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security made simple. Use the code matrix for a discount at microc.io. In this episode, I sit down
with Jeff Booth, entrepreneur, author of The Price of Tomorrow, and one of the clearest thinkers on
how technology, money, and human agency collide. We explore why Bitcoin is not just an asset but
a protocol, how broken money distorts society, and why deflation is the natural state of free markets.
We also dig into AI, privacy, self-custody, family, time, and what a Bitcoin standard could mean for human consciousness itself.
If you're trying to understand Bitcoin beyond price, grapple with the implications of artificial intelligence, or make sense of the confusing moment we're living through, this conversation is for you.
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And now, let's enter The Bitcoin Matrix with good friend of the show, visionary technologist, and best-selling author, the indelible Jeff Booth.
What is real?
How do you define real?
You can't jump into cash.
Cash is trash.
What do you do? You get out.
Jeff, welcome back to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast for the fourth time.
How are you?
Great, great to see you again, my friend.
Yeah, no, it's great to reconnect.
I think we spoke earlier in the year about the greatest game.
We've talked about your piece, Finding the Signal in a Noisy World.
Of course, we talked about the price of tomorrow.
I kind of want to talk about Bitcoin, time and family and sort of the effects of these
things or, you know, how they impact society, culture and economics.
But, you know, when I think about telling friends and family about Bitcoin, one of the
things I struggle with is sort of to get across what Bitcoin can do for someone beyond sort
of number go up or watching your assets go up in value or just strictly financial independence.
What sort of role do you see?
you know, how do you see money sort of in people's lives or how Bitcoin might improve their lives
from their very first sats? Yeah, and that's a big question, and obviously a big question,
because it's connected to everything. It's literally connected to everything. And what you
learn through the course of Bitcoin as you go down the rabbit hole is you realize that everything
you thought about money, and if money was connected to everything, everything you thought about
freedom, everything you thought about laws, everything you thought about free markets,
everything you thought about political systems, everything was a lie. Not necessarily a lie in
people, everyone was trying to conspire against you. A lie that you had a belief in a system
that was on a foundation that was a complete lie. And that meant everything resulting from that
foundation was also a lie. And, and that's a really hard thing to take for somebody because
it means their objective or perspective reality is shattered as they form a new objective reality.
And we don't want to face that we could have been fooled. We don't want to face that, that
our time and energy hurt somebody else. It's really easy just to believe the narrative that
the prevailing narrative of the lie, it's way easier to believe the prevailing narrative of the
lie than you have agency. It's way easier to believe it's somebody else's fault for your pain
than you have agency. And so that, now I know we just started kind of midway through that concept
in your question. I wanted to start there because it's so big. It's such a big deal.
And price, especially price of Bitcoin in a piece of paper is part of living the same line.
It's so much bigger than that. So I always try to start in the same place to try to pull this out.
I try to start in the natural state of the free market is deflation.
That is an absolute truth.
Everybody knows that it's true.
And in that world, because how do we create value for others?
We have to create more value than what came before.
And then we only use the things that give us more value.
So if we're both the creator of the more value and the consumer of the more value,
and anything with less value fails, how could prices go up?
And specifically how if you were creating more and more value,
if we stood on top of shoulders of all people who ever went before us
that made mistakes and we were creating technology
that was moving really fast with the same ideas
and using all the knowledge base of the entire world
to create technology that would be smarter than us,
that would remove our labor,
and then we would use the companies that removed more labor because they gave us more value.
How could that possibly not drive exponential deflation if we were a part of those choices?
Then you have to ask, where does inflation come from? And it comes from this lie. It comes from
a complete nonsense. It's not the free market. It means we've never lived in a free market.
We have no reference point of what the free market could do. And those systems are complete
opposites. A debt-based system, which we've always lived in, must create more debt and can't allow
deflation because the debt-based system would collapse if we allowed deflation. And at the same
time, the natural state of the free market is deflation. So a derivative of what I just said
is we've never lived in a global free market. Never. So we have no reference point. We've lived
in local free markets, the founding of the U.S., individual rights and freedoms, with people moving
from all over all countries to take advantage of their ideas, which created the wealthiest nation
ever, was a local free market. And that's what drove the productivity of the U.S. until it was
captured by central banking and slowly eaten away at. And as that slowly gets eaten away at,
You can see the same constitution that created the U.S. and individual rights and freedoms come under attack.
You can see laws changing to support Patriot Act and all of the state and all of the nonsense and everything else that essentially uses fear as a weapon to control you and tries to divide.
you can see all of the symptoms of the same system capturing more and more of that value
that should naturally flow to you because it has to because the debt-based system that credit must
expand forever and your part and so anytime you're measuring bitcoin in the piece of paper
you're still in the system of control when does a person become financially free so i i think that's
That's again an abstract concept of what they believe is financially free.
