The Dollar System MUST Collapse and Reset | Jeff Booth

Summary

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The Mark Moss Show

Episode: The Dollar System MUST Collapse and Reset | Jeff Booth
Date: May 27, 2026
Guest: Jeff Booth
Host(s): Mark Moss (appearing in transcript as Interviewer 1/2; Interview co-hosts)
Podcast: iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

This episode features entrepreneur, technologist, and author Jeff Booth, discussing why the current fiat money system is fundamentally flawed and why its collapse is inevitable. Booth lays out a sweeping, philosophical, and practical critique of the dollar-based global financial model, tying it to war, surveillance, inequality, and resource extraction. Throughout, he argues that only the emergence of a decentralized, scarce, and incorruptible monetary system—i.e., Bitcoin—can end this cycle, unleash global productivity, and restore individual agency. The conversation weaves together macroeconomics, history, technology, ethics, and Booth’s personal journey into Bitcoin maximalism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Fundamental Flaws in the Fiat Money System

[04:16–20:27]

• Booth explains his background in technology and entrepreneurship, noting that despite exponential productivity, prices don’t fall as they should in a free market.

• The supposed “free market” is inhibited by a credit-based money system (fiat) that must continually expand via debt—this is incompatible with natural deflation from innovation.

• Quote (Jeff Booth, 06:50):

  “Nothing’s changed. Everything I wrote about in the book is exactly on the path you’d expect if you had exponential technology trying to make our lives better and it was being stopped and centralized by a system essentially manipulating monetary units.”

• People struggle to accept this reality because their identities are intertwined with the monetary system they've always known.

• Quote (Jeff Booth, 07:57):

  “You’ve never lived in a free market. If prices are meant to fall in a free market… and prices don’t fall when we choose more value, how could the market we’ve always lived in be free? It’s impossible.”

2. True Free Markets and Deflation

[09:06–14:24]

• In a real free market, productivity and competition drive prices down over time—yet in our system, essentials like health, education, and food get more expensive.
• Government and regulations (not a natural market phenomenon) push prices up, while technology products (in truly competitive areas) fall in price.
• Quote (Jeff Booth, 13:08):

  “Anything the government’s involved with—regulation, trying to protect monopolies, bigger government—all rising in price…All prices should fall at different rates, but all prices would fall.”

3. Bitcoin as Protocol, Not Just Technology

[14:24–24:33]

• Booth likens Bitcoin to foundational protocols like TCP/IP and the Internet—it’s not just another technology; it’s the immutable base layer for a new “free market” monetary system.

• Decentralization and the hard cap of 21 million Bitcoin are essential. If these hold, then all productivity gains accrue to holders in self-custody.

• Quote (Jeff Booth, 20:59):

  “You’re participating in the productivity of the entire world competing for you. Every single human adding their productivity adds to your benefit. And that productivity accrues to any holder of Bitcoin in self-custody.”

• Booth argues Bitcoin is actually the “ultimate AI investment”—because it will absorb all global productivity gains from advanced technology.

4. Surveillance, Stablecoins, and Control

[22:36–27:16]

• The existing system will fight back—expect manipulation, coercion, consolidation, and surveillance. Stablecoins, in Booth’s view, are more likely an avenue toward surveillance than liberation.
• Both governments and corporations will seek to control or co-opt digital money.

5. Moral & Spiritual Awakening—Moving to Bitcoin

[28:34–33:27]

• Both host(s) and Booth share personal stories of selling all fiat or traditional assets and moving almost entirely into Bitcoin, not primarily for number-go-up, but for ethical reasons.

• Recognizing that by holding dollars or U.S. assets, one is unavoidably supporting systems of violence, extraction, and surveillance.

• Quote (Jeff Booth, 30:10):

  “I woke up one night... and I went, wow, I’m a hypocrite. I’m telling everybody why they need Bitcoin, and all of my energy was in the other system…”

• Overcoming this is as much about admitting personal fear and identity attachment as about financial calculation.

6. Dollar Hegemony and Global Extraction

[33:46–40:43]

• Booth and the interviewer connect U.S. dollar supremacy to ongoing resource extraction and de facto slavery, particularly in the Global South.

• The petrodollar, export of inflation, and suppressed labor abroad enable cheap imports and sustain U.S. dominance.

• Quote (Jeff Booth, 36:35):

  “If you had a big war machine and you could put somebody else in slavery and take their resources... then you have a zero-sum game.”

• U.S. productivity initially came from mass immigration and open markets, but was corrupted over time by banking interests and centralized monetary control (e.g., Federal Reserve 1913, Gold confiscation 1933, Bretton Woods, 1971 Nixon shock).

7. What Can Individuals Do?

[40:45–44:43]

• Booth and hosts discuss the felt experience of opting out of the legacy system—primarily “relief” and a sense of agency, despite the social pressure and uncertainty.
• They stress the importance of providing value in the new system and not succumbing to fear or tribalism.
• Quote (Jeff Booth, 44:03):

  “It doesn’t feel like a fight. It just feels like I’m being. I realize the existing system needs to fight this, but I don’t need to fight. I just need to be.”

8. Observers: Four Levels and the Challenge of Perception

[44:36–49:33]

• Booth explains how people experience the shift through four broad types:
  • The majority, who trust the system and believe an authority will save them.
  • Crypto/gambling types, focusing on quick profit and scams.
  • Asset holders, seeing Bitcoin as just another investment.
  • Protocol-level Bitcoiners, focused on decentralization, personal custody, and expanding the network for long-term societal benefit.
• Each type acts according to their model of reality—hence conversation around Bitcoin is often “ships passing in the night.”

9. The Path and Pace of Collapse: It’s Chaotic, Unspecified, and Unstoppable

[49:33–65:51]

• When will the fiat system collapse? Booth refuses to predict a precise timing, emphasizing the mathematical certainty of failure, amplified by accelerating technological change.
• Most people will exit Bitcoin too early, trading it back for fiat as the system undergoes repeated crises and resets.
• “Yield” in the Bitcoin world is a potential trap—if it’s built on top of the protocol with new debt, it risks centralization and collapse, just as in the fiat system.
• Quote (Jeff Booth, 59:07):

  “If you look—guaranteed, it has to [collapse]... instability in the system you’re measuring from is growing every day. And you have no idea that you’re measuring from the instability.”

10. Bitcoin Mining, Energy, Nation States, and the Future

[66:32–76:17]

• Booth critiques concepts like “hash force” (the idea of mining centralization), explaining that free markets and energy arbitrage naturally decentralize mining.

• The future of mining is driven by access to the lowest-cost or stranded energy (e.g., solar in Africa). Innovations will increasingly integrate heating, grid balancing, and AI compute.

• Quote (Jeff Booth, 74:04):

  “Solar panels... it’s literally almost free in mining Bitcoin... and all these things further and further decentralize.”

• Booth acknowledges he would add nuclear energy to future editions of his book, as it was historically suppressed to maintain the petrodollar standard.

11. Ethics, Ego Death, and Collective Agency

[76:19–82:27]

• Booth explains the philosophy behind his venture fund, Ego Death Capital: investing in Bitcoin means serving others, not extracting value.

• Emphasizes personal and collective responsibility—we are all entangled in systems, and the transition is about recognizing agency and refusing to blame “them.”

• Quote (Jeff Booth, 81:10):

  “There is no they. There’s only we. It’s a quick way to say how connected we all are, how we all matter.”

• The real battle is internal: unlearning false constraints, embracing a system that’s deflationary and value-driven, and accepting that profound change starts on the individual level.

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Notable Quotes

• “There is no better AI investment than Bitcoin.”
  — Jeff Booth, [02:05], [22:59]

• “Your actions within this monetary system give it strength. You believe it's solvent; that's why it survives.”
  — Jeff Booth, [02:25], [24:38]

• “If you’re not living in the natural state of a free market, which is deflation… it's not somebody else—it’s you.”
  — Jeff Booth, [33:27]

• “It doesn’t feel like a fight. It just feels like I’m being. I just need to be.”
  — Jeff Booth, [44:03]

• “There is no they, there's only we.”
  — Jeff Booth, [81:10]

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Memorable Moments & Timestamps

• The Emotional Realization of Hypocrisy
  [30:10]
  Booth admits waking at night, seeing he had not aligned investments and values (“I was a hypocrite”).
• Explaining Global Extraction via Petrodollar
  [36:35–40:43]
  The mechanism of how the U.S. dollar, war machines, and "exporting inflation" fuels global exploitation.
• Comparing Bitcoin to Foundational Tech Protocols
  [20:27–22:36]
  Analogy between Bitcoin as base protocol vs. technology companies built atop it, e.g., Amazon/Internet.
• Discussing Mining and Energy Decentralization
  [71:11–74:10]
  Solar-powered mining in Africa, grid balancing, and the importance of abundant, cheap, decentralized energy.
• Final Philosophy
  [81:10]
  Booth expounds on his core belief: interconnectedness, agency, and the futility of blaming “them.”

