Jeff Booth: Money Is Theft and the Debt Can't Be Repaid

What would that racket look like if, if all of money was theft? And you, but you were believed it was democracy. You believe one side or the other was, was different. It's all the same club, and you're not in it.

If you zoomed out, the global debt is three hundred and sixty-five trillion, and the global debt of three hundred and sixty-five trillion, you, you believe that the debt is money.

Do the math on how many years it would take to pay back at a dollar a second, and it's millions and millions and millions of years. It's insolvent. That means everything tethered to it, all of your asset prices

are only solvent if that thing's solvent, which it clearly isn't. There's going to be swarms of billions of agents that are gonna create things we can't even imagine, working all the time for free.

Like, I can spin that up on my computer right now. Our intelligence, the thing we were the best at, is now being replaced by machines and, and, and power.

All of the frontier labs to try to f- keep you in fear that AI is gonna kill you. Do you think there's a chance that these frontier labs might not survive the battle- Yes... against open source? Yeah.

I, I think that's exactly what happens. Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights, today with Jeff Booth. Jeff, welcome back to the show. Uh, thanks for having me, Marc. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, it's great to have you on, Jeff. Inflation just came on hotter than expected. Right. The Fed is raising rates and the 10-year Treasury yield is back above five. You say that none of that changes where we're headed.

Technology makes everything cheaper, and only Bitcoin lets you keep the gains. You also wrote the defining book on why technology breaks the debt-based money system.

It's called The Price of Tomorrow, and you run Ego Death Capital, and you sit on the board of Core Scientific, and you just co-founded Orange Juice to buy real businesses with a Bitcoin treasury.

Jeff, excited to talk about lots of different topics today, and the first thing I wanna start is actually what's happening right now in the markets.

And what I see in the markets is money getting more expensive almost everywhere at once.

The Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England, and soon the Bank of Japan will all raise rates, and the last time that happened was twenty twenty-two, and it w- was a really bad year for crypto.

And then on top of that, you have oil that's above hundred dollars, and you see US borrowing costs increasing. What is actually happening here, and how do you make sense o- of all of that?

I think this is the most easy thing to see in the world, and that's why I, that's why I, I, I, I almost smile every time people say the, the same thing you do.

Every time you're talking about a, a debt-based monetary system that must lend more money to stay solvent,

you, you reali- and that, and, and because the money is actually already gone, if you allowed deflation, if you allowed prices to fall, productivity gains to flow to people from the system I just described,

all of the money would disappear because, because the debt would be insolvent. So the faster productivity gains happen,

the faster that debt can't be repaid, the faster it goes insolvent, the more money printing that's needed to pretend it's solvent to drive inflation.

And all of your questions and all of the world's questions are from the debt-based system because they've never seen money that was outside of that.

They've always had to store their a- store, store-- They've had to collect assets tethered to the debt-based system because they couldn't store money in money. Right?

In other words, they had to try to figure out where to store their wealth because they couldn't store money in money, and that it gets worse and worse and worse as the debt and the underlying structure of everything breaks because it's already insolvent.

It can't be repaid. So the only solvency is, that is possible is from a knowing that your money needs to be ba- de-based faster and faster and faster. And what does that do?

That centralizes everything into very few rulers that control everything you do. And all of your questions just started from why is this happening, right? From that system.

Of course, it's happening from that system and, and all of the measurement that everybody's measuring is from the same system because they don't-- they've never known anything different. Now ask a different question.

Completely different question. Pre-pretend you never lived in that world, your actions weren't emergent from that world, and you asked a completely different question.

You had this other thing, forget, we'll call it Bitcoin for now. You had this other thing that was decentralized and secure, and it couldn't break, and it was twenty-one million units.

And, and it w- and it was money, right? 'Cause you could move it around anywhere in the world. It was money. Now pe- a lot of people would call it an asset from the other system, but it was money,

and you couldn't make more of the units than twenty-one million. What would it be pricing if you didn't have your baggage from the other system? It would be pricing the first free market that ever existed.

Prices would fall relative to it, and it would be really confusing, right? Because, because in moments in time, let's use the AI boom, right?

All of the-- Most of the money, because prices fall under the marginal cost of production in AI, most of the debt that's gone into the AI thing to build the data centers and everything else is already insolvent.

I run a model on my computer that four months ago was the best frontier model, and, and I don't-- it doesn't use anything. It's local. I can, uh, I can-- I don't need the internet for it. It's on my computer.

So in other words, the payback for the debt that's into the data centers and everything else needs to be paid back in four months. But, but the payback is 15 years.

So, so there's a whole bunch of people into this trade because AI is gonna change the world. That, that is a productivity trade whi- which means prices fall faster, meaning the debt can't be repaid.

