The Pomp Podcast - #527: Jessica Vaugn on Playmate Turned Bitcoiner

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Jessica Vaugn is a former Playboy Playmate who has reinvented herself as a talented photographer. She also has become a staunch proponent of bitcoin over the last few months. In this conversation, we discuss her career as a Playboy Playmate, professional reinvention, independent thinking, the Federal Reserve, Bitcoin as freedom, the legacy system, and meme masters. ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global full-time employees and contractors. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Learn more about Remote and their new Remote for Startups program at http://www.remote.com. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there let's kick this thing off jessica vaughn is a former playboy playmate who has reinvented herself as a talented photographer she also has become a staunch proponent of bitcoin over the last few months in this conversation we discuss her career as a playboy playmate her professional reinvention independent thinking the federal Reserve, Bitcoin as Freedom, The Legacy System, and Meme Masters. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jessica, and I think you will as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Remote.com. In 2021, every business is a global

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way, Choice is on a mission to give you full control over your retirement savings. So head on over to retirewithchoice.com slash pomp. Again, that's retirewithchoice.com slash pomp and sign up for an account today. And one more thing, you know how I feel about this, but if you have a pro that manages your money, don't take any BS. Choice has tools for them too. Take back control today and visit retirewithchoice.com slash Pomp. Retirewithchoice.com slash Pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with Jessica. I hope you enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek

Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang i've got jessica here with me uh she has never been on zoom before so we're going to give this a try uh thank you so much for doing this yeah absolutely thanks for giving me a reason to download it i was kind of resistive but i couldn't i couldn't deny your invite so here i am you uh you have a very different background than almost anybody else I've ever had on the podcast. Let's start just with where were you born, where'd you grow up,

and how did you get into modeling, photography, et cetera? Well, I'm from Kansas. So I did 20 years of hard winter and decided I didn't want snow anymore. So graduated college after doing my undergraduate, moved away, did the Hollywood dream thing. So lots of photo shoots, lots of production i'm a photographer now but um moved out here to do modeling hair and makeup just you know the hollywood thing so when you say the hollywood thing how exactly does this work i think people are fascinated with if you go to hollywood and uh you talk to every waiter waitress uh bar hop etc like everyone's trying to break into acting modeling uh or some aspect of that like how did you break into that industry and like what is that life like well um no two days are

ever the same which is a part of the fun of it I guess the appeal so um we did it's hard because it's already been a year that I haven't had my normal life so it's sort of bittersweet to think back to all the great things about it um that aren't afforded to us right now so um it was a lot of castings a lot of media events a lot of production days that were long and I do all kinds of things so it was just fun to squeeze in on production however I could and I started doing sports media for combat sports and that was really fun so I just sort of could squeeze in wherever my interest led me so that was a cool thing about the opportunities in Hollywood all right so let's separate these out let's first talk about the modeling part of it um what is that like on a

day-to-day basis so forget it kind of the other aspects of what you would do like just from a modeling standpoint is it you show up to a shoot and literally it's like six hours and they just take pictures of you the whole time is that weird um it was weird for a couple years i traveled around the country and i would just fund self-fund my tour across america and shooting and the world was just different when I started in 2008. So once I parked it in LA, sure, it's a little more, this is a little more structured, but you build a network and then you start doing projects with people that you're comfortable with creating and you start just cross-promoting each other. And so I really work with the same core group of people a lot of the times, and we just diversify and

pull each other in on projects we're doing. So you mentioned being comfortable with the people work with uh if somebody asked me to go and uh and be a model i would have all of my clothes on and probably would be the least eventful uh photo shoot in the world uh by your wife yeah yeah exactly like you know my wife would actually be the one directing it etc yes and uh and she probably would be telling me i'm an idiot uh for even trying anything like that but uh she's a good cheerleader for you i watch lunch money i know well if you watch lunch money then you already know exactly how how that would go down i pretty much would uh would do uh nothing that i wanted to do uh but in terms of uh the modeling that you did a lot of it when you're going across the

country was unstructured it sounds like then you get to la it's a lot more structured talking about like kind of being comfortable you eventually end up uh doing much more with playboy and all that like how do you get comfortable with people is it weird like that's just such a foreign concept to 95 99 of people like what is that like well it's been so long since i had to think about it that it's that it's uh hard to articulate it and because pretty much my existing network is all people that are already in it so i guess i never make that um that explanation it's not unlike anything else when you do it i mean you know when you somebody goes to war they just get used to the things that come with that so this was just a different kind

