What Bitcoin Did - Jeff Booth: Everything They Told You About Money Is Wrong

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

“You’ve been deceived your entire life.” Jeff Booth returns to the show to break down Bitcoin, AI, inflation, debt, deflation, and the kind of systemic chaos that could reshape everything people think they know about money. If Jeff is right, we are heading into a period of supply chain shocks, inflation spikes, mass money printing, job destruction from AI, and a brutal repricing of the global economy. In this episode, Jeff explains why the natural state of the free market is deflation, why Bitcoin is the only real path to agency, why trusting digital credit and custodians could end in disaster, and why most people still cannot see the system they are trapped inside. We also get into whether Strategy and the digital credit thesis are dangerous for Bitcoin, why AI changes everything faster than most people realise, and what a true Bitcoin economy might actually look like. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN CLUB ORANGE FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Jeff Booth: https://x.com/JeffBooth

They can't see the moment they're spending right now is the most important thing. An abundance 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 open 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 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, whereas you seem to see the world and everything fits into your thesis. How do you get to that point? 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 they can't see other people's view

because their reflection of the world is true to them. So you've 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 your construct of what reality is to you is true for you. 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 um and and and and it'll be other people's problem and when you look around the world and you look at everybody else viewing the world on and and how could how could they think the world looks like that and anything they're like completely crazy if you're 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 that because it's not true, true, it's right, it's a belief system that feeds back on itself. So how would I know my belief system is right for me. 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? 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 a, 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 constantly curious, if we'd if we live in this, it's called a 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, those ideas are in me,

and I believe this a certain version of the world, and then until I don't, and then it changes, and I'm a different, then that means that those inter, sections of people touching me impact me in a big way. And then you see you watch other people have the same interactions, but nothing changes in their life. Their belief system just carries on 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 like I agree with that.

But I don't know if everyone has thought as, deeply as you have about this. So like 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 day. single eight billion people in the planet. So if there are eight billion people in the planet going through a structural change and most people were fighting that structural change because 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 Candice 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, 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 at all. And they would find, 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 when I look at that, I totally understand it's natural. It's what people do. But I wonder why.

I wonder if you can't solve it. the problem, what are you doing? So 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. we would easily see in a world that look 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 Anchor Watch comes in. With Anchor Watch, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A-plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy, and all Bitcoin is held in their time-lots multi-sig volts.

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That's L-E-D-N-O-F-S-WB-B-D. 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 make me smarter in this space, or try to clarify what I'm saying to bring it tighter and tighter and something that's so obvious to me. But when I watch this space evolve, right, and I try to put simple language to something that's really complex. When I start with the natural state of the free market

is deflation, right? People laugh at that. because I say it over and over and over again, right? 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, right? 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 the company fail? Because us as users, producers, 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? And why I try to drive into this so carefully is because it has to.

And so 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. 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. 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 this is, 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? 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, if you added up all of those people, it might be, it might only be 10,000 people. many of them private for most of the nonsense maybe a but building protocol technology in service of humankind that is the free market that is and protecting it like 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 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, 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, you would, 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, and not, all of those people would drown out these people. But they wouldn't drown out these people inside that bubble. And those people 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 this 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 wasn't here, I can imagine what they would think about what this look like.

So now how do I know I'm right, right? If they all think they're right inside a system that has to steal their money 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 stop tomorrow and said, ha, 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. Like, 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 bigger mortgage as possible to basically short the Fiat system with. 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's 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. If I want, 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, around that. And each choice has 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 chains,

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 have to use AI to get you to use their system to remove the job because if they don't 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 the 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 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 instability. 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 to get 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 nonsense, unsensical world that is more and more control.

