Jeff Booth, Investor ego death Capital

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Jeff Booth is a visionary leader, technology entrepreneur and best-selling author of The Price of Tomorrow โ€“ Why Deflation is Key to an Abundant Future.  With his expertise in technology, system thinking and design, he is at the forefront of a transition from an economic system built for the past, and one built for the future. Jeff has been featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, Inc.com, The Globe and Mail, BNN, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2015, he was named BC Technology Industry Associationโ€™s (BCTIA) Person of the Year, and in 2016 Goldman Sachs named him among its 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs.He is a Founding Partner of ego death capital, Co-Founder of addy and NocNoc.  He has been a Young Presidents Organization member since 2004 and contributes time as a Founding Fellow at the Creative Destruction Lab. Jeff currently sits on the boards of Core Scientific, Scoop Solar, Fedi and Breez.  Read Jeff’s article Finding Signal In A Noisy World

So much is going on in the world and in crypto. How do you think this year is going to go as far as fintech and crypto?

Jeff: Chaotic. I would say that nothing has changed from what I thought would happen. You know that the book I wrote described the free market being deflationary and that being in collision with a market that required inflation from a credit-based system. The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future

Jeff: And from that really simple understanding, you can understand everything, all the things that are going to happen next and all the chaos that’s going to happen in the world because of what I just described. So you have a centralizing system based on a credit based system. Most people are feeding it with all of their energy and Bitcoin is repricing all of that. And so when you said crypto, I got shivers because just about all crypto is a scam!
Jeff: Yeah, so if you’re going to centralize something, you would use a database and just about every other crypto is either centralized or or insecure. So the insight was something that was decentralized and secure and couldn’t be hacked by the greatest governments or the biggest powers in the world. and that’s so Bitcoin is decentralized, secure, bounded by energy. So because of that, it is pricing the free market. Essentially every 10 minutes there’s a new block that can’t be manipulated and it’s bounded by energy.
So all prices in the free market, not the natural state of the free market, is deflation. We should have accelerating deflation because of the productivity gains from AI and everything else that we invent.
And because we use the things that provide us more value so that the output of entrepreneurs having to create more value in the free market and us using the things that give us more value must be deflation.
That also leads us to another unfortunate consequence. We’ve never lived in a truly global free market! So now you ask yourself, if you’ve never seen something like Bitcoin, money’s always been manipulated! But Bitcoin can’t be manipulated, related it would reprice that, it would reprice the market. In other words, all prices against Bitcoin would fall forever.
Jeff: And it would just keep happening. So that’s what is happening on Bitcoin. And then it’s growing and it’s a protocol, not a technology. In other words, protocols are winner take all and they come in layers.
And so Bitcoin is gaining greater functionality in different layers that negate any use for any other crypto. So I know that’s a complicated topic for people who are trying to make a whole bunch of money in US dollars and then sell it at some point. Because most people in Bitcoin and in crypto are really saying that.
But that’s not that’s not what’s happening! Bitcoin is reprised. Bitcoin is a foundational state change, a state change to the entire credit base system that we’ve always lived in. Why it’s so hard to understand, is that that state change is imposing a discipline on our beliefs.

The whole gaming of the system with everyone wanting Bitcoin to go up in price and it just seems like gambling?  Buy Bitcoin when it’s low, Sell it when it’s high!

Jeff: Yeah, many many many people are, but what are they actually doing?
So let’s just go to first principles. We know, I think just about everybody in the world knows, that the money, that the debt that they’re sitting on, every single asset in the world, the debt is approaching $600 trillion dollars, if you count derivatives exposure and the likes It’s $323 trillion, according the International Institute of Finance. And the Bank of International Settlements found an extra $65 trillion off-balance sheet two years ago. So just the combination of that, if you just think about that debt, that debt underpins every asset. It underpins your house, underpins everything that you’re doing. And no one will let that debt collapse. So as Trump kind of rips out some of the structure and fires people out of the government, all of those people bought houses, bought food, bought electronics!
So what do you think is going to happen? It’s going to create a deflationary spiral. That’s what is happening in the stock market right now because it’s predicting deflation. At the same timeโ€ฆ

As soon as this started happening, I wondered if there’s going to be a recession?

