The Wolf Of All Streets - Jeff Booth: Buying Bitcoin Is Not Enough

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Deflation is the key to our future. Learn why from guest Jeff Booth - GP at Ego Death Capital. Jeff believes that Bitcoin will help us move from a society run on manipulation to one where we will all cooperate through aligned incentives. He joined us at Bitcoin Miami to discuss monetary policy, the inevitable failure of printing more money, how capitalism is looking more and more like communism, and why Bitcoin is unstoppable. JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSOR ►► Vauld is a Smart Investing Crypto Platform which allows the user to invest without any stress! With Vauld, you can earn free passive income in crypto. Vauld lets you earn the highest interest rates in the crypto industry - 12.68% on stablecoins and 6.7% on BTC and ETH.. Sign up below and get a 40% kickback on trading fees, 5% commission on interest payouts and 5% commission on loan interest. Vauld’s ‘Buy the Dip’ function automatically purchases specific cryptocurrencies for you when the price dips below a pre-set level. It’s awesome! Sign up here: http://thewolfofallstreets.info/vauld EPISODE LINKS Jeff Booth: https://twitter.com/JeffBooth Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c

People don't talk about the internet like they talk about Bitcoin. It is the rails that we build a commerce on top of. It powers communication. It's just an open communication platform that everything else was built on top. Bitcoin is that platform that everything is going to be built on top. This podcast is sponsored by Vauld. Please stay tuned for more information on this amazing company later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where two times every single week, I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, music, art, sports, basically anyone with a

good story to tell. And this time, I have a guest who's been on the show, I believe, twice before. So this is probably round three. And this is the first time, because we launched the show right before COVID, that we've actually been able to do a podcast sitting live here at Bitcoin Miami 2022. And couldn't have a better guest, of course, than the author of The Price of Tomorrow, Jeff Booth. Jeff, we're here. We did it. But you have not been coming from home to get here, right? You were just in El Salvador. Can you tell me about that? Because I haven't made the trip yet. Yeah, it was incredible. This year we decided with COVID and everything,

we decided to put the kids in online school and travel the entire year. So we've been a couple trips home as well in between, but one of those trips we planned on doing was El Salvador. And so we just got back, actually flew in yesterday to Miami. And wow, it was incredible. So talk about what it's like on the ground, because we get this, I think, strange sort of media false impression, I'm sure, of everything that's happening there, both on the extremist side, positive and negative. Yeah. And I think that's

important. So my wife and kids were with me, and I would say they were hesitant because you heard about the gang violence and you heard about in the news, it consumed the news before we went. It wasn't like that at all. So it felt safe. It felt we traveled to Santa Ana to do a volcano hike. We went to a lake. We went boating on a lake. We went surfing. I went into San Salvador for some meetings with officials. And I did a YPO speech there to the YPO group in San Salvador. And I felt completely safe the whole time. It is, it's earlier than, so Bitcoin isn't widely accepted everywhere.

That was the next question. Are you seeing this massive Bitcoin presence every store, every, you know, gas station? It is impossible not to see the hope and so and that's just like anything that's new and starting there's some confusion over it but even at Bitcoin Beach not every single vendor would take Bitcoin but for those that do and for the people that are understanding this just it's just when you see hope through people's eyes and what they're doing, it's just amazing. So it's early, but really positive.

Was the feeling that the people who aren't taking it or who aren't participating because they just haven't gotten there yet? Or did they have a bad experience? Some customer came up and they couldn't figure out how to use their Lightning wallets. So it's mostly just an adoption curve. Bitcoin might be hard to understand. It might be harder to understand if you're in El Salvador and you've never trusted a system and you're not banked and everything. And so I actually believe that that's actually what all the entrepreneurs are doing. They're creating product market fit that make adoption better.

So when people teach Bitcoin about all of what we do, that's really hard for people to grab onto and say, now I want to use this as my main thing. Right. Right. And, and, and I'm going to shift all my attention from something to the, to the new thing. And, and I use an example often, the Palm Pilot was similar to the iPhone. It was just earlier and it was clunky. When the iPhone worked and it removed all the friction, everybody used it. And so that product market fit, which is largely in the entrepreneurial domain of creating great companies, is going to be the thing that drives adoption like crazy.

