#80 Jeff Booth | The Age of AI and How to Build a Better Future

Terry: Jeff, welcome back to the 

show, 

Jeff: Uh, thanks Terry. Thanks for having me back.

Terry: mate. I really appreciate, you’ve just told me that you’ve jumped off a, a, a

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. To see p Peter McCormick team win the, uh, division and uh, and we did a conference there too, a small conference there too, but it was a blast.

Terry: So, yeah, cuz they fly you out. Do they, 

Jeff: Yeah. yeah, and so not a lot of sleep in the last four days, but, uh, maybe 12 hours and four days, but, uh, but we’re good

Terry: Well, this could go one of two ways. We could

could get

of or . could 

Jeff: Yeah,

exactly.

Terry: could

get the tired version of You 

Jeff: You never know what you’re gonna get.

Terry: Well, mate, well I really appreciate it and I know our audience does as well. We had so much chatter. From the last time you, you came on the show, lots of comments in our community about folks that went out, bought the book Reddits, and it’s really changed their paradigm, I guess.

And you, you predicted a lot of the instability we’re seeing right now in the global finance space, but also you specifically mentioned AI in the book, the Price of Tomorrow. And that’s why I wanted to get you back on because I know for myself, since OpenAI released Chat G p t last November, the amount of time that I’m spending using tool and other AI tools, it’s actually has just opened my eyes to how much I was already using ai, but now how it’s changing the way I work.

And actually, I used Chat Jeopardy four to help me plan for this interview based on rereading your book and helping it sort of act as kind of a producer

see how we go 

Jeff: Oh, awesome. I’m looking for forward to that.

Terry: Well, mate, what I’d love to cover though today is I guess your view on how things are playing out with ai, and implications for career and investing. And then just a little bit of advice, um, for folks who really wanna make sure that we’re riding the wave of change and, and not getting left behind by this.

Um, but for those who aren’t familiar with the book, could you just really briefly give that central thesis on how technology and innovation drive

Track 1: Yeah, so prices fall to the marginal cost of production and technology is moving faster and faster, exponentially driving, uh, more and more things to the marginal cost of production. So that means prices should be falling all around you exponentially. And as, as the, as the technology does, more of the work prices should fall lockstep with it so that we can, as a society, live with, we get more for less.

That’s really the whole basis of technology and there’s nothing you can do to stop it over the long term anyways. It’s, it’s why we’ve always used technology to try to save our time, get more for less. but that’s com That’s com, uh, directly opposed to the financial system that we’ve constructed that works exactly opposite and it, it needs to keep.

Working for less and less and less as it inflates away because the debt’s unpayable, so the debt is already insolvent. And if you allowed prices to decline, what that would mean is the insolvent debt would reset immediately. Because, because it means the interest can’t be paid back on it because there’s less income to pay it back.

So we live in a world that we’re actually pretending to live in a sys, uh, a solvent system that’s insolvent. and everybody is, is working harder and harder in that world, um, as things are getting more and more expensive away from them when they should be getting cheaper. So, um, but they’re, but most people are measuring the world they live in from the system of manipulation, so they can’t see it.

And so they’re, they’re really confused. And what ends up happening as we, I think we explored this last time, is in a system like that, that is really just based on theft ba, they essentially based on, on you can create more wealth in the world by creating more monetary units or more pieces of paper, right?

Which is ludicrous. Cuz if, if that was true then 5,000 years of human history, we would’ve probably solved abundance by now , if that could solve it. But. That allowing of that system to essentially corrupt a base layer of society means on top of that system is we divide, we, we, um, we each, we’re, we’re measuring that system.

And, and, and people take sides of an issue on top of the, on, on top of the system and they turn to hate and division. And because they’re, because of the anxiety that goes with it and, and they’re fearful of what goes with it and they think their side can fix it. And so that’s what ends up happening to society, rips apart. And so that’s what we’re seeing.

Terry: Yeah. And that’s because I guess in the, the current setup and the way things work, the, the inequality

to extreme levels.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. And then, so how do you solve the inequality? You have some people saying, I’m going to manipulate money more. To give you, to give the poor people more, uh, more. And when you manipulate money, inflation is wage deflation, so I’m gonna manipulate money more to take more money from you, is really what they’re saying.

And then you have the o and the other side is, uh, I’m gonna manipulate money and concentrate more into the, the global wealth. But either way, you cannot, you can’t solve it from the system and nobody is gonna vote for, to let that whole system collapse because your entire way of life would collapse.

There would be no food on the supermarket, sh shelves, supply chains would collapse. Uh, it would look like the glo, the wo the entire world would look like kind of the wor third, worst, third world nation relatively quickly as you went back to barter, for a while to be able to fix it. So it would be a painful reset because every single o other thing other than Bitcoin, has counterparty two, the 400 trillion of of insolvent debt.

so the banks would close, everything would fail. And so you, you, you can’t let that fail. So, so in other words, what governments are doing is pretending it’s solvent and trying to create inflation to pay it back in cheaper nominal terms, 

Terry: Yeah. 

Jeff: which exasperates the problem.

Terry: yeah, And that’s sort of oh, loop, sort of like stuck between a rock and a hard place at the moment. Right. Because as you say, we couldn’t pay it all back if we had to. We have to continue to, print more money to,

Jeff: Yeah. So just the, if you paid back one, $1 of debt per second, um, it would take you about 32,000 year, uh, years to pay back 1 trillion. There’s 400 trillion of insolvent debt . So it’s, it’s ludicrous. It’s not, it’s already insolvent. Um, so it’s only, it’s only solvent because of a belief system that people have that that’s okay to manipulate money. It’s the only reason it’s still. Solvent

Terry: And so we’ve got

Jeff: trying to give you, trying to give you more for less.

You could just say, you could just say that trying to give you more for less

to give you less for more, has to give you less for more

Yeah.

