You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
We talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Jason, welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you, Marty, for having me. Excited to be here.
It's been about 15 hours since I last saw you in person.
Yeah.
First time you met in person. How was?
That was awesome. Yeah, it was great seeing you in D.C.
Yeah. Like I was saying, I got back late from D.C. last night, like 1 a.m.
We're slow moving today. I hit the sauna. I got to sweat in.
I think I have a sinus infection we're going to power through.
Sounds awesome.
I'm ready for it.
Because the show must go on, as you know.
We've been working together for, what, like four months now?
Something like that, yeah.
It's at least been a full quarter.
So, yeah, we've been going for a while.
Yeah.
And so, for the audience, Jason Healy works at Satoshi Pacholi,
recently joined them, and is bringing an incredible service.
and tool set to the firm, which is our accounting firm
and partial CFO services firm here at TFTC,
which is a management consultant,
particularly as it pertains to implementing
the management practices of Koch Industries,
which is a principle-based management process.
And so we've been going through the exercise.
myself, Jason, and Ed, our head of growth here at TFTC over the last four months, really diving into
the principles of principles-based management, why Koch Industries has been so successful by
implementing these management processes. And it's been incredibly productive for us. I think,
as you know, from our recent conversations, we've already implemented a lot of what we've gone over
over the last four months, and it's already made us extremely more productive
and gave us a lot more insight and knowledge about our business here.
But I think the story of Coke Industries is rather fascinating.
So I think we start there.
Just the history of Coke Industries, for some reason or another,
Coke Industries is a controversial business, I guess.
I think a lot of people may look at them as greedy capitalists,
But I think after reading Good Profit, which is the book that explains the management principles of Coke, you really understand that it seems like they're trying to make the world a better place and more importantly apply free market economic theory to business management, which I think is fascinating.
So I think starting there with Coke Industries, how they came to be and how they implemented this particular management strategy and your history at Coke, I guess, to establish.
Yeah, of course. I guess I'll start a little bit with a little bit of my history and then with principal base management and Coke.
And then we can dive into Coke industry.
So coming out of college, I went to work in the D.C. nonprofit area.
I was in the Coke associate program in 2012 through 2013.
and that was run by,
back then it was the Charles Koch Institute
and now they're called Stand Together.
But the program is what really introduced me
to principal-based management.
And back then, just to clarify too,
if you read, you mentioned Good Profit
or if you read one of Charles Koch's earlier books,
Science of Success,
they refer to it or he refers to it in those books
as market-based management.
But in the last about four years,
there was like a little bit of a rebrand and now it's called principal base
management, but the ideas are fundamentally the same.
They just updated a little bit of the language that they use.
So if you read good profit, you'll read about market-based management.
So anyway,
I get introduced to market-based management in 2012 to 2013 through the
cook associate program.
I ended up working on the team after that,
after that year that was leading instructional programming on market-based
management. And that the cool,
One of the coolest parts about that opportunity was the market-based management team at Koch Industries would come and they would work with us.
And we would get to do mock trainings where we ran a session and we would get direct feedback from the folks who worked at the market-based management team at Koch Industries.
Or I also remember sitting in on some of their meetings remotely and listening to them do their sessions and getting their feedback.
So that was really cool to see them explain and teach the concepts and then get real live time feedback from that.
So anyway, that was kind of my first stint with market-based management and then slash principal-based management.
I went to another industry for about six years, seven years after that time.
So I was there for about four or five years, then about six years in another industry and then came back to stand together.
And that was when they had rebranded to principal based management.
I worked there for about three and a half years before transitioning to Satoshi Pacholi and helping the Satoshi Pacholi team start to put these principles in practice.
And the cool side note to all of this is that Joe, our founder at Satoshi Pacholi, he and I worked together at the Charles Koch Institute back when I was there the first time.
So he remembered me and we basically synced up on LinkedIn after he realized that I was also getting into Bitcoin.
And he obviously had started his business.
And we actually talked in one of our first conversations as we reconnected about the idea of helping Bitcoiners integrate PBM into their businesses because the principles are so aligned.
So all of that to say, now to take a step back and talk about kind of the story of Koch Industries that you referenced earlier.
So Koch Industries is founded by Fred Koch, Charles Koch's father, I believe in the 1940s.
1940s. And Koch Industries then goes on to become mainly an oil company in its early years. It's
mainly in the oil business based out of Kansas. And in 1967, Charles Koch takes over as CEO after
his father passed away, I think, in that time. So Charles Koch takes over as CEO in 1967.
And during this whole time in the 50s and 60s, Charles is going through kind of like this intellectual personal revolution.
Like he's – if you think about where the United States is as a country, right, we're in the middle of the Cold War.
We are – there's the threat of the Soviet Union and communism is one of the predominant issues of the time, right?
And so Charles Koch is sitting there and he's starting, he's taking over CEO of Koch Industries, but he's also reading all these books about Austrian economics and collectivism and freedom and political philosophy and ethics and psychology.
And he's trying to take all these principles that he's learning, and he's also an engineer by training. So he's trying to take all these principles that he's learning about what makes free societies prosper. Why are free societies superior to collectivist communist regimes? And why do I want to live in the United States versus the Soviet Union? Or, you know, why do I want to be in West Germany versus East Germany, right?
Like he's he's thinking through and wrestling through these questions.
And then he starts to think, wait a second, there's a lot of even though we say and agree to all these things like property rights and capitalism and free speech and free markets like in economics or in politics.
A lot of organizations tend to run with a very top down hierarchical bureaucratic structure that was more like the central planners that we're criticizing from the Soviet Union and communist states.
And so he says, wait a second, what if I were to develop a framework or an approach to running a business that applies these same principles of free speech, markets, decentralization, and equal rule of law, and take these concepts and put them into a management to run my company?
And so this is all back in the late 60s, early 70s that he's starting to put this into practice.
