You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 31: Jeff Booth - Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

🎙️ My guest today is Jeff Booth, a brilliant teacher and mentor, entrepreneur, investor and General Partner at ego death capital. He’s also a bestselling author of “The Price of Tomorrow”. In this episode we discuss Jeff’s insights as an entrepreneur and investor in the Bitcoin ecosystem, explaining how bitcoin is repricing the world, while prices fall to the marginal cost of production.  Jeff highlights the importance of understanding the true risks of the existing financial system vs. the perception of risk for bitcoin. He covers the potential for Bitcoin-related companies to provide significant value, and the flow of money into the bitcoin industry. We explore the importance of marketing for companies (where we don’t necessarily agree), and address the fear of AI and its impact on society, highlighting the potential for control and manipulation. Sharing his spiritual viewpoint, Jeff talks about the importance of opting out of the control system, and embracing the freedom and abundance offered by Bitcoin. He concludes with the potential for scaling solutions like Lightning and federated models. ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, subscribe and support my work. Thank you! -- SPONSORS & AFFILIATES – ►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn  ►► Join me at Bitcoin Nashville with 10% off tickets (use code BTCIL): ⁠https://glnk.io/lr8q9/btcil⁠  ►► Join me at BTC Prague with 10% off tickets (use code EFRAT): https://bit.ly/3VZDhrn  ►► Join me at Mallorca Blockchain Days with 50 euro off tickets (use code efrat): https://bit.ly/4bvDjwc  -- CHAPTERS – 00:00 Coming Up... 02:04 Intro to Jeff 03:29 Jeff's Entrepreneurial Journey 05:12 Technology's Prices Falling & System Designed to Steal 07:34 Ad Break - Trezor, Bitcoin Nashville, BTC Prague 09:31 Prices Fall to the Marginal Cost of Production 12:16 The Importance of Decentralization and Security 15:18 Running a Bitcoin Node 19:35 Bitcoin Market Manipulation Attempts 22:00 Risks of Bitcoin vs. the Existing System 26:42 The Ego Death Fund: Investing in Bitcoin Companies 31:27 Investing in Bitcoin Startups 33:32 Flow of Investments Into The Bitcoin Industry 36:39 Is Bitcoin VC Game Different To Fiat VC Game? 42:44 Do Bitcoin Companies Need Good Marketing? 45:18 Jeff's Prediction on AI 49:22 Human Consciousness, Energy & Victimhood 57:43 Future Development Above Layer2, Fedi 01:01:40 Where To Follow Jeff   -- LINKS – Jeff’s Nostr Jeff’s Twitter: https://x.com/JeffBooth Jeff’s website: https://www.jeffbooth.ca/  Ego Death Website: https://egodeath.capital/ Ego Death’s Twitter: https://x.com/egodeathcapital  Jeff’s Talk at Bitcoin Atlantis: "The honest path forward - a journey to hope and abundance" Jeff’s article “Finding Signal in a Noisy World” Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigson Efrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigson Watch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoice Support Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson⁠ Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson

People aren't looking at the risk of their existing system. They know it's based on theft. Many people know that their individual rights and freedoms are getting taken away. If you look at the voting, politicians are getting worse and worse. So what is it? Have we become resigned? What they're actually saying is, if it's based on theft, and it doesn't matter which politician you vote for, it's who gets more of the spoils of the theft.

And that means everybody gets worse. So that's the way that our system works. And so then people get apathetic to this, desensitized, and they see it's getting worse and worse, and they can see it all around themselves, and they know it. And then you have a system like Bitcoin that this system would say is terrible. So all the media that they would need would say, oh, don't go there, that has risk. When it is the only thing without counterparty to the rest of the system, it's the only thing, Housing has counterparty risk

Banks have counterparty risk Every single thing inside your system Has counterparty risk Except for Bitcoin So it's the least risky thing you could do And people think it's the most risky Because they're so used to this They're in a control system

It's not a political system It's not an economic system It's a control system 100% And with CBDC coming up It's going to be even worse Because it has to It's mathematically

It has to peace man okay let's do it yeah i've consumed so much of you and your content i've never watched i feel like i know you so well i've never watched a podcast back because otherwise i wouldn't do another one because i i hate seeing myself on yeah so yeah it's really pleasant listening to you it's uh it's very easy you can go to sleep you mean you fall asleep yes that too um okay so hello and welcome to another episode of you are the voice i'm very happy to be here today with jeff booth thanks for having me thank you for coming and we're in the beautiful island of Madeira in Portugal, right off the coast of Morocco, actually. We're here

one day before Bitcoin Atlantis, which is a massive Bitcoin conference that Jeff helped put together with a group of really committed people. I've interviewed Andre not long ago, and he told us all about the committee and the work that you guys have been doing and the different blocks of content that you took responsibility of during the the conference so really impressive work it's the first time right it's the first time that a big event like that is happening in madera well for sure yeah and so it's really exciting it's really exciting and you you've met a bunch of people here already it's a high signal event yes it is yeah the the attraction of the bitcoiners the audience, but also the speakers. It's overwhelming, like 200 speakers and amazing

content over the next three days. So I think we're going to have fun with the price of Bitcoin going up. So it's a big party. Wow. Okay. So I just want to start with a quick intro. Brilliant teacher, investor, general partner at Ego Death Capital, which you'll tell us about in a minute if you will an entrepreneur board member and best-selling author of the price of tomorrow why deflation is the key to an abundant future can you tell us a bit more about your background just so people get to know you i i don't know even what to say it's hard to talk about you so i would say probably the easiest thing is i've i've always been an entrepreneur from an early age, kind of wanted to get into business and understanding

