Technology Is Deflationary — So Why Does Everything Still Feel Expensive? A Conversation with Jeff Booth

We live in an age of extraordinary technological progress. AI is transforming industries overnight. Software is eating the world. The cost of computing, communication, and information has collapsed. By every measure, technology is making things cheaper, faster, and more abundant.

And yet, for most people, everyday life doesn't feel cheaper at all.

In this episode of The IJK Podcast, host Imad Jack Karam sits down with Jeff Booth — visionary entrepreneur, technologist, and author of the groundbreaking book The Price of Tomorrow — to explore one of the most important economic tensions of our time: technology naturally drives prices down, but our debt-based financial system is designed to push them up. What happens when those two forces collide?

The Idea Behind The Price of Tomorrow

Jeff Booth didn't start as a monetary theorist. He's a builder — someone who spent decades founding and scaling technology companies. But along the way, he noticed something that didn't add up. The technology he was building made things dramatically more efficient, yet the broader economy kept requiring more debt, more stimulus, and more intervention just to keep growing.
That observation became the foundation of The Price of Tomorrow, and in this conversation, Jeff shares the origin story behind the book and the moment the core thesis clicked into place. It's a perspective that reframes how we think about inflation, productivity, and the role of money itself.

Why Deflation Doesn't Feel Like Deflation

If technology is deflationary, why doesn't it feel that way at the grocery store, at the gas pump, or when paying rent? Jeff explains how monetary expansion — the constant creation of new money and credit — absorbs and masks the natural price decreases that technology should be delivering. The result is a system where productivity gains flow disproportionately into asset prices rather than into lower costs for consumers.
This section of the conversation challenges some deeply held assumptions about economic growth and asks a provocative question: what would the world look like if we actually let prices fall?

AI, Productivity, and the Future of Work

With AI accelerating rapidly in 2026 and beyond, the deflationary pressure Jeff describes is only intensifying. The conversation dives into what this means for jobs, skills, and entire industries.

As AI takes on more cognitive tasks, how do workers adapt? What skills remain valuable? And is the traditional model of employment equipped to handle a world where machines can do more every year for less?

Jeff brings a nuanced perspective here — not utopian, not dystopian, but clear-eyed about the scale of the transition ahead and what it demands from individuals and institutions.

Bitcoin, Trust, and the Future of Money

No conversation with Jeff Booth would be complete without discussing Bitcoin. But this isn't a surface-level crypto conversation. Jeff explains why he sees Bitcoin not as a speculative asset but as a protocol — a foundational layer for a new kind of monetary system built on transparency and fixed supply rather than discretionary expansion.

The discussion covers why layers matter in Bitcoin's architecture, how the network could evolve to serve different functions at different scales, and why Jeff believes a monetary system aligned with technological deflation would produce radically different — and better — outcomes for society.

Best-Case and Worst-Case Scenarios

The episode closes with a candid look at where things could go over the next five to ten years. Jeff lays out both the optimistic path — where society adapts to a deflationary reality and the benefits of technology flow more broadly — and the darker alternative, where resistance to change leads to greater instability, inequality, and institutional breakdown.
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It's the kind of big-picture thinking that forces you to step back and reconsider assumptions you didn't even know you held.

Listen to the Full Episode

If you enjoy debating the forces shaping the future — money, technology, AI, and the systems that connect them — this is a conversation you won't want to miss.

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