1479: The Price of Tomorrow, Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

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Welcome to episode 1479. 1479. I have a question for you. Do you think deflation is good or bad? Now, if you've been listening for the last 15 years or maybe the last 15 months or maybe the last 15 weeks, you are probably going to say it's bad because Jason told me so. But not necessarily. Things are always a little more complicated than they seem, right? Well, deflation seems good in a way. Prices go down, meaning the standard of living goes up. And the higher the standard of living, the better. Right? If we can buy more with our dollars, then that is a good thing. And that is true. However, most economists would argue, and they got some decent evidence for this argument, but our guest is going to disagree with them today. Our guest disagrees, so it's going to be interesting to hear his side of the story. Remember, I always am giving you opposing viewpoints. Yes, I'm like anybody else, just like Bill Gates, just like Jerome Powell, just like Trumpster, just like Joe Biden, the idiot. Well, I don't know if you could say Trump is that much smarter either, but yeah, he's smarter than Joe Biden. Come on. Trump is smarter than Biden. If there was an IQ test, that's an easy win. But I don't know Trump, he says some things that just don't make any sense. It's like, shut up. Stop talking. Donald. You really can tell that he has aged because when I see old interviews of him, old clips that they play, you know, like him with Oprah from years ago, he's like a sharp guy, but now he just, I don't know, he says some, he says some things that just like, why did you have to say that? And you're probably thinking, well, Jason, that applies to you too. Okay, maybe it does. Anyway, what were we talking about there? See, Senior moment Yeah. Most economists would argue that deflation is a very dangerous thing. Why is that? Because it causes people to postpone decisions. And if you want to keep the economy going, you don't want people to wait till later. You want them to buy today. Because that increases the velocity of money. And part of the thing that is a measure of a healthy economy is, of course, the Phillips curve, which I've taught you about many times. And that's the target, if you will, between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. They try to just perfect this to where they can have low unemployment with a target rate of about 2% inflation, meaning the value of your money. They are only robbing 2% annually. And that hasn't been the case for many, many years. I don't know, it might be the case this year, actually. No, it's not the case at all. Food prices are at a 50 year high. And let me tell you, I just went to the store this morning maskless, no mask. But almost everybody in the store was wearing a mask. I didn't get close to anybody. I didn't sneeze on anything. What do I need a mask for? You know, I don't completely disagree with the mask idea. I just think it's kind of overrated. Like, I see these people walking around my beautiful neighborhood wearing a mask. I'm like, I live in a low density, suburban, nice neighborhood. Why are you wearing a mask? You're not coming within 50ft of another person. Do you think it's just the nerve gas? The sarin nerve gas is floating through the air and you're gonna die. I mean, really, I can see some places where you should wear a mask. I get it. Walking around outside. Oh, let me tell you this. There's this old guy. I probably shouldn't say that because I'm gonna be an old guy before you know it. But anyway, there's this old guy. Hey, he's a wise man. He's older. You know, we should respect and revere that. Not say it as though it's dismissive. So I apologize for that. Actually, that was not the right thing to say. That's like something Trump would do. But then again, Biden, he eats his foot every time he talks. I mean, he's such an idiot. Oh, God, the guy's so dumb. See, there's a difference between Biden and Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is just delusional. He's actually not as dumb as Biden. But anyway, it's a whole thing. Okay, get back on track, Jason. So there's this Guy, this mature gentleman, and he rides his electric bike in the morning around my neighborhood. And when I'm out walking the dog, I see him on his electric bike. He's probably under the delusion that he's actually getting exercise. He has goggles and a mask. Not the kind of mask that was made for bike riding or something. The kind of mask that's a medical mask, like for coronavirus paranoia. He's riding his bike and a couple times I've crossed the street in front of him. I'm walking the dog, crossing the street, and I swear to you, this guy stops his electric bike. The delusion of exercise. He's on Florida, as flat as a pancake, okay? You do not need an electric bike in Florida, okay? Unless you're just using it for transportation, not under the delusion that you're getting exercise, okay? So anyway, he stops his bike 45ft short of me crossing the street. 45ft, I kid you not. That's four and a half stories. Now, of course, that's an estimated distance only my layperson's estimate. I did not measure it because if I got close to him to measure it, he would have freaked out.

