Bitwise Advisor Jeff Park: Renting Beats Homeownership, Bitcoin Outperforms Real Estate

Organized & Compiled by Shenchao TechFlow

Guest: Jeff Park, Advisor at Bitwise

Host: Kevin Follonier

Podcast source: When Shift Happens

Why Buying a House Is the Worst Investment You Can Make - Bitwise Advisor - Jeff Park | E167

Broadcast date: April 16, 2026

Jeff Park is a seasoned macro strategist and advisor to Bitwise. He firmly believes that the current financial system has lost meaning for young people, especially in the context of soaring housing costs and the potential for artificial intelligence to displace jobs across an entire generation. He argues that real estate is, in fact, a depreciating asset, while Bitcoin is the ultimate financial safe haven. Additionally, he predicts that the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence will trigger the largest wave of Bitcoin adoption the world has ever seen.

He proposed that "Occupy AI" will become a pivotal moment for Generation Z and Generation Alpha. At this juncture, these two generations will discover the potential of Bitcoin through a "moment of awakening" similar to what Millennials experienced during the financial crisis. Through this process, they will gain a deeper understanding of the nature of digital assets and investing.

In addition, Jeff is highly optimistic about the potential of real estate tokenization. He believes that tokenization has the power to transform the existing financial system and provide more equitable investment opportunities for ordinary people.

This section explores how these pivotal moments shape our understanding of digital assets and investments, and the profound implications they may have in the future.

Summary of Key Insights

The Truth About Real Estate and Wealth

• The reason housing prices have risen is not because homes themselves have become more valuable, but because the dollar has been continuously depreciating. Homes are depreciable assets—the tax code explicitly states that you can deduct depreciation over 20 to 30 years—we’ve long known that homes are depreciating assets.
• Over the past decade, the average home price in Manhattan has not increased—it has remained flat. What has truly risen are luxury penthouses treated as stores of wealth—units that often sit vacant, serving merely as line items on the balance sheets of the wealthy.
• This year, the average age of Americans applying for a mortgage is 59. They’re not buying their first home—they’re buying their third or fourth. And these individuals are competing with a 25-year-old trying to buy their first home.
• In New York, renting is the financially smart choice. When you own a home, you pay taxes, maintenance fees, repair costs, mortgage insurance, and property insurance—leaving you with a net return of less than 2%, and sometimes less than 1% in unfavorable years. You’d be better off simply putting that money into a money market fund.
• There is now a better way to store wealth—wealth that requires no maintenance, takes up no physical space, isn’t subject to annual taxation, and won’t be seized by the government if you’re placed on a list—that’s Bitcoin.

About AI and "Occupy AI"

• We have never seen a technology as disruptive as AI, which has the potential to completely replace human labor while enabling businesses to achieve record-breaking profits. Amazon’s layoff of 30,000 employees and the stock market hitting all-time highs—this is the most straightforward illustration of “free will price collapse.”
• AI is stripping away humanity’s ability to make autonomous decisions. Throughout history, every technological revolution—electricity, airplanes, mail—has amplified human capabilities, but AI may directly eliminate the very “work” itself.
• The essence of AI is to ultimately centralize all your data, exploit it, and then use it to replace you. If my data is making models smarter, I deserve some form of compensation—and this compensation mechanism can theoretically only be achieved through cryptocurrency.
• Each generation needs a moment of awakening to discover Bitcoin. For Millennials, that awakening was the financial crisis; for Gen Z and Alpha, it will be Occupy AI—they will find Bitcoin through the personal pain of competing with AI for jobs.
• AI and Bitcoin share a common logical core: energy consumption. If you disagree with the negative externalities of AI, then the other side of the same energy expenditure is Bitcoin—a scarce asset. You can vote for Bitcoin as an alternative.

Regarding the investment framework and logic

• The foundational assumption of value investing—that everything should be priced at the risk-free rate—is crumbling, as America’s credit quality itself is being called into question. Once you remove this assumption, the world becomes clearer: what truly drives value is ideology, not whether something is cheap or not.
• Your mom actually understands investing better than you think. She knows that the most valuable assets are sometimes found in the physical world—a Hermès bag, which has outperformed the S&P 500 consistently over the past two decades.
• Diversification hasn’t died—you just need to broaden your perspective and seek assets truly uncorrelated with global liquidity cycles—gold, art, fine wine… These assets have nothing to do with whether the S&P is at 6,800 or 6,200.
• What I’m truly interested in tokenization isn’t the tokenization of BlackRock’s money market fund, but rather long-tail assets—like premium wines and yachts—that allow ordinary people to own a piece with just $100. That’s where the real opportunity in tokenization lies.
• Instead of focusing on how much upside potential owning Bitcoin might bring, consider this—what downside risk are you exposed to by not owning Bitcoin? Not owning Bitcoin is essentially taking a short position on Bitcoin.
• If I had to choose only two assets, Bitcoin must be one of them—it is the most uncorrelated and orthogonal asset to everything else in the global capital markets. The other would be an income-generating asset denominated in U.S. dollars.

