The Pomp Podcast - Why Bitcoin Is The Ultimate Value Investment | Jeff Park

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Jeff Park is a Partner and Chief Investing Officer of ProCap BTC. In this conversation we talk about what separates smart investors from those who just follow ideology, how that mindset shift can make you better in the market, the idea of a bitcoin treasury company, and how businesses could stack more bitcoin without constantly raising new capital. ===================== Markets are at all-time highs. Public equities are outperforming. And individual investors are driving it all. It’s officially the rise of the retail investor. On September 12th in NYC, I’m hosting the Independent Investor Summit — a one-day event built exclusively for self-directed investors. We’re bringing together some of the smartest public market investors I know for a full day of macro insights, market predictions, one-on-one fireside chats, and actionable investment ideas from each investor. This is going to be an absolute banger event. Join us if you like markets and think retail is two steps ahead of Wall Street.👉 TICKETS: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.independentinvestor.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (use promo code POMPYT25)======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================⁠⁠⁠Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at https://stake.coredao.org/pomp======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.======================TimeStamps:0:00 - Intro  1:55 - Intelligent investor vs Ideological investor 5:28 - How to think through where the world is headed 18:30 - Why people are attracted to bitcoin’s worldview 31:51 - How to think through bitcoin treasury companies 

Hello, midsize business. We see your big ambitions, but how do you achieve the wins you want when your technology is holding you back? SAP Grow is built to grow with your business, no matter its size. With AI embedded at its core, working across every system, all ready to go from day one, so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI cloud ERP for any size business. What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform,

watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression

of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. So Bitcoin doesn't need to take an ideological view on how AI is expressed either, right? It doesn't actually have to take the ethical concerns of AI into the conversation because Bitcoin is not about having an ethical view. But what it does recognize is it's a store of energy for which high compute is considered important. I think when you introspect deeply and understand that's what people want to own in their portfolio

that's valuable to them, I don't think there's any asset better than Bitcoin in the world. What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great episode with Jeff Park. Jeff is the chief investment officer of ProCapBTC. And in this conversation, he lays out a view of the world that pits the intelligent investor versus the ideological investor. And he explains exactly what the differences are and why you understanding this framework will help make you a better investor in the market. On top of that, we talk about the idea of a Bitcoin treasury company and why treasury operations, the ability to actually generate more Bitcoin on the balance sheet without having to

raise more capital is such a unique idea and something that we think will be very valuable in the future. Here's my latest conversation with Jeff Park. All right, Jeff, I thought a great place to start is you wrote this piece and you basically pit two different worldviews against each other. The first is the intelligent investor, Ben Graham, and kind of the Warren Buffett world of the view. And then you describe something called an ideological investor. And after I read this, it's like you see it and you can't unsee it. I keep seeing it everywhere in the world. People we're all talking about some form of this idea, but I think intelligent investor versus ideological investor, what is that? Help people understand. Yeah, sure. So at the core, I think it's

redefining what intelligence means, right? Because I think we're told intelligence means a particularly narrow version of how we're taught to invest. But the truth is, intelligence in itself is a meta, It's a concept. And so the version of intelligent investing that we're told through academia and Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett are not false. But I think it's also worth noting there for a specific paradigm of the world order in which it worked. And if you believe that there might be a seismic shift underneath of that global world order, then maybe it's time to reconsider a different version of that intelligence. And so when I broadly talk about the antiquated intelligent investor, Benjamin Graham's intelligent investor. What I'm alluding to here

is that it's based on these very fundamental valuation principles that are rooted in what feels Newtonian at some level, right? It's based on time value. A lot of it is about discount cash flows and interest rates and duration curves. And how do you model normal distribution across terms, where a very assumption of a normal distribution is the foundation of a lot of options pricing in itself. So what does that mean? It implies that there is a modelable world, right? It actually implies there's like a steady base for which you can do yield extrapolation and liquidity manipulation and transformation and all these great things, which ushered in a great amount of financial prosperity. But it worked because actually, if you take a step back,

the Washington Consensus. Everything we know about investing from 1980s and on is really is belying this very stable unipolarity of the dollar hegemony, where the risk-free rate itself is like the foundation that is not challenged. But when you really think about what risk-free rate means, that's an open-ended question in itself. And the risk-free rate of the dollar-based world, if you think that might be changing, then everything you ever knew about intelligent investing has to go out the door and you have to rewire your brain. And the case that I make is that is the backdrop of the macro that we're entering. We are at the point where the Washington consensus is clearly failing. It is absolutely clear at this point, because even last week,

