Jeff Booth - Why Bitcoin Might Be The Only Thing That Can Save Humanity

Full transcript: Jeff Booth on London Real

2:41 Brian Rose: This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jeff Booth, the entrepreneur, technologist, thought leader, and author. You have been at the forefront of technological innovation for the past 20 years and have been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, Time Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. In 1999, you co-founded Build Direct, a $500 million first mover technology platform for the home improvement industry. And last year, you released your first book, The Price of Tomorrow, why deflation is the key to an abundant future, where you explain how inflation is a hidden theft that is literally stealing our wealth.

3:16 You believe we need to embrace deflation and that Bitcoin can help us ensure that the abundance gained from technology reaches the widest audience possible. You’ve even said that Bitcoin might be the only thing that can save humanity. Jeff, welcome to London Real.

3:31 Jeff Booth: Thanks for having me.

3:33 Brian Rose: Hey, Jeff, it’s great to have you here.

3:35 And I had a flashback today when I was preparing for you to my early days on Wall Street. And just bear with me for a minute, I’ll paint the picture. It was 1993, I was 22 years old, just graduated from MIT. And I was on this massive trading floor at Bankers Trust on the 33rd floor, about 300 alpha males and females, shouting over hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses every year. And I soon learned as a young kid, Jeff, that there was one number everyone paid attention to.

4:04 And they even called it the number. And I was trading in the fixed income markets. And a lot of people probably know the number I’m referring to. It was non-farm payrolls, right? It was the number of new jobs that were created that month that weren’t in farming.

4:19 So they couldn’t be treated as cyclical. And everyone looked at this number, we were glued to it and the markets waited for it and then they reacted and moved because this number would tell us the growth rate, potentially the inflation rate, what the Fed would do. And it was like that moment in trading places, where Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd are in the frozen concentrated orange juice pit and they do all their trading and then they wait for some old dude to read out the crop reports and then they all go back to trading.

4:45 And I got used to knowing this number, I could trade that number, I could position my portfolio. But Jeff, I never sat back and asked the simple question that you seem to have asked in your book, which is this, why is my money worth less each year? You know, I was born into a system where we assumed that was true and then we reacted around that. And I think most people watching us were born into that system as well. But maybe we start with that simple question, is that where we should begin?

5:14 Why is our money worth less each year?

5:17 Jeff Booth: I think, so first off, it almost doesn’t matter what governments do. Technology is a greater force and technology is a greater force to lower costs or free our time. So what governments are facing all around the world is essentially hiding inflation, which is a hidden theft. They can’t tax at the rate they, people would rise up against tax rates going that high.

5:44 So they hide taxes in inflation, which allows them to expand governments and services that people demand out of a hidden tax. The problem with that hidden tax is it’s levied on the most, the poor part of society, the middle class and the poor, and the rich have ate it because their assets go up. But it’s a system problem. And why we don’t ask that fundamental question is we grew up in that system. We measure every single thing that in our lives by the system that creates the problem all around us.

6:20 So all of our measurement, including GDP, jobs, everything is from that system, our house prices, everything else, and so we get trapped, lulled into a false sense of security. But we never ask the question, wait, does a productive society require that my money be worth less each year? And if we would ask that question, we would realize why, that makes no sense at all. And so I think what you just did, I think that is the question. Does a productive society require that your money is worth less each year?

6:56 And if that’s true, who should decide? Who are you going to anoint king of the world who decides how much money or how much your money is worth less each year, or really how much you’re stealing your labor rate each year or your time, because money is just a trade of our time. And so we give our time for money and we expect to be able to use that money later on. So it’s just a trade of our time. So when you’ve asked that question, it opens your mind to a whole bunch of things that you can’t unsee it, right?

7:37 It’s hard to, and it takes you down a path. If that’s what I thought before, and that’s not true, how many other things in my life might not be true too, because of that fundamental miss at a base layer of money.

7:50 Brian Rose: Right, it can lead to a real paradigm shift if you go deeper into that problem. And for people that are tuning in that might not even understand what inflation is, it’s that concept you said that if I have $100 today or 100 pounds a year from now, it’s not worth that.

8:07 Worth 99 or 98 or 97 or if you’re in certain countries it’s worth half of that depending on what that inflation rate is and it’s something we’ve all grown accustomed to we think is normal and it’s something we ultimately allow other people to decide and it’s almost a trick being played on us right it’s almost an illusion.

8:31 Jeff Booth: It is an illusion it is so when you actually get to the bottom of the hole on this. And you know this from my book, but over the last 20 years, this is before COVID, it took $185 trillion of stimulus to grow the real economy by $46 trillion.

8:49 So essentially $4 to 1, $4 a debt for leverage for every $1 of growth. And so anyone just has asked a simple question, could you ever pay back that growth? And you can’t. And so that came in 20 years. But nobody ever connects the dots and says, what would my house be worth?

9:12 My house’s houses always rise. That’s a different phenomenon. But what would my house be worth if the printing didn’t happen? And then if it requires that much printing, and by the way, now it’s accelerating, and it has to keep accelerating, It’s just math. And so if it has to keep accelerating, do we actually live in a free market or is all markets an illusion out of the printing?

9:40 And what you find is the entire world we live in is essentially illusion where governments are forcing prices higher of everything, food prices, energy prices, housing prices, because they have to, because the entire system collapses with deflation. So they’re on a path that they have to keep on printing. Otherwise, the whole system resets. And if you’re on the top of that ladder, if you have businesses, if you have a whole bunch of real estate, those prices are rising as a result.

10:16 And if you’re on the bottom of that ladder, in the middle income of that ladder, your savings are being devalued at the same rate. And so you’re losing out. And then we turn to the same governments and say, redistribute wealth by creating more inflation to be able to create a whole bunch of programs to redistribute wealth when it’s a system problem. And it doesn’t matter who is in that system. You could vote for anybody in that system.

10:44 If it requires monetary easing and our entire inflationary policy does require forever printing and more and more of it. It doesn’t matter who they cannot change. There’s no vote that you could make that could change that system. It’s a system problem. So there’s a whole bunch of good and bad people, mostly good, but caught in a system that they don’t understand, that there’s no way out of it.

11:08 And so if you went to what kind of, I’m sure we’ll talk about it a little bit, but that means, and if you look at what happens with technology is the incumbent rarely sees the change that’s coming. A change is imposed by a technology that produces far better benefits for society and society starts using the new change. And what the incumbent does typically is tries to block the change and they make it worse by blocking the change. So if you look at Blockbuster and the US adding candy aisles to their stores and we laugh now, went because Netflix essentially made the stores redundant, it was useless.

11:48 Didn’t need a store because download speeds changed and you could download a movie and stuff. So that’s typical in business and what we’re finding is that pattern is actually happening at the monetary level. What’s happening at the entire monetary level all around the world is the existing system will break down. It will fail. There’s a whole bunch of things we could talk about on the cascade towards there, monetary easing, concentration of all power and government on that path and a reduction of individual rights and freedoms along that path. You can talk about all of that, which will happen for sure, as Bitcoin is a different system. It’s a network transfer of value that is an escape valve from that system.

12:37 Brian Rose: This is powerful stuff and I definitely want to get to the Bitcoin implications.

12:43 You published your book pre-COVID, and then you got to watch all of this happen right in front of your face, Jeff, as you just talked about what happened for the previous 20 years with all the printing. And then you saw a record amount of printing happen in the last year. I think it’s like four or 500 billion. What was it like for you to watch this happen in real time to see a crisis and then to see more money being printed on the back of it? What did you note from how the government reacted, how the public reacted, and then did anyone realize that they were being inflated their assets at the end of the day?

13:20 Jeff Booth: I think more and more people are waking up to the fact every day, but still caught in a system. And then when you’re caught in a system and you don’t feel like you have any power over that system, you might scream at the system, you might march from the street of the system, but then you go back into your job and you go back into the world and you live in that system. And there’s not much you can do. And so funny, a lot of people, because I wrote that book prior to COVID, prior to all of this, and it’s just played out, everything has just been like a, it’s like, you could see the future.