About Society and the Future

• America's greatest strength, and also its greatest weakness, is the diversity of its population. This is, in fact, a known attack vector from the East... diversity will destroy this country.
• It’s a strange feeling to realize that everyone around you—upstairs, downstairs, and on the street—is under the same patriotic call, powerless to control their own fate.
• I don’t tell my kids “practice makes perfect”—I tell them that practice isn’t about perfection, it’s about progress. Nothing is perfect—not even Bitcoin—but it’s improving. Everything we do is chasing that ideal direction.

Host Kevin: You mentioned earlier that you had an early experience with currency devaluation as a child. Could you tell us about that?

Jeff Park:

I grew up in both the United States and South Korea, spending part of my elementary school years in Korea. I experienced the 1997 Asian financial crisis there, a shock that reverberated across the world and left a deep impression on me. I was only in second or third grade at the time, but you could feel the entire nation in a strange collective state—everyone, upstairs, downstairs, neighbors across the street—united by a shared patriotism in the face of a fate they could not control. It was an odd feeling: realizing that the devaluation of a nation’s sovereign currency could bring people together so profoundly. For most Americans, the closest analogy might be 9/11—the national trauma that united everyone, left and right, in reflection on what America was and stood for. Currency devaluation can generate the same kind of unity.

This experience in 1997 deeply affected me, but it also showed me the power of a nation—when its people are mobilized to confront a sovereignty crisis with principle and defend the interests of the people. One thing I clearly remember is that the South Korean government asked all citizens to donate gold to replenish national reserves and help repay IMF bailout loans. In the United States, the IMF may sound like a neutral institution, but in many emerging markets, it is a highly politicized term, often met with suspicion, disdain, or even viewed as having hidden political agendas. I witnessed this side early on, and sometimes I wonder whether these experiences were, in some way, the seeds that led me down the path of cryptocurrency two decades later.

Host Kevin: So, who are you?

Jeff Park:

I’m Jeff Park, but in a sense, I represent the convergence of many forces. On one hand, I’m a Korean American who grew up in the U.S. with an Eastern mindset, allowing me to serve as a bridge between Eastern and Western narratives—whether it’s the prosperity brought by globalization or the social tensions it has generated. On the other hand, generational-wise, I entered the workforce in 2008—my first job after graduation was at Morgan Stanley, right at the epicenter of the global financial crisis.

But this also quickly made me realize—nothing in this world is truly invincible, and much of what you’re taught in school isn’t as solid as you thought. It’s humbling, but you can also turn it into motivation to build your own way of thinking. This experience also made me a representative of my generation—a millennial who entered society during the financial crisis, developing deep distrust in institutions and intermediaries, and seeking decentralized, self-sovereign solutions across social networks, careers, and every aspect of life.

Host Kevin: You witnessed currency devaluation as a child, and when you started working in 2008, you saw the illusion of the financial system collapse. Now we’re in New York—the world’s financial center—where prices are absurdly high. I’m from Switzerland and have lived in Singapore; neither is cheap, but even so, this feels outrageous. I simply can’t understand how ordinary people manage to get by—all of this is connected to what you experienced as a child, only now it’s far more urgent. What are we looking at? And what should we do?

Jeff Park:

America’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: the diversity of its population, and how this diversity permeates the entire social fabric. You often hear Asian commentators predict the decline of the American empire, and they typically latch onto one central idea: diversity will kill this nation. I heard this frequently as a child. This notion has always lingered in the geopolitical dynamics between Korea and China, Korea and the United States, and now these trends have fully emerged within American domestic political movements. The core issue is this: when a population is so diverse, it becomes extremely difficult to forge genuine national cohesion. In Korea, it’s much simpler—we are all Koreans, sharing a common historical foundation and having endured colonial oppression; these shared sufferings provided us with a unifying vector. In America, history is so rich and complex that it’s hard to find an obvious, unifying thread that makes everyone feel, “We have all sacrificed together.” Korea has mandatory conscription, requiring all men, regardless of class or education level, to serve—an experience that has played a huge role in fostering social solidarity, as does Israel’s system. In America, you ask: What is the shared American experience that everyone has? It’s a hard question to answer. American politics typically draws its fault lines along left versus right, class, or generational divides—but I believe these are distractions, evasions. The real core issue is the lack of national cohesion among younger generations—and that is precisely what is most precious and hardest to build.

Host Kevin: What’s wrong with the current financial system?

Jeff Park:

We are witnessing the signs of a financial system that has completely spiraled out of control and collapsed. People use the term "K-shaped economy" to explain what is happening at the societal level. A K-shaped economy means that some individuals experience tremendous economic prosperity due to asset inflation, while other citizens are on a downward trajectory, facing recession—unemployed and unable to find work. The gap between these two groups is widening—this is what the K shape represents: one line rising, one line falling.