And those people think the money's still money, but it's gone, right? And they have, they haven't marked it to market, and this includes banks, this includes entire infrastructure, this includes everybody in that system.

It's only solvent if you print way more money. So at the same time, what would happen in Bitcoin is it would appear to go down or face pressures because people who held it, it's the only thing they can sell.

They can't sell their hedge fund, they can't sell the private equity position in the hedge fund. Redemptions have stopped. Their house is underwater. The, the AI trade is underwater, everything.

So, so the money that they think they have is already gone, right? And they're waiting while they still need to pay things to, to... for the government to print way more money to rebase the trade.

So, so this would be really confusing if you were measuring from the system that's debasing you.

Very, very interesting, Jeff, and I know we talked about this last time in our show, and I will wanna go much deeper today as well.

Uh, one question that I have when I listen to you is, and, and probably a lot of people have, is isn't that more intuitive what's happening right now?

The US government has almost an unbearable amount of debt by now, and the easiest way is just print more money, inflate that debt until that debt is much smaller than it was before.

Wouldn't that be a, a logical next step? Yeah. And the question is when, right? So, so but first, what happens is the, is, is, is, is everybody knows that that has to happen.

So they, they want higher rates of in- of interest because they know that they're gonna be debased in real terms. So they're asking for higher rates of interest.

And as that, the, the US dollar actually gets stronger because everybody wants US dollars all around the world. So other countries start breaking because they need the US dollar, and they turn into a deflationary spiral.

And they're, uh, and, and, and they're, they're short on US dollars.

So US dollar gets stronger through the, through this process as this ca- as everybody's looking to try to protect their money in the thing that eventually has to be debased. But the other currencies are just as bad.

Because when you, when people zoom into their own market and they see $40, $40 trillion of debt, if you zoomed out, the global debt is $365 trillion.

And the global debt of $365 trillion, you, you believe that the debt is money. So you believe it's solvent, $365 trillion.

Do the math on how many years it would take to pay back at a dollar a second, and it's millions and millions and millions of years. It's insolvent. That means everything tethered to it. All of your asset prices

are only solvent if that thing's solvent, which it clearly isn't. And the... So how would you get out of that? You have to debase the currencies at a staggering rate. You have to drive massive inflation.

You have to reset the, the currencies.

Which, and as, as you do that, you centralize assets in very few hands, and you cause the world to break, and people, people divide and turn against each other because you're picking the pocket of, of, of populations everywhere.

And so now you go into this control system that who gets to, who gets to decide how much money is stolen from you, and do you have a vote in it? Right?

And it starts to break a whole bunch of beliefs you formerly had that are formed by how you think the economy works from a debt-based system that has to look like that. It's mathematically...

It's, it's mathematically certain. It's just when, what time, what everything else. And so I find it so crazy that people could just move their time into Bitcoin. They just move

and be protected from it all, and they could see the first free market ever exist, and they could be part of it. They could emerge into it, and very few people will move.

They'll just continue listening to other people spout out about where they should put their money and savings and everything else and what, what, what the Fed chair should do or what this interest rate's gonna be today, what Japan did.

And they're inside the chaos, seeing more chaos from their point, from their view of money as credit, and it needs to expand forever. Yeah. Makes sense.

Uh, I think something else that people would think about is, let's say they understand the first step. We have a system that has expanding money supply. Bitcoin is finite. 21 million Bitcoins exist.

You can't expand that supply. It's scarce. It's different than the debt-based system that we have today. But what if our economy is expanding?

What if governments need to print money because they need to pay for pensions, healthcare, or defense? So keep going on those questions. So, so what if governments need to print money? Do you have a vote in how much? No.

So, so then what you're saying is, is I'm electing somebody to steal money from me behind my back to pay for healthcare because they, they would... they're not telling me the truth.

What do you think you would get in politics if you, if everyone believed that that was okay, right? So the, the... it's okay for you to steal money from me without my knowledge.

What would you get in, in, at the, at the top of that financial system if the, if the best minds knew the whole thing was a- against cheating, right? Where would the best minds go?

They would go into the arbitrages of the cheating. They would get in and, and they'd figure out how to, to, to cheat the system more from the top of the system.

And you would drive all trades, everything in that sys-- And it would get, and it would decay more and more, and society would decay more and more as that, as that happened.

And so from that view, like, I, I guess, sorry, I'm not trying to pick on you because this is a predominant view. Right. So if you have it, another... lots of others have it. Why?

Like, how, how do, how do you actually believe that that's okay, that somebody can steal money from you without your knowledge? And, and what would, what would the emergent society look like if that was okay?

By the way, it's okay if that's what everyone believes. But where does money come from? It comes from you. It comes from hiding it, hiding theft from you. It doesn't come magically. It comes from theft, complete theft.