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Key Takeaways

• The fiat system’s end is mathematically and structurally inevitable.
  Expansionary debt cannot coexist with the deflationary forces of technological innovation.
• Bitcoin is unlike any tech investment—it’s a protocol, a new base layer for society’s economic interactions.
• Opting out of the legacy system isn’t just financial; it’s philosophical, emotional, and spiritual.
  True agency begins by rejecting systems of theft and extraction, even at personal risk.
• Surveillance, control, and narrative manipulation will intensify as the system falters; be prepared for pushback and chaos.
• The revolution is personal, not collective:
  Each individual must break their emotional and cognitive attachment to the old system for true change to spread.
• No matter the volatility, the incentives of a decentralized, deflationary, global protocol will prevail over centralized fiat, just as free markets always overwhelm control—even if it takes time and turmoil.

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Connect with Jeff Booth

• jeffreybooth.com (Get his real Nostr key and avoid scammers.)

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This summary is based strictly on the substance of the conversation, omitting ads, promos, and non-content sections.

Transcript

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[Jeff Booth]

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[Jeff Booth]

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[Jeff Booth]

it was true, then it means you've been lied to your entire life and all of your models of reality are wrong. There is no better AI investment than Bitcoin.

[Interviewer 1]

All of the productivity gains because in

[Jeff Booth]

a free market prices fall to the marginal cost of production.

[Interviewer 1]

It's not an application on top of something like Amazon is an application on top of the Internet.

[Jeff Booth]

It is bingo. The base layer survives by your belief that it's solvent. Your actions within this monetary system give it strength.

[Interviewer 1]

I see stablecoins of course as the most likely avenue towards the surveillance state.

[Jeff Booth]

Surveillance state?

[Interviewer 2]

What do you mean I'm holding? I'm just holding dollars. How am I funding War in the Middle East. How am I, like, paying for all these terrible things?

[Jeff Booth]

And I woke up one night similar to you, and I went, wow, I'm a hypocrite.

[Interviewer 2]

I'm not doing this because I think it's the right thing. I'm doing it because I'm a coward.

[Jeff Booth]

And those cycles speed up and speed up and speed up, and it's bound to be very chaotic.

[Interviewer 2]

How fast do you think it could happen? Welcome back to Market Disruptors. My name is Jake Roquet, and today I'm joined by the great and powerful Jeff Booth, the man who I would say he probably needs little to no introduction around here, but I want this episode on the first half at least, to be laying out your general thesis. I want it to be something that bitcoiners can send to normie friends, people who are new to the. This type of conversation. So I'm going to try and ask questions from that perspective as we start. But, yeah, I want to focus on. I feel like a lot of your thesis is tied to. Bitcoin is not just, like, technically good. It's not just good as an investment, but it's something that is good for humanity, good for the flourishing of our species broadly. And so I think it'd be cool to start there, laying out your thesis on that.

[Interviewer 1]

And then on the back half, I'd love to dig into some deeper questions

[Interviewer 2]

about your personal story. Who you are, where you come from, and maybe some of the deeper questions about your work as well. So first, if you could just give a little introduction for those who had this sent to them. They've never heard of Jeff Booth. Yeah. How do you introduce yourself when you're

[Interviewer 1]

starting off this conversation?

[Jeff Booth]

I don't even know. Always been an entrepreneur, technology entrepreneur, essentially. Using. Ran a building company, ran a real estate company through the building company, found a problem that I wanted to solve and used using technology to do that. So early on, the Internet, built a very large, almost Amazon of building products that grew to about half a billion dollars in value in its pe. Lived the ride in technology through, kind of, let's call it, 98 to 2017, and couldn't understand why if there was all this productivity emerging in the world that I was using to create value and everyone I knew was using to create value, that prices weren't falling. So I wrote a book exploring that in 2019 that explained what would happen as two incompatible systems crashed into each other. The free market, which should make prices fall, because the free market, we have to serve somebody else. We have to create value for somebody else. And they choose the value. And that should make prices fall because we are part of that market. That it was butting into a credit based system, essentially money that was lent into existence that couldn't allow those prices to fall or broad based prices to fall. And that set up a conflict that could not be resolved through the existing system. So that's the book I wrote in 2019. It turned into an international bestseller. And that same problem still exists today. And it's being resolved. It's being resolved in real time by Bitcoin and on the other side by a system that's inflating monetary units that most people are measuring Bitcoin through. So nothing's changed. Everything I wrote about in the book is actually on exactly the path that you would expect it to be if you had exponential technology trying to make our lives better that was being stopped and centralized by a system that was essentially manipulating monetary units.

[Interviewer 2]

So you say that the old system, manipulation of monetary units, that is the

[Interviewer 1]

problem that Bitcoin is looking to solve.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. And, and, and this is a hard thing. So, so even like just before we go there, just a lot of the stuff I say, will the first time you hear it, the second time you hear it, the third time you hear it, will you, you'll want to resist it. Because you've never lived in a free market. You've never truly lived in the next free market. And you don't want to believe that. You want to believe that you have that the capitalism. But if prices are meant to fall in a free market and we have to create value globally to create more value for somebody else, and prices don't fall when we choose more value. How could the market that we've always lived in be free? It's impossible. And that sets up a conflict that is in your brain that you kind of say, well, there's no way it can be totally free. Those, those people need to manage money. There needs to be some inflation, how much inflation? And, and all of their, your, your mental models that are just destroyed from the, just the statement I made. You don't want it to be true. Because if it was true, then it means you've been lied to your entire life and all of your models of reality from that lie are wrong. And your identity is inside that lie. So why this is so hard to grasp is it's outside your knowledge base. It's outside most people's knowledge base. It was outside my knowledge base. And things that are outside those are really hard to really Hard to believe.

[Interviewer 2]

You've mentioned how when you say the

[Interviewer 1]

phrase the natural state of the free

[Interviewer 2]

market is deflation people, you, you. I've noticed listening to a few of your podcasts, even the first time you say it, even for those who they're

[Interviewer 1]

hearing it for the first time, and they vaguely know these words, what they mean, they're like, wait, yes, that makes sense.

[Interviewer 2]

As you said, in the free market

[Interviewer 1]

exchange, you have this consensual exchange of value.

[Interviewer 2]

So in every exchange, each participant is happier after the exchange, I want your dollar, you want my burrito, we exchange them. I want the dollar more than I want the burrito.

[Interviewer 1]

We're all happier as a result of that, right?

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. Yet the burrito producer faces competition from everybody else attacking their margin, trying to make better burritos. And what do we choose? We choose the best, Right? Same thing as. So it's that competitive force. You have a globally competitive force trying to deliver us value. And we're on the other side of that. Whether we work inside a company that's part of that globally competitive force trying to deliver value, or we work as the founder of a company trying to deliver value, both things exist. You can only serve in the free market if you provide more value, because otherwise people don't use you anymore. You fail, spectacularly fail. And so the money that you invest in your company and all your time, if you don't provide more value in a free market, you fail because people don't use you. And so, so, yes, so, so. And then if you extended that and you said the rails of underlying that were using technology that was moving exponentially and that you had, we had now had tools to provide tremendous more value to other people. And if we didn't use the tool essentially remove labor with technology, then our price or service would be too high and somebody else who'd use the tool would win the market. Why? Because we choose more value. So it's not those other people, it's us choosing value inside a system that ensures prices have to fall and value goes up. But we're measuring what I just described through a system that can't allow that to happen. So the other system has to centralize and government gets bigger and regulations get bigger and manipulation gets bigger and fraud gets bigger and centralization gets bigger and surveillance state gets stronger, and every single thing from that other system has to happen because it's based on a flaw in a monetary setup where credit money has to expand forever. And the natural state of the free market is the opposite. So those two Systems are irreconcilable, their opposites.

[Interviewer 2]

So in layman's terms, prices should be

[Interviewer 1]

getting going down, right? We have techn.

[Interviewer 2]

Technological advancements, we have productivity gains, we

[Interviewer 1]

have people using their human ingenuity to find more and more creative, productive, efficient ways to create the products. Yet everything, for my whole life I've looked around, everything's been getting more expensive forever. Gas is going up, burritos are going up. I saw the Taco Bell.

[Jeff Booth]

Education, health, everything, right?

[Interviewer 2]

Right. Even Taco Bell chicken quesadillas.