Jeff Park:

You can see it in the real estate asset class in New York. You might be surprised to learn that the average price of New York City real estate over the past decade has actually remained flat. You’d be surprised because many narratives suggest New York real estate experienced extraordinary growth, especially with reports of stunning skyscrapers and capital inflows from China and Russia into residential development. But that’s not entirely wrong.

We’re also seeing a K-shaped economy in real estate: ultra-luxury units, sought after as stores of value, are performing well. They aren’t truly occupied for living but are held as assets—people buy them to preserve wealth on their balance sheets, and this segment is performing strongly. If you bought a $20 million penthouse seven years ago, you might now be able to exchange it for a $30 million penthouse—you’re making a profit.

But if you're buying a standard home—one you actually intend to live in, raise a family in, and contribute to the city’s productive economy—prices for such homes are often closer to what’s considered "affordable," and these properties may actually decline or remain flat in value.

Manhattan has a "mansion tax" that applies whenever an apartment sells for over $1 million, but today in New York, $1 million might only buy a studio. This tax was likely established three or four decades ago, when a $1 million apartment genuinely represented luxury. Because it’s not indexed to inflation, the government has no incentive to adjust a revenue-generating measure for inflation, so now nearly all apartments traded on the secondary market are subject to this mansion tax.

Housing that contributes more to urban economic life has instead seen price declines or stagnation. New York itself is a paradox—a city where two different life stories unfold in the same place. If you come here from Singapore or Switzerland, you’ll find that everyone’s experience can be entirely different. All of this, in my view, is a symptom of a shortage of quality assets.

The issue of real estate is not new. When many discuss the decline of capitalism, they point to real estate as the source of contradiction, because land, by definition, is scarce. Scarce land means scarce communities formed around physical space. Manhattan real estate is expensive because people want to work in commercially vibrant areas, where people are close to one another. When you layer these social components on top, the value of land rises above its historical baseline due to the convergence of social power. This pattern has occurred repeatedly throughout human civilization: whenever a place releases a core of activity, land prospers.

The problem with the United States is that we enjoy the immense privilege of running the global financial system. We often say the dollar is America’s biggest export—and that’s true—but it comes at a cost. The cost is that offshore funds must eventually flow back and invest in U.S. assets. This is the correspondence between the trade deficit and the capital account surplus. If the United States wishes to continue running a trade deficit, by definition, we need sustained inflows of offshore capital into U.S. assets. This is how the dollar works.

You are essentially creating an artificial market for U.S. assets. Offshore investors need somewhere to hold their balances, which creates a highly distorted environment. Because that market is not priced based on whether you or I truly live in New York, or on our productivity and contributions to the economy—it is priced based on U.S. assets as a sovereign store of value. When different motivations exist within a real estate market, pricing distortions are inevitable.

Host Kevin: For someone who is 30 or 35, has saved some money, and wants to make a sensible investment, how should they think about this? They might barely afford the down payment on a studio apartment in New York, but you’re saying a studio already costs $1 million—and theoretically, $1 million should be reserved for something scarce and luxurious. Yet you’re saying no, you need to buy a $20 million penthouse instead.

Is the path our parents’ generation talked about—“buy a house, buy real estate”—still relevant for us today?

Jeff Park:

Real estate is a prime example of what we truly need to reflect on: it’s not that home prices are rising, but that the value of the dollar is falling. Fundamentally, homes require maintenance—they are a capital expenditure; things break down and need repair, and there are mortgage taxes, property taxes, and various upkeep costs. After purchasing a home, significant ongoing capital investment is required. A house does not turn into gold over time; instead, it continuously depreciates, and you must continually maintain it—making it, at its core, a depreciating asset. In fact, U.S. tax law explicitly states that homes depreciate over a long period, allowing real estate investors to claim depreciation deductions over 20 to 30 years. So we’ve long known that real estate is a depreciating asset.

So why is its price still rising? First, because the U.S. dollar continues to depreciate. Second, people treat real estate as their primary savings vehicle, as it anchors them to economic productivity—for example, if you want your child to attend a good school, public schools are typically assigned by district, and you need to pay substantial property taxes to qualify for enrollment. As a result, homeownership is tied to numerous social functions that continuously drive housing prices upward in line with inflation.

The issue stems from two dimensions: demographic structure and the conversion of liquidity. In the U.S. market, the average age of Americans applying for a mortgage this year is 59—a figure that should raise concern. People aged 59 are unlikely to be purchasing their first home, but rather their second, third, or fourth. And these individuals are directly competing with the 25-year-olds you mentioned, who are trying to buy their first home.

The issue we face in housing is a uniquely intergenerational one: the role of real estate as a store of wealth has become entirely at odds with society’s need for families to truly settle down and raise the next generation. Many young people’s life trajectories are stalled because buying a home is simply out of reach. There is also a dimension of capital control: you hear more and more New Yorkers moving to Austin, Texas, because of New York’s high taxes. But the result? Locals in Austin are also dissatisfied, because their home prices have been re-anchored to New York’s economic benchmarks rather than their own local market—creating a new affordability crisis. This is both a problem of capital control and an intergenerational issue of liquidity transformation. Both dimensions are levers that policymakers can adjust. The U.S. once experimented with 50-year mortgages to explore liquidity transformation. But this is only the beginning of society’s most pressing issue: young people simply cannot afford to buy homes.