Terry: Yeah. exactly. So these two forces colliding. And um, I guess that’s kind of is, would you say it’s accelerating the end game? Because you talked about the role of technology and, and where we are with

Track 1: Yeah. So that’s actually what I explored in my book. There were two chapters on AI and AI being a general purpose technology and, and the concept of, of, and you know this because you, you’ve read it a number of times, it predicted where we would be now. And what we’re seeing today with ai and people are looking at what that’s going to do and what they don’t know, what they’re doing is every single person trying to gain more value through the AI is teaching the AI to remove their value too, right?

So it’s, it’s moving at an exponential rate now, and it’s gonna learn on itself and it’s going to take more and more jobs at an exponential rate. And so as that happens, now, I’m not saying there can’t be some winners in ai. If you know more about, if you’re earlier at ai, you know how to work at and ask the right questions and everything else, or, or how to construct something, then you’ll win at somebody else’s loss for a while.

But let’s say the entire pie that there was a hundred dollars in that pie, now there’s $60 in that pie. and you take more of them. So it’ll look like you’re winning while the pie is getting smaller. And then the next step is somebody’s gonna do it to you, or the AI’s gonna do it to you. So what should happen

prices should fall to there it from because of that.

And then everybody could live by working less and getting more. Everyone. It would be a broad, the broadest distribution. The people who did the most work have provided the most value would get more of the pie. But the output of that, more of the pie for everybody else would bring down, down prices. And, and as this thing exploded, as this thing got better and better and better, all prices would fall to zero.

on the other side of that, if you, if you do anything to stop that process by manipulating the monetary units in the world, then you concentrate that productivity gain that should flow to society in the form of lower prices in very few hands.

and it’s literally that simple. It’s, it’s, but,

but from a, from a technology perspective, um, it, and, and people go, okay, well my most things are some, my housing is getting more expensive, my food’s getting more expensive, all these things, but technology’s moving, getting cheaper.

energy’s getting more expensive. but what they’re not seeing, I, um, in, in that is if you actually measured from a stable currency that wasn’t able to be manipulated, everything, including housing, food, everything would be falling at that rate. It’s just the things most driven by technology would be, uh, um, would be falling faster.

And as, as technol as technology moved into more and more things. Like imagine, imagine, and I’ll tell you why the process works. The process works because, because of this, the first calculator app on your phone cost you money. and then the next entrepreneur said, wow, I’m gonna create a better calculator.

Act am I’m gonna charge it cheaper. The next entrepreneur. Now there’s 50 calculator, uh, apps, uh, competing for your attention on, on your phone, and they’re all free. And if you, and, and, and because it, it, well, there’s a penny of profit entrepreneurs will race in to try to make that better and better until there’s not a penny of profit anymore, and it becomes free.

Now, let’s imagine

as jobs were taken out, you had a couple of industries that had these big fat margins, right? What do you think the entrepreneurs would go tack to bring those? Exactly. So, so that’s why, that’s why, that’s why the by very nature, and it’s the same reason your photos on your phone are free.

It’s the same re reason This Riverside app that we use is free and it’s touching millions more people than you could have touched before. All for free. And that’s, that is what sh well life should look like. It should keep coming down. And so, but we believe in a false reality only because we have always lived in it that we can manipulate money for to make prices go up.

We live in that false reality, and we give it more power to make prices go up.

Terry: Let’s talk about resistance to deflation in a couple of those sectors. So healthcare, housing, and education for me are three that seem to be, is it resistant to tech technology, but it feels

it seems like they’re actually accelerating and I’ve

Jeff: Perfect. explore each one of them. Healthcare regulation, right? And in essentially that regulation is protecting the incumbents, the large drug companies to, to steal all that productivity gain from you.

That’s what it, that’s, that’s what it’s, uh, that’s what it’s doing. And same, same thing that happens with tech.

You can regulate an industry for a little while, but the technology keeps moving and then that industry gets attacked somewhere else in the world that does it way better because of the free market. And you can’t, so long term, no matter what, prices fall to the marginal cost of production. You can slow it down by regulation, but you can’t stop it.

So, and then here’s another thing. For many year listeners that would think, think about regulation. You have financial regulation to say, to protect your money on top of a system designed to steal your money, right? How is that going to look? Right? So it, of course, it’s gonna concentrate the wealth in the people that are above that system, of course, because it’s designed by that, right?

So, So, and that’s, and you can see the same thing in healthcare. That’s why it’s designed that way. Um, it, and, and by the way, I’m not saying bad people, bad systems, bad, bad feedback systems, but it, it’s designed that way. And people will, in, in any, any economic rationale, you can expect people to take advantage of rules if they can, to win at somebody else’s expense.

So, 5,000 years of human history, you can see that?

Terry: yeah. And, and the one that strikes me is, is housing here in Australia is, it’s, I think it’s similar to Canada. It’s out of control. So you can see, what you can see is right now, um, open up new housing. So, like new

that happens at a local and a state level,

Jeff: Yeah. 

Terry: for housing

a federal level.

They don’t talk to each other. 

Jeff: Yep. 

Terry: the fed, the federal government says, I’m gonna make it cheaper for you to get into a house, which generates demand. The state and the local governments are the ones who have to open up developments and their systems are so archaic that it happens very, very slowly.

So we have this huge sort of imbalance between supply and demand, and it keeps driving prices up and up. And

we’re 

Jeff: It’s worse than that.

it, it’s way worse than that. It’s way worse than that.

If you now explore, you talk, we, we explored, uh, regulation as one way, and that’s in healthcare to be able to slow that down or to not see what we’re talking about. The, uh, the, the, uh, the other way is if you use the same very asset to make the financial system work, like housing becomes a, because you can’t store your wealth in a, in the dollar anymore because it’s losing so much value.

People decide, I’m gonna store my wealth in a house and a house instead of moving from a utility.