And so one of the things that's really cool about the story of Koch Industries and the emergence of PBM is this is really the result now of a 50-, 60-year experiment.
And it's one that has seen Koch Industries go from a very small oil company in Wichita, Kansas, to, again, the second largest private company in the world.
And I think the cool thing for us as Bitcoiners, when we look at a story like this and we see the emergence of this, of Coke Industries as a business, and we could talk maybe a little bit later about, you know, some of the controversy around Coke Industries.
I'm okay talking about that.
But just overall, the overall story, when we see that as Bitcoiners, it's like, this is a prepackaged framework for running a business that is closely aligned to many of the things that draw us to Bitcoin as Bitcoiners.
Right. We we didn't come to Bitcoin because we wanted free handouts for everyone.
And and we wanted a top down control structure to tell everyone what to do.
Like that's literally the reason we we for many of us, we're running away from the fiat system or looking for alternative outside of the fiat system.
And so that's one of the things that's exciting, I think, when you look at PBM for the first time as a Bitcoiner and you start to and you're and you're thinking about growing your business like you're going through the day to day of.
I'm in startup mode. I'm in hustle mode. I'm trying to grow this business. I'm trying to
make all these things happen. I'm wearing all these hats. But how can I start to develop systems
and frameworks and decision-making tools that allow me to scale my business and to do so
efficiently and productively in a way that's consistent with the principles that I believe
in as a Bitcoiner? So I think that's the really cool thing about the Coke industry story for us.
And that's one of the things that I think should draw many Bitcoins to at least consider a Coke industry story.
Yeah, I was telling you, I think a few weeks ago, I was at a family office event with my 1031 hat on last month and met a couple of gentlemen who had worked for one part of the Coke industry's family.
and I mentioned to them when I found out that they were coming from Koch Industries,
I was going through a principle-based management exercise and a red good profit.
Their minds were blown.
That's awesome.
When I was talking to them, it seemed like they believed it was a hidden secret,
like nobody outside of Koch has heard of this management practice,
which shocked me a bit because you think, particularly for free market Austrian thinkers like myself,
You think that this would be more popular among business owners, this management practice specifically, but it seems like it's not as popular outside of the Koch family of companies.
Yeah, I think part of that may be due to some of the political controversy, especially in the 80s and 90s, 2000s as well.
There was an emergence of like this narrative of the evil Koch brothers and especially in politics that emerged.
And so I think that tainted a lot of things associated with them in the media and in kind of popular conversation.
But as you as you've found reading good profit, and I think as many people would find if they actually just took the time to read the book and to understand more about the way that Charles Cope runs his business, you'd see that there's a bit of a disconnect between the public narrative and then what they actually talk about.
I think one of the things that's like, for example, one of the straight up, I think one of the kind of narrative busters that comes out of good profit is when Charles talks about the idea of good profit.
Right. So there's a very strong emphasis that, again, I think would appeal to Bitcoiners on low time preference in in principle based management framework.
We want to create value for the long term. We want to be thinking five years down the road, 10 years down the road. We want to produce a business that's sustainable for our customers and for the profit we're making. That's long term value creation.
So the emphasis is not on the next month's budget or the next quarter's budget.
The emphasis is very much on thinking long term in terms of how you create value for the business.
And the way that you create good profit is to create real value for the customer and to do so in a way that optimizes the business's resources that does so efficiently,
make an efficient use of resources to satisfy and tangibly improves the lives of the customer,
as opposed to he distinguishes that from rent-seeking behavior, right? Like the corporation
that lives in D.C. and gets a lot of their rents and their profit margins really from carving out
special protections in the law or using the law to their advantage to get subsidies or whatever
way that they use the law as a means of benefiting themselves, regulatory capture, right?
So he's distinguishing this idea of truly voluntary exchange in the market where we,
as a company, create real value for our customers and do so consistently over a long period of time.
And that's how we earn our profit. And that's good profit versus the rent-seeking behavior,
rent-seeking profits that many companies take advantage of in the market, in the regulatory
system that we have structured today because that's the way a lot of it runs.
And this low time preference approach has proven to be rather wise as Coke Industries is the second
largest, most profitable private business in the United States, potentially the world. Is that
correct? Yes. Yes. They've done most recently over $120 million of revenue in the last few years,
um, they, uh, annual revenue, um, and they, uh, uh, and, and one of the keys to their success,
and Charles has said this in multiple, uh, of his books. He's, he's, he says, uh, the key,
one of the fundamental keys to their success is the application and development of the five
dimensions, uh, within the principle-based management approach and the application of
these principles of a free society to the running of the business and the running of
the organization.
And I think that's really interesting because when someone with his position, when someone
with his experience says something like that, I think someone who's naturally curious, your
reaction should be, that's an interesting claim.
I want to see if that's true for myself.
I want to go and look deeper into this, right?
Because this is a CEO of a business that is very successful.
So if he's going out there and saying, we've spent 60 years refining these ideas and learning
from this process of applying the principles of free society to running my organization,
running my business then and he says that one of the most important keys to their success We should I excited when I hear something like that to take a further deep dive because I don have those kind of credentials in and of my own self
but I do have the ability to go in and look at his claims
and see what he's doing and put it into practice for myself.
And every time I've seen PBM better applied,
it's always led to more clarity and vision
or better decision rights, clarity and decision rights
or better knowledge systems and processes.
the things that help your business run on a day-to-day basis.
And I think that's one of the coolest things is it's a concept that has worked scaling a massive business
because you're now Coke Industries is a very large company.
I think they have over 100,000 employees.
I mean, they're all over the world now.
They're an international business, not just in the United States.
But the concepts and principles apply to even if you're just a startup
and you're in your first year of business and you're trying to make things better.
stuff freaks healthcare open enrollment has started it will roll through the end of january
opt out of traditional health insurance which doesn't care about you it's impersonal it's
expensive they deny an increasing amount of claims premiums are going up you don't have to live this
way you can opt out i opted out four years ago and joined crowd health i've been a crowd health
member a very happy crowd health member for four years i've had two children a couple of health
events in that time period and crowd health has been there you pay a monthly fee you contribute to
the crowd we were paying eighteen hundred dollars on cobra as a family of three now we're paying
around $900 a month as a family of five. And that's with CrowdHealth and direct primary care.
