WBD489 Audio Transcription
The Distortion of Money with Jeff Booth
Interview date: Friday 15th April
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Jeff Booth. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
Jeff Booth is Entrepreneur and Author of ‘The Price of Tomorrow’. In this interview, we discuss the distortion of money, how Bitcoin can herald in a fairer system based on truth and a free market of ideas, and the transition from scarcity to abundance.
“These ideas of communism and free-market collide, and they’re both communism over time. And that sounds harsh, but it’s a control structure. There is no free market, if there’s a distortion of money, because everything else is on top of that distortion of money.”
— Jeff Booth
Interview Transcription
Jeff Booth: What does this whole setup cost you?
Peter McCormack: So, I mean the equipment's a fixed cost, it's about $40,000 of video, about $5,000 of audio. But then we have the production costs, which are the Airbnb, the flights to get in, the costs to bring guests in, the production afterwards; so, a two-week trip is probably $40,000 to $50,000. But if you add everything in, I think the show is probably about $800,000 to $1 million. And it's interesting, because it could be a much more profitable show. I or we could make much more money.
I was listening to MrBeast interview yesterday, and he was saying he just reinvests everything back in all his ideas, and that's essentially what we do. Whenever we level up on the money we're making, we just reinvest. So, we upgraded all the equipment recently, Danny now flies in from Australia and is part of the show, and will continue to do that. And if we made more money, we would book a better place and maybe we'd have an assistant in as well. I mean, Danny, your opinion on this is important, because Danny heads up the production, the output is down to him.
Danny Knowles: I just think it's very easy to do what everyone does, so the more we can level everything up, the more we set ourselves aside from just a regular, remote, interview podcast. And it's become more important as well, because as we've invested, we've definitely started seeing an increase in, not just the downloads, but the quality of the show, I think.
Jeff Booth: Well, I think that's what MrBeast does, and I think it's a really good example. When you do that and you're investing back in the show, it shows, and more people start following it, because you're able to put more into it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I think the other thing was, with Bitcoin just becoming a much bigger thing itself, we recognised not only an opportunity, but a need for there to be this kind of product out there. We're lucky in Bitcoin because there are so many good products. Marty's Tales From the Crypt is a fantastic podcast, kind of my go-to. I learn so much from what he covers, even though I don't agree with him on certain things. And if you want to learn about the technical stuff, Stephan focuses more on that and does a great job; John Vallis does a great job. There are so many great products out there that we are lucky and where we fit into this is…
Right now, what I've noticed is there's definite new arrivals coming into Bitcoin, both people interested in it, and people you can talk to and interview, and there's more moderates and people from the left coming in, who've got opinions and ideas, which can support Bitcoin, but also how Bitcoin can help support their ideas. I'm from the UK, I'm not an American conservative and I am interested in libertarian ideas, but I also come with the lens of what a British European person is. So, we recognise that there's a need for a product that is produced like this, and so that's what we've done, we've just invested in what we think the market needs.
Jeff Booth: You mean, learning?!
Peter McCormack: Yeah! It is learning. It's funny you say the word, learning. Hold on, are you interviewing me? There are so many elements to learning, because there is providing a product that helps the listener learn, there is myself and the team learning about the product, thus also learning from the guest; but also, just doing -- there was no plan to create a show that has 1.5 million downloads a month, and that comes with a lot of ideas and pressures, but it makes you then learn about yourself, outside of whatever we're talking about Bitcoin, as we talked about at dinner last night.
Jeff Booth: I love you said that, because in my technology career of BuildDirect, of the first technology company I built, the biggest learnings were the things that actually were blocking me from success. It wasn't the outside stuff; that was relatively easy. It was the stuff that I didn't see, because I couldn't see it in myself. Probably everyone else could see, but I couldn't see, and it was those breakthroughs that changed my life.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. There's been a lot of breakthroughs in this. Danny is uniquely positioned as a person I probably talk to most in the world, strangely, so he's gone beyond a colleague and a producer, to being a friend and a confidante and a therapist!
Jeff Booth: So, you're seeing a diverse collection of people, and they all have their own views and those views might be really narrow, and you get to synthesise all of that and then talk to each other about what it meant to you guys. In fact, what ends up in building a company is very similar. A lot of times when you're going through a war in a company, trying to create value for somebody else, and you have a bunch of likeminded people trying to create that value, you create those same deep connections and friendships, because to get there, you have to learn so much about the industry, what you're doing, what you're doing that's different, there's a whole market against you that you have to try to find out and navigate where you might be wrong, and you make mistakes along the way.
So, a lot of those relationships, when you figure who sticks along those relationships, it's actually the same thing.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it's a cliché, and as somebody who's built three or four businesses now, nothing huge, but businesses ranging from 10 to 45 people and turnovers up to small numbers of millions, I think the biggest I ever got to was £2.7 million; I think that's about $3.5 million, so nothing huge, but significant, the cliché is you absolutely learn most from when it fails, because that's when you have to do the biggest autopsy on both yourself and the business, which I went through with my advertising agency, which I had prior to this. It collapsed and I had a year off work, and there was a whole autopsy on what I got wrong and what the company got wrong.
I think that's why when you go out to raise money for a start-up, VCs embrace the people who've previously failed, they always embrace that. They say, "Okay, great, you've failed. Do you know why you failed?"
Jeff Booth: Yeah, "What did you learn?"
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "What did you learn?" And, I guess you've been through similar scenarios.
Jeff Booth: On both sides, and even in winning or in one of those examples, in 2008, selling my family house to be able to go all in, and you realise how much you have on the line, what if it fails, how did we get to this point where we had to do this? External events aside, 2008 was a crazy time. But you try to detach the things that are external, in that case, monetary system, kind of a flip of a switch, how everything can look different on either side. So, you try to take away the timing and then, what could you have done differently, what would you differently to be able to not get into that same thing again?
Peter McCormack: Did you enjoy that risk element, because I always do enjoy the risk?
Jeff Booth: I don't perceive it as risk. So, the people that would look at me or what I do as risk, where an entrepreneur is risk, I look at it as an asymmetric bet on myself. So, there's risk everywhere in the world, and I don't think people do a really good job of measuring external risk of tying your thing to somebody else's thing, especially if they don't believe in that. So, they go get a job, the thing has no risk, and then they don't really believe in the job, and they measure all their time against a job they don't really like, thinking that has no risk, when actually that has the greatest risk.
Peter McCormack: Well, there's a time risk.
Jeff Booth: There's what you do every day. Is it satisfying and is it putting you into a hole that you don't like what you do every day? And who do you blame for that? You chose that.
Peter McCormack: And also, I think some people just don't have the makeup to escape that idea of working for somebody. I think some people also get trapped by the budget of the life they've built, and they think, "I can't leave this and take a step back, or lower pay, to get into a career or an idea I want to do", so there's that trap, especially once you've had kids. But I also think some people just don't maybe have the confidence to make a big change.
Jeff Booth: So, when you say "some people", it's all people, including you, including me. We design our own life, we choose 100% of our time, we choose every single person around our time, who we spend time with. Everything in our life is designed by us. When we give ourselves an excuse that we don't, it's still designed by us, we just don't have the choice in it anymore, we've given the choice away.
What I just said there has dramatic consequences for everything. And so, I'm taking you deeper into something I think about a lot because of my own journey, so why do we do the things we do when we could do anything? And it's so easy to see somebody else's failings, what they do wrong and what's stopping them from success, but so hard to see in ourselves. And I use often that victim analogy.