of war a different battle you know normalizing some things and so um i don't know it's it's hard to think back to it i i just accepted that that was the path i picked to have the ticket out of my hometown so after graduating college i just decided to go model which is strange but hey one of the things that's fascinating about this is uh as a ticket out of your hometown if you decide okay i'm gonna go do this what's the reaction from your family from friends you can go to college with is it one of uh support is it something that's so outside of their like framework of a job that they are jealous they're agnostic to it like what was that well i didn't ask anybody's permission. I didn't require anybody's support. And if you're not a person that requires those

things, then you can break free of the mold that's made for you. So I didn't want to stay in Kansas and I didn't want to do that. Now with the city having changed some, I can see the appeal of that a little more than I would before the shutdown. But I feel like people have to get it out of their system if they want to go and do something you've got to go check it out because otherwise you'll just wonder yeah my my uh true friends my true support system they didn't care they now they didn't bring it up all the time they didn't want to hear stories they don't go like my pictures that type of thing which is fine that's not what i needed from my real world friends you can always make a digital community that supports you and what you create so yeah

that's that's it's there's been a a bit of a divide come from a pretty conservative background my parents weren't too thrilled but we just didn't make it a big talking point they were just happy i made it to 18 all good so coming from a conservative family and then ended up in playboy i'm sure was uh what was a challenge to navigate but uh it sounds like you figured it out uh talk to me about the you're good well now i'm navigating the opposite terrain having been a playboy in hollywood you know that type of thing and then and then changing politically to more center right that comes with its own uphill battle that was reminiscent of coming from a conservative family in a red state and then going off and you know posing naked that type of thing

so it's a similar experience it's parallel we'll get to your second uh transition here in a second But the Playboy experience, I am sure that if you get into modeling, it is almost like the pinnacle. I almost look at it like if you play basketball, you want to play in the NBA. If you play football, you want to play in the NFL. As a model, that seems like that is kind of the aspirational achievement. What was that like? Any regrets, positives, negatives?

Just how do you kind of view that now that you don't spend a lot of your time doing it? I just accepted it as the terms of modeling that it was no, even supermodels don't get out of the game without posing naked in some capacity. So that part wasn't ever really a concern for me. In fact, if you're going to do it, you may as well go all in. so i looked at people like jenny mccarthy and and you know um belania trump and people like that it's it's like you can of course pose for playboy and then move beyond it into whatever domain you want and it's a good launching platform so everybody has to come from somewhere it's fascinating to me to think about um and i don't even know if you realize this like the thought process that uh even the supermodel ends up uh modeling naked at some point uh but people being able to transition past like you mentioned uh when it's coming up are you nervous are you uh

worried at all do you think about like oh my friends my family etc here's what they're going to think or is it from a political or a professional standpoint uh it is the epitome and kind of that achievement. And so you're more focused on this professional goal and everything else you're like, Hey, I'll figure it out as, as it comes. Well, I wanted to do the commercial aspects of posing for magazines like Playboy and FHM. And there was a whole series of, of other, of other magazines, but I just wanted to do that to legitimize the fact that for two years, I had already been modeling. So I had already done sexy photo shoots and lingerie and all that. so I guess I just wanted to commercially validate my endeavor so and it was good for marketing after

the fact because then other brands want to use you and that how that whole thing ascends so this sounds nuts but as I hear you talking uh you're basically describing what now everyone is like yelling and screaming all excited about it's like the creator economy right it's these people who they build some large audience and then they're able to monetize it afterwards really what you're talking about almost a decade, decade and a half ago is as you're coming up in the modeling world, you end up getting into Playboy. That's like a stamp of approval or a validation of that career. And then you're able to launch that into other business endeavors. Is that kind of a fair comparison? Exactly. And everybody wants to put somebody else in a bottle, a container that they

can understand. And it's been so long that now I've been interested in so many other things that I feel like I've shattered that mold enough but I still go to the well enough to support the fact that that's why people follow me but it's it's been really great to just grow an audience and then whoever wants to stick around for the conversation can or you know if not I'll still still push the pictures and that type of thing so I I know why people came but that isn't necessarily why they stayed so but uh no I appreciate the fact that it's been it's that i got a little bit of head start on the game um the only bad side about coming from doing it before the creator economy was is that i didn't necessarily see the market potential for some of