You can opt out of health insurance. Go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC. You're going
to get $99 a month for the first three months if you use the code TFTC. Joincrowdhealth.com slash
TFTC. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes
Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two
or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device,
and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends
and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but
haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of
setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up
a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step,
your first step to self-custody.
If you have friends and family on the exchanges
who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey.
Go to bitkey.world.
Use the key tftc20 at checkout for 20% off your order.
That's bitkey.world, code tftc20.
Yeah, I'm not sure if you've seen this,
but in the wake of Scott Adams passing earlier this week,
the live stream he recorded a couple of years ago
of the user interface for reality
has been floating around Twitter.
Yes, I have seen that.
We reposted it from the TFTC account.
I rewatched it this week for the first time in a while.
What you were just describing there reminds me of something that Scott really leaned into in that video.
It's like set up systems, not goals.
Systems will set you up for better success.
Obviously, you should have goals, but you should depend on the systems more than the goal itself.
And I think what you were describing there with the five principles that have been applicable have set up a system that has led to their success.
And if you are a business owner, as I'm trying to do here at TFTC, applying these principles to build systems to increase our success is what we're trying to do.
And it was funny.
I was rewatching that and I was thinking of our exercise.
Like, oh, we've been going to the process of setting up systems here.
Mm hmm. Yeah, that's I think that's a really salient point. And the other thing about that, that's I love about PBM. Once you get it, like once you really start applying it, you start seeing the truths of PBM in other authors, influencers, people who know what they're doing, because really there's no.
the, there's no claim, there's, there's no, uh, kind of, uh, there's no owner of the idea that
free speech works better in a society. Therefore it works better in a business, right? But it's,
it's, or there's no one person who claims owns the idea that systems are better than goals,
right? Uh, there, there's certain people that talk about it, but one of the things that's really cool
is that when you understand PBM, you start to see the patterns and the truths that you understand
and PBM, you start to see them and recognize those same concepts in the other successful
people and other successful business owners and entrepreneurs and people who understand
and have experienced a lot of success in the things that they do.
So that's one of the interesting things that I find as well is that principle-based management
when understood, I think of it like this, imagine a deposit of gold or oil like in the
ground, right?
a massive deposit, right? And if you mine it from one direction and you use your capital,
your experience, your team, and you're going to have an experience getting to that deposit,
but you're going to get to the same, you're going to get to that deposit in the end.
But somebody else might come at it, that deposit from a different angle using a different technique
or different approach, but they're still going to get to that same fundamental deposit. So
The example that you just talked about with Scott Adams is like, that's an example of coming to the same truth, right?
But just use it from different perspectives and different backgrounds.
So that's one of the other things I love thinking about is as I look at other key leaders in business and other investors and other entrepreneurs,
what are the things that they're saying that are consistent with what comes from PBM?
because really we're all learning the same truth in a different way sometimes on some of these things.
Yeah, so let's jump into a high-level overview of PBM.
You mentioned the five principles and applying them.
How would you give the elevator pitch for PBM or the elevator pitch explanation of PBM?
Yeah, that's a great question.
Maybe an elevator that's going up 150 floors.
Yeah.
I'll try to keep it maybe to like 70 floors.
We'll see if we can keep it tight and efficient.
PBM is the idea that free societies work better than controlled societies.
So let's apply that to our businesses.
And if we can do that successfully, we should see significant and improved results.
So it's not just like an ideological commitment.
It is a true commitment to we're going to apply these principles because we see them getting us better results in the company and in the firm.
So that's the that's the 32nd pitch. That's the that's the immediate.
Like if you distill it down to one idea, it's we are applying the ideas that make free societies better and more prosperous to an organization.
Now, some of the examples of what those ideas are. Right.
I've mentioned a few of them, free speech, right? The idea that we have free and open discourse,
and you're free to challenge, and you're free to share your ideas, bring your knowledge to the
table, learn from others' knowledge. Like if we have that open culture of knowledge sharing and
free speech, we're probably going to get better ideas quickly compared to competitors who don't
have that culture, right? So that's one example. Another example is the idea of spontaneous order,
right? So this is the Hayekian concept. So we've talked about Austrian economics a bit.
But Friedrich Hayek is one of the key influential economists to Charles Koch.
And this idea of spontaneous order of orders naturally arising and emerging based off of human action, but not human design.
Right. So and that's a lot of what we experience, especially in the Bitcoin world.
I mean, Bitcoin was given to us anonymously by Satoshi Nakamoto, and it is now it's a decentralized protocol distributed across the entire world.
And there's no there's no human central planner that can change or manipulate Bitcoin.
Right. Like that's the fundamental. If you were if you were talking about one of the fundamental characteristics of Bitcoin, that's it.
So spontaneous order, free speech, equal rule of law. Right.
The idea that the rules apply to everyone the same.
So just because you're in political authority, just because you have high level of social status or influence, that doesn't mean you get to go around violating or breaking the law just because you feel like it today, right?
The laws apply to everyone. And so in the organization, it applies to the executive leaders and the leadership, the CEO, the CFO, the COO, all your executive suite, just as much as it applies to the person who's joining the job on the first day.
So you take these principles and these concepts and you apply them to the organization.
And then what you should see is improved results from the implementations of the systems and the decision-making approaches that arise from that approach.
And specifically, the way that Koch systematizes this is through what we call the five dimensions of PBM.
So we've talked about these. I've mentioned these a little bit, but those five dimensions are vision, virtue and talents, knowledge or knowledge processes, comparative advantage and motivation.
So basically, the fundamental idea is that if you look at a problem in your business,
so just think of any problem that you might be running into.