13:53 A lot of people call me, they think I have a time machine, but it’s not a time machine. It’s just, if you understand the patterns in one system that must keep increasing, must keep monetizing, must drive inflation, because you couldn’t pay back the debt in real terms. So you have to drive inflation, and the number has to keep going up and up. And what that does to society, it makes a whole bunch of people poor, and it makes some very small people wealthy. And those wealthy people have access to government, so they stay on time, and the businesses that benefit from it too, it’s all feeds back on itself. You know, you can predict all of the next steps, And it’s pretty easy to predict what had to happen.

14:44 And so what’s happened is it’s played out exactly, I didn’t predict COVID, but virtually every other thing is predicted in the book. And all the next steps are predicted too.

14:54 Brian Rose: Right. It’s like in the playbook. You know, I’m having some flashbacks to guests that have been in the studio.

15:00 And I remember having conversations with people last year when we saw governments send out checks, government print money to prop up equity markets. And I remember having conversations with people and saying, you think this is what you want. You think you want to check from the government, but you’re going to pay for this ten times over, especially as one of the lower income people, especially as someone that doesn’t own assets, and yet it was very difficult for people to connect with that.

15:25 On the same note, I’ve had guests in here like Robert Kiyosaki, who says, Brian, poor people work for money, rich people make money work for them, which illustrates that if you own assets, at least you can be on the winning side of that temporary situation, right? You can, again, win by owning those businesses, better taxation, not hit the inflationary hit as much as someone was savings, but you go on to say the rich get richer until they don’t because ultimately that leads to overthrows of governments, massive changes in power, seizures of assets. So even the people, the one percenters, who look like they’re winning, you would argue that this system is flawed for everyone in the long enough timeline.

16:05 Jeff Booth: Yeah, 100%, and I’m really glad you pointed that out. I wrote an entire chapter in the book called Us versus Them that talks about how do you manipulate other people against others? And when a giant part of the population looks at a very small group of people that has everything and they don’t, look through history at what happens. And so it’s easy to see what’s coming next and it’s easy to see those people. So I totally understand because I understand human nature so well as well, evolutionary biology, everything else.

16:44 I understand how our minds, where they change all the time and we think, but so you have to really have empathy to put yourself into somebody else’s position that is at the bottom of the ladder or the middle of the ladder and they don’t know what’s happening. And some new leader comes and says, it’s those people’s fault. And I’m going to take it all from them and caused it. That’s how those people get elected, by creating society that turns society against each other.

17:19 And because it’s a foundational problem, because it’s a structural problem instead of a people problem, those people essentially concentrate control of everything as they do that, and you have to create a bigger enemy that’s outside of your borders to retain power. And so if you look at currency, and here’s what happened historically, historically you would see these currency resets, call it 80 to 120 years, and you’d have a long debt cycle, essentially in a war would reset that, and the winner of the war would say, now here’s the currency promise we won’t do it again and then do it again over and over.

18:05 Because your population is demanding more services and the easiest way to give them more services without telling them you’re picking their pocket to give them more services is to hide it in inflation. So you can control a population by giving them exactly what they want by picking their pocket and not telling them. And it gets away on itself and then every currency around the world does the same thing and they’re all playing the game theory racing to the bottom. Essentially, if you looked at inflation, it’s also wage deflation. So you’re creating lower cost labor to try to keep jobs while technology is removing them and saving your time. So essentially you’re creating a society where you’re creating modern day slavery of society and that’s what so but these things typically reset every 80 to 120 years and then the winner of the war kind of here’s the new currency regime look at Bretton Woods out of World War II and here’s the way this is going to set for the next for the next system right and Bretton Woods effectively ended in 1971 when the US went off the gold reserve and pushed their pain because they couldn’t fund the US taxes at that time were in the 60s were about 90%. They couldn’t fund their liabilities.

19:35 And so France demanded their gold back in return and the US went off the gold reserve and pushed that pain around the world. And now you had a whole bunch of and then they, the next trick, essentially parlor trek, was to price their dollars in oil. And so the entire oil complex is actually pricing energy in US dollars that every other country had to play on that game to be able to energy. And what it did for the US is it gave them a massive advantage because their energy was effectively free.

20:11 Right. Because they can set the price themselves by setting the dollars. They can print more money and make the energy free.

20:19 Brian Rose: The fascinating part about this is that right now here in the UK, there’s something called universal credit. And it’s basically money given out to certain income levels, and they increased it during COVID to an additional 20 pounds a week.

20:33 And now they’re talking about stopping it, because all of those issues are now over. And yet, it’s the lower income people that are fighting tooth and nail to keep the subsidies going that ultimately deflate their wages, right, ultimately hurt them in the long run. And yet, as you said in your book, they’re caught up in a system where they’re making the worst choices for themselves, trying to fight for those or even more social repairs or more distribution that’s ultimately going to end in more pain for them and then a failure of the system.

21:08 Jeff Booth: So when we’re and think about, and you know, I wrote about this, when it’s easy to question your, it’s going to be not easy to question your own privilege and status, where you grew up, what you have, and the reason you have those things, but imagine it on the other side. So imagine it’s you, you don’t know, you don’t know you have access to unlimited education because education is free today, because internet’s free today. You don’t know you have all of this.

21:38 You’re stuck in a loop, because that positive reinforcement for the wealthy is a negative reinforcement for the middle class and poor. And the kids can’t get into the schools and the kids. And so they’re stuck into working harder and harder and harder, two jobs to be able to pay the bills and they don’t know how to anymore. And now you take away and they don’t have savings. And so what ends up happening in our brains is if we feel fear, We shut down all possibility.

22:08 We don’t think about abundance. We, our animal brain, our prehistoric brain takes over and we think about, I can’t get eaten by the lion. It’s a fear response. And so it makes you less intelligent or able, unable to see a whole bunch of possibilities. So if you think about how many people live in that fear today, it’s a perfectly understandable response that they would race to.

22:37 I get that it’s hurting them more, but it’s perfectly understandable why they do that and why it’s so easy to control a population through concentrating all power in government when you do that and why a dictator always gets, gets elected or gets elected and then takes control and changes individual rights and freedoms and concentrates more power and say, it’s because it’s history, if you look through history, it’s a really easy path to see. It always happens that way. And it happens because the masses will trust anyone that will tell them it’ll look different.

23:20 Brian Rose: Yeah, you know, I spent six months of this year running to be the next mayor of London and it was my crash course in politics. And, you know, Jeff, it was very sobering because, you know, my brain went in and tried to solve the major problems this city faces, which I think are the same problems every other city. It’s crime, it’s transportation. We were having obviously lockdowns because of business, so that was a real issue as well, and housing. And we came up with all these creative solutions.

23:46 I tapped into a bunch of really smart people in the city. And I remember I was on one Zoom call and I said to everybody, if we do everything we wanna do, we won’t get credit. Two mayors from now will get credit because these things will take 10 or 15 years. And I said, is everybody okay with that? And they said, yes, because we see what happens now.

24:05 The only way to get elected is to give this short-term gains and it’s never to make those real changes because people don’t really wanna hear that. And it’s hard to even fathom that. And what you’re really thinking about is what’s happening to me right now. And like you said, that fear impulse is very real. And even though there is an abundance of information and education, you have a prison in your own brain to a certain extent.

24:28 And so, yeah, I learned really quickly that none of these ideas made a difference. They didn’t get people’s attention. And I don’t know how anyone would get elected to work on those longer-term solutions with the short-term pain. So that cycle in itself is maybe perpetuates some of this. But again, the system I think is the core, core issue.

24:48 Jeff Booth: Well, that’s what you have. You have misinformation and money. And when misinformation exists in money and an incentive system, entire incentive system is to create more misinformation, then misinformation must grow at that rate that misinformation and money grows everywhere in society. And that’s what’s happening. So if anybody’s trying to get elected from the system using the same economic model, inflationary economic model, that misinformation must be prevalent everywhere. And it must it must exponentially grow everywhere in society.

25:27 That’s what we’re facing.

25:29 Brian Rose: What’s an example of misinformation exponentially growing?

25:34 Jeff Booth: So, I think people would see it, see it everywhere. So, maybe I’ll take you to a piece in my book where I said, our intelligence is error correction. Intelligence is error correction.