So you could, I think there's a whole bunch of people who believe in this other system,
which operates as a zero-sum game, that at some number that's on an ever-escalating number,
that they will be free.
And they're racing towards that number.
And as they get to that number, that number goes higher
because all of the things they need to pay for with that number move higher
because the money's broken and it moves it higher.
so that concept is always moving because the ground underneath them is shifting at such a
rate and they don't know the ground is shifting and the ground wasn't shifting as fast as technology
wasn't moving as exponentially one way and and debt had to rise exponentially the other way
so now it's if you ask somebody two years ago what their number was versus this year the number has
to have grown a lot because they know and they don't know this but the money is losing value so
fast that they're that they're inside that game game now same thing on on bitcoin that people
don't understand right if you had an energy-backed protocol that was decentralized and secure and it
couldn't be broken then what is that number it as more and more people contribute to that system and
more and prices fall forever relative to that number that instead of needing more and more and
more in this system forever, you'd need less and less and less in the other system forever.
They're exact opposites, exact opposites. And then you can derive, you can ask other questions
from those opposites and say, what would the world look like under both scenarios? And you
should ask what the world looks like under both of those scenarios. And then you should ask yourself,
my own time and my own energy, which scenario would I want my time and energy going into?
What would it look like to me to apply my time to which one of those systems? And from that,
you can see your own agency in creating the world that you think you're living in.
What does it mean then to be financially free in a Bitcoin world? Is it when you buy your first set
and you say, oh, this first sat will be,
there'll only be one sat per block in 2140,
I am better off now instantaneously,
or is it a cheat code that you'll just get there faster?
So the reason why that question is deeper
than just that question,
there's many people who would buy that in an ETF
and think they own Bitcoin
when they own a derivative claim on Bitcoin.
There's many people who are still measuring that sat
in a piece of paper
and measuring thinking Bitcoin's going up
because the paper's going down.
So what you're actually talking about
is how deep you understand it, right?
And then trying to explain how deep you understand it,
where you are free and you're living in Bitcoin
and you're spending in Bitcoin
and you're contributing to Bitcoin
and you're teaching other people
and your value is being created
by helping a whole bunch of people understand this.
And your depth is way deeper.
And then you asking a question is when does somebody else get it And we forget and we forget in ourselves that we were once them that we also didn know
And the first time we bought it, we bought it as a hedge against a system.
And we were still measuring it in a piece of paper.
And then as we got deeper and deeper, we realized that, wait, this is a network and it's expanding.
And we're part of that network.
and we're going to run a node and we're going to spend in Bitcoin
and we're going to charge in Bitcoin.
We're going to be part of an economy that's thriving
and creating an economy that's thriving while everybody else is over here.
And so as you go down the rabbit hole, I think that question
that you can answer, I can answer, what it looks like to me now
has looked different at different stages down the rabbit hole.
And that's why I have no, if some, I don't care where somebody is.
It doesn't matter, right?
The, taking the steps to be able to understand this, the curiosity to realize this is a system
that has all of these things that I say I don't like about the world.
This is a system that seems to be aligned more with my beliefs of what I think the world
should look like.
And then I choose.
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How do you convey that to the next generation that it's Bitcoin and not ETFs and that it's not paper
wealth or it's not how much you have, but how you see or think about the world? So I think everybody
has their own unique take on what that looks like. And I think it's not one person's take.
It's a combination of a whole bunch of people's take that gets sharper and sharper and easier to
explain over time. I'll give you a framework that two different starting points would give you
drastically different outcomes. If you saw, and Michael Saylor is a friend, right? And I think
he's been really good for Bitcoin. And I categorically disagree with him on this issue that
I'm going to say, and how he views the world and how I view the world, right? Through this lens.
If you thought Bitcoin was an asset and your view it was the best asset of all time and it couldn't be taken, then you'd have to ask, what is an asset?
An asset has always underlined money because we couldn't trust money.
We could never store our time in money because money was always broken.
So we always had to find assets to store our value because money was broken.
And if you held more assets, you did better than everybody else because money was more broken and they didn't have the asset.
And if you saw Bitcoin as an asset, then it would make perfect sense to try to control all the Bitcoin, get it all,
and then leverage on top of that and all of the broken money and then create instruments from that.
And all you would have done with the entire world structure is create new kings.
Same zero-sum game that we've always lived in with different rulers.
But from that system, if it looked like that, Bitcoin would get centralized and it would fail because it would get centralized.
If you saw now, so one framework, Bitcoin is an asset within a control system.