I mean, folks, are we going a little nuts as a culture? I think we're getting a little nutty. I mean, hey, we're out rioting and protesting and that's nutty. Listen, protesting is fine with me. But getting violent and stupid and burning down your own city so the stores never come back and your economy gets worse and worse. Oh, that's really brilliant, you idiots. I. I mean, seriously, what kind of idiot does that? You know, I remember in the LA riots in 1992, Rodney King and those police officers should have never gotten away with that. That was so awful what they did to him. And of course, George Floyd is even more awful. Police brutality is disgusting. No one is in favor of police brutality except a very, very tiny number of small, awful police officers. And that's a tiny number. Most police officers, great people, they're risking their lives to protect us. And you know, this whole thing is going to make it a lot harder for the good cops to do their job, and there's going to be a much smaller supply. I mean, who would want to be a cop nowadays? Are you kidding me? Who would want to do that job? They're going to have to pay them a fortune to do that job because nobody's going to want to do it after this because the one bad apple ruins it for hundreds of thousands of other good cops. It's really Sad. But anyway, so those evil cops that beat Rodney King, they got off. And so the LA riots happen. And I'm thinking, like, why are these morons burning down their own neighborhoods? How dumb could that be? No business is going to ever want to open up in those neighborhoods. And investors investing in opportunity zones. Oh, here you go. I always thought that opportunity zone was just highly overrated. And it is, because I'm right again. I mean, yeah, there's a couple little tax breaks, but it's really not super significant. It's very complicated to jump through the hoops of it. Anyway, you've heard my episodes on that. No need to go into it. But since everybody's talking about the awful, awful crime of police brutality, which does happen occasionally, when you have 327 million people in a country and you got, I don't know how many police officers, probably how many are there? A couple million, I don't know the number. And you've got them walking the thin blue line between crime and chaos and law and order, you're going to have some bad apples. So police brutality, it's a thing. But let me give you another term. You know, once in a while we have some bad property managers, some disgusting crooked property managers, and hey, we got other disgusting crooked people too. There's crooks everywhere you look. There's crooks in medicine law, welfare fraud, Medicare fraud, contractors, accountants. I mean, there's crooks everywhere you look. You know, buyers and big corporations getting kickbacks for the agreeing to buy products from somebody. Right? City councilmen, governors, politicians, whatever. You know, they're all. There's crooks, media, there's tons of media crooks. Wall street, don't get me started. It's the modern version of organized crime. Wall Street. Wall Street, Right. Yes, it is. But I'm going to coin a new phrase. When a property manager rips you off and steals your money, I think we ought to just call it property manager brutality. Yeah, property manager brutality. Next time a property manager or anyone takes advantage of of you use the word brutality to go with it. Because that's what it is. They're stealing from you that's brutalizing you. It's awful. Don't stand for it. Do not stand for it. And remember, whenever you stand for it, you're letting them get away with it and someone else is coming after you and that person is going to get taken advantage of too, until you stand up for it and put a stop to it. And then that person realizes they can't just get away with this stuff. That's the way it goes. All right, before we get to the inflation deflation debate or the debate about how good deflation is, that's what our guest will talk about today. As if we needed a committee. This is why committees don't make any sense. Right. As if we needed a committee to tell us. Here it is, the committee stating the obvious. Officially, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the nber declared that the US Economy officially fell into a recession in February. Duh.

I mean, really, we needed a committee for that. Yes. They determined that a peak in monthly economic activity occurred in the US economy in February of 2020. This peak marks the end of the expansion that began in June 2009, the longest expansion in history. 128 months it lasted. And they've been tracking cycles back to 1854. 1854. And now they tell us we're in a recession. As if we needed a committee to tell us this. Well, I guess so. There's your committee, folks. You got a committee telling you there's a recession. Imagine that.