25:50 And so I’ll use an example in the printing press, it created a whole bunch more information. And that information, that information used to be centrally controlled in the church. And King or church and a co-op and everybody else had to listen to that information and it was based on the, and very few people had other information. So when you had a printing press that reduced the cost of knowledge, so people could contribute to that and distribute that knowledge everywhere, you had an explosion of knowledge.

26:24 And then that knowledge, that knowledge created a whole bunch of misinformation as well, other religions, or they’re all trying to essentially create power their own way and a whole bunch of science as well. And the best ideas win over time because that information could now be written and other people could error correct that information. And if you think about the entire, what we live on is that information expanding and being error corrected. And the best ideas cut through that information and they live on.

27:02 Fair? Yeah, yeah. Now, think about a technology that’s 100,000 million times more powerful than the printing press and lowering the cost of information. and has made us all be able to contribute our own information and money is breaking down in itself and printing more money, which is causing a whole bunch. And so all of that, there’s a bunch of misinformation in that as well.

27:31 And the best signal is cutting through that and it’s catching its own, it doesn’t need a government to save Bitcoin, it doesn’t need, so you have a whole bunch of misinformation the system, getting worse and worse and worse. And the technology has also created a way for all minds to contribute to something that could look very different. Now, what will happen on the backside of this is artificial intelligence will error correct that as well, because we won’t be able to see, we won’t be able to, our minds are capable to do that error correcting at this scale. But that’s what’s happening today. It’s just such a change from what we’ve lived through in information processing and everything else compared to where this is going.

28:21 And if then you’re changing money, or time, money, just think about money. It’s an arbitrary concept. All it is is a trade of our time. We don’t want more money. We want what we think more more money will contain us.

28:38 We want more time.

28:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s the powerful realization right there. And so say, for example, the internet hadn’t come along and hadn’t been adopted. We were already facing a crisis with what we were doing with our monetary policy, but now you have this technology that’s growing at an exponential rate that we can’t even conceive that is now dropping the price of everything and that now compounds on the issue we’re sitting with right now And we can’t see that coming because we don’t humanly understand what exponential change means.

29:15 Brian Rose: Is that another point you’re making that we need to try to do?

29:18 Jeff Booth: So, and you know from the book again, but if you fold a piece of paper on itself 50 times, that piece of paper will reach the sun. Now, for people that are just hearing that for the first time on your show, I know they’re gonna Google everything else, but because what ends up happening is on the first number of folds, it’s really thin. And it’s the same thing that we misunderstand how fast technology is.

29:41 You have an exponential pattern in technology that’s moving at that rate, doubling every 18 months to two years that is moving at that rate. And when you’re in the thin folds of the piece of paper, fold one, fold two, fold three, there’s in technology people think, wow, this is gonna change the world. And it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t move the needle. But when you’re in a thick fold, fold 34, 35, 36, the steps are so big, we can’t even comprehend it.

30:11 And so look around the world today and look at your phone and look at self-driving cars coming and everything else. And these are just the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming, very tip. You can’t even comprehend what’s coming. And these things, how can it be if you look on your phone, photography, music, everything’s free. Think about what it cost to do those things 20 years ago.

30:38 How can it not be at that rate of everything free that prices aren’t coming down everywhere? And if you forecast that forward, the deflation has just started. Most of it’s in front of us. And so you have one path wanting to free our time and make our time worth more essentially as jobs come out of the market, prices fall in lock step, and you have a system that will not allow it going the other way. And so this system has to offset the rate at which technology is decreasing, making your time more valuable and concentrate all wealth by doing that and printing money.

31:19 So instead of you freeing your time, you become a modern day slave to whoever is in control of the money printing. And that’s what those two paths have to keep going like this, because this system.

31:35 Brian Rose: So now, but let’s just ask a serious question. If governments today, any government today said, okay, we’re gonna stop printing money, what would happen?

31:47 Jeff Booth: Yeah, this is the great question.

31:50 Brian Rose: That’s why I wanted to have you on because everyone criticizes the printing of money last year during a pandemic, but no one entertains what would happen if you didn’t. So, what happens?

32:05 Jeff Booth: I see mayhem. You have, so the money that people think is there, isn’t there. It’s a counterparty risk in 2008, my business had letters of credit all around the globe.

32:18 And counterparty banks wouldn’t take the money because they thought our bank would fail. In tier one, number one bank in Canada, We had tons of money in the bank. Other banks, the Banking Institute, took our money because they thought our bank would fail. And so what you have, if you have housing prices starting to fall globally, if you have anything starting to fall globally, which technology requires, then the entire system, the money that people think is there, isn’t there.

32:56 It just keeps, it cascades, and it’s an unwind of that leverage, which is so monumental today. And that leverage is our life today. Everything’s in it. Our institutions, our hospitals, our governments, everything, our banks. There is no money there with the, if you let the, so that deflationary spiral.

33:20 And it’s because governments didn’t catch this, just like a normal business like Sears wouldn’t see Amazon. They didn’t see it early enough. And so they kept on that pace and technology is going the other way. And now it’s too late. So now if you let that credit collapse, there would be mayhem.

33:47 Brian Rose: It would absolutely mayhem. There would be a collapse of everything. And so how does that play out and you thought through like what happens in the first day the seven days the one month I mean, I’m not trying to get a macabre on here,

34:01 Jeff Booth: but there’s there’s no there’s no food on their shelves You have riots you have the you have you have complete chaos You have energy fails you have you can see what by the way, those things are coming in a different form anyways Unfortunately winters coming. I wish that wasn’t true But those things are coming anyways, it’s going to come, it likely comes in a different form.

34:23 But that’s what it would look like. If government stopped printing today, you would have a complete credit unwind to the world. And then society would race to the people that said, either through force or through, I’m going to change it. So you just have a consolidation of power in a different form if you had allowed an unwind today. And that’s actually what is so critical about this, and it’ll get into Bitcoin. From this system, unless you want revolution war reset global, and we’ve never been through a debt reset like this, entire global debt reset, with the technology we have to kill ourselves like today, and what’s coming. So we’ve never seen what that could look like. When I said, when I said, I think it could possibly, Bitcoin could be the possible only way humanity survives.

35:22 It’s not hyperbole. It’s if you think about that path and what must happen on that path, it gets pretty grim on that path. And imagine it doesn’t get grim. Imagine somehow governments could keep doing that. The only way they’re doing it is by concentrating all control in government and destroying the free market. And so remember, government is no more than you or me or anybody else. It’s a collection of people. And so who should have that type of domain over other people?

36:01 And I don’t think anybody should have that domain over other people. Because if you understand where artificial intelligence is going or robotics. Think about Boston robotics 10 years ago. Go look at the videos 10 years ago. Look at it today and think about AI moving at that same rate and think of what it would look like. Who owns that control? Who is the one person? Who would you trust out of that control over their human beings and who would rise up against that control?

36:31 We don’t, if you look at dictator states and everything else, very few people rise up because they get killed. What would happen if governments were able to concentrate all wealth into very few hands and pretend that they’re doing it to help people? I’m not willing to trust my kid’s life to that path because people change their minds. We see it all the time, narcissism a whole bunch of some of the somebody believes that they should have that much power and power corrupts absolutely absolute power crops absolutely

37:12 Brian Rose: so that’s china a future is china a future version of us because the government has to lock down lock down lock down more and then it ultimately fails just like the western system or is it just a parallel universe.

37:28 Jeff Booth: That’s what’s happening. If you look to China, if you look what’s happening in China, if you want to live in that society, a lot of people misunderstand China’s growth and they think it was the unbelievable free market society. It wasn’t. You’ve never had a country grow their debt to GDP faster than China. And it’s concentration of control. And now what has to happen is they have to, through force, have to control society through any means, through artificial intelligence, through social credit, through kind of changing what they think by controlling TikTok and all that. They have to control society.

38:16 So that potentially is a future version of us right now in the Western world before that ultimately collapses in a revolution. But this time, like you said, it’s a global revolution with a massive debt reset. We’ve never seen on top of that technology. We can’t handle from an arm standpoint of you or just it’s the technology itself from AI. And you’re looking at a massive disaster, massive, massive disaster.