A different framework, a different starting point is it's a protocol coming in layers, adding more functionality like the Internet bounded by energy.
So it's an open, decentralized, secure protocol bounded by energy. That's the first layer.
layer. The asset that they think is an asset is a protocol and different layers are building to
provide more functionality like privacy, like communications in Noster and in transfer of
value in Lightning and ARC and Spark and everything else. And that protocol layer is emerging where
the protocol is repricing everything and now you can store your money in money. So those two
scenarios produce radically different opportunities. One, if you're thinking of it as a protocol,
you're building value in the layers of the protocol and you're building society in a world
that's never existed where prices constantly fall and we contribute in the first global free market
to each other through that vehicle.
If you're pricing in the asset only,
then you're contributing to the centralization of Bitcoin.
These things cannot coexist long-term.
It's impossible for them to coexist long-term.
Why?
Because the natural state of the free market is deflation.
Because the free market, the value that we create for each other
has to come to us.
And the other system has to absorb that value into a control system.
They're incompatible, completely incompatible at time.
So now the question is, is it a protocol emerging in layers or is it an asset?
And for a time, it could look like both.
But over time, we will see it's a protocol.
And that means a lot of people that are taking risks on somebody else's Bitcoin
could also get liquidated in time.
What does that mean, taking risks on someone else's Bitcoin?
Because you don't own the Bitcoin in self-custody.
You own a derivative claim on the Bitcoin.
If somebody else owns the Bitcoin, you don't have agency.
You are not protected from somebody else's actions.
And you could have really good actors.
And Michael Saylor, I think, is a good actor.
And I think he's a Bitcoin treasury company.
He's done remarkable.
and that that will do extraordinary as bitcoin's going up and it'll underperform when bitcoin
sideways are going down because it's the levered bitcoin play and he's done and i think he has safe
margin requirements i think it's safe i think he's done a whole bunch of the right things
and i don't and i'm actually an investor in my rsp which i had to keep in canada
So I'm an investor in it, and I don't have anything against that,
but I categorically disagree with them on asset or protocol.
Now, everyone is welcome to make their own decisions,
and in a free market, the cost of your decision,
if you make the wrong decision, could hurt on protocol or, right?
So which one is it?
But what I see is this emerging in layers, in a protocol, and protocols are winner take all.
And in that, nothing is going to stop Bitcoin from emerging and everything is going to be priced in Bitcoin, not in pieces of paper.
Yeah. So none of this is financial advice.
I'm also a financial investor in strategy through my retirement vehicles as well.
But I want to talk more about sort of the protocol side.
So the protocol is developing and that sort of makes it sound like it's unstoppable.
And maybe it is.
But what would be the barriers to the protocol succeeding at its highest level, where each level is sort of adding synergy and we're getting more and more things we need to become money?
Okay.
So for Bitcoin, we have to go back before Bitcoin, right?
And the cypherpunks talking about privacy and the idea of what Bitcoin would become and all of the tries to be able to create Bitcoin that failed.
Meaning instrumental in Satoshi's work were all the failures.
The failures, we discard the failures like they didn't matter.
They were instrumental in creating Bitcoin.
and then the genius of creating Bitcoin with the entire thing, difficulty algorithm and everything
else to have something that was decentralized and secure for the first time. But that was a result
of all these failures. Same thing that happens on each layer on top of it. But when Liquid first
came out, when Lightning first came out, it seemed like a pet project. It seemed like, okay,
it's not fair. I'm using, I'm using a payment channel. That's not working all the time.
And, and they harden, they harden and entrepreneurs race in and try their best to,
to create value. And some work, some don't. And as the ones work and coalesce, you have a new layer.
Now that layer today consists of lightning or spark, right? Um, uh, liquid, a bunch of others.
and you have a payment layer that's working all the time,
Noster on top of that.
You have an identity and communications layer
that's built into this, right?
It's interoperability with the whole thing
also decentralized since you're because it's sitting on top.
You have Fediment and Cashew built within this on top
that now provide privacy that are scaling.
So what does it look like?
it looks like all of the things that this thing needs to be able to be to provide more value coming
in layers and protect it from all of the threats that would come it looks like that it looks like
the free market expanding to provide value to a whole bunch of people that don't know they need
that value yet that's and and if those people are right and if they've created that value
those pieces of the protocol and technologies that are built into it explode in value because
they've provided value to somebody else and and so it looks like exactly what you would expect it to
look like and why people are mismeasuring this and how why they don't see it is because they're
not living in this ecosystem they're living in the other ecosystem and they have no idea this
ecosystem even exists that you have complete privacy in your communications on top of bitcoin
today if you want it by interacting with it they'd have no idea they exist because they're measuring
something else and through how many millions of coins that are trying to tell them that you can't
exist that can't exist on on bitcoin so that would be a confusing time that'd be a really confusing
time and from both systems it would appear and people would believe in their own belief system
from their system, that they were in the right paradigm. It'd be chaotic. It would be exactly
what you would expect to see if you had a monetary transition like this, that was the transition one
that we'd never seen and we had no mental model for. At the same time you had exponential technology
that should be driving prices down and wasn't because you had exponential theft, taking money
or coercion or whatever you wanted to call centralization.