[Interviewer 1]

I saw that somebody posted this on X yesterday. They were like a dollar 10 years ago or something, and now they're 375 and they're telling us that CPI inflation is 3%, 2%, whatever they're saying, I mean, they were saying it was a little higher during the pandemic during this time, but in reality we're seeing like, I think it was a 371% increase over the course of the past 10 years. And so a lot of the things that we really need are becoming devalued or are increasing in price. And then they find these alternatives to cook the books with CPI essentially on top of that. And so, so can I, can I

[Jeff Booth]

just pause there for one second? Because I think it's really important in the framing. And then you see these charts that go around and they go viral every kind of two months. And it's technology, products kind of falling in price, like TVs, you're getting more and more value, computers more and more value all the time, falling prices, like I said. And then you see education, health, anything the government's involved with, regulation, trying to protect monopolies, bigger government, all rising in price. And so then people, people hang on to my thesis and they see, they say, see, prices should fall, but not everywhere. Some prices should rise, unaware that that denominator for all of those things is through broken money and all prices essentially through monetary units that have to infinitely expand. So now if you measure all things through monetary units that have to influentially expand, then it would appear that some prices are rising and some were falling. If you didn't, you would see all prices would fall at different rates, but all prices would fall.

[Interviewer 2]

So how does Bitcoin bring forward that future? It's a mixture of the technological revolution that we're seeing, the advancements that AI is bringing as well. But how would a bitcoin standard bring

[Interviewer 1]

forward that world where we're all seeing those gains, those productivity gains distributed to all of us in the form of Lower prices. Like how do, how do those two things connect?

[Jeff Booth]

So if you start with if, there were only 21 million units and that couldn't be changed. So I always say if Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure and you can, why I say if is so people take action to realize that they are part of the decentralization security. They can run a node. They're essentially Bitcoin is them. Like I'm not changing my node to increase number of units. I don't know any bitcoiner who runs a node that all things have to go through that would ever do that. Because you'd be hurting yourself by doing so. So now if you have a decentralized protocol, decentralized and secure protocol that cannot be broken by the existing, no matter what it does. Right. It can't break that. Now I just want to pause there and just assume I'm right for now. Right. And, and then we can dial into where are the risks of that breaking at late later. But just assume this stays decentralized and secure forever. Then you have a protocol bounded by energy that's decentralized and secure. That's hard. Capped 21 million units. What would that tell you about the world? If you were measuring from that protocol, what would you expect to see? You'd expect to see the productivity gains from all of AI, from all things, every single thing measured against that protocol would be the first free market that ever existed. And it would be imposing that because it couldn't be changed. So it'd be imposing a new reality that didn't care about your model of reality or your infinite units of dollars. And as long as you were in self custody and not moving your coins back to somebody else, giving yourself, then it would be the first time that you could actually take in the world, that you could actually take agency in something that protected you and protected the world. But when I say imposing, that's a really intentional word. It doesn't care about me. Every 10 minutes there's a new block. It's decentralized and secure for 17 years. There's no breaks. And so why this is so hard to grok is because we've never seen something like this. And so people think it's a technology rather than a protocol. And technologies are very different than protocols. So protocols emerge in layers, like the Internet. And they emerge and they deliver more and more functionality on top of layers. So they really secure at the bottom and they extend their functionality in layers that grow over time. And so if you and most, most people who Missed the Internet in 1989. Right. What was going to happen in 1995 and 19 in 2000? I remember when I started my Internet company, how many of my friends said, you're insane. The Internet's a joke. Right. And, and that was 1998, 1999, just the beginning of 1999. So I thought I was late, but how early I was on that. But the Internet didn't start in 1989. The Internet started in 1969. Now imagine you have this view of what Bitcoin is from this. And you're used to technology cycles and you're used to the Internet and how many people. I remember when I was running my company, I remember the 2000 collapse where Amazon went from $128 to $3. And how many people said Amazon was dead, but how many people held on and the Internet didn't change? Right. The adoption rate on the Internet was straight up to the right the entire time. But the belief in the, what the Internet could come was very. In the companies on top of it. Now adjust that back to what I just said. Adjust it back to a protocol that you're not investing in a company on top of Bitcoin. You're investing in the base protocol. And now you're extending that 1989 example back to 1969. How many people will hold Bitcoin and not trade it for a piece of paper through the cycle that's coming? And I would say very, very few, because they're going to think they got rich in a piece of paper or try to get yield from a system that doesn't allow yield unless you're consolidating into the other system, centralizing into the other system. They're going to trade their Bitcoin for a piece of paper. So this is going to be really chaotic as this new system imposes a new discipline across the, across the world. It imposes the first free market that's ever existed. But you can tune out of it. You can tune out of all the nonsense and you can be a part of that new system that's imposing that reality. But just even what I just said, how complicated that would be, how crazy that would be for our brains, because we've never seen a model like this.

[Interviewer 2]

And so one of the primary distinguishing

[Interviewer 1]

things that I think is important for people to wrap their heads around is

[Interviewer 2]

that it's investing in Bitcoin is like,

[Interviewer 1]

right, the TCPIP layer of the Internet. So the difference between it is it's not an application on top of Something like Amazon is an application on top of the Internet. It is bingo. The base layer. The difference between an application and a protocol is the protocol is the foundation on which all of their applications are built. And that's not just a company.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, exactly. Now extend. Exactly. That was a really well, really well said. Now extend what you're just saying? It means you're participating in the productivity of the entire world competing for you, your participatory network in the first free market. And every single human adding their productivity adds to your benefit. The first free market, first free market that's ever existed. And that productivity all accrues to any holder of Bitcoin in self custody. And you can expect tons of fight from the existing system. You could expect manipulation, you could expect consolidation, you could expect all of these fights. We can talk about those risks. Quantum threat. You could expect to anything to detach you from self custody and running a node. You could expect fear, coercion, control from a centralized system that's always been centralized from our actions to attack. So, so through, through that then you have to you, you step out and you start to claim your own agency and understand what, what would the world look like if I was right and what would the, what would the attacks look like if I was right and what do I need to do? But that means what you were just talking about because it's not an application on top, you're part of the protocol. It means there is no better AI investment than Bitcoin because it's the sum total of all AI, all of the

[Interviewer 1]

productivity gains, it's all the competition, all

[Jeff Booth]

of the productivity gains on all of the AI companies are in service of a system that can't be manipulated. And so they appear in Bitcoin and prices falling against Bitcoin, that's where they would, that's what they would appear. And it would be really easy to mistake that if you're in the other system that is needs that can't allow AI to unwind. Here's a different take even on AI. What if AI wasn't a company? As everybody's the amount of dollars going into AI companies thinking that it's a controllable resource like an Amazon, that network effects would win it all. It baffles me because every second day there's a new model that beats the old model and everybody moves and you're constantly getting more and more value all the time. And everybody's moving all the time. So there is no moat. So what if it isn't that and all of the money going into it isn't that, but it's a, it's a horizontal technology like, like electricity where there is no moat. And because in a free market, prices fall to the marginal cost of production. And so what we're find. What you're seeing in AI is what I just described. But the, the misallocation of resources and money into AI is the opposite. Like it's an Amazon. And so, so now all that money, all that money, much of which has already gone to money heaven, has to be bailed out or many of the companies that, that are doing this are going to just be destroyed.

[Interviewer 2]

What is, what does that mean?

[Interviewer 1]

Money heaven? I think I've heard Larry say this before, but.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, exactly. I got it from Larry. Okay, the money's already gone. It's a. So just like the money in 2008 was already gone. It was. If it, if it was gone, if it was marked to market, the entire system would default and go to zero. So instead of marking it to market, we papered over the whole thing and stole money from, stole tons of money from savers and, and wage earners and transferred it to assets to paper over temporarily to paper over. And every time we paper over that because the money, the money can't be repaid. So the money is already, it's already insolvent. The entire system is insolvent. It only survives by your belief that it's solvent. Your, Your actions within this monetary system that's stealing from you give it strength. That's what. And, and eventually in all times through history, as money breaks down, people start to realize money breaking down and make it money, not just money breaking down, but everything breaking down because money is breaking down and they start to rise up. So you're, you're just seeing a hint of what's coming from that, from, from the other system, not Bitcoin. And it does not Bitcoin. Isn't it. The, the other system would blow up no matter if bitcoin existed or didn't exist. Because it's our. It's been insolvent for a long time. It's. And more than insolvent, the natural state of the free market can't allow that system. So one system has to win. You either have a free market or you have a complete control system. They're incompatible together.

[Interviewer 1]

Right.

[Interviewer 2]

I think this realization is what drives a lot of the. I'd almost say, like, I'd almost say extremism, perhaps. Extremism, like among bitcoiners. I think it's the realization of like we're at the crossroads and we have the technological innovation is here, it's happening.