And so some of those, like some of the wallets, the Chivo wallet, it's okay, but it's not as good as Moon Wallet. So you're getting, but I also went to a Bitcoin meetup there. I met a guy, he calls himself the Bitcoin Taxi. And he created a dirt poor taxi driver. And he created a business calling himself the Bitcoin Taxi, where now he employs many taxi drivers and everybody uses them. And then now he's telling other people about how it's changed his life. And so you just see this. It's really exciting, really exciting. And I think what you described is sort of a microcosm for the growth of technology in general,

but of Bitcoin everywhere. We just have a UX, UI and marketing problem. Like we just need better PR, right? We still can't explain to your average 50 something or 60 something person. We can get them there, I think, on the importance of it as an asset, but how to actually use it. Listen, you and I are down this rabbit hole probably as far as it goes. I don't want to only use Bitcoin to transact in my life. Yeah. Funny enough, I actually am now getting to the point where I want to, and I'm going to spend more time working on top of businesses that are all in. I'm going to spend more of my time, energy, everything else supporting that ecosystem because buying it is not enough.

No, it is for some people, but that's not what's going to bring it to a full level of mainstream adoption. So obviously, you had the experience of being in El Salvador, but there's sort of the macro surrounding everything that's happening there. The delay of the Bitcoin bond, of course, the IMF pushback. The United States, I just saw Congress people are trying to pose legislation in the United States about El Salvador. What's your take on the reaction to this move by El Salvador? It's a pretty, if you look at any business, what does a monopoly business do when a technology threatens their business? It's exactly the same thing. So a monopoly business tries to use their monopoly to crush the business. And in Bitcoin's sense, that's what's happening at a higher level in the world.

And most people don't understand that. And when there's a technology that provides a 10 times improvement for people's lives that's decentralized, nothing can stop it. So we will go through iterations of this for a long time as IMF comes in but El Salvador was a crack in the dam. You're gonna see at this conference, you're going to see other cracks. Oh, big ones. In that dam. And it's ultimately unstoppable. And more important, why would you want to stop a technology that provided this type of power and abundance to people?

So to stop it, you have to be offside on truth. And so will that continue to happen? Do I understand why the monetary policy in the world looks like it does and what it looks like? And will that continue? And will the powers that be try to stop it? Absolutely. It can't be stopped. I literally feel like that could be the new marketing campaign for governments. United States, offside on truth. Right. I mean, it's literally what they do. It's their business. As you said, it's sort of a monopoly. But that brings us, I guess, to the monetary policy that you talk about and we talk about, obviously, all the time. And it's probably the reason that you fell down this rabbit hole in the first place.

But you've almost looked like a profit at this point, right? I mean, you've been talking about this, beating this drum for years, and even the previous times that we talked, transitory, not really a problem, under control, 2% target. We haven't talked since they've admitted that inflation is actually a problem. The Fed has turned hawkish. So having seen this coming for so long, I know it's not an I told you so moment, but what's your feeling now on seeing it in real time? Yeah, and I want to be careful because it's not, I don't want to say I told you so.

No, you did. But this is something even before the book I was talking for 10 years on. In fact, one of the central bankers, the previous central bank of Canada, was just on TV talking about where we are in this cycle. And I had a conversation with him in 2016 because I was on the Canadian Business Roundtable. And so a private conversation, it had access to everything. And I had a conversation about my thesis, about technology deflationary and it's two different systems and he said

what would you have us do? And I realized at that point our institutions don't have a clue. They don't have a clue and so we we trust that our institutions are looking after our best interests but they're just as likely to be to miss how fast technology is moving as us and so when when he said that and i realized and i did i just did the math i did all the probabilities of what would happen on the existing system and what would happen on on a new system and i realized my kids were going to grow up in a really polarized world and that's that's that's actually one of the things that gave me the impetus to write the book. Because nobody was talking about these two systems.

You had a free market driven by technology, where we all vote with our time to use technology that gives us more value. And that must be deflationary. It has to be. Because we vote for it. We wouldn't use Zoom if it didn't give us more value. must be deflationary. It has to be, because we vote for it. We wouldn't use Zoom if it didn't give us more value. And that value now can touch millions of people

all over the world where it didn't before. We wouldn't use Google if it didn't give us more value. All of these things that give us more value create deflation. And so if you have a system that has to work in the opposite direction and has to drive inflation, then you can a system that has to work in the opposite direction and has to drive inflation, then you can see what's going to happen. And you can probability event everything that's coming on both sides because you have one system going this way and you have one system that

essentially has to match that. And even Scott, when you say that inflation-deflation debate, people are saying, okay, where are we here? How much is inflation going to be this quarter? And here's just a first principle simple question. What would it look like if no governments were able to print money? There wouldn't be inflation. Right. There would be, every market would collapse to zero.