And we were looking at all our media.
If we were looking through that lens from that system,
you would expect this to be a confusing time for a lot of people,
like a really confusing time.
And then you'd have to ask,
which system are you giving your energy to?
But you wouldn't know.
If I zoom out and I say, Cedric,
what would I expect it to look like?
if my thesis was correct, if Bitcoin was a protocol that was decentralized and secure
and coming in layers, what would my thesis, what would I expect to see?
I'd expect to see exactly what I'm seeing.
Nothing different.
And Bitcoin would have to withstand every one of these attacks,
every possible one and more to be able to withstand,
to be decentralized and secure a protocol.
And then you ask a deeper question, a fundamental question, is who am I scared of?
Because every time you worried about one of these attacks what you really saying is I don have agency in the world I create Somebody else does Somebody else is more powerful than me
Well, that's interesting. Agency and someone more powerful than me. So if there are,
let's say, nefarious or unwittingly bad actors who want to capture or control or centralize
Bitcoin, could they do so in a way that was more than permanent? Could they sort of thwart
the potential impacts of that Bitcoin could have on humanity for forever?
So I don't think so.
But I don't think so because now, again, my view is I have agency in the world I live in.
It's a mirror.
And from that view, I can lead and I can touch other people who then also determine if they
have agency or not.
If you've heard me say probably on your podcast before, too, there is no they only we.
We are all connected.
We're all completely connected.
So if we believe there is they and those people, then it is true for us.
And we remove our ability to to contribute, to make a difference.
And so so that agency, it's a way bigger deal than than than it seems like at first blush.
It's a name a threat model to Bitcoin that doesn't go through what I just said.
So when somebody says quantum, what are they saying?
Those people.
When somebody says, what's the government going to do?
Those people.
When they say, what's China going to do?
Those people.
All of these things come down to those imaginary people that are more capable than you.
and every single one of them because you haven't done the work to understand how you matter and you
contribute to the world that you see and when you do that work and you're actually
inside that work and actually influencing the world you want to see it starts to appear and
you start to see other people doing that as well and the world looks totally different wow um i'm
gonna have to think about that uh what about privacy though privacy is a major concern and
digital money assets. How does Bitcoin balance privacy with transparency?
Yeah. So Bitcoin on the first layer doesn't. It's an open monetary protocol and it gains its
decentralization and security by having an open monetary protocol. You can't change that at the
first level layer. The second layer, and everything's KYC, if you only had the first layer,
Bitcoin would fail. Not it might fail. It would fail. Because in time, we would be co-opted.
When I said agency, the one thing I neglected to say is, as we're blaming them, those other people,
we're inside a system that we know is based on a lie yelling at other people,
contributing in the money that's stealing from us. And we think there's somebody else to blame
but us. We wouldn't allow that financial system to collapse on its ground. We wouldn't vote for
somebody who told us the truth. So it's not saying anything about them. It's saying something about
us. And those things are hard to take, right? As you're going through the rabbit hole and you're
realizing it's no one else, it's me, right? How could I blame somebody else when I was making the
same choice until I saw it in me and then just made a different choice? So if you can change,
if you can, I'm speaking to you, Cedric, I'm speaking to me, if I can change and show up
differently, then shouldn't everybody be able to change, right? And so people are stuck in this
other system, and they don't realize that some of their choices are all inside a zero-sum game,
and they're not outrunning it, and they can make the choice.
And so do you think we have enough privacy now, or we're sort of...
Yeah, and I didn't. So four years ago, if you look at FEDI and the FEDMENT protocol, four years ago when we invested in that, it was looking to the future and realizing if you didn't have privacy, then Bitcoin would be co-opted.
And how would it be co-opted? First, rogue governments would put people in jail, right? Just what ends up happening? They would murder people. They would do whatever it took to send a message on privacy that it's dangerous to have privacy.