Hey, rents are going down in Los Angeles. I think that's fitting down 3.3%. And guess what else? The Airbnb prediction that I've been making is now being verified by the mainstream media. Yes, yes, yes. It is being verified by the mainstream media. And I'm getting to pat myself on the back again and say I was right. I'll tell you about that later because we're running out of time here. All right, if you need us, reach out Jason hartman.com or 1-800-hartman we're here for you. We're here to guide you through these tumultuous times. But we have something else. We've got a webinar coming up and we've got an easier webinar link for you. Don't try this today because it may not be working yet. But I'm going to have our tech people set it up. It'll be up, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, Thursday. And you can register jason hartman.com webinar jason hartman.com Webinar and our webinar this weekend will be on the Southwest Florida Market. Florida is the new Texas and, man, there's some good opportunities in Florida. So we will have that webinar this weekend. You can register@jason hartman.com webinar by probably tomorrow, Wednesday. The depending on when you're listening to this. If you listen right away, like so many of you do, and I so much appreciate that the link may not be working yet, so just check it Wednesday Thursday and register for our webinar this weekend on the Southwest Florida market. We will have our local market specialist on there and we will talk all about those opportunities. Very educational. And by the way, this is a nice, short, snappy webinar. Just over 30 minutes or so, maybe 38 minutes or something like that. So it's a quickie for you. All right, here is our guest. Let's talk about the virtues, the wonderful things that come with deflation.

It's my pleasure to welcome Jeff Booth. He is the founder and former CEO of Build Direct, a technology company that aimed to simplify the building industry. He's founding partner of Odio Labs, co founder of Abby Invest and Knock Knock. And he's also the bestselling author of the Price of why Deflation Is the Key to An Abundant Future. Jeff, welcome. How are you? Great.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

And you're coming to us from one of my favorite cities, Vancouver, Canada. Right?

It's pretty beautiful. Yes.

Yeah, it is. It's a great place. So I have long talked to my listeners, Jeff, about how there's sort of this war of opposing forces, if you will. On one side there's technology and globalization, both very much deflationary, and on the other side there is irresponsible monetary and fiscal policy, inflationary. And which one will win, we don't know yet because the outcome has yet to be known to us. But deflation does make life more abundant. And if I look around in my own life, I constantly think about it and I think, wow, just everything I buy is so much less expensive than it used to be. And like the economists, they use hedonic adjustments, hedonically adjusted, it's better and it's even cheaper if you hedonically adjust, with the exception of assets, real estate, much more expensive, and you get a lot less, a lot less land with your house, et cetera. So it's hard to really kind of figure this out, isn't it? But tell us about deflation being the key to an abundant future.

There is no doubt there's nothing that governments can do long term to stop deflation. Nothing deflation will win short of destroying.

Can they just print so much money that no matter how good technology is and how much Moore's Law, the power of the processor doubling every 18 months, no matter how deflationary that is, can they just be so irresponsible and print Zimbabwe level money and prevent deflation? Is it impossible?

So that's on the way to deflation on the other side of that. But in the end. Fighting deflation is like fighting gravity. You're going to waste a whole bunch of money and you're not going to stop it in the end. You said it perfectly that you have an opposing force. If you looked at CPI and the things that are inflating health care, education, education, the house prices and everything else, all of those are inflating unnaturally because they have so much money chasing them. When you have zero rate interest rate policies and essentially you're punishing saving, you're creating an incentive structure to not save and you're creating an incentive structure on opposing to create more debt. And that debt creation, $185 trillion of debt creation in the last 20 years, years to try to grow out of the deflationary environment.

Actually adds to disinflation. Because if you assume you have to pay back the debt at some point, consumer spending has to go down. You juice growth in the short term at the expense of growth in the long term. That $185 trillion of printing or debt creation did boost economies, but it was like pushing on a string. It's actually only increased GDP. GDP globally by 46 trillion with all of that printing. So you can see structurally you have a break. So it takes more and more debt to chase less and less growth. And then we're at a point where it doesn't just take debt, it takes bailouts and complete butchering of any sort of capital system and free markets that we grew up with. So it's really easy to see what's going to come.

