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Conversation with Bitwise Advisor: Don't buy a house, buy Bitcoin
Organized & Compiled: Deep Tide TechFlow
Guest: Jeff Park, Bitwise Advisor
Host: Kevin Follonier
Podcast Source: When Shift Happens
Main Title: Why Buying a House Is the Worst Investment You Can Make - Bitwise Advisor - Jeff Park | E167
Broadcast Date: April 16, 2026
Key Takeaways
Jeff Park is a seasoned macro strategist and also an advisor to Bitwise. He firmly believes that the current financial system has already lost its relevance for young people—especially in a context of high housing costs and the possibility that artificial intelligence could replace jobs for an entire generation. He points out that real estate is, in fact, a depreciating asset, while Bitcoin is the ultimate financial safe haven. In addition, he predicts that the rapid development of AI will trigger the world’s largest wave of Bitcoin adoption.
He proposes that “Occupy AI (Occupy AI)” will become a key turning point for Generation Z and Generation Alpha. At this moment, these two generations will uncover Bitcoin’s potential through something akin to the “eureka moments” Millennials experienced during the financial crisis. Through that process, they will come to understand more deeply the essence of digital assets and investing.
Moreover, Jeff is very optimistic about the potential of real estate tokenization (real estate tokenization). He believes tokenization has the power to fundamentally transform the existing financial system and provide ordinary people with more equitable opportunities to invest.
This segment explores how these key moments shape our understanding of digital assets and investing, and the far-reaching impacts they may bring in the future.
Highlights of Great Insights
The Truth About Real Estate and Wealth
On AI and “Occupy AI (Occupy AI)”
On Investment Frameworks and Logic
On Society and the Future
Jeff’s Early Exposure to Currency Depreciation
Host Kevin: You mentioned earlier that you had an early experience with currency depreciation when you were a kid. Can you tell us about it?
Jeff Park:
I grew up in both the United States and Korea, and spent part of my elementary school years in Korea. I experienced the Asian financial crisis in 1997 while in Korea. That crisis shocked the entire world and left a deep impression on my heart. I was only in second or third grade at the time, but you could feel the entire country in a strange collective state—everyone, upstairs and downstairs, neighbors across the street, were gathered together by the same patriotism, facing a fate they couldn’t control. That feeling was very peculiar: when you realize a country’s sovereign currency is depreciating, it can unite everyone to that extent. For most Americans, the closest analogy would probably be 9/11— that national trauma brought everyone, left and right, top and bottom, together to think about what America is and what it represents. Currency depreciation can create the same kind of cohesion.
That experience in 1997 hit me very hard, but it also showed me the power of a nation—when the people are mobilized to confront a sovereignty crisis in a principled way, and defend the people’s interests. There’s one other thing I remember very clearly: the Korean government at the time required all citizens to donate gold to bolster the national treasury, helping repay IMF’s rescue loans. In the United States, the IMF might sound neutral, but in many emerging markets, IMF is a term with extremely heavy political color—it’s suspected, despised, and even viewed as something driven by political motives. I encountered this early, and sometimes I think these experiences might have, to some extent, been a foreshadowing of my path into cryptocurrencies 20 years later.
Who Is Jeff Park?
Host Kevin: So, who are you?
Jeff Park:
I’m Jeff Park, but I think that in a certain sense, I represent the convergence of many forces. On one hand, I was raised in the U.S. as a Korean-American, with an Eastern way of thinking at my foundation—so I can serve as a kind of bridge between East and West narratives, whether it’s the prosperity brought by globalization or the social tensions that it creates. On the other hand, from an intergenerational perspective, I entered the workforce in 2008. After graduating, my first job was at Morgan Stanley, right at the front line of the global financial crisis.
But it also makes you quickly realize—nothing in this world is truly unbreakable. A lot of what you’re taught in school doesn’t end up being that solid. It’s humbling, but you can also transform that into a kind of motivation to build your own way of thinking. This experience also made me a snapshot of a generation— a Millennial who entered society during a financial crisis. Because of that, there was deep distrust toward institutions and intermediaries, and in social networks, across all kinds of careers, and in every aspect of life, there’s a yearning for non-custodial, autonomous solutions.
How America’s Diversity Is Both an Advantage and a Weakness
Host Kevin: You personally lived through currency depreciation as a child, and when you entered the job market in 2008 you saw the illusion of the financial system shatter. Now we’re in New York—the financial hub of the world—with outrageous living costs. I’m from Switzerland and live in Singapore; both places aren’t cheap, but coming here still feels absurd. I really can’t understand how ordinary people make it. And all of this is related to that thing you experienced as a kid, except now it’s more urgent. What are we looking at? What should we do?