Everything would unwind. And cash would be, every market would collapse to zero. Everything would unwind. And cash would be super valuable. But not cash that you think you have in the bank, because that would unwind too. The cash you have under your mattress. Because, and so that's what would happen. But that failing of the entire market structure, everything that's built on top of it that we live in is impossible for governments to say, I'm going to let this happen. So by de facto, they have to keep printing. They have to keep printing more and more and exponentially more, which is what you're seeing in inflation.

Right. We're seeing an inflation, but the Fed is turning more hawkish and talking about rate raises. But I mean, it's impossible, right? Especially, I mean, let's put it in context of the fact that we're in a, at least in the United States, we're in an election year, right? And so what happens if they allow this to continue to get out? They become too hawkish. They stop inflation, which they can't. Anyways, everyone loses a job, right? We go into a massive recession or depression and there's not a safe. The entire, every bank fails. There's no food on grocery stores.

You can't go to the hospital. Everything fails. The information layer between, all money is, is information. And so as people are corrupting it, but if you stop that more, the counterparty risk around what people think is money and it's only credit. So if you allow the credit to contract, it just keeps on contracting. So the Fed is right now, and you see stock market valuation off, risk on, risk off, all over the place, because the Fed is trying to pretend that they have an ammunition to be able to stop printing, but they can't.

So they're going to have to do yield curve control. They're going to have to come in with massive monetary stimulus. I can't tell you the time of that. I can't tell you when that looks like, but I can tell you if they don't, you're going to see cascading collapse all around the world of bank failures. Remarket, right? Exactly. A big one's last remarket. It really is. And even it, it is a free market, but it is influenced by all of these policies.

It's impossible to live in this world without that influence. That said, does the increasing adoption by institutions, governments and all these things give you any pause or cause for concern? When we started, it was peer to peer cash. It was short the bankers, long Bitcoin. We cheer when they come in and the price goes up. But that, as you said, sort of makes it even more tied to what's happening in the macro situation. Do you think that Bitcoin being controlled by Wall Street, that won't happen? But that won't happen. But that narrative, do you think that we're at risk of the asset having problems?

If people self-custody, we're at no risk. If people are taking this off exchange and self-custodying and more and more people doing peer-to-peer, there's no risk. And a lot of people mistake money in Bitcoin for influence in Bitcoin. And they're two totally different things. The only way eventually to gain more Bitcoin is going to be to provide value to somebody else in their terms. That's the only way you're going to be able to get more Bitcoin after or buy it from somebody else for more than they paid. But eventually, it is going to be, you're going to have to provide value to them. And it will look like a completely free market. And what that means, and I don't think people can see that far,

but what that means is every single test onto Bitcoin, all these entrepreneurs building on top and what will be to come, and I can see some of these things are really exciting, what's to come. Even if you hate Bitcoin, it forces prices down everywhere. It's a free market and it forces the abundance gained from technology to be most broadly distributed. Guys, I have a serious question for you. How much interest are you earning in your bank account? Is it 0.00001% or something similar?

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is absolutely incredible. It does everything. They're backed by Pantera and Coinbase Ventures. You really can't ask for anything more. And if you use the link right down below, you get a 40% kickback on trading fees, 5% commission on interest payouts, and 5% commission on loan interest. Guys, sign up right now at thewolfofallstreets.info slash VAULD. That's V-A-U-L-D. Do it now, seriously. Okay, so you have a solution, right? You wrote an entire book about it. You know what a utopian world would theoretically look like. And just before you say that, there is no such thing as utopia. It's a mindset. Of course.

But because as humans, we want to solve the next problem. Can we ever get there with this runaway train now? We've discussed this before. 2008, maybe they had a chance. A bit of a chance. What would the world look like in 2022 if they had let the banks fail, not had stimulus? We would have had a major depression, obviously. But would we be better off in 2022 now than with the current situation after all of that stimulus for 14, 15 years? The interesting thing on this, and Dalio talks about this, Dalio, I think,

mistakes what Bitcoin is and what the transition mechanism is in a big, in fundamental deal, we can talk about it, but he talks about this thing that over time, you get these long-term debt cycles that have to be reset. In 2008, they don't get reset through that crisis because if 2008 was allowed to expand, that was what was happening. We had a business where we had containers all over the world in transit. And the counterparty banks in all these other countries