So you, uh, what would, what, what, what would that racket look like if, if all of money was theft and you, but you believed it was democracy? You believe one side or the other was, was different.

It's all the same club, and you're not in it. So let's look for an asset that's finite, that's scarce. Bitcoin might be one of that. What about gold? Why shouldn't I just buy gold instead of Bitcoin?

So that's a really good, really good question, and you could. There's a actually a chance that the, the US revalues to gold. That revaluation to reduce the debt size might take gold up to $22,000 an ounce.

But gold, what, what happens is because you can't move gold as money, because you can't carry big bricks on a plane under your, in your, under your jacket, um, you centralize gold and you build a debt-based system on top of it.

And then people forget the gold because it gets centralized, and then people cheat on top of that debt-based system. That's what happened in... And, and how does that happen?

The government comes and steals the gold back, like in 1933. You can't hold gold. We'll put you in jail. And then, then they revalue it once they have enough of it.

Or in 1971, when everybody-- when currencies were supposed to be pegged to gold and they started... The US couldn't pay its debt. We're gonna change the rules on gold, and we're gonna see...

and, and, and, and, and reprice gold. And so that same thing could happen. And, and what ends up happening is because it's centralized, the rules change. And, and there's a deeper question there, right?

There's a deeper question to what you, you said when you said asset. Have you ever thought about why you need an asset? Have you really deeply thought about it? And I'd love to hear your thoughts. To protect my wealth.

Why? Because... [chuckles] Because you can't store money in... Exactly.

Because you, because you, be- be- because you, because the financial system's rigged against you, so you're chasing assets within the financial system, all tethered to the same financial system to protect the wealth that you know you're living in a lie.

And, and, and all of the assets are tethered to the same lie, all because you can't store your money in money.

And then from that lie, you're hearing, "Hold them here, hold them here, hold them here, hold them here," and everything's getting more and confusing because the entire thing is a lie.

You can store your money in money, in Bitcoin. That's the difference. It's money that you can port around in your head. You can hold it in your head. You, nobody can... Y- y- you, you are decentralized, secure.

You're a part of the network, and it is not an asset. Now, people will have you believe that it's an asset within the system. Why will they have you believe that?

So you can trade against it and everything else and, and stable coins will come on top of it and a whole bunch of financial engineering will happen trying to make you believe it's an asset within the system. Why?

Because then you'll drop self-custody. You'll use it within the walls of the system, and it'll centralize. It's money. There's two... If, if it's centralized, it would look no different than gold.

It will be cheated on top. It will be repriced. Rules will change if it's centralized. It won't centralize. Why won't it centralize? Because the conversation we're having right now. Because as you know

that you have agency, takes a lot, a lot of time for people to realize that they have agency in the world they create. It's not created for them.

They, they're giving away their agency in this other system and believing other people in this broken nonsense.

As they realize they have agency, as you realize you have agency, and the reason you collected assets is tethered to the other system is because you didn't know better. But once you do,

you can move your time and energy outside of that system and start building into the new system, and it's really easy. Everything gets easier because you're living in an honest system.

You're part of the honest system expanding, and you're telling more people. That's all we're doing right now.

So once you know, once that information is in your, your head and you know you can escape, and you can help others escape, more people escape. Mm-hmm.

Uh, Jeff, are there assets beyond Bitcoin that you're looking at that you think are interesting? None. Because, because if you had money-- If you had something that w- money was s-super...

Or money would be superordinate to all assets because it prices the free market. And so it, it price, it...

If you could store money in money and it was decentralized and secure and it stayed that way, it would be the highest thing against everything else.

Now, I'm not saying that there wouldn't be other opportunities that moved in shorter time, uh, time intervals and everything else.

But over the long term, that would be the thing that would be superordinate to everything else. Mm-hmm. It's pricing everything. It's pricing the deflationary- Yeah. It's, it's pricing the...

It's, it's, it's from hard money that can't be, uh, uh, cheated. It's pricing the deflationary abundance that should be coming to us, and it is coming to you if you're in Bitcoin. Mm-hmm.

And then you would also say it doesn't make sense to price Bitcoin in US dollars, right? It, it makes no sense. It-- So, so, so, so let's go, just go back to make that real.

For your audience, look up the US dollar rate of Bitcoin today. I think people do every day. What is it? Eighty thousand, eighty-two thousand, whatever it i- is.

And, and then- Go and look at it in Venezuelan dollars or Turkish lira and see what it is there, and it'll be millions, maybe billions, right?

But, but, but maybe hundreds of millions for sa-same t- for, for same, same unit.

And, and your, your head will go to, "Yeah, but those Turkish people, they don't understand how much inflation and how much money there is manipulated, ma-manipulating."