And again, this applies to any business, large or small.
Think of any problem in your business.
You can probably trace the root of that problem to one of those five dimensions, the vision,
the virtue and talents in the organization, the knowledge process that you have, the comparative
advantage, how it's being used, and the motivation of the individuals in your company.
So you want to use these five dimensions as kind of like different lenses to look at your business.
And then as you look through your business through those different lenses, you're going to see both problems that you can solve, but then you're going to have a better idea of solutions that you can present forward.
So that's the, and again, going back to this idea of spontaneous order, and this is one of the key benefits of PBM.
The idea is we empower employees to apply PBM throughout the organization.
So everyone's looking through these five dimensions.
It's not just the executive leaders who are saying, oh, today we got a vision problem.
Everybody needs to get on board with our vision solution.
It's everyone throughout the organization going around and saying, well, what are our
knowledge processes like on this?
How are we leveraging everyone's comparative advantage on the team like this?
And when you have a culture like that across an entire organization, you can start to see how people feel empowered to contribute and toward the results of the company as opposed to feeling like they're just checking off boxes or just clocking in, clocking out.
They're actively solving problems in real time.
So that's one of the empowerment themes in the spontaneous order, one of the ways that spontaneous order emerges from the use of PBM.
There are cracks in the foundations of your money.
governments around the world are managing record debt the same way they always have,
by debasing their currencies. And the effects are already showing up across markets.
In his report, The Debasement Trade, James Lavish explains why the shift is reshaping portfolios,
why gold tends to act first, and why Bitcoin often follows as the implications become clearer.
On January 28th, James joins Unchained Live for the Age of Debasement, a presentation and Q&A
expanding on that research and exploring what this environment means for long-term investors.
If the playbook no longer explains what you're seeing,
This event helped put the pieces together.
Register now and get early access to the report at unchained.com slash tftc.
That's unchained.com slash tftc.
What's up, freaks?
This rep is brought to you by good friends at Silent.
Silent creates everyday, faraday gear that protects your hardware.
We're in Bitcoin.
We have a lot of hardware that we need to secure.
Your wallet emits signals that can leave you vulnerable.
You want to pick up Silent's gear, put your hardware in that.
I have a tap signer right here.
I got the Silent card holder.
Replace my wallet.
I was using Ridge Wallet because it's secured against RFID signal jacking. Silent, the card
holder does the same thing. It's much sleeker, fits in my pocket much easier. I also have the
Faraday phone sleeve, which you can put a hardware wallet in. We're actually using it for our keys
at the house too. There's been a lot of robberies. They have essential Faraday slings, Faraday
backpacks. It's a Bitcoin company. They're running on a Bitcoin standard. They have a Bitcoin treasury.
They accept Bitcoin via strike. So go to slnt.com slash tftc to get 15% off anything or simply just
Use the code TFTC when shopping at slnt.com.
Patented technology, special operations approved.
It has free shipping as well.
So go check it out.
Tying this to people running Bitcoin companies, why do you think this is so aligned with what we're doing specifically and how should people begin to implement this?
Yeah.
So as Bitcoiners, like I can speak for myself, but I know this is probably a common experience for most of the Bitcoiners in our space, right?
we all at some point got fed up with the fiat system for some reason or another.
We realized that the central banking, the central banks are just, they have arbitrary control over our money.
They can literally print money out of thin air.
And we have to work and give our time and our energy away for these dollars that the Federal Reserve can just manipulate it with.
And so that centralized approach, that top-down approach to money supply is something that frustrates us as Bitcoins.
Or maybe we're frustrated by the fiat short-term consumption, high-time preference consumer society that we live in.
Right. We we don't want to participate in this, you know, keeping up with the Joneses lifestyle and just having to always be one upping everyone with a nicer car and a bigger TV and, you know, five bigger TVs.
And we want to live a good, honest life and contribute our work to the world.
But then we want to stack stats and stay humble. Right. So there's many.
So there's low time preference. There's this there's this natural skepticism of central planning and control.
there's even kind of this sense of meaning and self-actualization, right?
I think a lot of Bitcoiners are becoming more aware, especially if you're part of like the old guard, right?
You bought Bitcoin in 2016 and you held on to it until now.
You're realizing that there's more to life than number go up and money, right?
Like you're starting to think about what can I do?
What legacy can I leave for my children?
What legacy can I leave on the world?
How can I make the world a better place?
And so there's this idea of meaning and like actually finding like that and finding self-actualization, which is a key component of the fifth dimension of PBM, the motivation dimension.
So you have all these principles that I think Bitcoiners like the things that drew us to Bitcoin are the same principles that drive the PBM approach, the principle based management approach in Koch Industries.
uh the uh even the affinity uh one more to reference even is the affinity for austrian
economics uh charles coke if you read good profit if you read the science of success
it's hayek and mises and thomas soul and a lot of these economists and thinkers that
obviously champion free market ideas and and stood against a lot of collectivists and socialists
and keynesian ideas back in their day but then he's taking their concepts as well and applying
them to how do I run a business? How do I use these concepts to help me run a business and get
better results for my team? So we share a lot of the way that I would say it is Bitcoiners are
predisposed ideologically to accept many of the tenets of principle-based management at a first
principles level. We want free speech. We want equal application of the rule of law.
We want open debate.
We want Austrian economics and we want economic thinking.
So we want all of these things and we agree with all these things in principle.
And now we have a management framework that's been in place for now 60 years through trial
and error and iteration.
That is literally the embodiment of those principles just as a management framework for running a business which you know you can always try to take your concepts and make them your own
And that's fine. I would encourage anybody to do that. But also, let's at least learn from this approach that is grounded in the same principles that we hold as Bitcoiners.
And then we can take that and learn from that and apply that to our businesses and make our businesses.
I guess one other thing, too, on this point that I've been thinking about a lot is you and I would say we believe in hyper-Bitcoinization.
We believe that there's a world coming where Bitcoin is one of, if not the fundamental building blocks of our economy.
