Jeff Booth: Everything They Told You About Money Is Wrong

They can't see. The moment they're spending right now is the most important thing. An abundance that we can't even imagine because we can't see what's not there. You won't even be able to keep up with the rate of change. You'd expect the centralized system to attack this everywhere. You're going to see supply chain shortages. You're going to see inflation like crazy. Then there's going to be printing into that.

Because if there isn't printing into that, there's going to be a deflationary collapse that destroys all money. If what you're saying is right and we're entering this sort of super chaotic period, is the only thing to do hold Bitcoin? If you haven't done the work to understand this and you're trusting somebody else and you don't have agency, then you're likely to get annihilated. But the point here is you have a choice. You've been deceived your entire life. You don't want to believe it.

It gets easier when you face the truth.

All right, Jeff, my roommate in Costa Rica, you're back on the show. When we were in Costa Rica, we had a few conversations that I think opened my eyes to the way you view the world. And the analogy that I've come to is, you know that scene in The Matrix where Neo sees like the green code for the first time. And he's like, what, you just look at code? And the other guy's like, oh, no, I don't see code. That's like blonde, brunette, redhead.

that's like how i view your thesis like when i i see the world i'm a bitcoiner i live on a bitcoin standard i totally understand everything you say in your argument but i struggle to just naturally see the world that way um whereas you seem to see the world and everything fits into your thesis like how do you get to that point um that's a big question and i think before i go there i would say most people see the world and everything fits under their thesis and it reflects back to them

and they're completely convinced that they're right and and they can't see other people's view because their their their their reflection of the world is is true to them so you probably heard me say before many times that our reflection of the world is us, right? The world we observe is literally a reflection of our thoughts, reactions, and we create that too. And so when I say that, some people think that, okay, that's true for Jeff, but it's not true

for me. But I didn't say it's true for me. I said it's true for every single person. So, so your construct of what reality is to you is true for you and, and you will make it true. You will, you will sort information to make it true. You will, you will ensure that that view cannot be distorted. and it'd be other people's problem. And when you look around the world and you look at everybody else viewing the world and how could they think the world looks like that?

And you think they're like completely crazy? If you realize the entire world looks like that, then you must be subject to the same thing. So then how would you know? So how would I know that my view of reality or what I call reality is true for me? And I would need an outside objective measure because it's not true, true. It's a belief system that feeds back on itself. So how would I know my belief system is right for me? is probably, that takes us, that could take us down a crazy journey.

And one of the things I constantly think about in my own journey to this, and we'll go into Bitcoin and what, so, but if everyone else believes their truth unconditionally and they'll push back and they'll fight people and they'll so sure, then and they're only human then wouldn't that mean that i would be subject to the same thing and so how would i know i spend a lot of time on i spend a lot of time in how would i know what is

actually the sand down to the sand what is true for sure um and then and then how do i reconstruct my actions and reality from that truth for sure. And I'm constantly challenging those assumptions as well. So I know that's probably a different answer than you were looking for. And now we can take that into why I wrote the book, what Bitcoin is to me, what that looks like to me. But I think

that's the fundamental thing. I wonder, I'm constantly curious, if we live in this matrix of all of these ideas bouncing into each other, and I'm a construct of a whole bunch of ideas of people that touched me in my life that have changed me. In other words, those people are in me.

what's already in me, and I believe a certain version of the world, and then until I don't, and then it changes, and I'm different, then that means that those intersections of people touching me impact me in a big way. And then you watch other people have the same interactions, but nothing changes in their life.

their belief system just carries on and and what could be a zero to one moment and have something that totally changed they're so they're so dealing in their past reality is their reality that they can't see that the moment in front of them the moment they're spending right now is the most important thing so they don't never see the change that could change everything in the future and they continue to stay in a very narrow path of a belief system.

So there's a load in there that I want to dig into. But the first one, you said everyone believes their own truth. And I agree with that, but I don't know if everyone has thought as deeply as you have about this. So for all the people that are still supporting and living within the current system that we have, I don't think they're necessarily viewing that as the right thing to do or the good thing to do. I think they're just seeing it as this is the way it is.

And what I've never fully got is like what has to change for that to change? Yeah, and that's why, so this is all of us in every single 8 billion people on the planet. So if there are 8 billion people on the planet going through a structural change, and most people were fighting that structural change because of their own beliefs from past biases, then the expectation would be this would be really hard.

because most of the people, and it would be really noisy, because most of the people were feeding back against the system that they said they hated and using the exact same money that they said they hated to increase the power of the state and the system over them. And what they would find is they would find always somebody else. They would find Candace Owens. They would find Tucker Carlson. They would find good people yelling at the system, but with no solution to the system.

And so they would find themselves in this hate, right? That they didn't know that they were creating because they were using the same money that funded it all. and they would find belonging in that hate. They would find, I know more than those other people, those stupid other people. And it would feel like love. It would feel like belonging. It would feel like I know something that the rest of the people don't do.

And that would expand everywhere while using the exact same money that funds the entire thing.

and and and when i look at when i look at that i totally understand it's natural it's what people do um i but but i wonder why i wonder i wonder if you if you can't solve the problem what are you doing right so what are what are you doing to actually solve the problem And what, because what it's actually saying is in all of those versions of their realities is somebody else will save me instead of I have agency. Every single other version says somebody else is to blame.

