance of it, and I actually want to pivot to what Roundtable is doing if you don't mind, because I think it'll help you personally as well. The idea that humans intervene into databases, okay,

is an incredibly dangerous thing. Anybody with half a brain know that humans manipulated election databases, right? And so when you go to a database that is not non-human touch, not run by a smart contract, people can steal elections they can steal cars they can steal money they can raid bank accounts they can they can steal audience data right and so people with well beyond PhDs in computer science who are you know the inventors of tether who i mean the founder lives a block from here right so tether's revolutionizing the world right now and you know the idea of um buying a

home, for example, where you have to rush a payment. I was buying a home here, you know, you know, Peter and Scott in Puerto Rico. They have a different banking thing. Think about if you're in Africa. Think if you are in an unbanked system. I tried to wire money to buy my house to put my down payment on a house. The wire didn't go through for seven days. Okay. I ended up losing, you know, ESPRO and lost the house. Unfortunately, with the U.S. banking system. And, you know, when you basically go to a new recipient, they slow things down if it's, you know, obviously if it's eight figures. So a lot of that is government regulation, though.

That's not the banking system. Again, you, you absolutely fixed my point, which was human interaction at a databases. But you know what I did? I ended up buying a different house and I set the same amount of money in five milliseconds. And no banks, you know, stood in, no regulations. I just gave the person a million bucks. And Bitcoin or stable coin? Stable coin.

But again, I just, I don't want to waste any more time about arguing about Bitcoin. Blockchain technology is working. Dollars are moving. Gold is moving. Real estate's moving, you know, moving. And, you know, the tokenization of the world, all that means is improve technology with smart contracts. I think embracing and understanding it is this is where exactly where we were when I was

in 1997, saying the entire media. industry is going to change. You know, people laughed at me. Obviously, we went, you know, completely viral. You know, the idea that ink by the barrel, it was no longer, you know, important, you know, that mass access to media, you know, happened. Access to every store in the world happened through Amazon, access to every, you know, musical file, happened eventually through Spotify. my strategy team, you know, built the business model for Hulu. I remember sitting there at News Corp at the annual, you know, picnic over at Rupert Murdoch's house. And I remember telling, you know, Peter Churn and Peter Levinson, do you realize the technology exists?

I've been able to tell you this story. Do you realize the technology exists right now where every movie could be watched by sending packets with almost no delay? You could have a simple database pick any movie you want. subscription system is ready to go and we could completely revolutionize the movie and television industry and one of them not peter churnan said that's impossible never work we've got HBO we've got release rights we've got videotapes and of course everybody understood the vision well everybody understands mortgages real estate tokenization of assets smart contracts it's coming it's here and you know and you know round tables now bring it to the media industry you know we have to talk

about it right now, Scott. Maybe we talk about it in a minute. But everyone needs to understand that the world's changing. Banking's changing, mortgage is changing, buying a car is changing, buying artists changing. And it's upon us now. And here's the biggest punchline. There is over $3 trillion of dry powder. All these guys made money. And Peter's probably right, mostly on scam coins. Okay. A lot of made it in Bitcoin. But if you're an investor and you're worth $100 million, Scott, and I've got a friend who lives in my neighborhood who spent $200,000 buying $20,000 Bitcoin of $5. Okay.

Now, that's obviously now a billion, you know, a billion dollar plus, you know, asset. All the guys holding on to Bitcoin and Ethereum or even stable coins because they know what's going on, they made 100 Xs,000 Xs, 200 Xs, okay? these guys don't want to go buy treasuries they don't want to buy bitcoin anymore right they don't buy gold these guys have taught themselves that they can get 100 x's okay so here's what's hot right now and it started with treasuries right it started with treasuries and that is they want to buy a company that's crypto blockchain base let's just start there so these are the type of mentalities, people who bought Facebook early, Google early, AOL early, Yahoo, and they saw

total rocket ships. So there's $3 trillion here. Maybe they'll put some in gold, Peter, but it's really not the conversation. The conversation right now is that people who lust for 100 X's, and you see them in our chat, okay? They lust for 100xs are looking for the next, but they got burned on meme coins. Some of them bought the highs in Bitcoin or some of them bought, you know, the wrong, the wrong tokens. Some of them bought NFTs and got destroyed. Some of them bought Beamcoins and got destroyed, but they're super rich, three trillion dollars. And so what they want is they want a regulated, regulated, transparent, audited. They want a senior executive, Scott, who don't have a secret wallet sitting in a Taiwan exchange. Okay. So the fact that there are public