Jeff Park:
America’s biggest advantage—and also biggest weakness—is the diversity of its population, and this diversity runs through the entire population structure and the social fabric. You often hear Asian commentators predict the decline of the U.S. empire; they usually focus on one core idea: diversity will kill this country. I heard that a lot when I was a kid. This idea has always hovered in the geopolitical relations between Korea and China, and Korea and the United States. And now these trends have fully surfaced in domestic political movements in the U.S. The core issue is this: when a country’s population structure is so diverse, it’s hard to form a truly strong national cohesion. In Korea, it’s simpler: we’re all Koreans, with shared historical roots, and we’ve gone through colonial oppression—those shared sufferings give us a unifying vector. But in the U.S., with a history so rich and complex, it’s hard to find that obvious connection point where everyone can feel, “we all sacrificed together.” Korea has mandatory conscription; all men, regardless of class or education level, must serve—this plays a huge role in creating a sense of social homogeneity. Israel is similar. But in the U.S., you end up asking: what is the one U.S. experience that everyone shares? It’s very hard to answer. U.S. politics typically draws the dividing lines between left and right, between classes, between young and old—but I think those dimensions are distractions, escape routes. The real core is—young people lack a sense of national cohesion, and that’s the thing most worth cherishing and also the hardest to build.
What We See Today From a Broken Financial System
Host Kevin: So what’s wrong with the current financial system?
Jeff Park:
We’re seeing the signs of a financial system that is completely out of control and completely collapsing. People explain what’s happening at the social level with the term “K-shaped economy.” A K-shaped economy means that one group of people experiences enormous prosperity due to asset inflation, while another group of citizens is stuck in a downward channel—in their case, that’s recession. They don’t have jobs, can’t find jobs. The gap between the two keeps widening—that’s what the “K” shape means: one line goes up, one line goes down.
How the “K-shaped system” shows up in the real estate market
Jeff Park:
In New York, you can see it through real estate as an asset class. You might be surprised to learn that the average price of real estate in New York City over the past 10 years hasn’t actually gone up—it’s been flat. You might be surprised because a lot of narratives make people think New York real estate has experienced incredible booms, especially those astonishing skyscrapers and reports about Chinese and Russian capital entering residential development. But that’s not entirely wrong.
What we also see in real estate is a K-shaped economy: the ultra-luxury units that are chased as a store-of-value perform very well. They aren’t truly lived in; they’re assets—people buy them and keep them on their balance sheets to store wealth—and this portion performs well. If you have a $20 million penthouse and bought it seven years ago, now you might be able to switch it for a $30 million penthouse. You’re making money.
But if you’re buying an ordinary home—one you actually intend to live in, raise a family, and make some kind of productive economic contribution to the city—and the price is closer to so-called “affordable” ranges, those homes may actually be declining or staying flat.
Manhattan has something called a mansion tax. As long as an apartment’s sale price exceeds $1 million, this “mansion tax” is imposed. But today in New York, $1 million might only buy a studio. This tax was set up about 30 or 40 years ago, when a $1 million apartment really could imply some kind of luxury. Because it isn’t indexed to inflation, the government won’t proactively adjust it. So almost all apartment transactions in the secondary market get hit by this mansion tax.
Housing that contributes more to the city’s economic life—affordable housing—tends to fall or remain flat. New York itself is a paradox. It’s a city where two different life-story arcs unfold in the same place. If you come here from Singapore or Switzerland, you’ll see that everyone’s experience can be completely different. In my view, all of this is a symptom of a shortage of good assets.
The problem with real estate isn’t new. When many people talk about the decline of capitalism, they point the contradiction at real estate, because land is scarce by definition. Land is scarce, and the communities formed around physical space are also scarce. Manhattan’s real estate is expensive because people want to work in areas where commerce is thriving and where people are close to each other. When you stack those social components on top, the value of land rises above its historical level due to the intersection of social power. Human civilization repeatedly shows this pattern: whenever a place releases the core of activity, land thrives.
The problem in the U.S. is that we have an enormous privilege: running the global financial system. We often say the dollar is America’s biggest export—that’s true—but it has a cost. The cost is that offshore capital ultimately has to come back and be invested into U.S. assets. That relationship corresponds to trade deficits and capital account surpluses. If the U.S. wants to keep maintaining trade deficits, by definition we need continuous inflows of offshore capital into U.S. assets. That’s how the dollar works.
You’re essentially creating a manufactured market for U.S. assets. Offshore investors need somewhere to park their balances, and that creates a very difficult environment. Because that market isn’t priced based on whether you and I truly live in New York, or on our productivity here that contributes to the economy. It isn’t priced around the cost structure of us as residents. It’s priced around U.S. assets as sovereign store-of-value instruments. When there are different motives in a real estate market, pricing problems are inevitable.