Trump made the announcement that we're taking Intel into the US government 10% stake. And the stock rallied. And nobody batted an eye, as I followed at least in the media, as if this was one of not the most bizarre things to ever happen in American history. So it shows you society is ready here in this country. We're ready to have these kinds of conversations without squeamishness. And that in itself tells you the Washington Consensus has failed. And so the opposite of that is the Beijing Consensus, which is led by not a markets-first principle, which is an American value. It's led by a sovereignty-first principle. And sovereignty-first principle by nature is ideological. So the paper that I tried to delineate through is we look at ideologies at different

lenses. One is a geopolitical lens. The other is the role of technology, specifically as it relates to how AI is an ideology in itself, believe it or not. And then the third is the cultural ideology that is emerging intranation as well as international relations that play a role in defining what investing paradigms could look like in the future. So taking it all in,

I think the key point here is that intelligence in itself doesn't have to just come from yield-based time models. It can come from other aspects of reimagining the distribution of outcomes that is, I think, a time for us to be ready for

into the future. Now, one of the things that you mentioned in the piece is that historically, event-driven changes to valuations and investor returns were changes to the fundamentals. There were more revenue, maybe an earnings beat. There could be some sort of thing that happened within the company itself, a new product launch or whatever. Now, there seems to be quite a bit of volatility, uncertainty, appreciation, et cetera, that is related to external events that occur. And those external events don't tie all the time to those valuation components. Explain a little bit more as to, you know, we know where we came from. Most people, if you went to an economics class, if you've been on the internet, someone at some point has yelled at you and told you

you're an idiot if you don't believe X, Y, Z, you know, valuation metric. But the world we're going into, I think that there is maybe a bifurcation. And I used to think it was purely based on age. Young people have an understanding of the internet. Older people don't. I've met a lot of people who are not sub 40 years old, but they understand what's going on too. They're online. They get this. And so how do you think about this new world? What are the things that are driving the changes in valuations or maybe the data points and the waypoints that are helping investors understand where's the world going? Where will returns be captured versus those old school kind of quote-unquote valuation metrics? Yeah, I feel very lucky in some sense that I had

the privilege to live in both East and the West as worldviews can converge. And the US and the Western kind of vision is pretty clear about a free markets approach, where to your point, there's not a lot of friction towards the growth model if you believe that everything can be done openly uh but but actually it's just not true for the rest of the world if you look at kind of stocks in asia the big news are generally policy related because the very thing that can change the outcome of those private companies to access offshore markets are actually entirely political and so um i think if you only believe in like a revenue model where growth is coming from like subscription and you have free access to a subscription. How do I get more eyeballs and

that kind of stuff? It feels pretty like quantifiable and mathy and actually like a little bit gameable. But there are such things as blunt events that otherwise is actually even more important. And I just think we took it for granted that for a long time, the market was pretty open and there was no barrier to trade. There were no tariffs and everything was generally kind of absorbed in consumer first principles. But anywhere else you go, governments have a lot of decree on being a kingmaker to different kinds of companies in this space. I think you're seeing a little bit of that now here in the US as well, where you see a lot of the corporate leaders trying to get closer to the power of DC. And on the other side, you're seeing kind of the

international competitors come to the US for those same reasons. I think, for example, no matter how much you believe that luxury watch markets are going to grow, and it probably will, the way that it's growing with Bitcoin and gold and other hard assets people like to collect and store wealth in, the moment you put a big tariff in the luxury watch market, the valuation changes overnight, right? And so this debate with Switzerland, as it's happening with that particular conversation, every watchmaker is on the edge of their seat because it changes everything so it doesn't really matter your excel spreadsheets are amazing or like you have the best trading algorithms to

catch like the eps change faster than somebody else those things just become less important and i think in a way it's um at a philosophical level this is very powerful for uh those on the outside right those that are kind of living on the fringes of retail for example because they don't have the edge of algorithmic trading. They don't have the edge to getting faster data than other people. So in a sense, by changing the distribution of these outcomes where events appear to be a little bit more random and discrete and creates jump risks, it actually fattens the tails. And fattening these tails is actually pretty empowering for folks in the retail investing space. And I think that's why you always see a lot of community coalition building around