wouldn't take our money. It was in our bank. It was a ledger item in our bank, but nobody would take it. And so for three days, containers just stopped as no one took our money. And what you realize, the entire global financial system was going to cascade and collapse. That's why they came in with TARP. They weren't just bailing out the U.S. They were bailing out the entire monetary policy or the rails of commerce on the world. So it's hard to look back at that time

and then say what would have happened because there wasn't Bitcoin at that time. Right. There wasn't a transition mechanism from this system to another system. So there probably wasn't a way without a complete and utter collapse. And if you let that collapse happen around the world, do you think dictators would rush in and take advantage of that? Of course.

And so it's hard to look back and say, but you can say this for sure. By failing to do what capitalism requires, the free market requires, and bailing out the architects of the crisis by socializing the losses, you send a signal to capitalism itself that said, if we are too big to fail, then there has to be a, then the government will always bail us out. So what do you think happens? Do less people know that or more people know that? Right. And as more people know that, they race in and they distort capitalism further and further and further because they know their leveraged bets are always going to be paid by the taxpayer.

Bonuses get bigger, nobody goes to jail, and at the end of the day, you're going to get refunded. And now today, 15 years later, people think that that's capitalism. They think that's the free market. And it's a Frankenstein version of crony capitalism. It actually looks more like communism than capitalism. Well, it looks like capitalism for poor people and socialism for rich people. Communism for the rich and capitalism for everybody else to suffer through. I love what you said about what you've done with your family. I've wanted to do it. My kids are way too young, two and seven. I don't feel like I can pack them up and do that. But it leads to a point,

A, you've been making forever. We live in a world now with the technology exists where you can just do that. You don't need to be in school. Maybe you don't need to go to college. Maybe you just learned to code. Maybe you already have some awesome job playing video games in the metaverse when you're 13 and have made a million dollars, right? But what that brings me to is the fact that our kids, certainly mine, are going to grow up in a Bitcoin cryptocurrency native world. And maybe I can't see it because it's so new to me being in my 40s, but isn't all of what we're talking about just going to disappear sort of into the ether as this just becomes a part of the underlying technology, the conversation, and our kids are going to laugh at us that we didn't even know about it? Yeah.

So people don't talk about the internet like they talk about Bitcoin. It is the rails that we build a commerce on top of. And it powers communication. It's just an open communication platform that everything else was built on top. Bitcoin is that platform that everything is going to be built on top. Now, that creates, if you're in an old world industry getting disrupted by that, I understand that you have empathy for what you're going to face. But for our kids, building on top of that, you could create so much value for other people

on top of that network, just like all of the wealth that was created on top of the internet. And so that's what's happening right now and it's wildly positive as we move through this. But depending on your point of view, if you're in the old system breaking down, you're not going to think it's very positive.

But anybody could change in an instant and say, I want to explore this and I want to see where I can provide value. That's what I was going to say. We'll live in a world where you can pivot very quickly. Warren Buffett's not pivoting. Yeah, quickly. Warren Buffett's not pivoting. Elizabeth Warren's not pivoting. But actually, if you think about what gives them their control structure, so Warren Buffett gets his control.

His wealth is a derivative of the fiat system. In 2008, remember, he bailed out Goldman Sachs, got preferred shares in Goldman Sachs, and then Goldman Sachs became a bank to be able to access TARP funding. Yeah. You think he might have known that transaction was coming? And so he gains a lot of his wealth from a system that requires this manipulation.

And he might not see it, that something so profound for so many people on the planet, it's a different system. But it doesn't benefit him the same way the existing system. And if you take Elizabeth Warren, as you drive inflation and more people are left out, she gets a stronger calling because those people left out want to blame somebody. And those people left out want to blame the rich. And that was created by the same policies, transferring wealth from the middle class and poor to the rich,

that she advocates for. And then she takes advantage of dividing society by blaming the rich, when it's not... They're just... It's a system problem. Right, but that leads to the fact, people like that, I'm not picking on her, but you're either dumb, you're in denial or you're evil. Right. And she's not dumb. Right. We know that she's not dumb and I don't think those people are. So is it just a, is it cognitive dissonance because you've had a belief system for so long? Maybe that's my glass

half full is that you don't see how it can help people. If you're a liberal, if you're on the far left side, Bitcoin should literally be the dream that you're pushing to every person. This should not be, and I don't think it's as politicized as they make it, but if you believe in helping the average person, you should be an ally, not an enemy. You should be a flag carrier for this. But let's just say, in her world, let's just, and I think it's worse than this, but let's just give her the benefit of the doubt. In her world, everyone's saying, I love you, I love how you're standing up for my rights. Does she not read Twitter?