How should new real estate investors think?
Host Kevin: For someone who is 30 or 35, has saved up some money, and wants to make a reasonable investment—how should they think about it? They might barely be able to reach the down payment for a New York City studio apartment, but you say a studio apartment is already $1 million. Theoretically, $1 million should be a scarce, luxury asset, but then you say no—you actually need to buy a $20 million penthouse.
So is the “buy a house, buy real estate” path our parents’ generation talked about still applicable to us?
Jeff Park:
Real estate is a great example that shows what we truly need to rethink isn’t house prices rising—it’s the declining value of the dollar. Essentially, houses require maintenance. They’re capital expenditures—things break, they need repairs, and you have mortgage taxes, property taxes, and various maintenance expenses. After buying a house, there’s still a huge amount of capital input that must continue. Houses don’t turn into gold over time; they keep depreciating. You have to continuously repair and maintain them, so houses are fundamentally depreciating assets. In fact, it’s written in black and white in the U.S. tax code that houses depreciate over a relatively long period of time, and real estate investors can claim depreciation tax deductions within 20 to 30 years. So we’ve actually known for a long time that real estate is a depreciating asset.
So why is its price still rising? First, because the dollar continues to depreciate. Second, because people treat real estate as their primary savings vehicle, because it anchors you to the economy’s productive capacity. For example, if you want to send your children to good schools, public schools are typically assigned by school district. You have to pay a lot of property taxes in order to get admission eligibility. So behind homeownership, many social functions are tied up. Those functions continue to push house prices to rise along with inflation.
The issue comes from two dimensions: demographics and the liquidity transformation itself. From the U.S. market, the average age of Americans applying for a mortgage this year is 59. This number should make people alert. People around 59 are probably not buying their first home—they’re buying their second, third, or fourth. And this group is directly competing with the young people you mentioned, the 25-year-olds who want to buy their first home.
The problem we face in housing is a very specific intergenerational issue: the role of real estate as a wealth storage tool is already completely at odds with the social need for families to truly settle down and raise the next generation. Many young people’s life paths get trapped because buying a home is simply out of reach. There’s also a capital control dimension: you hear more and more New Yorkers moving to Austin, Texas because New York taxes are too high. But what happens then? Local Austinites are also unhappy because their home prices get re-anchored to New York’s economic baseline, not their local market—creating a new affordability crisis. This is a capital-control issue and also a cross-generational liquidity transformation issue. Both dimensions are levers that policymakers can adjust. The U.S. has proposed 50-year mortgages to experiment with liquidity transformation. But that’s only the beginning of society’s biggest problem—namely that young people simply can’t buy homes.
Host Kevin: From the perspective of a rational average man: after working for a few years—with a girlfriend, marriage, and kids—I’d probably need a home. But I also want this to be a smart investment, because I put many years of salary and hard work into it. Now you’re telling me that most of these kinds of investments are actually not good—they’re bad. So if I’m 30 or 35, saved $100,000, $200,000, or $500,000—and I can apply for a mortgage—what should I do?
Jeff Park:
That’s exactly the crux of the problem. I often tell people moving to New York that New York is fundamentally a renters’ market, and renting is more economically worthwhile. Because when you own a property, you have to pay taxes, public charges, maintenance, mortgage insurance, and property insurance—these all ultimately eat up your returns. As a result, your capitalization rate could be lower than 2%. If you’re lucky, it might be 2%, and sometimes it can even be below 1%. That means you might as well put your money into a money market fund to earn 3.5%. The reason you still accept a return below 1% is only because you’re hoping house prices will rise—so the whole path is really a bet on house-price appreciation.
For young people, at least in New York, renting is the economically correct choice. But my view changes once you have a family. Once you have children, stability becomes more important. You need to know which school your kids can attend, and you need to plan for the next 15 years. That sense of security and certainty comes at a premium, so you do need to make a commitment. But at that stage, it’s not an economic decision anymore. When you buy a home in that phase, you’re not buying because house prices will rise—you’re buying because you’re forming a family and you need a stable social safety net. This is also why I think young people are increasingly reluctant to have children: economically, renting forever is always the optimal solution—until you have to have children. And once you do have children, you can’t keep renting, so the whole cycle breaks. Either you don’t have children, or you have children but face so much pressure that you don’t want to deal with it.
Another frequently heard option is waiting for the older generation to pass away and for wealth to be passed down. This is common in Asia, especially in Japan, and there are similar issues in South Korea—large amounts of wealth are concentrated in the baby boomer generation. Eventually it will be passed down, but with a time lag. They live longer, while Millennials are growing up, and asset prices don’t fall accordingly. That time lag creates massive friction between young people and the elderly.