companies using the latest technology, which is blockchain and AI, some both, that's a real thing. That's a real investment. I would think, though, if you're, you know, when you're super rich or you're a billionaire, your, your main goal isn't to find another 100 Xer. You want to preserve the purchasing power of the billion that you have. That's not the mental mentality, Peter. You know, you are, you are correct in what they should do. I think James correct. Three trillion dollars worth of. But I think Peter's correct in what they should do. James is correct in what they are doing. But the thing they have to recognize, yeah, what people have to recognize is, yes,

you could be a billionaire today, but if you have your billion in U.S. treasuries, you could be broke tomorrow. So what's key is where, no, but it's like, where am I going to, where, where, where, where, where am I going to put my assets to preserve their value, not necessarily looking for the best new thing, but looking for a way to protect yourself from the, dollar debasement from from inflation. That's what people should be focused on. What what big boy and big girl investors do is they invest in a pyramid. Okay. So let's not waste any more than 18 seconds describing that the foundation of a pyramid are hard assets. Okay. Gold, real estate, you know, magnificent seven,

whatever. Okay, Peter, you want that. Okay. So now we're talking about the mid level and those are, I think, you know, possibly growth stocks, but stable stocks. Maybe it's Amazon. Maybe it's Microsoft. Okay, but the top of the pyramid, which, of course, should be less than 20% of your portfolio are where are you going to get growth? Money that you can afford to lose. Okay, so can we just get there? So the top of the pyramid is $3 trillion of it are blockchain investors. And those people, a lot of them are under 30 years old. They don't have gray hair like us, right? They're not here trying to preserve their wealth. They still want to hit the home run. Scott knows these people. They look for influencers. They look for sediment. They look for.

for insane reasons to invest, right? Speaking of insane reasons, I want to get back to the point. They shouldn't be buying gold mining stocks. Go ahead. That's my only point. Exactly. You said it. You said that was a great.

No, but for that speculative portion, I mean, okay, gold is one of those foundational assets that I love that I own. I'm not talking about the metal. I'm talking about this mining stocks, very different. Look about Bitcoin mining. Sox have done. Go ahead, James. Okay. So let's pivot to $3 trillion of liquidity. Okay. And we saw some unnatural things. And what I think we should think about is that there's three levels of crypto investing. So if we would go back, you know, 20 years, you know, or more, we'd say,

hey, what do you invest in in this upcoming internet? Right. So it started off with ISPs. then it went into commerce, then it went to media, then it went to infrastructure. And infrastructure, basically, single platform with billions of people using a single platform, that is what became the future, right? Spotify is a single platform. Amazon became a single platform for stores all over the world. Google became a platform for advertising, for search, you know, for a lot of different businesses. Essentially, the operating leverage of a SaaS business that touches,

consumers. Those are all the biggest companies in the world. Full stop. They're the biggest companies the world now. So what happened is that Nakamoto came out. You know, David Bailey is the, you know, the voice of Bitcoin. He's got the biggest, you know, Bitcoin conference. And he came out with a stock based on a Bitcoin treasury. Okay. And I'll just say, it's collapsed. Well, it's worth what it should be, which is the price of Bitcoin, right? Is it even a low now? Not to its Bitcoin. I think it's trading for... It's a discount now, even with the debt.

It's a discount, but it will be like when Tether went down, it'll end up naturally trading in the value of Bitcoin. But people were paying $30 a share at that Bitcoin conference, and now it's less than a dollar. Yeah, so that's the point. So the point is he was first, right? So this is really important for investors to understand. Okay. and you have $3 trillion of pent-up lust for a blockchain-based regulated public company.

This is the most important thing in the market right now. More important than AI, more important than any other thing, is that you've got $3 trillion of people who made their money on rocket ships, but they've been burned on meme coins. They got burned on mining companies when the ETFs came, right? and people say, okay, you might as well just buy micro strategies or BlackRock ETF. So they're sitting there ready to pounce, starving for a rocket ship that's regulated. They're starving for it.