Jeff: Yeah. So exactly. So everybody knows that, but they don’t know how bad that debt is. And if you had, if you allowed recession, it would turn into a depression unless you printed a whole bunch of money. That’s what happened in 2008. That’s what happened in 2020. And so the entire global market relies on printing money, which distorts, which is really theft. You don’t vote for who prints money. You don’t vote for how much is printed. And It shouldn’t be measured from zero or the inflation shouldn’t be measured from zero. It should be measured from the productivity rate that should flow to you naturally from the free market.
So in other words, with that control system it doesn’t matter who’s leading the control system, whether it’s Elon and Trump or Biden and team. It doesn’t matter. That control system must print money. It must destroy money and becauseโ€ฆ Why do you buy houses? You buy houses and you store your wealth in houses because a house used to be a utility but now it’s a store of value against a depreciating currency that you can’t store in your money.
Jeff: And so the houses and neighborhoods fail because people can’t live in them anymore. They’re investments rather than utilities. If you think about the consequences everywhere in our world, everywhere in our world, and if you measure it from Bitcoin, you’ll see house prices falling. You’ll see energy prices falling like my house was 300 Bitcoin five years ago, and now it’s 22 Bitcoin. It’s measuring the free market. It’s perfectly measuring the global free market and it’s stealing back
essentially the premium of these assets that are attached to other things, the monetary premium, because of a broken monetary system.
Jeff: Now, most people, like you just said, are going to sell that Bitcoin for a piece of paper.
So they’re gambling with this, but they’re gambling on other coins because I think they haven’t done enough of a deep dive on both the operating system that they live in or how Bitcoin has fundamentally changed things.
So they’re going through this process of misunderstanding this first time we’ve ever had money that could be a global connected network without cheating.

Why would Trump do this? Why would he set this up, this great disaster? What’s the reasoning behind it?

Jeff: It’s not him, it’s you. And when I say this, it’s going to hit really hard, a whole bunch of people. And I’m sorry but here’s what it is. We wouldn’t let the system fail.
If the system fits so there’s only two choices, print tons of money and centralize more. Or let the system fail? No one, you included, will let the system fail. As prices fall, you’ll beg for more printing! As banks start to fail and your money isn’t actually there because it’s a credit note that’s hinged to it.
You’ll rage and and you’ll yell at people within the system and say it’s this person’s fault or this person’s fault. And all of this is just window dressing. You’re making, we all are not you, but we make the system stronger by our actions within it. So if we say we want productivity to flow to us, if we say we want a free market, that is deflation.


Jeff: So how could we say we want to live in a free market with freedom of the individual, well, we vote with all of our time in a manipulated market. So it’s not anyone else, it’s us! And every single person has a choice today, to move their time to the honest network. And the more time they move to the honest network, being Bitcoin, the more their life improves because their money isn’t losing value.
They’re seeing the free market. And it’s a global free market. Now, that’s going to take a long time for people to figure out, but I would just keep saying, like it’s the hypocrite in us that we think, okay, I’m going to get free AI, but my house should go up in price.
Why does a house go up in price? Why do the stocks go up in price? They only go up because of the manipulation of money. They actually don’t go up, if you actually look at the rate of printing in the world. Stock prices, house prices haven’t moved in 100 years. It’s that your money has lost value.

Where do you think we’re going from here? Is it just going to get worse?

Jeff: Chaotic, it has to, because you have two exponential trends against each other caused by each other. The rate of productivity is exploding in the world and AI is going to move into robotics and if you do simple economics in a free market, prices fall to the marginal cost of production.  That is a first principle as you have a competitive landscape.  So what’s the marginal cost of production of a line of code that drives your calculator app on your phone? Zero. So prices fall to zero. What’s the marginal cost of production of a line of code created by other lines of code? AI. Zero. All of that abundance should flow to you naturally and then it’s going to merge with robotics and it’s going to do a whole bunch of other jobs.

Jeff: And every business will use it or they won’t be a business because you won’t use the one that’s more expensive. So all of that pricing is going to fall faster and faster and faster. The productivity rate of the world is staggering, but most people are remeasuring the productivity rate through the debt-based system that essentially has to steal that productivity from you and drive it up into higher prices. So what would the world look like if you were afraid of your job being lost because you should be?  Because the productivity rates are improving and AI is going to do your job better than you.  And all prices were rising exponentially because you live in a control system.

Jeff: You would feed that control system with fear. You would think somebody else can save me and you would feed it. And so what you’re seeing in the world right now is a perfect mirror of this, what I just described, with people making the system worse by their actions within it. So will it get worse? Unfortunately, it’s going to get a lot worse.

That certainly gives pause for thought?

Jeff: And maybe this is why this is important. It doesn’t have to get worse for you. And it doesn’t have to get worse for anybody you love. Because if they understand Bitcoin, they can move their time and energy to it or hold it in self-custody. And they have the first non-counterparty risk asset in the world that’s ever existed.
It has zero counterparty risk to the other system. And they can hold it outside that other system. As they learn it more and they understand the free market exploding there and what the opportunity is that is offered, instead of seeing despair, you see hope.