that you can only create a business if that business helps others and they determine value in it. So that's actually probably the draw in to get into business and tried to find different ways and created various things. I early saw where the dot-com market was going, technology was going, and I was really early and that's an understanding where what people thought it was versus what it would turn into so created a pretty successful uh company in their board members of other companies investor and other companies i saw that wave and honestly i made so many mistakes and it was the mistakes

that taught me more a lot for a long time i thought everything was outside it was every mistake everything happened to me and i realized over time that all of those mistakes were me happening to the world and so so it just almost a lifetime of learning and realizing those mistakes just you see patterns faster you read a lot you see patterns and and out of the experience and kind of building in the technology wave i was wrestling with the problem that everything i was building and technology i was building was falling in price and it was getting more and more efficient and i knew every all my friends were doing the same thing i was at google's Lightgeist each year. I was in some of the top technology companies, Shopify founders are my

friends. So you could see this happening everywhere. So it wasn't just my technology company. It was all technology companies. They were essentially creating more efficiencies and that's why they were grabbing more value. But when you looked at broadly, that value, those efficiencies weren't translating to the general public in the form of lower prices. and so it was a it was a dilemma for me i would say something that and when something bugs me like that i tend to keep going and keep going and as i understood what the existing financial system looked like and how it essentially had to capture that deflation that should be flowing to society in the form of lower prices and it had to steal more of it and more of it

and more of it, I realized that the system we lived in would, it would almost be a mirror image of the technology that should be providing abundance. It would steal that and it would divide us and it would make, people would fight, people would give it more strength as they fought. It would divide us all over the world. And so that's why I wrote the book, because I saw, I could just see this moving forward and I saw my kids living in that world, which was very different than the world i i grew up in i thought that's going to be a terrible um a terrible place and even in the book you know this but there was one line about bitcoin yeah there hardly any talk about bitcoin it was it was it was it was mostly i listened to it yeah it was it was it was mostly

me so kind of walking through the paradox of these different systems and then and then posing that bitcoin could be a solution not it was a solution and since i've gotten i was it was 2020 that you wrote it right yeah i wrote it through 2019 actually and released it in 2020 2018 2019 and then released it in january of 2020 um so yeah and then virtually everything i wrote about is coming true yep so yep with great pleasure i'd like to introduce my sponsors they help me fulfill my mission of spreading truth, freedom, and sovereignty. You're the Voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013, empowering individuals with an open-source

device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins. I find my Trezor super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family. Enjoy my 5% discount on Trezor product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code FLAT. Next up is Bitcoin Nashville. If you're like me, sick of the globalists and central banks robbing you blind through excessive money printing, you need to be at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville. This July, the largest Bitcoin conference in the world will shed light on monetary freedom with a glimmer of hope among a darkening reality of centralized power and control. Top speakers and companies will gather in nashville to take part in building a new reality i'll be there too speaking and

interviewing head over to my link in the notes for a 10 discount using the code btcil and finally btc prague the biggest most influential bitcoin event in europe coming up on june 13th with 100 speakers on four stages 100 bitcoin companies presenting at the expo and 10 000 like-minded bitcoiners and freedom lovers from all around the world. I'm excited to attend for the first time as a speaker. I'll be speaking about CBDCs, interviewing other speakers, learning about Bitcoin and meeting the best and brightest in the industry. The event runs for three days with a rich program from pitching contests to panels, presentations and parties. I'd love to meet you in Prague, use my code for a 10% discount. And also, I read your article, Finding Signal

in a Noisy World. And your thesis about prices falling into the marginal cost of production is like a thread between all the different pieces of your work and everything I hear you talk about. And you always say Bitcoin is repricing the entire world. It's not the other way around. And that's what people tend to think. And I think a lot of your insights are difficult for people to comprehend, right? And I think you do do a good job in taking us through the claims or the thesis that you have. But the most interesting one for me was that the price fall to the marginal cost of production.

It's why it's so hard to see, though. So I'll give you an example, just a very real example of what people do in broken money. Yes. So you know and I know and everyone knows you go to Google every day because it gives you more value. Yes. And so now ask yourself, if Google increased the price of every search to $2, would you still go to Google? Probably not. So your choices influence their decisions to give you more value.

And then to do that, they need to remove labor faster and faster and automate things with AI. and and and as they get bigger and bigger because money is broken you also put your money in to google because if you put your money in the bank your money loses value and then you wonder why they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger you put it on stock you put it in google stock because unless you do the magnet and seven all ai companies that are doing this job that are giving you more value you're you're making them stronger with your investments and then you complain about everything's being taken when you make it happen you put your energy in there you put your money in there and so everybody in in society is doing the same thing now here's the

interesting thing about bitcoin bitcoin's repricing google and bitcoin's repricing all the cash flows that come from google and if you look objectively look at google's returns which are very high compared to s and p returns but look at bitcoin's returns and you can see bitcoin is repricing the entire thing so if people want to store their wealth in google it's going to not go down as fast as cash but it's still going to go down relative to bitcoin and that's why i say bitcoin's repricing everything and it doesn't matter and i also i say on the caveat that it stays decentralized and secure yes and and the but let's talk about that for a second so the reason i say if it stays decentralized and secure is not because i believe it will not be cd yeah you

repeat it i repeat it all the time and people ask me why i repeat it all the time i repeat it because people need to do the work on why um and they can't trust me for it you know you know they're saying bitcoin don't trust verify yes if they do the work to understand how it stays decentralized and secure and they become a node in the system and they become and they hold in self-custody it's inevitable it stays decentralized and secure so it's not about somebody else taking the ability from you yes it's you taking accountability and so i i would say the chance of that not happening it being not decentralized and secure is so infinitesimally small because i've done the work but i always say if so people realize um they can they can break the two problems

into different problems so they can say okay i get it right it will reprice everything else i don't i'm not i'm not pricing it from u.s dollars it reprices everything else so that's one if it stays decentralized and secure and they'll put all of the attention on will it stay decentralized and secure and and my work on that one just like i wanted to understand the existing financial system i went down to the sand and and in that i thought of if we live in a system that we make stronger through our actions and most people don't know they do then and it's literally theft but most people don't know and they're dividing further and they will divide further, right?