NACA came out by itself. And there's something called Econ 201, supply versus demand. And, you know, when I got started at a stock brokerage agency at age 19, if you have more buyers and sellers, sometimes things tend to go up. And so every single investor on the planet, bought Nakamoto had nothing to do with David Bailey, had nothing to do with Nakamoto's business model. Their business model is actually outstanding. It's not just a treasury. I actually am holding, you know, I've got a, you know, a couple million of Nakamoto. Actually, it's a great buy

right now. But the point is, is it rocket shipped, not because David said, hey, we think you should pay $20 for a dollar worth of Bitcoin. He didn't say that, right? It was just crazy demand. Then all the rest of the treasuries came out. It ended up smoothing out because there's a lot of it. Then people start thinking about what idiots they are, right? They're giving money, no offense to pomp, but they're giving money to celebrities who have no money managing experience who are saying, we're going to buy Bitcoin, okay, and you should pay $5 for $1 of the Bitcoin. Yeah, that's the kind of crazy stuff that happens in bubbles and manias. It's completely delusional. But it's more than just a bubble. What I'm trying to tell you is that

people got burned so bad in the meme coin industry, which is responsible for $2 trillion of the $3 trillion, it is, or at least all of coins. They want a place that's safer, regulated, audited, transparent, and on a major exchange. When you check those boxes, that's a big deal. Okay. So the treasury thing is going to go down, I think pretty close down to one. And then people are going to ask if you're going to do a treasury, why do you just give it to a genius like Michael Saylor?

whether you agree with it, what he thinks, he is a really smart guy. Certainly, if I'm going to do a treasure, I'm going to give it to him or I'm going to do BlackRock before we give to a celebrity Bitcoin voice or somebody who does, you know, memes for a living. Okay. The next step up, Scott, and I hope we're not kind of boring, but I think this is really important to look at. The next step up are people who are basically changing old businesses operating margin,

net operating margin, and buying Bitcoin or buying treasuries. now that kind of basically puts pixie dust on an old car right so if you're a hotel chain if you're a restaurant chain if you are you know generating operating income and you have like a three to four times ebid a model when they add this people will look at it and that company's market caps going to go up but it's not really a blockchain company. It's just buying stuff. It's just buying crypto assets as a treasury. And a lot of people don't understand that. But it's actually not a bad model to take an old decrepit business and have them

buying something that, to Peter's point, isn't cash, which is going down. Right. So you're going to tell them they should be buying, you know, digital gold. But the point is Treasury's stocks. Yeah, sure. Gold mining stocks, whatever. But the point is this is coming and it's evolving, okay? It's evolving. And that actually is a good model because a little bit like when I was at Yahoo,

you know, we had Alibaba going up. It looked like we were making profits, but it was really net operating income because of the beginning balance sheet to the end. It looked like our balance sheet grew. It looked like we were profitable. We were just going up because Alibaba was going up, right? So all these public companies with low multiples,

are going to be lifted with the pixie dust of so these are actually possibly good investments now we have what I think is the holy grail of investments right and I'm not going to talk about AI because I don't know what AI is going to work if you get in the wrong AI company you can end up crashed right if you end up losing what I think is the best investment in the world right now are blockchain based infrastructure companies right and if you look for example figure I don't if you can call up the stock, Scott. Figure markets. I had them on the day of the, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, this is a great example. Okay. So figure is revolutionizing mortgages on the blockchain. And essentially at the end of the day, you get your mortgage quicker, you get an answer quicker. You cut out humans, right? Eventually smart contracts, eventually smart. What do they have, 50, 60 million in revenue?

And they've got a, what's your market cap, Scott? I'm trying to find it right now. now if I'm looking at their, it's not on CNBC. I'll find it, nine billion, nine billion, I mean, it's low. Nine billion on 60 million. This is the same thing that happened with Amazon. Amazon was losing billions, but people saw that it was the future, right? I don't even know if they're making money yet.

Are they making money? Amazon? Yeah. Now they're making money. They're making a lot of money. I mean, they've gone from a, they don't hold inventory anymore. They basically are a platform for stores, right? And so, you know, they become basically the Google of commerce.