So, we can all see when we're coming across somebody who's a victim, and measuring everything the world's conspiring against them, and they have a sign on their forehead that says, "I can't do this because --". What they're really looking for and what we're all looking for is love and connection, belonging. What they don't realise is they're pushing away that love and belonging with all their might, because the thing that attracted the love and belonging first was being a victim, "I matter, everybody comes racing to me", and then stops working. But it's a thing they know how to get love and belonging, so they double-down on it. And everybody knows except for them. Fair; do you see it?
Peter McCormack: I do, because I've played the victim in the past plenty of times.
Jeff Booth: So have I, and that's at a higher level, that's why I'm talking about in business, or us choosing our reality, but they can't see it. I use the victim example here, but it's the same through any lens that you look at yourself for. You can say the billionaire who takes all the time away from family to be the billionaire, to matter, because the representation to matter is so that love and connection is so important, but they push away the thing that they say matters most, because they get reinforced that this matters. So, that's just how we all show up, not good, not bad, but how do you check?
So, if it's so easy to see in everyone else, yet so hard to see in ourselves, and everything around your world is created by you, because it is in the victim's case, they actually can't see what's happening in their world, same in the billionaire, same in any different lens you look through, then how do we measure in ourselves? And I think you measure in yourself, "What does your world look like?" If there's something that you don't like, it's you, it's no one else, it's just you.
Peter McCormack: I know what Danny's thinking right now. That's what happened earlier, right?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: When Jeff says it like that, I was being a victim, wasn't I?
Danny Knowles: Exactly.
Peter McCormack: So, earlier today, there was a Twitter interaction. Somebody wrote something about me that was a lie, and it was a provable lie. And I got pissed off about it, I was like, "Right, I'm going to tweet out about this, I'm going to show why it's a lie, I'm going to prove it". And Danny was like, "You don't need to do this", and I was like, "Yes I do, because they're lying about me". He's like, "No, you don't, you don't need to do this". Essentially, I'm trying to prove that I'm right, but essentially it's being the victim, and what does it actually achieve, what's the benefit? Because, the people I'm telling it's a lie didn't see the lie, so now I'm showing them the lie.
Jeff Booth: You're magnifying it.
Peter McCormack: Magnifying it and splitting the crowd. And the funniest thing, this is where it's going to make you laugh, it's what I mentioned earlier, Danny said, "What would Jeff do?" I was like, "Fuck, you're right!" So, I closed my laptop and ignored it!
Jeff Booth: So, when I look at things like that, and what hurts us in that, and you can see it in Bitcoin, you can see it in any interaction with people, but let's use Twitter as an example, you say something and it's kind of bucketed into three things. Somebody says something back to you that either makes your argument stronger, or says where I was wrong and I need to learn more; so, it's either learning. They say something that they're just being an arsehole, right, and if they're just being an arsehole, nothing they can say can hurt you without your permission. It's your ego that's driving that, and everyone else sees who they are too, so why do you respond? It's just your ego. Or, they're trying to get attention by using your fame to be able to drive attention. And there's a whole bunch of people like that too.
So, I just turn it around and I say, "If it's just information without my ego, then just take it as information and ignore the stuff that doesn't help move the conversation forward". I'll get more philosophical here, but if I think about the physical world we live in, measuring things, information, and then at the quantum level, I'm sure you've heard of the double-slit experiment?
Peter McCormack: I have.
Jeff Booth: The double-slit experiment at the subatomic level, the observer creates the reality. A subatomic particle goes through two slits at the same time. But if the observer watches that, it only goes through one slit, kind of a probability distribution. So, now just take that and it boggles your mind because how, at the subatomic level, and that's where physics still can't figure this out, there's string theory, there's a whole bunch of theories; but when an observer watches, a particle doesn't go through the other slit, so that collapses that reality. That reality that could have happened collapses and it's no longer a part of your reality.
That forms, at the atomic level, at the things level, everything else. What I think it says is, "The observer has an affect". And I extrapolate that to think of a party, and take the victim at that party, the same victim we talked about before, and take every experience at the party, all the conversations, there's 100 people in that room. And, in those conversations right now you're listening to, if you ran an imaging on your brain, you'd have a P3 wave, you'd create a P3 wave as your neurons all connected and you actually connected to this conversation; you could see this coming into your consciousness.
But in that room, you would see the same thing if we were having a conversation, and the imaging machine would actually pick up every other conversation too, but it wouldn't create P3 waves. So, those realities don't exist to you. But if somebody across the room said, "Peter", even quietly, new P3 wave and you're trying to concentrate on the other conversation, you can't concentrate on mine. So, what I think happens, just hypothesis, what I think happens is, so now I imagine those 100 people and all the different conversations at that party, that you'd have to assume that somebody in that room is having a conversation that could change your life forever, but you can't hear it. It's invisible, it never happened to you, because you're focused on the reality of it. And you can see the conversations that are focused on you, the one that you're creating, you can feel it.
So, the same reason why I see more opportunities and all around me sees opportunities and my friends are incredible, and everything else is, because it's the view I have of the world, and so I see more opportunities like that. And the more people that I meet like that expand those opportunities, and it feels incredible. I feel for a whole bunch of people who can't see the world like that, but to say they don't have a choice to see the world like that, they have a choice to see the world like that, they just don't.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, absolutely. And, with that wrong focus, or looking in the wrong direction, or spending time on things which, when you're putting yourself in that victim place, they can actually destroy opportunity as well.
Jeff Booth: So, if you go back to what you did on Twitter, or you've done on Twitter before, if you love that interaction, if that defines you, keep doing it, and all power to you. But I think that's it, we all control that reality.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well taking it into this Bitcoin world, there is obviously a lot of opportunity. I mean, we talked about the show, and we have this opportunity to travel and make shows and meet people and have conversations. But it's also one of the biggest learning exercises that I've been through, because you're not just learning about Bitcoin, you're learning about everything it touches, and its reality and the world.
So, a great example, over the last year, it feels like -- I was talking to Nic Carter about this yesterday; every major event around the world that's been happening over the last year, two years, has a Bitcoin angle, whether it's direct Bitcoin stories, such as El Salvador making Bitcoin legal tender, because they are a dollarised nation and so they have no control over their sovereign currency; to COVID and people being locked down and understanding the control governments have, and the connection between that and money; to what's happening in a warzone right now, where an army is being funded by uncensorable money, another country's been cancelled, and there are certainly going to be Bitcoin considerations both for the state and the population of that country; to Canada, where the truckers were deplatformed from GoFundMe.
It feels like Bitcoin has now reached that weird tipping point where it's gone beyond just a suggestion of ideas, or just these predictions about the future. Everything that people wrote about years ago, people like Pierre Rochard and Nakamoto Institute and all those people, it's all happening now. And so, you don't just learn about Bitcoin, you have to learn about all the asymmetric topics. And add to that, into that mix, you have got this broad set of people, broad set of ideas that need considering. It's wild, man!
Jeff Booth: Every one of these islands of information that seem independent islands of information, with their camps of people that are totally committed to that camp, that feel like they're getting further and further apart from society, are further and further apart because of the misinformation in money. And money is just an abstract concept for our time. So, we don't want more money, we want more of what we believe money will buy us, whether that's love, freedom, vacation, whatever that is, live a life of retirement; we want what we think money will buy us. It's just information.