Human nature shows that that will continue to happen. And that system is 10,000 times bigger than Bitcoin. And many of the people that are essentially prisoners of that system also don't like Bitcoin because they're scared of it, right? And they're prisoners over here. Then that system has so much power against Bitcoin. So you would have to expect every attack to try to kill it. Yes.

And I expect every attack. Cyber, pricing, manipulation. FUD, manipulation, everything. Yeah, propaganda, whatever. And look in the last 14 years. Yes. Because those attacks have happened. Yes.

And it's stronger today. More decentralized, more secure. Evidenced by more mining, more nodes, never a hack. And so I can prove what I just said. I don't need to guess. I can prove this. And my node, which confirms the entire network, confirms that all the time. And so somebody to change that needs to change me, right?

They need to be able to attack that network. They need to take me and a whole bunch of people that know what I know. Yes. And they have to get me to vote against my self-interest. I wonder, is it the message of if it's decentralized and secure, is that message catering catering only for advanced bitcoiners because when i've been listening to you for the past few months and i've been hearing that message over and over again i went on to search what i need to do in order to open my own node and i'm a technical person

right i have a degree in computer science and i used to be a programmer for a few years although it was like a thousand years ago i'm still a technical person so i can understand but and i didn't do a very great job in digging i admit however from my first glance it wasn't very user-friendly it wasn't very easy to understand how i'm going to open my own node and what i need for it and i need new hardware and i need like to follow a lot of instructions and i thought to myself but why am i doing this what is the incentive all i'm trying to say is it wasn't very clear for me that you know okay i want to open a node let's do it so have you done that Yeah, I haven't done it yet. No, but I started looking into it and I just thought, is it for advanced Bitcoiners?

Am I missing something? Because it's not that simple. So so here's a here's probably a good way to look at this. When when you know Bitcoin and you realize how deep the rabbit hole is, you start here and you start to see insights that you didn't see before. And in those insights, it's like a wild journey down the rabbit hole. And you just you can't believe the world looks like this. you can't believe it and then you think why doesn't everybody see this yeah when you yourself didn't see it two years ago yes right and then then you go deeper and then you go deeper and then you go deeper and where you are in this journey yourself you're now getting to wait

i'm a node yeah i protect the network yes and no and and and instead of i don't have to trust anybody. This is held in check. There's no minors that can stop. It's people defending the network. And those people are global in nature. And if you counted full nodes, there's probably over 50,000 people that think like I do. And they're not going to validate. There are about 50,000 nodes today? And there's probably more because a lot of them are hidden behind Tor networks. And how easy it is to plug in a full note it's actually remarkably simple okay you have to go through the work to be able to do it but it might cost in energy it

might cost $25 a year and and and you can do it on raspberry pi and you could and so it's very easy and it's getting easier and easier to do that and so where you are in the journey yeah is describing how how far down and that's where I say this this this journey it feels complicated where depending where you are just like to the person that you're talking to now that you know everything about the financials and things that you didn't know before correct and you look at other people and you go how can't you know that yes right yes so that's that's not that's just the depth of this rabbit hole it's and and

so I understand that everybody is is finding their way through and everybody is because there's early people there's early people coming into the etf right now that you probably would never buy an etf because why would you do that why would you pay fees on something you could self-custody you like you look at those people why would you empower those yeah and you look at those people and you go are they insane why would you hold the thing and not the thing the paper and not the thing itself yeah so so you do that and and then you realize a lot of those people are at step one and a lot of those people will be at step two and they'll go into self custody pretty soon yes right so that's just our learning as this transitions good answer

no no you're right i mean but i do want to open my own notes so i do need to put in the work yeah and then and then how could this ever how could this system ever fail in the decentralized and security if there's that many people as guardians protecting it and they can't be found i love it It's virtually important because that means, I'm going to zoom up a level. When I go all over the world, what I know is 99% of people are incredible, beautiful people. That's not what the media would say, how fearful, how those people are like this, and how you believe that and you're scared to go to that country because those people are all. but when you actually meet the people who where they are who they are they're beautiful yeah now

this network allows all of those people to step out of of a system of of corruption and protect it hard to see it going away as more and more people because are you ever going to let's say bitcoin fell by 95 you're going to sell or buy no buy yeah of course buy 95 great so bring it on yeah so now so now let's say the existing system imagine just let's play game theory imagine system that the black rock and every consolidated enough coins yes and then they start to try to make self-custody illegal and these things are coordinated and then they start shorting bitcoin to drive price down there's too many people that know and they will just take all the bitcoin yes into self-custody yes and so it became it keeps it decentralized and secure and what would happen