They make money on other people's work. And it's really an amazing business. They pivoted. I remember walking in Amazon in 2006 when I was working at Fox and I walked in. I'm like, what are all these 22-year-old kids doing, right? They had rows and rows of desks and they're on the phone. And what they were doing is they were calling ski shops and auto glass repair shops. and um uh you know bakers like what are they doing they're basically signing people up to be an amazon

store right and so they don't have to they don't take the inventory they've already got distribution they've already got infrastructure it's the hulu spotify netflix amazon model and what i'm trying to tell investors i'm not telling them to go by figure is that whoever looks like they're going to be the winner in a sector for the next general of the internet, which is smart contracts, no human, decentralized, encrypted, un-invadable, un-data-based-stealable, undetabase-manipulatable, right, is going to be the future. And that's why figures market cap is up. You look at bullish, like bullish is out of control. Well, I mean, the reality is, James, and what you're saying in a very short way, and I've been saying

it since probably the Circle IPO, but before everyone in crypto says, when's Altzee's going to happen? you just say, look at any crypto-adjacent equity. And to your point, that's where the $3 trillion is playing. Nobody wants to buy coin 97 on coin market cap when they can go buy a bullish or an etoro or a circle IPO or get in and out of one of these treasuries very quickly. It's the same model, but now playing in a much bigger pool. But the in and out, the in-and-out thing, listen, I would advise against what I call getting too cute. okay. And I think the in and out, I mean, if you can buy direct because you're accredited

investor and you can get on something, you can get in and out, maybe, you know, obviously that's what happened to Nakamoto. I'm not advising. I'm just saying that's clearly what's happening when you see a Christmas tree chart, right, Peter? Yeah. I agree. And those accounts are going into fidelity. They're going to JPMorgan. So where they're going to be moving from Coinbase and they're going to be in legitimate stockbroker accounts. I just think, though, that and you guys you could just watch out for this over the next several weeks, a couple of months. But I think what happened on Friday, you know, late in the day with the tokens and Bitcoin, I don't know if that was a one-off thing just related to Trump's post. That could be just a dress rehearsal for

what's about to happen in crypto. It's possible that gold is pricking that bubble. And I think the risk is high right now of a major crash in that market. I mean, probably higher than I think the risk has been, as I can recall, that the bottom could just drop out of this market. You have so many people, so bullish, so long, so leverage, thinking nothing can go wrong. And to me, it looks like it's an accident waiting to happen. Well, that leverage got flushed on Friday. I don't think the leverage is anywhere near flushed. But I mean, I think we're talking about a totally different subject. We're talking about investing in technology companies right now. And right, but that could kind of, you know, upset the Apple cart, you know, the landscape. But the,

The point is whether you agree, sorry, Peter, go ahead, finish. Yeah, I'm just saying a lot of the people that have a lot of money to invest may find that they don't have that money anymore. If it's still tied up in crypto and the bottom collapses, a lot of that money just disappears. Here's what happened. I mean, our, you know, our chairman, you know, Walton Combers went, you know, 15 years as a, you know, Stephen Cohen trader and, you know, one of the co-founders of Derribut. we were tracking this and it was really interesting listening to his analysis when he was saying look people are getting wrecked right now but don't look at the Bitcoin chart go look at the

Alcoin chart right the Bitcoin chart was bad but on a relative basis over the last six months obviously it's way up but the all coins are getting the all coins are getting destroyed Scott like I don't what I think is basically someone to zero on Monday. you saw the slingshot, right, where people actually had to liquidate more Bitcoin to cover their losses on all coins, right? So I honestly think that whole market, because when you have an alternative, right, and I'm not even talking about Bitcoin right, that you can buy a blockchain investment, right? So same thing of buying the internet, right? Regulated, people aren't going to be able to rug you. They don't have secret wallets.

You know, management is always locked up for a year, right? They have to warn to buy all the things that burn people so badly over the last 10 years with altcoins doesn't happen with a public company on NASDAQ SEC regulated. This is the biggest swing ever. And I think your point, Scott, I just wanted to kind of make the metaphoric point, which is getting in and out. on a treasury stock or something that has no incremental value over the actual shareholder equity, which is the amount of money put in the, you know, before it goes public.

I mean, maybe it has value, but I don't think it does. Okay, the reason why, so it goes up and down, if you look at the IPOs, okay, in 2000 and 1999, there were ridiculous IPOs. I remember a company called Fogdog that had negative gross margins. and as their sales went up, their gross margins went down. Of course, their operating margins went up, but their gross margins, which were negative already, got worse. And they had like this crazy high market cap.

