I Spent 15,000 Hours Trying to KILL Bitcoin. Here’s What I Learned | Jeff Booth

**Scott Melker** (0:00)
What if almost everything we've been taught about money, inflation and economic growth is built on a system that fundamentally cannot survive?
I've read Jeff Booth's book, The Price Of Tomorrow, More Times Than I Can Count. And few books have had a bigger impact on how I think about Bitcoin, money and the system we live in. Every time Jeff and I talk, I walk away questioning something I thought I understood. Today, we dig into why our financial system is fundamentally broken.

**Jeff Booth** (0:25)
Global debt can't be repaired. It's impossible. All of the things from that system get worse and worse and worse. And there is no resolve.

**Scott Melker** (0:33)
How AI could accelerate that breaking point.

**Jeff Booth** (0:35)
They're measuring AI moving exponentially. The rate of centralization and manipulation in society has to be the inverse of that exponential, because the credit based system would fail if you allowed the productivity gains.

**Scott Melker** (0:48)
Why Bitcoin may be the foundation of the first true free market and what the transition to that world could actually look like.

**Jeff Booth** (0:55)
The credit based system where money is lent into existence is a zero sum game. Somebody has to lose for you to win. The free market, the one that's backed by Bitcoin is an infinite game. Everybody wins and you have to create value for somebody else to win. They cannot coexist. They can coexist for a short term.

**Scott Melker** (1:11)
This is one of those conversations that may change the way you see money and the world. Let's go.
What do you believe today that maybe you didn't believe last time we spoke?

**Jeff Booth** (1:38)
I think it's the exact same framework I laid out 7 years, 6 or 7 years ago. And so, I don't know if my beliefs and the overall thing have changed. By the way, thank you for sending kind of, that you read my book 5 times and went down the rabbit hole and you re-emailed, somebody sent it to me.
But I think it's just, what I've recognized is what I am talking about is so hard to grasp in us, that it's us changing, that is the change in society. And we don't want to change. And so we want to believe it's somebody else's fault, somebody else's, there's that great group of people that is against us. And we can't see it's actually us.

**Scott Melker** (2:28)
Is that frustrating to you?
I mean, you're screaming from the mountaintops. I think that the lessons become glaringly obvious as you see what the government does on a month to month, year to year basis. It seems like it should be an easier sales pitch at this point.

**Jeff Booth** (2:44)
But again, just really simply, if you just said it's your actions or it's this person, people will always pick somebody else. That's it. It's so trapped in our identity that we give our agency and control to somebody else that we don't see it's actually us. Now I know for people that don't know my thesis or what you talk about now and everything else, just look at it in you, right? Think about some of the conversations I've had quietly with you. After you've read my book many times and you were still largely on the other side and I watched you change over time. It wasn't because of me, it was because of you, right?
But it wasn't fighting the world and everything else. And you started to change and you started to see what this looks like from a spot. And the same thing happened to me. The same thing, I was over here, I didn't realize it was me the whole time. And that move was the thing that kind of set me free. It doesn't matter what other people do, they can do whatever they want to do.
I know that this system will create that structure, and where most people get caught into that system. But I can choose differently with my own actions.

**Scott Melker** (4:06)
Okay, so let's, I don't want to take for granted that every single person watching has watched our conversations in the past, so maybe we should at least lay the TLDR framework for exactly what we're talking about and what those actions are.

**Jeff Booth** (4:18)
So at the top level of the framework is, the natural state of the free market is deflation. Now if you've measured and been in a system that has always been the opposite, what I just said there will push back again, and it can't be true and it can't be true. But just ask the next question. I'm just saying first principles. You, the free market rewards delivering value to somebody else on their terms, period. We have a group of things we use today in the market, and entrepreneurs try to create more value against that group of things. When the entrepreneur creates more value against that, the old company dies and is replaced by a new company, because you use the new thing.