Okay, so butchering of capitalism, which by the way I agree with and the pre coronavirus we could argue that capitalism and free markets had a chance. Now I think we are firmly in an era of socialism, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory maybe, or Welly in 1984, who knows. I mean the Austrians, you're just out of luck folks. The Austrian economists, the Austrian school, it's just not happening. What do you mean when you say that?

You say it's now. But in 2008 we had my business. In 2008, banks on the other side of the Ocean wouldn't accept LC's letter of credits because they didn't trust the counterparty risk. And so the global economy effectively stopped as people didn't trust balance sheets of different counterparties. And bailing out that system, which really was socialism for the rich.

Kept some asset prices artificially high and reduced the value of cash in doing so and set us on to essentially we papered over 2008 that created more divide of Society, as if you were an owner of assets or stocks, the stock prices went up when they should have gone down. If you didn't let that happen, if you actually let capitalism clear the market, they should have gone down. We should have entered a depression. It would have been ugly, but it.

Would have been quick.

It would have been quick and people with cash would be the new leaders. Instead, you destroyed the value of cash and you incented asset holding and you actually took down the value of savings more. Is it any wonder in a system that works like that that companies would not save money for rainy day? Because if you're making the money worthless and you're going to bail out the system over and over again, then being in cash is the worst thing you can do. So you set up your own demise because of a perverse incentive system that values debt and asset prices higher to try to get growth in a deflationary environment.

So when you say you, you mean the government and the central banks all over the world?

Yeah, all over the world.

Governments and central banks all over the world. Yeah, got it. Okay. Yes, they definitely distort the market. They don't allow one of the most important things markets do, which is known as price discovery. And so they keep kicking the can down the road effectively. Right? Because they never want to have pain on their watch. And so they try to just minimize the pain. But that has its own consequences, of course. But let's go into the technology angle and. Well, actually, maybe before you do that, one of the sub chapters in your book is entitled the Ponzi Economy and I would love it if you would elaborate on that for us.

It's connected to what we just talked about, the amount of debt created. And at some point people realize the debt can't be paid back and you reset and everything's reset. Now that's reset through bankruptcies and depression, or it's reset through essentially debasing currencies and creating hyperinflation. Or it's reset through revolution. Once you pass that, once people realize the debt can't be paid back, it can go on for some time. Time like that where people don't realize that as soon as people realize that the debt can be paid back, it starts to turn into a Ponzi scheme. The last one in to that gets really hurt. And so connecting the dots to all of these things, if you just start with first principles on inflation or deflation, they're not good or bad, they just have different winners and losers. Deflation makes your value of money go up because Goods and services. Services go down in relation to your money. I don't see how that's necessarily a bad thing. Inflation is the opposite. It makes your assets worth more because your money is worth less. Now, if governments said, instead of we have inflation targets of 2%, if they said we want to destroy your currency at whatever cost, you might have people up in arms. But if you drive inflation into that deflationary environment where it wants to go, asset prices explode in value. That's what happens. And so that's what you're seeing. And the owners of those assets become.

The winners because they own hard assets that have intrinsic value. Is that your point?

It's not just hard assets. The stock market right now has no bearing to reality whatsoever. Prices go up in something. So if you have stocks and everything else, they're shares of companies that people deem valuable, there's a race to hold things that are going to go out because of the stimulus.

It's interesting when we look at the macro of the inflation deflation picture, in a way, you could almost argue that deflation causes inflation. And here's what I mean by that. When all of your consumer products are so inexpensive as they have been getting, I mean, certainly everything's cheaper and better than it used to be, then you have these other asset items where you have consumer deflation and asset inflation, they get more expensive because people have more disposable money with which to invest. The market starts getting flooded with money. It pushes stock prices up, pushes real estate prices up. It's kind of interesting from that perspective in a way too.

If you think about. If you let natural price discovery happen, what would it be? Look at the acceleration of COVID on Zoom. The company went from 10 million users to 300 million users in a month and a half. I suspect that when this is over, 300 million users isn't going back to 10 million users.