But by the way, we would easily see, we would easily see in a world that looked like this, we would easily not see our own agency. And we would easily see that we would be led to believe from that same system that it's not you, it's somebody else. And we would want to believe that because it couldn't be us. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where AnchorWatch comes in.

With AnchorWatch, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A-plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy. And all Bitcoin is held in their time-locked multi-sig vaults. So you have the peace of mind knowing your Bitcoin is insured while not giving up custody. So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly mistakes, you're protected by AnchorWatch.

Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55% and are available for individual and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to AnchorWatch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage, visit anchorwatch.com today. That's anchorwatch.com. Bitcoiners, as you know, with fiat money constantly debasing, wealth preservation isn't optional. That's why I recommend Swan Bitcoin, a team of dedicated Bitcoiners who work with families

and businesses to build and secure generational wealth with Bitcoin. Strong relationships with clients are at the center of everything Swan does. A dedicated Swan private wealth representative, which is a real person that you can text and call, will help you build a Bitcoin wealth strategy using Swan's comprehensive platform of Bitcoin services, including tax advantage retirement accounts, advanced Bitcoin cold storage using collaborative self-custody, inheritance planning

with both trust and entity accounts, tax loss harvesting, asset-backed loans, and more. SWAN have helped over 100,000 clients since 2020. And if you're serious about acquiring and securing Bitcoin, I recommend SWAN. Meet the team at swan.com forward slash WBD, which is swan.com forward slash WBD. Do you wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Well, Ledin makes that possible.

They're the global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending, and since 2018, they've issued over $9 billion in loans with a perfect record of protecting client assets. With Ledin, you get full custody loans with no credit checks or monthly repayments, just easy access to dollars without selling a single sat. Ledin exclusively offer Bitcoin-backed loans with all collateral held by Ledin directly or their funding partners. Your Bitcoins never lent out to generate interest.

I recently took out a loan with Ledin. The whole process was super easy. The application took me less than 15 minutes. And in a few hours, I had the dollars in my account. It was super smooth. So if you need cash, but you don't want to sell Bitcoin, head over to leden.io forward slash WBD and you'll get 0.25% off your first loan. That's leden.io forward slash WBD.

Because everything is downstream of money, is it possible to have agency without Bitcoin? So that's actually why I don't think so. So, you know, I've started, and why I continually start with, here's the thing that I feel like even with you, right, in Costa Rica is talking, but in, like, we're good friends. You inspire me in this space.

there's so many people who have different views and everything else that same similar to to that make me smarter in this space either or try to clarify what i'm saying to bring it tighter and tighter and something that's so obvious to me that uh but but when i watch this space evolve right and i and i and i and i try to put simple language to something that's really complex um

when I start with the natural state of the free market is deflation. People laugh at that because I say it over and over and over again. And you're smiling now. But if you think of the magnitude of those, what is it, seven words, what they actually mean to every other nonsense that you've ever heard and that you choose.

So when I say that, I mean, entrepreneurs have to, whether you're working for an entrepreneur, you're working for a new business, or you're an entrepreneur, in the free market, you have to create more value for somebody else to get paid. If you don't, the company fails. Why does a company fail? Because us as users, us as purchasers of the product or service, demand more value. So how could those two things, right? You have to create more value than what was there before, and we use more value.

how could those two things in a free market not produce more value it's it and why i try to drive into this so carefully is because it has to and people can hear these words and you've heard these words and you smile at these words without thinking about the repercussions of the world the imaginary world that you've always lived in that looks nothing like i just described

And so if you had one, the natural state of the free market is deflation, you had two, our ideas move exponentially to create more value, then three, you would expect exponential deflation or prices falling or value increasing for humanity.

four you would expect with ai where it's going every single person to be able to contribute to humanity and accelerate that curve and you would expect an abundance that we can't even imagine because we can't see what's not there we can't even measure what's not there we measure from the other system so but if those things are true and they are most certainly true

If those things are true, then the entire nonsense, everything we've been taught about economics, every single other thing means we lose our agency to somebody else's agency. We, everything is, and we trust the economists, we trust Trump, we trust Biden, we trust, somebody else always has to be the person that we trust because we don't live in a free market.

And so it's actually really simple. It's really simple. Now, the only question now, the next question, a derivative of that question, can Bitcoin withstand all of our nonsense actions trying to stop it?

That was going to be exactly my next question because there's never been a time in history where Bitcoin has been more ingrained in the old financial system. And can it remain a free market? So then to that degree, what you would have to do, and this is where I've spent a lot of time, a lot of time. Why would I believe it does? And I'm going to talk about this in my speech in Vegas. But why I believe it does is because of people like you.

And I mean that actually very seriously because of people like you that are bringing this to other people, even if you didn't know it all the way to the sand. Right But um and and and not just you but all of the others that I meet every day who are who know this as a protocol emerging in layers and are building on a protocol And if you added up all of those people it might only be 10 people Many of them private for most of the nonsense.