And then you'll go right back to measuring the same thing in your dollars that you know is, are being manipulated, which is crazy. Which is crazy. But, but people will do that.

The, it, it, and, and even your questions started, and they always do. This is just so normal because this thing is outside the system. All of the questions are inside the system,

trying to, trying to make sense of this thing that was out, is outside the system. Jeff, I wanna go back to what you mentioned at the beginning.

You talked about AI, and you talk about the frontier labs training their models with infrastructure that has a payback period of 15 years, but they need to pay it back in four months. Can you expand on that?

What is happening in AI infrastructure right now? A-a-and maybe where do you see the opportunities, but also where do you see those signals that this might not work out?

Yeah, this is-- I could do a-- we could do an entire podcast here about it just 'cause the, the, this is ri- part of my thesis. This is part of-- I'm v-very deep on AI ev-everywhere.

I run a self-learning model harness that's kind of learning at the rate because I can't keep up to the rate, and it's constantly moving, it, essentially the best model to my local computer that my local computer can run and then, and picking and choosing.

So but then also I'm on the board of Core Scientific, and I'm on the, on, on, on, on some of these big infrastructure companies. And so what would you do if you knew what I knew there? You would have a counterparty

that w-you knew would be in business 15 years from now if you were gonna sign a contract that was 15-year payback, right? You'd, you'd sign co-count, uh, so Core Scientific signed a...

We had lots of choices with other, with other people in the middle, the old clouds and such in the middle, that you knew would go bankrupt because they're playing this game all on revenue, but massive losses.

You knew that, that it just can't go on. So it's s-sus- they would consolidate. And so we try to put ourselves into a spot that we w- we would be one of the consolidators rather than the c- people consolidated by.

So we signed a contract with AMD, right?

A fift- uh, uh, it w- pretty obvious AMD is gonna be in, in business, and there's gonna be w-winners just like there were winn-winners in the, i-in the railroad build-out that was, it was also hype.

There were winners in the, in, in the '99 fiber build-out that was hype, but there was also this massive overbuild and a, and a, and a breakdown, is the AI is not going anywhere.

It's just prices in a free market fall to the marginal cost of production. And I've said this on thousands of podcasts. [chuckles] Marginal cost of production of a line of code creating other lines of code is zero.

So you can expect this ex-exponential change to drive price declines, and you can also expect from the other system, the, the, all of the frontier labs to try to f- keep you in fear the AI is gonna kill you

because they need to regulation to protect, to protect a monopoly, to protect... So, so people think regulation is for them. Regulation is always serves a monopoly. There would be no monopoly without regulation.

So they-- so what ends up happening i-is the, you get a bunch of companies together and you say, you s- you drive fear into the market.

Then the governments come, and then the, the fear drives people to vote for the government who says, "Okay, we'll regulate this and create barriers and everything else."

And the barriers allow those companies to extract margins that otherwise wouldn't be there. So it, so and then you'd have to ask, well, if it con- it's controlled and it's extracting from you, who controls the models?

And, and underneath this, uh, and I can tell you this for sure because I've done so many test, tests with different models.

The frontier labs, when we were trying to find bugs in, let's say, some of the Bitcoin's adjacent things, so wallets and everything else, the, the frontier labs couldn't find them.

In other w-- And, and when you tried, when you pushed really hard, they were guardrailed for your protection. But the open models from China, Kimi 3 and such, found all the bugs. So what does that say, right?

So that means the frontier labs are actually you-- there's a bunch of backdoors and things that you're believing, that you don't know they're the backdoors because you're listening to one model tell you what it looks like.

And what would the world look like if it was con- if, if it was a control system like that and everything you believed was from, from that? Well, pretty dystopian.

So th-this is connected, uh, to so many things because it's all through broken money that allows it. And so, uh, so what would you do if you're China?

I'm not saying this is good or bad, but what would you do if all the money was in the US labs and, and there was this-- they were moving further and further ahead? In China, you would open source it all

and remove the money, right? Because if you didn't, the other, the other, the-- everyone else would, you, you would have a, this dystopian world where one country would win it all. But, but...

And so a different way of looking at forget China because people will be b- kind of one side or the other, US or China, is the world we live in is so polarized. Would you want US or China?

Would you want anyone controlling you totally? And so the free market is battling into us, [chuckles] right?

And it's, and it's constantly, it's constantly evolving to be able to give us more value, and Bitcoin's pricing the whole thing.

And outside of that, you're inside the control system trying to control you to make you believe X or Y or, or this, or this lab's bad, this lab's good, and everything, uh, else. You, we need to regulate AI to save us.