Is it a good thing that Trump’s taken power and that the whole crypto scene is being given more freedom?

Jeff: I don’t know. So when you said crypto, again, I don’t think that Trump totally understands. He doesn’t understand Bitcoin, right? Yeah. This gets votes: consolidate cryptocurrency.

Trump made some money on ETFs at the very end of his first term so maybe thats the only reason?

Jeff: Yeah, so I think and I choose not to, but how many people, and if we’re being honest, how many people actually understood what i just talked about, right?  So I wouldn’t expectโ€ฆ  Yeah, exactly. So I wouldn’t expect Trump to know this today, but he will in time.   And some people around him do understand.  It’s a very, very small portion. Some are still trapped in crypto land, which is normal. If you’re going through… going back in time, If this was the first time in 3,000 years humanity could ever have a decentralized secure protocol bounded by energy? In other words, money has always been cheated, and that means we’ve always lived in a control system with some people winning more.  So if you were inside the country of the control system and it was exploiting other countries, it would appear to you as a free market, but it would not appear to someone else being exploited, as a free market.

Jeff: So this has happened throughout the ages. The sun never sets on the British Empire. right? As they exploited other nations for their good? And the rise of the U.S. was to stop that. And the fight against Europe and the U.K. was the rise of The U.S. Constitution, a Declaration of Independence, was to allow people to be free.  Who came over? All of the people from Europe who weren’t at the top.

All of a sudden, now the UK & Europe are almost the enemy but the US, the whole country, consists of European people?

Jeff: Yeah, to be free. And the free market produced way more ideas, way better and created in a way a more productive economy than in Europe, which created the superpower of the U.S. And then the U.S. co-opted money to be able to now be the control structure for the world. And through the control structure of money, they export the inflation to all other countries. And there it creates this and that game has repeated over and over through history.So what would it look like if you had something that could break the cycle of that game that was caused by us, our fear and greed? And that’s what Bitcoin is! It’s imposing this discipline. It’s imposing every 10 minutes on an honest network that cannot be cheated. And yeah, we’re coming to grips with what I just described.
Jeff: And so because in all of our history books, we don’t have something like Bitcoin. So we’re looking back at other things and saying, this looks like this. This is how governments work. So governments are saying, OK, how do we negotiate with Bitcoin? How do we get or buy more or how do we control that? Or is everybody going through this same thing, including in crypto. They’re trying to understand because it would be normal. Let’s just use that. We see technologies way more often than we say protocols and technologies are winner-take-all! Most companies like Amazon or Google, winner take most or/and until there’s a new technology that changes the game.
Jeff: And bitcoin protocols are winner-take-all. So what would it look like if Bitcoin was a protocol versus a technology and it came in layers and gave more functionality, like the internet? Versus a technology that winner-take-most? It would look to a whole bunch of people who were confused, like, Ethereum is going to be the next technology? Bitcoin’s old tech? or Solana is going to be the next technology? Bitcoin’s old tech.
And this would repeat over and over and over again. because of our lack of understanding of how protocols develop, because we see technologies more often. So I guess what I’m getting at here is this is a really confusing topic. And most people haven’t done the work on the depth of the system they live in or of Bitcoin or crypto to understand why it would be confusing to most people.

Pemo: When I heard about Bitcoin in 2008, in Dublin, Ireland I must have intuitively felt like it was the great white hope? I have followed it ever since and tried to support the fintech community. But really, talking to you now, I know nothing. It was just my intuition about Bitcoin that has kept me focused on Bitcoin. So I guess we have to recommend that everyone read your book to start with?

How does Canada feel about being the 51st state?

Jeff: So I can tell you how I give it zero attention because I would say I’m immune from this conversation or all of this nonsense because of where I spend my time. But how does Canada feel generally?  Oh my God, there’s every conversation, how mad people are and what does it look like?  And what this is what I said before, we give the system more energy, as it steals ours.  And all of these conversations, if you realize that every single conversation here is one of manipulation of money and the centralization because of the money, right?

Jeff: Then you can see that the control system has to do these things. Not it might do these things. It must try to do these things or fail. and so from that control system, it would be normal. But I would tell you that the simple answer is people are crazy mad.  And most people in Canada don’t know what I’m talking about in this either. They are also giving more of their strength and energy to a system that they don’t know how it works. And it’s just stealing their energy.In my book The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future , I only talked a little about Bitcoin. It was one paragraph at the end because I realized people needed to understand the problem before they understand the solution.  So if you want to go deeper on the kind of protocol and what Bitcoin is, to be able to challenge all kinds of crypto from a first principle standpoint, I wrote an article Finding Signal In A Noisy World years ago.