But building protocol technology in service of humankind that is the free market and protecting it. And what would you expect?

you'd expect the centralized system to attack this everywhere but and and so if there were 10 000 people like let's call it 10 000 and there's probably 10 000 it might even be be more but you have to assume some of those 10 000 people will sell for pieces of paper and go back to the other system right so um and they'll be replaced with more and more people that are understanding this and developing in as this changes, then those 10,000 people are against,

not against, but are building the future. Their actions are building the future that 8 billion people don't know yet. And so if you looked at the market at any given time, the expectation would be the noise of all of these other people with their own observations of what Bitcoin is to them or what money is to them or who should be in charge of money. All of those people would drown out these people. But they wouldn't drown out these people inside that bubble.

And so what I live in every day is circular economies, expansion, a network effect on Bitcoin that is like, it's just, it's so incredible. What I live in is, and I recognize that for somebody observing the system without living like I do, investing in these companies, investing in these people, seeing who these people were, and they're never going back, no matter what. If I didn't, if I wasn't here, I can imagine what

they would think about what this looked like. So now how do I know I'm right? If they all think they're right inside a system that has to steal their money to be able to, and they stay in it, how could I know I'm right? And why I know I'm right is objectively, I'm watching more and more people build this. I'm watching more and more layers being built on top of Bitcoin. I'm watching

prices relative to Bitcoin fall exactly as I would expect them to fall. Not that all the risks don't exist because if all of these people stopped tomorrow and said, ah, nice experiment, let's go back, then Bitcoin wouldn't be a thing. This is why, like, one of the things I've said over and over again is Bitcoin without the freedom money aspect isn't interesting to me. And this is exactly why. And to get back to your point a little earlier, you said like the people that aren't

going to leave Bitcoin. This is a thing that I say over and over again. It's like people ask you when you're going to sell Bitcoin. And I'm like, sell it for what? I'm not going to sell it for more dollars, that's for sure. But the thing that I will do at some point is sell it to buy my family a nice house. And does that reinforce the old system? Because when I do that, I'm going to do it with as big a mortgage as possible to basically short the fiat system with the housing market.

And is that not a reinforcement of that system? So why do houses have as much value as they have? They have as much value as they have because money is broken, right? Yeah. And so when you decide to make that, so I've told this story many times, right? My house five, six years ago was 300 Bitcoin. Now it's 15 Bitcoin. So pretend I don't have a house and I have 300 Bitcoin.

then I can choose when to buy that house, and I can buy it for one Bitcoin if I want to hold off, or I can buy it for 15 Bitcoin, or I can put a mortgage down and buy it for one Bitcoin and have a mortgage. All of these are free choices, as this new system imposes discipline around the other. And each choice has repercussions. So when you buy a house, you're choosing to buy now for your lifestyle of your family, which is totally fine.

Which was meaning you're going to distribute your Bitcoin to other people. And other people are going to take them and then buy a house later for less Bitcoin. And it's just part of the evolution of this thing repricing the entire world. that has to look like this. And each of our choices in a free market, when we want value, when we decide that this is the right price for us, is part of those choices.

But you are kind of propping up the debt Ponzi for a period of time though, while this happens. So let's change that subject or tackle this from a different way. In the next little while

in the economy, you're going to see supply chain shortages, you're going to see inflation like crazy, you're going to see crazy, and then there's going to be printing into that. Because if there isn't printing into that, there's going to be a deflationary collapse from money that can't allow deflation that destroys all money. And so there is going to be, and it's likely an order of magnitude higher than what COVID was.

as that happens and pushes prices up like crazy at the same time as jobs are leaving the market because the businesses the businesses have to use ai to get you to use their system to remove the job because if they don't um you won't use their system because you won't have the money so you're going to create so you're going to create this inflationary pulse massive inflationary pulse

There's going to be food insecurity. There's going to be uprisings all over the world and everything else because fertilizers are also going up in price. And all of these inputs are going up in price. At the same time, there's going to be massive printing to save the financial system.

at that time at that time that inflation is going to cause um demand destruction right because people won't be able to afford it their jobs and what they get paid especially in the businesses that pay them that are going to have to shed that there's going to be massive demand destruction and it's going to collapse in a deflationary spiral so now let's say and so these things, if you look back into Weimar Germany, as it was going through this, you see this chart

that goes up and down and up and down, and it flushes people up and down and down. We're used to living in stability. But when it looks like that, and we think we're outsmarting the market, we're going to take massive leverage at the time, thinking it's going to be devalued, and then it's going to go into deflation, and we're going to owe the leverage, and we're going it wiped out. So a lot of people inside of this system, and it has nothing to do with Bitcoin,

zero to do with Bitcoin, that this is happening. It has to do with money being debased at a crazy rate and physics coming due, right? And the free market coming due and a realization that we live in a nonsensical world that is more and more controlled. And this is going to create psychological breaks everywhere too in people because they're not going to be ready. They're thinking they're living in a normal world that's always looked this way. And it's not going to look that way.

And so let's say now you, Danny, take this and take a huge mortgage, Bitcoin, at this time, And then mortgage rates go way up at the wrong time. And what does that do to you when you think you played the game properly? So from the other system, which is growing in instability and has to do a certain number of things, which have second order consequences to people and third order consequences to people, and those people change what they think from that, you can expect this crazy chaos.