these things because i had been so used to just giving away my product on online just to build a community around because we weren't um really community building in 2008 so much i mean i was just in artist communities growing in that space just there was there was social media networks that were just for models and photographers to connect so we could create in our own little world instead of things that were so wide open like Instagram for everybody to consume, so. Yeah, it's fascinating to me that, you know,

if you had almost done that today in one viewpoint, it's almost taboo at this point, right? It seems like there's a lot more social pressures and the way that some of those activities and publications, et cetera, are viewed is very different than it was a decade or 15 years ago at the same time uh you being the model actually in the content uh there's way more tools available for you to actually build an audience catch the audience monetize the audience and so yeah uh it just they don't see it coming

and they don't see it coming explain that yeah yeah um well some people are just taken by surprise i guess my diverse interests but everybody is always a everybody has a whole universe inside them and obviously everybody has potential to grow and find new interests so um it's fun to just sneak up on people and pop some stuff in like people are often surprised that you know i'm a mixed martial artist fan yeah and so i guess from the publication side uh are they in trouble with things like only fans or streaming platforms or uh the ability for whether it's models or other kind of content creators to go direct to audiences or is there still some kind of moat that they have in terms of that stamp of approval right if there's people who want to be in

modeling today do they still want to go and be featured in playboy or do they just say i don't even need that i can just go direct to an audience and monetize it that way like what do you see happening there i think that it's still a novelty to be associated with brands but also the brands that um our leveraging models or online personalities has opened up so much um you know makeup campaigns for just beauty bloggers because of their wide audience and the reach that they have so um the power has just shifted to creators and that's a really nice thing because we can validate with stats the reach that we're going to have for a company to um choose us as opposed to somebody one of the other you know 90 people that are just like us but maybe better yeah so if I

talked to you in 2008 like maybe the early 2010s and I said what do you do for a living how would you have described it would you have said I'm a model uh I'm a playmate like what would you have described then and knowing that it's probably changed but how did how did you originally um well i would uh sit for artists and sculptors and painters and photographers mostly and they would work from those images that we both make but um the community was just was just small i mean i was a starving artist for a long time so it's nice to not be that so much these days and so if we fast forward to today uh i think that you have tapped into many other different audiences and it sounds like a lot of those audiences are coming out of your personal

interests right so we can start with mma and there's bitcoin and um and now even uh you know kind of broader macroeconomics and government but mma seems to be the first thing that you kind of transition to or sort of talk about outside of the arts or the creative work where does that interest come from and like how did you uh navigate that transition was it something that was very strategic and thoughtful or did one day you just start tweeting about mma and said hey look you know i don't care what people think um well i would watch the fights with a friend a playboy photographer kind of funny um but um yeah i i just watched really loved it got enamored with the game you start investing in uh individual sports are so much different than than uh team

sports because you get to know the players so much more intimately and they do a pretty good job of um brand building the individuals so especially with social media and so you become more engaged in their game, I guess. So, um, I just love that. I fell in love with it. I don't really know what to say other than that, but this space was so wide open, especially when I started to shoot pictures. Cause then I was getting ringside access and cage side opportunities to shoot for amateur and, um, some professional, uh, leagues. So yeah, it was fun. So I just saw the opportunity i've done the red carpet on roll camera for you know ufc hall of fame and just these interviews and media days the day before that they you know when they do their weigh-ins

and stuff so um it was just an opportunity to go leverage my modeling but then contribute in a different kind of way and i just loved the scene and it was different and um i relate to fighters and their stories and um overcoming obstacles in the journey and seeing the hard work like i find them so inspiring because we're all we're all fighting for something what are you fighting for oh wow such a big idea right um you have to i um am am shattering the mold that was made for me as you know a little farm girl in kansas that was never supposed to leave and get out and certainly not get to um break break the need to have a job and people to uh have to please all the time like i i speak my mind and i say exactly what i mean probably to too far of a degree because i don't

have really any accountability in that way but that's what freedom is to me so i guess the what i'm fighting for is building something where nobody can take that from me in a world where people are constantly seeking to invalidate your humanity for not having a mainstream opinion and perspective on things and so when you think about the transition uh around mma some of that was personal interest you enjoyed watching you enjoyed talking about it uh but you also had somewhat of a career change there it sounds like you went from being the subject of the photography to actually being the photographer in many cases where you were capturing the content was that um anything kind of driving that or was it just you were familiar with cameras and had one