in that case is as they tried to to manipulate bitcoin i'm not saying they will but if they if they tried to do that and manipulate price down then you would have a major financial uh party yes get liquidated completely liquidated it would look like ftx but jp morgan or blackrock and that would take down the entire system if that if that happened so will these games happen of course they're going to happen people are going going to try to cheat because human beings have always tried to yes to cheat so that's totally logical that they will but human beings have tried to cheat on a system that allowed cheating try to cheat a system that won't allow cheating and eventually you're going to get liquidated bring it on wow doesn't touch it doesn't touch

anybody that self-custodies doesn't touch you at all like did you were you hurt by ftx no were you you were hurt by it like nothing nothing yeah it's not in the bank it's not no one's no it's nothing nobody cared no yeah um that is so hopeful i love it okay let's talk about risk people talk about bitcoin risk and to me it's an irony they simply are not aware of the damages and risks from fiat or at least that fiat is the root cause of the biggest risk in the world weaponization of money i and i heard you i think talk about risks um in one of the podcasts and i was curious from your point of view and your experience to hear about how you handle objections that are related to risk it's a risk it's a risky business it's a risky so and that's mostly for beginners so i'm

gonna so i'm gonna say this from a um an entrepreneur and what my parents thought when i When I was kind of going into creating technology companies or something, why would you do that? There's so much risk to it. Or just take this safe job. And a lot of different people did that. And what they're really saying is they're doing a bad job of understanding true risk. They're only looking at the risk of the new and not risk of the existing.

Because if you work for somebody and that job goes away, does that have risk? Of course it does. And, and, and, and then if you're, if you start something that creates value for, for somebody else, the risk is, can I create enough value and can I learn fast enough to create enough value? So, so it's not more risk. It's, it's, it's a different perception of risk. So when you do that and you become an entrepreneur, you, the, you take that ownership and you have to get better fast because if you don't you will fail and then it seems risky but if you even if you fail and you learned all those lessons and you do the next one you have all the lessons and so now now when when people this is the thing that confounds me people aren't looking at the risk

of their existing system they know it's based on theft many people know that their their individual Individual rights and freedoms are getting taken away. If you look at the voting, politicians are getting worse and worse. So what is it? Have we become resigned? Because what they're actually saying is, if it's based on theft, and it doesn't matter which politician you vote for, it's who gets more of the spoils of the theft. And that means everybody gets worse. So that's the way that our system works.

And so then people get apathetic to this. Yes, desensitized. desensitized and they see it's getting worse and worse and they can see it all around themselves and they know it and then you have a system like bitcoin that this system would say is terrible so all the media that they would say read would say oh don't go there that has risk when it is the only thing without counterparty to the rest of the system it's the only thing it housing has counterparty risk banks have counterparty risk every single thing inside your system has counterparty risk except for Bitcoin so it's the least risky

thing you could do and people think it's the most risky because they're so used to this they're in a control system it's not a political system it's not an economic system it's a control system and with CVDC coming up because it has to it's mathematically it has to and this is the thing I had explored in the book if deflation is the natural state of a market and we for inflation to be the natural state of the market you would have to choose as well as every other person on the planet to get less value each day yes do you choose that like it should be painful painfully obvious that we choose to get more value and and that's deflationary and then if you add technology to

that it's faster deflation so that productivity should be flowing to us and anything that stops I'm going to add to this. Most people are measuring inflation from zero. The rate of theft is not from zero. The rate of theft is what rate of deflation should there be. How much richer should you be getting each year by doing nothing? That's the rate of theft. So if it was minus 5%, you should just be getting richer every year. and then that would that productivity would expand it would get faster and faster the rate of theft has to be higher and higher and so most people are painfully unaware that there's that much theft in in in their in the system that they're measuring from yep that's why i'm doing

what i'm doing okay hopefully some more people after this will go and study more tell me a bit about ego death the fund and what you guys are doing so and we just talked about the rabbit hole and being uh being deep and i and you've probably seen me say this before but in founding ego death it was actually something it was resolving something in me in a hypocrisy um and and i'm being honest with that and it was a the because as i understood this more and more i realized that that i was hedged against this system breaking down but all my time was in the system i was on boards i was on a whole bunch of boards within the system and and meaning just for the people that i know boards of technology companies started companies a whole bunch of

things but the output of all that work making these companies successful meant the system had to make more money and and and to so maybe my companies could win extraordinarily in that system but the output is more people had to lose yes right from that and i found myself and when i say hypocrite when i went a moral dilemma that i was in i was caught talking all over the world about bitcoin and everybody thought me saw me as a thought leader and my time wasn't congruent with it and that was i couldn't like so when i say it was not in alignment. It wasn't in alignment. Yeah. And so when I say, when I say this, I, I, how deep the rabbit hole and you find things in yourself. So now I can, it's easy to see in others.

Nico and Andy and partners asked me to create this. And I thought this was a really great vehicle that I could put all my time congruent where I wanted the world to go. And, and it's been it's been incredible it's been because now you're building with the the best entrepreneurs on the planet onto a system that is in service of making all eight billion of us better um um and it's completely in alignment so i can't believe investing only in bitcoin companies only in and to do that i and and and so what would that look like so i believe that if bitcoin is repricing the world then and the bitcoin has had an irr for the last 14 years of 44 percent every like ups and down 44 ir which isn't like incredible irr investment returns so the rate of

returns of by holding bitcoin yes um and arguably that's measured in fiat dollars but but what's actually happening is is bitcoin is repricing everything else yes and so i give this example at the time, my house was 300 Bitcoin four years ago. Now it's 25 Bitcoin. In four years, it'll be two and a half Bitcoin. So you can see it's repricing everything over time. So now if you're investing in Bitcoin related companies, and you know that just holding the underlying asset, you'd ask, well, why am I going to invest in a company when I can just hold something like that? And you invest in it because you believe that that company is going to provide so much value that they're going to collect more Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And so you'd get venture-type returns on top of a venture-type asset.