Or you could just hold your Bitcoin. Just stay in stability. Yeah, and no matter what side of it, you're going to win. Now, we look back to fonder times and say, I want a family home. I want it to look like that. I want a white picket fence with the kids and everything else. In the next little while in where we're going, it's unlikely to look like the past 30 years, past 40 years. It was a construct out of manipulated money that felt right. And that construct is going to break down.

and so so so so all of these individual choices including in bitcoin right are going to long for those times and make choices and they're going to sell their bitcoin and then many people will sell all their bitcoin for the pieces of paper then it will go to zero and all they'll do is distribute their bitcoin if you just stay with the natural state of the free market is deflation exponentially exponential technology gains should mean exponential deflation or prices falling or

abundance if bitcoin stayed decentralized and secure it is measuring that and just stay there everything else is uh everything else the problem and what you're doing and house the question too what you're doing is an emotional need to what does security look like and family look like to you tied to an old system wanting that wanting that to be true but it's no longer but but it's it's less and less true if what you're saying is right and we're entering this

sort of super chaotic period is the only thing to do hold bitcoin so it so that would be so imagine you so now that's an entirely different vector you just hold bitcoin um you don't spend it If you just held Bitcoin and didn't spend it, and it looked like that, then Bitcoin would get centralized, just like people held gold. And they used a monetary system that they knew was always broken. And why they needed an asset underpinning the monetary system is because the monetary system was broken.

And so Bitcoin is different in that way, in that you don't need an asset underneath the monetary system because the money isn't broken. The money itself is the network and you can store your money in money without having to store it in a piece of paper tied to a broken monetary system. So that change is another huge change in our perspective of what reality looks like.

Now, in Bitcoin, you have a whole camp of people talking about digital credit and what that would look like. You have an entire camp of people that believe that this is the strongest asset in the world, but it's not money. It's credit. Well, what is credit? Credit is loaned into existence from nothing. So if you had the strongest asset in the world and you had this credit that was loaned into existence for nothing, then most people would centralize their Bitcoin just like they centralize gold.

And you would have this nonsense system of broken money on top of gold. And then what would happen eventually is gold would break. You'd reprice gold. And so we can expect, if we look back at history and we know human nature, we can expect these things to happen. We can expect lots of people to be fooled, just like they were in FTX, just like they were in some of these others, and like they will be again.

we can expect tons of people to go into etfs trusting somebody else removing their own agency and and and trusting somebody else to get a higher yield um and and if if bitcoin all look like that if it looked like that it won't um but if it all looked like that it would fail so like you're obviously talking about sailor there I want to be careful of this because I can coexist in a world that I like Saylor I think he's good for Bitcoin I think he does a lot of great things I actually like the

investor in the business at least in my RRSP investor in the business but think he's brilliant but also disagree with him on a fundamental premise of and he can be right for a long time he can actually be, he can consolidate a lot of Bitcoin by telling the world that it's just an asset. But that is fundamentally different than it is money and it is used as money. And so I can like him. I can think he's really smart. I can see a lot of things that he does that are well for this.

And I can disagree with him that I believe it's a protocol and the protocol is emerging as money and privacy and everything else. It's a new internet protocol. So, and so, and I, that's why I want to be careful of the creating an us versus them and everything. Cause it is really easy to bite and say, yeah, he's terrible and everything else.

He's done a lot of great things for Bitcoin and a whole bunch of people that have understood his actions in Bitcoin will then in turn understand it's a protocol. Do you want to pay less in taxes and stack more Bitcoin? Of course you do. Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockware, you can. Under section 168K of the US tax code, Bitcoin mining servers qualify for 100% bonus depreciation. This means every dollar you spend on miners can directly offset your income in a single year.

And that's true for both business owners and W2 earners. If you have $100,000 in ordinary income, you can purchase $100,000 in miners and potentially offset your tax liability entirely. Blockware's mining as a service does all the heavy lifting. They secure the rigs, they source the low-cost power, and they handle all the day-to-day maintenance. So you get to stack Bitcoin every single day while drastically shrinking your tax bill.

Get started today at blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD and use code WBD for $100 off your first miner. That's blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD. If you haven't tried out Club Orange yet, then now is the time. It's my go-to place to find Bitcoiners whenever I'm traveling. Club Orange is a social app built for Bitcoiners where you can find meetups and events in your area and find merchants that are accepting Bitcoin.

There are over 19,000 Bitcoiners on there and whether you're at home or traveling, it's a great place to keep in touch with Bitcoiners from all over the world. I've been using Club Orange since it was Orange Pill app and it really is awesome. So if you're on there, drop me a DM and say hi. And if you want to find out more and download the app, just search for Club Orange on your app store or go to cluborange.org. If you already self-custody Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets.

Complex setups, clumsy interfaces and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen or forgotten. Well, BitKey fixes that. BitKey is a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square and Cash App. It packs a cryptographic recovery system and built-in inheritance feature into an intuitive, easy-to-use wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over. It's simple, secure self-custody without the stress. And time named BitKey one of the best inventions of 2024.