How People Respond to the Current Housing Investment Crisis
Host Kevin: So either I wait until my parents die at 60 or 70 and leave me the property, or I look for another way out. For people who are 25, 30, or 35, are there any other options?
Jeff Park:
Yes, there is now a better way to store wealth than real estate. This wealth doesn’t need maintenance, doesn’t take up physical space, doesn’t require repairs, isn’t taxed every year, and there’s no risk of being confiscated by the government for any reason—that’s Bitcoin. Bitcoin is so important to me because it directly alleviates the pressure points of real estate. In other words, in the past, someone who bought a $40 million penthouse in New York did so because they needed to preserve wealth and move $50 million. Historically, they didn’t know how to move $50 million easily. Now they can buy Bitcoin directly. You don’t need to pay annual service-type taxes for it, and you don’t have to worry about seizure. In theory, there are all kinds of possible issues within U.S. property rights. If one day they decide you should end up on some list, your assets could be confiscated. Bitcoin means you don’t have to worry about those things.
This implies that this portion of money will no longer flow into real estate. If this money stops flowing into real estate, the demand curve for real estate will be reset, and house prices could drop—allowing young people to buy homes. Of course, there’s a massive political apparatus built around continuously protecting house-price appreciation. Because homeownership brings wealth, and that is the foundation of the American Dream’s social compact. Bitcoin is fundamentally challenging this.
I think this is the biggest test for Bitcoin’s mainstream adoption: more people need to start viewing Bitcoin as a primary store of savings relative to real estate and other assets, and reach the same conclusion—that it’s a win-win for society as a whole. Short-term pain might include house prices falling. But as a store of value, it’s more efficient and far less discriminatory than today’s property system.
At the end of the day, the reason house prices rise isn’t because the houses themselves become more valuable. It’s because the dollar keeps depreciating, and humans naturally cluster in places with higher productivity. The natural law of capitalism is that the strong get stronger. If there’s no export, this tension will eventually break. We’ve already seen this in New York—the lighthouse of capitalism—only to have a left-leaning mayor that nobody expected.
Breaking Down the Intelligent Investor Framework
Host Kevin: Let’s talk about the article you wrote—“The Fall of the Wise Investor and the Rise of Ideological Investors.” What is a wise investor? Why has he fallen?
Jeff Park:
A “wise investor” is a framework I borrowed to describe the approach used by investors like Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. When people talked about value investing in the past, it had a very specific meaning: buy stocks that are cheap relative to cash flow, buy stocks with valuation multiples lower than growth stocks, focus on dividends rather than reinvesting profits. In summary, there’s one word for it: cheap.
My thesis is that this era has ended—and it has ended for a long time. Because if you look at the best-performing assets in the world today, cheapness doesn’t lead to good returns. What really performs are precisely things that are scarce—like the top-tier luxury homes I mentioned. The wise investor framework is built on a lot of assumptions taught in many schools, but I believe those assumptions have now completely collapsed.
One of the core assumptions is: all assets must be priced using a risk-free rate. The risk-free rate is the government bond yield—this is the foundation of all pricing models, the cornerstone of CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model), discounted cash flow (DCF), and equity risk premiums. But everything we understand about the risk-free rate is changing, and this is also why the 60/40 portfolio is becoming less and less effective. The correlation between U.S. Treasuries and the stock market is getting higher, because the very concept of “risk-free” is being challenged. Why? Because the credit quality of the U.S. is being challenged.
Once you remove the assumption that “the risk-free rate is the anchor for pricing all assets,” the world becomes clearer: what are people truly buying today that carries ideological weight? What is the value driver beyond “cheapness”? That’s what I call “ideological investors.” Culture, how AI affects people’s investment ideology, geopolitics—these are real value-creation mechanisms, not noise that needs to be hedged away.
What Do Ideological Investors Do?
Host Kevin: How exactly do ideological investors act?
Jeff Park:
Ideological investors spend a lot of time thinking about what will happen in the future—and past models can’t tell you that, because the premises of those models are being rewritten. So you need to look outward. How do you gain an advantage in a market like that? You have to think deeply about where capital flows, the shift in liquidity paradigms, and where the buyers of different assets come from. You also need to consider the possibility of asset manipulation, and how to position yourself outside of that manipulation. So you have to build an investment framework that lets you exit certain dynamics in ways most people aren’t told.
Here’s a simple example: mothers have an innate instinct about what’s valuable. They know that the most valuable things sometimes exist in the physical world—for example, a unique piece of jewelry, or a Hermès bag—something that has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past two decades. Top-tier artworks are another category of assets that aren’t part of the traditional stock-investing framework, but can serve as tools for diversifying wealth. Mothers’ insights into this investment paradigm are actually far beyond what people who receive traditional financial advisor training understand.