A place to live moves into a store of value. And then when I said, when you, when you in incentivize kind of a bad rule in a system, then the people with the most money go buy up all the houses because, and, and, and then they get richer faster as more and more, more and more because they have thousands of houses versus you’re one and the, or a renter who doesn’t have any houses, their rents keep going up because of, because of this, because of the system.

And so that’s a way, and, and so housing is not acting as a u a utility like it once was. Housing is acting as a store of value against the manipulation. So the manipulation enhances the house, enhances the housing. Now people are gonna get really hurt here, unfortunately, cuz they’re going all into housing and the housing can’t move.

Right. It’s the same reason. And I wrote a little bit about this, I don’t know if I wrote about this, but it’s the same reason why. The people who were going to be most hurt in, in Nazi Germany had the most wealth in the housing, in, in real estate. And they didn’t move. They didn’t move because if they left, they, they left, they would, they would’ve been wiped out.

So they, so most of them stayed and they didn’t see the next thing to happen. And, and what has to happen because more and more people left out, out against the very, against a privileged elite few who, who gained most of the wealth at one at some point. There’s a massive revolt inside the country and the people get elected to be able to take back that, that.

Through force or otherwise, um, take back that wealth and redistribute it. So you can see this, if you, all you have to do is open your eyes and you can see, see, uh, see this all around the world, you can see this divide happening and people getting elected and all the saber rattling and it gets worse. So now if you, now if you say, I’m gonna lever everything I have and I’m gonna take a million dollar mortgage because this is the way I’m gonna get wealthy, and it goes the other way, that’s a really, it would, it is, it real estate is a precarious time to be able to do that.

Now I, I say that in the same, same breath with if governments have to manipulate their money way more than, than the debt you take on may have to be paid in way less way, way cheaper dollars. So it might work out, you’re getting to that point in the cycle where it’s starting to become,

uh, very risky. And then, then on your third thing, uh, it was housing, uh, education.

So why do people, uh, when, when, right now it is literally free, literally free to, uh, to, to learn anything you want at a, at a, at an advanced rate than almost any educator could teach you. You just have, you have to find them. Um, and you’ve, and, and you can do, do that. And when G B T four can beat 92% of doctors and lawyers and everything else, and that’s the start of this, why is education so expensive?

And because it, because there’s a belief, only a belief that by taking four years or eight years or 12 years, that you are going to get more of the economic pie on the other side. than somebody else who doesn’t. And I will tell you that belief is completely wrong. It was right 20 years ago. It’s not right anymore.

And so, so, so as you manipulate money and there’s, and there’s more people believing that they are gonna get more from that system, then there’s less spots available because everybody races into that system. But it’s, but again, similar, it’s impossible to train a teacher fast enough to be then able to have them stop learning and then train everybody else.

It’s impossible. The world’s moving too fast.

So that education,

the, that ed education model that we once knew, um, is irrelevant today. In fact, uh, uh, somebody came up to me in, in, in Bedford, um, who , who, who worked, who works at the Bank of England, was a, who was a Bitcoin and, and said in all my, in all my financing courses, everywhere.

Um, for, for eight years of everything else I did. Um, nowhere was there a question, what is money? was, it, it, it, it was like everything was taught on top of this education system to don’t look over here, don’t look over here. Right? We’re gonna teach everything how the system operates on top of the most important thing.

But don’t look at the most important thing. Look on, here’s how the rules of the system operate. So it it like, here nuts.

Terry: that is exactly what happened to me. So like, coming to your book and coming to this whole thing, I’m like, I, I sort of stood back in a second. I was like, what? Hang on a second. Had that exact realization, like, we’ve been talking all about money. We’ve got a podcast all about money.

never even thought about what it actually is,

Jeff: What is, money 

Terry: we

it’s, it’s actually ridiculous. 

Jeff: It’s ridiculous. 

Terry: but, but, so coming back to AI here and we, it’s obvious that we’ve got bubbles in housing, healthcare, education. How do you see this playing out? So, um, particularly on the education one I’m really interested in because the edge was when I went through, you accumulate specialized knowledge that becomes your edge, and to me is completely, completely gone.

Now. It does, it doesn’t exist and it’s not going to exist. So how do you see

Jeff: So that’s why, that’s why Terry, this, my, my, my frame in my book was so important and it’s still so, so what, what’s happening right now? I, I’d say virtually every podcast I’m on, virtually every person I talk to, including Bitcoiners, um, and not everyone, but many are trying to make their existing model of the work world, Mo uh, work with all of these things that are changing at a radical speed.

And what they’re really saying is, Where am I gonna work in the future? Where do I win more of that economic pie than somebody else? That’s what they’re saying. They’re scared and they say, see this trend?

It’s moving this way. And they’re, they’re racing into that trend. How do I win against this? And, and that self-interest is driving them from that anxiety harder and harder in the system that’s hurting them the most.

There, there is no way out of that system except for Bitcoin. And what’s happening is Bitcoin is repricing everything. So it’s not, Bitcoin isn’t going up in value. Everything is falling against it. And so it’s measuring because it’s 21 million, uh, units, or 21 million, uh, Bitcoin and divisible by a hundred million each Bitcoin because the, because 21 million units, you have a right measure of the world measuring prices falling to the marginal cost of production, driven by technology.

So, So on, on that longer time horizon. Yes, there’ll be ups and downs and everything else, but if you watch that longer time horizon, what people are doing is the mistake is they’re thinking that Bitcoin’s going up in value and they’re in and out, and they’re trading all these stupid other coins and everything else because they’re trying to gain an edge inside the existing system, which is, which is being destroyed.

And if they just realize in a stable monetary unit, everything’s gonna fall on price forever, they would zoom out of what they’re doing and they would start to move into the new system. And, and that’s, and, and that’s such an important, uh, piece, um, because what I would say is you, can you again name a area of my book that didn’t, isn’t actually coming true today.