Exactly. standing up for my rights and and and she's not reading twitter exactly most people in her whole entire power base and her entire election base is telling her yeah you go after them and she just believes her own what bubble is that because it could it could be the same bubble that if you're just being on it could it's not but it could be the same bubble we all fall into. When people tell us we're really great, we want to believe them and we want to keep on doing that thing. Andrew Yang, when I talked to Andrew Yang, he said, you're the first person that ever got me to see Bitcoin was different in this. Because his whole policy agenda was UBI. And he couldn't see that that was making the whole thing worse.

But now how do you backtrack from that statement? Has he backtracked from UBI now? I mean, he's starting a completely... And listen, you're allowed to... A mark of intelligence is strong opinions loosely held, right? That's what I wrote in my book. Right, of course. But for someone like him, I mean, his entire platform was effectively, but he had the right idea with the wrong solution

in your mind, right? The idea is the same that's in your book. Technology is going to take your job. Things are going to get cheaper. You're going to have to work less in theory, but it's just the solution to give everybody a bunch of money that they print maybe isn't. What you just said is the thing that gives me hope. The free market has all of our ideas. And when you say only these ideas count and we're going to manipulate media just so these ideas count, or if you're World Economic Forum, and these ideas count. Same idea, technology is going to replace jobs. But if you're in that idea and you're saying, I need to control it all because I need to control those useless people

that aren't smart enough to know this, and I'm not saying this in a, and it sounds like a derogatory way, but you could make a convincing case to a small group of people and say, we have to do this to save people. And you could believe your own bullshit about having to do this. And you could create an entire structure of, we're smarter than all those people and those people don't know, so we better create this.

But who decided to give you that power? And that's actually why I say I'm positive on the future. The free market is all of our ideas competing for attention. My book was just one of those ideas, which was a different idea than all of these other things that cut through the clutter and why it turned into best-seller, why we're talking right now, why that idea is more powerful than a bunch of the other ideas and where that leads into

Bitcoin is, Bitcoin is the only way to get from a transition from a system that has to go through these iterations without controlling everything through a central structure is the only way to transition to a different system. And that's a really powerful idea. It's unstoppable. It's so interesting, though, because that really does sort of let them off the hook from 2008 and before, because that really does sort of let them off the hook from 2008 and before because maybe there wasn't an answer, but now they have no excuse.

And whether they see it or not, whether any single person, Bitcoin is so much more powerful than me, you, any single, it doesn't matter if you're here, don't trust your heroes, right? Don't meet your heroes sometimes. And it's an idea. And the idea is all of us. And it's a really powerful idea. And if enough people believe in that idea and move towards it, our world is just made up of ideas. This chair competed against a whole bunch of other ideas of chairs to be right here. And that was a free market force that was in somebody's brain that created a company around delivering this. It had to compete against all of the other ideas to get here.

The entire system that we live in, that most people believe that you have to have inflation to have a productive society, is just an idea. It's a wrong idea. It might have been right in the past where you had hard money and a credit-based system on top. And to drive velocity and money, you had to have more and more credit. But Bitcoin replaces that idea because you can have velocity through technology instead of credit. And so it's just an idea fighting for attention. But that idea is a very powerful idea that is based on truth, hope, abundance, and I think it's inevitable. I love it.

They say never meet your heroes, but that's going pretty good for me here. I think what you inevitable. I love it. They say never meet your heroes, but that's going pretty good for me here. I think what you're doing is absolutely incredible. I hope we get another book, third, fourth, fifth. I'll tell you the one person that would never meet your heroes that that was true is Nassim Taleb, who's called me an idiot enough times now on Twitter that I've finally given up.

So where can everybody follow you and keep up with you after this conversation? Best is just at Jeff Booth on Twitter. Guys, this conversation? Best is just at Jeff Booth on Twitter. Guys, check out Jeff Booth at Jeff Booth on Twitter. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm glad that we got to do it while things were a little bit quiet and before it gets out of control. It's always amazing to put a face to a name after talking so many times through a screen. Thanks, Scott.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you haven't already left a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please do that now. Spotify just added ratings, so please go ahead and click that five star. I'll see you guys next time.