And you would expect from a central control system that we all have always lived in that was not the free market, but got its power from theft in a centralized control system, and we didn't know we were in it.
you would expect it to constrain the ideas of the people within it so that they believed a certain
narrow thing and if you had AI that you could constrain it more you would expect them to
be inside this information bubble and not know they were information inside this information
bubble and if somebody stepped out and was dangerous because other people could step out
you'd expect that system to attack the people that stepped out to provide value or provide
different value. We've always lived in a kind of a narrow box of a belief system. And the genius
over here, the crazy and the genius, always pushed us to new areas that was the free market,
that if they were right, we moved. So if you were in this little box inside this control system,
and the box was tightening narrower and narrower and you were in it, would you know you were in it?
You would have to have privacy, right? Because privacy would be a threat to that. And if Bitcoin
wasn't private and it was a threat to money, you would expect for sure that that would attack
Bitcoin in time. You'd expect what I would expect if I go back four years. I'd expect most people to
not have any idea what I'm saying right now.
Right.
Them to be acting from their own view of inside the control system,
thinking Bitcoin was going up in value.
Right.
In other words,
taking more risk of their Bitcoin,
cheering for it to go up in value,
cheering for the government to co-opt Bitcoin,
to regulate it,
to co-opt it,
cheering for that to happen.
And as they were cheering more and more inside,
inside that, if Bitcoin was just open, at some point Bitcoin would be centralized and fail.
But if you know that, and that's the thing, if just one idea can spread to another person and
another person, if you know that, and you know that that risk is coming, and you know most people
will fall willingly into that trap, what would you build? You would build pieces of protocol
that provided freedom, true freedom and abundance
that were built on top of Bitcoin
or you would invest in those companies
and people building that.
And so this already exists.
This exists in Fediment.
This exists in Cashew.
This exists in a bunch of different other privacy tech.
And it will continue to exist
and it will continue to get stronger and stronger and stronger
as more people realize they need it
in a system that's farming them and aware of every transaction, every communication that they're
doing. And they thought they were living in a system where free speech was important. And they're
more and more living in a system where it's punished. And you can see this from where money
is most broken is, do people have free speech? So why would you expect if your money is not as
broken as their money, but on trending towards being as broken? Why would you expect to have it?
But the simple answer is, in the worst places in the world, in some of the worst places in the
world, even where money is completely broken, you have a dictator and such, the free market still
works. When they say, here's the rate, here's the exchange rate, the government exchange rate,
there's always a dark market rate, the real market rate of the free market transacting.
So if that exists in all of those places in the world, then the same thing exists here.
The problem and the growing problem creates the opportunity for entrepreneurs to solve the problem,
even though most people don't see it.
And as entrepreneurs solve the problem and create value for society,
as people see it and move to solve their problem, the companies do really well.
When it comes to Bitcoin, the rules are simple.
Run your own node, hold your own keys, and protect your seed phrase.
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credit card in a convenience store and buy a candy bar very quickly for a very small dollar amount.
Will people, do you think self-custody is important? And if so, do you think people will
actually use it out of need or it'll be sort of a luxury and a nice to have, but a lot of people
will still keep their money at Fidelity and BlackRock or whatever the new institution is?
So I think self-custody is critical. I think self-custody is part of this and so is payment
in Bitcoin. And so is Fediment to provide a different type of custodial solution that is
near to self-custody. But I think self-custody is still critical. I think that that's a critical
step. People should run a node. People should be in self-custody. People should be paying in
Bitcoin. They should be starting to understand the ecosystem that's growing around it,
because then they'll see all the opportunities to provide value.
But do you think it'll be a thing where, you know, you go through the evolution of money.
People wore necklaces to protect their money.
So, you know, you couldn't take it while they were sleeping to necklaces with sort of a large amount of money became a very braggadocio type thing.
You might keep some money in your house in cash, but maybe you keep most of it in your checking or savings and or your stocks.
I don't think the institutions look anything like the institutions of today.
So when you said people trust today, and then they find out that their food is laced with poison, and then they find out the medical system is lying to them, and then they find out the technocrats that are saying that they're wanting to help society, consolidating wealth and using to spy on them.
Right. And and so when you say trust, it was a it was a belief of trust.
Right. We we want to trust, but we keep finding in this more and more centralized society that that we can't trust the way we used to.
Right. And why? Because money is so broken and it's so centered that that control system has to fool us, has to have us to believe something to extract more and more and more.
And so that's where trust starts to break down.
And you're rebuilding a new society on top of trust, on top of a system that can't be broken, where money can't be broken.
And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck is they're trying to imagine a world.
They change one factor, a big factor, and think everything else will look the same.
It can't.
There can be no monopoly in the free market.
It's impossible because there's only possible monopolies under broken money or regulation to stop the free market.
Because the margin that's created by somebody creating value is somebody's other opportunity to attack that margin.
And so it constantly decentralizes.
And so there's this belief because of the world we inhabit today that all of these things look the same in Bitcoin.