How could AI hurt, [chuckles]

how, how could AI hurt us i-if, if, if everything was prices falling and, and all the productivity gains were fl- uh, were, were-- it was just a technology that drove the productivity gains to us?

It could only hurt us if it was controlled. Uh, a-a-agree, Jeff.

And, um, a follow-up question on that is, when you look at these frontier labs with their payback period for the frontier models, which get shorter and shorter,

do you think there's a chance that these frontier labs might not survive the battle- Yes... against open source? Yeah. I, I, I think that's exactly what happens.

I think the, there's this hype cycle that, that people see growth rates. They don't see-- They, they... In the, in the old model of the internet, because you could capture a network effect.

If you have it, you could pile tons of money into Amazon or Google and such, capture a network effect, and then you could extract rents forever. And people are using that model

on something that will look more like electricity. So they're, they're, they're pricing, "When I get this big, I can keep everybody out." That's why the regulation too, right? Everyone will use my model forever.

But, but the, th-the world works kind of this, and you could go back in time and see, see what, what's happening. This world works, we as humans, we have two choices when we face scarcity: control or innovation.

And both happen at the same time. But, but the control or, and this, this, the, the scarcity is the pricing signal, right? Because we charge more for scarcity.

You don't charge for the air you're breathing, and nobody can create a market for the air you're breathing because it's abundant.

And, and, and so if you kind of run the history of time of what people thought in the previous world, then what we did with the scarcity, like you-- we use sand to make the iPhone, right? The chips in the iPhone.

We turn sand into compute. It's wild, right? If you think about what we do as humans and, and so all of the abundance comes out of our brain solving scarcity

that we try to, in the free market, and we solve scarcity because the pricing signal allows us to create more value to be able to solve the scarcity. And the more control, the more scarcity, more, the more try, try...

more scarcity, more minds attack it. And so scarcity, while the control looks like it works in the short term, it always fails because we go around it with different ideas.

And so now go the long history of time, the long arc of time of, of us, and this is my paper folding analogy in, in my book.

Like, if you pu- fold a piece of paper once, twice, three times, four times, five times, if you could fold that piece of paper 50 times, it would reach from here to the sun.

And, and if you just hold up the piece of paper, then prior to 19-- 'cause I started the piece of paper folding in, when I, when I did the book in 1965, and we're on, we're now on fold 37.

So in the last six, seven years since I wrote my book, we've folded that piece of paper three ti- three or four times, and the folds are way steeper.

And why everything feels like it's coming at you faster and faster and faster is because now we're in this, the thick steps. Folds are really small in the beginning. Doesn't feel like anything happens for years.

It feels like a whole bunch of people overestimate what's gonna happen next and, and they fail in the free market. And then the folds get thicker, and we underestimate how fast it's happening by a staggering amount.

So if you just play what I just said, right now, most people that are looking at AI are so radically underestimating what's happening.

We just hired a, in Orange Juice, we just hired one of the head engineers, systems engineers from Nvidia.

So this, this, the space that we don't see, the space inside the frontier labs is reinventing itself every 11 days. 11 days, right? Mm.

So the, the edge of this frontier model is moving so fast that we can't, we can't even comprehend how fast that's happening. Now go back to that paper folding thing I, I said.

Prior to 1965, if you look at the thin edge of the paper before you fold it once, all of history,

all of the doubling, all of our capacity of standing on the shoulders of greater greats and then solving that problem, then standing on the shoulder of somebody else, electricity, solving, solving food scar-scarcity, right?

Solving all of these things, which used to take 90% of our population to farm to feed us a billion people. Now it takes 1%, right?

Because of the things that come out of our minds to pro- to solve scarcity, all from that control or innovation. More control, fast... And, and so the same thing is playing out right now at a, at a, at light speed.

And, and, and you could say the same thing in Bitcoin. So what would be the most scarce thing ever in a world that looked like that, that has always had broken money, that always, that always stole from you?

This most scarce thing ever would be a money that nobody could control.

And so for 20 years before Bitcoin, a whole bunch of failures, a whole bunch of trials and everything else, this was one, they all failed, the crypto-- the cypherpunks. And then Satoshi put together all of those things,

which would, would seem genius and, and, and now you have this thing that's outside that is, that it, that is superordinate to everything else.

So the same pla- the same play, if you look at that, that thing is happening in AI today, same thing is happening everywhere today.

But we're-- It's confusing because we're inside, most people are inside the control system, measuring the control system from the control system. Yeah, very fascinating.

If you look at the internet as a foundational technology and, and when it started, a lot of people thought this is gonna be the best open source, decentralized thing that the world has ever seen.

And then 20 years later, it's monopolized by five big platforms. Why do you think it played out like that for the internet, and why are you convinced that it'll play out differently for AI or for money?