Host Kevin: From the perspective of a rational, ordinary man: I’ve worked for several years, have a girlfriend, plan to get married and have kids, and most likely need a house. But I also want this to be a smart investment, because I’m putting in many years of salary and a lot of hard-earned labor. Now you’re telling me that most such investments are actually not good investments—they’re bad ones. So if I’m 30 or 35, have saved $100,000, $200,000, or $500,000, and can still qualify for a mortgage—what should I do?

Jeff Park:

That’s exactly the issue. I often tell people who move to New York that New York is essentially a renter’s market, and renting is more economical. When you own a property, you pay taxes, common charges, maintenance fees, mortgage insurance, property insurance—all of which eventually eat into your returns, leaving you with a capitalization rate possibly below 2%, and only occasionally reaching 2%, sometimes even below 1%. This means you’d be better off putting your money into a money market fund earning 3.5%. You accept a return below 1% only because you’re betting that property prices will rise—so the entire strategy is essentially a bet on rising home values.

For young people, at least in New York, renting is the economically sound choice. But my perspective changes once you start a family. Once you have children, stability becomes more important—you need to know which school your child will attend and plan for the next 15 years of life; this sense of security and certainty comes at a premium, so you truly need to commit. But at that point, it’s no longer an economic decision. You buy a home not because property values will rise, but because you’re building a family and need a stable social safety net. This is also why I think more young people are choosing not to have children: economically, renting forever is always the optimal choice—until you’re forced to have kids. And once you do have children, renting becomes unfeasible, breaking the cycle entirely. Either you don’t have kids, or you have them and face overwhelming pressure that makes you want to avoid it altogether.

Another commonly heard option is waiting for the older generation to pass away and for wealth to be inherited. This is widespread in Asia, particularly acute in Japan, and similarly prevalent in South Korea—where vast amounts of wealth are concentrated among the baby boomer generation. While this wealth will eventually be passed down, there is a time lag. The older generation is living longer, while millennials are coming of age, yet asset prices have not declined accordingly. This time gap has created significant friction between younger and older generations.

Host Kevin: So I either wait until my parents pass away at 60 or 70 and inherit their property, or I need to find another path. For people who are 25, 30, or 35—is there another way?

Jeff Park:

Yes, there is now a superior way to store wealth compared to real estate. This form of wealth requires no maintenance, takes up no physical space, needs no repairs, isn’t subject to annual taxes, and carries no risk of being seized by the government for any reason—Bitcoin. Bitcoin is so important to me because it directly alleviates the pain points of real estate. In other words, in the past, someone buying a $40 million penthouse in New York did so because they needed to store wealth and move $50 million, but historically, they had no easy way to move that amount. Now, they can simply buy Bitcoin—you don’t pay annual service-type taxes on it, and you don’t have to worry about eminent domain. Theoretically, there are various possibilities under U.S. property rights—if one day they decide you should be on a certain list, your assets could be seized. Bitcoin frees you from these concerns.

This means that this portion of money will no longer flow into real estate. If this money no longer flows into real estate, the demand curve for housing will reset, potentially lowering home prices and enabling young people to buy homes. Of course, there is a vast political apparatus dedicated to protecting rising home prices, as homeownership represents wealth and forms the foundational social contract of the American Dream. Bitcoin is fundamentally challenging this premise.

I believe this is the biggest test of Bitcoin’s adoption: more people need to view Bitcoin as a primary store of value compared to other assets like real estate, and then reach the same conclusion: it’s a win-win for society as a whole. There may be short-term pain in the form of falling property prices, but as a store of value, it is more efficient and far less discriminatory than today’s property system.

The reason housing prices have risen is not because homes themselves have become more valuable, but because the dollar has continuously depreciated, and humans naturally tend to cluster in more productive areas—the inherent law of capitalism is that the strong get stronger. Without exports, this tension will eventually snap. We’ve already seen this in New York—the beacon of capitalism—now hosting a mayor with strong leftist leanings, something no one could have anticipated.

Host Kevin: Let’s talk about your article—“The Fall of the Intelligent Investor and the Rise of the Ideological Investor.” What is an intelligent investor? And why has he fallen?

Jeff Park:

“Smart Investor” is a framework I’ve adopted to describe the investment approach of investors like Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. When people talk about value investing, there used to be a very specific meaning: buying stocks that are cheap relative to their cash flow, purchasing shares with valuation multiples lower than those of growth stocks, and focusing on dividends rather than reinvesting profits. In summary, it all comes down to one word: cheap.