[Interviewer 1]

And we're at this crossroads that I see between free market and control system, between decentralized freedom money and authoritarian surveillance state, central bank, digital currencies.

[Interviewer 2]

And it's kind of funny because a

[Interviewer 1]

lot of people I see stablecoins of course as the most likely avenue towards surveillance. Surveillance state, yes. And it's funny because they're grouped to the genius act, the clarity Act.

[Jeff Booth]

We've had name an act that was in service of you. Patriot act, right. Inflation Reduction Act. It's almost like these things are named perfectly to be the exact opposite of what they are.

[Interviewer 2]

You asked me the question is my

[Interviewer 1]

audience more Bitcoin or gold? Where do I fall on that?

[Interviewer 2]

While we were fixing a technical difficulty and for me I became bitcoin only basically. It's not totally true.

[Interviewer 1]

I'm probably 95% Bitcoin. There's a couple companies that I hold a little bit of mstr, a couple other things that I just find interesting. And you just want to keep tabs. I want to feel what it feels like to hold it.

[Interviewer 2]

I just like because I studied these

[Interviewer 1]

things and so I want to feel,

[Interviewer 2]

I feel like I understand it better

[Interviewer 1]

when I have a little bit of

[Interviewer 2]

skin in the game and I can just feel what it's like. But I came to the same realization that you did. It was actually we'll skip to this now. I had a plan for later but it was more of a spiritual decision than anything I'd say. I had this like overtly I was living in Bali, Indonesia for a little while and I had this like this was doing some like digging into my soul, so to speak. And there was this in a part

[Interviewer 1]

of it that it hit me where

[Interviewer 2]

I was like I think that this thing is good. I think that the surveillance state that's

[Interviewer 1]

growing, that the tech monopolies that are

[Interviewer 2]

growing are like a big danger to the well being of humanity. Yet I'm giving them my monetary energy because I want a return on it. And I mainly was not all in in bitcoin at that point in time. This was 2021 or 22, I think early 22 was because I was afraid. I realized that I was like I'm not doing this because I think it's the right thing. I'm doing it because I'm a coward. And that's when it hit me where I like it was, whatever it was. It was an evening in Indonesia that day. But the markets Were open and I

[Interviewer 1]

set orders on everything. I set S&P 500, Google, Apple, all these companies that I think are, like, using my economic energy to do evil things to usher in a world that

[Interviewer 2]

I don't want to see.

[Interviewer 1]

And I sold everything.

[Interviewer 2]

And we were down 50% from the highs, I believe, at that point in time.

[Interviewer 1]

Converted it all into bitcoin, ate another 50% drawdown. And I was like, oh, ouch.

[Interviewer 2]

Maybe I should have waited for my spiritual awakening a couple months. But that was, you know, that was a key point to where I went, you know, and even. Even holding in dollars. We're talking about the genius act, the Patriot Act. You're supporting this system that I don't like the direction that it's heading.

[Interviewer 1]

Yeah.

[Interviewer 2]

Could you. Could you maybe connect the dots for people? Other people are like, what do you mean? I'm holding. I'm just holding dollars. How am I funding war in the Middle East? How am I, like, paying for, you know, all these terrible things?

[Jeff Booth]

First off, and I think this is important for kind of how this would feel, because I actually feel the exact same thing. And this was why I started Ego Death Capital, because I was. I was living a lie. Like, I was telling everybody why they needed bitcoin, and all of my energy was in the other system, and I had all my investments and boards and the other system. And I. And I woke up one night similar to you, and I went, wow, I'm a hypocrite. Right. I'm telling everybody that. But. But really, I'm. All I'm doing is I'm. I'm trying to make more money in the existing system and convert it. I'm going to be safe, but everybody else is going, and I'm giving all my energy to the system that is incompatible with where I believe, where I want the world to go. And. And I didn't actually recognize. It was. It was like. It. It was. It was. It's exactly what happened to you. Like, it's a subconscious layer that you don't want to. You don't want to see in yourself. You don't want to see that fear in yourself. You don't want the lies you tell yourself that it's somebody else and everything else. And so claiming my own agency and moving my time to this, I wouldn't be able to see what I see now unless. Nothing in this other system, fear. I have no fear. I'm just spending my time where I want. Similar to you. Similar to. Then you find a way to do podcasts and connect with people that you want to connect to and everything gets easier. Like way easier. But you try to explain that to somebody who is still on the ledge, right? And making. And their identity is still in this. And the fear and the what. What they do. I know how hard it is because I went through it myself. It's not a. And so I don't try to everybody, everybody in their own time. But you did the same thing. So now if we connect this to why that's true. It's really simple. If you're not living in the natural state of a free market, which is deflation, if you're not in that system, if you're using the dollars that are funding the other system, it's not somebody else, it's you. But there will always be another hero, another villain to make you feel better about yourself that will divide you from other people, that you'll say, yes, Elon's right, should be universal, high income. Without asking where did the money come from in the first place? And who's going to own the means of production that steals more from me to tell me what to do? Right. And so you look up to these people and we bias to experts and we have an authority bias. We bias to. We don't know. We bias to. To the money, but we bias to those people. And then when somebody says something that challenges who we are in that, it's really difficult for our brains to accept. So that's why this is going to be a massive challenge. Because it is true. It's 100% true. Every time I use a US dollar or send a piece of paper that is solely based on manipulation, then I'm part of the manipulation.

[Interviewer 1]

Yeah. Theft at the point of a gun, essentially, that you support by participating, whether you know it or not.

[Interviewer 2]

You gave this great speech at Madera.

[Interviewer 1]

I think it's like the bitcoin conference in Madera. I feel like it's criminally undervalued or under viewed. I mean, so I wanted to link that in the description here for people to go check out after this.

[Interviewer 2]

But there's a couple really important points

[Interviewer 1]

you made in it.

[Interviewer 2]

The first, you were talking about these

[Interviewer 1]

cobalt mines in Africa, right? And we have electric vehicles.

[Interviewer 2]

Vehicles. Cobalt is something that the world needs a lot of. Yet this country that has great reserves of it.

[Interviewer 1]

70 of the world.

[Interviewer 2]

Yes.

[Jeff Booth]

70% of the world's cobalt.

[Interviewer 1]

Wow. More than I thought.

[Interviewer 2]

They are not becoming wealthy from it.

[Interviewer 1]

There's children working in mines for 30 cents an hour or whatever it is to extract this. They Ship it out across the world.

[Interviewer 2]

And, and basically this I'd love for you to explain it. Essentially in the United States we've come to a point in the past, at least since 1971, where we export inflation,

[Interviewer 1]

we export printed money, we export theft essentially, and we import goods for that.

[Interviewer 2]

And you were connecting how these things are connected. I wonder if you could lay this

[Interviewer 1]

out better than I can here.

[Interviewer 2]

How does using the dollar basically facilitate the slavery of people overseas or near slavery of people overseas as a result?

[Jeff Booth]

So if you go back to what, let's go back further and say what did gold do? Kind of put a. We've always lived in a zero sum game. And gold would allow you to essentially force the productivity further. But because gold was always centralized, we would innovate other countries. Or how did a tiny country like the UK become the flag never sets or the sun never sets on the British Empire. How is that possible? From the resources there. Because if you had a big war machine and you could put somebody else in slavery and take their resources and have them work on your monetary system, then you have a zero sum game. If you're at the top of that zero sum game and it looks good to you because you're extracting from the world, it looks really poor for the person being extracted from and that keeps on resolving itself in various ways. And a new country would exist. And in fact the US was the closest to a free market that we ever had. In the rise of the US was immigrants from all over the world moving to the US and where their ideas would serve other people and it would be more productive. And the rise of the US because of that productivity was destroying the banking cartels elsewhere, which. To which the banking cartels had to drive in a central bank into the US to regain power. And so the Constitution.

[Interviewer 2]

When was, when was that?

[Jeff Booth]

That was 1913.

[Interviewer 1]

Okay.

[Jeff Booth]

And. And the Constitution prohibits that, but it slowly strips away rights. Gold was taken in 1933 and repriced again in 1971. And it slowly removes the rights. People don't realize it because it happens so slowly. And then it happens faster and faster and faster. But, but, but what drove the productivity of the US was ideas in our brains with people that moved from all over to take advantage, to live in free, live in freedom. And then, and then you had a central bank that exported a model through, through manipulated money to. You didn't have to go to war anymore, you just had to control oil reserve reserves, control the straits, because you linked essentially energy money to oil. And if people Priced in oil in your money. It made your money money stronger. And everybody else had to operate on your system. And if they didn't operate on your system, they were invaded puppet dictators.

