TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #704: Running Your Company Like a Free Society with Jason Hughey

Episode Date: January 17, 2026

Marty sits down with Jason Hughey of Satoshi Pacioli to discuss principal-based management (PBM), the free-market management framework developed by Koch Industries, and why its Austrian economic principles make it an ideal fit for Bitcoin companies. Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonhughey Satoshi Pacioli: https://satoshipacioli.com/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/4pOv2L4 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://joincrowdhealth.com.tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be Jason welcome to the show sir thank you Marty for having me excited to be here it's been about 15 hours since I last saw you in person yeah I'm in person how what that was awesome yeah I was a great senior in DC

yeah like I was saying I got I got back late from DC last night like 1 a.m. well slow moving today got hit the sauna I got a sweat in I think I have a sinus infection we're going to power through sounds awesome i'm ready for it because the show must go on as you know we've been working together for what like four months now something like that yeah it's it's at least been a full quarter so yeah we've been going for a while yeah and so for the audience uh jason jason healy works at satoshi patcholi recently joined them and is bringing an incredible service and tool set to the firm, which is our accounting firm and partial CFO services firm here at TFTC,

which is a management consultant, particularly as it pertains to implementing the management practices of Koch Industries, which is a principle-based management process. And so we've been going through the exercise, myself, Jason, and Ed, our head of growth here at TFTC over the last four months, really diving into the principles of principles-based management, why Koch Industries has been so successful by implementing these management processes. And it's been incredibly productive for us. I think, as you know, from our recent conversations, we've already implemented a lot of what we've gone over over the last four months, and it's already made us extremely more productive and given us a lot more insight and knowledge about our business here. But I think the story of Koch Industries is rather fascinating, so I think we start there. um just the history of coke industries uh for some reason or another uh coke industries is uh

controversial business i guess i think a lot of people may look at them as greedy capitalists but um i think after reading good profit which is the book that explains the management principles of coke uh you really understand that there seems like they're trying to make the world a better place and more importantly apply free market um economic theory to business management which i think is fascinating so i think starting there with coke industries how they came to be and how they implemented this particular management strategy and your history and your history at coke i guess to establish authority on the matter yeah of course uh i guess i'll start a little bit with a little bit of my history and then and then um with the principal base management

and the, and Coke, uh, and then we can dive into Coke industry. So, uh, I, coming out of college, I, I went, uh, into, I went to work in the DC nonprofit area. Um, I was in the Coke associate program, uh, in 20, 2012, uh, through 2013. Uh, and that is, uh, that was run by back then it was the Charles Koch Institute. And now they're called Stand Together. But the program is what really introduced me to principle-based management. So, and back then, just to clarify too, if you read, you mentioned Good Profit, or if you read one of Charles Koch's earlier books, Science of Success, they refer to it, or he refers to it in those books as market-based management. But in the last about four years, there was like a little bit of a rebrand and now it's called principle-based

management, but the ideas are fundamentally the same. They just updated a little bit of the language that they use. So if you read Good Profit, you'll read about market-based management. So anyway, I get introduced to market-based management in 2012 to 2013 through the Cook Associate Program. I ended up working on the team after that year that was leading instructional programming on market-based management. And one of the coolest parts about that opportunity was uh the the market-based management team at coke industries would come and they would work with us and we would get to do um like mock trainings where we we pretended like we we ran a session and we would get direct feedback from the the the folks who worked at the market

based management team at coke industries or i also remember sitting in on some of their meetings remotely and listening to them do their sessions and getting their feedback. So that was really cool to, to see them, uh, explain the, the, the, and, and teach the concepts and then get real lifetime feedback, uh, from that. So anyway, uh, that, that was kind of my first stint with, uh, with market-based management and then slash principal-based management, uh, went to another industry for about six years, seven years after that, after that time. So I was there for about four or five years, then about six years in another industry, and then came back to stand together. And that was when they had rebranded to principal-based management. I worked there for

about three and a half years before transitioning to Satoshi Pacholi and helping the Satoshi Pacholi team start to put these principles in practice. And the cool side note to all of this is that Joe, our founder at Satoshi Pacholi, he and I worked together at the Charles Koch Institute back when I was there the first time. So he remembered me and we basically synced up on LinkedIn after he realized that I was also getting into Bitcoin and he obviously had started his business. And we actually talked in one of our first conversations as we reconnected about the idea of helping Bitcoiners integrate PBM into their businesses because the principles are so aligned. So all of that to say, now to take a step back and talk about kind of the story of

Koch Industries that you referenced earlier. So, Koch Industries was founded by Fred Koch, Charles Koch's father, I believe in the 1940s. And Koch Industries then goes on to become mainly an oil company in its early years. It's mainly in the oil business based out of Kansas. And And in 1967, Charles Koch takes over as CEO after his father had passed away, I think, in that time. So Charles Koch takes over as CEO in 1967. And during this whole time in the 50s and 60s, Charles is going through kind of like this intellectual personal revolution. If you think about where the United States is as a country, we're in the middle of the Cold War. uh we are uh there's this the threat of the soviet union and communism is is one of the

predominant uh issues of the time right and so charles cook is is sitting there and he's he's starting he's taking over ceo cook industries but he's also reading all these books about austrian economics and collectivism and and freedom and and political philosophy and ethics and psychology and he's and he's trying to take all these principles that he's learning and he's also an engineer by training so he's trying to take all these principles that he's learning about what makes free societies prosper why are free societies superior to collectivist communist regimes and and and why why why would why why do i want to live in the united states versus the soviet union or you know why do i want to be in west germany versus east germany right like he's