It's also a question of scale. If you want the whole ecosystem to grow, you want to invest in companies that are doing more to scale the ecosystem bigger, faster. For sure. So I would do that anyways, but I would say, selfishly, it's the best investment you could ever make. Is it like the MicroStrategy kind of model? So MicroStrategy has a different model to collect more Bitcoin. We have a model that by building the companies that are going to be essentially the new utilities, and they're going to provide so much value in Bitcoin that they get paid in Bitcoin.

So they're collecting more Bitcoin every month. While MicroStrategy is still getting fiat money. They're buying more. Yes, they're buying more, but their revenue is in fiat dollars, right? Exactly. And maybe they change, and Michael's fantastic, and he's becoming a Bitcoin development company, so maybe he sees some of the same thing we see.

But I'll give you an example. One of our companies that we funded, we did the term sheet last, LN Markets. they were not profitable in august of last year now they're massively profitable they did 40 50 million in august last year now last month they did 470 million wow um in bit in bitcoin in that's trading volume sure but now they're very profitable what do you think they're profitable in they're profitable in bitcoin so so not only are the profits going like skyrocketing like venture You don't see companies grow that fast, right?

No, that's very fast. So you're in a six-month time frame. But now their profits are all, as Bitcoin is going up in value, all their profits are going up in value and their balance sheet is going up in value. So for you from an investor point of view, this isn't easy. There's nothing like that. Here's an example. To me it's a simple example, but I don't know why people don't see it.

um if you were in argentina in 2000 and you had a chance to invest in google and have the cash flows denominated in u.s instead of denominated in argentina that would seem like a good trade you're getting a massive growth company that is in a stronger currency right and then when you realize that u.s cash flows on all companies are getting destroyed and you could put into bitcoin and create bitcoin cash flows it seems like a pretty simple a simple idea and and so that's what we're doing but the entrepreneurs in this space they're incredible it was early in the internet and i thought i'd never get a chance to uh to do that again because i went into the internet because you could see the future what

was going to happen and you saw the best talent moving it moving into this this is an order of magnitude maybe two order magnitudes more powerful than the internet was it's early it's really early but it's it it is so much and i experienced both right so so i have a i have pattern recognition on what this looks like and i can't believe i can't believe i'm lucky enough to to do this And at the moment, correct me if I'm wrong, there are no other investments? No, there are. There are? Yeah, there are.

And there's some really good ones, too. Like, there's a wall of money that's going to come here. Now with the ETFs? I'm talking about wall of money. So we just opened up our second fund. Second, yes. And in 22 days since opening it up, the calendar's full of people wanting to join. So normally it would take kind of a year, 18 months to close a fund of that size.

It's not going to take that long. A few months? Yeah. Wow. It's remarkable. Okay. So the money will come in. And we're raising that fund because now the ecosystem is exploding.

It's growing so fast that now the next money can say, okay, this is de-risk. Now it's growing this. Now let's go into this. So if I compare these compared to the Internet that lived through and this, I still think we're kind of 95, 96 in the Internet. Not even. We're not to 99 where the where where a whole bunch of money comes in and is burned because they're spending on outrageous valuations and things. That's still to come. And then there's going to be a correction after that.

And then another then then the best will emerge out of that. OK, so exciting times ahead. Can I ask you about the LPs that are putting money into these kind of venture funds? Yep. Do they get Bitcoin? Yes. Or are they money people? 100%. Really? They're just wealthy individuals with the get Bitcoin?

And now institutions and some people that, like I don't want to say names, but actually I can say, Pete Brigger is an advisor, so I can say his name. Pete Brigger is the chairman of Fortress. Fortress is a $46 billion capital company that's extraordinarily valuable. So they're one of the kind of cogs in the existing financial system. Pete is a huge Bitcoiner, massive Bitcoiner. At the BlackRock conference, he had me stand up in a room with about $8 trillion in it and said, I've told you guys to buy Bitcoin for years. Many of you haven't. and still won't, if you're interested in learning more, I'd like to get Jeff Booth to stand. Jeff Booth is a GP at EgoDeath. You'll never forget the name. I suggest you go talk to him.

So more and more people, just like that insight, they're starting to see, it's just early, right? They're starting to see this is the signal and they're moving their time, just like i did just like you did just like we all do um and and once you're here once you're in that spot you think nobody you think everybody else is over here they're just it's just somewhere along their journey yes oh yeah okay wow i hope and okay and so my next question and i've written to you about this and i had some time to think about it as well is that where i come from and the industry that i've seen my investors i mean my in previous startups that i've worked for we're silicon valley and new york-based vc firms and i've just seen a fiat game totally i've seen

a revenue like a chase after revenue to grow startups just for the revenues not so much attention on the value on the market and what the actual end user will get from it and that's one of the reasons why i'm leaving and i've left this life i call it the previous life because i don't want to be part of that anymore i'm making money for someone else and that makes the money for someone else that makes the money for someone else in the end it's the big bankers and the powers that be that rule the world or whatever and what kind of value am i left with and the end users are left with not much in the end of the day and many of these companies collapse so many startups do not succeed and they do burn a lot of money and i don't want to be in that game