Right. And what I’m, what I’m getting at is my model of the world keeps reinforcing on itself, everything’s right. because, and, and. and these predictions keep coming true. Um, and it’s getting, and, and, and I’m trying to disprove different things. Where can I, so I’m constantly trying to disprove it, but everything’s following that path.

And then in the existing fiat world as well, all of the result of that is making this more unstable. And people are surprised at each event. They’re surprised at Chape t GT three than four, then they’re surprised at all these Ra then they’re surprised about a war in, uh, Ukraine. They’re going to be surprised at, uh, at China, going into Taiwan.

Taiwan. They’re gonna be surprised by all of these things because they’re not, they’re trying to attach new information to a model that can’t work in this, in this, they’re two completely different forces colliding to each other.

Terry: It’s interesting. I’m, I was talking to, I think it was my brother, uh, maybe a week or so ago, and he was, he was calling me because the price of Bitcoin was going up, and, uh, he’s like, it’s going up. It’s going up. And, uh, he’s like, I can’t explain this to, to, to my partner. She just doesn’t get it. She thinks it’s all a joke and all this sort of thing.

And I just sort of said to him like, you’re looking at it the wrong way. So think about it like this 15, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 10 years ago, it would’ve cost you thousands of Bitcoin to buy a house. Now it costs you about a dozen. and so think about a type of money that you want to use. Do you want to use the type of money where everything gets cheaper or do you want to get, use the type of money

gets more expensive?

And that’s literally as simple as

is 

Jeff: right? 

Terry: Um, but it’s just

Jeff: We,

Terry: it? 

Jeff: we’ve never, we’ve also never seen,um, through human history, we’ve never seen a money like Bitcoin that doesn’t require institutions for trust. So if that’s true and it is true and it’s more decentralized and secure all the time, then all of our history books would be filled with errors of what people thought made the economy work.

But, but we’re subject to manipulation because money is such a powerful motivator. If you can actually control it for your win at somebody else’s loss, human history says you will. Right? So now, so now if you have a money that actually truly is decentralized and secure without an institution requirement to, to validate it, then that would be the first time in history that anybody’s ever seen it.

So it would obviously be confusing and people would drag their previous mental models into that, and they would probably think it was a scam. . So, um, and, and so when, when you said to your brother that his wife doesn’t understand it, I, I have empathy for all of the people that don’t understand it because to understand, to, to rewire your first ni number one, to be able to be curious and open enough to challenge your long-held beliefs on one system, to go deep enough to understand how that system works is one thing then to be curious and open enough to go to the bottom of Bitcoin to say, could this fix it, is another thing.

And most people don’t have the time. They’re dealing on the level above that and they just don’t care.

Terry: And it is hard in a system where

Jeff: Yeah. And it, it, yeah. And that anxiety keeps him there.

Um, I, I said this to Peter the other day. I said, um, so. how early we are in Bitcoin. You can see, so some people think Bitcoin’s going to a million dollars, and remember that’s in via terms, um, in the next two months or three months. Now, I think they’re categorically wrong, but there, there’s a, there’s a small probability that something like that happens, but the probability looks like this for that to happen.

It’s not Bitcoin going up. It’s an entire collapse of the entire entire system. That’s really what it looks like. It’s just such a, uh, cataclysmic, uh, uh, collapse. And I suspected it doesn’t look like that. And here’s why. If it would look like that, then in Venezuela where they have 180 808% inflation right now, or Argentina, where they do right now, then.

Or Turkey or, or Lebanon where everybody’s just been destroyed, then, then you, then you would think that at least 50, 60, 80% of those people would all be Bitcoiners. They’re not, they’re not. So, and, and what it shows you is how much power that existing system has over people. Now, if, for anybody listening that’s not a Bitcoin or yet, or is having trouble doing this, if it looks like that in Venezuela and, and, and, and they’ve just had their savings wiped out and now they’re more anxious and they’re more scared and they’ve, and they’re more leaning into their political parties that are going to save it for that, um, what makes you different?

And you’ll do the same thing and most likely you’ll do the same thing. Cuz most likely, if you’re not a bit Bitcoin right now, you’re doing that same thing right now when they, when the inflation rate’s only 10% and you’ll be wiped in that system. and you’ll stay in it and each phase of this will create more and more bitcoiners.

And eventually you’re going to transition to a system that, that is, that, uh, that is, looks totally different. It exactly inverse and allows the productivity from, from technology to flow to society. It, it, um, so eventually that’ll look like that all that’s happening, um, with Bitcoin. And that’s actually why, for some people it feels like a religion.

And I get it cuz, cuz that in-group bias, outgroup bias can create people to be further away from it. But, um, but why it feels like that is they’re measuring the world already in a hopeful, constructive, abundant way. . And so why nothing is phasing me. I have empathy for all the people stuck in it. I, I, I wish they weren’t, but why?

Nothing is phasing me in. What’s happening. Why I’m really hopeful is I see a whole bunch of people building to this and how powerful it is for, uh, for, for people. And so I’m already living on a Bitcoin standard or mostly

Terry: Yeah. So what I’m hearing from you, and you just correct me if I’m wrong here, is these changes are gonna continue to happen. You wanna make sure that you are inner money that allows you to benefit

that 

Jeff: Yep, yep.

And then the benefit from that money. So now if you’re, now imagine you’re being an entrepreneur in that system or you’re creating value for others in that system, the output of your value, creating value for others is bringing young prices everywhere else for everybody else, right? So as you do work, you’re going to have to constantly find more value.

To be able to give, uh, give to people, um, and what it means. And, and, and today, um, today what is happening is the rent extractors that aren’t doing any work, right? They’re owning more houses. They’re owning. They’re owning, they’re closer to the money printer. They’re in government and everything. The rent extractors are getting all of the money unfairly, 

Terry: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff: Because of theft. Theft At the base layer

this, the value providers

get the wealth. No wonder in this system, no wonder the existing system

is big powerful. It is as it is, tries to stop the new system because it’s an inversion. It’s an inversion of who wins all of the, if you’re providing value in, in the new system, you’re going to take more of the economic pie.