So, when you have misinformation in money as a biproduct, you must have misinformation broadly across society. And all of these camps that look disparate and are further and further divided all the time, and people are taking opinions inside the camp and fighting fellow man inside another camp, it's all because of that distortion in money.
In fact, when I wrote my book, that's one of the reasons I wrote the Us Versus Them chapter, because you could see it playing forward with what would naturally happen as a result of moving down this path, and what has happened throughout history when you move down this path, when you get to this point in a cycle, what would naturally happen and how that would corrupt our brains; and we would turn against each other instead of towards each other, because it felt easier to do. It's always easier to blame a societal problem on a person rather than a structure, and this is a structural problem.
Peter McCormack: Okay, let's expand into that.
Jeff Booth: If you think about what drove our learning -- I could come at this a couple of angles; I'll start here. The division of labour is critical in the growth of society. And what the division of labour essentially said is, when we were in its small group of 150 people, that group of 150 people living in the Sahara, living on the plains, had to do everything together. Now that small group, you could have somebody hunt, you could have somebody stay and watch the kids and everybody else, but it relied on each other and everybody had their role.
As you expand global trade, the only way to have everyone have their role is a division of labour. And so, if you just think about the world we live in, which is just ideas, and when we predict the world we're living in from the world we're living in, we can't see the new idea that changes our life. And so, what that means is, in a division of labour, for me to be a doctor, I had to trust that somebody else was a farmer and somebody else was a metalworker, and somebody else was this. And if I couldn't trust that, and the only thing that glued all of that together was trust, trust and information of money, because if I couldn't trust that, then I had to do everything myself.
So, once you start distorting that division of labour, manipulating money, no matter where the distortion ends up, it has to keep on moving. Now, you could centralise all function and say, "Everybody here is at my control". That is one plausible way. You could say, "Those people will do everything I say because of coercion". You could centralise all functions and remove the free market. But if you do that, and we don't see new ideas until they're in front of us -- we thought we'd use a Blackberry forever until iPhone came out, we don't see the new idea until it's in front of us and those changes happen slowly or fast, depending on how that idea magnifies across society; if we don't see that, then how can we trust a centralised authority to see every idea for us.
So, if you do that over time, then that centralised authority has to gain power effectively through control; it's a control function. So, there are two ends of this spectrum, and you can see communism on one side is a control function; and we believe the free market on the other side is a government structure to allow ideas to flow.
Peter McCormack: And, under communism, that's a distortion of money?
Jeff Booth: Communism, it's a different control structure under a belief that, "We know better than all of you".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it distorts money, because there's no incentive model?
Jeff Booth: Here's the important thing. We believe we live in a free market here. If the thing that you don't vote on that matters most in your life and is the distortion of money, you're voting on taxes, but most of the taxes you could call it a transfer of wealth and inflation and nobody has a vote on it, and that underpins the free market, there is no free market. So, these ideas, the communism and free market, collide and they're both communism over time. That sounds harsh, but it's a control structure if there is no free market, if there is a distortion on money, because everything else is on top of that distortion on money.
Peter McCormack: So, how do you have a truly free market?
Jeff Booth: You don't right now, and that's actually why Bitcoin is such an important innovation, or discovery, and it's not well understood yet. It will be, over time, it's just an idea. And if we all believe in a different idea that we should live under control of somebody else, and that person should make all the decisions, then society's going to live under that, and that's what it will look like.
Peter McCormack: So, to have a totally free market, we can only do that by eradicating any form of centralised taxation or redistribution.
Jeff Booth: Yeah, I want to be careful there, because -- and again, there's some people who believe that, there's some people in Bitcoin who believe that. There are some people that, "All governments will fail and it's every man to itself". I don't believe that.
Peter McCormack: I don't either.
Jeff Booth: But I totally respect some that do and I want to listen to opinion, but I don't think society can function without an agreement of laws that protect society for their greater good. Now, what that looks like, and this becomes a complicated topic of the transition, because remember, if you look through the lens of what society looks like today, and you realise how unfair that is for most of society because of the manipulation of money, and how those most hurt by the manipulation of money can't see their way out, because they're living in fear and they run back to the same government that's creating it for more money and more manipulation, I know how that builds centralisation in a further function; and then from that lens, I could totally see how somebody could be so against that that they'll go almost fringe to burn it all down.
It's almost like the Monopoly game board. The game ends and you reset the game. But along the way on the game, if you get lucky and you land on the right properties and somebody else gets unlucky, the person that's lucky has greater and greater probabilities to win, and the other one gets greater and greater probabilities to lose; they go round the board. Now, what happens if at the end of that board game, or every time you pass go, that unlucky person that can't make it round the board game and the game won't end, it won't be allowed to end; but instead of getting $200, they can't around the board game, they get $300. Then all the prices of food and housing and everything else go up, and the richest get richer.
Then, they can't get round the board game again, and they go and ask for $400. That's what UBI, that's what all of these things look like, and it's perpetual slavery.
Peter McCormack: Danny, look up "Monopoly socialism". So, you can actually buy a socialist version of Monopoly. I bought it to play with my kids and it was so funny, we were playing it, and I remember my daughter, she was quite young and she was like, "This isn't fun. I'm not enjoying this. Can we play the old one?!" There is luck in life as well. Part of the reason you and I are sat here now is luck. I can tell you the strokes of luck which led to being sat here right now. I can think of two or three scenarios, if they hadn't happened, I would not be sat here right now.
Jeff Booth: So, in any free market, I'm not saying -- there's still inequality, and there's inequality because some people are valued higher by the free market and others at any given point of time. That is okay. What's not okay is unfairness. What's not okay is if I make a losing bet, that I socialise the losses to society and I win. And so, that's what we have today, is capitalism through monetary easing, and it has greater and greater consequences throughout the world.
So, in Monopoly, the game board ends, or it's kicked over. And today, if you see the rise of hate and everything in the world, what's happening is the game board is getting kicked over. But the game board that we're living in is our planet, and it's getting kicked over. So, there needs to be a new game. Bitcoin is a new game. The system itself has no way to solve the problem. I wish it did, but the solution cannot come from the system, because if you allowed the free market to work, the credit-based system in the world today would collapse to the ground and we would be living in the Stone Age. We would go back to barter, there would be no food on the shelves, dictators would rush in to try to control us.
What governments are trying to do to stop that, the natural clearing functions of markets from happening, is door number two: keep kicking the can down the road. And what they're doing by doing that, they're increasing the negative externalities around the world, they're increasing the divide of rich and poor, they're increasing global warming, they're increasing our climate change, they're increasing everything else as a result of blowing up a balloon faster and faster and faster that will pop, for sure.
Peter McCormack: And the main issue here is the political cycle changes the incentives for how the economy should be managed, because there is no incentive for austerity.
Jeff Booth: It's bigger than that. So, if you look at short-term and long-term debt cycles, Ray Dalio talks about debt cycles and he does a good job, I think one of the things that Ray Dalio gets wrong and many, many people get wrong is, the free market and technology has always been deflationary, it's always made prices go down. And it's always made prices go down, because we create technology to be able to do more for us. So it's natural, it seems pretty obvious that anything you use with technology is getting more and more efficient.