anymore so is that going to be different you think so like the bitcoin game so for sure it's going to be different it's going to be a lot different so this this reminds me of a conversation i had with jack dorsey and costa rica conversation is we compared notes on many of the vcs from the fiat game. And because they were in our cap tables, right? It was a higher level than my cap, but still a lot of the same VCs, same names and everything. And you realize how broken the system was and how little control you had in the system once it was a financialized game. And that was a hard thing as an entrepreneur trying to build value, to see how the game is played and he saw saw it too in fact that's why he's in bitcoin that's why i'm in bitcoin because

it's a totally different world now if you think about how capital needs to act it's the same thing it's an honest network and and we talked about prices falling to the marginal cost of production so that what does that mean in some of those two uh two things it means that entrepreneurs can't build a monopoly yes that's what i mean it's correct because they're going to be competed with and if they compete something and they have a huge everybody's going to compete and it's going to constantly fall to zero or near zero and their only value is as long as they're creating lots of value for everybody else so the output of the work means prices fall faster for everybody in society and everybody gets everybody wins the output from an investment return that means is that company if

they do just that one thing forever yes they'll go broke they have to innovate they have to constantly innovate and the output of decision means you better love the entrepreneur you're going into business with because it's going to be a long-term value it's it's long term like bitcoins long term you actually have to think I think actually first primarily is this somebody I want to work with like forever and obviously the investment returns you a fund is a ten-year twelve-year fund and so so it might not be forever but you have to think like that longer longer term and and you have to care about that person

at a deep, deep level because I've just learned so much from making mistakes. I just don't want the same entrepreneurs to be able to make those mistakes if I can shortcut some of them for those people. So if I get you right, are you saying that we're going to see more evolutions of companies, more pivots, more spinoffs? So look at all the wallets today. And successful but not breaking down as much as other startups in the fiat world? Yeah, so that's going to happen.

But again, and I want to be careful with that. Sure. And why I want to be careful with that is we still live in a fiat world, or most people are living in a fiat world. I'm not, but most people are. Yes. So right now. Because it's early days.

I know. So right now in the next two or three years, I suspect you're going to see a massive amount of confusion around Layer 2s. Lightning can't scale Layer 2. Why? Because if there's a whole bunch of VC capital, or tether or or convincing people that lightning can't scale then you can create a whole bunch of scams and and if you created enough scams or or or let's say a different layer than lightning

that that could be centralized now bitcoin would look like gold right because now it'd still be decentralized and secure in the base layer but you wouldn't know how much trading is happening and you could run fractional reserve on top of it. That will happen. It will happen because human nature says it will happen, and it's happening right now. We've probably seen 100 different startups funded for crazy valuations around no value whatsoever about a bridge to Bitcoin in a layer or two.

And I believe right now all of the stuff that Lightning can't scale, when it is scaling perfectly, I use it every day. is that trying to manipulate people's thoughts to be able to create different value, I think it's all going to go to zero. That whole ecosystem that is going to happen will look a lot like all the altcoins. Okay.

And a whole bunch of hot money will chase it. Okay. And it will disappear. And it will disappear. And that's what I mean. The honest system doesn't care. It just keeps on going. And do you guys have the expertise

to identify those kind of companies and not invest in them, but rather go with the right ones. Okay. Wow. Okay. I hope that the Bitcoin future for startups looks a bit different. It will in time, and I would hope that the people that we would back would say what it actually looks like, it looks totally different.

That's what it feels like to me. yeah um you'd have to ask different entrepreneurs that we backed what it looks like to them but that's what if i'm doing my job right or if we're doing our job right that's what it looks like to them right and the other thing i thought about is that if in a normal fiat world one of the toughest jobs in my opinion is to scale companies and for that you need really good marketing obviously sales as well but you need really good marketing in bitcoin startups i think it's even more so i don't think so you don't think so so i think i i think because of the education gap and the knowledge so no i don't think so i think uh the best companies uh today

are product companies and they need almost zero marketing okay the um they and and why is that And think about some that you use. How much marketing does Google spend? How much does Amazon spend? How much does Facebook spend? No, but what they're doing is you're spending on them. They actually never did a, they build a product that everybody else moves to, that then everybody else spends through them, right?

And convinces those other people to spend more on marketing. And they all do this, a similar model by aggregating supply. Yes. um the and so product product companies or how much does tesla spend on marketing when you cut through the noise on a product that gives so much value the market comes to you and so now and i don't want to i'm sounds like i'm being binary here on marketing yeah i'm not but or it's i know it sounds like i don't mean that that way they're great marketing is key but you gotta remember that when I say marketing, I don't just mean the marketing communications part of it. I mean

the product marketing and the strategy. So when I think about, when I think about the product, I think about designing something so great for people that it doesn't need marketing because every dollar I put into marketing, I have to put less money into the product to be. So I have to tell more people, I have to yell at more people that my thing's better than everything else. and I'm taking money away from making my thing better for everything else to yell at more people. So that's how I think about the process. And if I have to do that, then I'm going to be spending that marketing

in the same place everybody else is, Google, Facebook, everything else. And then my only advantage is can I spend it better than them? And it's a race to the bottom. Got it. Okay. i can go on here but no i get it can you talk to me a bit about the fear of ai that we see around us today i i did i must say that i when i listened to your book and um i think i got your view about ai and there are some things there that i didn't agree with i mean for example i

I think that regulation for AI is a step by the strong ones to gain more power in a way. I think regulation helps the corporations or the people that ask to be regulated in a way. No, regulation is what creates a monopoly. Exactly. So right now, who's advocating for regulation and who's scaring the public about AI? Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Twitter, yeah, yeah, yeah. And because prices follow the marginal cost of production, and there is no monopoly without regulation.