he's thinking through and wrestling through these questions and then he starts to think wait a second there's a lot of even though we say and agree to all these things like property rights and capitalism and free speech and free markets like in economics or in politics a lot of organizations tend to run with a very top-down hierarchical bureaucratic structure that was more like the central planners that we're criticizing from the soviet union and communist states and So he says, wait a second, what if I were to develop a framework or an approach to running a business that applies these same principles of free speech, markets, decentralization, and equal rule of law, and take these concepts and put them into a management to run my company? And so this is all back in the late 60s, early 70s that he's starting to put this into practice. And so the one of the things that's really cool about the story of Koch Industries and the emergence of PBM is this is really the result now of a 50, 60 year experiment.

It's and it's one that has seen Koch Industries go from a very small oil company in Wichita, Kansas, to, again, the second largest private company in the world. And I think the cool thing for us as Bitcoiners, when we look at a story like this and we see the emergence of this, of Coke Industries as a business. And we could talk maybe a little bit later about some of the controversy around Coke Industries. I'm OK talking about that. But just overall, the overall story, when we see that as Bitcoiners, like this is a prepackaged framework for running a business that is closely aligned to many of the things that draw us to Bitcoin as Bitcoiners. right we we didn't come to bitcoin because we wanted free handouts for everyone and and we wanted a top-down control structure to tell everyone what to do like that's literally the reason we we for many of us we're running away from the fiat system or looking for alternative

outside of the fiat system and so uh that's one of the things that's exciting i think when you look at pbm for the first time as a bitcoiner and you start to and you're and you're thinking about growing your business, like you're going through the day-to-day of, I'm in startup mode, I'm in hustle mode, I'm trying to grow this business, I'm trying to make all these things happen. I'm wearing all these hats, but how can I start to develop systems and frameworks and decision-making tools that allow me to scale my business and to do so efficiently and productively in a way that's consistent with the principles that I believe in as a Bitcoiner? So that's I think that's the really cool thing about the Koch industry story for us.

And that's that's one of the things that I think I think should draw many Bitcoiners to at least consider Koch industry stories story. Yeah, I was telling you, I think a few weeks ago, I was at a family office event with my 1031 hat on last month and met a couple of gentlemen who had worked for one part of the Koch industry's family. And I mentioned to them when I found out that they were coming from Koch Industries, I was going through a principle-based management exercise and a red good profit. Their minds were blown. That's awesome. When I was talking to them, it seemed like they believed it was a hidden secret, like nobody outside of Koch has heard of this management practice, which shocked me a bit. Because you think, particularly for free market Austrian thinkers like myself, you think that this would be more popular. among business owners this this management of practice specifically but it seems like it's not

as popular outside of the the coke family of companies yeah i i think part of that may be due to some of the political controversy especially in the 80s and 90s 2000s as well there was an emergence of like this narrative of the evil coke brothers uh and especially in politics uh that that emerged uh and so i think that tainted a lot of things associated with them uh in the media and in kind of popular conversation but as you as you've found reading good profit and i think as many people would find if they actually just took the time to read the book and to understand more about the way that charles coat runs his business uh you'd see that there's a bit of a disconnect between the public narrative and then what they actually talk about.

And I think one of the things that's like, for example, one of the straight up, I think one of the kind of narrative busters that comes out of good profit is when Charles talks about the idea of good profit, right? So there's a very strong emphasis that, again, I think would appeal to Bitcoiners on low time preference in principle-based management framework. We want to create value for the long term. We want to be thinking five years down the road, 10 years down the road. We want to produce a business that's sustainable for our customers and for the profit we're making. That's long-term value creation. So the emphasis is not on the next month's budget or the next

quarter's budget. The emphasis is very much on thinking long-term in terms of how you create value for the business uh and the way that you create good profit is to create real value for the customer and to do so in a way that optimizes the business's resources that does so efficiently make an efficient use of resources to satisfy and improve the and tangibly improves the lives of the customer as opposed to he he distinguishes that from rent seeking behavior right like the corporation that lives in D.C. and gets a lot of their rents and their profit margins really from carving out special protections in the law or using the law to their advantage to get subsidies or whatever way that they use the law as a means of benefiting themselves, regulatory capture,

right? So he's distinguishing this idea of truly voluntary exchange in the market where we as a company create real value for our customers and do so consistently over a long period of time and that's how we earn our profit and that's good profit versus the rent seeking behavior rent seeking profits that many companies take advantage of uh in the market in in the in the regulatory system that we have structured today because that's that's the way a lot of it runs yeah and this low time preference approach has proven to be rather wise as coke industries is the second largest, most profitable, uh, private business in the United States, potentially the world. Is that correct? Yes. Uh, yes, they've, they've done, uh, most recently over $120 million of

revenue, uh, in the last few years. Um, they, uh, annual revenue, um, and they, uh, uh, in, in one of the keys to their success. And Charles has said this in multiple, uh, of his books, he says one of the fundamental keys to success is the application and development of the five dimensions within the principle-based management approach and the application of these principles of a free society to the running of the business and the running of the organization. And I think that's really interesting because when someone with his position, when someone with his experience says something like that, I think someone who's naturally curious, your