And this is going to create, it's 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 they're going to take, 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 instability. 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 to wait, pick a fence with the kids and everything else. In the next little while and where we're going, it's, I 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 all of these individual choices, including in Bitcoin, 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. 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, everything else, the problem and what you're doing and 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 to be true. But it's no longer, but 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 that would be, so imagine you, so now that's entirely different vector, you just hold Bitcoin. 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 and 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 changes 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 this 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 centralized 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 ETS, trusting somebody else, removing their own agency, and trusting somebody else to get a higher yield. And if Bitcoin all look like that,

if it looked like that, it won't. But if it all look like that, it would fail. So, like, you're obviously talking about Sailor there. So, and again, I want to be careful of this because I can coexist in the 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 business. And I'm an investor in the business, at least in my RSP, an investor in the business, but, but, and 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 right. 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, I can, I can, I can, 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. And so I want to be careful of the creating an us versus them and everything. because 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 W-2 earners.

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That's B-I-T-K-E-Y.World and use the code WBD. So, like, I agree with that. Sailor's clearly a genius. 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 that digital credit narrative will get wiped out. Not might get wiped out. It's binary. An inflationary system is opposite from the free market. An inflationary system must centralize. If you're 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 is 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, you would, you would, um, 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 votes, doesn't concentrate the economic, the activity on Bitcoin. And so by doing that, you're taking massive risk by trusting somebody else with your keys that 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 this in my choice being 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. They're 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 that depending on how much, so I think strategy as a business model could actually do extraordinarily well. 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-leavered

against a deflationary collapse, right? At some point they could get really hurt. But I don't think they are overly weird. I think what you're talking about, I think Saylor is brilliant. I think he understands. stands the game that is being played. He might not, he might not be able to, as a public company, he might not be able to talk

like I talk, right? You're part of your public company and might get tapped on the shoulder and say, hey, and all of the people around is just that you can't go against the US dollar. I've always had that opinion. I think Sala has left the US dollar alone. very purposefully. I don't know if he, like he said that he doesn't think

Bitcoin's a threat to the US dollar. I don't know if he believes that or if that's just the line he has to tow. 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 world 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 8 billion people can create new apps, new technologies, attempt right now using the technology you 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 right it's a the free market is is massive abundance delivered by you choose you choosing more value and the other system is a control

system, whether it's U.S. dollar, yuan, everything else. And the emergence of the U.S. 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 is a whole bunch of people moving to the U.S. from these countries where they couldn't make it. So their ideas could make it. And those ideas create the value. So those ideas that you're creating value for other people is the thing that creates value for all people. And the more you can strain that.

So let's go into a different vector of what we're talking about, which is, so if you have an inflationary system that punishes people, that most people can't contribute, and only very few people can contribute, then all society suffers. You know when you wrote this book, AI was obviously a pretty big part of it, but I think did the book come out in 2019? Is that right? Yeah.

Yeah. So 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 you remember in the

book that I wrote about the paper folding? And I wrote this. It's like 50 folds get you to the sun or whatever it is. Exactly. But 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, no, I say most people, 99.999% guess two inches. It means we can't understand exponentials. But what I wrote, and I'm pretty sure I wrote exactly this 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 in nothing in the future. You can see perfectly what's going to happen out of what I wrote then. right the 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 to this now it's open source because it's now in rust libraries that's yesterday and then deep seek 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. And that's what I wrote about in my book. and you knew exactly where it would be now. So nothing's changed. It hasn't accelerated 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 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 are my Tai Bay confused? So even when I wrote that, and when I came up with the paper folding analogy for the book, and the same analogy is, you know, 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 or I will, 4x, I will each grain of rice.

So you need to double a grain of rice on each chess board piece. And the grains of rice take over the entire kingdom. But you hear something like that. You hear exponential patterns. and then your brain goes, I get it. What a nice trick. What a cool story. And then you go straight back into your linear life.