My assertion is that this era has ended—and has been over for a long time—because if you look at the world’s top-performing assets today, being cheap has not delivered strong returns. The assets that have truly performed well are precisely those with scarcity, just like the luxury homes I mentioned. The framework of the wise investor is built on many assumptions taught in schools, but I believe these assumptions have now completely collapsed.

One core assumption is that all assets must be priced at the risk-free rate. The risk-free rate is the Treasury yield—the foundation of all pricing models, underpinning the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), discounted cash flow (DCF), and equity risk premium. But our entire understanding of the risk-free rate is changing, which is why the 60/40 portfolio is increasingly failing—correlation between U.S. Treasuries and equities is rising, as the very concept of "risk-free" is being challenged. Why? Because U.S. credit quality is being called into question.

Once we remove the assumption that the risk-free rate is the anchor for all asset pricing, the world becomes clearer: What are people truly buying today—what carries ideological weight? What drives value beyond mere cheapness? This is what I mean by “ideological investors.” How culture and AI influence people’s investment ideologies and geopolitics—these are real mechanisms of value creation, not noise to be hedged away.

Host Kevin: How do ideological investors actually operate?

Jeff Park:

Ideological investors spend considerable time thinking about what will happen in the future—past models cannot tell you this, because the assumptions underlying those models are being rewritten, so you must look outward. How do you gain an edge in such a market? You must deeply analyze the flow of capital, consider shifts in liquidity paradigms, and examine where buyers for various assets are coming from. You must also account for the possibility of asset manipulation and how to position yourself outside of it. Therefore, you need to build an investment framework that allows you to exit certain dynamics in ways most people have never been shown.

For example, mothers have an innate intuition about what holds value. They know that the most valuable assets are sometimes found in the physical world—such as a one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry or a Hermès bag, which has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past two decades. Masterpieces are another category of assets outside traditional stock investments but serve as effective tools for wealth diversification. Mothers’ insight into this investment paradigm often surpasses that of individuals trained by traditional financial advisors.

Your financial advisor tells you: 60/40—buy stocks and bonds, and if you have extra money, invest in private equity, private credit, and venture capital. But these are all essentially the same thing—they’re all tied to the same global arbitrage trade linked to risk-free rates and the macroeconomic cycle. What you truly want is another pool of assets completely uncorrelated to these—that’s real diversification.

Under this framework, cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin serve as useful proxies—because, at least prior to the launch of Bitcoin ETFs, this group of investors operated independently of the stock market, with Bitcoin’s price movements uncorrelated to stock market fluctuations. I believe there are still many such opportunities for individual investors to discover and benefit from, prior to mainstream asset adoption. Cryptocurrencies, gold, Hermès bags, Pokémon cards, sneakers—these are all examples.

Jeff Park:

Another major asset class that has yet to achieve product-market fit is data. Your data is actually extremely valuable, but most people are giving it away for free because they don’t know how to monetize it. My generation, Millennials, grew up on Facebook, unknowingly surrendering our data without realizing the cost. But younger generations are more aware—they understand the creator economy and know how to position themselves as intermediaries in data flows to benefit from them. I believe data will become a legitimate asset class in the future, and every individual needs to recognize what they own and how to monetize it.

Prediction markets are a great example—I believe this is a massive asset class on the verge of explosion. No JP Morgan financial advisor would sit down with you to explain how to bet on prediction markets, because they consider it unprofessional. But I guarantee that in ten years, someone will be doing exactly that. The data needed to profit in prediction markets is hyper-private and fundamentally different from other financial markets, and the returns are uncorrelated with those of traditional markets. More and more young people are moving in this direction because they know all other markets are saturated with financial manipulation, and they don’t want to play a rigged game. This is why cryptocurrency exists, why Bitcoin succeeded, why DeFi exists, why people trade on prediction markets, why sports betting has become a focus for DraftKings and Robinhood, and why 2x leveraged ETFs are so popular. All of this is part of a broader trend—individuals moving toward greater freedom and more autonomy, away from a manipulated asset world dominated by global arbitrage.

Host Kevin: Raoul Pal said on this show that diversification is dead—that everything is now about monetary expansion and fiat currency depreciation, so he’s gone all-in on crypto. What’s your take on this? How do you structure your personal investment portfolio around this idea?

Jeff Park:

I agree with him, and I don’t agree with him. The reason I disagree is that his perspective on the world isn’t broad enough. When he says diversification isn’t necessary, if he’s looking at different facets of the same transaction—all of which share global liquidity as a common factor—then he’s absolutely right, and I fully agree. But if you expand your perspective further and imagine a set of investable assets not controlled by the same cross-border capital flows, then diversification has value.

So in my "Radical Portfolio Theory" proposed last year, I listed 25 distinct assets that fall outside our traditional understanding of portfolios composed of stocks, bonds, private, and public investments. Gold is one of them, and this year I finally see its opportunity. As Americans, we might mock gold enthusiasts, but returning to my cultural perspective—in Asia, gold is a massive asset class. My family still gives me gold during family gatherings as a gesture of love, rooted in Asia’s cultural understanding of wealth preservation. Gold is, in the truest sense, the most primitive form of non-replicable value storage.