reaction should be, that's an interesting claim. I want to, I want to see if that's true for my, I want to, I want to go and look deeper into this, right? Cause this is, this is a CEO of a business that, that is very successful. So if he's, if he's going out there and saying, we've, we've spent 60 years refining these ideas and learning from this process of applying the principles of free side to running my organization, running my business, and he says that's one of the most important keys to their success. I'm excited when I hear something like that to take a further deep dive because I don't have those kind of credentials in and of my own self, but I do have the ability to go in and look at his claims and see what he's doing and put it into practice for

myself. And every time I've seen PBM better applied, it's always led to more clarity and vision or better decision rights clarity and decision rights or better knowledge systems and processes the things that help your business run on a day-to-day basis so and and i think that's the one of the coolest things is it's a concept that has worked scaling a massive business because you're now cook industries is a very large company i think they have over 100 000 employees i mean they're all over the world now they're an international business not just in the united states but the concepts and principles apply to even if you're just you know startup and you're you're in your first year of business and you're trying to make things better.

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just describing there reminds me of something that scott really leaned into in that video is like set up systems not goals um systems will set you up for better success obviously you should have goals but you should depend on the systems more than the goal itself and i think what you were describing there with the the five principles um that have been applicable have set up a system that has led to their success and if you are a business owner as i'm trying to do here at tftc applying these principles to build systems to increase our success is is what we're trying to It was funny. I was re-watching that and I was thinking of our exercise. Like, oh, we've been going through the process of setting up systems here.

Yeah, I think that's a really salient point. And the other thing about that that I love about PBM once you get it, like once you really start applying it, you start seeing the truths of PBM in other authors, influencers, people who know what they're doing. because really there's no claim, there's no kind of, there's no owner of the idea that free speech works better in a society, therefore it works better in a business, right? But it's, or there's no one person who owns the idea that systems are better than goals, right? There are certain people that talk about it. But one of the things that's really cool is that when you understand PBM, You start to see the patterns and the truths that you understand in PBM. You start to see them and recognize those same concepts in the other successful people and other successful business owners and entrepreneurs and people who understand and have experienced a lot of success in the things that they do.

So that's one of the interesting things that I find as well is that principle-based management, when understood, it's – I think of it like this. imagine a deposit of of gold or oil like in the ground right a massive deposit right and if you mine it from one direction and you use your your your a capital your your experience your team and you're going to have an experience getting to that deposit uh and you're going to but you're going to get to the same you're going to get to that deposit in the end but somebody else might come at it that deposit from a different angle using a different technique or different approach but they're still going to get to that same fundamental deposit so what the example that you just talked about with scott adams is like that's that's uh that's an example of coming to

the same truth right but just use it from different perspectives and different backgrounds so that's one of the other things i love thinking about is as i look at other um key leaders in business and other investors and other other entrepreneurs what are the things that they're saying that are consistent with what what comes from pbm because really we're all coming we're all learning the same truth in a different way sometimes on on some of these things yeah so let's um let's jump into like a high level overview of pbm you mentioned the the five principles and applying them, how would you give the, uh, the elevator pitch for PBM or the elevator pitch, uh, explanation of PBM? Yeah, that's a great, uh, great question. I maybe an elevator that's

going up 150 floors. Yeah. I'll try to keep it maybe to like 70 floors. We'll, we'll see if we can keep it tight and efficient. Uh, PBM is the idea that free societies work better than controlled societies. So let's apply that to our businesses. And if we can do that successfully, we should see significant and improved results. So it's not just like an ideological commitment. It is a true commitment to, we're going to apply these principles because we see them getting us better results in the company and in the firm. So that's the 30 second pitch. That's the immediate, like if you distill it down to one idea, it's we are applying the ideas that make free societies better and more prosperous to an organization. Now, some of the examples of what those ideas are,

right? I've mentioned a few of them, free speech, right? The idea that we have free and open discourse and you're free to challenge and you're free to share your ideas, bring your knowledge to the table, learn from others' knowledge. Like if we have that open culture of knowledge sharing and free speech, we're probably going to get at better ideas quickly compared to competitors who don't have that culture, right? So that's one example. Another example is the idea of spontaneous order, right? So this is the Hayekian concept. So we've talked about Austrian economics a bit. Friedrich Hayek is one of the key influential economists to Charles Koch. And this idea of spontaneous order, of orders naturally arising and emerging based off of human action, but not

human design right so and and that's a lot of what we experience especially in the bitcoin world i mean bitcoin was uh given to us anonymously by satoshi nakamoto and it is now it's a decentralized protocol distributed across the entire world uh and there's no there's no human central planner that can change or manipulate uh bitcoin right like that's the fundamental if you were if you talk about one of the fundamental characteristics of Bitcoin, that's it. So spontaneous order, free speech, equal rule of law, right? The idea that the rules apply to everyone the same. So just because you're in political authority, just because you have high level of social status or influence, that doesn't mean you get to go around violating or breaking the law just because

you feel like it today, right? The laws apply to everyone. And so in the organization, it applies to the executive leaders and the leadership, the CEO, the CFO, the COO, you know, all your executive suite, just as much as it applies to the, you know, the person who's joining the job on the first day. So you take these principles and these concepts and you apply them to the organization. And then what you should see is improved results from the implementations of the systems and the decision-making approaches that arise from that approach. And specifically, the way that Koch systematizes this is through what we call the five dimensions of PBM. So we've talked about