In the new system, and if you’re rent-seeking in the, in the new system, you’re going to distribute your bi, your Bitcoin,

Terry: Yeah. Interesting. Uh, I’m sort of reminded of something, uh, Ray Dalio talks about actually where he says like, in, in the way that the system kind of tends to work and as it moves towards end points, the people in with most of the money accumulate most of the power and make the rules to suit themselves. but if we just, if we were to sit back for a second and draw, draw out or sort of create a parallel universe where we had actually a stable money that couldn’t be manipulated, would that look like for everybody right now, with the rise of

Jeff: your life would be filled with more and more abundance every day. , you’d get more and more for less every day. It would be exponential to a path where, just imagine today you’re looking today at ai. Remember what I talked about in my book, ? That was four years ago and could predicted this. And if you’re, if you’re looking on an exponential pattern and tomorrow on AI and where that’s moving now, imagine your food going up in price right now and other things going up in, uh, price.

Now imagine an AI has almost super like intelligence and can be put with any machine to be able to do anything and prices on all of it keep falling. Why isn’t food free?

It is. All of these things are free over, over, over a time horizon. And they should be if we’re gonna automate and use technology to be able to, to, to drive them now.

And if we stop that from happening, then we concentrate all of those gains in very few people unfairly. , why? Why do you think Elon Masks who people think is a savior? Um, why do you think he advocates for an inflationary monetary system? Because he, he couldn’t win. He couldn’t win against, against the world.

All of the people that could, could win with him, um, wouldn’t, so he wants to look like the hero of the world. He wants to look like the savior of the world. It’s narcissism to by, by, by capturing all of the value that should flow to society, and people love him for it. It’s crazy. He, ironically, he does the same thing that Elizabeth Warren does.

exactly the same thing. They’re just, all they’re doing is, is preaching to different bases. And the people that love them, uh, uh, uh, are, are, are doing exactly the same thing. You’re the, you’re the per only person who could save me against that evil person. You’re the only person that could save me against that evil person.

It’s all ludicrous. It can’t be, it can’t be stopped by the system. It has to be reinvented on a, a new system with fair rules for everybody.

Terry: And just quickly, for those who

Elizabeth Warren is a,

senator, is that right? In in America, yeah. And she’s, she kind of speaks out against,

Jeff: Yeah, they’re, they’re rich. But, but here, here’s, she speaks so against the rich and she, um, she’s only ever been in government on, and her salary is something like 150,000, um, and she has $60 million. How did that, like, how is that possible? , it’s impossible. Right? It, it is literally ipo. So it, like, it, it’s like we’ve gotten to peak hypocrisy around the world.

It’s true. And, and I’ve just decided I’m going to tune out the hypocrisy. I’m not gonna feed it at all. Like, it’s just, I’m going to do, I’m going to do as much as I can to build the new system with the people that are new, are building the new system.

Jeff: Yeah. And so one thing I wanna explore with you is, and we’ve been talking about how. wanna be, I guess, in a money that can’t be manipulated cause that scarcity will retain its value and will

your abundance, I guess. 

Jeff: Yep. 

Terry: I also wanna talk about, I guess the short to medium term for folks, because there is an element of this is pretty scary if you’re really understanding it. and you referred to a guy, Herbert Simon in the book who was a famous economist, and he came up with this quote, uh, which is where there is an abundance of information, there’ll be a poverty, poverty of attention. And that’s exactly what’s happened when the internet unlocked information. And so I’m kind of trying to draw a line in the, in the future a little bit and say, well, how do we position ourselves in the short to medium term?

Where is the scarcity going to be? That where we can create and capture value as individuals to protect ourselves, to

families? How do you see that

Jeff: Yeah, so. And, and that’s why I’ve pivoted most of, so even, even two years ago, um, I would have to say even, even everything else I did, I was probably a hypocrite in this way. And this is, and yeah, I, I came to the inclusion and I realized I can’t do that this, this way. And I talked about this. I, I talked, I spoke about it.

It was on all the podcasts. I was, everybody came to me, all like, governments came to me, different people came to me. How does this and what, and what I realized is 10% of my time, I held Bitcoin. 10% of my time it was talking about Bitcoin. But 90% of my time was in the fiat world on boards and lots of different technology boards and, and stuff.

Um, that in that system. So with, if I might have been one of the leading thinkers in it, right? And 90% of my time was outside it, how could I expect to create the world that I wanted to see? , right? So I moved my time. That’s when I started Ego Death Capital or with Nico and Andy, and created, I’m going to invest in the top entrepreneurs in this space and help accelerate this space.

And I pivoted my time to spend my most important time with the people in this space driving it forward. And it’s been the, it’s been the best thing in the world. And that is actually what I would do to answer the question, right? For what, what could people do if you know what I’m saying? If you’re already a Bitcoin, start spending more of your time in Bitcoin.

Start spending your my spend, spend your stats in Bitcoin. If, if just the number of people in Bitcoin today did, I’m going to spend and replace every time I spend, this would accelerate so fast cuz every business would have to take Bitcoin. , right? But now when they don’t do that and a business says, oh, I’m gonna accept Bitcoin, and nobody, and nobody comes in and uses it, they go, ah, this doesn’t work.

And I’m going to, and I stay stuck in this system. So we all have way more power than we have, um, or than we think we have to make a difference. Difference. So if you just did that, if I, and again, I’m assuming. For some of your listeners, they already know about Bitcoin and where this is going. The next step of that is, could you take your skills at whatever you do and move them into a Bitcoin job or, or create a business on Noster or BI Bitcoin or anything else?

If you didn’t want to create a bi uh, business, go find one of the entrepreneurs creating a business and say, how can I help you create your yours? And you’d be, you might be pleasantly surprised by how much opportunity there is in this and how, how Bitcoin only companies only want to hire Bitcoiners because they’ve already done the work to understand why it’s so important.