Beyond gold, top-tier artworks are also excellent diversification tools—scarce, culturally significant assets that can compound in value over time and are entirely uncorrelated with stock market levels. Some of the best trades in 2008 and 2009 occurred in the art market. Fine wine is another category—limited in supply, consumable, and perishable—so some investors specifically trade fine wine as a store of wealth. But regarding tokenization, there’s one aspect I’m particularly bullish on. If tokenization operates the way I hope it will, I’m not interested in tokenizing Apollo private equity funds or BlackRock money market funds—these already function reasonably well, and tokenization might offer only marginal improvements. The real opportunity lies in long-tail assets—such as fractional ownership of top-tier wine or a share of a yacht.

Host Kevin: So you could tokenize a bottle of wine or a yacht, allowing people who don’t have millions of dollars to buy a small share for $100 or $1,000?

Jeff Park:

Yes, historically, people haven’t had access to these assets because they were difficult to acquire, required extremely high levels of expertise and curation, and lacked mature channels to serve such demands. But if you ask any billionaire how they invest, this is exactly how they do it—and there’s a reason for it: yachts remain in high demand because they are exceptional stores of wealth. The issue has simply been the high barrier to entry, keeping ordinary people out. Tokenization offers the opportunity to truly democratize these alternative assets. I hope to see “radical portfolios” become a reality in my lifetime—where you and I can sit down and discuss that 40% of unconventional allocations, and it’s no longer just what Robinhood and E-Trade recommend you buy.

Host Kevin: What about ordinary people? My sister is 35, has a regular job, and wants to save and invest, but she can’t handle these complicated tasks. What should she do?

Jeff Park:

A few days ago, I came across an interesting statistic: in 2005, only about 5% to 10% of Americans had opened a stock account after graduating from college. Today, that figure is close to half. This means that over the past 20 years, younger generations have become more financially aware—or at least more willing to engage with finance. Whether they succeed is another matter, but they’ve shown interest and are beginning to understand financial matters earlier than our generation did. This is commendable, and I’m optimistic about it—as long as we provide them with the right tools and choices.

I’ve also noticed that many young people are trading sneakers and Pokémon cards. Some might find this interesting or niche, but culturally, I believe this is exactly what young people should be doing—they’re thinking about wealth diversification in different ways, rather than just chasing the rise of Nvidia and Palantir. Sure, you can play the game of “digital assets only go up,” but young people can play their own game. And if they can master their own game, that in itself holds tremendous power.

Host Kevin: We’ve discussed currency depreciation, the problems it has created for the world and our generation, and how asset prices have become unreasonable, making homebuying extremely difficult. But now AI is being added on top—remarkable in itself, yet also causing many people to lose their jobs. You wrote an article titled “Occupy AI.” You entered the workforce in 2008, lived through the financial crisis, and witnessed Occupy Wall Street. Your article is called “Occupy AI.” Could you first explain what Occupy Wall Street was, and then explain what Occupy AI means?

Jeff Park:

I have very vivid memories of Occupy Wall Street because it was a very tangible event that took place right in downtown New York. Many angry populists gathered together, set up camp, and demanded justice—they felt they had been deceived and exploited by Wall Street. This movement ultimately stemmed from the subprime mortgage crisis and from the widespread belief that banks had not truly been held accountable for their mistakes, whether legally or morally. In the end, it became a moral movement: How could we allow banks to do these things without facing consequences?

Host Kevin: What specific things did they do?

Jeff Park:

The subprime crisis, in simple terms, was a scenario of reckless risk-taking, where individuals received astronomical bonuses, yet faced no consequences when everything collapsed—“privatizing gains, socializing losses.” Taxpayers ended up paying for distorted and misaligned incentives. And it wasn’t just banks—the rating agencies were complicit too, as they were paid by issuers and thus inclined to assign high ratings; this enabled people who couldn’t afford homes and had poor credit to obtain loans and buy property. Everyone turned a blind eye, but the system was economically unsustainable—and ultimately collapsed.

The connection to AI is this: that was a class war, and AI will also be a class war. Because, in my view, we have never seen a technology as disruptive as AI— one that has the potential to completely replace labor while enabling businesses to achieve record profits. We will witness an even more extreme K-shaped economy: corporate profitability will continue to rise, not because revenues are increasing, but because costs are falling—and by “costs falling,” I mean people who are losing their jobs.

Host Kevin: In your article, you wrote: "Amazon laid off 30,000 people while the stock market hit an all-time high—this is the most straightforward illustration of 'free will price collapse and self-determined value surge.'"

Jeff Park:

I believe that when you ask most people why they work, they’ll say it’s to make money, but we all have higher aspirations—we want to be productive, to contribute to society, to set an example for our children, and to build something meaningful for our communities; our goals go far beyond just earning money.