investors wanting to support their retail-driven community stocks as well. Now, one of the aspects that I think has also changed is the retail community used to be seen as not a lot of money, not that smart, definitely not well-coordinated, and frankly, not worth paying attention to. It feels like 180 degrees now. They definitely have money. We know that they are a significant portion of trading volume and owning of the assets. They definitely are smart. You just go on any of these platforms, whether it's a YouTube, an X, a Reddit, whatever, Substack, and they write very long, thorough, well-regarded pieces about companies and things like that. They now can coordinate. I mean, there's, you know, kind of the general purpose

communication channels like an X. There's also things like maybe a stock twits where they're on there communicating about a specific asset, you know, in a community. And I think that now the companies realize what is the difference between your institution and your retail base? like there's trade-offs now the institution obviously has more money okay that's great they have the ability to give you the institutional kind of um you know maybe luxury position because fidelity you know is only of your uh of your company but the retail audience is way more valuable for a lot of other reasons including their ability to become your marketing team and go and spread the word and kind of you know provide feedback and do all these components

so i guess the question then becomes in a world where um you have these external kind of shocks you know and when you're talking it's like somebody's trying to build a house they have a spreadsheet okay here's how much it's going to cost here's the timeline if i hit all my assumptions i'm going to be able to build this house and halfway through the project a hurricane comes knocks on the house right right and you're kind of like okay well spreadsheet didn't really matter because we never modeled in the hurricane um how do companies or even assets right i think of even something like Bitcoin that doesn't have a CEO or a board, how do they navigate this world, right? Like what are the things that they should be doing that's different? And I use that as a

way for an investor to see the assets I hold, are they adapting to this new world, right? Like this is now something I need to underwrite because if they're simply just doing the things that worked 20 years ago, maybe that's a risk. Maybe that's actually something that I should ding them on in terms of my position sizing or how long I expect to hold this asset. So how do you think about identifying who is prepared for the new world versus people who are completely oblivious to it? There's a great case that Alex Karp makes in his book, The Technological Republic, about how Silicon Valley in the last 20, 30 years has changed ideology in this country. Um, the part that really stuck out to me, and I think I intuited always in the back of my mind, but it was put so cogently by, by Alex that, um, it has stuck with me, which is

the entire business of search, right? Of course, led by Google, but then by social media and Facebook and even Amazon, all the big Mac seven essentially are in the search business of some kind for customer eyeballs. If you optimize for wanting to cast the widest net for eyeballs, the incentive alignment here is to be basically a blank canvas, right? It means you actually cannot have a single view for the possibility you might offend one tribe. So the insidious thing about the culture of search, if you build a business on this foundation, and it's been very successful as we know it, is you're supporting a business model in which you must not have views. Because having views itself is the problem for which you're going to create issues amongst the

eyeball search business. There's a generation of entrepreneurs basically that grew up in this world, right? All they think about is consumer facing businesses of growing revenue, where you're trying to be as least offensive as possible. And therefore, you must not have any strongly held belief. And that can actually be on one hand, pretty powerful. But on the other hand, it could actually just totally tear apart the fabric of society and the ability to have meaningful conversations. And so what we're seeing with retail investors, I think, at some level is a pushback, right? They're kind of pushing back on this idea that like, we're all kind of commodities and eyeballs, and we're all the same, and we're going to be treated as if we're universally

fungible. And it's a little bit of a reaction to believing in something. I really do think when crypto Twitter jokes about the saying of believe in something, it is so fundamentally core at the culture of where ideology is going. And as a result, it's becoming more important that the CEOs and the executives that are behind these public companies are able to delineate an an authentic vision where it's no longer be enough to actually just be like a people pleaser. And I think that's actually the story of what happened with Carrie Wheeler at Opendoor versus the story of Alex Carpenter. I wrote about it a little bit in my writing, but when you're such a blank face like Carrie Wheeler, right? Where you don't really have the ability to display