And that's a world that I'm working for.
That's a world that you're working for.
That's a world that many Bitcoiners are working for.
And especially if we're running companies, I would imagine that's a world that many of those companies are working for as well.
So if that's what we're working for and that's what is meaningful to us, then we should be, I think, looking for solutions even in the management of the businesses and the cultures that we build and the way that we create value that is aligned with the principles and the ethos of Bitcoin.
And sometimes that's hard because if all your experience is you've been surrounded by 20 years of corporate America with sometimes it's soul-sucking approach to work and to getting things done for the company.
And if that's your mental models and that's where you're coming from, then it's good to take a step back and find new mental models that are grounded in these principles.
And I think that that is such a powerful thing for Bitcoiners to be exposed to this concept of principle-based management because it really takes those principles and gives them to Bitcoiners in a way that's easy to process.
Yeah, let's put some concrete examples on this too.
Obviously, we've been going through the process at TFTC implementing PBM and what we're doing.
similarly at Satoshi Pacholi, you guys have gone through the process. And maybe we can do that,
just give people some concrete examples of how we're applying this to our business. And what was
it like for you guys, if you don't mind sharing, if you think Joe would be comfortable sharing?
Absolutely. Yeah. Joe would be comfortable for sure. So for example, virtue and talents, right?
That's one of the dimensions of principle-based management. And one of the key questions that
you're asking when you're looking at your business through the lens of the Virgin Talents
dimension is, you know, what is our culture? What is it like to work here on a day-to-day basis?
What do we stand, pardon me, what do we stand for as a company? What do we promote? What values
do we hold to? So when you're looking at your company through that lens, one of the things that
that leads to is a discussion of the fundamental values of the company, right?
And the reason that you want to have a system of values in your company is not to be dictatorial,
like these are our values, you apply, you adhere to our values, and therefore, you won't break our values, right?
You're not trying to create a system that's like a dictatorship.
You want to create a set of values for your company that empowers employees to act in a way that builds the brand of the business, that increases your integrity and your reputation, that sets them up for success.
And so you want to use the values of your company as a way to empower employees to create value, build a culture that everyone wants to work in and be a part of, and to bring other people into that culture.
So at Satoshi Pacholi, when we were going through our team and going through the exercise of looking at our organization from these five dimensions, we got to the Virgin Towns dimension.
And, you know, we sat down and we said we don't have currently a codified system or codified set of values for our culture and for our team.
So we took several weeks and actually we were out in Denver as a team for a summit in October.
And that was a really good time because one of the things we did as a part of that time was we sat down as a team and we went through and brainstormed a list of values, like things that we stood for as a company.
And that included things like sound money.
That included things like value for value.
And we went through and created a list of all of the things that we stood for as a company.
And then we went through the hard part of distilling those down into some core values that we were then used to act and to give us the ability to act as employees of the company, you know, if we're representing the company or, you know, in how we're onboarding new employees.
And so ever since the development of those values, one of the things about that process that was really great was we were all involved.
So it wasn't something where just a couple of us went into a back room and created a list of values and said, here's the values of the company, now go do them.
Everyone felt like they contributed to the discussion and had something, and everybody did contribute something valuable.
We have about 10 people on our team, and everybody had something to say that really added to the discussion.
So now we have a set of values at Satoshi Patchouli that is organic to our company, and it really exemplifies what we stand for.
And so now everybody on the team feels like they have better clarity in terms of the culture that they're contributing to and the culture that we're building.
Because we're now thinking about how do we build this culture and exemplify these values over the long term, not just because we came up with these last month or last quarter.
We came up with these and now we can think about how do we put these into practice for the next decade.
And that's a powerful thing when you have a team that's able to do that. So that's one example. Another example, and this is a little bit more tangible in terms of like a process that we implemented or put in place.
So in the fourth dimension of PBM is comparative advantage.
And underneath that dimension, one of the things that is emphasized is this idea of clarifying roles, responsibilities, and expectations.
So having everybody understand on the team, what is your role or what are your roles on the team?
And what are you responsible for?
What are you accountable in the things that you do that contribute to the business?
And then what are the expectations associated with that?
How do we want to see that emerge?
And everybody took ownership of writing their own roles, responsibilities, and expectations
and getting that down.
And it wasn't one of these things where like, that's it forever.
We'll never change it.
The idea of RR&Es is that they actually should probably change over time.
But we were able to then really have a better understanding of who's responsible for what
on the team.
And then as a result of that, we had more clarity across the team about who was contributing
to what processes or aspects of the business.
And it helped set goals and accountability for those goals for different roles on the
team.
So those are two examples of like just taking the time to think about these questions that
may even seem like common sense at first.
Like, oh yeah, everyone should know what their roles and responsibilities are.
But if you haven't talked about it in six months, it can be one of those things that
kind of just falls by the wayside and you just assume certain things and then things
get lost.
taking the time to actually codify it, be clear about it, and then say, hey, we'll revisit this
in six months, that's something that's been very helpful to our team. And we've been able to
be a lot more streamlined and efficient with some of the processes that we've had since
the implementation of those RR&Es. Yeah. And here at TFTC, obviously,
we're still going through the process. I think we have three or four more meetings,
the next of which is tomorrow to really tie knots in in this whole exercise but we've been
slowly but surely implementing stuff along the way and i think for us the the biggest
value add from going through this exercise immediately has been the knowledge dimension
we were ed and i have been going through this this process with you um and i think we were
encouraged after reading Good Profit and having a few conversations with you. It's like, okay,
I think we're pretty much in line with this philosophy and are applying it in certain ways
in the sense that we have sort of a flat hierarchy and we communicate pretty regularly
in our company discord. But there were some gaps in knowledge, like information was scattered.
We didn't know who was supposed to own that information. And we began implementing this.
And as you saw last week on our last call, when we showed you our dashboard, like we're, we quickly recognized that that was a gap that we had and we can increase the productivity and efficiency of the business.