Peter McCormack: Well, it's always evident with the TVs. Every time I buy a TV, it usually costs about the same, or maybe a bit less, but it's bigger and has better technology.
Jeff Booth: Yeah, so your calculator app on your phone, people think it's free because of advertising. It's free because the marginal cost of production is zero. Do you want to go and create a calculator app? And why? Because, it costs nothing, you can't make money on it. And when the marginal cost of production moves to zero and it's digital in nature and moves everywhere in the world for free, it becomes free.
But now go back, this is where it's important. So, for all time it's been like that. We create technology, we get more efficient and it's for all time. The anchor to the system used to be gold, and for monetary velocity to expand that through -- you couldn't trade gold, it had to be centralised, and you couldn't trade gold from person to person, or at least at the speed that society was moving. So, the speed of society moving, especially today, digital in nature everywhere, the speed that society's moving and improving is at a rate that's faster and faster, so the technology's moving faster and faster exponentially through time.
Then, when you go back and anchor to gold, you have to build a credit-based system on top of gold. That credit-based system must expand forever, it keeps on expanding. And when you said short-term debt cycle, what ends up happening is short-term debt cycle, it can't keep expanding, so it collapses. And then, it takes on again and it keeps on going, and then when it really collapses, the pain to society is so great that you have to retake the gold, you go fight over the gold, world wars, winner of the wars sets a new monetary game from zero and it all starts again. And why? Because one system is deflationary, one system is driving down our time, in other words our time up, and one system has to go the other way, has to keep growing. And then it gets to a point in history where you have to break it and you have to reset everything. We're entering that time in history again.
Now you have to ask, this time in history, why might that be different? It's different for a lot of reasons. We've never had war machines that we could destroy the world in on a reset, that could happen as we go to the next level. If it resets around gold, or something like that, what we'd have to do is, the winner of the new war would have to reset the rules around that, or there'd have to be a negotiated settlement around people who say, "Here's how we're going to reset this", but it would start again because you'd have a credit-based system built on top.
Why Bitcoin is so different that's not well understood is, you both have the asset and the network on Bitcoin, but you also have the velocity, whether it's Lightning, or on top of Layer 2 technologies; you have the velocity of money through technology. So, I can trade with anyone in the world, anytime, on an open, decentralised network. That removes that ability to cheat from humans forever. And what you could simply ask yourself is, let me try and come back to these first principles all the time, throughout time, if a system could be manipulated by humans to give themselves an advantage over other humans, will it be?
Peter McCormack: Yes, without doubt!
Jeff Booth: We've seen it throughout history, and so there's an incentive for that to happen. And so what Bitcoin is, it removes that ability.
Peter McCormack: Removes misinformation.
Jeff Booth: And it removes that ability forever, or hopefully forever, whether it's Bitcoin or some other. But that ability, because we wouldn't make the choice otherwise. There is no politician, no person you look up to in the world, not me, not anybody else, that would globally make that choice without it being driven for us.
Danny Knowles: Could you not say the same thing about gold?
Jeff Booth: No, because gold would have to have a credit-based system built on top of it.
Danny Knowles: Because it's not transferable.
Jeff Booth: It's not transferable, because you can't move it around at the rate of the internet. So, it cannot work. You'd have to have a currency that allows for deflation, a hard currency that is being able to move at the speed of light without a credit-based system built on top, otherwise you get right back to this spot again.
Peter McCormack: So, the reason the gold standard existed and the reason it ended was top-down; it came from centralised authorities who made that decision. But the difference with Bitcoin is that the Bitcoin standard comes bottom-up. I've talked about this a million times on the podcast, Jeff. I operate on a Bitcoin standard, my football club operates on a Bitcoin standard, my podcast finances operate on a Bitcoin standard. All the decisions we make are based around Bitcoin. Nobody else has to do it, but I've made that choice. Maybe you do, maybe Danny does, maybe Jeremy doesn't. But the more people who do, the bigger network we have for this Bitcoin standard, and we will flourish and benefit together.
No centralised authority can easily stop this. Let's not say it can't be stopped, it could be regulated out, made difficult, but essentially speaking, it comes bottom-up, so nobody even needs to set the rules.
Jeff Booth: For the life of me, I actually can't understand why people wouldn't want this to win.
Peter McCormack: Well, for the same reason of the question you asked me previously. If you can manipulate the rules, will you? So, what we're removing is the ability for the people who can manipulate the rules to manipulate the rules, so that's why they wouldn't want it to.
Jeff Booth: But interestingly, when you say "they", it's easy to paint some dark picture of they. I don't know that they know what they're even getting into if that's the case, because the person who you'd identify as they, to be able to say who creates rules for everyone else, it won't be them. In a generation, it won't be them, it will be someone else and more than likely, we end our world before it gets there if it looks like that, because really you'd have to centralise everything to be able to keep going, and that probably starts in geopolitical areas.
Even today, if you just said, "Does anybody think it's a good idea to trust the yuan as a base layer for humanity?" Probably not.
Peter McCormack: Very few.
Jeff Booth: Very few.
Peter McCormack: Maybe Vladimir Putin right now.
Jeff Booth: But I don't think he does either. I think it's just game theory trying to figure out how he can respond to this. So, how do you enable global trade? And global trade is trade with people, not governments. Again, all of the ideas and the free market, the free market is us, it's our ideas, the ones that work when they deliver value to other people. But we think they're two different things. We think they're, "My house should always go up in value, but everything I buy should come down in price". It's an incongruence and on a Bitcoin Network, every single test, every single idea, and Jack Mallers talks about this as well, every single idea enhances the idea. The best ones win. The result is prices come down. You could hate Bitcoin; it will still benefit you.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it brings up this wider, more interesting question now, at a time of currency wars; Jerome Powell admitting there might be multiple reserve currencies; Russia being cancelled needing an alternative, which might be the digital yuan, maybe something else; at a time where the US dollar is certainly struggling; and, as Nic Carter said to me yesterday, Treasury Bills, which were seen as a global risk-free standard now are not risk-free, because you can be cancelled as a nation.
We're at a time where I think the US Government, in terms of the position they need to take, not in terms of, "Can we remain the strongest country?" more in a position of, "Let's stop somebody else becoming the strongest country" is actually to adopt Bitcoin and adopt a Bitcoin standard and promote Bitcoin, because I think the US promoting and defending Bitcoin harks back to traditional American values of freedom and decentralisation, as the republic is; but also, just because of the volume of Bitcoin wealth and companies within the US, it actually makes the country stronger. And the game theory of that, with the US tending to lead the way, would actually probably defeat the digital renminbis, digital yuan, I always get confused between the two, probably defeats its goal of becoming a challenger global reserve currency.
Jeff Booth: If you just said everything's an idea, everything is an idea, we live in an idea where it's okay to have inflation, a theft in our money, at the base layer. And that theft in the base layer would transfer, I know theft is harsh, but that's what it is, it's a transfer of wealth and control because we vote for it. So, people believe that's okay. If people believe that's okay and everything's an idea, if everyone believes that's okay, that's where the world will head, and it will get controlled.
If people believe that, and it doesn't really matter what currency you move that into, because what we said before, if a currency can be manipulated for some people's gain over others, it will be. So, no matter which, digital yuan, whether it's CBDC in the US, then you can expect over the next number of years to be really confused, as what started out as small fluctuations go into bigger and bigger fluctuations and it takes all your attention.