and want to start taking pictures like what drove that transition i found that i had all this access and i picked up a camera to not waste the access that i had so that worked with mma because i was just i was just getting such um positive results and access to fighters and making friends with journalists and there were just people I wanted to be around. And I, like I said, I find the fighter stories. So just inspiring. So it was a way to enhance my hobby. And also it gave me a reason to find a new way to be a creator. So I picked up a camera cause I didn't want to waste the opportunity, fumbled my way through it. Nobody seemed to even notice I was fumbling my way through the beginnings of it. So, um, it is just one, I just, I had time to do it and I always

love new challenges and being able to, um, just absorb information. So it just, it was just something that I felt like doing. And so I did it. And that's the, that's been the best thing that modeling has afforded me in this lifestyle is, is that I can go all in on anything I'm interested in so uh i'm noticing a trend here which it sounds like basically you said hey as a playboy playmate i can get my foot in the door when i get my foot in the door i have this incredible access and in a very opportunistic way you knew that if you had your foot in the door had access and you brought a camera with you you could almost launch an entirely new career and not break the mold from going from Kansas to LA, but also break the mold from being the playboy model to now being

somebody who's actually creating the content. Is that fair? That's very fair. Yeah. And it can, and it just, it keeps opening my world up so much. So if, if you're bringing value to other people, then they'll open doors for you too. So it's nice because it feels the world feels so big and wide open okay so this is fascinating because uh it sounds like you had this second career if you will that was taking off covid happens uh everyone's ordered to go sit in their houses pretty much everything that you had done up until that point was destroyed right there's no photo shoots whether you're in front of the camera or behind the camera like it all just goes to zero what's your reaction when that occurs how do you think about it um and what did you do

well um i had what is commonly called a red-pilled moment so it gave me the opportunity to question everything i thought i believed and that's quite the paradigm shift it it happened suddenly but but incrementally um but i had something traumatic you know with the shutdown happens because because all of my income was gig economy and um you know freelance finding my finding my way and i did so many things but there has to be international travel and there has to be live events and there has to be that ecosystem to support you know free market opportunities um so all like suddenly all my income turned off because i've done the internet monetization or anything like that i was just happily enjoying

my life and then all of a sudden it came to a screeching halt and then they started doing things like turning people's power and water off if they were gathering in their homes and all these just things that made me really need to go look at what I thought about size of government and those types of things okay so before we get into the the finance and government side uh let's just talk about from like a business perspective okay you've got a great business multiple streams of income everything's going awesome covid happens income goes to zero what do you do do you try to just scramble and figure out online and uh like other types of revenue channels what did you how did you kind of navigate well it was tough at least i had i had some

savings from the years. So I burned through that in about six months. And I was astonished that we weren't over this yet. So, um, I was angry, you know, it's hard to not be. And so when you think about like that anger, is that coming from, uh, you're angry that there's the shutdown you're angry at yourself that you had everything kind of in the analog world like what was driving the anger well i i was always aware that anything could come bring my freelancing to a screeching halt but it was never supposed to be government it was never they were never supposed to create problems for me um but i was always aware that there was no there was no safety net for me because that was the exchange that I had made. You know, it wasn't, you know, talk about

risk aversion and things like that. I'm not a person that's particularly afraid of those things because they're always there. So then when I saw everybody's reaction to, you know, this, the virus, it was recalibrating of everything I thought that was happening around me. and so as this plays out uh you said you had kind of this red pill moment what were the things that maybe um were antithetical to what you previously believed or the changes in opinion that you had as as this all played out well uh size of government and their ability to um the whole emergency powers and being able to just make decisions for you um the transparency of the media brought that into question um the amount of coordination between

nations to just wave your hand and shut down the world that was kind of astonishing to me um there were things that i had always heard conservatives say but i just hadn't had an opportunity to see it in the world to really point at that thing and say this is what you know over regulation looks like i'd heard people say that but i didn't really know what that meant and is it is it fair to say that this is a huge over generalization so correct me but i think los angeles and kind of southern california is generally seen as a very liberal leaning uh type of geographic region uh people for the most part it seems like were hey the government is going to save us government is uh has the right solution the government is going