conviction in anything, retail is going to call it out. They're like, this person does not understand anything because this person has no view uh and and and this becomes like a pretty meaningful detractor to their ability to then perform on their job uh and then you look at somebody like palantir and alex carp i mean wall street's been like befuddled by this business for years like they basically haven't had meaningful cash flow everything feels extremely elusive from a valuation perspective and yet here's this incredibly compelling cogent speaker who has deeply held convicted beliefs that people are rallying around. And the stock is, of course, like hitting limits for which Wall Street cannot understand it. And so I think it just shows you

that some of this is a counterculture. I do think it is a little bit of pushing back to like the Google business model, the Facebook business model, where even Zuckerberg, I think, has now come out a little bit openly to embrace some views. You know, who is this person? And everyone one is taking more risk. And I think the future is that the yield curve, as we know it, in which it's considered risk-free is actually not risk-free at all. The way to take risk, you must actually understand the social risk for which you have to take some action in. Today's episode is brought to you by Core. You can earn yield on your Bitcoin by just holding your Bitcoin. It's simple. Core, the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, will reward you for not selling your Bitcoin. It's not magic.

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There's a lot of people who say, hey, I have views, but I don't want to say them. Okay. Then there's people like an Oscar because I have views and I'm going to say them. That's kind of like one perspective to evaluate a company. But there's actually kind of another cut through of this, which is there's actually just a lot of leaders

who don't have views, right? Like even if you talk to them in private, no one will ever hear what they say. you're sitting at dinner and you're like, what do you think about X? They'd just kind of be like, eh, I don't really pay attention to it. Right. Versus there's a lot of folks like an Oscar is whoever who have very strong views.

And so in a weird world, you need people who not only have the views, but who are willing to say them in public. And I think it's become more in vogue to say them in public, but that doesn't solve for the people who just don't have a view at all. Right. And the reason why I call it offense versus defense is the people who don't have the views, they pretty much show up every day in a generalized way. And they're just like, okay, like what's happening.

in the world and how do I respond? Whereas you almost would laugh if I told you that's what Karp does, right? As he shows up every day, his response to the world, like, no, this guy has a very specific view. He's driving towards something. He's on offense. He's attacking every day. And he's saying, if something gets in my way, I'm going to remove it, get around it, go over it or whatever. You can look through many of the business leaders. Elon, he's got a view. He's on offense every day. A Dana White on offense every day, right? You just go through and you're like, okay, wait a second here. The people who are actually doing things, the people who are actually driving real material innovations and change, they are on offense. And so again, if you

think about Bitcoin, it's very interesting to me because Bitcoin, again, has no face, has no people, has no team, but it has a view. And it actually expresses that view via code in the world. And although people think of it as this passive thing that kind of exists, the view and the philosophy and the ethos are on offense. And I actually think the more I've thought about it, like that may be a reason why people are attracted to it is because it kind of implicitly is telling you, this is the worldview that I hold. This is the thing that I think is valuable. This is how I'm going to act in the world. I am on offense and it serves as a magnet. And it's kind of like, um, what is the commercial? Uh, I think it's LeBron James maybe

is, uh, got a Nike commercial and he's like running and he's by himself. And then like one kid joins and then five kids joins. The next thing you know, he's got a whole town that's running behind him or whatever. That's kind of what has happened with Bitcoin and many of these other assets that people would point to, right? Yeah. I think the greatest kind of misgiving and misconception about value investing is that value is defined incorrectly. I mean, the literal definition of value in the dictionary doesn't say cheap stock, right? It actually is something you hold dearly in your heart as a way to portray a belief. That's what a value is. So Benjamin Graham's version of value investing is one version of it, but the definitional aspect of value means

it can transcend that to what other people want it to be. And that's why I make this case that Bitcoin is the ultimate value. It's a capital V value because the ideological pillars of being censorship resistant, where it's not at the whims of these geopolitical orders and tariffs and all these things. It's above that. It's also, I think, culturally very unifying, despite the fact that there's these chasms that we're seeing in society where the ideology is pretty pervasive at a global level. And then even on the front of technology, I actually do think many of you and us, we've been early on what Bitcoin represents on the other side of AI, which is that if we believe high compute is important. That is a currency. And obviously, high compute is important. That is not