Your financial advisor tells you: 60/40, stocks and bonds, and then with some extra money you buy private equity, private credit, venture capital. But fundamentally, these are all the same thing—they’re all tied to the same global arbitrage trade involving risk-free rates and the macro cycle. What you truly want is another pool of assets that is unrelated to all of this. That’s real diversification.
In this framework, cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin are useful proxies. Because at least before Bitcoin ETFs were launched, this group of investors was independent from the stock market. Bitcoin’s price movements have nothing to do with whether the stock market is up or down. I believe individual investors still have plenty of opportunities like that to discover and benefit. Examples include cryptocurrencies, gold, Hermès bags, Pokémon card trading, sneakers… these are all examples.
The Important Role Data Plays in Wealth Creation
Jeff Park:
There’s another important asset class that still hasn’t found product-market fit—data. Your data is actually extremely valuable, but most people are giving it away for free now, because they don’t know how to monetize it. My generation, Millennials, grew up handing over data foolishly while Facebook was growing, without realizing the cost. But younger generations are more clear-eyed—they understand the creator economy, and they know how to intermediate a data-flow segment and benefit from it. So I believe in the future, data can become an asset class, and each individual needs to understand what they have and how to monetize it.
Prediction markets are a great example. I think it’s a huge emerging asset class that’s about to explode. No JP Morgan financial advisor would sit down and tell you how to place bets in prediction markets, because they think it’s not professional. But I guarantee that ten years from now, someone will do it. Because the data needed to make money in prediction markets is extremely privatized, completely different from other financial markets. And the returns are unrelated to other markets. More and more young people will move in this direction because they know all other markets are full of financial manipulation, and they don’t want to play in that manipulated game. That’s why crypto exists, why Bitcoin succeeded, why DeFi exists, why people trade in prediction markets, why sports betting became a track that DraftKings and Robinhood are both betting on, and why 2x leveraged ETFs are so popular. All of this is a trend: individuals are moving toward greater freedom and more autonomy, away from an asset world that is ruled by a single global arbitrage trade and is manipulated.
How Jeff Sees His Portfolio Diversification
Host Kevin: Raoul Pal said on this show that diversification is dead—everything is only related to one thing: money supply expansion and fiat currency depreciation—so he goes all-in on crypto. What’s your view? And how do you build your own personal investment portfolio around that?
Jeff Park:
I agree with him—and I also disagree. The reason I disagree is that he isn’t looking at the world big enough. When he says you don’t need diversification, if he’s seeing different facets of the same trade, and they share common factors driven by global liquidity, then he’s completely right—and I fully agree. But if you expand your vision and imagine a set of investable assets that are not manipulated by the same set of cross-border capital flows, then diversification has value.
So in the “Aggressive Portfolio Theory” I proposed last year, I listed 25 different assets that don’t belong to the combinations of stocks, bonds, private placements, and public funds as we traditionally understand them. Gold is one of them, and I believe gold finally showed me its opportunity this year. As Americans, we might mock gold enthusiasts, but from my cultural perspective— in Asia, gold is a huge asset class. My family still gives me gold at family gatherings even now, as a way to express love. This is rooted in Asia’s cultural understanding of wealth storage. Gold is the most primitive, non-reproducible store of value in the truest sense.
Besides gold, top-tier art is also an excellent diversification tool. It’s scarce, it has high cultural attributes, and it can compound in value over time. And it’s completely unrelated to stock market points. In 2008 and 2009, some of the best trades happened in the art market. Fine wine is another category—limited quantity, consumable, it disappears—so people trade wine specifically to store wealth. But when it comes to tokenization, there’s one thing I’m especially optimistic about. If tokenization can work in the way I hope, I’m not interested in tokenizing Apollo private equity funds or BlackRock money market funds—those already work fairly well in a sense, and tokenization might bring some marginal improvements. The real opportunity is in those long-tail assets—like top-tier wine, or a small share of a yacht.
What Tokenization Brings to the Investment Field
Host Kevin: So you could tokenize a bottle of wine or a yacht, letting people without millions of dollars buy a small share with 100 or 1000 dollars?
Jeff Park:
Yes. Historically, people haven’t had access to these assets because they’re hard to obtain—they require extremely high expertise and curatorial capabilities, and there aren’t mature channels serving this kind of demand. But if you ask any billionaire, this is exactly how they invest. Yachts, for example, are continuously chased because they’re an excellent store-of-wealth asset. The problem is the entry barrier is too high and ordinary people can’t get in. Tokenization creates a chance to truly democratize these alternative assets. I hope that within my lifetime, I’ll see the “Aggressive Portfolio” truly come to life. You and I can sit down and talk about that 40% unconventional allocation—allocation that no longer consists of the kinds of things Robinhood and E-Trade recommend you buy.