to step in here uh and so this red pilling that you went through almost kind of went counterfactual to or was a narrative violation to those around you right it seems like it's almost like well the majority of people felt one way you started to again break the mold and think for yourself to some degree right yes and that's frowned upon which explain why why is it frowned upon well it's frowned upon because um they don't would would prefer that you not challenge any of those beliefs um because it leads other people to doing the same and i didn't know that disagreeing was going to cause me to lose, um, opportunities and friends, even family members, that type of thing, but, um, it will. And that's, I feel like that's, um, contrary to the entire concept of

freedom of speech and freedom of opinion and, you know, diversity of thought. And, um, that opened my eyes to to a lot and the problems with mob mentality cancel culture it just opened up a door to everything because if you agree with things like the shutdown then they the left just turns its back on you entirely and it just eats itself in that way so i guess i'm just a product of the fact that i had a disagreeing opinion for shutting the economy down locally and um then people make me the bad guy in that situation which is crazy because i have no institutional powers whatsoever what does it really matter what i say or think when you say uh people make you the bad guy uh is this more like industry friends and uh

kind of forces or more of like the social media world uh and people you know being toxic or whatever well you can always minimize the latter by not talking about it a lot but it was all i was thinking about so and i was i was having my own journey it was more like a public um an opportunity for me to digest what was happening and my evolution it was just publicly happening because a lot of it was the the ideas and the arguments were coming from you know online but yeah I changed my entire media sources and um the people I followed and engaged with and yeah it was really recalibrating and you can never and you can never undo it what was the uh what was the most surprising part of all this and I asked that as um uh I think that

there's some people who had a starting point uh that was like halfway down the the red pilling uh pathway and then this all exasperated it but you straight me as somebody who uh went through the full experience right from kind of start to finish um during this and so what was the most surprising uh thing that you kind of took away from from that experience oh other other people's unwillingness to let you change and be fine with it because everybody has this little characterization of who who you are they're not actually able to really roll with the fact that you're going to evolve because usually evolution is slow but this happened rather aggressively i mean i can benchmark it from a one-year point

so i sound different every all my interests are different my perspectives of history i had to relearn everything i ever believed historically you know so when people hear that uh there's two new schools of thought uh the people who agree with you are gonna say uh amazing she uh you know was taught one thing she thought one way that's the incorrect way of thinking and now she's seen the light and look how smart she is because she's agrees with you know what we agree with the people who disagree with the way you think now uh say oh my god she changed her information sources she created an echo chamber what an idiot like you know that's the problem in america and uh we've got to prevent that from happening to the masses right uh i always laugh uh i'm literally laughing

because it feels like those two extremes uh obviously provide like the truth somewhere in between there and so like walk us through like almost like an execution application standpoint of like when you say you change your information it's like what were they what did you change them to uh what were the types of people you started to consume content from that you hadn't been from before uh just whatever you can share on that front well i wouldn't want to risk getting your video demonetized or get you in trouble so i'm trying to edit myself to a you can say listen You can say whatever you want to say. Don't worry about a monetization on YouTube, which, by the way, the fact that that's the first thing you think of may be part of the problem. Well, I, you know, and I'm not a YouTuber and I don't rely on that, but or any I don't rely on brand endorsements or any of that.

That was one great thing that made me have be in the right situation where I could speak my mind. And I realize how many people can't or aren't allowed to. People message me and say, hey, I agree with your politics, but I'm afraid I work in Hollywood and, you know, that won't go well. And so it was just really surprising to me the amount of people that want to but can't. And then I saw that phenomenon and I was like, well, it means I need to speak even more. So that brings us to the topic that everyone is wondering, which is Bitcoin. How the hell did you come across Bitcoin and why did you become interested? Well, I had learned about it just from observing.

I've had friends that are into it and they'll make posts and I would read it. But I didn't understand and I didn't have a necessity for it until the shutdown came. And and then the stimulus has started happening. And then you learn about the Fed and you can't audit it and all these things. And like I said, all this happened to me in a year. The evolution of all of this, because I couldn't have cared less about finance. So I had to learn a lot really fast, but I had nothing to do. So that was the upside since Los Angeles was shut down. I had nothing but time and new resources that educated.