these, I've mentioned these a little bit, but those five dimensions are vision, virtue and talents, knowledge or knowledge processes, comparative advantage, and motivation. So basically, the fundamental idea is that if you look at a problem in your business, so just think of any problem that you might be running into. And again, this applies to any business, large or small. Think of any problem in your business, you can probably trace the root of that problem to one of those five dimensions, the vision, the virtue and talents in the organization, the knowledge process that you have, the comparative advantage, how it's being used, and the motivation of the individuals in your company. So you want to use these five dimensions as kind of like different

lenses to look at your business. And then as you look through your business through those different lenses, you're going to see both problems that you can solve, but then you're going to have a better idea of solutions that you can present forward. So that's the, and again, going back to this idea of spontaneous order, and this is one of the key benefits of PBM. The idea is we empower employees to apply PBM throughout the organization. So everyone's looking through these five dimensions. It's not just the executive leaders who are saying, oh, today we got a vision problem. Everybody needs to get on board with our vision solution. It's everyone throughout the organization going around and saying, well, what are our knowledge processes like on this?

How are we leveraging everyone's comparative advantage on the team like this? And when you have a culture like that across the entire organization, you can start to see how people feel empowered to contribute and toward the results of the company as opposed to feeling like they're just checking off boxes or you know just clocking in clocking out they're actively solving problems in real time so that's one of the empowerment uh themes in the spontaneous order uh the one of the ways that spontaneous order emerges from the use of pbm there are cracks in the foundations of your money governments around the world are managing record debt the same way they always have by debasing their currencies and the effects are already showing

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slnt.com slash TFTC to get 15% off anything, or simply just use the code TFTC when shopping at slnt.com. Patented technology, special operations approved. It has free shipping as well. So go check it out tying this to people running bitcoin companies why do you think this is so aligned with what we're doing specifically and how should people begin to implement this yeah so as as bitcoiners like i can speak for myself but i know this is probably a common experience for most most of the bitcoiners in our space right we all at some point got fed up with the fiat system for some reason or another. Uh, there's, there's, there's, we've, we realized that the central banking, uh, the central banks are, are just, are, they have arbitrary control over our money.

They can literally print money out of thin air and we have to work and, and give our, our time and our energy away for the, these dollars that, uh, that, that the federal reserve can just manipulate it when, right. And so that, that centralized approach at top down approach to the to money money supply is something that frustrates us as bitcoins right or we're maybe we're frustrated by the the fiat short-term consumption high time preference consumer society that we we live in right we we don't want to participate in this uh you know keeping up with the jones's lifestyle and just having to always be one-upping everyone with a nicer car and a bigger TV and five bigger TVs. And we want to live a good, honest life, want to contribute our work

to the world, but then we want to stack stats and stay humble, right? So there's low time preference. There's this natural skepticism of central planning and control. There's even kind of this sense of meaning and self-actualization, right? I think a lot of Bitcoiners are becoming more aware especially especially if you're part of like the old guard right you bought bitcoin in 2016 and you held on to it until now you're realizing that there's more to life than number go up and and money right like you're starting to think about what can i do what can what legacy can i leave for my children what legacy can i leave on the world how can i make the world a better place and so there's this idea of meaning and like actually finding like that then in finding

self-actualization, which is a key component of the fifth dimension of PBM, the motivation dimension. So you have all these principles that I think Bitcoiners, like the things that drew us to Bitcoin are the same principles that drive the PBM approach, the principle-based management approach in Koch Industries. Even the affinity, one more to reference, even is the affinity for Austrian economics. Charles Koch, if you read Good Profit, if you read The Science of Success, it's Hayek and Mises and Thomas Sowell and a lot of these economists and thinkers that obviously champion free market ideas and stood against a lot of collectivists and socialists and Keynesian ideas back in their day. But then he's taking their concepts as well and applying them to how do I run a business?

How do I use these concepts to help me run a business and get better results for my team? So we share a lot of – the way that I would say it is Bitcoiners are predisposed ideologically to accept many of the tenets of principle-based management at a first principles level. We want free speech. We want equal application of the rule of law. We want open debate. We want Austrian economics and we want economic thinking. So we want all of these things and we agree with all these things in principle. And now we have a management framework that's been in place for now 60 years through trial and error and iteration that is literally the embodiment of those principles just as a management framework for running a business, which, you know, you can always try to take your concepts and make them your own. And that's fine. I would encourage anybody to do that. But also, let's at least learn from this approach that is grounded in the same principles that we hold as Bitcoiners. And then we can take that and learn from that and apply that to our businesses and make our businesses. I guess one other thing, too, on this point that I've been thinking about a lot is you and I would say we believe in hyper-Bitcoinization. We believe that there's a world coming where Bitcoin is one of, if not the fundamental building blocks of our economy, right?

And that's a world that I'm working for. That's a world that you're working for. That's a world that many Bitcoiners are working for. And especially if we're running companies, I would imagine that's a world that many of those companies are working for as well. So if that's what we're working for, and that's what is meaningful to us, then we should be, I think, looking for solutions, even in the management of the businesses and the cultures that we build and the way that we create value that is aligned with the principles and the ethos of Bitcoin. And sometimes that's hard because if all your experience is you've been surrounded by 20 years of corporate America with sometimes it's soul-sucking approach to work and to getting things done for the company. And if that's your mental models and that's where you're coming from, then it's good to take a step back and find new mental models that are grounded in these principles. And I think that that is such a powerful thing for Bitcoiners to be exposed to this concept of principle-based management, because it really takes those principles and gives them to Bitcoiners in a way that's easy to process.