38:43 Brian Rose: Now, Bitcoin is something I want to talk about now, if we hadn’t seen this technology invented, when would this scenario play out, do you think?

38:53 I mean, do you think this is something you would see in your lifetime, your children’s lifetime? If so, I’m sorry, the scenario we’re talking about now, but yeah, let’s just talk about this scenario. So assume that we didn’t have potentially Bitcoin to come in and provide an alternative. I mean, just based on what you’re telling me, it’s just only a matter of time and it’s growing exponentially.

39:15 Jeff Booth: And that’s what’s really important to note before we get to that, but I’ll get to that in a second.

39:20 If you believe that technology is supposed to save your time and technology is moving exponentially, then that means that technology gets cheaper and cheaper and you get more for less forever. It just keeps on running in price. If you believe that technology is going to slow down, then maybe we could go on forever. If you don’t believe that, if you believe the technology and look around what’s happening with technology. If you believe technology is actually speeding up or growing exponentially and what that could do to be able to get us out of being work slaves for our time, then you can see these systems are feeding back faster and faster. So technology is the giant change that there’s nothing that is going to stop it, it’s going to move faster and faster. And so how fast would this happen, what we’re talking about, this reset without Bitcoin? It’s probably two years away, three years away without Bitcoin.

40:25 It gets really bad.

40:27 Brian Rose: That soon. I thought you were going to say 10 or 20 or 30.

40:32 Jeff Booth: And this is something, and I got to be careful here, because I might, you can easily miss by a cycle with how fast technology is moving or something changes or somebody gets… But if you look around the world today and you see the signposts that it’s okay to have Khashoggi cut up with bone saws, and if you look at what’s happening in China, if you look around the world, all over the world, and just look at the signposts, they’re all accelerating.

41:12 If you look at the marches on the street in cities that don’t get covered by the nudes, if you think about what’s happening, all of these things are accelerating at a pace, and it’s accelerating because that has to happen. Right. So, but I might miss maybe it’s five years, maybe seven years, but if I had to say

41:38 This system becomes, here’s what people do, unfortunately do. It’s like asking when they’re looking for the event that triggers it, it’s like asking which snowflake caused the avalanche. When you’re building more and more instability into the system, you can guarantee it fails spectacularly, but you can’t tell when.

41:59 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, we, yeah, it just makes sense. I mean, just from a number standpoint, from the exponential standpoint. And again, look at, you know, like you said, Boston Dynamics, look at what they were creating, what they’re now creating. This is stuff they’re showing us.

42:18 And then look at some of the things we see in China that we know about with the social scores and all of that you know that that video technology with AI and 5G where it’s just you know and then what’s the likelihood of the of a revolt or that happening and then when it does happen it gets really ugly really fast and we haven’t really seen it at a global school we saw World War two but that’s not what we’re talking about here this is a global reset and global mayhem that probably make that look like a tiny blip. That’s what I worry about.

42:53 Jeff Booth: That’s exactly what I worry about. In fact, the reason I wrote my book, and you know that the reason I wrote my book is I looked out at the system and what the system must do. And I looked at my kids and I said, they’re not going to grow up in the same world I grew up in. And that’s not because of we don’t have the technology to make the world have abundance today. It’s not because of that.

43:18 It’s because of fear, greed, and living in a system that people can’t see a different system could produce way better results. And so it’s not through the lack of ability. It’s because people are so scared of what they do because that system is so unknown to them. A lot of people listen to the show and say, yep, totally got a technology supposed to free our time. We don’t dig holes with shovel or spoons anymore, we could. And what does that mean? And then go back to live in and not question anything else and reinforce the existing world. I think a lot about this, and our entire world is actually everything we experience was an idea first.

44:11 The system that we’ve designed was an idea, this was an idea. Remember, before this idea, there was a different idea that reigns supreme. It was, you had to have a keyboard on your phone, and it was with Vacher, it was a Canadian company. And everybody who lived in that world, you did, I did, believed we had, there’s no way I would use this. And this isn’t a phone anymore.

44:46 Think about what it is, it’s everything. And so all this is, is a different idea that changes the world when enough people see that idea. Our system is no different. We believe, the greater majority believe in a false god of inflation, in a false signal that somebody must be able to steal our time to live in a productive world. And if that idea doesn’t change, we’re in a lot of trouble.

45:20 And if that idea changes, the world can look very abundant.

45:24 Brian Rose: So in comes Bitcoin, and let’s talk about this. And again, I had Michael Saylor on here, CEO of MicroStrategy, who Bitcoin caught his eye when the pandemic happened and he actually saw the printing of money and he thought as the CEO, I have a fiduciary duty to my shareholders and maybe holding it in cash is not the right idea. And he started looking at alternatives, gold, real estate, and he looked at Bitcoin and said, OK, there’s something going on here.

45:52 And he said, if I want to leave something for the next thousand years, this is it. He calls it digital property, which really stuck in my head as opposed to digital gold. And Michael talked in depth about what he sees in this. And so it was interesting to see you look at this. And without Bitcoin as a potential bridge, a illustration of a deflationary system that people are actually using with transparency, I don’t know what else could have even introduced this concept to people.

46:22 Brian Rose: So when you saw Bitcoin and now that you see it, what do you see in that that could potentially help us, educate us, or even save us.

46:31 Jeff Booth: Yeah. And so if people looked at Bitcoin today, the average person in Bitcoin without the work that Michael has done, that I’ve done, a whole bunch of leaders in this space have done, they would look at Bitcoin and they would measure it by what it does today. And they would they would go back to their fiat world and pay for their groceries with cash and everything else. And so What ends up happening is, and by the way, that same thing happens in technology all the time, it’s what gives entrepreneurs like me, Steve Jobs, or an ability to see a different future, because there’s a whole bunch of people operating in a construct that doesn’t produce value, and then there’s a different construct. What that says, though, is people don’t predict the future. They predict the present into the future. Make sense? So they predict, they don’t predict what’s changing on Bitcoin, the network effect that’s changing on Bitcoin, and all of the additional, the layer two lightning network, and what that means to everything else. They predict what Bitcoin did last year or the year before and everything else, just too hard to understand and then it gets easier and easier and easier and more and more people start using it. More and more technology is built to it and it gets easier and easier and

47:55 Then more and more people are using it. That’s why I say it’s a network transfer. And that network transfer, if you think about lightning or what Twitter just did with lightning tips. So Bitcoin and then lightning is the second layer that you can transact really quickly on. Well, you can tip anybody in Bitcoin or in their currency right now on Twitter anywhere.

48:18 And so today, most businesses pay 2.9% to 3.5% for the privilege of using a visa. That alone just increased businesses’ ability to increase their profits by a lot, by a magnet, because 3% profits and essentially profit dollars to take a payment when Bitcoin is free or the Lightning Network is free. What do you think will happen? Businesses are going to integrate this everywhere at scale. And so that integration, and it’s going to get easier and easier and easier in the UX. But some people are predicting it from here that it never changes. What happens with technology is it gets better and better and better in a change.

49:06 And so you have to predict what will happen and where we are with Bitcoin adoption compared to the internet. The rates are actually growing the exact same if you look back at the internet growth. Bitcoin growth and we’re in 1997. Remember, Google didn’t start. So Bitcoin is like investing in the TCP IP, it’s like investing in the protocol layer of the internet Right. And there’s a whole bunch of additional value on top of that protocol layer, all of the companies that were built in on top of the internet. Now, remember, and again, think about this, in the protocol layer of the internet, most people misunderstood how much value would come from it.

49:53 Because in 1997, it would take you a week to download a cat video. People didn’t use it, A couple of some people had email but there wasn’t very many use cases and the use cases got better and better. That’s what’s happening on Bitcoin. It’s the rate of growth at exponential pattern and that rate of growth is changing and then the entire ecosystem is building there. Now what that does to what this conversation does is if you priced your world in Bitcoin today, day, you would see what we’re talking about.

50:30 Everything forever will get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper in your terms, instead of getting more expensive, because essentially your Bitcoin going up or all costs going down against your Bitcoin is the same thing. And so what you would see is prices going down to the natural order of things. Right. Because Bitcoin is deflationary in itself, so it won’t grow. So if you track your future prices in Bitcoin, you’ll see what prices really are, which are naturally going down, as opposed to what we see in our monetary policy dollar world, which is they go up.