Is Investing Now Already Out of Reach for Ordinary People?
Host Kevin: What about ordinary people? My sister is 35, has a normal job, and wants to save and invest, but she can’t do these complex things. What should she do?
Jeff Park:
I saw some really interesting data the other day. In 2005, only about 5% to 10% of Americans had opened a stock account after graduating from college. Now that proportion is roughly close to half. That means that in the past 20 years, young people have become more financially aware, or at least developed the intention to do so. Whether they can succeed is another matter, but they’ve shown interest and started learning about finance earlier than our generation. That’s worth affirming, and I’m optimistic about it— as long as we provide them with the right tools and choices.
I also noticed that many young people trade sneakers and Pokémon card trading. People might think that’s fun or a bit fringe, but culturally, I think that’s exactly what young people need. They’re thinking about diversifying wealth in different ways, not just chasing Nvidia and Palantir. You can play the “digital stuff only goes up” game, but young people can play their own game. If they play it well, that alone is incredibly powerful.
Why Jeff Proposed Occupy AI
Host Kevin: We’ve talked about currency depreciation, the problems it brings to the world and our generation, and how asset prices become irrational—making buying a home so difficult. But now AI is stacking on top of all of that. It’s impressive on its own, but it’s also causing many people to lose jobs. You wrote an article called “Occupy AI.” When you entered the workforce in 2008 and went through the financial crisis, there was Occupy Wall Street. Your article is called Occupy AI. Could you first explain what Occupy Wall Street is, and then explain Occupy AI?
Jeff Park:
I have very vivid memories of Occupy Wall Street, because it was a very tangible event—it took place right in downtown Manhattan. Many furious populists gathered together, camped out, and demanded justice. They demanded justice because they felt deceived and exploited by Wall Street. Ultimately, it stemmed from the subprime crisis—and also from the belief that banks didn’t truly take responsibility for their mistakes, whether in a legal sense or in a moral sense. So at the end of the day, it became a moral movement: how can we allow banks to do these things without bearing responsibility?
Host Kevin: What exactly did they do?
Jeff Park:
The subprime crisis, put simply, was reckless risk-taking—taking astronomical bonuses—and after everything collapsed, there were no consequences at all—“privatize profits, socialize losses.” Taxpayers paid for distorted and misaligned incentive structures. And it wasn’t just banks—rating agencies were also in on it. They took money from the issuers, so of course they were inclined to give high ratings. That also enabled those who originally couldn’t afford houses or had poor credit to obtain loans to buy homes. Everyone turned a blind eye to it, but economically it was ultimately unsustainable, and the entire system collapsed in the end.
The link to AI is this: it’s a class war, and AI will be a class war too. Because, in my view, we’ve never seen a disruptive technology like AI before. It could completely replace labor while enabling companies to achieve record profits. We’re going to see an even more extreme K-shaped economy: corporate profitability keeps rising—not because revenue is growing, but because costs are falling. And what people mean by “costs falling” is that people who are losing jobs are the “cost” being cut.
The Collapse of Free Will’s Value
Host Kevin: In your article you wrote that Amazon laid off 30,000 workers, and at the same time the stock market hit an all-time high. That is the most straightforward illustration of “the collapse of the price of free will and the surge of self-determined value.”
Jeff Park:
I think when you ask most people why they work, they’ll say it’s to make money. But we all have higher desires—we want to be productive, contribute to society, set an example for our kids, build something meaningful for our community. The goal is far beyond just earning money.
At a fundamental level, living means being productive. If you lose that, it’s not only an economic issue—it becomes a deep psychological one. The biggest blind spot in AI discussions is that this wave of technology—especially large language models—is stripping humans of their autonomous decision-making ability, stripping them of the ability to actively participate and contribute. It’s a loss of free will—and many people haven’t even realized it yet. When we discuss technological revolutions in history—electricity, cars, trains—those technologies amplified human capability. You’re still working, the technology is amplifying you. But for some parts of AI, it might make work itself disappear entirely, and most people won’t all be able to leap into the role of “top management overseeing AI implementation.” We already know this. Society needs people to do meaningful work, even if those jobs could, in principle, be automated, because that’s what keeps society running. And it’s that accelerated displacement that is truly terrifying.