Terry: Mm. 

Jeff: So, so, uh,

so that would be, that would be a way to move your time in, in, uh, uh, into this system. If you don’t know what we’re talking about on this podcast, if you’re new to Bitcoin and or you’re pushing away from Bitcoin, just investigate with Curious Mind op, open and Curious Mind. That’s all I ask. Like, what is your problem?

What is the thing that you worry most about? And try to figure out how you could solve that through the existing system. and if you can’t solve it, if you keep asking why, and you can’t solve it through the existing system system, be curious enough to know how you could solve it in a different way.

Terry: yeah, yeah. There’s a step I, I think almost before that, which is for me, So there’s one thing to understand it, but it’s another thing to actually observe it. And that’s only when you’ve got a little bit of skin in the game. So to do that, you kind of have to get fiat to turn it into Bitcoin, um, which is,

Jeff: Well, well, that’s actually why lightning’s so much easier right now, right? So, so if you, if, if you have somebody download a a a Breeze Wallet or, uh, Wallace Satoshi or any, any wallet, and you transfer them $5, $10 in, in fiat terms, but in, in Bitcoin and sa and, and SATs, and they can see that in a second, um, for almost no fees, that they have money inside their W Wallet that never touched the banking system, never touched visa, never touched anything else.

The light goes on for, oh my, you mean I could trade with anyone globally through the same system and without fees, and, or with very little fees. So, Before lightning. You had to teach them self custodys. You had to teach ’em how hard that was. And, and, and a lot of that’s getting easier today. But, but I, I agree with you, Terry, that that is another way.

Um, when I said spend your Bitcoin everywhere I go, cab drivers, bars, restaurants, I, I ensure people download. If they want a tip, they’re gonna download a, a wallet. 

Terry: Get a moon wallet, 

Jeff: Yeah, 

Terry: it is. It actually, and actually, and I’ve been watching Africa with interest. Um, cause I’ve been learning a little bit about, um, network effects

concept of the ALI threshold. Are you aware of this? 

Jeff: Yeah, Yep.

Terry: Yeah, and I’m starting to see like these little bright spots. Obviously, El Salvador is one bright spot, but there’s also these other bright spots happening in Africa where Lightning, and I’ve seen the, the work that Jack Malice is doing there. And I’m, that’s what I’m watching very closely because that’s where I see critical mass

threat, that sort of alley threshold, soonest, 

Jeff: Yeah. 

Terry: um, in an

kind of

that

Jeff: Right? Yes. In fact, that’s where we’re inve. Like if we’re investing, investing in fedi and investing breeze, investing in snow, investing in, in a, in a bunch of different companies that explode that network effect, explode it. and so, so, and, and, and can bring, and hopefully can bring on billions of, uh, people.

But that’s exact. I I, obviously, Jack Mallers is a good friend of mine too. Um, so lots of, lots of people doing really great things here. And what you said I think is important in this. We don’t see how fast a network effect is happening because we see it’s a distributed, it’s distributed and all. There’s, there’s lots of Bitcoiners, there’s a transaction here, there’s a transaction there, but when, when it’s localized, it happens way faster.

are you on Noster already? Okay. Send me a note on Noster so I make sure I follow you. But, uh, um, the, uh, 

Terry: have, I think 

Jeff: okay. Have I followed you?

Okay, good. Um, the, uh, because that’s gonna, because the, how fast that’s happening, that network effect with, with Bitcoin as a base layer into the communication channel on noster is a really important driver to what we’re talking about too.

Terry: Do you want to quickly talk through Nasta? I think to most people, the listening, they’ll have

how would you

Jeff: imagine a, a protocol or uh, or a technology that that network effects were at the base layer instead of at the client LA layer. So today you’re using Google, Twitter, all of these centralized platforms that essentially farm you your data to provide value and then then remove you from an algorithm.

And you fight harder and harder to get into an algorithm to be able to, um, to matter. And then a new owner could come in and say, these people matter, these people don’t matter. And so it’s all a control structure and no matter what, it’s a contr. So no matter who wins that, those centralized platforms is a long term, that network effect over time, cuz the network effect, uh, essentially is, each person who joins the network adds more value for all participants of the network.

But once, once these centralized platforms get too big,

They can’t keep going like that. Each new edition actually subtracts value from others because you can’t get seen. And, and so, but now imagine, instead of it, it all rising into the client and that all rose into the client because money was broken.

Because, uh, because, and now those centralized entities can price other companies out. And you could never compete against Google as a startup. You can’t, you could never compete against, you couldn’t start up anyone because Noster is built as an open standards proto, uh, pro protocol. The clients compete on top, on top of that.

And what that means is your, key on, on Noster, your private key on Noster. If you don’t like the client anymore, let’s say dams or, or Astro or any, any of the other

50 clients competing for your attention, competing for your value. , you can move your private key to another client. and all of your content comes with you.

All of your followers come with you. All of your followers come with you. So forever, they’re yours. They’re not, they’re not the centralized platform. And so no, there’s no walled garden to be able to stop you from saying anything. They can’t. It’s impossible. And you, it persists with you. As long as you’re creating value for people, then those people will follow you and you’ll create, create value.

So now we have a massively growing network effect at the base level with all of clients trying to compete for those people on top of it. What does that competition for those people look like? It looks like more value accruing to each user 

forever. And, and right now it,

um, and some people say, well, this is a little clunky right now.