And so these things that I realize other people do, then I realize I must too. And I work really hard to try to error correct that thing and adjust my thinking for the thing that I'm not used to thinking. So not perfect. But those, when I see something, when I observe. something and everybody else, I realize it must be in me too. When you say that 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, that's a really good question. I suspect not. And it could be. So 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, right? It would be so crazy. Would there 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, 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 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? Why does that happen? What's the sort of game theory behind that? So it happens because we don't want to look at first, we don't want to look at these first principles. So what I talk about over and over and over again, like I might say, 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 beliefs, system inside those other people who are smarter than us 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, 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. But unlike other conspiracy theories, it had an answer. Like Bitcoin was the answer to this other system. 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.

right and if you looked around the world today what do what do most people do they live in that other system and they might they might hear this I was just at lunch I was just a 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 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 believe that you know it's true. But 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, if you're

I-N-T-J, E-N-T-J, it's a very small fraction of the population. And, but, but it's a really high percentage of Bitcoiners. It's actually really, this is on the personality test thing. personality tests. 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 fit it 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

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 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's we just have different, we 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, to, to, an abstract concept that was emerging. They would hold on to, I have pieces of paper, and the government says they're real, here's how GDP works and everything that they believe from their system, they would hold on to that. I remember when, I don't know, a few, maybe like a year ago, Brandon quits him 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'll be different. And so I did the test. and yeah,

it was one of the two groups that basically every Bitcoin are 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. Like,

no one really desperately wants to talk. Like, when we meet up, how many times did we talk about the price of Bitcoin? Yeah, no, but like, Safe Dean said something to me

that I thought was really interesting when I had him on the show. 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 again, 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, let me talk about safety and what he just said in the way that I would look at that. We know in Fiatland, prices are imagined, right? 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 unbolic. it'd be 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-infinent 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 was not, 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 is 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've 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 in a straight line. But over time anyways, this is going to reprice everything if it stays decentralized and secure. And so that's why I don't think in price and fee a 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, the first time you've traveled a lot in the world when we went to Costa Rica, when you're changing your U.S. 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. And what would my expectation in the free market look like in Bitcoin if it stayed decentralized and secure? And that's what I see. That's what I observe.

I observe that happening around the world. In the, 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 bit-coiner. 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. 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 a logical 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's, 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 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, still use, abstract concept of Bitcoin, right, 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 the 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 constantly believe in that nonsense, nonsense, and do more of it? Right. We'd never go back. Have you ever read The Mandibles? This is the obligatory hat tip to O'Dell. 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. 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, 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. 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. Those people, just like us in Costa Rica, we're not talking about price. If you go back 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. And they don't see it as a store, 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 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 of exponential technology growth from the free market. and if Bitcoin stay 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 so when I start 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 it looks right now. 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 the biggest credit provider, then you provide systematic risk. 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 fast as you could. So you had heads-eye-win tails.

Now that feeds back everywhere in the market. So if you're bidding on other companies, if you're private equity company and you can't lose, then if other people are going to bid four times for a company, you would 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 of 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. But how does that work in this Bitcoinized world?

Yeah, 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. It's not just credit out of thin air. And the credit out of the thin air, the credit out of the thin air on a Bitcoin standard will blow up if it's Bitcoin standard. So the credit it'll get less and less and less. And there's going to be. 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 involved that is unlimited credit. When we say 39 trillion, remember in my book, I said in the last 20 years, credited grown $185 trillion. That was to 2019.

That's more than doubled down. Crazy. But it had to. It's mathematically, because deflation is one side of the axis and the credits the other. But people don't realize is that's centralization, right?

That's centralization of everything. Why do 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, has to. I just wish I thought like you more, Jeff. I'm getting there. 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 helps them get a little bit closer to Jeff Booth's way of thinking. Like, what is it? 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 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 move my time into this other system, I have agency in the world that's emerging. 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. Right. 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 believe you've all you've you've been deceived your entire life and into this in this system that you thought was a free market and 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 but it gets

easy it gets easier when you face the truth and then decide I love it Jeff um 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 growler 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. All right. I will see you soon. See you in Vegas. Yeah, it sounds good.