Get 20% off at bitkey.world when you use the code WBD. that's b-i-t-k-e-y dot world and use the code w-b-d so i like i agree with that sailor's clearly a genius um i think he's been good for bitcoin but i also would agree with you on the digital credit part but is there a world where that can be a dangerous narrative for bitcoin

yes yes so so that digital credit narrative will get wiped out not might get wiped out it's it's binary an inflationary system is opposite from the free market an inflationary system must centralize if you using digital credit on top of bitcoin and trust somebody else with your keys it is being centralized And at some point that's going to create a chain fork in Bitcoin. And one of those two, it's binary. One will win, one will not.

If you were the U.S. government and you were saying, I need my U.S. dollars to be the strongest, You would try to co-opt Bitcoin to using Tether and stable coins and everything else to concentrate other people so they don't hold their keys to concentrate enough Bitcoin. But the concentrating enough Bitcoin in sheer volume doesn't concentrate the nodes, doesn't concentrate the votes, doesn't concentrate the activity on Bitcoin.

And so by doing that, you're taking massive risk by trusting somebody else with your keys. The is eventually has to stop, because the inflationary system has to stop the deflationary one. or said differently, the system of abuse or centralization that we've always lived in can't allow the free market. But the point here is you have a choice. Your actions determine the choice. And what gives me so much confidence in my choice being the one that's going to resolve and win is it's not alone.

It's with thousands, tens of thousands of other people. And most of those people are hardly even known. And that's the number that goes up. Their heart and soul of Bitcoin and they're proving it with their actions every day. And so when I watch what's happening there and the emergence of the protocol and developing privacy and everything else and money and circular economies against what I would expect to happen with the vast majority of most people getting stuck in the old system.

It's just, I expect it. I completely expect it.

I expect it to, and then now if you're taking, if you have, if you don't hold your own coins, if you don't hold your own keys, if you haven't trusted, if you haven't done the work to understand this and you're trusting somebody else and you don't have agency, then you're likely to get annihilated so when you say that digital credit can't survive does that mean you don't think strategy as a business model will survive no i think i i think that that depending on how much uh

so so i think strategy as a business model could actually do extraordinarily well um and And because we're so early in this change, but many others will get hurt along the way. And strategy could get hurt if they're over-levered against a deflationary collapse. At some point, they could get really hurt. But I don't think they are over-levered. I think what you're talking about, I think Saylor is brilliant. I think he understands the game that is being played.

He might not be able to, as a public company, he might not be able to talk like I talk. You're part of your public company and you might get tapped on the shoulder and say, hey, and all of the people around, you can't go against the US dollar. I've always had that opinion. I think Saylor has left the US dollar alone very purposefully. I don't know if he said that he doesn't think Bitcoin is a threat to the US dollar. I don't know if he believes that or if that's just the line he has to toe.

Yeah, I would just say, keep going back to what I said in the beginning. Natural state of the free market is deflation. It means every single human being on the planet is working for you, trying to create value for you.

if you take where ai is going and where it is today that means eight billion people can create new apps new technologies and attempt right now using the technology we have right now to collapse price and deliver you more value and you're only going to use the things that deliver you more value so how in that world how possibly in that world could that be inflationary it's impossible the free market is massive abundance delivered by you you choosing more value

and the other system is a control system whether it's US dollar yuan, everything else and the emergence of the US as the greatest nation in the world was actually the free market if you look at in the 1800s you had something called the great deflation and what it was there's a whole bunch of people moving to the U.S. from these countries where they couldn't make it. Yeah. So, their ideas could make it. And those ideas create the value. So, those ideas of creating

value for other people is the thing that creates value for all people. And the more you constrain that so so let's go into a different vector of what we're talking about which is which is so if you have an inflationary system that punishes people that most people can't contribute and you only very few people can contribute then all society suffers you know when you wrote this book um ai was obviously a pretty big part of it but i think the did the book come out in 2019 is

that right yeah yeah so the it while it was a big part of the book there was not that much happening in the ai space at that time like it was all very behind the scenes and then today like it's crazy like the rate of change is unbelievable these are getting super powerful and only they're basically on like an exponential curve upwards does that speed up your timeline of when you think this change will come no it's been the same timeline all along so when i wrote the book so so you

remember in the book that i wrote about the paper folding and and i wrote it's like 50 folds get you to the sun or whatever it is exactly but most most people guess two inches at 50 folds you can only fold a piece of paper seven times but if you could continue folding it it reaches from here to the sun and most people when i say most people 99.999 percent guess two inches um it means we can't understand exponentials but that um but what i what i wrote and i'm pretty sure i wrote

exactly this in in the ai chapter that it's been the exact same rate since the 50s it's just the first fold created the first ai winter because the expectations were do everything and it did nothing and then there was another ai winter in the late 70s 80s and the expectation that now is the time and call it fold 15 or 16, that now is the time it's going to do everything. And then the fold just kept on, now they're bigger steps. But now what does that mean?

So this is why, like nothing I wrote has changed and nothing in the future, you can see perfectly what's going to happen out of what I wrote then. This is the slowest by far that AI is ever going to get.