51:04 Brian Rose: Right. And so you’ll see a real version of what the future is. It’s a way to embrace deflation, I guess, is kind of what you’re saying.

51:14 Jeff Booth: It’s a way to transfer from one system that can’t change itself to another system that allows the change. if you think about that network transfer, as more and more people see it, yes, people that see it earlier will have way more of the wealth. But what will happen, or as Bitcoin becomes a standard and everything else, it’ll get better for everybody, and materially better for everybody.

51:42 Some people question on Bitcoin, they said, okay, do you just throw control to new people? Well, it’s actually, it’s way bigger than that. It’s changing the incentives of the world. It’s changing the, and so now imagine I have control on Bitcoin because I have more Bitcoin. What does that mean?

52:01 Because it doesn’t mean I can control the network. It doesn’t mean I can go and print more Bitcoin. It doesn’t mean I can make a bad bet with my money as in a bank and I’m going to fail and I can change my bet and charge everybody else. It doesn’t mean that. All it means is I have more wealth in the system.

52:20 I have zero more control. And that’s an important piece. So if I want to use that wealth to control people, what it means is I’m distributing my Bitcoin for control because I have to pay them with something. And so control comes, more control is distributing your Bitcoin to other people. And so, and in a system like that, what it means is as the free market and technology work together, prices keep coming down lower and lower and lower and lower until they’re free.

52:56 And again, you saw this in the book, but we don’t pay for the oxygen we breathe, even though it’s the number one most valuable thing in our lives. Why? Like it’s ludicrous if somebody said, hey, I’m going to charge, I’m going to create this business, I’m going to charge you for oxygen and have everybody walking around with oxygen in front of you all the time. You just think, what do you do? That’s an insane business. Why would you do that?

53:21 Oxygen is free. Well, why is oxygen free? Because it’s abundant. And technology creates abundance everywhere. And it’s the same reason why your calculator on your phone is free. You can’t create a monitor, you can’t create value there.

53:35 It’s the same reason your camera, all your photos are free, and you take tons of photos are better now than they ever were because you can’t create value and all of those prices are coming down lower and lower all the time. So if you have a system that allows that, the world moves way faster to that abundance.

53:55 Brian Rose: And if people are coming in and don’t understand what Bitcoin is and how it’s able to do these amazing, wonderful things and save us as humanity from hundreds of years of these horrible cycles that are getting worse. How do you explain it to your mom when you say the reason Bitcoin can do what humanity can’t do is because of this? Is it the decentralization? Is it the trustless aspect, the fact that you can verify transactions independently without that control?

54:24 What are the big things in your mind that you communicate to people that say, hey, this is what makes it special?

54:33 Jeff Booth: So it’s worth everybody doing their own work on it, but not just believing kind of the MSN scenario or anything else, it’s worth doing the work. But the hard cap, the 21M, nobody can change that. It’s 21M Bitcoin forever, nobody can change that. Now that 21M is divisible, each one is divisible by $100 million. So you won’t price it in one Bitcoin at $60,000 or $70,000 or where that goes. Maybe it’s millions of dollars. You could price it in pennies or sats. So that’s part of the hard cap. But I think bigger than that to me is every other altcoin and every other form of money we’ve ever seen requires centralization, requires a number of people on top of that that says, I’m in control. Even a bunch of the altcoins today, they do a pre-mine, so a bunch of people have all the wealth, and then they try to market those altcoins to be able to create value. And so you have to trust in a number of people that aren’t going to change their minds. That’s what our currencies look like today. You have to trust in a number of people who say they’re not going to change their minds, who always change their minds.

56:00 And so a simple question to be asked in any of the, and I can’t remember who said this, but it’s just really, really good. It’s not from me, but I wish I could say them. They said, ask yourself in any one of those alternative currencies, if somebody came to the top 10 people, 100 people with guns and said, turn it off or your dad, could they turn it off? And all of them can. And if the servers on Ethereum, most of those servers run on Amazon, you could go in and you could say, I’m taking this, I’m co-opting the network.

56:39 In Bitcoin, you can’t. It’s truly decentralized. Nobody controls it. And so China should try and shut it down again next week, right? Because the more this is the 10th time they’ve said or 8th time they’ve said we’re shutting down Bitcoin, they have no ability to shut down Bitcoin. It’s a truly decentralized platform outside of the range of anybody’s control, mine, yours, anybody’s. And that’s what I like about it. So it’s rules, not rulers.

57:15 Brian Rose: It’s strange. It’s almost like this technology forces us to be the humans that we know we should be. And yet our tendencies are to always go back and cut the corners and, you know, feed our addictions and not do the right thing. And Bitcoin is a weird technology to kind of force us to do the right thing and show up, which actually solves all of our problems for humanity and makes everything almost better.

57:44 Jeff Booth: I love that you said that. I love that you said that. And so I’m hopeful for humanity. I wouldn’t have written the book and kind of proposed a path that was different if I wasn’t hopeful for that. But if you have an incentive structure that is based on cheating. Then you’re going to get cheating everywhere in the world. And if you have an incentive structure that is not based on cheating and nobody can control, then the best in humanity comes out. I think it thrives because incentive structure, we don’t want, again, we don’t want more and more money and more and more money to, we want more time. We want, the money is, is, what’s happening with money is, is, is a function of people being scared and having to consolidate enough of their wealth, so it doesn’t get taken before somebody else takes it and is getting more at first and worse, we want more time. And so if you have a system that allowed that it’s but it’s such a brain shift, because we live in the system, we measure the system, and a different system is emerging. And so it’s really

58:58 Hard for to understand what we’re talking about and people go back to the system they live in.

59:03 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, Jeff, and I’ve been thinking about this concept of, you know, transparency and, you know, the transparency that exists on a blockchain. And again, I just ran for office and I just saw, you know, a place where there’s not much transparency, which is in politics or even in government or even when it comes to where what our money is and where it is. But when it’s transparent, you know, everyone almost has to show up and, and be counted, and it takes me back to what I think of as our old days as hunter-gatherers, where there was a tribe of, say, 100 people, and everything was transparent.

59:38 So everybody could see if you showed up every day and if you contributed, and you would also be judged every day and reap the rewards or not. And so people go on about their privacy, but there’s something beautiful about a system where there is no privacy, where they can see what’s happening all the time and they can see how you’re contributing and there’s a finite number of things. And it’s weird in some way, Jeff, it feels like we’re almost going back to those olden days where things functioned now maybe as a global society.

1:00:08 I don’t know what you think of that, but I’m still working on some of these ideas.

1:00:13 Jeff Booth: You know, I actually think that that’s actually what it does. I think it changes when you go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and you realize how many people are protecting it and how many people are in this. make any money out of this. I don’t need more book sales for my wealth. I don’t need anything else.

1:00:30 This is a really, really important thing for society and I hope I’m doing something that can bring one more person on to more people and to something that can change their lives dramatically. Think about the number of people in this community that do that. Bitcoin doesn’t have marketing department. It has a whole bunch of people. Every node, it’s an emergent phenomenon that as more and more people understand it, it gets stronger and stronger and better and better and that brings on more and more people. And the change in our lives because of this emergent phenomenon that is congruent with technology and where it’s going, the change in our lives is so positive. I just wish more people could see it.

1:01:11 Brian Rose: It’s almost hard to believe it’s happening because again, you know, 15 years ago, if you would happen to write your book, we’d be having this conversation potentially and we’d be thinking, man, it really does look pretty bleak out there and there’s no way these humans can figure this out because they’re stuck in this system.

1:01:30 Brian Rose: And then all of a sudden-

1:01:31 Jeff Booth: We would be thinking about gold.

1:01:33 Brian Rose: Right, yeah, yeah, probably. And we’d be hoping that maybe there’s a solution there. And then now we see this strange structure of Bitcoin that actually starts to plant the seed of the paradigm shift. Like you said, everything starts with an idea.