So let's, let's start with, let's, let's start with money first and, and, and we have to know the risks in it too, right? So, so why... And then I'll go to why I'm con-convinced. So-

The internet that you're talking about was, was in 1989, right? And, and, and a whole bunch of decisions had already been made.

There was a socket in the original internet that, that money was going to be included in it, and it was disregarded. So there was a whole bunch of decisions before you knew the internet that broken money was part of it.

If you take the internet back to its roots, though, it was created by Paul Baran in 1965, and the kernel of the n-internet is it... Now it's called TCP/IP.

Before, b-before it was effectively communications that couldn't be shut down even in a nuclear holocaust. You could take out edges, but you couldn't shut it down.

So you could have communications in a, in a nu-nuclear holocaust. That's why ARPANET first took it on and started to connect it. And as that connected, it got stronger and stronger because you couldn't take it down.

It was open. That's the kernel. And then as that developed through-- But it was useless for anything else, right? Nobody, nobody thought about the internet in 1969.

Nobody thought about what it could do and nobody was using-- Very few people were using it besides researchers and such. And then it came in layers, and as each layer came on top, it added more functionality.

And what you're talking about is the functionality created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 that, that created the World Wide Web. Now you could link to these things and, and all the community could tie into all these things.

You could open pages and see a, a world you never saw before, link to research. And even in 1989, how many people knew what the internet would be?

How many people knew that we would be doing this right now on this podcast, powered by the same infrastructure stack or the iPhone or anything else, or Facebook or,

or all of these companies would create entirely different business models that looked like that on top of it. So really important to understand the evolution that you believe. It goes way further back.

And the same thing from 1969 to, to-- As, as people understood or some of the big companies understood that, they were also trying to control the internet.

So there were IBMs of the world and, and, and other companies on... that no longer exist that said, "We're going to make our own internet." Right?

And there was OSI and a whole bunch of frameworks, government frameworks, that you're going to build this one, and this is the one we're gonna reuse because then we can control it.

And but what happened instead is open networks win because they have more innovation on them. So open networks win, and they emerge in la-in layers. And that same thing is happening right now with Bitcoin.

So at the very core, what you call Bitcoin today is like TCP/IP. It's open, decentralized, secure, can't be broken. And on top of the layers is moving privacy payments, whole bunch of other things.

And those, those things, Nostr, FIPS, I, I won't bore you with all of the details, but there's this, like, there's this really deep emergence thing that is a new internet bound by energy that can't be co-opted.

It's one version of reality that I'm part of, and because I'm part of it, I get to see everything, right? If you weren't part of it,

you would believe that you couldn't have privacy on top of Bitcoin because you were in this other sy-system of control trying to get you to believe something else.

You would believe that all of the, Bitcoin's bad for the environment. You'd believe the nonsense outside of this. You'd be-- You'd believe in a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies. You'd believe in stable coins.

You'd believe in all of these things because you wouldn't believe that this thing, this nugget, would emerge in layers and could do these things. So you'd c- And so which one of those wins

is a real-- Like, if we all spent, if we all spent all of our time measuring Bitcoin from the other system and it was a trade and everyone did that, it would be a trade and it would be captured and it would fail.

It would centralize and f- and fail. But if enough people know that they're part of something that's building something that can't be broken, more people move their time.

It builds something and you see, you, you see it emerge from the exact same free market principles I told you before everywhere else.

So it wouldn't appear like that to everyone because they're measuring it from a control system and, and then but it appears like that to me because I'm not.

And, and so we're investing in this space, and we're seeing, like, this crazy adoption rate really early. Now you ask why, why wouldn't it look like Amazon, Google, everything else?

It's because the network effects happen at the protocol level. They don't happen in the company level that's, that, that's capturing it through broken money. They happen at the protocol level.

And that protocol, if you own Bitcoin-- Essentially, if you own Bitcoin right now, you're, you own part of the new internet infrastructure and everything that's ever built on top of it.

All innovation, all AI, all everything else that ever lives on top of it. Will you hold it for that long? Likely not.

You'll likely sell it back to-- because you'll be pricing it in dollars, and when it's a million dollars, you'll sell back and say, "I'm rich now. I'm in the other system again."

But if you hold it and it keep, continues to evolve like I think it continues to evolve from the innovation in our minds, then, then you are holding a piece of all productivity in the world forever. So

Bitcoin, a piece of productivity forever. I wanna take a step back and, and look at what's gonna happen now in the future.

And, and I wanna look at this from a pol-political standpoint, but also from a technological standpoint. First, from political, you've said that debt cycles like this usually end in a war.

The US is fighting Iran and oil is at $106 or something. Where do you think that cycle goes from here, and how will this gonna end? It's so hard to predict.