That's why they're doing it. So that's the entire, that is the entire game. Okay. And how do you see AI impact the shorter term, the next two, three, four years? So, you know, in the book, remember when it was written, 2019? Yes. And predicting where AI would be, where's AI? And because I knew this was coming exponentially, and most people were measuring linear,

I was watching the movie play out while most people were watching a frame of the movie. Yes, yes. And then they're surprised at the next frame, and they're going to be surprised at the next frame. It's really easy to see. It's simple to see where this goes. And all of that productivity that is driving should be in service to you, and prices should fall faster and faster and faster and faster. And as that AI merges with robots, and those robots can grow food,

and all of those things fall at the same rate. And so all of the things become abundant from that system. The only world that can measure that system is Bitcoin. And all of those things have to be stolen from you at a faster and faster rate in the control system. So why it feels like people are losing control, why CBDC is critical, why all these things, or war to reset world, those outcomes are critical,

is because it's a control system to steal that from you. And so out of the control system, you will hear more fear. You will hear more regulation. You will hear more, we need to tax the robots, right? That's a good idea, right? So we make the things more expensive so we can tax you so you stay in this mouse wheel out of the control system. But you'll hear these things and you'll think,

and people will say, let's do basic income. let's spend and you'll hear more and more crazy ideas and without any other wonder well where does money come from to do that and what if you just let it all flow to society so they don't need the all the nonsense then ai would serve us instead of control us right that's the that that's the choice that every human on the planet has has right now and you have an open decentralized secure network and bitcoin and any single person can move from the control system over to the new one to the freedom system and they just and all they need to know is i can't and nothing can stop that and so as as more and more control and more and more individual rights and freedoms are taken

away in the control system and things start breaking down more and more people are going to move to the new system and that's going to emerge it's like a it's like a bridge it's like parallel system that's building alongside in your view ai doesn't have to be this doom and gloom scenario where you know they they start controlling you're gonna like my speech tomorrow oh i can't wait my speech tomorrow okay yeah i look forward to it yeah okay good and it's gonna also be streamed on youtube so i'm gonna put the link to that okay to that speech also on the show notes here so people can make the connection okay great i'm looking forward to it and oh i've got a good one you spoke with knut about um the ascension in human consciousness

and i loved it and how do you see that related to bitcoin i mean we did touch on it a little bit we just didn't give it that title yeah i i i think this and i said this with with knut but we all uh we all view the world right through our own lens and and we reinforce that world through us and yours will be slightly different than mine and mine is slightly different and and and we go through reinforcing that and we're so convinced that it's the view of the world and it is it's true for you yours mine's true true for me and and we live in and how many people that you do you know that are caught up in this control system and believe it and are super unhappy and they give themselves more give more strength and they yell and they yell at one side or the

other and they and they give the whole thing more strength and they think they're winning but if you just objective and you say is my life getting better right and it's all about me right it's my views it's my that then then you either fix it or don't um and so what's what's happening in this once you move out of i would say the simple way is to explain it is this if we lived on a base layer of theft and and and that layer had to extract from some people to enrich another people and that's a world that everybody lived on what would be the mirror image over time reflecting back who would win who would lose what would your life look like if that's how we interacted humans all over the all over the planet and so that is the system

that most people live in today they know it right i'll give you a real tangible example people in the u.s or europe and everything else are now complaining about inflation yes and now they're starting to rise up but they don't know that democratic republic of congo right there where you get paid two and a half dollars a day to dig out a cobalt right and cobalt wouldn't work in their electric cars unless you pay them two dollars fifty cents a day and then they keep revaluing the currency down so what you've actually done by extracting that is you've created essentially modern day slavery but you don't have to move the slaves to your country you keep them there. And you constantly revalue the currency. And you extract more and more from them. And so

Lebanon just had a currency crisis. Malawi did. Egypt did. Argentina, Venezuela. All of them right now. It's happening all over the world. So you're keeping people there and you're constantly extracting more and more. And it's only for the rich nations coming into view because at the bottom of the economic ladder now it's not just extraction from other people it's extraction from within your country too yeah and it's getting worse and worse and worse but it's always been there that's a hard thing to deal with that's a hard thing to deal with that was i would say that was my hardest thing going down the rabbit hole that i was somehow complicit in my success was somebody else's pain and so when you see that and you say okay so that's what the

world looks like today i know that's what the world looks like today and everything i do in that system makes that worse and in the new system it looks exactly the opposite yeah um so you cannot help but be super hopeful to where we go as a humanity when the mirror image of of what it looks like is on top of an honest system because honesty wins all of the productive members of society win yeah right and you can't be stolen from and and that's why i spend a lot of my time now passing on the knowledge and the education that i get to other people so that they don't just yell at klaus schwab that he's you know trying to control our lives but actually do something about you do something about it think about the number of people that yeah think about

the number of people that march down the street and if all of those people just moved over the new system klaus schwab wouldn't have any power starve the beast he doesn't have any power the power is gained from the power you give yeah right yeah that's where it comes so you and every single person on it doesn't have to play that game anymore that's what bitcoin is play a new game that's why we say opt out yeah okay and then start the beast the beast can continue playing keep going but but you're only devaluing yourself right because we're not being devalued yeah and on a spiritual level this is where you not only you feed the beast but you also give your energy your your spiritual energy to that game rather than investing in your sovereignty in your calmness

in your community in your wealth in your life and then building something new that doesn't require you to fight and try to protect what's yours but rather live a much more relaxed life yeah that's the so so if you told and i've said this on too many podcasts so but i'm going to do it again And I use this specific example because everybody knows somebody like this. But we all know somebody who's a victim in our life, right? And why are they a victim? Most people would answer that they wouldn't answer what it really is. They're a victim largely because they want love and belonging, right?