Well, if you use Twitter, in the beginning it was a little clunky. if you use the internet, when in the beginning

it was a little clunky, um,

Terry: might have

Jeff: So we just dial up modem and it took forever. If you wanted to try to down and load a cat, you would like your cat picture, it would take forever. So it was a little 

Terry: be amazed. I used to be amazed when I used to use, um, what were the streaming

uh,

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Pi obey or whatever. Yeah, you, 

Terry: just waited

and I’ve

Yes, I’ve got this

Jeff: totally. Totally. So all of those things are going to be rebuilt on, on Noster, all of them. Uh, GitHub is gonna be rebuilt on Noster. YouTube is gonna be rebuilt on Noster. All of these things are going to be rebuilt. But why is that important? If you’re early on it and you’re providing value, similar to if you were early on YouTube providing value, you ride the wave up.

um, and your follow, and now it persists. If you’re still providing content, then you, you’re kind of the king of YouTube or you’re the, or you’re the TikTok star influencer and that influencer stays on and everybody tries to compete against you, and they make you stronger on, on no star because if you start early and you’re providing value, then you’re riding that wave, but everything else is moving into the same type of thing.

So if instead of being a walled garden like Twitter and then YouTube and then, and these are all different walled gardens that you have to go and participate in, it’s one platform and those people are all integrated into to all of those other things would happen to, to you as well. So it’s really, really powerful.

It’s early

and the cost of being early is you’re gonna have to do a little bit more work until the uh, um, until some of the UX is figure it out on some of these clients. But the cost, but the benefit of being early is you’re going to play it, you’re gonna be able to help. build that. And a further benefit is if you see a problem, you go and create value and solve that problem, and you’ll be richly rewarded for solving the problem.

Right? There’s all sorts of business, all sorts of business opportunities.

Terry: that’s really, I, I’m really glad you kind of brought that up because I mean, I probably haven’t, I’ve jumped on there and sort of, I’m on damas at the moment and, um, just trying to get a feel for, for how things are going on. But, um, potentially it’s an area that we could invest a lot more in to better understand. Um, and if you are listening, you know, Jeff’s giving us a real insight here because what, what he’s essentially saying is it’s an inversion of the power structure. Cuz right now we’re all beholden to LinkedIn, to Twitter, to YouTube, to to, to all these platforms. They own us. They own our data This is the opposite, where it’s like, it’s very easy for me to shift and change if I don’t like what you’re doing. So for

LinkedIn, I’ve been investing in LinkedIn for the last three months, right? 

Jeff: Yeah. 

Terry: I noticed that LinkedIn gave me a lot of reach in the beginning,

Jeff: That’s the game. That’s, that’s the game they’re trying to incentivize. Everything’s a game. And you think it, you, you, you talked about ai, it’s

to try to steal your attention, to get you working more and more for less and less. It’s designed, it’s a drug.

Terry: Uh, like so, so my brother, he jumps on and he does one post, his first post. And he got, he gets like 20 X to reach for mine. And he’s, and I said, that’s amazing, but just understand you’ve kind of

and 

Jeff: all, it’s all designed.

Terry: yeah, but it’s still, it’s still kind of worth it.

But I would love the power to be like LinkedIn. I don’t like the way that you incentivize me in this way. I don’t like that algorithm. actually gonna move to a place that

Track 1: Yeah. What I, what I would say is it’s actually not worth it at all on those, if you want to do it, you’re me because. You’re not measuring where your time could be and delivering value because you, because you can’t see the counterfactual.

So you’re, you’re, you’re, and the long term value, if you put all that time, if you actually thought about all that time because, and it’s gonna get harder and harder on everything you do.

If you imagine putting that time into the new system, the amount of value you would create would be exponentially more than, than chasing that. Um, that’s what’s, but it’s hard to see. It’s the thing.

Terry: content,

all my

Jeff: Exactly. Um, and, and people will tip you directly and, and you could create any sort of community right now you wanted to, whatever you care about most, um, you could create, because there are not that many communities there. Right. And the people that care about that too will follow you and you’ll be rewarded, uh, out, out of that.

Um, and by the way, Terry and this kind of, uh, , it’s the same thing I just said by my 90% of the time going in the existing system. Right. And I’m, and me moving it, and, and it would har it would be hard to see at that time how rewarding this was be going to be. Um, because you, you’re trapped in that existing system.

You say, well, I would have to give up all this income and do, do this to move. But it’s been extraordinarily rewarding.

Terry: Mm, mm-hmm. How do you see things playing out over this next two to three years? Obviously they’re, um, trying to restore confidence, in the system, in the currency.

you see things moving

Jeff: Um, how, how do you restore confidence in a system based on theft?

Terry: slow. 

Jeff: Yeah, but No, but, but,

but, but, but you can’t, so in other words, you have to lie to people.

All right. So, so everything you’re seeing through mainstream,

media, everything on the financial system and everything else is you have to lie to people. How can you, how do you restore confidence in a global system of trade between people that is based on a lie?

You don’t. There’s now for a time period, maybe some people, oh, yeah, now this better. It’s all gonna be, there’s gonna be these waves, but ultimately there’s 400 trillion on insolvent debt. There might be more than that. Um, that gets worse. There is no way to restore confidence. Um, there’s, to, to lock you into that system so you don’t look the other way, right?

You don’t try to get out of that system. They’re, they’ll try to close the doors to Bitcoin. They’ll try to do this. They’ll try, try to on-ramps and off-ramps to Bitcoin. All of these things are going to be tried if they’re tried. . Just remember a system that has to lock you in to steal your money is screaming at you to do something 

Terry: Mm mm. 

Jeff: screaming at you.

So,

so, so there, but there is no, there’s no way of restoring the system without taking away out all individual rights and freedoms and, and locking you in and, and locking you into system or re reset or resetting that system from the system.

Jeff: This is one last thing I wanna touch on here before we wrap this up, is, um, you know, we are seeing, a, a, pretty, looks like a pretty coordinated effort to make it a lot harder to get out of that system, into into something like Bitcoin, right? Because it is the, I guess you would call it the escape valve.

And in the past they haven’t had that. I mean, I guess there was gold where they outlawed gold in the, in the 1930s, but you can actually see right now. So, um, Binance just got shut down in Australia, and I’ve, you’ve seen those

shut down, um, over in America that were crypto based as 

Jeff: Yeah, 

Terry: gonna happen 

Jeff: more of the same.