[Interviewer 1]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

If, if they did operate on. And so this, this created this essentially monetary system that, that, that created slavery through a monetary system where you didn't have to go there, Right. You could just devalue their currency over and over and over again and destroy their labor and extract their materials way cheaper.

[Interviewer 1]

Yeah.

[Interviewer 2]

So not only is this extraction of

[Interviewer 1]

value, of course happening to users of the United States dollar network, right. If you're holding currency on it, let's say there's a million currency and it's just for a number and you create another hundred thousand, everybody on that network's money becomes worth 10% less. But then also globally we have essentially at the point of a gun, at the threat of military violence, have enforced United States Treasuries as the global reserve

[Interviewer 2]

asset, which that's declining. Gold recently passed treasuries as central bank reserve holdings. But all of those other countries who back their currencies with United States Treasuries, as we devalue our currency, we're also

[Interviewer 1]

devaluing the currencies of everybody else who's made that decision.

[Jeff Booth]

Right. And the other currencies lose money faster than the US dollar, Right. So you have this game that is a circular reference of a game that who controls the currency controls the world.

[Interviewer 1]

And every hundred years.

[Jeff Booth]

And who controls the currency. And it's completely extractive. It's not the free market at all, it's imposing. And if you control the currency, it's not completely great for US citizens either. It's really great for the financial, military industrial complex, the financial complex, but it's really bad for average citizens of the US because it has to be extractive at a higher and higher level and you have to have high labor rates, high you on one side of the balance. And because the zero sum game, sorry the zero, the currency has to balance all over the world. There has to be buyers, there has to be sellers, right. And so if you're the buyer from all over the world of all the sellers, you have to be, you have to create a lot of debt, increasing debt to fund that. And you have to be highly paid and everyone else in the world has to be really low paid, right. To be able to access your market. And, and, and you need more and more debt rising forever and ever, which is, and, and population gets. So the jobs move overseas, right. And then they get destroyed by AI And. And what's left is a very tiny group at the very top with all the control and all the money.

[Interviewer 2]

How do we stop that from happening?

[Interviewer 1]

You know, like, what can I do? What can you do? What can people listening do to avoid that future?

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. So this. This is where it's really easy. It's hard to. It's hard because you've already done it. I've already done it. And I'm going to ask you, because I say it all the time, but what does it feel like to you to. To do it? Like, if you said kind of you had this many units of energy in both systems, what does it feel like in the system you're in now versus before? Does it feel better, worse? Is it easier or harder?

[Interviewer 2]

It's funny, the first word that comes to mind is a relief.

[Interviewer 1]

I would say, I think it hasn't been easy exactly.

[Interviewer 2]

You know, like, I mean, holding bitcoin in some ways is easy, but in some ways, you know, for a while

[Interviewer 1]

at least, it was like, I sure hope I'm not crazy, you know, and

[Interviewer 2]

everybody thinks that I'm crazy, and I really don't. I really thought If I spent 10,000 hours thinking about this, but, like, I hope I didn't miss something, you know? You know, and I've said too, to people that I'm close with who are like, are you sure you're not, like, too focused on this thing? Like, is it too high? And I'm a Christian, and I often think about. I had a conversation with Luke Broyles where we talked a bit about this, of being like, okay, well, how do you be sure bitcoin doesn't become an idol in your life? How are you sure it doesn't raise to too high of a place? And that's also something I've thought a lot about too, of like, okay, well, I've just explained to people, I suppose, that I don't have undying loyalty to bitcoin. If something terrible happened to bitcoin, if it was manipulate or destroy. Now, I haven't seen a vector that concerns me enough to prepare for that eventuality. But also, I always have my head on a swivel. I know that I don't know everything,

[Interviewer 1]

and so I'm always paying attention in that way.

[Interviewer 2]

But, yeah, I think that I'm fighting this fight because I believe that bitcoin is a good thing and I have loyalty to that, which is good.

[Interviewer 1]

The spirit of the good, so to speak.

[Interviewer 2]

And so, yeah, it's a relief to know you're not propping up something that I think is evil. I think is the primary thing also too you connect with. Since I've been working with other bitcoiners, they're a unique, tough group and there's a cool camaraderie and community that develops

[Interviewer 1]

around that where you have very reliable, very intelligent people that you can go to and yeah.

[Interviewer 2]

That you're all like fighting on the same team with.

[Interviewer 1]

You know that you're always working.

[Interviewer 2]

You're working towards the same goal. And I don't know. Yeah, there's a lot of beauty in it in a strange way because of that. Because it's like, okay, we have. We're on this mission. It's something that is good. And yeah. You know, it helps that your economic power, that power of your currency increases over time. That makes things easier as well.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. The only difference from you and me, what I would say is it doesn't feel like a fight. It just feels like I'm being. It just feels like I'm fully, fully present in the. There's. I don't need to fight anything. I realize. I realize existing system needs to fight this, but I don't need to fight. I just need to be.

[Interviewer 2]

Just defend and be and help people.

[Jeff Booth]

It just claim my agency on. On this and provide value, period. The more value you provide, the better you do in a free market. And that's what should. Should exist. If we lived in that. And that's what seems to exist in the world I live in.

[Interviewer 2]

I like that.

[Jeff Booth]

And so I don't need to fight. I just need to be. I understand that if so another thing you were just tying on and actually I just gave this speech in Vegas. You might want to link that one too.

[Interviewer 1]

You got it.

[Jeff Booth]

If you observed bitcoin from credit money and you thought that was right, that the experts manage inflation, the Fed manages this. We live capitalism or socialism, which is both the same thing from credit money. And you were inside there. Most of the people in the world would believe that was true. It would feel and then the output that would happen from that. If you were an observer, if you're a participant in credit money is all of these things would get worse and you would keep clinging to some sort of hero inside the system that could save you and you get for. And you'd be more and more fearful. You'd be more. But you would. You wouldn't know that you were powering the very thing that was creating the fear. And so that's observer one and that's the largest part of the population, 8 billion people. So you can understand why, why this would be really hard to absorb. There's another observer who thinks in crypto and blockchain and cycles like that, and they think bitcoin is a technology. And if you thought it was a technology like Netflix replaces blockbuster, Facebook replaces MySpace, it would match your pattern. And then you would, from that pattern, what you would really be doing is trying to get out to the system, trying to make more money as fast as you can from a system that was deteriorating. And you would be wide open because of your observation of that, you'd be wide open to all these scams and they would just propagate everywhere, and there'd be hundreds of thousands of token scams. And the people from Observer 1 would look over at you and say, yeah, I told you, at bitcoin, crypto, it's all a scam, right? And so. And it would be very real for both of those people. Like when I say very real, it's true for your model of reality, is true for you, it's true for me, it's true for all of us. We just don't know. We create it from that model of reality. If you were a little further along in bitcoin and you only saw it as an asset without asking, why do you need an asset in the first place? And the reason you need an asset in the first place is money's always been broken. And because money was broken, this, the money stored in an asset isn't broken as fast, right? So the very reason for an asset is telling you, screaming at you, you can't store your money in money. Why would that look any different in the long run? If you stored your money in an asset and Bitcoin and that, that, that view, it would centralize. Of course it would centralize, because you were giving that, and eventually you would be wiped out because that system was incompatible with the free market. If bitcoin stayed decentralized and secure, which is the fourth observer, where you are, where I am. And if you're observing through that lens, you understand how protocols develop. They come in layers. You understand that what we're talking about would be really hard to comprehend. And it would take you 10,000 hours, me 15,000 hours, trying to kill this right to, to get to a spot where I moved all my energy to it and realize it. I'm not fearful at all, right? You contribute to it. You don't see, you're constantly looking, is there any risk? But you're part of a network that's expanding really fast like the Internet was, and you're watching it expand all over the world, and you're part of something that you didn't see before. And all of those observers would both be observing their reality and creating an emergent reality that would look different to each person. And I loved how you just described how you think about. Because that's exactly how I think about all of these other people and me in it. Because at first, if you're thinking, unlike just about everyone, you go through this phase where I must be crazy. And if they believe their reality is true and it's reflecting back at them, and I believe my reality is true and it's reflecting back, how could I know for sure? Right? It's easy because we look at other people and we say, how can they believe that? And then we don't check our own biases and everything else. So I spend so. Same thing that you see. You said I spend a lot of time thinking, okay, is this true or is it true for me? And what would it mean? And what would that look like? How would that play out versus all of these other observers? And how would those play out?

[Interviewer 1]

How would you answer that question?

[Jeff Booth]

How would they play out? It would be really messy. It would be really messy over. And it would take a long, long time. Because the change isn't bitcoin. The change is usually, how do you. And we. And we don't realize how much agency we have. And I didn't realize how much agency I had because I gave it away to believing I lived in a fair system. And I didn't want to believe it. I wanted to believe that I was voted every year from Canada, this side is the right side. And didn't realize the manipulation in all the sides. Right. And that nothing mattered from a system of theft that I was just upon. And. And. And it was it. And it took my breath away. Because you didn't want to believe it.