And every day you hear something, oh my God, Claude just removed, this now it's open source because it's now in Rust libraries that's yesterday and then DeepSeek comes out and then this so it's every day you're going to hear these things and you won't even be able to keep up with the rate of change because it's moving at such a rate so the AI where you're using today is by far the worst it's ever going to be and that means that AI is going to be free

it's going to be abundant, it's going to be ubiquitous, and it's going to tie into physical goods too, robots and different physical goods that are going to do the same thing, create that abundance in all of those jobs and such everywhere. It's inevitable, right? And that's what I wrote about in my book. And you knew exactly where it'd be now. So nothing's changed. It hasn't

accelerate at all. It's exactly the same path I wrote about in my book and why you needed honest money because a debt-based system couldn't allow that deflation.

You know, you say humans can't understand exponentials, which is like the first time I heard the paper analogy, I got it miles wrong. Do you understand? How do you see this? So what I recognize is if every, I always ask myself, if everyone else is confused, I must be too. That's my starting position. So where might I be confused? Even when I wrote that, and when I came up with the paper folding analogy for the book, and the same analogy

is the rice on the chessboard doubling. You've heard that one? I don't know if I have heard that one. So it's an ancient story. Somebody tells the king of China, I will four X, I will each grain of rice. So you need to double a grain of rice on each chessboard piece and the grains of rice take over the entire kingdom.

right there's something so and um but you hear something like that you hear something you hear exponential patterns and then your brain goes yeah i get it one nice trick what a cool story and then you go straight back into your linear life and so so these things that that i realize other people do then i realize i must too and i work really hard to try to say to error correct that thing and and adjust my thinking for the thing that i'm not used to thinking so not perfect not uh but but

those when i see something when i observe something in everybody else i realize it must be in me too and when you say that like with the ai growth it's going to get to the point where you can't even keep up i feel that we're really close to that now we're past that now yeah and that's obviously very linked to the sort of debt-based system that we live in because ai is going to be hugely disruptive and earlier in the show you were talking about us going into this really chaotic

time do you think this is the final sort of debt bubble debt cycle that we're going to go through before something actually breaks and we have entirely different system on the other side yes really good question I suspect not and it could be when I say agency let's just do a toy experiment if everyone today stopped using pieces of paper and used Bitcoin if they knew what you knew and were actually living in Bitcoin and building in this how fast the world would move to abundance would be

It would take your breath away. It would be so crazy. There would be a repricing of everything. It would be all in Bitcoin. We're using Bitcoin. It would take your breath away. So then the question is to your thing, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin because we know that's true. And we know we can make it stronger with our actions within it. Yet we choose not to. the vast majority of people have their agency giving their agency away and so it's not about

bitcoin it's about us and so what would be more likely if if what i said that somebody and you can see this in other countries you can see a currency completely lose everything complete reset people lose everything and then go back immediately to believing in that currency that's way more likely why like why does that happen what's the the sort of game theory behind that so it happens because because we we don't want to look at first that we don't want to look

at these first principles like so what i talk about over and over and over again like i might say they they it's actually really simple you could explain economics to a five-year-old We compete to provide value to other people in the world, and we use the things that give us more value. That's it. That's it. There is no more to economics.

meaning everything the construction of our belief system inside those other people who are smarter than us is is so wound it part of our psyche that we don't want to take our we don't want to claim our own agency i don't i find it really hard to understand that mindset though like when i first got into bitcoin um it was almost like hearing a conspiracy theory in the sense that it was like everything that you think every way that you think the world works is actually wrong and but

unlike other conspiracy theories it had an answer like bitcoin was the answer to this other system um and as soon as i heard that i was like if you're telling me there's this asymmetric bet that i can make that there's a ton of fraud and ponzi-like dynamics with the debt-based system then i'm going to take that bet every single day and i don't know how once the curtain gets pulled back people can still opt to live in that other system. I can't tell you why. I can just observe what is.

And if you looked around the world today, what do most people do? They live in that other system. And they might hear this. I was just at lunch. I was just at lunch with people who've read my book

three times. And they said the exact same thing. I know it's true, but I'm spending all of my time in the other system but it i guess it is hard to break out of but one of the things you've said a few times in this is that you know it's true and i i believe that you know it's true but what happened what has to happen for it to be like provably true so it's a so it's a really good you know in bitcoin there's uh if you're intj entj it's a very small fraction of the population

but it's a really high percentage of Bitcoiners. This is on the personality test thing. Personality test. I think it's because people that are that, not that they're better or worse, but they can handle an abstract concept. They can hold it and realize that they in turn create reality of the new thing. Where other people need to see the thing

logically fitted in and it feeds back and everything else. So if you have this new, new thing that's never existed before, that's really abstract and it's protocol emerging in layers and that has so many layers, then the people that are being most attracted to that new, new thing would be the people that would drive into, wait, how could the world look? and what are my actions in creating the world to look like that? And that wouldn't make the other people bad.

They would just need to see more and more evidence of that working. And there wouldn't be evidence because it was emergent. It was emergent from the actions that people took. And so I think that's why. I think that we just have different strengths, weaknesses. each person has different strengths or weaknesses, and some people are more likely to grab onto something like this that creates something totally different, and some people need to wait until it's proven in their minds.

And so what would that feel to people that are used to measuring physical reality from proof, from a system designed against them? It would be really chaotic, right? Because this new thing would feel abstract. It would feel like what I'm talking about right now is word salad. They wouldn't be able to hold on to an abstract concept that was emerging.

They would hold on to, I have pieces of paper, and the government says they're real, and here's how GDP works, and everything that they believe from their system, they would hold on to that.