So these crazy high market caps, I would just say as an investor, is it a real company? Does it have gross margins? Does it have operating leverage? Does it have operating leverage? because of technology. It doesn't have operating leverage, then they're never going to be able to take the gross margin, replicate that to drive past their OPEX.

Okay? Like, that's how you analyze a company. That's how you analyze a tech. I'm just going to go ahead and bring it up because it just hit anyways, and here you are, right? But we're talking about a very specific company at the moment or companies like it,

which is obviously roundtable, which I have people, everyone knows that I'm also one of like the founding partners in and that you're obviously the CEO. So a real company that's using money that it's actually making that has an actual underlying business to have a treasury, but not be a treasury. It's a very important differentiation. That's what we're getting at here.

Well, Scott, you know, I don't want to shamely promote, you know, my own company here on your show. What's wrong with shameless promotion? And the time I leave your house, I'm going to convince you to buy a little less gold today and buy Roundtable. You know, if you don't... Well, you should have got me in at the ground floor. We're trying to get me in now.

How about, I buy gold if you buy... This is crypto, Peter. Okay? I'll make you deal. Okay. I mean, listen, I really appreciate, at the end of the day, what we've learned, look at the, you know, the companies that, you know, I've been involved with, you know, over the last, you know, 25 years.

My whole focus has been, how does technology remove... human involvement of the database level, right, how does it free entrepreneurs to generate more profits, right? You look at the music industry used to be controlled by three or four centralized controller that used to rip off musicians, right? You look at the banking industry. They make the rules. They take huge cuts, unfair to the poor, high interest credit cards, you know, the banking industry is going to change, okay? The movie industry, right? You had to get in a car. You had to drive and, you know, look through videotapes. That's totally changed. Buying stocks, right? Stockbrokers used to be rocking around Maseratis. They'd work two hours

and then go to the club, you know, you know, in New York. Now, you know, you've got e-trade, you got fidelity, et cetera. So I think when it comes to media, my team, you know, built the first business model for over-the-top media at Hulu, which is followed by Netflix and Amazon Prime. At Rivals, we built the first we'd call blogging network that became the largest, highest traffic sports network that, you know, Yahoo bought. I've just been fascinated on how we have a single database, and now it's on the blockchain. And here's what I think the advantages are. Everyone who's a serious journalist, like you, Scott or, you know, you talking to investors, when you get advertising in the current ecosystem,

if you think getting your mortgage down is slow, if you think that sending wires a slow, you're going to wake through the weekend, advertisers pay 120 days, right? If you're going to go through Google, if you're going to go through an ad network, ESPN, NFL, premium media, you know, New York Times, they literally are waiting 60, 90, 120 days, and then people are taking huge cuts. So, you know, number one, the inventor and patent holder of decentralized finance, which is the underpinning of this industry, right, that smart contracts and non-humans can have the ability, humans can trade without an intermediary. We now can do advertising without an intermediary. We have a liquidity pool, digital assets.

So anybody in our system, we have over 200 clients right now, and we're working with Yahoo and we're working with. the street. We just had over 150 Sports Illustrated publishers leave Sports Illustrated and join Roundtable because they get paid by the nanosecond now. They don't have to wait for advertisers to pay them. They don't have to wait even for their bosses to pay them. They now can get paid immediately using the technology that IL. Herzog, who invented decentralized finance, the founder of Bank Corps, all media journalists can now get paid by the nanosecond because we took Bank Corps technology of an exchange and brought it to the media industry. And if they want, they can get paid in gold, real money.

Well, they can get paid in digital, you know, I'd say tokenized gold. Yes, tokens that are redeemable and real gold. That's what gives them value. That's what that differentiates legitimate currency from a fiat currency. We can do that. But we can also do it, you know, in tether and circle and whatever digital assets, you know, people wish, right? but we're very excited about it.

You know, we merged with a public company called rival, another SaaS company. The merger isn't complete. The definitive agreement is there. It's trading. You know, we put about $33 million in the liquidity pool for journalists last week. You know, so we're very excited about that. You know, Scott, are you looking at the, you know, at the ticker there? I have, well, right now I was looking at the figure technology ticker and the general

market, but I do have it up if I can Yeah. What is the ticket for that company? RYVL merger hasn't, you know, happen yet. Oh, well, it's not showing up under that. You can buy it right now, Peter. I mean, you can literally do it live. If you want, we can project it behind you.