[Interviewer 2]

I think why people have so much

[Interviewer 1]

trouble with understanding this.

[Interviewer 2]

They've lived in this world where all they've ever seen is. They've seen the government is the largest

[Interviewer 1]

corporation with a monopoly on violence. Right. That was something I remember Elon said when I was, like, getting deep into where I was like, oh, that it

[Interviewer 2]

helps pull you out of the. Like, there's this, like, you know, Nietzsche

[Interviewer 1]

talks about the death of the father as an individual and then the death of, like, the cultural father, which is

[Interviewer 2]

like, there's someone out there who, like, knows how to solve everything, and they're

[Interviewer 1]

out there and they'll figure it out.

[Interviewer 2]

And you break out of that when you realize for me, I was, I mentioned this political consulting I was doing to you off screen, but it was like, it's idiots all the way up and down. They say it's turtles all the way down. It's idiots all the way to the top. Now I'm an idiot. You know, I was in there working with these people in some of the highest, you know, high ranking levels of the government that I was like, they don't know, they don't know what's going on either. You know, none of us really like understand all the solutions. Right. There's the death of that cultural father

[Interviewer 1]

that, that I experienced there.

[Interviewer 2]

And then I think for people, I'm trying to figure out like how to ask you like how to help break people out of that because I think a lot of the problem is we've lived in this control system. The government has had this monopoly on violence. They've had the monopoly on currency. They, we've been in it for about 100 years. Let's say, you know, 1913.

[Interviewer 1]

We could argue maybe 1945 or whatever. Bretton woods agreement.

[Jeff Booth]

It goes back further than that. Because it goes back further than that. It goes back to central banking. Central banking of London. Yeah. So where did the war machine come from for City of London or British Empire to win, extract more from their people, to put other people in slavery. So create a central bank underneath it that skim money. Skim money, skim money go to war to extract it from, from other people. And it worked. And, and so, and, and that's propagated all over the world. We don't understand that all of our history books are written by the winners.

[Interviewer 1]

And it's so hard to see it.

[Interviewer 2]

It's been like that for all of history. Right. This is something that's, that humanity hasn't seen before.

[Interviewer 1]

Which is why it's so hard to

[Interviewer 2]

rip, rip, remove, help get like tear that veil from people's eyes. It's, it almost seems like this. You have to step outside, you know, you have to like get above it and look at it from far enough away. And people stay inside the bubble so

[Interviewer 1]

they can't see it.

[Interviewer 2]

You know, they see I need my

[Interviewer 1]

guy to win Republican Democrat for you in Canada.

[Interviewer 2]

It's, it and it's all within that system. And it's so hard to get people to step outside and view it.

[Jeff Booth]

So that's, that's why it's going to be a chaotic change. It's going to be really chaotic because

[Interviewer 1]

people are going to hang on.

[Jeff Booth]

It's individually each of us and we don't, we don't want to admit that our age agency in it. We think it's somebody else and it's us. And so that, that, that cuts, that really cuts into. And, and, and when, when something hits your identity like that, you want to push back, you want to scream, you want to, you want to block it and say that, that, that cannot be true. Right? That guy's an idiot. Ad hominem attacks everything and, and the works there because it's hit something in you. So the change isn't all of those people. The change is us. And when you see that yourself, and so it's not for each. If you take this string, what you're talking about through history, Buckminster Fuller, Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, going back all Mises going back all throughout time. In fact, all of the great religions, no, none of the religions had usury or debt as part of them because of the same thing all the way through time. It's the same theme. But what does that also say? That, that we're easily corruptible. Because if we've never lived in a system that is so obvious, the free market's an infinite game. We, you could explain the free. You could explain the entire economic landscape to a five year old. We compete to provide more value to other people and we win more when we provide value and the entire society wins. And then when that person wins, their margin is somebody else's opportunity to create more value. Prices keep falling. So the entire thing. So that's all of economics entirely meaning all of the economics dogma and nonsense and, and, and, and almost an institutional corruption that people believe in their education system and everything else from the other system that they have to go through and, and unwind their institutional knowledge from that other system. That would, that, that would make my first statement really hard to believe.

[Interviewer 2]

I wonder if this is connected at all. Your, you know, trying to like unwind from the system. Your venture fund, I believe it's called, is called Ego Death Capital.

[Interviewer 1]

I'm curious about like the origin of that name.

[Interviewer 2]

Because it feels connected, right? That like stepping outside of the system,

[Interviewer 1]

viewing it from, you know.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, it is, but it is, but it's actually fair to say that I didn't even come up with a name.

[Interviewer 2]

Okay.

[Jeff Booth]

So my partners, my partners came up with the name and, and, and it just landed. It seemed to fit, right? Because venture capital or any capital shouldn't look like venture capital does today. It should look like serving others. And it should provide value when you win and serve others instead of when you win and create a monopoly to extract from others. And so when you think about capital in a bitcoin standard, when you think about how to the rate of return of bitcoin underlying everything else, I can just hold bitcoin and do nothing and enjoy the benefits of the free market for all people moving forever and I could just tune out. But that rate of return, even against the existing system, it's actually probably a lot higher if you realize that prices should be falling and what's happening and the misallocation of capital which creates impairments that you don't see right away, but then just flash and go to zero. But if you said what's the real rate of return? Call it 45%, 25%, 40% IRR in Bitcoin.

[Interviewer 1]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

Then how could you increase your rate of return? And the only way you could increase your rate of return is that's my hurdle rate for any investment. That is my risk free rate of return. Because if I can't beat that return, then I'll just hold bitcoin.

[Interviewer 2]

Do you think that return is so high? Keep going, keep going.

[Jeff Booth]

So now how do you, now how do you beat it? Yeah, you beat it by delivering value on top of bitcoin and having those companies that are delivering value accrue more bitcoin on their balance sheet. So it's the exact same economic calculation as you would give in the existing fiat world. And people think the risk free rate is the long bond rate, call it 4.4% today. But they don't realize that bond has all of the risk of it failing and embedded into it. Not just failing, but the inflation rate that is way higher than, than what it's stated at. It has to go higher otherwise it fails spectacularly. So that's not a true risk free

[Interviewer 1]

rate, it's a return risk, as Saylor

[Interviewer 2]

put it in his keynote last week.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. And so they're trying to make rate or return on top of that and all of the returns on top of that are under just holding bitcoin. Fine. And they for any one time, like you can invest in Nvidia, you can invest in Google and you could you, for a short term you could see a massive return. But if that return is based on we need to massively print more money, then how stable is that return on a constant basis?

[Interviewer 1]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

And you can see it won't be

[Interviewer 1]

what was I going to. I had like five questions that popped into my head when you were saying that.

[Interviewer 2]

I wonder if the, that. Let's say that the bitcoin return is 40% annual. Let's say for now, I wonder if that is.

[Interviewer 1]

And then we're also saying, okay, so you have, you'll get 4.5% or whatever on your Treasuries, which Saylo is saying this is return free risk. Because you have the risk of the entire system collapsing, which if you run the numbers is guaranteed, essentially.

[Jeff Booth]

I mean, if you look guaranteed, it has to.

[Interviewer 2]

Yeah.

[Jeff Booth]

The instability in the system that you're measuring from is growing every day. And you have no idea that you're measuring from the instability. And you're making gambling decisions. Everybody's forced to gamble with their money on where can I make a higher rate of return? And they're gambling more and more and more and centralizing more and more out of that same risk happens in every country that this happens to and they, and, and people just get wiped out.

[Interviewer 1]

And it's happened in every country ever that's had a fiat currency by the.

[Jeff Booth]

It always looks like.

[Interviewer 1]

Right, right.

[Jeff Booth]

Always looks like this.

[Interviewer 1]

Right, right.

[Interviewer 2]

Yeah. It's important for people to realize too that it's like, okay, just because you've

[Interviewer 1]

seen for your entire lifetime, it's been this certain way, if you like, look throughout history. I mean, fiat currencies have a lifespan of 80 to 100 years, typically. And we're at 88 years from the Bretton woods agreement or something. So in some ways people are like, that's shocking. That can never happen. Maybe it could happen if you take another frame, if you zoom out, it's like, no, no, no, no. It's for sure going to happen then

[Interviewer 2]

not just the historical perspective too.

[Interviewer 1]

You look at the numbers, you do the math, math, you look at the interest on our debt, all these sort of things, what this entire system is based off of. And you realize, no, no, this is mathematically guaranteed at this point.