It's so hard to predict in the short run because, because what drives both of these things is us. And, and I'd like you to really ca- hold that mark. But here's what-- here's why s-I say this. I wrote my book not for me.

I wrote my book for my kids because I knew we would-- I knew the systems were incompatible.

I realized I had always lived in the other system, and I didn't know the incompatibility, and the technology, the abundance created by technology would either create one of two outcomes, binary. We lived free,

agency, more, more communication, more, more... Prices fell faster and faster. Or binary, we lived in a complete control system, surveillance, bank accounts frozen, you get told what you do.

And I, and I decided I wanted my kids to live in the world I just said, the, the, the free market. I wanted the world to look like that. It is binary, right?

But I, even with that and, uh, my understanding of Bitcoin, for a long time, most of my time and energy was on boards and everything else outside of Bitcoin.

That's where I made my money, and I would move it to Bitcoin, right? Hold it as an, as an asset. And, and, and I woke up one night and with, like this massive hypocrisy.

I wrote the book on what was going to happen, and all of my energy was inside the other system, telling myself and speaking all over the world about Bitcoin,

and all of my energy was p-empowering the thing I was-- that, that I was trying to stop, making it stronger. Every time I used that dollar,

every time I, it, that was being stolen from me and everyone else, I was making the thing stronger. Every time, the voting on both sides, the anger, e-and everything else, it was just making the thing stronger.

And I chose to move my time. That's when we created Ego Death Capital. That's when we created...

And that-- And from moving my time, I got to see some of the innovations I'm talking about, some of the, this early days we were participating in from my time, my, my, my, my vo- most valuable thing.

We're all gonna die, [chuckles] right? My most va-valuable thing. I could put my time in the direction I wanted the world to move, and nobody could take that from me. My agency, I decide.

I didn't have to listen to anything anymore. I could just move, move my time.

And what I found is a lot of other people were moving their time too, and those people are some of the most brilliant people and beautiful people I know that started moving their time.

And as you see that expand, everything got, was getting easier. And so now I'm in this, this, this spot.

I can't know for sure when, what this looks like from the other system because it's, it's more and more chaos getting fa- a bit worse and worse by stealing your time. But I know this for sure, you're still in it, right?

Because I-- And I, and, and I'm not saying it, that as a judge or anything else.

I know how hard it is because I was still in it even after writing the book on this and, and, and doing this, and I was still in it, saying what other people should do while I was giving it, it my energy.

And, and that, that changed. People make the change whenever they're ready to, but that change completely freed me.

A-and then, uh, on the AI side, Jeff, you also mentioned before most people don't understand what's yet to come. What is yet to come? What do you see? What do you think is gonna happen over the next couple of years?

Well, so, so even, even right now, not next couple of years, there's going to be swarms of billions of agents in the thing that are gonna create things we can't even imagine, working all the time for free.

Like, I can spin that up on my computer right now. Maybe use a frontier model for v-very small of a coordinator agent and then spin up a wh- like millions of agents. And so that's happening right now.

And so that productivity and the gains that we couldn't see is going to hit healthcare, it's gonna hi-hit material science, it's gonna hit math, it's gonna hit physics, it's gonna hit these things, and we're going to learn things that are, like, miracles from our perception today

that were right before our eyes. And it's going to hap- and so it's gonna happen faster and faster and faster. And that thing is, is... So our intelligence, the thing we were the best at,

is now being replaced by machines and, and, and power. Now, you take that so that, that, that... Now, the cycle takes time because all employees aren't gone tomorrow, and it takes time and...

But industry after industry after industry, you have to ask yourself this: If somebody has 100 employees delivering something and somebody has no employees and is, is delivering the same thing, which one will you use?

And you're us- gonna use the one that costs less. So you're part of the system that's driving the system. You're gonna always default.

So that means if, if a company doesn't get more efficient and deliver you more value, you won't use it anymore. So there's, there's nobody to blame but us choosing in a free market, right? There's no government to blame.

There's no... We're choosing. We're choosing to create more value and to use more value, period. And that value is going to explode at such a rate and from, from one, from one system.

Then it's gonna merge into robot-robots. Not the robots just that you see.

Tiny micro robots, all different swarms of different, uh, diff-different robots, and it's going to have that intelligence in every single one of them, doing different tasks that...

And, and so we will not have to do the same labor at work to produce abundance. It now go mo-move faster and faster and faster. There will be another system trying to control you at that rate,

believing you're not enough. Th-that's, uh, and it's going to get really confusing, believe-- telling you that it's this person, it's this person, your fault, and you're going to want to feed that

because you've never seen your agency that you have. Right? And so, so how fast this is going to happen is going to Break people's, break people's brains 'cause it's happening at su- at such rate.