They're just carrying over and they think only the money's changed.
But because the money's changed, everything else changes.
Is AI as big as Bitcoin or is it more like search and mobile?
How much is AI going to sort of maybe impact our lives?
a massive amount, right? And just from a very nature of, assume in some sort of capacity,
if we don't have artificial general intelligence today, we'll have it tomorrow at some point,
right? It might not look like these, it won't look like these big foundational models.
It'll probably look more like a swarm of agents independently and acting together to provide value,
But it'll feel like artificial general intelligence.
It feel like it can do more than any single person And then you going to attach that swarm of agents or that hive mind type of thing into robotics And they going to be able to do any task that you can do
better, faster, cheaper, 100 times better, faster, cheaper. And how couldn't that impact productivity?
And if a company was employing all humans to do and making mistakes, and let's say they had 100
humans providing some sort of value, let's take a lawyer, right, doing something for you.
The artificial intelligence with one human or part-time was doing way cheaper, better, faster than that swarm of people.
Who would you hire?
Better, cheaper, faster.
Yeah.
And so should that productivity flow to you?
Because you were an actor in the market trying to choose better, cheaper, faster.
So all AI is, all robotics is, all of any innovation is that works is we use the things that provide us more value.
And prices should fall as a result because we optimized.
Is it going to make things better, cheaper, faster?
Maybe we become more efficient, but do we get our time back?
I feel like in the Internet era, we didn't actually get more.
Or a lot of people don't feel like they got their time back.
So that was early in the internet, and this is foundational to why I saw Bitcoin.
What I thought I was building in the internet is kind of a global internet that everybody mattered and everybody could contribute.
What happened because of broken money and network effects is it centralized power faster.
For a while, it appeared that everybody contributed.
And all of that power was extracted faster because prices weren't allowed to fall.
Because you printed money into that to stop prices from falling, which centralized all power.
And so what's different about Bitcoin is because it can't centralize, because it's bounded by energy, all prices are falling in it forever.
As it moves faster, what people will think is happening is Bitcoin's rising really fast in pieces of paper.
But what's actually happening is prices are all falling at a crazy rate and everybody is getting wealthy.
Abundance for everyone. Infinite game.
But again, what people think is happening is because they're measuring in a piece of paper, they think Bitcoin's going up.
How are you using AI today? Do you have an avatar that attends meetings for you?
I've used that. I still sometimes do. That's really a simple use case.
I'll say my son has created agents that are his entire front end to his business and back end to his business.
that he helps companies create agents.
And he has a lead funnel
that by the time the person's talking to my son,
they think they know him or he knows them and everything.
They've been working with him,
but they've been working with the agents
that have been constantly iterating
and knowing the business
and giving proposals while he sleeps.
When you say an agent in this case,
Is it a video slash hybrid?
No, no.
When I'm talking about narrow, narrow agents, one that would find a whole bunch of type of customers that he wants,
another one that would find all of the names of those people in their social media profiles, dump them into the –
another one that would send an email, another one that would – a targeted email in his voice and to that person.
Another one that would say measure response rates and constantly update and try to drive a higher response rate.
Another one that would do the same thing on LinkedIn.
Another one that would kind of be orchestrating the whole thing.
Another one that would then put together a proposal,
knowing the customer's business and target market.
This is all before he's ever talked to somebody.
And each of those agents is constantly working and optimizing and getting better.
So it's an entire funnel.
And I'm using my son as an example, but I'm seeing this everywhere.
I'm seeing this, which means the other side of this is a lot of people on Twitter and such are arguing with agents.
They don't even know it.
Wow, that's fascinating.
That's a whole conversation.
What about on the greater level?
Is AI a great power that humanity is attempting to harness right now and can be unleashed in ways we just don't understand?
And so all technology cuts both ways.
We wouldn't use technology unless it provided us value.
A business wouldn't use technology unless it provided them cost savings or an ability to do more with less.
So you wouldn't use the technology that the business creates unless it did the same for you.
You are part of the thing.
How could that be bad?
Would you build a road with a spoon?
right? Or then you use a shovel, then you use an excavator, right? You're constantly, humanity's
always searching for, we think the world looks this way, we invent new things to provide us
our time to do things better, faster, cheaper. And the only things we use are the things that
provide us more value. That's the constant path, and it moves faster and faster and faster
throughout time because we're at higher and higher amplitudes of other people's work that
we're sitting on top of that we don't have to relearn. And so why that would move exponentially
is as everybody's contributing on top of this and finding errors and trying to contribute,
of course, we're going to use the things that give us the most value. And of course,
as a derivative of that, prices should be falling at that rate.
But they can't from another system.