Yeah, let's put some concrete examples on this, too. Obviously, we've been going through the process at TFTC implementing PBM and what we're doing. similarly at satoshi patcholi you guys have gone through the process and maybe we can do that just give people some concrete examples of how we're applying this to to our business and what was it like for you guys if you don't mind sharing if you think joe would be comfortable sharing absolutely yeah joe would be comfortable for sure uh so for example uh virtue and talents right that's one of the dimensions of principle-based management and one of the key questions that you're asking when you're looking at your business through the lens of the virtue and talents

dimension is, what is our culture? What is it like to work here on a day-to-day basis? What do we stand for as a company? What do we promote? What values do we hold to? When you're looking at your company through that lens, one of the things that that leads to is a discussion of the fundamental values of the company, right? And the reason that you want to have a system of values in your company is not to be dictatorial, like these are our values you apply, you adhere to our values and

therefore you won't break our values, right? You're not trying to create a system that's like a dictatorship. You want to create a set of values for your company that empowers employees to act in a way that builds the brand of the business that increases your integrity and your reputation that sets them up for success right and so you want to use the values of your company as a way to empower employees to create value build a culture that everyone wants to work in and be a part of and and to bring other people into that culture so at satoshi patcholi when we were going through our team and going through the exercise of looking at our organization from these five dimensions, we got to the virtual talents dimension. And, you know, we sat down and we

said, we don't have currently a codified system or codified set of values for our culture and for our team. So we took several weeks and actually we were out in Denver as a team for a summit in October. And that was a really good time because one of the things we did as a part of that time was we sat down as a team and we went through a and brainstormed a list of values like things that we stood for as a company and that included things like sound money uh that included things like um uh value for value and we we went through and created a list of all of the things that we we stood for as a company and then we went through the hard part of distilling those down into some core values that we were then used to act and to give us the ability to act

as employees of the company, if we're representing the company or in how we're onboarding new employees. And so ever since the development of those values, one of the things about that process that was really great was we were all involved. So it wasn't something where just a couple of us went into a back room and created a list of values and said, here's the values of the company. Now go do them. Everyone felt like they contributed to the discussion and had something and everybody did contribute something valuable. We have about 10 people on our team and everybody had something to say that really added to the discussion. So now we have a set of values at Satoshi Pacholi that is organic to our company and it really exemplifies what we

stand for uh and so now everybody on the team feels like they have better clarity in terms of the culture that they're contributing to and the culture that we're building because we're now we're now thinking about how do we build this culture and exemplify these values over the long term not just you know not just because we came up with these last month or last quarter we we came up with these and now we can think about how do we put these into practice for the next decade and and that's a powerful thing when you have a team that's that's able to do that so that's one example another example uh and this is a little bit more tangible in terms of uh like a process that we implemented or put in place um so in the fourth dimension of of of

pbm is comparative advantage and underneath that dimension one of the things that uh that is emphasizes this idea of clarifying roles, responsibilities, and expectations. So having everybody understand on the team, what is your role or what are your roles on the team? And what are you responsible for? What are you accountable in the things that you do that contribute to the business? And then what are the expectations associated with that? How do we want to see that emerge? And everybody took ownership of writing their own roles, responsibilities, and expectations and getting that down. And it wasn't one of these things where like that's it forever we'll never change it the idea of our needs is that they actually

should probably change over time but we were able to then really have a better understanding of who's responsible for what on the team and then as a result of that we had more clarity across the team about who was contributing to what processes or aspects of the business and it helped set goals and accountability for those goals for different roles on the team so those are two examples of like just taking the time to think about these questions that may even seem like common sense at first like oh yeah everyone should know what their roles and responsibilities are but if you haven't talked about it in six months it can be one of those things that kind of just falls by the wayside and you just assume certain things and then things get lost taking the

time to actually codify it be clear about it and then say hey we'll revisit this in six months that's that's something that's been very helpful to our team and we've been able to be a lot more streamlined and efficient with some of the processes that we've had since the implementation of those RR&Es. Yeah. And here at TFGC, obviously we're still going through the process. I think we have three or four more meetings, the next of which is tomorrow to really tie a knot in this whole exercise. But we've been slowly but surely implementing stuff along the way.

And I think for us, the biggest value add from going through this exercise immediately has been the knowledge dimension um we were ed and i have been going through this this process with you um and i think we were encouraged after reading good profit and having a few conversations with you it's like okay i think we're we're pretty much in line with this philosophy and are applying it in certain ways in the sense that we have sort of a flat hierarchy and we communicate um pretty regularly in our in our company discord but there were some gaps of knowledge like information was scattered we didn't know who was supposed to own that information we began

implementing this and as you saw last week on our last call when we showed you our dashboard like we quickly recognized that that was a gap that we had and we could increase the productivity and efficiency of the business so we simply had better knowledge processes in place and began implementing them and building them out almost immediately and it's already had a massive benefit to to what we're doing here yeah going going through the knowledge dimension with you guys was a lot of honestly i had a lot of fun doing it just because it was cool to see the opportunities emerge as we were having the discussion about where you guys could improve the business and where there were where there were opportunities to improve the knowledge flow

