Volatility Is the Price of Admission

When Mark Yusko, a long-time money manager, tells me Bitcoin isn’t a trade, it’s an allocation, I listen.

Yusko’s been in the money game for decades, from managing endowments for UNC and Notre Dame to launching Morgan Creek, he’s managed billions. And in our recent conversation, he dropped a line that stuck with me:

“Volatility is not risk. It’s the price of admission for outsized returns.”

That right there is what decades of experience in the markets will teach you.

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Soft Money, Hard Problem

We live in a world where governments can’t stop printing money—not because they want to, but because they have to. The US government is well beyond addicted to borrowing; it’s structurally dependent. Without continued borrowing, the country as it is known today (global superpower) and its citizens’ standard of living will disappear. Of course, there are massive consequences to this predicament. The debt’s too big, the obligations too entrenched, and the political will to fix the system is nonexistent.

So what happens when you structurally debase your currency over decades?

Simple: capital flees to scarce assets.

That’s not ideology. That’s history.

Gold, real estate, art, and Bitcoin—the newcomer—have all risen when trust in fiat systems declines. However, most investors still treat Bitcoin as a trade. Yusko doesn’t.

He calls it a lifeboat in a sinking monetary system.

And like any good lifeboat, you don’t wait until you’re neck-deep in water to climb in. This is why, over the last couple years or so, I’ve established my allocation in what some now call the ‘digital gold.’

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The Potential Mispricing of Bitcoin

In our recent chat, Yusko argued that Bitcoin is the most mispriced asset on the planet—not because it’s volatile, but because people still don’t understand what it is.

They think it’s tech. It’s far more. They think it’s a company. It’s not. They think it’s a passing fad. It’s definitely not.

Still, less than 10% of global capital allocators have exposure to Bitcoin, yet it has outperformed nearly every other asset over the past decade.

As Yusko puts it, Bitcoin is the most secure computing network ever invented. It’s energy-backed money with no central issuer and no off switch. And it’s increasingly where capital goes when trust evaporates.

And the volatility? That’s the market showing a lack of conviction because most capital allocators still don’t understand what it really is.

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The Energy Cost of Money

Mark and I got into the weeds of energy and money, two things that, until recently, most investors had never thought to connect.

Yusko laid it out: fiat currencies are backed by trust and force, while Bitcoin is backed by physics. Proof-of-work isn’t a flaw; it’s a feature. It gives money a cost, which is exactly what fiat lacks.

That’s what makes Bitcoin unique. You can’t just conjure more of it. You can’t inflate it with a spreadsheet. And for the first time in modern finance, you have an asset that’s truly outside the system…uncensorable, unprintable, and, increasingly, unavoidable.

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Get Off Zero

Yusko’s message was clear: you don’t need to go all-in (in fact, you should never go all-in on any single asset). But if you’re still sitting with zero exposure to Bitcoin or scarce, non-inflationary assets, especially in a world built on devaluation, that may be the riskiest decision.

He’s not saying Bitcoin will replace the dollar tomorrow.

He’s saying: understand the direction of the system. Understand where the incentives point. Understand that the people in charge don’t have a fix.

More debt. More printing. More intervention. That’s the elites’ playbook.

And in that world, what you own matters.

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Final Thought

I'm not a financial advisor, so I don’t give investment advice, and investing in anything comes with risks… but I do know how to spot capital shifts when they start breaking through the noise.

This one’s loud and getting louder. And that’s why I own Bitcoin.

The crowd still thinks volatility equals danger. But the people paying attention know that volatility is the toll gate you pass through on the road to potential outsized returns.

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