So now I see the necessity of it, how you get there, just wanting money that they can't ruin. I mean, I don't I'm not somebody that's amassed a lot of private property. You know, I have a Ford and a French bulldog. It's not like I have a lot of value to to protect or, you know, transition my assets or something. But it was just the principles, like the fact that people can wave their hand and stop the world and destroy people's ability to make a living and they can wave their hand and change, you know, the geopolitics of what's happening in other countries. And then they can actively dilute the dollar that's in your bank account that you've already worked for and renegotiate, essentially renegotiate the wage you worked for retroactively. that seems so crazy to me. You, uh, you, you, you definitely were not red pilled. You were orange pilled because you're speaking the language, uh, in terms of, um, this kind of learning journey. Right. And it really does sound like you, uh, kind of went through an evolution

of understanding and, uh, and frankly, kudos to you because it sounds like you were actually very thoughtful, not only of understanding what's happening right now, but you went back in history and started to understand why have certain things uh happened and created the situation that we're in today um why talk about it publicly right because you could have said hey you know what i've got a bunch of free time i'm going to educate myself okay cool now i'm educated uh you know what i think i should buy some bitcoin uh i think i should change my thoughts and uh you could have done that all in private with no risk to your career or anything else yeah you chose to talk about it and talk about it quite a bit it's like why do that well I didn't know where it was heading

just publicly discussing the shutdown when it all happened obviously everybody was talking about it for for the most part um but I didn't know necessarily one thing would lead to another like it would and then you find yourself in your in the next discovery and understanding of what's going on leads you to the next step like it took me a a year of the process before i bought bitcoin which was what like two weeks ago wasn't even that long ago so that i mean thought it just takes a while for thought to get you to action and i was just ready to ease the depressed because i was depressed about the political landscape and and um the social engineering i was witnessing uh and and I guess the more I witnessed and was a became aware of those things the more I felt

compelled that I had to say these things that other people weren't going to say or at least not people in my full domain of the internet so um but like I said a lot of it a lot of my understanding came from those online discussions yeah so as many people go ahead well I should say it's fascinating to hear you kind of talk about how impactful the online education, the information was to that journey. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. Thank you. Thank goodness. Thank goodness for YouTube educators and people who want to give away what they know, like yourself, because I don't think I would have always connected the two. I just had an existential crisis with what's happening in my country and specifically my state. And then to, you know,

have witnessed places like Texas and Florida fully functioning. And I was like, I want that kind of leadership. Why can't, you know, and then everything that descended from that, I guess, just led me to Bitcoin. Yeah. You described it almost as a parallel economy, right? Kind of the digital world and digital currencies and protocols. How do you look at earning moving forward? Is it something where the work that you do, you'll ask to be paid in Bitcoin or other digital currencies, where you basically take a portion of what you get paid and convert it? Like, does anything change? Or is it more just an awareness of, hey, there's kind of these two economies that are parallel

and you'll exist in both of them, but it won't necessarily change anything in your work perspective? Well, I started the daydream of two parallel economies because I wanted to be free of things like cancel culture and I wanted to you know go and and um you know Gina Carino and make sure that she had a job even though she now can't have a job with Disney and and and Candace Owens and people like that that just get accosted online and their and their opportunities removed for nothing other than their opinion so I wanted to I wanted to go back to the land of where we were fine with having diversity of thought. So I just wanted to go participate with people that wouldn't financially consequent each other in this way. But it's so new to me. I've had Bitcoin

for two weeks. So it's sort of hard for me to have amassed the understanding of how it is that I can possibly earn in Bitcoin, but it's just the willingness and it certainly signals some confidence in it. And it's probably going to present new opportunities. I don't even know how you can necessarily earn in crypto yet so um but i'm willing and just being willing is going to um bring opportunity i'm sure yeah you you are very open-minded so uh i congratulate you on next that is a rare skill in today's world um what has the response been uh among other people in the various communities that uh that you've worked in and you have friends in uh as you've kind of talked about more of this publicly bought Bitcoin, et cetera.