At its core, human life requires productivity—losing this is not just an economic issue, but one that leads to deep psychological consequences. The greatest blind spot in AI discussions is that this wave of large language models is stripping away human autonomy in decision-making and the ability to actively participate and contribute—this is a loss of free will, and many have yet to realize it. We’ve long understood technological revolutions in history—electricity, automobiles, trains—these technologies amplified human capabilities; you still worked, and technology enhanced you. But certain aspects of AI may cause work itself to vanish entirely, and most people cannot all ascend to become “top-level managers of AI implementation.” We’ve always known this: society needs people to engage in meaningful work, even if those tasks could theoretically be automated, because this is what keeps society functioning. And it is this accelerated displacement that truly represents the frightening challenge.

More troubling is that the current debate over federal backing for AI data centers has been framed as a matter of “existential urgency”: if we don’t do this, China will, so we must invest no matter what. When investment is framed this way, people can no longer rationally price its value. If the total value of all human labor is $35 trillion, and AI could replace 10% of it, does that mean AI is worth $3.5 trillion today? These numbers begin to border on the absurd. And then the government is expected to backstop these investments—investments that are precisely replacing the very people they represent. If the government’s role is to maintain the social flywheel, it’s impossible to imagine the public supporting a scheme that funds its own obsolescence—that’s precisely why Occupy AI is inevitable. The challenge of Occupy Wall Street was that you knew who your opponent was—you could see them in their suits and Hermès ties; they were your enemy. But AI, by definition, is invisible; it exists on platforms. You might say it’s tied to Meta or Nvidia, but no one truly “owns” the architecture—they all say, “We’re just a platform; what happens here isn’t our responsibility.” AI faces the same problem, but even more acutely, because this platform now has a life of its own.

Host Kevin: At the end of your article, you wrote that Occupy Wall Street made a generation of millennials staunch supporters of Bitcoin, and you are one of them. Now, Occupy AI will be the moment that turns Gen Z and Alpha generations into Bitcoin believers. Could you briefly explain that?

Jeff Park:

Everyone needs a moment of awakening to discover Bitcoin. I don’t believe Bitcoin quietly seeps into someone’s life—perhaps it happens that way sometimes, but usually, it requires a moment of realization. For many millennials, this awakening occurred against the backdrop of the financial crisis, because they fundamentally came to understand that money isn’t what it appears to be. We’ve lived through decades of QE, QT, and more QE—that’s what speaks to this generation.

Host Kevin: First, the invention of Bitcoin during the financial crisis. Very smart people—or one person, or a group—said we need something new because the system is broken. The second moment was COVID, with crazy money printing, making more people realize how absurd it all was. Now you’re saying, for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, it’ll be Occupy AI.

Jeff Park:

Based on my experience, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are less concerned about currency depreciation. It’s not that they don’t care as much as you and I do, but they’re already in a very disadvantaged position and have become somewhat desperate. Among millennials, some still believe Social Security might be saved—even if it likely won’t be—and we still link this issue to the baby boomers. Gen Z and Alpha know everything is broken and that they will never benefit from it; they understand it’s not something they can fix.

So currency devaluation won’t be what wakes them up—in fact, as institutions like BlackRock and Bridgewater adopt Bitcoin, it becomes even more suspicious to them. They’ll say, “Now this isn’t even my game; it’s the older generation’s game, and it’s not our money.” For this group, Bitcoin becomes even more alienating.

I believe AI will resonate because, just as I was part of the first generation to truly live within Facebook and understand its pros and cons, these children will live within AI from the moment they graduate college, competing with it for jobs. It must be something deeply personal to them to awaken their awareness of what’s wrong with society as a whole. I think the AI movement will largely stem from youth-led opposition, and this will become a gateway—not only helping them understand Bitcoin, but also rediscovering the broader spirit of crypto.

Host Kevin: I understand that Occupy Wall Street, currency devaluation, and Bitcoin are hedges against fiat currency depreciation. But why does this generation relate Bitcoin to Occupy AI or understand Bitcoin through AI as a solution? Or, as the industry says, Bitcoin is a lifeboat—how can Bitcoin save me when I give up everything else?

Jeff Park:

Because they will recognize that Bitcoin is a better store of value than the legacy assets that millennials continue to compete for since Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street was still about a housing crisis, a crisis of home values. There’s a substitution effect there, and I don’t think young people are easily drawn into it.

Additionally, if you believe AI and Bitcoin share a common thread, it is energy consumption, as both are energy assets. If you wish to vote with your feet by refusing to support certain negative social dynamics and externalities generated by AI, then the other side of the same coin is energy being used to produce scarcity—in the form of Bitcoin.