a controversial statement anymore. And Bitcoin doesn't need to take an ideological view on how AI is expressed either. It doesn't actually have to take the ethical concerns of AI into the conversation because Bitcoin is not about having an ethical view. But what it does recognize is it's a store of energy for which high compute is considered important. And so all of these three like pillars that are coming together to me represents value it's it's it's it's a little bit counterintuitive but i think when you introspect deeply and understand that's what people want to own in their portfolio that's valuable to them i don't think there's any asset better than bitcoin in the world it's funny i used to uh whenever someone would say bitcoin's

not backed by anything i'd say well before i address that what do you think is the most valuable commodity in the world and they would say gold or oil or you know whatever and i would say well you know those are all valuable obviously but i think the most valuable commodity is computing power and bitcoin happens to be backed by computing power and so it may be hard to think through this but it's actually commodity backed you know currency and you could just see some people were like okay you're crazy some people were like you sound stupid and then every once in a while you would meet someone and they were like i never really thought about computing power as a commodity but like yeah now when i tell people that they're like oh of course like i've

seen the electricity you know charts right i've seen the you know the ai data center uh investment charts like this is very valuable yeah yeah no it's it's a bit of like a humbling lesson for me too because i think a lot of people in social media in the community think of me as like a very quanty person right like they think i'm a mathy guy are you saying this is my club it probably doesn't help that i'm asian uh let's be honest and you know i am good at math so i will own it but many people don't actually know that when i uh first got to stanford i chose to be a philosophy major. And the one thing that... Blasphemous. Why would you ever? Well, the thing is, you know, I think also people don't know this, but my good colleague and friend

Matt Hoogan was a philosophy major. And a lot of times when people are just moved by how Matt is so eloquently able to put together disparate concepts in a very cohesive way that makes it relatable. You know, I revisited kind of all my earnest interests in my earlier years about what philosophy in itself represents. And I think it is maybe also like a counter movement to how technical like the world is becoming, where we're just kind of losing touch a little bit with the things that matter. But this is where I think the lines are being redrawn. I remember walking into my classroom i was 17 years old and the professor you know put like you know a grain of rice on the table and was like is this a heap and i was like no it's a grain of rice and he's like he puts

another grain is this a heap it's like no it's still two specks of rice and basically the point you're trying to make is when does it become a heap like how many specks of these rice we have to put together to convert it into a heap and of course i walked out because i was like oh my god this is not why I came here. I didn't come here all the way to like learn about rice becoming a heap. Like I have plenty of rice at home. Like I don't need to be a part of this. But I look at that memory with great kind of enamorment because it shows you that these kinds of conversations about what like value and quality in itself is can actually be even reflected in that exercise of a heap of rice. Well, a very applicable example in kind of the Bitcoin and crypto world is I've

constantly ask people what qualifies as decentralization if you have one node everyone agrees that's not decentralized if you have two probably not three okay what about ten is that enough a hundred right thousand a million like at what point do you cross there's no kind of definition and uh bitcoiners in particular they don't like like you know it when you see it right no they do not they that's a gray area that people exploit right they want to know you know what is like mathematical you know thing that i can verify and uh the the short answer is like you can't sometimes right and i think whether it's a heap of rice or you know a single grain of rice same thing with decentralization it's like at what point do you get to that but i do think that there's

this you know and you can call it an ideological investor which you do in this piece you can call it a bitcoiner worldview you know whatever you want to kind of label it i do believe that there is a entire generation of people who are growing up and we know that trusted institutions are falling. We know that the economic prosperity outlook for these people is much lower than their parents. Hope is declining. All these things that people have pretty well documented. But I do think that there's an entire generation that just says, if i can find people who think like me i got a shot to get out or you know change or uh um grow my portfolio etc and i do think like elon alex carp right i mean you just go through there are

very specific examples um yeah what what it comes back to though for me is those people also have throughout their career there's been an iterative test they say of you they see the response bigger bolder i'm gonna lean more into what i actually believe i'm not scared of you know the the pushback actually when i get pushed back it gives me ammunition to you know double down like alex carp today is not you know spinning on a computer on his finger or doing an interview it was not the Oscarp when they first went public, but it's working. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is the incredible mental incongruence about what financial nihilism can look like to outsiders and to those that are on the inside, which is actually, there's a very optimistic version of