Right. But it's not going to stay at 300. But it might be at 150 million.

Right. And every one of those incremental users is less commercial real estate.

Yeah, commercial real estate is. I mean, the retail apocalypse has been going on for years, but now it's the hotel apocalypse, the office space apocalypse, and who knows what else.

You could artificially bail out those industries and keep prices high. And then what you'd have to do in addition to that is for all of the people left out of society because you enriched the people with those assets, you'd have to pay them more so that you could pay rents on those assets. So the amount of wasted money going into something effectively trying to fight gravity, it is going to break systems, it's going to break currencies.

Why are governments and central banks so afraid of deflation? If you say that technology is deflationary, which I agree with, and so is globalization, why fight it? What's the problem? Why are they fighting it?

Okay, so first, let's go with how deflationary, because it's actually just so. If you look at your phone, your smartphone, that was only invented 13 years ago.

Right.

My first phone cost me $1,200.

Hey, hey, I got a better story than you've got. My first phone cost me $3,200. It weighed 14 pounds and it mostly stayed in the car. But you could take it out and have like this big, huge lunchbox.

And it only made phone calls, right?

Yeah, that's all it did.

And now.

And the phone bill was $45 a month base plus 45 cents a minute. There were no calling programs. My phone bills used to be $800 a month. And adjusted for inflation, today that'd probably be, I don't know, $2,500.

Yeah. My first phone bill was $2,000 in the first month. And then all it did was make phone calls. Now everything on my. You look at your app screen and it's all free. So the power you have, we think that it's isolated just small pockets of our industry right now. But with AI, what's coming in technology, and I'm on board with lots of companies that are developing this technology with AI, where artificial intelligence is going and what's happening across the landscape, we're in the first innings of technology deflation that across every. That abundance. So lower cost, abundance is moving everywhere. And there's a mistake that people make and they think economics is about value. It is not about value. It's about scarcity. And things that are abundant are hard to price.

Yeah. I always say it's about scarcity and utility. Those are the two. It's not just scarcity, it's also got to have utility.

Yeah. But let's use air as an example. The oxygen debris, it's the most valuable thing to you. The only place you can charge for air is underwater. So what technology is doing across all of these industries is it's taking down. So it's taking up abundance and taking down that cost. Yes. That comes at the expense of jobs. So governments are trying to protect jobs by fighting a system and having more jobs, but they're actually making that whole system more vulnerable by doing so, by adding debt and trying to grow their way out of it. To answer your other question, why is deflation so bad? Because if you have debt and you.

Allow deflation, the debt gets more expensive to repay.

That can't be repaid. So you have a structural change in society with central banks and governments not realizing it early enough and having a problem so big that they don't know what to do with. And so the problem keeps getting bigger at every step. And that's what you have. But why? There's business analogs all over the place for this. It's the same as Blockbuster. Nine thousand stores not seeing technology and how fast Netflix emerges because now download speeds could increase and the business changes overnight and Blockbuster's 9,000 stores become a noose around their neck. They think by adding candy aisles and popcorn to their stores, they can change that. That is a really good analog to what's happening today with central banks and governments trying to delay the.

See, that's the thing I always say, don't bet against the Fed. As much as I philosophically hate what the Fed and governments, well, not just the Fed, but every central bank is doing. Because I think the value of money ought to be dictated by a free market. But it doesn't matter what I think. What matters is that they are the two most powerful entities, governments and central banks, the human race has ever known. And. And by betting on deflation, you're betting against them. Because not only is every individual's debt and every company's debt more expensive to repay in a deflationary environment, but also the national debt. And hey, if we want to wipe out our debt to China and Japan and everybody else, then all we got to do is keep inflating and we just pay it back in cheaper dollars. So it's a pretty good business plan for them. But you're saying technology is so powerful that it can't overcome massive amounts of money creation.

Let's say you did that.