I remember when I don know a few maybe like a year ago Brandon Quitton put a thing on Twitter trying to get people to do that personality test and he was taking data of it And I was like oh I be different And so I did the test and yeah I was one of the two groups that basically every Bitcoin falls into Which is a really like that is strange that it has attracted that particular sort of personality type over others.

But one of the interesting things is that as you get more and more into Bitcoin, talking about the price becomes less of a talking point. No one really desperately wants to talk. Like when we meet up, how many times did we talk about the price of Bitcoin? Like zero.

but like safe dean said something to me that i thought was really interesting when i had him on the show he he said that the price is the ultimate scoreboard because that's how we see how much we're winning if bitcoin goes to a million dollars is that your thesis proven out as you were right no no so but but again i i can totally accept somebody else's observation of what they think it is to win and have a different observation of what I think it looks like to win.

When I think about, so let me talk about Saifedean, what he just said in the way that I would look at that. We know in Fiatland, prices are imagined. You print more money and house prices go up and asset prices go up, but it's all an imaginary construct from infinite units that are able to be printed infinite. If you have infinite units pricing the world and you keep on printing those, all prices will rise. So house prices and everything else would rise. If you had non-infinite units in

Bitcoin, then those will rise to against that dollar. And all of it will be, if you said pricing, will be kind of an illusion because it's based, that price based in US dollars is based on an infinite variable. If you said what should happen in a free market is prices fall of everything, and they might fall really fast because some of that money has already gone to money heaven. It's just been propped up, right? It's completely gone.

And so some of those companies are going to fail spectacularly. They're going to be wiped out. But if you just looked at the trend, you could just say, if the natural state of the free market is deflation, and we know it is for sure, and if Bitcoin stayed decentralized and secure, it will price number one. No matter what. It will price the free market. And then if the free market is, now we don't live in a free market. So there's all these crazy prices all over the places.

And so some prices are going to fall like in a straight line. But over time anyways, this is going to reprice everything. If it stays decentralized and secure. And so I don't, that's why I don't think in price and fiat dollar. because it takes Bitcoin into the denominator of something that's infinite and tries to pull me back to the other system. I just think about goods and services priced in Bitcoin. Now, that's hard to do.

It's almost like if you're the first time you've traveled a lot in the world, when we went to Costa Rica, when you're changing your US dollars for cloning and you're trying to figure out what does this mean for goods and services and everything else it's a mental tax that you're constantly having to do it's the same thing in Bitcoin it's a mental tax because you're used to doing this and the mental tax and what is the value in Bitcoin and it's probably a harder mental tax

because it's never existed before but that's what I try to constantly do try to constantly and and and what what would my expectation in the free market look like in bitcoin if it stayed decentralized and secure and and that's what i see that's what i observe i observe that happening around the world in the um i'm sure you saw elon musk talk about in the sort of ai world of the future we're not going to need money because as you say like the

cost of everything drops to its marginal cost of production, like things might just be free and abundant. Do you think that's true? Do you think we will still need money?

Very little. So a better way to look at it and imagine how complicated this is right now. And then somebody wants to make that complication. And typically when they do that, they're jumping, the shark and they say, like Elon Musk is not a Bitcoiner. Most of his money comes from government contracts and government. And subsidies. Subsidies and such. I'm not saying he's not a great

entrepreneur or a great marketer or something. He clearly is, yeah. He clearly is. But if you actually understood what it would look like in a free market, prices would fall and he would have to compete broadly with everybody. And so it's illogical to me that you could say, we don't need money. Well, he uses money that's growing infinitely to create a crazy empire. Because what that means is he controls the means of production.

and he controls the means of production and everybody operates on or he does, Google does, Amazon does maybe in China a couple of other but the means of productions are controlled by the technocrats and we all use that and we can get shut off of that anytime and the means of why those are centralizing is because of money so a free market looks different so to answer your question in the year 2140 when Bitcoin mining when we've mined the last block would we ever go back to a time

where we thought it was normal to manipulate money and that was normal nobody would ever make that choice it would be insane to make that choice So the thing we would use as money, not that we wouldn't still use an abstract concept of Bitcoin to base the free market, but you wouldn't feel like you needed it.

You'd never go back to a time where, like, if we go to that point, if you just move forward, assuming Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure, and what that world looks like, can you imagine those people looking back at this timeline and saying, what were they thinking?

how could they how could they trust all of those people that were extorting them and and constantly believe in that nonsense and and do more of it right we'd never go back have you ever read the mandibles this is the obligatory hat tip to odell um because in that you do kind of see in that book so this is a book about basically fiat collapse and then there's the free state of Nevada where they basically have zero tax and the whole point of the book is these

people trying to go from New York to Nevada. When they get there, I think the last line of the book is and then they implemented like a 5% tax. Do you think there's no way that if we do move to this world, we don't end up very slowly moving back into a fiat type system? No, I don't think so. So, and that's chosen by us. If we move just about all that way, if we move to it's just a store of value, then guaranteed that's what we do. For sure.