More of the same if people, if people don’t stand up and take control. Um, I hear a lot in, in Bitcoin, those people, those people, there is no, they, there’s only we. If you make the choice to, to move. There’s nothing in a system that has decent, uh, decentralization and security at its base.

You decide if you make a decision to move to the, the system and you drive the system, there is nothing that they can do. And, and trust me, I know many, many people at very senior levels of different organizations in this power structure, many of those individual people are already full-time Bitcoiners driving this forward.

Their company might not be, their institution, might not be anything else, but they are. And it’s all just a series of people. And once enough people move in that direction, that’s the direction the society moves.

Terry: Yeah, good point. Last thing I wanna ask you mate, is very explicitly, I think we’ve kind of talked around this a little bit, but. Advice for a young professional knowledge worker that’s gone out, got their qualifications and sort of try trying to establish themselves in a career. How would you advise this person to spend, um, or what, what to do

Track 1: Yeah, I would just say the same thing I said to you, like when I see how much opportunity there is on noser, when I see how much opportunity or there is on in Bitcoin, when in the related companies that are building that ecosystem, I actually look at the, that people stuck in the existing system thinking they’re safe and all they’re doing in their fiat jobs thinking they’re safe while their real wages are going down.

And I go, you are, you’re living in the most unsafe spot. But you’re scared, you’re, you’re scared to move and explore the safest, most exciting, most abundant spot. And so it’s it for, for me, I find it, but I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I’ve been willing to question my beliefs and said, what would this look like if it could look like the, uh, this here, here’s a, most people would look at an entrepreneur and they would say, those people are risky, risk-adverse, or they’re risky.

I would say the exact opposite. I am super risk-adverse. I just measure the entire risk. So I don’t when, when somebody says this job or this job, I look at underlying the job. And if I’m not in control of that thing and it’s sitting on a bedrock of instability, then nothing then, then it’s a riskier spot then in being in control of my own destiny in some something else.

And even if I fail in learning on the, on, on the new, new path, I have all that learning to try it again in something else. So, so I never looked at, like, I just, I measured the true total cost of the risk and, and my time in, in both systems and what that would look like versus, versus what people arbitrarily measured at risk is small part of that risk.

And I think that’s what’s happening here. I think that a lot of people are, um, are totally mis misjudging the real risk in the system they live in. Versus actually the safety and upside and upside in the new system.

Terry: So what you just said there I think is very, very important. But there’s a lot of, there’s, I guess there’s a lot that needs to be understood for someone to get there. So where would you point people to be able to get to that place that you’ve just explained? Cause I think there are a lot of people that are gonna hear that and say, Bitcoin is the most risky, you’re in the riskiest place ever.

And they’re gonna be like, you are telling me

Where would you point 

Jeff: I just can’t do that on a podcast,

you know, you know how much time you’ve spent understanding it to be able to get, get there and, and you’re, you have a podcast in Bitcoin, you’re there and you’re still spending a majority of your time on LinkedIn and other stuff when there’s so much. So even you have so much further that you could say, wow, I have so much value I can create and extraordinary value, and you’ve already done the work.

That’s kind of what, where I get to it’s, I it’s actually, it’s virtually impossible to tell somebody some nugget to say, just do this. It’s, it’s, it’s a process, but I would, uh, but if you think in first principles and you kind of look to where, when there’s a pro, when there’s more problems, there’s more opportunities to solve, right?

That would be, that, that would be, if I said one thing than if you see a new platform, something emerging that you believe in. and that you think that this could have a long, long path to success and there’s problems with it, then then stay there and fix the problem.

Terry: Yeah, yeah. Good point, So here’s what I’ve taken from this conversation. I really appreciate this. you’re saying to us is this is only gonna continue, technology’s gonna continue to accelerate. The problems with the, the existing system are going to compound. These two forces are gonna keep butting up against each other.

It’s gonna get harder and harder and more uncertain. And if you want to protect yourself, ride that wave of change and not get left behind. You need to save in money, your money in a place that it can’t be manipulated

Jeff: That’s, yep. Well done. It is better than I did. 

Terry: Good. Good.

leave our with? 

Jeff: No, it’s all good. Um, if,

uh,

my website is jeff booth.ca, if they, if there, if people wanna read some kind of, uh, things that I’ve written on this topic, um, but, uh, yeah, that’s probably the best spot to read some of those articles that kind of lay this out at a deeper level. 

Terry: Uh, what’s the one that you wrote about? Um,

the book? What was it 

recently? 

Jeff: Uh, the greatest game and then, and then fi. Yeah. Finding signal in a noisy world.

Terry: Yeah. I think, um, if you haven’t already read, read the book, the Price of Tomorrow, go out and read it, even if you don’t agree, just read it. Just, just really think about this for a second, because Jeff has predicted. so much of what’s happened just in the short term, but as you said, you wrote it four years ago and literally everything I’m seeing play out, play out. So for me, I kind of link Jeff’s someone that lives in the future, he’s talking to us now. pay attention, basically. Pay attention. So read that book, I’m gonna link to the two articles underneath it, which I think are also fantastic. the other thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna leave our whole, Bitcoin, resource library. I kept a track of everything we learned, put it into a notion database. So if you are coming to this now, obviously you’ve got the whole Bitcoin series that we’ve done in the past. We’ve had Jeff’s, Jeff’s been on before. Um, so I’ll kind of link to all that stuff. Um, and hopefully this kind of, this can kind of spark your thinking in this way. Cause I don’t, I don’t think it’s a time to do nothing okay. I think it’s a time to get busy. 

Jeff: Yep. Agreed. 

Terry: Yeah. Mate, thanks so much again for coming on the show. Really appreciate

and sharing your insights with us. 

Jeff: Uh, thank you.