Just was it. Yesterday there was talk about not repaying China or letting local bankruptcies in the bond market collapse cities in the U.S. what do you think that does to world trade and the debt markets? It explodes. Everything changes in an instant. So things that seem like they never change change in an instant at some point. What happened last week in oil, two weeks in oil is a really good example. I'm sure if you ask most people, they'd say, put your money in oil because you can Never lose negative $37 oil future where you get paid to again because it's abundant because there's no place to store it anymore. And it becomes. Nobody wants it. And so there is going to be a time when people in the bond markets, I think actually probably right now are still good because the dollar is going to get stronger and interest rates are going to go negative, and the dollar is still going to get stronger in spite of that because the US has reserve currency and other countries are failing faster and needing those dollars desperately, which is creating demand for US Dollars. But at some point that's going to break.

Why does it break?

It breaks because either US can't pay back the debt. It drives into hyperinflation and changes the. Let's say you and I trade together and I'm in Canada and you're in the US And I borrow a whole bunch of money from you, and then I decide to pay you back in booth dollars with a different denomination. Will you trade with me again or will you want something more secure?

Well, here's the deal. I may not want to trade with you, but I may not have a choice for two reasons. Number one, you may be my biggest customer with the biggest economy, and the next part of that is, number two, you also have the biggest military the human race has ever known, and you're going to force me to trade with you, essentially.

I suspect on this that both those answers that don't solve that dilemma. You'll find if going to trade with somebody because they're a big buyer, but they never pay their bills. Seems like a greater fool of philosophy.

Well, I mean, you know, the U.S. if we're doing the U.S. china metaphor, right, which I think we are, maybe we're not, but it seems like we are. Then, you know, the US Pays, gets the goods from China, pays it back in cheaper dollars, and that's a pretty great deal for the US I don't know why Trump is complaining so much about. I get that the trade war too. You know, that's sort of a. And separate kind of issue in a way. But as far as the inflation issue of buying goods, paying them back in cheaper dollars, that's a pretty great deal.

For the US it is, but it's the same deal for China. It's actually a good deal for China too, because what China does is they devalue the currency so they have cheaper labor to play that game. And then the trade wars start because, wait, they're stealing our jobs because they have cheaper labor, because they're. They're artificially changing the currency. As they change the currency value, everybody knows they have to devalue the currency. Money floods out of China into real estate in the US Further exasperating the problem. When you don't have a base of currency tied to something and every government is printing their own currency via currencies, you have manipulation of pricing everywhere.

Sure you do. I mean, I agree. I'm just saying that the reality is I don't know if that game ends very easily. It seems like they can kick that can down the road for a long time. I don't like it. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it is.

They might be able to. That's what I'm getting at. But the cost of kicking that can down the road means asset. So today, what would you do? Let's play out both scenarios. In one scenario, that's going to happen and I would say that's a high probability scenario. So credit is going to, at whatever cost, bailout markets, and they're going to keep going. That means that in the short term, asset prices explode, real estate explodes higher. Everything else, everybody searches for safe haven of assets. Gold explodes higher. Everything else. To be able to protect against.

Step two of that, taxes have to go up significantly to pay back that debt, assuming it's going to pretend to be paid back. Step three of that is when that and that slows economies and we get here again. And step four of that is debase your currency. That's the path on that. And it won't stop technology deflation in the end anyways because technology is marching forward or that doesn't happen on that and companies go through or countries go through kind of an orderly unwind.

It looks more like a managed, I hate to say this, it looks more like a managed depression and you rebound stronger on the other side.

The thing is, as much as we might criticize the US for the way they're handling it, it's pretty much the game plan of almost every developed country. I mean, you think our debt's bad? Look at Japan. They've got 230% to GDP debt. Ours is only like 100%. I mean, we're really good. And they don't have the reserve currency or the biggest military or anything or the biggest economy. So. And Japan has a. Japan's just not going to exist in 70 years. I mean, they can't. If they don't have immigration or children, you know, if you don't have any people, you can't have a country. I don't know. It's just a very weird situation. If you have a comment on that? Go ahead. But I want to ask you in chapter four of your book, I love talking about self driving cars, but before that you talk about doubling up. And I'm curious what you mean by that.