What’s even more unsettling is that now discussions around the federal government backing AI data centers are being framed as a “life-or-death” issue. If we don’t do it, China will—so no matter what, we have to invest. When investment is framed this way, people can’t rationally price its value. If the value of the entire human labor force is $3.5 trillion, and AI can replace 10% of it, is AI worth $3.5 trillion today? Those numbers start to sound absurd. Then the government is asked to back these investments—which are precisely replacing the people they’re supposed to serve. If the government’s role is to maintain society’s harmonious gears, you can’t imagine people supporting a plan that funds their own replacement. That’s why Occupy AI will happen. The challenge of Occupy Wall Street was that you knew who the opponent was. You could see him dressed in a suit, wearing an Hermès tie—he was your enemy. But AI, by definition, is invisible. It exists on platforms. You can say it’s related to Meta or Nvidia, but no one truly “owns” that construct. They all claim, “we’re just a platform; what happens isn’t our responsibility.” AI faces the same problem—and even worse, because this platform now has its own life.
How the “Occupy AI” Moment Will Turn Generation Z and Alpha Toward Bitcoin
Host Kevin: At the end of your article, you wrote that Occupy Wall Street made a generation of Millennials become steadfast supporters of Bitcoin—you’re one of them. And Occupy AI will be that moment that makes Generation Z and Alpha become Bitcoin believers. Can you briefly explain?
Jeff Park:
Everyone needs an awakening moment to discover Bitcoin. I don’t think Bitcoin will quietly seep into someone’s life. Perhaps it can—but usually it needs a sudden realization moment. For many Millennials, that realization happened in the context of the financial crisis, because fundamentally they realized: money isn’t what it appears to be on the surface. We went through decades of QE, QT, and then more QE. That’s what spoke to this generation.
Host Kevin: First, during the financial crisis, Bitcoin was invented. Very smart people—or one person, or a group of people—said we need something new because the system is broken. The second moment is COVID. Massive printing of money made even more people realize how completely irrational all of this is. Now you’re saying that for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, it will be Occupy AI.
Jeff Park:
Based on my experience, Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t care as much about currency depreciation. It’s not that they don’t care about it like you and me—but they’re already in a very disadvantaged position; they’re somewhat hopeless. Among Millennials, there are still people who believe social security might possibly be saved, even if it probably can’t. And they connect that issue to the baby boomer generation. Gen Z and Alpha know everything is broken, and they know they’ll never benefit from it. They know it’s not something they can solve.
So currency depreciation won’t be what awakens them. And worse, as institutions like BlackRock and Bridgewater adopt Bitcoin, it becomes even more suspicious to them. They’ll say, “This isn’t even my game anymore. It’s the old people’s game. It’s not our money.” So for this group, Bitcoin ends up being even more oppositional.
I think AI will work because, just like I am a generation that truly lives inside Facebook and understands both its good and bad sides, these kids will be living in AI from the moment they graduate from university—and they’ll be competing with it for job opportunities. It has to be something very personal to them that wakes them up to what’s wrong with society as a whole. I think the AI movement will largely come from youth opposition, and that will serve as a channel—not only for them to understand Bitcoin, but also for them to rediscover the whole spirit of crypto.
When Everything Fails, Bitcoin Is the Answer
Host Kevin: I understand Occupy Wall Street, currency depreciation, and Bitcoin as a hedge against fiat depreciation. But why will this generation come to believe that solving the problem through Occupy AI or understanding AI will lead to Bitcoin? Or as people in the industry say: Bitcoin is a lifeboat. Bitcoin can help me when I’m willing to give up everything else?
Jeff Park:
Because they’ll realize that compared with the legacy assets Millennials are still competing for after Occupy Wall Street, Bitcoin is a better store of value. Occupy Wall Street was still a housing crisis, a crisis of housing values. There’s a substitution effect inside that, and I think young people aren’t as easily pulled into it.
Also, if you believe AI and Bitcoin share a common thread—that thread is energy consumption—because both are energy assets. If you want to vote with your feet and say you don’t want to support certain negative social dynamics and externalities produced by AI, then the other side of the same coin is that energy is used to produce scarce goods—those scarce goods are Bitcoin.
Even though what we’re talking about now is Bitcoin, I hope the younger generation can revive and reinvigorate the spirit of crypto and cypherpunk money. That way, it won’t just be a store-of-value structure. This generation can truly take on the grand mission of peer-to-peer money mechanisms. Its use isn’t only storing value; in their fight against AI, they will reactivate all of this around the necessity of decentralization. Even for Millennials, decentralization is more of a talking point rather than something native, because we also live inside many centralized intermediaries and benefit from them. But soon, a group of investors will start out opposing these things from day one. Decentralization won’t be just a talking point anymore—it will become their ultimate right to earn a livelihood.
Why Decentralization Is Crucial in the AI Field
Host Kevin: Why is decentralization so important in the AI era?
Jeff Park:
Because I believe the core of AI is ultimately to centralize all your data, harvest it, and then use it to replace you. If you believe that efforts toward decentralization can give you attribution rights—that you can receive some kind of compensation because you contributed information—then that’s part of the entire decentralization issue.