But at the root, Bitcoin is an idea against that and the free market, and what I suspect is going to happen is as people do this, more and more people are going to understand. One system will drive the other system, because it actually creates more value in the other system as this is happening. And if enough people believe in, "Wait, why should my money or my time be manipulated? And who wins by that manipulation?" if enough people believe that, Bitcoin is just an idea that is going to transition, and it will become a reality; I suspect enough people are going to see that.
Peter McCormack: I suspect so too. I mean, I think it is happening.
Jeff Booth: I think it's happening, it's happening at a rate that I don't even think we can comprehend, even in the Bitcoin community. I'm flying to El Salvador in a couple of weeks, I know you've been there, but it's happening all over the world. It's happening in Nigeria, it's happening in -- I think 10% of the network is still in China, even though China's trying to clamp down everywhere on it, because it's an open, decentralised platform that really governments have no control over.
You have to ask yourself, "Who is government? Who is this dark force of government?" It's us, we control it, it's our ideas. And if we decide to give it all power to control us, then we'll give it all power to control us. But the way that's all structured is an idea, government is an idea. And one side of that idea is, "Government should control everything". That's what it would look like in China and they'll look after you; and one side of that idea is, "Freedom of ideas, freedom of expression, free market".
I go back to what I said before, if you believe government can control you, and it's only a certain number of people, a small number of people, then that must come at the expense of all new ideas, those ideas will never be seen. And most times, we don't see the new idea, how great it is, until it is before us. We don't know we'll change until the idea is in front of us. So, I actually suspect that over time, there's nothing you can do to stop this idea, because it is us.
Peter McCormack: So, we're entering into an era which is essentially, without being hyperbolic, it's a battle of freedom versus control, because if the Chinese idea of control works and you want to beat China, you have to be better at control.
Jeff Booth: Exactly.
Peter McCormack: So, the US has to be better at control. But in a society which is, to an extent, more free, you can't win that battle. But can you win, therefore, by leaning into free and being more free as an acceptance, and breaking down those barriers of government from within to win that battle?
Jeff Booth: This gets harder to even contemplate when you say from a US-centric or Canadian-centric. I had to realise some of the things we're talking here, realise my idea of freedom came at somebody else's expense. And so, when we looked at a whole bunch of nations around the world, who effectively got cut off from the oil network, pricing of the US dollar and currency, to be able to gain advantage in trade, essentially the US could print oil by pressing a button; everybody else had to pay for oil. So, it gave some countries an advantage, and it gave some countries a disadvantage. The only way to actually make that work --
Peter McCormack: Hold on, let's go back a second. I hadn't thought about that, because energy security is a huge issue right now. It's a huge issue right now, but you've just said, "Everybody has to buy oil, but the US can press a button to print oil". Just for clarity, what you're basically saying is, because of the dollar hegemony, the US can print dollars to buy oil at the expense of everyone else, because it debases their currency and it makes oil more expensive?
Jeff Booth: Correct.
Peter McCormack: I've never thought it through like that.
Danny Knowles: I hadn't thought that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'd never thought that through like that. The US gets to print oil, fuck! Okay.
Jeff Booth: So, energy is priced in US dollars today. All energy will be priced in Bitcoin, because if you're Saudi Arabia right now, you're starting to think, "Just a second, I'm getting paid in less valuable dollars; I'm buying your bonds and I'm getting paid in less valuable dollars, and I can be cut off from its system".
Peter McCormack: If I do something wrong.
Jeff Booth: If I do something wrong. So, that whole thing is breaking down before our eyes. Also, energy is becoming more decentralised. So, that decentralisation can't be -- the way you've protected it, that US petrodollar oil system, is you've protected it by force, coercion. And if somebody was cut off from the system, they were cut off from the entire network. And so, that positive externality for US citizens, myself and Canada, has created negative externality somewhere else, and it's all tied to the same thing I said to you before. If you could create an advantage for yourself or your citizens over somebody else, you will; history proves it.
So now, you have now countries like China are bigger, more impactful in global energy, and they're trying to get energy priced in yuan. And the game is all trying to see who has the power, and that's kind of driving a military force around the world to say, "Trade with me, trade with me", and it's breaking down.
Back to that thought before, we have an advantage that came at a disadvantage from other nations, through this same thing. And Bitcoin fixes that globally. And so, if you believe in a free market and if you believe in your people, and what will happen in a free market is there's more idea generation, and that idea generation creates value for society, the nations that go earlier onto Bitcoin will create more talent pools and more ideas. And those ideas will move those nations at a way faster pace.
Peter McCormack: Interesting.
Jeff Booth: What you'll see is, I don't think you need to think about what governments, what nation states, what does this look like, it's just going to create game theory between governments competing for people and talent and resources under a free market. Effectively, all that ends up happening is the fraud in the system that must be there through inflation has to be exposed. What that means is there will still be taxes, but nations are going to compete for, I believe this, "Here's what I believe for my citizens", and they won't be hiding through the back door, "I'm telling you this, but I'm actually going to take all your money through inflation", they won't be able to do that anymore.
So, that will bring in a competition of, I think, a totally different political class that is actually for the people, by the people.
Peter McCormack: Okay, right! So, we're in this transitionary period now where Bitcoin is really being tested; the theories you're talking about here are being tested. And actually, at a political level, they're being tested. I mean, here in the US, even though we think there isn't sometimes political capital around this, I actually think there is growing political capital around this. We've seen Senator Lummis, now Ted Cruz, Governor Abbott here, Josh Mandell. These are people actively saying we should adopt and support Bitcoin. Josh Mandell's specifically saying, "If you believe in small government, you should believe in Bitcoin. If you believe in big government, you should be against Bitcoin". So, there's actual political capital pushing us towards these ideas.
Jeff Booth: Yes. A lot of those ideas are still in an existing architecture.
Peter McCormack: Of course, but that's a part of the transition.
Jeff Booth: It's all been politicised and everything else. We talked about it at dinner last night, how do you get noticed for a long time? Truth matters, even in a world that feels chaotic. So today, truth is a kind of line that lives on, it just keeps going. So, everything we're talking about right now, people could argue it, they could politicise it, but it's still true. And what you're finding in Bitcoin is more and more people starting to realise that truth, coming out of the fog from their individual silo and realising, here is a throughline.
I think about it like, what would it look like if you were Galileo and you looked up through a telescope and you realised, "Wait, the stars don't rotate around the Earth, it's the other way round", but the prevailing truth at the time was a different truth. And so, eventually that truth wins. It takes society a long time to understand, a lot of different people fighting it, deplatforming somebody, but eventually society starts to come around to say, "That's true". And again, it's just an idea, the truth fighting against a previous idea.
So, there's an idea that we live in a world that should, needs to, requires inflation to live in a productive society, and nobody's double-tapped on that idea, "Why is that true? We require theft in our time, or our monetary base layer, to live in a product of society?" A lot of people swallow that hook, line and sinker, because it used to be true on a credit-based system, because there was no alternative, because technology hadn't provided a path to be able to have velocity and decentralisation, so that needed to be true.
Peter McCormack: But isn't that just an idea as well?
Jeff Booth: So, that idea is now being challenged by Bitcoin, an idea, that it doesn't have to. So the adoption rate of Bitcoin, which looks like the adoption rate of the internet, which was just another idea, is matching the adoption rate of the internet, same thing. It's an idea that puts more people, more of us, into control. We gain control, we gain our time back.