the knowledge sharing that you guys were doing even though like again going into it it wasn't like you guys had terrible knowledge like you as you said you were you were communicating regularly and there were a lot of ways in which you guys kept each other up to date but still taking the time to be intentional about going through that process and that's the thing that i would emphasize for every bitcoin business out there is being intentional about going through and asking these questions will reveal, no matter how well you think you're doing, it will reveal something that you're missing or some gap or some way that you can improve the results you're getting in your business. And for with you guys, with the knowledge dimension that we went through and

what we discovered, there was just a lot of ways that you guys were able after the discussion to coordinate the knowledge that you're using on the backend for your podcasting business that um, that, you know, we hadn't really thought about or where we wasn't front of mind when we first started the discussion. And so seeing like the dashboard that Ed showed that he built as a result of that, and just seeing the fruition of that was, was really fun experience. So I think it just speaks to the Testament, right. Of this applies to all businesses. It's like one, like one of the common, one of the things I've heard in starting to talk to some, some, some entrepreneurs about this as well, you know, that's Koch Industries and they, they, they're already

very successful and they, they do a massive, you know, massive revenue every year. And they're, they're, of course, you know, it works for them, but I'm, you know, I'm small, I'm getting started. And I think the key is it does apply to everyone, right? It's not about who it's being used by. It's about, it's about the principle itself. And if you just take the time to be intentional about it it's it's fun to see the results that emerge from it yeah yeah well i mean i think uh i'm curious i think we've discussed this before but i'm curious to get your thoughts on air about what it was like working with a media company to go through this process and is that is it a new type of company yes well you guys yeah you're you're the first media company i've worked with which is

exciting right uh but it wasn't like it wasn't there there's there's nothing that once you understand pbm there's nothing that comes at you that's like oh this is i don't this is a media thing um i don't know about that you know like the it's it's the the the concept of these principles of virtue and talents vision knowledge uh comparative advantage it all applies to whatever business you're running so learn it was one of the things that is cool with working with you guys is just learning about the media business learning about what the way that you guys think about your audience right learning about the way you guys manage sponsor relationships learning about the way that you guys think about how you educate and contribute to the the ideas and the debate

the discourse that go out there around the issues that you guys talk about which is that was really cool to see and learn more about what that looks like on the back end but at the same time when it comes to like applying these principles of principle-based management, you're still running into the same problems that any other business would run into, right? You're running into areas where you have knowledge gaps. You're running into, you know, identifying yourself as a culture and what values you stand for and being clear about what those values are and how you can use those to inspire your team and empower your team and give them the feeling that they can contribute to, to something meaningful, right. Or just clarifying your vision, right. We haven't

really talked about the vision dimension that much, but, uh, you know, clarifying one of the things that was, uh, you know, cool with you guys is clarifying your vision as a media company, right. What you guys are standing for. And if you, if you're comfortable with me sharing, uh, it was being signal in the sea of noise. Right. And that's, that is, that is a unique approach to your vision that that is unique now to tftc and so now you guys are trying to be a signal in the sea of noise in this world of information overload right that gives starts to give me a picture about what you guys stand for and i think just even going through that process was very cool uh in terms of helping to see like as a media company this is how we're

going to interact with the world this is how we're going to create value for the world it's we're We're going to be the signal for our audience in the midst of everything that they got coming at them, all the algorithm, all the social media feeds, all the doom scrolling, right? All of that stuff that's coming at them, we're going to stand out. We're going to be that signal. So that's a very cool way in which you take the specific company in the industry that you're dealing with, but then you take these principles and you come to clarity on what you're trying to accomplish. And it's an exciting process. Yeah, I think another added benefit that really stuck out was the marginal analysis of new initiatives. Like we talked about, we just launched BitcoinProducts.com, and we're going to lean into that.

And we just went through the marginal analysis. Okay, we're going to allocate time and capital to this. Like, what is the potential value add to the business? And going through that process was very enlightening. and not only that um with the ai tools maybe we can talk about this for a while but i remember last week i i asked you to send me like a zip file of all the documents of the finished dimensions that we've gone through so i took those and i uploaded them into the back of a cloud code and cloud co-work and created individual skills for each document like we had our vision doc we

had our marginal analysis doc or knowledge um doc and basically like dumped them in the cloud and said okay take each of these docs and make a skill and when we're doing something and i pull in a particular skill whether it's basically trying to determine whether or not something we're doing is aligning with our vision or um the the best example is um after our discussion last week i took the marginal analysis doc made a skill out of made a skill for claude on it and then basically had a conversation using that skill about bitcoinproducts.com was able to create a memo and share it with the people working on bitcoin products and tftc like all right here's um here's why it makes sense to go after this here's some timeline here's a timeline of what

we're going to measure over time to see if it's successful and decide whether we should keep leaning into it or or back away from it and with ai um and in these principles we codify them and actually have artifacts that you can dump into them you can really work with these lms to get better results yeah it's that's i mean i've i've learned from you guys even just talking with you guys about what you're doing with ai uh what what you and ed are are implementing uh i think that's awesome to hear that like and i think that that's again as far as the time that we're living in what we're going through as small businesses as entrepreneurs with the tools that are coming online and the things that we're really being able to do, you know, the process of iteration

that has gone into PBM, that's gotten it to be such a proven framework. Now it can be for many of us as we start to grasp these principles and apply them, again, not grasp it in a first principle sense. We've already got that, especially if you're a Bitcoiner for the most part, but grasp them in like a, how do I implement this in my business? And how do I make this into a framework, like the principle-based management framework, take that, plug that into AI, plug that into, you know, build out tools for decision-making, for economic thinking, for these knowledge processes that we're talking about, for even, you know, staying true to your organizational vision. The possibilities are endless, right, with what you can do with that. And it's cool to hear