So if you're measuring, if you're inside that system,
if you're not in Bitcoin, or if you're in Bitcoin
and you're measuring from the piece of paper,
you are still in fiat.
You are still in the zero-sum game.
Do you think if we, when we get on a Bitcoin standard,
that human life evolves differently
beyond just our institutions changing?
We get more time back.
Is there more love in the world?
More peace?
So I'm going to turn the question around to you
and ask you, in your time in Bitcoin,
have you seen inside that ecosystem
versus outside of it,
have you seen more love, more belonging,
more community,
more of what you would expect to see
on an honest chain that looks like that?
I'm going to answer yes, but maybe that's what I'm looking for.
Maybe others aren't.
Yeah, so for me, that's exactly what I've seen.
So I've seen a world that's emerging, exactly what I would expect it to do,
and as people go deeper into that, they're never going back.
And some of those people have become my closest friends in this,
and why I know why this is so resilient is nothing is going to stop these people.
They're going to create, and they're being joined by legions and legions of more people,
each at different levels of understanding, that as they go deeper, they never go back.
And so why I'm so positive about this happening is that's exactly what happens.
It's a rise of consciousness in the world because you have your time back,
because you're contributing to other people through an honest protocol,
because your time is in an infinite game.
And the mirror reflection you're starting to see in this,
Now, I realize that depending on where you are in your Bitcoin journey, it might not look like that to you as you're still fighting the old system, right?
As you're still spending all your time yelling at other people who don't get Bitcoin while you yourself is spending all of your time measuring it in a piece of paper, right?
And so that will feel like a fight because you haven't kind of got to the bottom yet.
But I also, it would have to look like that.
It would have to look like that because it wasn't Bitcoin that was changing.
It was us that was changing.
Us making a decision which system we wanted to contribute our time to.
You said, you know, if you were to hypothesize how all this would play out,
it's kind of playing out very much how you would expect in some way, most ways.
Exactly as I'd expect.
Is there anything that in 2025 was unexpected or that you were really excited about, expected or not?
I think the very big frame, nothing.
But inside that, lots of people that have moved their time to this,
spending time with President Velsalva or two times
and understanding how deep he understands this was unexpected.
I'm not saying that he couldn't choose, say one thing one day
and choose another thing another day, just like we all could.
But I believe he actually understands what this means for humanity
and for the people in his country,
and he's actually trying to make that happen.
And by giving them agency, by ensuring that they understand this
and use it as money, by telling them to run nodes,
by training this in the school system,
I actually believe he understands this and what it means.
And so that was unexpected to hear somebody that I expected the opposite, actually.
I expected to say one thing and do another.
That's what I expected.
And so that was unexpected to see somebody that felt like it was that authentic and to be able to say that.
And when you're communicating something that you're telling other people they have agency, once they have agency, you can't take it away.
And that spreads throughout the world.
That spreads through more and more people.
That spreads through what we're talking about right now in this podcast
and allows other people to see how they too can contribute.
One of my final questions for you is how do you...
I was talking to Aaron Day about information and PSYOPs today.
And we were talking about how we grew up hearing,
finish the food on your plate, there are children starving in China.
And I don't know if this is true, but he mentioned that maybe top 50 out of 60 companies right now in the world are Chinese.
Most of our manufacturing is there.
I mean, how much of what I grew up or we grew up hearing is filtered through sort of the lens of on truths or, you know, communications channels that weren't free?
So unfortunately, a lot of it.
Like, unfortunately, a lot of the belief in a longing time that looked different in that time was also, so we've never lived in a free market.
That system had to divide us, had to manipulate money or change the rules of money.
Great.
So the gold system failed, right?
Because it got centralized and you couldn't inflate it out.
So we just changed the rules of it, then drove into the petrodollar system.
We just created new winners and losers to be able to anchor our money to oil,
and a different energy-backed money.
And that required a whole belief system that some people were enemies
and some people were the good guys, which we created,
which was still a zero-sum game, which is breaking down today because money's still broken, always been broken.
And people are going to believe in a different belief system because they're living from within the system that money's always been broken.
But they don't know it.
So a lot of those things, a lot of those things, if you just think about the food pyramid,
invention of the food pyramid or the inversion of the food pyramid, when I was born in 69, right?
It happened just after.
And my growing up, I thought the cereals were the healthiest thing for you.
All the things you don't want, you didn't want to eat eggs.
You didn't want to, they were bad for you because we were programmed to believe that.
Why were we programmed to believe that?
Because you had to stop food inflation in a time you were going off the gold reserve to keep people placated.
And so when you see some of the implications of that on health and well-being and everything else played way forward,
and it forces you to ask, what else was I led to believe from big food or big tech or big pharma or this out of a control system?