Yeah. And you can hit, you know, show the couple, show the, you know, show the month, you know, the last month. So this is an infrastructure company using blockchain, you know, technology. and that's really what we're about. That's what we've done for the last 30 years. The thing that I didn't have, you know,

is three decades of doing SaaS platform for media companies is to be able to use blockchain technology so humans don't have to intervene and do the calculations in advertising so that publishers don't have to wait for advertising. And so we merged with a company called Dweb out of Israel. And these are the best blockchain engineers in the world, the guy who owns the patent for,

for Defi, I.L. Herzog, super famous guy. So we merge Roundtable with Dweb, and then we're now merging to get on a NASDAQ. So, you know, it's, we're very excited about it. We're just getting started. You know, we hope that the merger will consummate here, you know, in the next few months. We had an announcement today that, you know, we have brought our, this company to compliance with NASDAQ. We're doing a reverse split. We put enough shareholder equity. We invested in this company that we're going to be merging in. So we've got enough shareholder equity. So the NASDAQ sustainability, you know, we believe we're going to be there. So anyway, listen, I think it's been an amazing, you know, conversation. I don't want to pivot

to our company. I do think it's a reasonable thing that tether and Coinbase and figure and bullish and people that are making our lives more efficient on a single non-human intermediary, blockchain-based database is the future. And that's what I thought about the internet, you know, 20, 25 years ago. That's what I think about blockchain technology today. You know, when I brought up the figure technology screen for James, I saw an article on the top breaking that you must have written. What does it say?

The coin has just lost more than stocks did in the 2019-market crash. It won't be the last time. Oh, obviously, because. Yeah, 1929. Well, that's probably in nominal terms. Just, you know, the Dow Jones, in 1929, when the Dow was at its peak, it was 360. So you're talking about a lot of inflation.

You know, gold was $20 an ounce. Hey, Peter. I'm going to go buy some more gold today, but I'm going to bet you today an ounce of gold. Hold on. I'm going to bet you an ounce of gold today. Okay. And it'll be at your, at a Valentine's Day party that will attend. in February, that Bitcoin will be higher in February than it's all-time high today.

I, you know, it's hard to make bets on Bitcoin because I've lost a bunch of gold coins betting on what. What, come on? I'm fine keeping my guess. You know what, all I know is that goal is going to be a lot higher. All I know is the Trump's own a lot of Bitcoin. They do. They do.

They do own a lot of Bitcoin. But you know what, I also know that they. Trump stakes didn't work out that well. There's a lot of Trump businesses that fail. Sure. Yeah. Okay. And the operative, here's what's coming, right? They're going to make an announcement that they're going to be buying Bitcoin, our U.S. government. Like, we all know that it's coming. But it's after American Bitcoin accumulates enough while they've artificially depressed it. Once they get here, we just took 127,000 Bitcoin. Who needs to buy Bitcoin when you can seize it and add it to your strategic Bitcoin Reserve? it's easy all right what do you well i don't look what do you think trump trump has done a lot of dumb things since he's been elected uh so i don't know i mean he he didn't campaign that was rfk said he would buy bitcoin trump never said he would buy it uh but who knows now that his family owns so much

of it he said they would buy it in the budget he said they would look into budget neutral ways of buying it and would ask percent and let me to do so so yes he didn't specifically say he would but it wasn't the but i mean we would be the laughing style of the world, because the world is loading up on gold because they don't trust the dollar. And then if the U.S. government decides to load up on Bitcoin, that will only reinforce the fact that the people who are buying gold, the countries that are buying gold, are doing the right thing. And they'll just buy even more of it. Hey, Scott, I'll just make it.

I know we're at time, but Peter, I just do want to say, if the United States buys gold, if the United States buys Bitcoin as a strategic asset, the rest of the world may laugh, but they would also buy gold because they would have to because it was the United States. No, they won't buy Bitcoin. They'll keep buying gold. They're not going to look. If your friend jumps off a bridge, you don't necessarily jump off the same bridge. Hey, Scott.

I really appreciate you putting us on today. A lot of amazing news in the market. And appreciate you allowing us to make our announcement, you know, our NASDAQ announcement today for Roundtable. And, you know, I'm also appreciative that, you know, your partnership, you do a great job. and I love being on your show today. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it. I know we're over time.

Peter, James. Enjoy, as always, I'm going to tuck my chains away now, get my back to the chain. All right, right. Thanks, gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you.