Largely, because all of human beings, we all, that's superordinate to anything else, love and belonging. and through being a victim early on when you're a victim everybody came to you and it felt magical so you use a tool to get everybody to come to you that pushes everyone away and as they go further and further away you go down deeper in a hole and you have a sign that every friend knows they can see it on your forehead that you're a victim and they don't tell you and you're lonely and so you create more drama to try to get people to come back and they push way further and so there's people that go through their entire life like that and they're and and in that they don't know they created their entire life like that because they didn't know that love was all around them

all the time but to try to convince that person that they're not right they are right they just don't know that they created it right it is is real to them and if if i'm walking down the street and I see abundance everywhere and I see beautiful relationships everywhere my world my truth is just as true to me as there's this to them it's just different yeah and so and and so me telling somebody yelling at somebody that they're wrong they're not wrong they're right for them it's up to them to decide if they want something different yeah it's up to them to see and choose yeah choose something else yeah if they can see it yeah if they want to but if they don't if they don't want to if that's if that's what you want then then by all means go keep doing it who am i to tell you

and that's going to be the life that you have yeah okay so other than ai what else are you going to cover or talk about in the conference this week can you give us a hint just a hint not the whole thing so i what are you going to touch on i'm going to touch on on this the kind the future of Bitcoin yes um so if you thought if you thought I was doing this at the expert level now this might blow people's brains okay because it actually takes us to really what this means okay and it takes us way deeper on what on what this means but I would say one thing one of the things I'm really excited for on where where Bitcoin is layer 2 on lightning where fediments are

coming you have a so there's a belief right now and Lynn Preston and I were talking in New York last week and so I'm surprised people are surprised right because because we saw a long time ago lightning couldn't scale to 8 billion people like a long time ago but it could be a superhighway network to connect the next layer and so that's actually why we invested in Fetty mm-hmm because we knew the conversations that people are having today and coming up with some crazy trade-off decisions that are just they won't work nonsense we had knew this a long time ago and and wanted to build this help build the scaling people that

don't know Feddie the startup that you invested in yeah just in one one line you what ends up happening is in in in Bitcoin at the bottom of Bitcoin you can do custody where right where you can share custody so you could have kind of a three of my five multi-sig you could have five people and three people could unlock them so so fetty took chowman e-cash and they tied it to a federated model of of of that and what that would mean it's a it's a completely private above bitcoin secure private communication private everything private and what that means is i could have a family federation my my five family members could be family uh on this i mean if i lost my bitcoin they could restore it for me three or five

so it isn't a simple example but i could have a bigger federation with more money a community that can trade all and it isn't even have to touch lightning or bitcoin it can trade all and decide that and then it just and then anytime you want out of the federation you go to lightning and you come back to bitcoin but you can you can create essentially limitless community banks limitless small federations and so what i think is going to happen on that as a scaling layer is people will trust more money in the smaller ones and they might trade a little in the in the in the larger ones but you provide a scaling solution that's that i think can touch every person on this planet i must hook up with them because i think this is going to be a perfect

solution for a lot of the awakened red-pilled community that are looking to to build like sovereignty that's happening right now so they're they're they're actually they're they're in beta right now in a whole bunch of communities is it available all over the world so it's not public yet but we actually helped uh that team they're incredible so but i saw the ceo is cool It's always awesome. The entire team is incredible. And so we actually pulled back on a public launch to make sure that it was so buttoned down. Okay. So it was so secure that because once it goes public,

and it'll go probably in the second quarter of this year, look out. Because anybody has that. Once it's in the wild, everybody can use it anywhere. Sure, exactly. And imagine you're in North Korea. Yes. And your guardians are outside of North Korea. Wow. Nothing can stop people from using it in there, in China, nothing.

You can't stop it. Wow. That's very exciting. Yeah, really powerful. But I took you away from talking about the... Yeah, so this speech and everything else is kind of the future. Where we're going on a Bitcoin standard. What does that mean for humanity?

What does that look like? Unreal. Yeah. Unreal. Okay. Okay. Jeff, where can, I mean, I normally ask, like my last question is, can we end this on a message of hope, but we don't need to because I think this whole conversation is all hope, so no need. Where can people follow you? Where's the best place? Probably on Nostra these days.

Ah, really? Are you active there? Yeah. Yeah. More, more so than Twitter. And, uh, but I say, go to the website, go to my website, jeffbooth.ca. And the reason I say go to the website is if I don't have a social media account on my website, it's not me. There's so many scammers out there. Yes. And so take the Noster ID from my website. If you're going to do that, then, then we can connect there. Okay, great. So Noster. Yeah. And Twitter, if you have to. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. And, um, I just want to thank you for who you are. Oh, thank you.

It's a privilege. I mean, I approached you on Twitter, and you said yes straight away, and it's just really nice. I've built some incredible, incredible... Andre did the same. Andre from here, same thing. Yes. And you meet incredible people all over the world, and this is what it should look like. This is what it should look like, right?

This is what it should look like everywhere. This is what it will look like everywhere. This is so great. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. And for spending the time with me. No problem. It was wonderful.

It was great. Thank you.