So technology, and it's more than Moore's law, but let's use Moore's law as a case of exponential growth. And so whether it moves from Moore's law to quantum computers or to whatever. But let's see, Moore's law doubles every 18 months to two years. And to see that effect, that same effect that's in your cell phone and project it forward, is that typically doubling up? I think it tricks. Most people can't understand the pace of change. If you fold a piece of paper on itself, if you could fold, you can only fold it on itself seven times. But if you could continue folding to 50 times, that piece of paper would reach from here to the sun. And I've asked that question to tens of thousands of people and audiences all over the world. Most people guess about 2 inches. What that tells you is not a whole bunch of people. We misunderstand. Exponential technology, exponential patterns. If you compare that analog of paper folding to the sun to what's happening with technology, we are on fold 33 right now in 18 months. The technology that we see. So we're looking backwards and all the deflation that we've seen and all of money printing to be able to stop it is looking backwards in the rearview mirror, looking forward. What's going to come across. Society is so staggering and people aren't prepared and there's nothing governments can do to stop it because it's marching forward and AI is moving at light speed across industry, self driving cars, additive manufacturing. Name an industry that isn't going to see.

It's truly amazing. I mean it really does feel like we are at a hockey stick inflection point in the world of technology. But I try to think back just the past and you know, I'm a pretty decent history student. Maybe they thought the same thing. When the steam engine and the sewing machine was invented and every other innovation, everybody thought there's going to be unemployment. And by the way, those things you just mentioned are unemployment.

Promoters certainly the self driving car, maybe the most of any of them. So I don't know.

Stick with what you just said. And the first time you fold a piece of paper once or twice, there's no way you can predict that'll go to the sun.

Three times, four times, there's no way you'd make that Prediction. The same thing happens with technology. In the early predictions there's a whole bunch of people saying what this is going to do and then it folds once and it disappoints and it creates nothing. There's no change. And that change compounds on itself and compounds on itself and compounds on itself. We are so now if you take that analog. So they said the same thing against electricity or they said the same thing against. But electricity was a general purpose technology that as it rolled into society it did create deflation and there were a whole bunch of wars as governments to be able to try to.

Hey, I think it was Buckminster Fuller who said electricity will eventually get so cheap they'll just give it away. It'll just be free.

But that didn't happen by the way. Maybe that still happens, right? Maybe he was just early. Yeah, maybe electricity is a bad analog for artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is moving exponentially and nobody ever thought electricity would be smarter than humans, which most of the top AI researchers believe is we're on a path to be able to get there. So every job is a function of our intelligence, which it clearly is. And artificial intelligence has the possibility to to be smarter than us. It's hard to see how logically there's way more jobs out of that type of technology.

I agree. I think unemployment is definitely a big concern and I think that might be the need for universal basic income. And amazingly even some of my most Austrian school libertarian friends believe that we are headed quickly toward ubi. Andrew Yang was on my show before I interviewed him, the presidential candidate who behind the universal basic income concept. And it may be coming maybe upon us for sure. What about the laws of energy? I mean right now we're in this oil glut market but that's kind of a weird anomaly probably. But energy just in general, we were talking about electricity and for any of this stuff you got to have energy. Anything on that?

There's a whole chapter on it. And I think we're still some ways off. But solar is now competing for lowest cost energy and that we're a long ways off solar contributing dollar energy needs. But the path of reduction. If you looked at the trend on solar cost, what it is today and project that forward energy is going to be deflationary as well for economies. And when economies are built with 10% of all economic output is in energy and if you have an incentive to have cheap energy, your economy does better. It's what drives coal, natural gas, oil.

A military machine to protect cheap energy. If you and you could argue this. If you have solar that is getting to be the cheapest energy and that continues on a downward trend like it seems to be continuing, that changes the economic paradigm across countless industries.

Yeah, it really does. We will see where it goes. Just Jeff, give out your website and wrap it up with a closing thought. If that wasn't your closing thought, maybe it was.

You can follow me at jeffbooth on Twitter website's jeffreybooth.com and it's been great talking with you, Jason. Thanks.

Good talking with you too. And thanks for joining us.

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