1:01:46 Now this Bitcoin idea is becoming front and center and whether you come in because it’s interesting or it’s in the media or you come in because it’s volatile, you start learning and seeing this system and then you start to see a deflationary system for the first time maybe in your life and then you see all of this interest and action and also increase in market cap on top of that even if they don’t understand your concepts and this is like a very interesting bright star here and I’ve been having conversations for the past 10 years here, Jeff, and I’ve had incredible people from around the world and at the end of the show, after two hours in the studio, they all say, you know what, we better get it together as a species or there’s gonna be some real problems going forward and we need to think about how we can come together, be of service, think about the bigger picture, but nobody ever really had a ray of hope, Jeff, like this.

1:02:37 Brian Rose: And again, it’s taken me a while being in this community and it’s still not been a long time where I’m fully into it, to start to see the potential that it is something that can save us. And I guess what it needs is adoption at this point. And is that going to happen regardless, do you think? Or is the adoption the piece that might stop this from happening? Or is now this just a piece of technology, like you said, and will it exponentially grow?

1:03:06 Jeff Booth: It’s gonna exponentially grow. It’s the adoption is, I think the adoption is built into the system. think there’s anything that can stop it. In fact, every bit of news, when I said misinformation must create more misinformation, I’ve tried to look at this from a, what could kill it?

1:03:31 Now, I’m going to leave one tiny thing. Potentially some time, you’re going to have have quantum computers and quantum computers might be able to, at some point in the future, break the algorithm. Now that would presuppose that the network doesn’t change itself before that happens, which I think, so even that in itself, I see a very, very low probability risk, but I would have to say I’d have to if I’m a technologist, I’d have to say I’d have to say that at risk. But all of the others, all the things you hear in the media, everything else, if you think about climate change, climate change is caused by inflation. Because it presupposes the world can grow forever on a finite planet, not just grow forever, but but manipulate money to grow forever. So the reason most people have two jobs working harder and harder driving two cars to work to be able to buy more things is because you’re creating something that their money is worth less and less, and they have to be on that merry-go-round.

1:04:43 That is climate change, so it’s crazy that we’re around the world giving governments more money to create more climate change because if they were successful in actually reducing prices because the market wants to be free. If you think about what’s happening in solar, energy is getting cheaper. If you think about what it isn’t right now, why isn’t it right now in the UK and elsewhere? It’s because of all the printing. They have to keep the prices going up when the market wants to bring them down. You cannot solve climate from a system that requires inflation forever, growth forever on a finite planet. All of these ideas, all of these things that are creating more and more misinformation around Bitcoin actually make it stronger.

1:05:38 Because questions like this come out and say, okay, how do you solve climate through inflationary monetary policy that must burn the world and there’s no answer. And so more and more people, every time there’s more news around Bitcoin and no more news around kind of the alternative, more people realize what Bitcoin is and it gets stronger and more people move into it and defend it and all those nodes and network and everything else. That’s why I think it’s almost unstoppable, or it is unstoppable.

1:06:09 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s the answer I would expect a technologist to give me.

1:06:13 Because if you look at the numbers, you know, going to a billion people by 2025, it almost seems like nothing can stop that. And like you said, the China ban accelerates it, the more decentralized it is, you know, and I’ve heard all the different arguments. And I’m glad you brought the quantum computing, because we had a few guests in our history that brought that up. But yeah, it’s hard to find something that will, you know, you mentioned Ethereum, and a bunch of other various

1:06:39 Jeff Booth: Can I just jump? Can I just ask you something I think before that, because I think this is an important thing.

1:06:45 Ask people why they would want to stop it. Because I think that it deserves an answer, right? So if you want to stop it, aren’t you saying, I want somebody to control me? Well, I want somebody, I want a system that’s based on lies and they can’t fix these problems. I want to be a work slave.

1:07:08 Want to be. So shouldn’t we as humans, and so this is where try to find another technology in humanity that provided, empowered millions or billions of people that was ever stopped by government. You can’t find it. Technology that empowers people will find its way. And so, but the simple question is why would you, why would any government want to try to stop that type of technology? And if you, if you ask that question, you realize you better get it really fast because if the government is trying to stop it, they’re screaming at you on why you need it.

1:07:58 Brian Rose: It’s an excellent question. And it’s when I ask, I mean, I spent 15 years in the banking industry and my bank here in the UK, Jeff Nat West texted me the other day, one of the first texts I got in 20 years that said we’re concerned about your money so we’re not going to allow you to use your credit and debit cards with the Binance network so you won’t potentially danger yourself by buying the crypto. And I was shocked that they were so concerned about my money and immediately I was suspicious because I look at their oligopoly and I was a part of it and I saw it from the inside and first of all I realized that it’s probably taking out, you know, six to eight percent a global GDP into their pockets every year, but it also is a brainwashing system where we’re born into an inflationary system and also this banking system where other people control your money, other people manage your money, the experts do that, we handle your pension and you have this weird relationship.

1:08:52 I remember going to my first bank when I was a kid and it was the marble floors and the people dressed really well and I was like, wow, what’s this? My son Caden’s five years old, and I imagine going to that building in the future, and I’ll say, this used to be a bank, and he might say, what’s a bank? It’s now apartment buildings. But we were born into this reality, and again, Robert Kiyosaki talks about this. He raised his hand when he was 10 years old and said, when are we gonna learn about money?

1:09:18 And the teacher said, we don’t teach money. He said, but you’re teaching me Spanish, and math, and science, and biology. When are you gonna teach me about money? We don’t. Now, this is probably a parallel idea to what you’re saying about the inflationary cycle.

1:09:30 But again, it is this strange system we were born into where we’re not asking these questions. And so, when our banks and our governments say, stop the Bitcoin, we have to ask why. And let me take this one step further. I’m looking at Gary Gensler, who runs the SEC. And he is saying, okay, he’s not talking about necessarily Bitcoin per se, but he’s saying stablecoins or the tokens of the wild, wild west.

1:09:55 And at the same time, I’m watching him from 2018 teach at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the blockchain. And he’s very smart. And he can see that this is an incredible technology that can be embraced for all sorts of power. And yet, it seems to me that same individual is saying, don’t use it and don’t touch it. And so again, I’m just trying to learn from that and say what’s happening here.

1:10:21 What do you see when you see those things happen?

1:10:25 Jeff Booth: Yeah, and again, when I tried to see the best in people, and I understand that some people, there was very few people, Gary Gensler might be one of them, that I understand, and I think what he’s doing is he’s looking at all of the altcoins that are securities, and he’s going to regulate, and I think he’s gonna leave Bitcoin alone. I think it is, if what I guess, But there’s not very many people in government that understand this at the level that they should.

1:11:06 But if you just go to any business, if you think, why didn’t Kodak understand the digital camera that they created? Because they’re paid not to. A system reinforces itself on that system and that technology changes the business model. So there’s a whole bunch of people the top of this business model, which is money, that Bitcoin changes completely. And I understand why some of those people wouldn’t like it, because it takes away their privilege. It takes away their privilege at the top of the business model, and it does so by advancing that power to all individuals instead of them alone. That’s how it works. And so that’s actually the point.

1:11:53 That’s why it’s virtually impossible to stop.

1:11:56 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s the innovator’s dilemma. You’re paid not to see it. I’ve never heard it put that way. This is great.

1:12:03 Jeff Booth: And nobody wants to give up power if they can’t see that it’s in the long-term interest, whether it’s monetary or any other power. And that’s when you see these short-term land grabs, power grabs, money grabs, where they can’t necessarily see what’s happening.

1:12:19 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about Ethereum. And again, Michael Saylor was on here and he said, Brian, I like Bitcoin because it has low aspirations, is what he said. I thought that was interesting. And he said, it doesn’t try to do this. It’s not time to decentralize the banking system. It does this really well. It’s decentralized. I like it.

1:12:39 But we started to talk about stablecoins. We started to talk about Ethereum. And I do see some incredible innovation happening in a decentralized way where we are seeing a a technological advancement where the banks would be dragging their heels and non-innovating that I see benefiting a lot of people around the world. I understand your point that if you got a bunch of them in a room with a gun out, that it’s hard to say that they are actually decentralized.

1:13:04 But do you like to see that people are at least trying to introduce these elements, trying to introduce these ideas and the innovation on the back of it? And can you see this creating something positive that will help us in the future?