even the application that you're talking about there, feeding the documents that we've worked on and plugging that into AI to begin that process for you guys. But I do think that is one of the exciting things is once you get exposed to the framework, once you understand and internalize, this is how we want to attack problems from these five dimensions. We want to look at our business. We want to look at the different problems that we're running into in our business, look at the different ways we can add value to the world. We want to look at it through these dimensions. Now I'm going to plug that into the AI tools and the AI opportunities that are, that are out there in the LLMs and, and then use that to just take, to streamline this

process of making it that much more efficient. And I think that's a, that's a huge opportunity. And I mean, there's, there's, there's apps that can be vibe coded. There's there's, you know, there's there's consultants and coaches to be able to, to really propagate these, these tools for us. And the cool thing is then you guys can make them for you in terms of the specific uses of your business right and when we'll be able to do the same as satoshi pacholi and any company that that really starts to take this area will be seriously we'll be able to do it for themselves based upon their needs and and what's going on yeah selfish question yeah where do companies fail when trying to implement this that's a great question that is a really great question um

a couple things immediately come to mind first is this idea of i would call it like jargon right the jargonization of business and i think every business runs into this problem no matter what system or framework you have in place right there's a lot of words like key concepts i would say that emerge from principal waste management things like comparative advantage roles responsibilities and expectations, knowledge and knowledge processes, benchmarks, decision-making, economic thinking, right? We have all these terms that emerge. And if you read Good Profit, you'll see a lot of what I just talked about, those terms referenced. So you can kind of fall into the pattern of using the words, but not implementing, if that makes sense. Like, you know,

I say, oh, I'm working on knowledge processes today, or I'm thinking about my RR&Es today, right? Your roles, responsibilities, and expectations. And you use the terms, but do you really internalize them? And do you really ask the questions and search for the answers that enable you to truly apply them, right? So jargonization can be a pitfall because you get excited about all the concepts and teaching them to your team. And then everybody starts using the term. One of the funny ones is comparative advantage, right? So comparative advantage obviously in economics it's it's based upon your opportunity cost right so i should i should spend time and energy doing things for which i have the lowest opportunity cost right so

like i don't i don't want to spend time on something that uh or i'm sorry not lowest highest opportunity cost i don't want to spend time and energy on something where you know i'm I'm doing something that I saw I'm performing at a suboptimal rate to get a suboptimal result. I want to leverage my talents, my knowledge, my skills at something that is as as my the best use of my time relative to my opportunity cost. Right. So you always have to think about that opportunity cost. Sometimes people interpret or can misinterpret comparative edges. I'm good at it. Right. I'm good at the thing. Therefore, I should do the thing. And that's not necessarily that just means you're good at it. Right. So you're not considering that opportunity cost question. So anyway, jargonization and not being, not really being intentional about applying the

concept, just using the words as one. The second thing that I think can fail is, is more so like, honestly, the hardest thing, the hardest one, or sometimes one, one of the hardest ones is the challenge culture. so the open feedback the challenge culture the free speech because no matter what happens at the end of the day we're all still human right so we all still ego can get in the way uh the just natural human instinct of the way that we operate when things get rough uh we can sometimes stifle productive challenge we can sometimes run away from productive challenge because we're scared of what people will think about us or or whether we'll get criticized by the boss

uh we again we can uh we can weaponize challenge like or make make challenge or feedback into something where it becomes about the persons involved not about the ideas at play so when we do that we might still be saying or you know we might still say we have a challenge culture a feedback culture but it it's not getting put into place in practice and that that can very quickly lead to some negative morale. And I think the last thing that is really important with all of this is it still does matter that the leaders of a company are bought in. So if the leaders aren't bought in, then it's much tougher to have a culture that is centered around this framework. If the leaders are playing lip service to it, then that can be a problem as well. But those

are some of the immediate pitfalls that come to mind uh the other the last thing i would say is it is hard like it genuinely is hard if you really take the time to do pbm i would compare it to something like a heavy deadlift right like a deadlift is a very simple exercise you have a weight that's sitting on the floor and you pick it up that's all you do right that is literally if you're just going to describe it as bare bare bones level heavy weight is on the ground you pick it up. But when you actually understand what goes behind a deadlift, and I have experience in the fitness industry, so I was a personal trainer for six years. When you look at the physics behind a deadlift, when you look at everything that you're doing from a biomechanics perspective, there's a

lot that goes into a really good day, especially when you look, talk about like competitive deadlifters and people that are lifting those five, six, seven, 800 pound weights. There's a lot that goes into that on the back end that's way beyond just picking up a weight and putting it down. I'd say the same thing with PBM. At the end of the day, we're applying free principles that work at a level of the free society to the organization. That's it. It's a very simple concept, but the actual commitment to doing that day in and day out and thinking from an economics perspective. If we were to really challenge ourselves, am I thinking economically as well as i could be am i really thinking about the opportunity cost here am i really uh looking at

the knowledge processes and gaps and where we can find that like that does take mental effort mental energy and so i think the last thing is it's it really is just hard uh it's it's like a good workout regimen that if you stick to you're going to get a lot of results but it's also like a good workout regimen and that it's hard and you got to stay committed and you don't skip on it because you're not feeling like it because that's when that's when the results go away so that would be the last pitfall is just you got to be willing to to muscle through some of the tougher times when it comes to applying and staying consistent with it and what are the teams that are good at sticking with it applying it what is like the number one thing that they do i know it's hard