this too. When you have kind of the global concerns around income inequality, that is just so pervasive, right? It's present everywhere. This is not even an American story. This is everywhere in the world, the number one issue is income inequality, the next generation not being able to afford a home. It's everywhere. And so at that point, what is the rational thing for somebody in that seat to be doing? It's actually recognizing that you have to break the system to give yourself a chance at a fat-tailed event to catch a bid. It's actually a very rational thing to do. And so some folks may scratch their head and say, oh my gosh, these people are acting crazy. You know, they're just left tail, right tail on the fringes of

being IQ 80 and IQ 150. But guess what? Like all ideologies are IQ 80 or 130. That's the point of having an ideology. If you're 100, you're in the middle of the curve. That's not an ideology. That just, you are, that is what it is. Existence. You're just existing. Right. And so I think once you see that, um, and, and I think a lot of smart kind of business leaders are able to see it like that is a form of soft power. And there's actually a great kind of like a primal optimism in that too, which is that it's a case for a survival mechanism that people are navigating. And I think we should be optimistic about this movement. Like it feels a little scary because it feels like, oh yeah, higher volatility, more kurtosis, more unknown events, more fat tails. But it's almost like a

natural pushback to a system that failed the majority of the people. And so to me, we should have a lot of optimism about it and religion too right at some level like i think there's been lots of studies that have shown religion is going up in the u.s now for the first time in a long time there's also studies that show that religion generally tends to prosper when there's economic hardship and that there's also a pair with people's sense for wanting a greater us belonging and and those two trends i think are not just exclusive to religion it really is this concept of belief-based investing, right? Value-based investing founded upon beliefs.

And that's why the ideological investor to me is so important because I do think that's going to shape the next 10 years. It just won't matter what earnings are going to look like for some of these stocks. It just won't. The things that will matter will be determined by the court, the cabinet, the executive leaders,

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when um when i think about what we're working on um one of the things that is a view right that i think is very important is um there's a lot of companies that go and they buy bitcoin on their balance sheet some of them are raising capital to do that i know a lot of private companies that are operating businesses that have nothing to do with bitcoin and they're sweeping them in you know their profits into bitcoin i there's a company blue cotton in tennessee who even is creating like almost the equivalent of like a retirement account for their employees and it's like a bonus system and the longer you stay, the more that you get out of the pot and the pot is being funded by mining in their facility.

I mean, it's crazy, right? But very innovative and very valuable to the employees. I think one of our views is buying Bitcoin and holding it will work, but also buying Bitcoin and then being able to operate treasury strategies in a pretty unique way should be very valuable as well. Talk a little bit as to kind of like philosophically how you think through this view as we're kind of putting this together. Yeah. I think I saw recently that about 10% of Bitcoin is actually now held by institutions.

These are governments and public companies for the most part. And when you double click on it, what's actually more fascinating is that there's only like 115 entities or so that constitutes the top 7%. So it's actually early in terms of the counts of institutions relative to the ownership of the Bitcoin network, which signals something. There's still a lot of opportunity for more companies to come online and buy Bitcoin. But what companies will then do with them will be really different going forward. I think we're used to thinking about the Bitcoin treasury company by the way Saylor has defined it as kind of the de facto base case. But I think that's one version of it. And I think there's things to appreciate there about

the possibilities of financializing Bitcoin exposure for the institutional investor. And it's been wildly successful. But that's not really the kind of embodiment at the core of making Bitcoin in itself more productively useful for the actual gains to be had for society, right? And so the thing that keeps me up a little bit at night with a lot of excitement and a lot of ability to think about what synergies could exist out of Bitcoin is not just Bitcoin accumulation. Of course, acquiring Bitcoin per share is the driving metric for which people will be enthused today. But a close cousin of that is operating revenue that can then also acquire Bitcoin more creatively on the balance sheet, right? So if you can just determine Bitcoin

as the unit of account for which you want your valuation of the balance sheet to exist, then the goal is to actually generate revenue to increase the balance sheet in itself. And the nice thing about Bitcoin as an ideology is that if it works, you can basically reduce what is one of the highest cost center of any operating business, which is customer acquisition. Most of the businesses spend an inordinate amount of money on marketing, on distribution, and all the ways. I mean, even the case with how Coinbase and Circle is set up in their JV for USDC shows you the power Coinbase has over Circle in the take rate. So distribution is everything. Um, but the nice thing is if you're a Bitcoin treasury co that can earn the goodwill of