1:13:23 Jeff Booth: So, I’m going to qualify with this with, I may be wrong. I don’t think I am, but I may be wrong. I’m always curious, open to anything that I’ve seen, but I don’t think I am. If Bitcoin was solving a different problem, and it’s the most secure network of money and everything else at the highest level. By doing that on proof of work, it solves probably humanity’s greatest problem. But because it solved that problem, it couldn’t be used to do a world computer. It couldn’t be used, at least on the base layer, the primary layer. It couldn’t and solve the other problems, because what it does through proof of work is secures that network so that network can’t be hacked by anybody.

1:14:18 That’s what it does, primarily. So I understand in that model that people looked, wow, that’s a really interesting technology. We could use the same technology somewhere else. And that somewhere else, you’d have to make trade-offs in security or centralization. And that’s what Ethereum did, a bunch of trade-offs to be able to solve a different problem because they weren’t trying to solve that problem.

1:14:43 They were trying to solve a different problem. If you talked about it early on, the world’s computer, right, and everything else. And so, and to solve that, you have to have low fees and you have to have everything else. And so for a while, actually, I could understand an Ethereum use case. No, I never did.

1:15:02 I was never, it never ended. But I could understand why people invested in Ethereum everything else. Because if you looked at the network effect underneath the theorem, you’d say, wow, there’s a whole bunch of NFTs on it and a bunch of people doing things that they’re really innovative. And I might not agree with those NFTs, but there’s people using it and gaining value on the network. And you’d see more and more people using it. But where we’re going, Now, Bitcoin on layer 2 and what the new update will do on Bitcoin solves all of those problems.

1:15:39 And so that happens on layered money. So all of those things on the Lightning Network, you can move money around the world for zero. And I have it on my phone, I have sats on my phone, I can carry it around, I can pay for everything with my phone. And it’s faster, it’s not the same base layer protocol. And so what I think is going to happen is all of that value from that entire space is going to be over time.

1:16:11 This might not happen right away. It’s going to be sucked into the Bitcoin ecosystem and layers. And so I don’t see the use cases of all of those, they’re all kinds of really, I don’t see a use case that stands up to the time when everything could be pegged to the initial Bitcoin.

1:16:29 Brian Rose: Right, okay, understood. Now, if we looked at that maybe with a corporate analogy, you could say, well, Ethereum is doing this innovation and maybe Solana is doing some innovation.

1:16:40 They’re solving all sorts of very interesting problems, all sorts of financial innovations that are happening in smart contracts. Now, potentially those were just kind of merged into the Bitcoin with all that transfer of knowledge, you might just get this great entity in the future where those networks on themselves might still exist, but the innovation would still be a win for everyone out there.

1:17:02 Jeff Booth: So this is why I think it’s different. People are comparing Bitcoin and Ethereum as two businesses like you would compare Yahoo and Google.

1:17:10 Brian Rose: Yeah, which is bad, I understand, but explain why.

1:17:13 Jeff Booth: And Bitcoin is the internet itself. It’s the internet of money. And all the businesses are built on top of it. And those businesses are being built on top of the primary network.

1:17:25 And there wasn’t a way to build those businesses on top of the primary network until recently, but now there is. And the ecosystem is racing to it and building all of these, if you look at Jack Mueller’s strike, if you look at a whole bunch of all the innovation that’s coming into that ecosystem, it’s just started, it’s really early. But it’s also, as that innovation has happening, it’s reinforcing the primary network. So you have two network effects that are reinforcing each other on this.

1:17:53 And why do you need the others? So again, the internet, there’s one internet, it’s all around, some people trying to close as part of it and everything else, but there’s one internet. And then there’s a whole bunch of businesses on top. If you look at all the altcoins, they are creating businesses on top. Pre-mine is a business on top.

1:18:15 If you look at Bitcoin, it’s very different. It is the internet of money. And I think all of the businesses are gonna be built on top of it in layers.

1:18:24 Brian Rose: Some of my guests have compared Ethereum to the Microsoft Office of a blockchains as in it’s not the best software, but everybody uses it. And it’s got such a network effect on itself that it’s gonna be hard for anyone to proceed that changing in the future.

1:18:40 Brian Rose: Do you buy that analogy or do you think as a technologist, the best product rules?

1:18:45 Jeff Booth: So that’s actually what I mean. why they’re changing so many, like why they keep changing and ask yourself, so on Ethereum, there was just, there was no block size war, there was no shift in Bitcoin splitting and Bitcoin cash, like two different, there was no change. It was just a decision to change the rules on Ethereum recently. So you can tell it’s controlled by a small group of people that can, if you can make decisions like that, then it’s a controlled network.

1:19:15 There is a whole bunch of innovation happening on it. And I would say it’s a startup trying to find its way and they have to keep changing because each time they change their way to try to, right now, I think, unless they become Bitcoin, I think all else was lost because of the altcoins, which a bunch of the other altcoins that do what Ethereum does at a lower fee or kind of smaller versions of the Ethereum to do Ethereum is trying to be the supercomputer. And there’s a trade-off on all of those things.

1:19:50 That’s actually what’s happening. And while that trade-off is happening, you have Bitcoin kind of reinforcing itself as a primary network. Now, remember, if we had this conversation two years ago, Bitcoin couldn’t do the job that Ethereum was doing. It was doing a different job. But now through Lightning Network and eventually the layered solutions, now it can pegged to Bitcoin.

1:20:16 So now it’s so I think over time, it just takes that all that takes that market share. Right.

1:20:22 Brian Rose: Um, Bitcoin’s had a little bit of a pop in the last couple of days and coming back into the mid 50,000s. You know, I think price predictions in themselves aren’t necessarily great pieces of information, but I do want to get your thoughts on price of Bitcoin in the future. Max Keiser was on the show back in 2013.

1:20:42 Booth of us were in my old broadcasting studio, which was my kitchen. I don’t know if you remember Max from back then. He was screaming a lot, and I love Max, and he came to my Thanksgiving dinner, I think, in 2014, and he actually transacted a Bitcoin at the table with one of my trading buddies for $1,000, I’ll have to figure out which year it was, and I remember thinking that was a very strange thing to happen, but Max and I were talking about Bitcoin back in 2013, and talking about what would happen, and I saw a clip recently with Max, where they were asking him price predictions one year, five years, and 10 years, and he threw out some numbers, and I wanna get your thoughts, and then he said something like, in 10 years, we won’t even think about the price of Bitcoin in dollars, because our whole paradigm will have shifted to where we don’t even have that conversation.

1:21:29 Whether the dollar’s not relevant, or even the price of Bitcoin isn’t relevant, because it’ll be woven into just our lives. What are your thoughts? as far as prices and then maybe even behavior changes.

1:21:43 Jeff Booth: So I think that Max is right on what you just said. And Max, so I’ve been fortunate to spend a lot of time with Max as well.

1:21:51 But in what you just said, we price Bitcoin and we don’t care. Prices go down in Bitcoin forever. So everything against Bitcoin will go down. Houses will go down, cars will go down. everything will go down forever.

1:22:10 But we have this, because we measure a system by the system, we wanna measure our Bitcoin and US dollars, or we wanna measure our system, we wanna bit, and it’s kind of ludicrous when you think about it, because all of that system requires, so if you said today, and I’m just, let’s throw out a number, let’s say the entire global wealth is, call it 500 trillion, 400 trillion, because if you had a dead unwind or if you had, but the way people live today, every experience is about 400 trillion globally. Divide that number by 21 million. That’s what Bitcoin will be in time for today’s living standard.

1:22:59 But tomorrow, because we can guarantee there’s gonna be a ton more printing coming, tomorrow’s world value may look in our world and they feel like it’s 500 trillion, but it’s not really. It’s just all the costs have gone up because we printed a whole bunch of money. Right. So to get the same standard of living, you’re chasing harder and harder and harder in a system that must keep that number go. So it’s an irrelevant number, right?

1:23:27 So whatever that number is, whether Bitcoin goes to a million, 10 million, 20 million.