And, and that does-- and when I say break people's brains, that includes every single politician,

person that you, you believe is great today and what they're controlling the world, all of the media empires, everything else, it's going to do the same thing there.

Every single-- We're just pe- we're just people making decisions on incentives,

and the incentives in the other system are completely broken, so you could expect people to make bad decisions on top of those in- incentives. Incentives on Bitcoin is just, it's the first free market that ever existed.

If you get out of the other market and spend more time in it, you'll start to see that clearly. Mm-hmm.

H-how do you think people like you and me and, and everyone else, we as individuals, prepare best for a future like that? We're doing it right now. This is gonna happen. It's not...

Somebody said to me the other day, uh, and it was just beautiful. What I'm saying isn't hard. It's so easy.

The, the problem is beli- so believing what I'm saying is hard because it has to go through all your wiring of your old belief systems, and you have to ch- uh, change that.

So it-- we move slowly as, as our belief systems c- come up against a new reality. This is the new reality, for sure,

and, and, but people are welcome to believe whatever they want out of the other re- reality, and it'll feed back to them that, that case. So we don't change very fast, and we need to change. We need to be really curious.

We need to be really adaptable. We need to understand, um, going back to this, I, I ask my simple qu- a, a simple question to know, right? Almost an if this, then this.

If the world w- was being described the way that I describe it, would it show up the way I'm describing it everywhere from both systems? And then I can make a judgment call, am I in the right one, right?

Am I in-- am I participating in the right one? And, and, and it-- so if you're, if you're looking at the world through broken money or money that needs to be stolen from you, you can see all the next steps.

You can't see exact timing of the next steps, but you can see all the next steps. And if you're looking through the world through honest money, you can see all the next steps, too.

Uh, when it comes to AI, I, I understand what you're saying. We also run a big part now of our company on AI and different models and agents and, and, and all of that.

What's the best way for people to start with open source AI? So they could ha- they could literally create this. They-- you could create a model. So use Claude to create it.

Cr- where, just ask Claude to create it on your computer, right?

And, and then a- ask, ask Kimi 3 or a different model to audit it, and then, and do some adversarial testing on other, other models, and you'll be able to create the best instance for open source, best models on your computer.

You don't need the internet, right?

So internet goes out, you lose power, you're on a plane, uh, doesn't have internet connection, you'll still have all, all your models, and those will get better and better over time too.

Uh, there'll be-- and, and so free, open source and works. And then from there, so I would start there. Those, some of those models aren't quite as powerful as the frontier ones are right now.

And then you can ask the same thing to build you through OpenRouter and d- but if you ask the AI to build this, then it'll build you the, a system or harness or, or different things.

And you can research them in a whole bunch of different ways, see what other people are using, and keep iterating against it. But it'll build you all of this,

and then you audit it with a different model, and then you audit it, and then you start using... In my, in mine,

because of the data, data and everything else, I've, I've integrated Tinfoil, um, which, which hides, which encrypts my data to the frontier models. Um, but most people aren't.

They're kind of giving all of their data away to-- They have a Claude plan. That's all they have, and they're trusting the Claude plan for everything they do, and I wouldn't do that.

I wouldn't, I, I absolutely wouldn't do that. You can see different answers from different models, and you can see vulnerabilities in all the models. Very fascinating, Jeff. Uh, we're almost at the end of the show.

Last question. Will the US dollar be the world's reserve currency in two thousand forty? I don't, I don't know.

Two thousand forty, it still might be, it still might be, but, uh, it won't be, it won't be my reserve currency. Okay. [laughs] Great ending. Jeff, it's always a delight to have you on the show. It's so fascinating.

And of course, if you wanna learn more about Jeff's thinking, read his book, The Price of Tomorrow. We'll link it in the show notes, and, uh, thank you for your time.

Marc, one, one thing I'd like to do too is I'm gonna send you, um, I'm gonna send you a, a, a, a wallet address to something called Morpheus, and you can-- if you put it, that in the, the show notes too.

It's, uh, it's through-- people should download Fedi first, F-E-D-I. Make sure it's the right one in the app store and they're not scammed. But, but it's private communications, private money on top of Bitcoin.

And, and I'll invite people. So if people wanna do that, they can, they can add that into that if they wanted to fund it to you.

And, and, and, and the w-- I, I, I, we don't have time to go into how it works, but you're starting to see this emergence of completely private money, private communications that you need

inside a world of surveillance, right? And it, it's, it, it, it would be wise to start understanding these things before it's too late. [upbeat music] Amazing.

We'll definitely link it in the show notes and, and, uh, show people how to do that. Yes. This is great. Cool. All right. Thank you, Jeff, and all the best. Thank you. Thanks, Marc.

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