Although we’re talking about Bitcoin now, I hope the younger generation can revive and reinvigorate the spirit of crypto and cypherpunk money—so it becomes more than just a store of value, and they can truly take up the grand mission of peer-to-peer currency. Its purpose won’t be limited to storage of value; they will reignite all of this in the struggle against AI, reasserting the necessity of decentralization. Even for millennials, decentralization is often just a talking point rather than something innate, because we also live within and benefit from many centralized intermediaries. But a new generation of investors will oppose these structures from the outset. Decentralization will no longer be merely a talking point—it will become their fundamental right to livelihood.

Host Kevin: Why is decentralization so important in the age of AI?

Jeff Park:

Because I believe the core of AI is ultimately centralizing all your data, harvesting it, and using it on your behalf. If you believe that decentralized efforts can give you attribution rights and some form of compensation for contributing information, then this is part of the entire decentralized issue.

I’m not pessimistic about AI—I truly believe it has tremendous positive potential for society. The key issue is that the benefits of technological progress need mechanisms to ensure those who contribute also share in them. Right now, profits are extremely concentrated, while the costs are borne individually, with no compensation. If we can solve the problem of data attribution, the future of AI is bright. If my data is helping make models smarter, I deserve compensation in some form—and such a compensation mechanism can theoretically only be achieved through cryptocurrency, because it has inherent attribution properties.

Host Kevin: That’s why the existence of decentralized AI companies and decentralized computing projects matters—many projects may just be riding the AI hype to make money, but the ideal itself shouldn’t be dismissed, because it could truly be one of the solutions to this massive problem.

Jeff Park:

From a critic’s perspective, the crypto space indeed has a lot of dishonesty, but we must still hold onto the belief that the ideal is achievable, because that’s how we align with a greater purpose.

Host Kevin: What does this mean for Bitcoin today? Many people, possibly Gen Z or millennials, might say that Bitcoin is still too expensive, trading between $120,000, $100,000, or $70,000, and that they’ve already missed their chance. They might feel it’s their only lifeline. What would you say to them?

Jeff Park:

I think more people need to start asking themselves this question: What if you don’t own Bitcoin? Instead of focusing solely on the upside potential, seriously consider the downside risk you’re exposed to by not having Bitcoin in your portfolio. In other words, not holding Bitcoin is essentially taking a short position on Bitcoin. Regardless of the wealth creation effect, owning Bitcoin is advantageous—especially given that fiat currency depreciation is occurring at an unprecedented rate, and history has repeatedly shown that such monetary resets are cyclical.

If you study the history of dollar hegemony—from the Bretton Woods system to 1971 and the Nixon Shock—all of it reveals that the illusion of dollar hegemony we currently live in depends on fiscal deficits being effectively controlled, yet we are heading down a path of losing control. Under these circumstances, you need to consider holding assets capable of withstanding global arbitrage cycles—bitcoin is among the most compelling options.

Host Kevin: You mentioned downside risk. But as CIO, you’ve talked about diversification and investment frameworks. Is it meaningful for an individual to allocate a large portion of their portfolio to Bitcoin and adopt a more aggressive approach, rather than just focusing on defense?

Jeff Park:

I know many people in the crypto industry, and Bitcoin makes up a large portion of their wealth. They use a “dumbbell” strategy: one end is a large allocation to Bitcoin, the other end is money market funds, with virtually no exposure to intermediate risk tiers. I still believe that having some diversification between the two can help expand the boundaries of your capital allocation flexibility. People should pursue broader diversification than a simple two-asset dumbbell. But if you force me to choose only two assets, Bitcoin must be one—it’s the most uncorrelated, most orthogonal asset relative to everything else in global capital markets. For the second asset, I would choose a dollar-denominated, income-generating asset. For example, I tend to believe we’ll return to a zero-interest-rate environment.

I know many people are skeptical, but if global arbitrage is to continue, only falling interest rates can keep this system running. If that’s the case, 30-year Treasuries are now a strong speculative opportunity—when rates fall, bond prices rise. This is also how I’m betting on the U.S. I believe America will ultimately prevail, finding solutions through its innovation. The dollar, stablecoins, and dollar-denominated assets remain the world’s primary reserves. That’s why I’m long long-term Treasuries—it’s my view on the U.S.

Host Kevin: You have two children and a Bitcoin mindset. In a future world shaped by Occupy AI, how would you raise and prepare your children?

Jeff Park:

Bitcoin has taught me—and many others—something vital: you can never know enough, and you can never fully understand anything. We must remain open and humble toward all possible attack vectors, because this endeavor is far greater than any individual, any model, or any paper—technically and socially alike.

So it’s a living experiment, and to succeed, you must maintain an open mind. I’ve done my best to instill this mindset in my children, using the context of money and Bitcoin’s evolution to help them build resilience. There’s a saying, “Practice makes perfect,” but I prefer to tell my children: Practice isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress.

Nothing is perfect—Bitcoin isn’t either, and these things will never reach a state of perfection defined by empirical measurement, but they will improve. All the practices we undertake in life are aimed at moving toward that ideal. I try to incorporate Bitcoin’s mission into my children’s daily lives, though I don’t drag them into debates about nodes and forks—maybe when they’re a little older.