Peter McCormack: The wider externalities that come from this are mind-blowing.
Jeff Booth: Mind-blowing.
Peter McCormack: A show we're trying to work on at the moment is the things that have come out of Bitcoin that probably weren't part of even Satoshi's roadmap. Who knows what Satoshi truly thought? But I believe Satoshi thought peer-to-peer money, uncensorable, censorship-resistant money with a fixed limit would be good for the world because of central banks. I do not imagine, in any scenario, he thought about the impact that Bitcoin would have on the energy sector, which has come out of it.
We had Troy Cross in yesterday with Nic Carter, and Troy's thesis, whether or not somebody listening believes that burning fossil fuels and increasing the carbon in the atmosphere leads to climate change or not, his theory is one based on he does believe that. And he has a thesis whereby, not only can Bitcoin miners stabilise the energy grid, they can also drive a revolution in investment in renewable mining infrastructure. We were just laughing this morning just like, "Wow!" If Troy is right, two things can happen at the same time. We can transition the world to a better form of money, whilst reducing the impact of climate change.
Danny Knowles: And boosting energy consumption massively.
Peter McCormack: And making more energy available. There's no way Satoshi thought about that with mining. Mining was just a process of securing the blockchain, but this whole thing's come out of it. And it's not the only thing, there are other amazing concepts, and there's things we don't know about that are going to come in the future. It's like, "Crap, Bitcoin's going to fix this".
Jeff Booth: But that's it. We can't see something until it's before us. We're terrible -- some people are better predictors, because they start to imagine what a world could look like and they build to that. The entrepreneurial process is actually that. You go up against a monopoly, you say, "I can do this with technology that delivers more value", and the only way you win is if other people agree with you, or they use with your technology and you deliver more value.
What's predictable is the response by the monopoly. The only change here, the only change to what I just said is that predictable response is coming at the monetary level. But what you just talked about, and I've talked to Troy on, I totally agree with that premise. At the higher level, you just have to ask this, "Should oil be $130 a barrel right now? Why is it $130 a barrel?"
Peter McCormack: Well, there's multiple factors that come into that.
Jeff Booth: Primarily?
Peter McCormack: Primarily right now, it's $130 a barrel, I would say due to, gosh, well a lot of things are coming into my head. I think of sector subsidies, speculation, risk, but mainly probably because people are moving to commodities because of fear over what's going to happen to the dollar? No? You're going to tell me I'm wrong.
Jeff Booth: It was partly all, but the biggest thing is, abundance in money created scarcity everywhere else. Scarcity in money creates abundance everywhere else. So, abundance in money, I print anything I want, means oil prices go up, I can't get enough, scarcity in every single thing. I keep creating money, I create scarcity everywhere.
Peter McCormack: I guess that's the central thesis to your book, right?
Jeff Booth: Yes, because it has to, because all it is is a manipulation. We live in a world that's an imagination that somebody can print money, and all of these responses are because somebody gets to print money, and those consequences have to get greater and greater and greater.
So, when you play that forward, and that's actually why I said it, at the highest level, the very highest level, if you believe in climate change, or if you don't believe in climate change, it actually doesn't matter, but if there's 95% of the population that believes that climate change is a real thing and every day they see more either news reinforcing that, ESG narratives reinforcing it, money reinforcing it, they will believe that climate change is a real thing, is it best to say, "No it isn't, you're stupid", do you think they'll change their mind? Or, is it best to, say, meet them where they are and ask them this, "Is there any way to solve climate change through a system that must drive growth, by printing money, fake growth, forever?"
So, instead of having one job and having time to be able to travel, you need two jobs. You need two cars, you need two -- because prices keep going up and you're on a perpetual hamster wheel, entire society is, needing more and more things that are just manipulated to be able to create more and more damage to the climate, that is just manipulated. It's impossible to solve if you believe in climate change, it's impossible to solve climate change from a system that is climate change; that's the biggest level.
The next level is what Troy's talking about. Now you have an incentive system to capture stranded energy everywhere, and you move in incentives, and stranded energy, excess energy are everywhere, and you move on a scale and you increase energy, which is a function of all of us, and you increase energy and you decentralise it at the same time, and it's tied to money. If you care for climate, the only way to solve climate is from a new system that does it. It's impossible to solve it from the existing system.
Peter McCormack: The butterfly effect of money, or the nature of money, is the butterfly effect from the creation of Bitcoin. It's truly unreal. Okay, sorry, you're blowing my mind here quite a bit. Danny?
Danny Knowles: Mind-blowing.
Peter McCormack: Mind-blowing. Okay, how much do you think about the transitionary period from an era of money abundance to scarcity? Do you think it just morphs and just changes, or do you think there's -- is it a highly bloody transition; I worry about that?
Jeff Booth: Yeah, so I've thought about this a lot. As one system is getting more and more chaotic, it's going to want to drag people into that system and fight. And as one system goes the other way, it's going to -- labels matter, and labels are a way that we say, "That person's okay and that person's not okay" and then we make more and more labels and we define ourselves by labels. So again, I don't know one person that I'm friends with, and I have lots of friends, that I agree with on everything. And the disagreement, the free market of ideas, is actually what makes us stronger.
Peter McCormack: Well, we spoke about this last night.
Jeff Booth: Yet, somebody can label you and say, "That's that bitcoiner anti-climate guy", and they want to label you into this bucket without understanding everything about you, because it's easier to define you and polarise.
Peter McCormack: And sometimes, not just label you, but block you, shout at you, insult you, coerce you into trying to share their beliefs.
Jeff Booth: And you'll do the same to other people.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jeff Booth: And that's actually really important. We think it's everybody else doing it to us, and you'll do the exact same to other people.
Peter McCormack: But I'm consciously aware of it and I fight against it.
Jeff Booth: But that's actually why this is so important. In a system that's breaking down that we know structurally has to break down and get worse and worse and worse, we're really liable to create us-versus-them narratives everywhere and defend our piece. And most likely, as we do that, we push people further and further away from the truth. Why do we do it? Really, why do we do it? Bitcoin's an idea, I can stand completely behind the idea and its truth and talk about every single relation of that, and if somebody says, "I have a better idea", okay, I'll hear it. I haven't seen it yet, but I'll hear it.
Peter McCormack: Ego.
Jeff Booth: But it's only ego, it's because we want to matter to the person who is coming at us, it's everyone else that we matter to. And so, we lose ourselves in this war of ideas by fighting that. Is it going to be ugly on the way through? It could be really ugly. Are some people going to see the ugliness? No, some people are going to be just totally fine, and in fact a whole bunch of people in Bitcoin are already fine, they're already starting to see it. I'm certain they don't want society to go through this upheaval, and some of them -- I just want more people to understand that it's a bridge to the other side, it's a way to transition from a system that cannot work, structurally, to a system that can, for where we're going, and I want more people to know that. But if somebody yells at me because of it, okay.
Peter McCormack: And getting muddy in that fight is actually a distraction from the time you could be spending on helping somebody find this bridge and cross this bridge.
Jeff Booth: I want to spend the most time with people I love, period. Every single company that I spend time with, that's what I think about. Can I make a difference? Do I love these people? Do I want to spend my time here; and can it make a difference in the world?
Peter McCormack: It's like what Saylor said, again to hark back to that, about focus.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, focus and spread positive messages.