We simply had better knowledge processes in place and began implementing them and building them out almost immediately.
And it's already had a massive benefit to, to what we're doing here.
Yeah.
Going through the knowledge dimension with you guys was a lot of fun.
Honestly, I had a lot of fun doing it just because it was cool to see the opportunities emerge as we were having the discussion about where you guys could improve the business and where there were opportunities to improve the knowledge flow, the knowledge sharing that you guys were doing.
Even though, again, going into it, it wasn't like you guys had terrible knowledge.
As you said, you were communicating regularly and there were a lot of ways in which you guys kept each other up to date.
but still taking the time to be intentional about going through that process.
And that's the thing that I would emphasize for every Bitcoin business out there is being
intentional about going through and asking these questions will reveal no matter how
well you think you're doing, it will reveal something that you're missing or some gap
or some way that you can, you can improve the, the, the results you're getting in your
business.
And for with you guys, with the knowledge dimension that we went through and what we discovered, there was just a lot of ways that you guys were able, after the discussion, to coordinate the knowledge that you're using on the back end for your podcasting business that we hadn't really thought about or wasn't front of mind when we first started the discussion.
And so seeing the dashboard that Ed showed that he built as a result of that and just seeing the fruition of that was a really fun experience.
So I think it just speaks to the testament, right, of this applies to all businesses.
It's like one of the common, one of the things I've heard and starting to talk to some entrepreneurs about this as well, you know, that's Koch Industries.
And they're already very successful and they do a massive, you know, massive revenue every year.
And they're there. Of course, you know, it works for them. But I'm, you know, I'm small. I'm getting started.
And I think the key is it does apply to everyone, right?
It's not about who it's being used by.
It's about the principle itself.
And if you just take the time to be intentional about it, it's fun to see the results that emerge from it.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think – I'm curious.
I think we've discussed this before, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on air about what it was like working with a media company to go through this process.
Is it a new type of company?
Yes.
Well, you guys, yeah, you're the first media company I've worked with, which is exciting, right?
But it wasn't like, it wasn't, there's nothing that, once you understand PBM, there's nothing that comes at you that's like, oh, this is a, I don't, this is a media thing.
I don't know about that.
You know, like it's the concept of these principles of virtue and talents, vision, knowledge, comparative advantage.
It all applies to whatever business you're running.
So one of the things that is cool with working with you guys is just learning about the media business, learning about the way that you guys think about your audience, learning about the way you guys manage sponsor relationships, learning about the way that you guys think about how you educate and contribute to the ideas and the debate and the discourse that go out there around the issues that you guys talk about, which was – that was really cool to see and learn more about what that looks like on the back end.
But at the same time, when it comes to applying these principles of principle-based management, you're still running into the same problems that any other business would run into.
You're running into areas where you have knowledge gaps.
You're running into, you know, identifying yourself as a culture and what values you stand for and being clear about what those values are and how you can use those to to inspire your team and empower your team and and and give them the the feeling that they can contribute to something meaningful.
Right. Or just clarifying your vision. Right. We haven't really talked about the vision dimension that much.
But, you know, clarifying one of the things that was, you know, cool with you guys is clarifying your vision as a media company, right?
What you guys are standing for, and if you're comfortable with me sharing, it was being signal in the sea of noise, right?
And that is a unique approach to your vision that is unique now to TFTC.
And so now you guys are trying to be a signal in the sea of noise in this world of information overload, right? That starts to give me a picture about what you guys stand for. And I think just even going through that process was very cool in terms of helping to see, like, as a media company, this is how we're going to interact with the world.
This is how we're going to create value for the world. We're going to be the signal for our audience in the midst of everything that they got coming at them. All the algorithm, all the social media feeds, all the doom scrolling, all of that stuff that's coming at them, we're going to stand out. We're going to be that signal.
So, you know, that's just that's a very cool way in which it's you take the specific company in the industry that you're dealing with, but then you take these principles and you you come to clarity on on what you're trying to accomplish.
And it's an exciting process.
Yeah, I think another added benefit that really stuck out was the marginal analysis of of new initiatives.
like we talked about we just launched
bitcoinproducts.com
and we're going to lean into that
and we just went through the marginal analysis
okay we're going to allocate time and capital to this
like what is
the potential value add to the business
and going through that process was
very enlightening and not only that
with the AI tools
maybe we can talk about this for a while
but I remember last week I asked you
to send me a zip file of all
the documents of the finished
dimensions that we've gone through.
So I took those and I uploaded them into the back of a cloud code and cloud
co-work and created individual skills for each document.
Like we had our vision doc,
we had our marginal analysis doc or knowledge doc and basically like dump
them in the cloud and said, okay, take each of these docs and make a skill.
And when we're doing something and I pull in a particular skill,
whether it's basically trying to determine whether or not something we're
doing is aligning with our vision or um the the best example is um after our discussion last week
i took the marginal analysis doc made a skill out of made a skill for claude on it and then
basically had a conversation using that skill about bitcoinproducts.com was able to create a
memo and share it with the people working on bitcoin products and tftc like hey right here's
um here's why it makes sense to go after this here's some timeline here's a timeline of
what we're going to measure over time to see if it's successful and decide whether we should
keep leaning into it or back away from it.
And with AI and these principles, we codify them and actually have artifacts that you can
dump into them.
You can really work with these LLMs to get better results.
Yeah.
I mean I learned from you guys even just talking with you guys about what you doing with AI what you and Ed are implementing I think that awesome to hear that
I think that that's, again, as far as the time that we're living in, what we're going through as small businesses, as entrepreneurs, with the tools that are coming online and the things that we're really being able to do,
the process of iteration that has gone into PBM, that's gotten it to be such a proven framework.