[Jeff Booth]

And remember, the Bretton woods agreement failed in 1971. It didn't fail now.

[Interviewer 1]

Right, right.

[Jeff Booth]

And then it got converted to a petrodollar system that the other side of that petrodollar system was what's happening in the Middle East. Right. The instability in the, in the Middle East. And you just. And, and, and they had to, essentially they needed to make oil scarce in 70s to expand that market, to flood the US dollar into. To be able to have a new regime. And then that new regime is failing now. Right. So, so, so, and here's what, here's why I think when we use historical precedents for 80, 80 to 100 years were using historical precedents that technology moved slower, so the currency would fail slower. Now technology is moving fast, so it's exposing what the free market has always been at a faster rate, which is exposing the currency system is at a faster rate. And those cycles will speed up and speed up and speed up, and it's bound to be very chaotic. If you're measuring from that system that's building more and more instability, how fast

[Interviewer 2]

do you think it could happen?

[Interviewer 1]

This is kind of. It's always a tough question to ask, but we're seeing the acceleration of this. A lot of the bottleneck now is simply understanding. It's simply more and more people understanding what's going on and making the adoption. We're here having a conversation. There's lots of people on the Internet at doing bitcoin evangelism, so to speak. These things often go at exponential rates. Like what sort of timeframe. From your research, do you feel like you expect these things to take place over.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, I can. I can never say that, in fact. So I don't think this is going to happen fast, at least in the way people are. Now, bitcoin, if measured in pieces of paper, could be a million dollars, $10 million. And that could be considered fast. But that's not the finality of this, the finality, because what would that do? It would reset the piece of paper and the thing would build again. And most people will measure in the piece of paper. And a lot of people will sell their bitcoin back to the piece of paper through that cycle. So this is going to happen over and over and over again. Where does yield come from?

[Interviewer 2]

Depends on the product, I suppose.

[Jeff Booth]

But again. So where does yield come from? From the interest rate. It comes from debt that has to grow exponentially on top of an asset.

[Interviewer 1]

Right, right, right, right, right, right.

[Jeff Booth]

So where does yield come from? If you're achieving yield on bitcoin.

[Interviewer 1]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

Comes from debt growing exponentially on top of bitcoin. More and more pieces of paper built paper, Bitcoin being built on top of bitcoin. And you think you're winning in a centralizing system. So people are going to get wiped out on. And I'm not. It's going to be. Some people make a lot of money and then get wiped out. It'll. It'll. People offer higher and higher interest rates or it'll be chasing back and forth. But lots of people are going to do that and get wiped out and not go stay in self custody because they're going to essentially not be part of the protocol. They're going to give up their access to not your keys, not your coins, they're going to give up in service of their short term win on debt, which will centralize. And so these fights are going to happen for a long time as people make mistakes and mistakes and mistakes. Going through this, hard to understand protocol, emerging through that. And so it's worth spending a lot of time it's worth spending a lot of time understanding what's the next steps, what can happen, what would happen out of each of these systems, what would be. Why would we be easily food? We like think about banks. We the beautiful banks, like institutions to protect our money. We put our money in and our money's stolen.

[Interviewer 1]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

So the entire facade of the entire thing that makes us believe it's safe is a game, that it steals our money, lends money into existence. Right. And where does it, where, where does all of this come from? Where does all the facade come from? It comes from us. And so, so because these things are so hard to grok and everything else and because they're hard on, on our mind, they're we, we don't want to accept them. And that means, that means this is going to. You ask a question that no one can answer, although everybody says to answer, tries to answer. And I used to determine all the time which snowflake causes the avalanche. And in retrospect, you can see the snowflake, the cause avalanche going into that. You have no idea. You just know instability is building and building and building. And it could build for a long, long time. And people watching it build, oh, it's safe, it's okay, it'll never happen. Instability builds. So there's no way to call this timing.

[Interviewer 2]

Are you familiar with Lowry's software thesis?

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. In fact, I was one of the first to see it and I asked him to take it off LinkedIn to broaden it. So actually early on I asked him to go onto Twitter to broaden that.

[Interviewer 1]

Okay.

[Interviewer 2]

So before he was out like talking about it essentially on podcasts like that.

[Jeff Booth]

Okay, yeah, it was, it was a diagram that he put onto a diagram.

[Interviewer 1]

The one on.

[Interviewer 2]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, right, right. That.

[Interviewer 1]

I think that's a great little napkin scratch. That one's going to, that might show up in some history books, I think.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah.

[Interviewer 2]

How do you think about the role

[Interviewer 1]

that nation states will play in this? Right. So we have these centralizing forces. We see you know strategies bought a bunch of Bitcoin. Of course we see all these other players accumulating bitcoin. We see nations accumulating bitcoin via seizure essentially.

[Interviewer 2]

I think post this shift to the

[Interviewer 1]

new world, let's say, let's make the assumption that Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency. How do you see the nature of nation states changing under that?

[Interviewer 2]

I think a lot about Lowry's thesis and that frame hash forces, you know, if, if.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, so, so that's one thing I didn't agree with Lowry at all on hash force. And by the way, so, so, and same for me to do so people agree with some things, not agree with others. But Lowry made the space better by adding initial knowledge. And, and in Hash Force I think he got it totally wrong. And, and why he got it totally wrong is he's measuring that through something that's not a free market, thinking you can control a system. And so I'm on the board of Core Scientific, one of the largest bitcoin miners. Now hyperscalers. And what happens in bitcoin mining is it's constantly chasing lower cost energy all around the world. And the miners don't control it, they're just economic actors and the nodes control it. And so because you're node the miner, if they don't agree to the rules of your node, you reject their book. And so those are economic actors chasing lower cost energy. And it can't centralize in a free market because what ends up happening is miners essentially, let's use the US right now. And if you're mining at $0.05 kilowatt hour and some are mining at higher, you're hemorrhaging money, hemorrhaging money you're losing on every, on every bitcoin you're, you're mining with the capital costs and interest costs and everything else. And so, so if you have a giant facility that's hemorrhaging money, you close the facility, raise more debt, right? But eventually it catches, it catches up to you or you convert to sell that energy to somebody who will pay more like a like high performance computer. And that that facility moves somewhere else where you have 2 cent energy and 3 cent energy and, and it, and it distributes all around the world. So, so there's a, there's Jason's. That's one thing that I think Jason got wrong in that book about the hash rate because you could control what goes into the blocks, but you can't. The nodes, the nodes determine right who who has this and then the economic the free market determines who is going to risk capital, infrastructure, everything else to make a return on the bitcoin. And that distributes further and further and further. So by the way, the same thing in this core knots debate and the core group saying we have to the centralized mining is important. We have to stop them. And we have to stop because they're driving inscriptions out of band or they're driving into the blockchain out of band. The fee market on bitcoin is immaterial. Most of the things are moving into lightning and fediment and transactions and the bulk of the generation of the capital of the return is actually winning the return on the block. So if you had high energy cost and you were trying to subsidize your high energy cost by getting more fees and you were trying to out of band stuff, it would work for a little while. But what it would do is lock you into your high energy cost while the market moved on and you drive yourself off a cliff. So the free market completely fixes that without changing core to say let's solve this a different way to stop mining centralization.

[Interviewer 2]

I remember I just checked the time

[Interviewer 1]

by the way and this has flown by. This is so interesting.

[Interviewer 2]

There's a couple questions I guess I'd like to get to. The one related to this is that in chapter five of your book I think was about AI.

[Interviewer 1]

Chapter six of your book was about energy.

[Interviewer 2]

And then you talked about distributed solar generation, solar power generation and how these three things would play together. So I guess considering that frame a little bit, what do you think the

[Interviewer 1]

mining like mining looks like post that world. Right. So it's the cost of your energy needs to drop, needs to drop, needs to drop. With each having we'll have transaction fees, we'll subsidize it at that point in time.

[Jeff Booth]

So even forget transactions and fees. Okay. Because one bitcoin and 2140 the amount that were 10 sats in 2140 the amount of real productivity gain that that is is a step like the, the, the the reward in 2140 is the same as now. Okay. If that makes sense. So what people are measuring that and they think it's falling because they're measuring in fiat currency.