Jeff Booth: And let the other stuff go, because the other stuff is just trying to get a reaction out of your ego.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. What's the book?
Jeff Booth: The Ego is The Enemy?
Peter McCormack: The Ego is The Enemy, yeah.
Jeff Booth: That's a good book.
Peter McCormack: It's a really good book. And it's really funny, this stuff affects you in different scenarios. I actually don't think I have an ego when I make the podcast. I mean, there'll be some, but I'll talk to anyone, I'll admit I'm wrong, I'll talk to people I disagree with and not usually I don't like, I won't bring someone on if I don't like them, but I'll disagree with them. I did a show with Marty Bent the other day, he told me a bunch of stuff and straight afterwards, I'm on my laptop, I'm researching and learning. Take me out of this environment, put me onto Twitter, I'm like, "Who the fuck are you? You're wrong!" Block! Which is a strange phenomenon.
Jeff Booth: And again, you define that, and you can define that in maybe this one thing, maybe this thing. It's actually kind of the positive in this. Our ideas matter, all of our ideas matter, and they touch other people in different ways, and that changes sometimes suddenly, sometimes it takes a long time and sometimes people never see that they could change themselves in a second and have a different outcome.
If they're happy in what they have, like one of the things that I think you do, what you just said about your podcast, bringing on diverse opinions and being able to talk through those, is probably why if you looked in a mirror on the rate of growth on your podcast and why, it's resonating to a whole bunch of people. So, if that's true, why do you care about anything else? Or, if it is about -- because what ends up happening is, when somebody questions something you do, you make yourself the message. I'm not saying you.
Peter McCormack: But I do.
Jeff Booth: But again, you turn into the message. Bitcoin isn't me. I care about it a lot because I love the idea and I love where it takes humanity, but it's an idea. And I have lots of friends, the majority of friends, who still don't really get it. I can't believe it, but they're still my friends.
Peter McCormack: This, "What would Jeff do?" is --
Danny Knowles: You need to get it on a bracelet!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, get it on a bracelet, get it tattooed, just go like this, "Look at my wrist. What would Jeff do?"! Yeah, it's fascinating and it's like, when people say the thing, "We're still early", that becomes more apparent the further we go down this rabbit hole. You realise the profound effect that this technology, or idea, is going to have on so many people. And like you, I want to get that in front of as many people as possible, and help them learn and understand this, and I guess this is the best vehicle for it.
Jeff Booth: Yes, it's a great vehicle. But again, it's easy for us to become the message, and then when we become the message, when somebody questions the idea, they question us at the same time. That's what becomes the polarisation.
Danny Knowles: Do you think another reason for the polarisation is, I think most people in society, much wider than Bitcoin, see things breaking down and see there's a real issue. And then the solution to that issue is really different between, say polar opposites, MMT and people who are into Bitcoin. And do you think it's like, "If you question what I think is a salvation, then I'm going to fucking fight you"?
Jeff Booth: That's what I mean, they become embedded in the message instead of the idea, so let's just explore MMT and what that idea would take us to, without the insanity of the position, just explore it as an idea and just ask yourself, "Is that idea congruent with the free market and with all our ideas, or is it not?" and realise that the free market is us, it's our ideas. So, if there's something that has to stop that, then it comes at our expense. So, where does that go, how do you rectify that problem?
So, I can easily talk about all of these ideas without disdain for different people and everything else, and investigate them to their root cause. In fact, even if you looked at the World Economic Forum and what you'd hear in bitcoiners and everything else, imagine Klaus came up with this idea at the same time; imagine if he realised technology is deflationary and exponentially so? And through his organisation, imagine if he said, "Oh my God, this is going to leave a whole bunch of people out. We need to control them, we need to set up a whole narrative that effectively says this, 'People can't determine for themselves, so we're going to determine for them, and we're in this seat because we were the beneficiaries of inflated money in the beginning and we have the best ideas on how to control other people'".
Just take it on face value and say there could be an argument that says, if our system is moving to a deflationary one where we'll be happy and get nothing, who should control it? An idea might be, "Here's how we can make society work". But that idea done in a silo could never match the ideas of all humanity, it's one person's idea of how a world would look. So, it can't match the free market of ideas.
In fact, my idea, why I wrote the book, is a different idea than that idea, that puts the free market in charge. So now, we'll see throughout time which idea wins. I suspect where we're going, Bitcoin will win, but again, it's that idea.
Peter McCormack: And that idea is starting to win. Okay, do you think much about how it might fail, our idea?
Jeff Booth: I do, and probably why we spent a lot of time talking about how we can be manipulated, how we'll easily fight against people and we'll turn that narrative into -- even if you look at some of the fights within Bitcoin itself.
Peter McCormack: I don't see any of them!
Jeff Booth: But I actually don't get it, because the primary thing underlying it all is so important.
Peter McCormack: Well, this is my whole fight with Saifedean, it's kind of funny. It started back in, I think, 2019 maybe, where I made a comment on Twitter, quite aggressive, but I basically said, "People who disagree with climate change being caused by humans are idiots", so it's provocative.
Jeff Booth: That's provocative!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but go all the way back to the learning, you learn, one of things is learn how to communicate. Whereas this week, where he put out a tweet thread regarding climate change I disagree with, I actually wrote a response that was really considered, balanced, admitting what I don't know. That's a learning exercise. But he disagreed with me, shouted at me in my DMs and then blocked me.
I saw him in Vegas and I went up to him, and this is God's honest truth, I said to him, approached him, despite him blocking me and said, "Listen, we're on the same Bitcoin mission. Can we not have things we disagree with and still be friends?" because he can come out on the podcast and share his ideas, I can challenge his ideas, other people can listen to them, agree, disagree, and obviously he's chosen that's not the path he wants to go. But I think it's actually wrong.
In some ways, thinking about everything you've said today, people who block people with different ideas, it feels like a different form of control, whereas Bitcoin is allowing those ideas to flourish, allowing ideas to be built in this open way, and I think we've lost something by him and I being mortal enemies, because he's got things he's an expert on, he's got things he's potentially wrong on, and this is one of the biggest platforms. He can come on and those can get out to a wider group of people, and now we've lost that.
Jeff Booth: Yeah, and maybe you haven't over time, and both of you guys will make decisions. And what he does to you and what you do to him, again, his view of his world will have a feel of this world. I like Saife, I like you, I don't agree with everything you do, I don't agree with everything Saife does. I have my own world and if my world and everything around me is good for me, then great. I can't control everybody else. I can't control if somebody blocks me, I can't control what they say about me.
Peter McCormack: Does anybody block you?
Jeff Booth: Not very often.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was going to say. You're like the nicest guy in Bitcoin!
Jeff Booth: It's only because I realise I'm just as susceptible. My ego, it could really easily turn into, this matters because I need to matter in Bitcoin. I don't care. I don't care that I matter in Bitcoin, I care that truth, fair rules, I care that society moves in the right direction, and I care about that for my kids. It's a way bigger mission, it has nothing to do with me.
Peter McCormack: Back to the point, because I interrupted you, how do we fail, or how does this idea fail, outside the obvious of not enough people believe in the idea?
Jeff Booth: So, that's probably the only way that an idea fails. But what you have to think about is, and that ties into yours and Saife's thing, it is really easy to polarise an idea if there's a whole bunch of people who look like they're crazies promoting that idea, "Take down government, take down this". It still might not fail, but --
Peter McCormack: It doesn't help.