Now it can be for many of us as we start to grasp these principles and apply them, again,
not grasp them in a first principle sense. We've already got that, especially if you're a Bitcoin
for the most part, but grasp them in like, how do I implement this in my business? And how do I
make this into a framework like the principle-based management framework? Take that, plug that into
AI, plug that into, you know, build out tools for decision making, for economic thinking,
for these knowledge processes that we're talking about, for even, you know, staying true to
your organizational vision.
The possibilities are endless, right, with what you can do with that.
And it's cool to hear even the application that you're talking about there, feeding the
documents that we've worked on and plugging that into AI to begin that process for you
guys.
But I do think that is one of the exciting things is once you get exposed to the framework,
once you understand and internalize this is how we want to attack problems from these five dimensions.
We want to look at our business.
We want to look at the different problems that we're running into in our business.
Look at the different ways we can add value to the world.
We want to look at it through these dimensions.
Now I'm going to plug that into the AI tools and the AI opportunities that are out there and the LLMs
And then use that to just streamline this process of making it that much more efficient.
And I think that's a huge opportunity.
I mean, there's apps that can be vibe-coded.
There's consultants and coaches to be able to really propagate these tools for us.
And the cool thing is then you guys can make them for you in terms of the specific uses of your business, right?
And when we'll be able to do the same as Satoshi Pacholi and any company that really starts to take this seriously, we'll be able to do it for themselves based upon their needs and what's going on.
Yeah. Selfish question.
Yeah.
Where do companies fail when trying to implement this?
That's a great question. That is a really great question.
A couple things immediately come to mind.
First is this idea of, I would call it like jargon, right?
The jargonization of business.
And I think every business runs into this problem, no matter what system or framework you have in place, right?
There's a lot of words, like key concepts, I would say, that emerge from principal waste management.
Things like comparative advantage, roles, responsibilities, and expectations, knowledge and knowledge processes, benchmarks, decision making, economic thinking, right?
We have all these terms that emerge, and if you read Good Profit, you'll see a lot of what I just talked about, those terms referenced.
So you can kind of fall into the pattern of using the words but not implementing, if that makes sense.
Like I say, oh, I'm working on knowledge processes today, or I'm thinking about my RR&Es today, right, or roles, responsibilities, and expectations.
And you use the terms, but do you really internalize them and you really ask the questions and search for the answers that enable you to truly apply them, right?
So jargonization can be a pitfall because you get excited about all the concepts and teaching them to your team.
And then everybody starts using the term.
One of the funny ones is comparative advantage, right?
So comparative advantage, obviously, in economics, it's based upon your opportunity cost, right?
So I should spend time and energy doing things for which I have the lowest opportunity cost, right?
So I don't want to spend time on something that – or I'm sorry, not lowest, highest opportunity cost.
I don't want to spend time and energy on something where I'm doing something that – I'm performing at a suboptimal rate to get a suboptimal result.
I want to leverage my talents, my knowledge, my skills at something that is as as my the best use of my time relative to my opportunity cost.
Right. So you always have to think about that opportunity cost.
Sometimes people interpret or can misinterpret comparative advantages.
I'm good at it. Right. I'm good at the thing. Therefore, I should do the thing.
And that's not necessarily that just means you're good at it. Right.
So you're not considering that opportunity cost question.
Uh, so, uh, anyway, jargonization and not being, not really being intentional about
applying the concept, just using the words as one.
Uh, the, the second thing that I think can fail is, is more so like, honestly, the, the
hardest thing, the hardest one, or sometimes one, one of the hardest ones is the challenge
culture.
So the open feedback, the challenge culture, the, the free speech, because no matter what
happens at the end of the day, we're all still human.
So we all still ego can get in the way. The just natural human instinct of the way that we operate when things get rough, we can sometimes stifle productive challenge. We can sometimes run away from productive challenge because we're scared of what people think about us or whether we'll get criticized by the boss.
uh we again we can uh we can weaponize challenge like or make make challenge or feedback into
something where it becomes about the persons involved not about the ideas at play so when
we do that we might still be saying or you know we might still say we have a challenge culture
a feedback culture but it it's not getting put into place in practice and that that can very
quickly lead to some negative morale. And I think the last thing that is really important with all
this is it still does matter that the leaders of a company are bought in. So if the leaders aren't
bought in, then it's much tougher to have a culture that is centered around this framework.
If the leaders are playing lip service to it, then that can be a problem as well. But those are some
of the immediate pitfalls that come to mind. The last thing I would say is it is hard. It genuinely
is hard if you really take the time to do PBM. I would compare it to something like a heavy
deadlift. A deadlift is a very simple exercise. You have a weight that's sitting on the floor,
and you pick it up. That's all you do. That is literally, if you're just going to describe it
as bare bones level, heavy weight is on the ground, you pick it up. But when you actually
understand what goes behind a deadlift. And I have experience in the fitness industry. So
I was a personal trainer for six years. When you look at the physics behind a deadlift,
when you look at everything that you're doing from a biomechanics perspective,
there's a lot that goes into a really good debt, especially when you talk about competitive dead
lifters and people that are lifting those five, six, seven, 800 pound weights. There's a lot that
goes into that on the back end that's way beyond just picking up a weight and putting it down.
I'd say the same thing with PBM.
At the end of the day, we're applying free principles that work at a level of the free
society to the organization.
That's it.
It's a very simple concept.
But the actual commitment to doing that day in and day out and thinking from an economics
perspective, like if we were to really challenge ourselves, am I thinking economically as well
as I could be?
Am I really thinking about the opportunity cost here?
Am I really looking at the knowledge processes and gaps and where we can find that?
Like that does take mental effort, mental energy.
And so I think the last thing is it's it really is just hard.
It's like a good workout regimen that if you stick to, you're going to get a lot of results.
But it's also like a good workout regimen in that it's hard and you've got to stay committed and you don't skip on it because you're not feeling like it because that's when the results go away.
So that would be the last pitfall is just you got to be willing to muscle through some of the tougher times when it comes to applying and staying consistent with it.
And what are the teams that are good at sticking with it and applying it?
What is like the number one thing that they do?