I’m not saying I’m pessimistic about AI. I really do think AI has enormous positive effects on society. The key is that the benefits brought by technological progress need mechanisms so that people who contribute can also share in those benefits. The problem is that now profits are being concentrated extremely, while consumption is happening at the level of every individual, with no compensation at all. If data attribution can be solved, then AI’s future is bright. If my data makes the model smarter, I need to be compensated in some form—and in theory, only cryptocurrency can make this possible, because it has attribution properties.
Host Kevin: That’s why decentralized AI companies and decentralized compute projects make sense. Maybe many projects are just chasing AI hype to make money, but the ideal itself shouldn’t be dismissed, because it might truly be one of the answers to that huge problem.
Jeff Park:
From the perspective of critics, there are indeed many dishonest things in the crypto space. But we still need to hold onto the belief that the ideal can be realized—because that’s the way we can intersect with a bigger mission.
Is It Too Late to Invest in Bitcoin Now?
Host Kevin: What does this mean for Bitcoin today? A lot of people—maybe Gen Z or Millennials—will say Bitcoin fluctuates between $120,000, $100,000, and $70,000, and for ordinary people it’s still too expensive. They’ll say Bitcoin is too expensive; I already missed the opportunity—this is my only lifeboat. What would you say?
Jeff Park:
I think more people need to start thinking about this question: if you don’t have Bitcoin, what would happen? Instead of focusing on upside potential, think seriously about the downside risk you’d be exposed to without Bitcoin in your portfolio. In other words, not holding Bitcoin is essentially shorting Bitcoin. No matter how strong the wealth-appreciation effect might be, holding Bitcoin is favorable—even if only because fiat currency depreciation is happening at an unprecedented speed. And history keeps telling us that these currency resets are cyclical.
If you research the history of dollar hegemony—from the Bretton Woods system to 1971 to the Nixon shock—everything tells you that we’re currently living inside a dollar-hegemony illusion. It depends on the effective management of fiscal deficits, but we’re headed toward an out-of-control trajectory. In such a case, you need to consider owning some kind of asset that can withstand global arbitrage cycles. Bitcoin is one of the most worth considering.
People Should Be More Proactive in Including Bitcoin in Their Portfolio
Host Kevin: You said to consider downside risk. But as CIO, you talk about diversification and investment frameworks. For a person to take a more aggressive approach and allocate a big portion of their portfolio to Bitcoin, rather than just defending—does that make sense?
Jeff Park:
I know a lot of people in the crypto industry, and in their wealth, Bitcoin accounts for a large proportion. They use a “dumbbell” strategy: one side is a large amount of Bitcoin, and the other side is money market funds—the risk layers in between basically aren’t involved. I still believe that some diversification across the two sides helps you expand the boundaries of your freedom in capital allocation. People should pursue broader diversification than just a two-asset dumbbell. But if you force me to choose only two assets, Bitcoin must be one of them—because it’s the least correlated, most orthogonal asset to everything else in the global capital markets. For the second asset, I would choose income-generating assets based on the U.S. dollar. For example, I tend to think we’ll return to a zero-interest-rate environment.
I know many people are skeptical about this. But if global arbitrage cycles are going to continue, then only a decline in interest rates can keep this system running. If that’s the case, 30-year U.S. Treasuries right now are a very good speculative opportunity—rates falling means bond prices rising. That’s also how I’m betting on the U.S. I believe the U.S. will ultimately win; it will find a path to solve the problem through its creativity. The dollar, stablecoins, and dollar-denominated assets remain the world’s primary reserves. So I’m going long on long-term Treasuries, and that’s my view of the U.S.
How Jeff Prepares His Children for the “Occupy AI” Future
Host Kevin: You have two children, and you have a Bitcoin-thinking framework. In a future world shaped by Occupy AI, how do you raise and prepare your children?
Jeff Park:
Bitcoin has taught me a lot, and it has taught a lot of people: you can never know enough, you can never fully understand anything. We have to stay open and humble to all possible attack vectors. Because this, whether from a technical angle or a social angle, is far bigger than any one person, any one model, or any one paper.
So it’s a living experiment. To succeed, you must keep an open mindset. I try to pass this spirit on to my children—combining the context of money and Bitcoin’s evolution to help them build resilience. There’s a saying that “practice makes perfect,” but I’d rather tell my kids: practice isn’t for perfection; practice is for progress.
Nothing is perfect—Bitcoin isn’t either. These things will never reach the kind of “perfection” defined by empirical testing. But they will progress. Every practice we do in life is chasing that ideal direction. I try to incorporate Bitcoin’s mission into my children’s everyday life—although I’m not dragging them into debates about nodes and forks. Maybe when they’re older.