But I don't think, and that's why this is going to be a chaotic transition, because I think all of these observations or truths in the market are true today equally. And each person is making one more true than the other.

and so what's happening is at least from my observation is as you have a protocol that's emerging and it's adding privacy and it's adding payments and you have these circular economies growing and you have this emergence um those people just like us in costa rica we're not talking about price if you go back on on crypto twitter or bitcoin twitter it would look like everybody is. But those people don't at all. They're building something entirely new that's

totally different. They don't care. They're never going back. And they don't see it as just a store of value. They see it as money. And so, of course, it has to go through all of our belief systems, and only one's going to win. Last question on this sort of future Bitcoinized world

is what do you think happens with credit markets? Because I don't believe you can ever get rid of credit. What would that look like in a Bitcoin world? Yeah, and a lot of your questions, actually most of these, even in the entire way, start from a credit-based system, which you're used to, and move into what does Bitcoin look like. If you want to know my simple, how I make it easy for myself, I start with first principles. Natural state of the free market is deflation.

We have exponential technology growth from the free market. And if Bitcoin stayed decentralized and secure, you have an energy-backed system protocol emerging around the world. What would it look like? So I start from a different place than you start from. So what you're starting from is to buy a house, I need credit. To start a business, I need credit. I start from a different point. Natural state of the free market is deflation. I invest in companies all the time, and I always have.

And when I start a company, when I've started a company, I can never get credit. I have to get equity. Somebody has to believe in my view of the world is going to produce more return for me and them by delivering value to somebody else. No one gives you credit. And so I start from that spot. And so people say, well, there's no way business could survive.

and I ask why that's the way the world looks right that's the way that's that's the way it looks right now so so what happens is credit gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller as a percentage of the overall economy today it is the economy because we live in credit-based money that is always manipulated and if you're if you're the biggest credit provider then you provide systematic risks. If you fail, the entire system fails. So government always bails out the

largest credit providers. And so if you knew that and you were a credit provider, systematic, you would want to get as big as you could as fast as you could. So you had heads, I win, tails. Now that feeds back everywhere in the market. So if you're bidding on other companies, if you're a private equity company, and you can't lose, then if other people are going

to bid four times for a company, you'd bid six because you always have somebody else to. And so it's a rational game to overpay when you have a backstop of credit money, which is more and more

debt forever, and you can never lose. So all of these things that people's perception of what the what money looks like and debt looks like and that the prices because those are overbid and um seem so high you think you need more debt so and then the other part of that which is important is if you had productivity gains all the time and you take took debt then the debt gets more expensive in real terms. So if you took too much debt, the debt would fail.

So I do, I could totally understand what you're saying there, but in this future world, if someone like everything's abundant, everything's marginal cost production, so very cheap, abundant world, there's still going to be people striving for things that they

may not have the capital to do on their own. And so like, if you're a credit worthy person with an idea that you think you're going to add more value to society there's going to be people that are willing to back you in that and offer you credit like but how how does that work in this bitcoinized world yeah so what is so probably they offer you equity they want to be owners of your business with you if they believe in you it's not just credit out of thin air i just it's not just

credit out of thin air and and the credit out of thin air the credit out of thin air on a Bitcoin standard will blow up if it's a Bitcoin standard. So the credit, it'll get less and less and less. So now, if you think about this, even the conversation we're having right now, I'll bet you most people that are listening to this right now go, that's insane because they're measuring it from the other system too. And they're used to living in a credit involvement that is unlimited credit.

When we say $39 trillion, remember in my book I said in the last 20 years credit had grown $185 trillion? That was to 2019. That's more than double now. Crazy. But it had to. It's mathematically because deflation is one side of the axis and the credit's the other. But what people don't realize is that's centralization. Right?

That's centralization of everything. Why they see big tech, big government, and they're yelling at all of these centralized things is because it's mathematical. It's part of a system designed to extract. It has to.

it's i i just wish i thought like you more jeff i'm getting there um i i always love talking to you let's close out with if there was one thing that you could say to all the listeners that helped them get a little bit closer to jeff booth's way of thinking like what is it i i i know i joke around about the kind of when i say the natural state of the free market is deflation but they should hold that thought in their head over and over and over again and if it's true

then then the next step is i have agency or i don't right every time i use a piece of paper that somebody else can print unilaterally i lose my agency if i if if i move my time into this other into this other system i have agency in the world that's that's emerging um and so those are the things that I would get them to, if something's true, even if it's uncomfortable, if it's true, it's true. And this is an uncomfortable truth, meaning that we've always lived in a lie. Uncomfortable truth.

And that's the hardest thing. The hardest thing in that is to examine that for what it is. And because we don't want to believe we've always lived in a lie.

and that's probably the thing that's going to perpetuate this system longer yeah is that no one's willing to admit that you don't want to believe it it's just too hard on your own psyche to to believe you've all you've you've you've been deceived your entire life and into this in this system that you thought was a free market and that that you have a construct for your belief on what it is that's why i'd say you have to break that you don't have to you could stay trapped but it gets easier

when you face the truth and then decide I love it Jeff when we were in Costa Rica I said we had to make a show on this you said a few things to me that kind of blew my mind I think you were the only person in Costa Rica that can snore louder than a growling monkey but it's been awesome hanging out Jeff I appreciate you so much thank you for coming on the show yeah you too buddy alright I will see you soon see you in Vegas yeah sounds good