I know it's hard. It's just like doing it. But like what?
One thing that I found very successful is not trying to do everything all at once.
so uh if you're just getting into pbm and you want to become successful with it don't try to
be thinking about every single question from all five dimensions all at once that's going to burn
you out and you're you're gonna you're gonna feel like this doesn't work pick one dimension like for
you guys i'd use you guys in as an example here it sounds like not you might want to live in the
knowledge processes dimension for the next six months like i'm not saying the other dimensions
don't exist, not saying there aren't beneficial things that you're going to learn from still
thinking about virtues and talents and vision, but you guys have really had some breakthroughs
going through the knowledge dimension stuff. So let's live there for six months and let's,
let's be consistent about applying that dimension for just the next six months.
And we'll keep the others in mind. So for me, one of the things that I found very successful
is companies or teams that pick specific concepts that really start to lead to a breakthrough
and just stick with that and grow from there.
Because once you experience results there,
then you're going to start to see where the other dimensions fit in
and they come in over time.
You still want to understand all the dimensions,
but I'd say pick one or two things that are really starting to stick,
one or two dimensions, one or two concepts within those dimensions,
and really get good at that.
And then grow from there.
The other thing that I think is, I go back to this a lot
because this is preferential to how I like to manage.
And I do see, I have seen a ton of success
when this is present.
Just the overwhelming commitment to a feedback
and a challenge culture.
The teams that are good with that,
they get a lot of things right in the longterm.
The teams that end up missing that,
or there's like a chilling effect,
or there's subtle politics and bureaucracy
that goes on in the background,
or there's things that, you know, there's, there's, or shut down of any challenge.
Once that starts to happen, a lot of other things do start to fall off.
So on the flip side, the teams that are very well, it's robust.
You come into the meeting and you're like, Hey, I messed up.
I take ownership of that.
You know, I'm going to do better next time.
This is how I'm going to do it.
Or, Hey, I don't agree with your idea.
I understand where you're coming from, but I don't agree with it.
I think there's, this is the better way forward.
If you've got that environment where people can be that honest with each other and give
that direct feedback, you're going to get to better ideas over time. So I know that's kind
of a specific knowledge dimension and maybe a little bit of virtue and talents dimension
aspect of it. But that's something that I found to be extremely, when you got a team that operates
like that, they're going to get a lot of things right over time. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to begin
implementing this more. Logan listening in. I think he's experienced some of it, but I think
we have to finish the process first and then really go full bore in terms of like, okay,
here's all of our artifacts.
Here's our vision.
Here's how we're going to attack knowledge and run marginal analysis and our virtues and
talents, what are our responsibilities.
And I think it's going to be a good 2026 for TFTC in large part to you sitting down and
going through this process with us.
So thank you for that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And just as a final note here, I think one of the things that's really cool about this
is I think about the culture, right?
Again, going back to the point I made earlier
about the ethos that we're contributing to
and we're a part of,
I really believe this framework for managing a company
is part of that emerging Bitcoin ethos, right?
And so if we can practice what we preach,
if we can take these same principles
and put it in the way that we run our business,
it's exciting because of the cultures we're building
and the results we get to achieve from that.
So that's one thing that I'm very excited about with this framework. And I hope and hopefully more Bitcoiners and even just more individuals in this privacy, freedom, decentralized. It doesn't have to be just Bitcoiners, right?
Like if we're all in the same space working for the sovereignty of the individual and the bottom up approaches to solving problems that society typically uses a centralized or top down approach.
Let's let's use these principles and put them into frameworks that can also just help our businesses run better.
And that's an exciting culture to want to be a part of, not just in terms of the not just in terms of the work that you're doing, but you're really you're really on kind of a bigger team when you're when you're when everyone's operating that way.
which is exciting. It's one of the reasons that Bitcoin is so fun.
Yeah. And if anybody's listening to this and is intrigued by what we've been discussing,
you guys at Stoshi Patchouli are going to be doing this with more companies or open to doing
this with more companies, correct? Yes. And we'd love to work with any company that's
interested in trying to take this framework and grow their business and achieve better results
through it. And then even just to start learning more, we do have articles on our sub stack.
where I've introduced the idea of Bitcoin,
PBA, principal-based management for Bitcoin companies
and growing your business
from a principal-based management framework.
We have articles on the five dimensions of PBM as well there.
So if anyone's interested,
they can also check out on our sub stack.
And we're continuing to produce more content there as well.
Awesome.
Well, Jason, thank you.
Thank you for all you've done for us at TFTC
over the last few months.
It was great to meet you in person last night, and I will talk to you tomorrow morning as well.
But this has been fun.
And anybody listening, I would seriously consider, if you're running a business, especially this PBM management style.
Just going through the exercises alone, learning about it, and being forced to think about our business here has been incredibly productive in and of itself.
And hopefully I'm able and we as a team are able to lean into it and really make sure that we're following the principles that we have discovered throughout all this.
And I think if we're successful in doing that, it will be massive for this business.
So thank you for that.
Yeah, of course.
Thank you, Marty.
And it's obviously been great working with you guys and helping you guys go through the exercise of applying this at TFTC.
So appreciate the words of encouragement there.
And you guys are grateful for everything you're doing, even just in the Bitcoin space and educating all the audiences about all the important stuff we're talking about here.
So awesome.
Awesome to be a part of that journey a little bit.
Well, the journey continues.
It's going to be a long one.
peace and love freaks
thank you for listening to this episode of tftc
if you've made it this far
I imagine you got some value out of the episode
if so please share it far and wide
with your friends and family
we're looking to get the word out there
also wherever you're listening
whether that's youtube, apple, spotify
make sure you like
and subscribe to the show
and if you can leave a rating
on the podcasting platforms
that goes a long way
last but not least
If you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that.
Five dollars a month, get you every episode a day early, ad free, helps the show, gives you incredible value.
So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well.
Thank you for your time. And until next time.
Thank you.