Jeff Booth: But it doesn't help, because it doesn't actually get more people to investigate, it gives more power to the existing force that, "You'd better be scared with Bitcoin, because this is what it will look like". And we just have to realise, people don't move from fear to more fear, they move from fear to hope. So, the more that path is hopeful to what it could look like, the more that journey is -- I've created a whole bunch of companies. All a company is is a whole bunch of people with a belief set that they want to create something different in the world, and that belief set is typically hopeful. If it wasn't, nobody would join the company.
If I think that through this lens and how many people -- how would it look like to you if you weren't in Bitcoin? If you were the person that was working three jobs to try to keep up, your house value is here, there, you don't own a house, your food price is going up, you can't afford gas, everything else, and certainly you don't have time to investigate the way I can investigate? You'd feel despair, you'd feel loss of hope. And if somebody came along to you and said, "We're going to give you more money versus these bitcoiners over here that are talking this completely different story that you couldn't even get to --"
Peter McCormack: And, "You probably can't afford it".
Jeff Booth: You can't afford it, you don't have the time to investigate, what would you believe? So, through that lens, you can actually totally understand all human nature through the world, and you can see what would you do in their position.
Peter McCormack: Well, then it comes to that point that the transition to Bitcoin as a standard will have collateral damage.
Jeff Booth: The collateral damage is already guaranteed. The collateral damage from the existing system collapse is guaranteed.
Peter McCormack: But there would be people, if we moved from a fiat system to a Bitcoin system, there will be people who will be part of the collateral damage, but they will see Bitcoin as the thing to blame, not the decisions and the reasons the fiat system collapsed, because they lost something within the fiat system and they haven't recovered it yet in the Bitcoin system.
Jeff Booth: Most likely, the people most hurt by the transition to the Bitcoin system will be the most wealthy.
Peter McCormack: Yes, I see that.
Jeff Booth: Because you can no longer, in that system, you will no longer be able to socialise losses at the expense of everybody else, and winning bets no matter what. So, those are the people that will be most hurt by this system. The people most helped will be the exact opposite end of that spectrum.
Peter McCormack: But I think that's on a macro level. On an individual level, individuals could be completely wiped out by the transition, a system they were even mildly happy with. They weren't the billionaires, they weren't the people benefiting from the manipulation of the system, but they had a certain life, or certain living within it, and in the transition they lose, because they haven't replaced their fiat system collateral with Bitcoin collateral; there's just natural collateral damage.
Jeff Booth: Yeah, and that's why I try to say, in just about all the podcasts, "If you're not on Bitcoin yet, get off zero, get a hard wallet, get it off an exchange and own some Bitcoin". It's really important.
Peter McCormack: Do you have any plans to write another book? I'm sure I've asked you this before.
Jeff Booth: Yeah, I don't think so, but almost never say never. I get asked all the time, I never wanted to write the first one.
Peter McCormack: That had a profound effect on your life.
Jeff Booth: It's been awesome. It's one of those things I thought would be completely different. I actually thought that when I wrote it, the system would come after me, and that I would be cancelled from a whole bunch of my boards, because you're going up against a system that is so profound in all of our lives, and we all measure the system from that system. So, I thought that, but I think I told you this before, I had to write it.
I remember talking to my wife and said, "You know the risk of this? The risk is we have nothing, but we'll be happy"! And it went completely the other way, and it's actually an interesting thing. And the amount that I've learned from that journey, from writing the book, the number of people I've met, all around the world, it's been remarkable, it's been such a fun ride.
Peter McCormack: I totally understand and feel exactly the same. And to be at the forefront of all this, it's --
Jeff Booth: I pinch myself. I pinch myself, in this type of transition that is this big that society has never been through one like this, that you're right in the middle of that transition, being able to talk about what that transition looks like, in the middle of the transition, being able to --
Peter McCormack: Speak to everyone else.
Jeff Booth: -- speaking to everyone around what it looks like. It's incredible.
Peter McCormack: And a new set of friends you get, because it's not just an interview. We go out and have dinner, we hang out, and we talk privately and it's fascinating.
Jeff Booth: If you like learning, there's nothing better.
Peter McCormack: It's been nothing like what I thought we would talk about, and it's been incredible. This is one of those interviews where there's at least two times where I've had my mind completely blown to the point of making me reconsider things. But one of the overall, on a personal level, my overall take from this is that the lens of decision-making, Danny, of things we do it's, is my decision good for Bitcoin? Then it's the right decision. It takes me out of it, then my ego isn't even relevant.
If I get in an argument on Twitter, is that good for Bitcoin or is it good for me? It doesn't matter if it's good for me, is it good for Bitcoin? No, absolutely not, to the point that Saifedean, if you're listening, which I doubt, if you want to come on the podcast and make friends, I'm more than happy to do it.
Jeff Booth: I hope you do, by the way.
Peter McCormack: Look, I'm British, I don't hold grudges. Some people have done awful things to me in my life and I've shook hands and said, "Yeah, let's have a beer and forget about it". Honestly, I don't hold grudges. I don't expect it will happen, but that's the same for anyone. Anyone who ever listens, if we've fallen out, or I've called you a dick, or whatever, drop me an email, happy to be friends, happy to unblock.
Danny Knowles: You're going to get a lot of emails!
Peter McCormack: Well, I am, because in the end, it doesn't really matter. It just has to be acceptance. I may see the world differently, or learn at a different pace, or I have to fully explore and idea before I'm there. There's a lot to this, but in the end it's like, the world you've painted to me that we can get to, that bridge we cross, I'm blessed to be part of that; and if I can contribute to that in any meaningful way, which I think I can do, then I want to be part of that. That's way bigger than any personal goal I may have.
When you get to the end of your life, I'm an old man with grandkids, I'm looking back, I think, "I helped this. In my tiny, little way, I helped this", and everything you've said today is one of those -- this is a two-hour conversation which I'm not going to forget and is going to have a profound effective on me. So, I think you for it and I thank you for your friendship, Jeff, because also secretly, you don't even know this, I was having a rough time once, Jeff got in touch with me and told me, "Don't worry about it, we love you".
Danny Knowles: Nice. I must have not answered my phone that day!
Peter McCormack: Danny was asleep, Australia time! So, thank you so much for everything you've done, and for this, Jeff. I appreciate you immensely.
Jeff Booth: Way back at you. That bridge idea, we are all nodes, we are all building a wider bridge to where we want to go, somewhere people can walk across it. And every single interaction, every single thing you do matters, whether it tears the bridge down, whether it builds the bridge stronger. If you realise that the entire world is made up of our ideas and we live in that world, it's kind of a profound thought, that wouldn't you want to live in a world where it worked on fair rules?
Peter McCormack: Of course. Jeff, tell people about your book if they've not heard it. If you're some moron who's not heard about Jeff's book yet, for some reason you've been living under a rock, tell them where to find your book, where to find you.
Jeff Booth: Just Amazon, The Price of Tomorrow and me, just best on Twitter, @JeffBooth.
Peter McCormack: The Price of Tomorrow, quite interestingly, I could use that title as an argument against those who want to burn fossil fuels now, but that's a whole conversation for another day. Take that one, Saifedean. Right, thank you so much, let's go and get a drink.
Jeff Booth: Awesome.
Peter McCormack: All right, buddy.
Jeff Booth: Thanks.