Big education, right?
Because the studies that reinforce that, when you look down to those studies, you can clearly see.
that they were paid for?
So, you know, thinking about control systems and being a slave to the algorithm,
two things that have been really disturbing to me, I mean, I like being on X.
I'm probably on there too much. I sort of...
It's a very interesting experience, but I didn't like the Butler video
and the Charlie Kirk video being instantaneously on my feed
within seconds of that happening. I felt very...
So how has maybe moving to Nostar changed you?
Nostar is still early, right?
And I don't see it as a clone of Twitter.
I'm on it because as it becomes a protocol layer,
one of the layers of identity and communications,
it becomes so much more than Twitter.
There's other things you can do with identity,
and you can preserve your identity.
It doesn't have to be Cedric Young.
You could do it in a NIM and you could still have communication with it and it's you.
And you could build a web of trust out of that, out of people who constantly do the right thing versus people who don't.
And you could find out who do you like, who do they follow, and you could build a web of trust where you can't do that in a centralized fashion.
You have to rely on the algorithm.
You have to rely on what they want to show you and why they want to show it to you.
And how could you have freedom in expression if embedded in freedom and expression
that you have different rules in different regions based on what the government says
that can't exist?
So you start to see...
Now, I'm not saying if you like Twitter, stay on Twitter and everything.
at this is just like if you like fiat stay in fiat it's not my job to tell somebody when
what they need to do i'm just saying for my own decision and and it happened through the
first time through and he larry larry lepart has had this happen how many times now and a sim a phone attack that attacked my Twitter a bunch of other things that had to come from the highest levels of the phone company
because of our security against that.
The only way it could have happened is through that.
And understanding how I was exposed there and what that looked like
and a lowering and lowering of why am I spending time?
Am I gaining value or am I contributing value to society here?
How much time, what does it mean for my life?
Am I life better or neutral out of the things I'm doing here?
It's easy to tell yourself all of the things I'm doing I need to do,
but really questioning that led me to, I don't need to do it at all.
I just don't need to do this.
And I wanted to contribute more of my time to the world that I want to see,
the decentralized, secure, honest, where people create value
and it has to be expressed in a free market.
I just wanted to contribute.
And I didn't mind losing 375,000 followers to be able to do that.
It was my choice because I didn't.
I wasn't
at the time I remember somebody on Noster
we'll see he'll go back
right and I didn't
go back because I'm
because of that but it's
just I just made a choice
not that everybody else has to that I
wanted to spend more time and by doing
so I get to see all of the genius and the chaos and everything else emerging in the new system So I get to spend more time and all of the people there So that choice was a benefit
not in reach, but in value. What about sort of cleansing your,
or just finding better signal in terms of maybe, I feel like Twitter is like a psychological
operation on us. And there's some pros, but I'm feeling over the long term, it's more negative
than positive what I'm being exposed to and how I'm being exposed to it, the timing of it and the
way it's being sort of cadenced to me and sequenced. I knew this from early in building
tech that the brain science and understanding how our brains react to cues, to stimulus,
stimulus response, and how you do the studies and you could essentially get somebody to do
whatever you wanted to. And this is how advertising works today. And if you implanted fear or something
first, right. And then another thought, and then you can, you can kind of make a suggestion that
moves somebody. And there's a, so there's a whole bunch of science to this. And now if you take
technology and you understand the science, you can do exactly what you're saying. And, and people
wouldn't know that they're inside, inside that system. And they're constantly replaying and
they're actually building community there, which they think is a really powerful, they
don't want to give up their community.
And then sometimes they could just, the algorithm could take them down and they fight harder
to try to get that community back because it feels like loss.
And so and that why you just have to ask yourself if a word if you if you were living in a world that looked like this unbroken money money and you thought everybody else seemed like they were insane but their view of reality was totally right for their view of reality what makes you think yours isn
And I ask myself that often. I ask myself that. So if everybody else I see is caught, and they're kind of mirroring back, they're caught here, and they're getting mad and mad inside that, can I objectively be sure?
I'm not the same and I can't.
I just constantly have to ask the question and make decisions to try to,
to avoid the worst part of that.
Well, Jeff, this has been incredible as always.
I really appreciate you making time,
taking time out of the holiday season to come talk to us.
So, you know, thank you so much.
I'll leave it to you for any parting words and let people know where they can
find you and your work.
No, anytime, Cedric.
Just thanks for everything you do in the space too.
and a pleasure to be on this journey with you.
Hope to see you soon, Jeff.
Thanks so much.
and let's keep growing this community together.
Stay curious, keep stacking,
and I'll catch you in the next one.