[Interviewer 1]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

And, and so be 10 minutes of world's energy. Exactly. And so what you're finding is you don't eventually there will be a tiny little bit of a fraction of a fee market, but that'll probably be at that time. We would never go back to this time and cheat money. Can you imagine the productivity gains 8 billion people in service of 8 billion people and what the world would look like and then making a decision to go back to this dystopian hellhole. Right. It's just, it wouldn't, it is, it's so, so, so what. And what bitcoin does in kind of inside that, in inside that time, it's constantly searching for lower cost energy. So I made. If there was one thing in my book that I would have changed, I would have changed. I would have been, I would have added to the energy chapter and I would have added nuclear to the energy chapter because that was a technology that essentially I think was stopped or slowed down to support a petrodollar system. So you didn't have a free market that exploded and what energy could look like today if you had what that would look like and the abundance of energy. But even what I talked about in solar in happening right now. I'm an investor in Gridless in Africa and Gridless is now mining bitcoin with solar cheaper than they are on run

[Interviewer 1]

of river

[Jeff Booth]

because the price has fallen so much on solar panels that it's literally almost free in mining bitcoin. And so that's happening right now and

[Interviewer 1]

you set them up and that's it. The energy is coming in forever.

[Jeff Booth]

Exactly. So that would distribute further and further and further mining. And then other companies we've invested in are placing mining and heat right together. And now you can have a heater in your home and you're making money or lowering your heating costs because you have a smart heater rather than a dumb heater. And all these things further and further decentralize, essentially you have a free market finding the best value all over the world, chasing lower cost, abundant energy, stranded energy, abundant energy feeding it back into heating systems. Because if you do that better than other people, you make more money

[Interviewer 2]

and it incentivize.

[Interviewer 1]

You know, bitcoin mining gridless is the perfect example. It, it gives the monetary incentive to develop the energy infrastructure that then say it does not become profitable or I guess it's, it's a matter of frame I suppose because profitability, it's, it's an opportunity cost, right. It's like you could be mining bitcoin or you have this new application for the energy. You built out energy infrastructure for 12 years. The best way to spend that energy is to mine bitcoin. But at some point in time that infrastructure is there like gridless like you guys have in Africa or say what's

[Jeff Booth]

happening in core scientific. You develop the energy that was mostly stranded. It was low cost energy at the time and they were making a lot of money in bitcoin mining. It becomes the frontier energy to drive energy. Now you own the energy and a new buyer of energy comes that pays more than bitcoin. That's all AI is right today, right?

[Interviewer 2]

Yeah.

[Interviewer 1]

And all you got to do is swap out the chips essentially and the rest of the infrastructure is there.

[Jeff Booth]

It's not all you have to do. It's a lot of work, but

[Interviewer 1]

I'm sure.

[Interviewer 2]

All right, yeah, we just have a few more minutes. I guess I'm going to have to skip the personal cues.

[Interviewer 1]

Perhaps we'll grab a beer at another

[Interviewer 2]

conference at some point in time or something like that and get to that.

[Jeff Booth]

Awesome.

[Interviewer 2]

One thing I've been really curious about actually is I know that you're someone who is, you know, you're largely driven by the ethics and morality of, you

[Interviewer 1]

know, of pushing this revolution, so to speak.

[Interviewer 2]

What is the basis for like your ethical or moral frame? I'm curious. It's not something I've ever heard you talk about really. But like where does that.

[Jeff Booth]

That. Yeah.

[Interviewer 1]

What is the foundation or the framework that is the origin of that?

[Jeff Booth]

You'll see it in my speech in Vegas where what people don't know in that is actually how close, how emotional I got in or was getting in, even delivering it. And how I see myself in the world is a. Is a. Is somebody who is change, changing, changing, changing, changing as a sum of all of the people who have impacted me. And so I mean that in a very real way, even if they don't feel like that to me and I could never thank them all. I can feel the impact on my thinking, my mental models from all of these people that it wouldn't look like that. So you're standing on the shoulders of giants include my parents, my brothers, friends, family, and any person I want to spend any time with or books I read. Sometimes it's garbage, you throw it out. Sometimes you see what somebody does that is exactly the opposite of what you do. And you go, why do they do it like that? But it hones yourself. So I see myself as very connected through time in all of these different people in, in service of doing that, doing that, that forward and my time is the most valuable. This, in fact, I said it on the speed right now, your background that went through the same thing for your mental models and all of the people that you know that you. The stories you tell yourself. Right. Your identity and everything, how they formed and Then how they change over time. You're not just, just the same person forever. Your sum of all of this, these other things and your background and my background just collided in that the actual only moment for each of us that matters right now because we can't do anything. The future doesn't exist yet. The past is already gone. It only put us here. And this is the only moment that matters. So when I think about my moments, when I think about my time, I want to spend it with people that the moment matters. I'm fully present where the moment matters. And, and that was a, and it's a recognition I think for, for me too is, is I didn't always have it right. I might not have it right today. Right. I, I, I, It's a, it's an evolution. And, and, and so I'm just, I'm almost in awe that I get to live in this timeline in, in, in in gratitude in what I get to do surrounded by all, all of this being able to do what I get to do. So I, I, that include that is in my family, that's in my friends. That's it. That's universal everywhere and it's not a. So your question is how did it come to this? I don't know came from but it, it wasn't just me

[Interviewer 1]

following the, the influences of everybody around you and yeah.

[Jeff Booth]

And the curiosity what works? What doesn't work? Why is what, what, What I found probably if it was helpful to, to, to your audience. What I found for me is the things that I would take credit for all of the good things in my life and as soon as something was, was a negative I would just assign blame. You know, it had to be somebody else. And I find that fascinating in me that I realized it so it ha. It all has to be me. So I, I use the every time I wanted to to, to, to turn blame I had to accept and that allowed me to find some deeper things kind of that, that I didn't have modeled correctly that unlocked just an easier path

[Interviewer 1]

you've relating to the blame thing. I've heard you wrap up a talk or two perhaps with. It's one of my favorite things I've ever heard you said that. I remember it hit me the first time you said it was there is no they, there's only we or there's no them, there's only us. I guess to wrap this up here. What does that mean to you? Why is it important? And, and you know how it's what

[Jeff Booth]

I just, it's what I just explained we are all completely connected. Think about your. Think about the life and think about some people that you can't even thank that have impacted your life. Think about Michael Faraday, who came up with an insight in that speech in Madeira. Right.

[Interviewer 1]

You.

[Jeff Booth]

You don't. Most people don't even know he exists. Right. And how he came to his idea of electromagnetism and what that means for electricity and everything else. Maybe that would have been found 20 years later, 10 years later, 100 years later. But all of these people that we don't even realize are part of our story and our way of life today. Instead of thinking about the negative of all the bad things and the fear of what all those other people are doing and everything else, if you stay in the gratitude of what it actually looks like and what you can control and what you can do every day, it's in the. The capability you have. It's a. It's just. It mirrors back. It's just. At least that's what I found. And, and that there is no they. There's only we is a. Is a quick way to say how connected we all are, how we all matter.

[Interviewer 1]

That makes sense.

[Interviewer 2]

Jeff, thanks so much for coming.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, no problem. This was great.

[Interviewer 2]

Yeah, I could, I could talk for many more hours. We'll have to, hopefully sometime in the near future we'll get to continue the conversation. Yeah, I just want to say too, like, you're.

[Interviewer 1]

This is the third conversation we're doing for the series and you were at the top of my list, one of the top guys that I wanted to talk to. So I just really appreciate you coming on and sharing. I think there's just a ton of value to the way you share about what Bitcoin is and the impact that it can have for humanity. I think a lot of people will probably, you know, a lot of people come for number go up. A lot of people come because they want to build wealth. And you see that in their approaches to how they're handling. I don't know what they're working on, I suppose, but I think that your perspective on it is what the masses need to understand. I think it's probably the most important piece of it.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. And it would feel really chaotic if most people were early in this journey going across and measuring a number go up off. There would be far more people measuring and number go up than measuring in protocol. It would just. It would have to look like that, that, that feeling and, and that's why they. It just is. It's not Good or bad, it's just has to look like this as this emerge, as this emerges. And so when I meet people like you, taking your time creating a podcast to touch more people and doing the very same thing and, and you, you'll never know if the one person you touched then, then turns around and touches 2 billion, you'll never know it was you. Which is the most beautiful thing ever.

[Interviewer 1]

Speaks to the interconnectedness of it all.

[Interviewer 2]

Yeah. Well, thank you so much, sir. Really appreciate it. How can people connect with you? Where's the best place to find you?

[Jeff Booth]

To learn more just on Noster now and but if you're looking for me on social media, go to my website first because and look at my Noster key on my on my website because there's just too many scammers out there trying. I will never ask you for money. So jeffreybooth.com okay.

[Interviewer 1]

Right on.

[Interviewer 2]

Thank you so much, sir.

[Interviewer 1]

Really appreciate it.

[Interviewer 2]

Talk to you soon.

[Jeff Booth]

Thank you.

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[Jeff Booth]

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No idea.

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[Jeff Booth]

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[Jeff Booth]

Because it's the best thing ever. We can play games with astronauts, wild animals and superheroes.

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[Interviewer 1]

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[Interviewer 1]

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