1:23:32 Brian Rose: I think you’re lagging just a little bit here, Jeff, but I’m gonna wait for you to catch up. Jeff, I think your zoom’s just lagging a little bit, but I’m gonna just take over from what you were saying, and we’re gonna try to reconnect here. I think based on what you were saying is I’m doing the math in my head. You’re saying that if you divide that 400 trillion by the 21 million Bitcoin, I guess you’re looking at maybe a $20 million Bitcoin, although I’m gonna have to triple check my math on that and make sure I’m not missing a zero.

1:24:05 But as the system continues to do, what it does, that value goes higher and higher and higher and then it becomes almost pointless because the whole point of Bitcoin is replacing the system and displacing the system. And so, yeah, it’s strange to kind of measure a system from the inside, I think is kind of the big realization that’s going on here with the price of Bitcoin. And so, yeah, I guess it’s the whole change of that paradigm shift. And if you think about the fact that if all prices are going down in the future, everything is going to be cheaper in Bitcoin standards, and you project that out for, say, 10 years, then you see everything becoming potentially free.

1:24:51 And then that’s against a society where everything’s inflating and prices are constantly going up. And so those two things really do diverge at some point. And that makes it super interesting. And so I’m getting you back here. Hey Jeff, I think I got you back here.

1:25:11 I was just kind of extrapolating what that meant if my math wasn’t right, like a $20 million Bitcoin. But again, as you continue printing, it becomes pointless. And then you’re talking about a currency that replaces the system that’s based on dollars anyways. So it becomes kind of a moot point to think about the future price in dollars of Bitcoin. And can you hear me okay from this end?

1:25:38 Jeff Booth: I think so. It’s like what’s Bitcoin worth in Venezuelan dollars. And we were just not used to in the Western world, our currency is failing at that rate. So we’re not used to it because we’ve never seen it. In our lifetimes, we haven’t seen it. But if you were in Lebanon, or if you’re in Venezuela or if you’re in Turkey, what’s Bitcoin worth there?

1:26:13 And you can see what happens a lot for the pastor. That’s gonna happen everywhere.

1:26:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, Jeff, I just wanna get some of your final thoughts. You know, when Michael was here, Michael Saylor, he said famously, mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin, you know, and I pressed him on that. And I said, is that really the smartest thing for everyone to do?

1:26:32 And he said, yeah, Brian, if you look at it, it actually is. And yet a lot of people aren’t willing to do that. And I’m wondering, how do you have this conversation with people that are very new to this space? And how do you talk to people about this on the street when you bump into them? Well, how do you communicate what this is to people?

1:26:50 Do you get them to try to understand the system, to try to buy a little bit of Bitcoin and go down the rabbit hole and learn? Well, what’s the best way for people to explore this or understand this?

1:27:03 Jeff Booth: So I find one of the best ways, get a hard wallet, buy it yourself, store it yourself, understand why. So when you understand, that takes you through a certain path to understand why. Put $100 and put $500 and contribute every week, put 100,000 and a million and whatever, but buy a hard wallet, find out why, do you?

1:27:23 Once you’ve done that work, you cannot, it’s almost impossible to not keep going down the rabbit hole and understanding why. So what typically happens is once people do that work, which doesn’t take a lot of work or a lot of risk, they’ll look for themselves and they’ll start to understand why they need to do more.

1:27:52 Just as a summation of what we’re talking about, people see Bitcoin as risk. I think it’s the least risky asset the planet today. It’s the biggest asymmetric bet of our lifetime. And that’s on the wealth side, but for your family, for everything else, it’s all included in that as well. The existing system, and everything we’ve talked about here is true from the existing system. There is nothing that we’ve exaggerated on and everything else. It’s all true from the existing system. It must get worse. So the risk is in the existing system. What people do is they hold a whole bunch of houses and assets inside that existing system. And when revolution comes, they don’t see it and there’s no escape valve. There is no safety boat. There is no lifeboat from that because they have all their wealth denominated in a currency that is inside the system and they don’t see it coming. That is, you want the greatest risk of our time, that’s the greatest risk of our time. Bitcoin’s and that is the safest bet.

1:29:08 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a great observation. Even the people that think that they’ve mastered money, that they understand the system that are the 1% or the 100th of the 1%, they don’t see that baked into the system is ultimately bad news for them too. And so along enough timeline, go look back at the Russian Revolution, the Bastille Day, like all these things celebrate. Germany, look at what happened in Rome when currency crisis and changing land

1:29:41 Ownership. Go back through history and you always see the same thing. Yeah. And I agree with you with you with action. Yeah, I started DeFi Academy and in the first week I get everybody on a cold wallet and they buy tiny amounts of the crypto and then they just experience it. That’s it. Now you know, you understand, you make a mistake, you forget your key, you did. Oh, guess what? You just learned really quickly about this system, really cost effectively as well.

1:30:11 And as Anthony Scaramucci came on a couple weeks ago, who I think has a billion now in his fund, He said the first Bitcoin is the hardest to buy. That’s what he said I love that because once you buy one you can’t stop because then you then you understand it Right, but that first one is hard because you have to just get over all those resistances, right? All of that baggage all that you know that that that that Emotional trauma we were brought up in to think that there’s something Wrong with this system that actually makes more sense. So yeah, you want to get on that mill Jeff final thoughts What’s next for you? Is there another book coming? I know you advise companies, but what’s next for you?

1:30:55 Jeff Booth: Yeah, so my favorite thing to do is help entrepreneurs create value.

1:30:59 And so when I think about value, an entrepreneurial company only works if you’re delivering value to other people. Otherwise, it fails. And so I love the intersection of being able to do that, either through my investments or through boards. And so I’m on a bunch of different technology boards, but really it’s a passion, it’s a love. And I love working with entrepreneurs who are changing the world. And so I don’t need to do, I don’t need to work. I never wanted to be an author.

1:31:30 I didn’t. So a lot of people are asking me to write another book. It’s probably not in the cards, just because if I want to write something, I’ll just write it and post it on media. It was never about me in the first place. The book itself was something I felt I had to do.

1:31:51 It was so compelled to do it because on one side I was living in this technology world and a whole bunch of utopians and technology that’s saying how great the world’s going to become. On the other side you had this this system and both weren’t talking the same language with what one system did to another and and I couldn’t I it was making me more and more mad all the time watching it this is something I’ve been talking about for 10 years so that and I you can see this is going to be become an awfully dangerous world and so that’s why I wrote the book in in the first place, but yes, in a perfect world, I just slide back and let the emergent network take off.

1:32:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, well, like you said, it’s an incredible space.

1:32:40 I love the energy. I love the ideas. I love the positive place that seems to be pulling everyone forward. And so it’s just a privilege to be talking in this space. I think, I find it really, just it’s empowering.

1:32:54 And again, it seems to be something that can solve a lot of the issues that we were feeling. And again, back to my guests on London Real, they didn’t necessarily understand monetary policy or inflation or technology, but Jeff, they knew that something wasn’t right. They knew we weren’t going in the right direction and they knew that our leaders and our current ways of being weren’t gonna get us there. So it’s nice to be able to show a solution and it’s still early days.

1:33:22 I still meet people that, when I say I’m talking about crypto and DeFi markets, they first give me the look of what we thought that word crypto meant, but the more I talk to them and I start to say this is very different than you think. This is us creating a better version of ourselves for the future. It’s powerful. So we’re gonna keep talking about this. Jeff, I really appreciate your ideas.

1:33:44 I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that really puts it so bluntly as in, you know, I think it was Bill Clinton that said it was the economy stupid, but you’re just like, look, it’s the policy stupid. That’s the problem here. So I appreciate you waking us up to all this stuff. The book is incredible. So I highly recommend people get that.

1:34:03 And yeah, just keep being part of the conversation. Go get some Bitcoin on a hard wallet. Like Jeff said, if you wanna learn and be a part of this ecosystem, it can start small. But the best way is to do that, do your own research and to jump in. So thanks so much, Jeff.

1:34:19 I really appreciate everything you do and hopefully we’ll get you here next time in studio.

1:34:24 Jeff Booth: Awesome, Brian. We would love that.

1:34:26 Brian Rose: All right, fantastic. Great stuff.

1:34:28 Thank you everybody for watching. Follow this man on Twitter, get the book, et cetera, and we’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care. Thanks, Jeff, bye.