your customers being your shareholders who are ideologically aligned for Bitcoin adjacent businesses, you can attack that vector in a very cost efficient way, right? That gives you, that gives you an unfair advantage that gives you a chance to acquire different kinds of businesses or build different kinds of businesses where only you can actually exercise that premium as your customers then therefore being your shareholders. And I think that is really what I think about a lot when the idea of the Berkshire Hathaway of Bitcoin coming to be, which is the synergy that arises out of that network effect of having your shareholders also being your customers to potentially the businesses that they're also invested in.

Well, it, what it really does is, um, you start to give ownership to the people who are using products. Right. And you know, what's always fascinating to me is, um, I've heard people throughout the years say, you know, whenever I buy a pair of Nikes, I also take the equivalent amount of money and I buy Nike stock. It's a very forward thinking person, right? They're like, if I'm willing to consume, I also want to own. And, you know, I know people who say, Hey, I do the same thing with a Starbucks or a Walmart, or, you know, like, well, the things I use are the things I want to own. I do this and actually never knew that other people do this. I was like, I thought, no, this is like, yeah, I thought I was the weird one kind of thinking about it. It's not

popular, but I have heard other people say it. Right. And frankly, it's usually somebody who is not like a finance person, right? It's somebody who just says, hey, I want to build some degree of wealth that isn't going to just come from a W-2 income at my job. And so I don't own anything at my job. And this is the way that I figured out how to do it. And if you think about like,

go all the way on the other end of the risk curve in terms of like hardcore degen crypto, and it's like, you know, buy a token in a DAO and, you know, get to participate in economic value, whatever. public companies are actually kind of like in the middle and i think what you're talking about this idea of like serving a customer but also having them be a shareholder that's right is this like blending of a relationship between an organization and uh the people who benefit from it yeah that's pretty interesting because isn't that what crypto ultimately has always been about

right it's this idea of owning a piece of a network for which you of course are the asset owner, but you're also the productive participant where you're contributing the ability to make it more thriving and be a part of that ecosystem in which the circular flywheel of that revenue model is accretive to all, right? I mean, we should be able to apply the same ethos in an operating company. And I'll take a little bit of a jog here. Did you ever read this book by Robert piercing zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance yes a long time ago that's like a one of those books that gets recommended and you hear two or three times like i don't know i'm gonna read that and then finally you're reading you're like man i gotta i'm gonna go tell 10 people about this book

really i feel the same way many people have told me to read it and i finally got around to it and i was shocked by one how relevant it is now considering it was written in the 1970s and it's really a book about technology at some level which is like 70s i mean that's pre-internet pre anything. And Prisic talks a lot about how to define quality. What is the definition of quality? Do you know it when you see it? Do you know when you touch it? Because I think on one hand, you would say it's something well-made, but now with IKEA producing well-made things, we all know that's not what quality is. That's why we're gravitating towards imperfect handmade potteries that we would now then consider quality because it's artisanal. And he defines quality as

this. He says it's when the exact moment of the subject becomes the object. And you recognize that experience is quality. And I think Bitcoin Treasury Co. and the Bitcoin network and all the ways where the customer is also their shareholder is quality. That is so valuable. And we just haven't seen that kind of shareholder kind of mindset. Because as you've said, most companies don't exist from that fundamental ethos of operation but we can change that because it's crypto and it's bitcoin i um i couldn't agree more um where can we send people to find you on the internet especially your writing i'm trying to get jeff to write more uh because he's excellent you wrote this piece and i told you i said dude you should do this as often as possible

where can we send people to subscribe there so i'm on twitter my handle is dgt10011 and in my profile i actually do link my sub stack so if you go there and subscribe on my sub stack you'll also get some of my occasional writings and if you've made it this far in the episode what i need you to do is go and tweet at jeff and tell him jeff i want to see more writing and then maybe we can all convince him to write more maybe then i'll have to go back to stanford and see my philosophy professor and bring a bag of rice the next sub stack is just a grain of rice picture that's the next meme just rice exactly all right well thank you so much for doing this we'll do it again next week. Let's do it.