just like doing it but like what one thing that i found very successful is not trying to do everything all at once so uh if you're just getting into pbm and you want to become successful with it don't try to be thinking about every single question from all five dimensions all at once that's going to burn you out and you're you're gonna you're gonna feel like this doesn't work pick one dimension like for you guys i'd use you guys in as an example here it sounds like not you might want to live in the knowledge processes dimension for the next six months like i'm not saying the other dimensions don't exist not saying there aren't beneficial things that you're going to learn from still thinking about virtues and talents and vision but you guys have really had

some breakthroughs going through the knowledge dimension stuff so let's live there for six months and let's let's be consistent about applying that dimension for just the next six months And we'll keep the others in mind. So for me, one of the things that I found very successful is companies or teams that pick specific concepts that really start to lead to a breakthrough and just stick with that and grow from there. Because once you experience results there, then you're going to start to see where the other dimensions fit in and they come in over time. You still want to understand all the dimensions, but I'd say pick one or two things that are really starting to stick. one or two dimensions, uh, one or two concepts within those dimensions and really get good at that. Uh, and then, and then grow from there. The other thing that I think is, I, I, I go back to

this a lot because this is, uh, this is, this is preferential to how I, I like to manage. And I, I do see, I have seen a ton of success when this is present, just the, the overwhelming commitment to a feedback and a challenge culture. Uh, the teams that are good with that, they get a lot of things right in the long term uh the teams that that end up missing that or there's like a chilling effect or there's there's subtle politics and bureaucracy that goes on in the background or there's things that um you know there's there's or shut down of any challenge once that starts to happen a lot of other things do start to fall off uh so on the flip side the teams that are very well it's robust you come into the meeting and you're like hey i messed up i take ownership of

that, you know, I'm going to do better next time. This is how I'm going to do it. Or, Hey, I don't agree with your idea. I understand where you're coming from, but I don't agree with it. I think there's, this is the better way forward. If you've got that environment where people can be that honest with each other and give that direct feedback, you're going to get to better ideas over time. So I know that's, that's kind of a specific knowledge dimension and maybe a little bit of virtue and talents dimension aspect of it. But that's, that's something that I found to be extremely when you got a team that operates like that they're going to get a lot of a lot of things right over time yeah well i'm excited to begin implementing this more logan listening in i think

he's experienced some of it but i think we have to finish the process first and then really go full bore in terms of like okay here's all of our artifacts here's our vision here's how we're going to attack knowledge and um run marginal analysis and our virtues and talents what our responsibilities and i think it's going to be a good 2026 for tftc um in large part to you sitting down and going through this process with us so thank you for that absolutely yeah and just as a final note here i think one of the things that's really cool about this is i think about the culture right again going back to the point i made earlier about the ethos that we're contributing to and we're a part of uh i i really believe this framework for managing a company is is part of

that emerging Bitcoin ethos, right? And so if we can practice what we preach, if we can take these same principles and put it into the way that we run our business, it's exciting because of the cultures we're building and the results we get to achieve from that. So that's one thing that I'm very excited about with this framework. And I hope, and hopefully more Bitcoiners and more, and even just more individuals in this privacy, freedom, decentralized, it doesn't have to be just Bitcoiners, right? Like if we're all in the same space working for the sovereignty of the individual and the bottom-up approaches to solving problems that society typically uses a centralized or top-down approach, let's use these principles and put them into frameworks that can also just

help our businesses run better. And that's an exciting culture to want to be a part of, not just in terms of the work that you're doing, but you're really on kind of a bigger team when everyone's operating that way, which is exciting. It's one of the reasons that Bitcoin is so fun. Yeah. And if anybody's listening to this and is intrigued by what we've been discussing, you guys at Satoshi Patchouli

are going to be doing this with more companies or open to doing this with more companies, correct? Yes, and we'd love to work with any company that's interested in trying to take this framework and grow their business and achieve better results through it. And then if to learn, even just to start learning more um i do we do have articles on our sub stack uh where i've

introduced the idea of bitcoin uh pb principal based management for bitcoin companies and growing your business from a principal based management framework we have articles on the the five dimensions of pbm as well there so if anyone's interested they can they can also check out on our sub stack and we're continuing to produce more content there as well awesome well jason thank you um thank you for all you've done for us at tftc over the last few months it's great to meet you in person last night and i will talk to you tomorrow morning as well but uh this has been fun and i anybody listening like i would seriously um consider if you're running a business especially this pbm management style just going through the exercises alone

learning about it and being forced to think about our business here has been incredibly productive in and of itself and hopefully um i'm able and we as a team are able to lean into it and really make sure that we're following the uh the principles that we we have discovered throughout all this and um i think it if we're successful in doing that uh it will be massive for this business so thank you for that yeah of course thank you marty and uh it's been it's obviously been great working with you guys and helping you guys go through the the exercise of applying this at at uh at tftc so um appreciate the the words of encouragement there and you guys are and i'm grateful for everything you're doing even just in the bitcoin space and educating uh educating all

the audiences about all the important stuff we're talking about here so awesome awesome to be part of that journey a little bit well the journey continues it's gonna be a long one peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether That's YouTube, Apple, Spotify. Make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way.

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