Is it been one that has been receptive? Is it one that is a little bit more kind of abrasive or, or they have, have they been agnostic to some of this? Well, a couple of my friends already were Bitcoin holders. So, and now I don't really deal with people that, cause I'm so public about my, I just assume people know that about me now. So I've been creating with during the shutdown. It's it's been less opportunity for growth, but it's made it to where you can have small productions with just the people that you know and that you're comfortable with and that are all on the same page with some things. otherwise you have serious disagreements about what how it's safe to operate your space and those

sorts of things so um my the people that i consider my friends today because it's changed a little bit i may have just deepened ties with people who were already you know um right of center so they're so they believe it and they and they but they don't need me to have to adopt all their beliefs. They don't have to buy Bitcoin themselves to be fine and never bring it up if they think it's dumb. They're, you know, some people that aren't really all that into it or like just don't invest more than you can afford to lose. And that's a fair thing to say. But if the government's going to make me take their money, you know, I may as well do something with it. I feel like it's a fun, harmless way to do something productive with free stimulus money the government is giving me

that I don't even want, you know, it's just, I don't know. It makes me smile a little bit in the, you know, in the quiet moments. Yeah. It, uh, it's fascinating to me. Uh, one more thing before I get into the rapid fire questions is, uh, I, uh, I saw this, uh, you tweeted and I couldn't stop laughing when I read it. Uh, you said that you thought the MMA community were, uh, really great at memes, but the Bitcoiners were the meme masters, uh, explain that a little bit more because uh that that is a uh a topic i uh really really think

people underestimate of like the meme is the message but uh but talk a little bit about the memes and uh bitcoin yeah yes well that is um what familiarized me with the fact that there was a whole secret language in certain ways of spelling things and all this has just been a fun it's been a fun few weeks i gotta say um it's definitely a crash course in understanding the lingo and the nomenclature of Bitcoin. So I got flooded with people taking my pictures and giving me laser eyes, which was just so great. I got this whole like gallery or resurrecting Playboy pictures and taking my profile picture and lasering it up. So I got a nice little art gallery, a little digital art gallery there made for me. Yeah, but the memes are crazy. But people like put me in

memes and make memes about me being in Bitcoin. And I never had experienced anything like that. but it's fun. I'll save them and send them to friends, but for the ones that can relate to those. So it's fun. I had no idea you were the meme masters. Uh, we prefer the terminology meme Lords, but a meme masters is, uh, is basically the same thing, right? Yeah. See, but meme Lords is, is you have to have, you have to have the insider language. So thank you for that. You'll appreciate this. I think Elon Musk was asked in a, uh, New York times or Bloomberg article. They said, you know, you're a billionaire. You also like memes, but given the choice, would you rather be a billionaire or a meme lord? What would you choose? And he said, meme lord,

which will forever go down as one of the great comments, I think, in a professional interview. I love how he doesn't take himself too seriously all the time. You just reach a point of success where you don't have to answer questions in the right, predictable way, you know? I think that's why we like him so much that is very very true um before i let you go i'm gonna ask you three questions that ask everybody you'll get to ask me one at the end uh the first is what is the most important book that you've ever read most important book i've ever read um so many so many great ones what do i have i got a i got my wall oh

I need a minute too many oh you know what um uh Tim Ferris uh for our work week I would say pretty revolutionary yeah that's it that's a uh a great book and uh obviously with a lot of what you were doing before pandemic uh makes sense uh second question is sleep schedule comes from our friends over at eight sleep they've got a thermoregulated bed means that you can turn it really hot or really cold and i used to sleep like five or six hours uh i thought that was normal and then i started sleeping on this thing and now i'm like eight or nine hours completely changed my life and a full-on convert of the sleep religion uh what is your sleep schedule now and how has that transitioned over time? Yeah. Well, I've been getting the best sleep of my life now that

LA is shut down, I guess, all of California, which isn't a super great for my, you know, hustle mentality, I guess, but no, it's, it's, it's been good. I can, you know, sleep like midnight to eight, you know, there's a little bit of flexibility in there, but. And what did you used to do? You used to sleep eight hours? uh well no I mean especially with no day ever looked like the next one I would just fit it in where I could and early mornings with productions and late nights and a lot of Hollywood culture going till two three in the morning and then you don't go to bed till four and it was just really inconsistent and then you you know had a whole lot to get ready for and get up early and for

hair and makeup and all these things that you had to do hours before everybody else so no I'm getting a lot more sleep these days more than I probably would like you know you have these messages and you're unconscious buried like if you're sleeping if you're sleeping eight hours you're not working hard enough that type of thing so there has been a little bit of alleviation as far as as that goes um but also I'm not missing anything there's nothing I need to go out and do that you know or at least I'm not hearing about it all right I think I think you're doing just fine with uh with eight hours uh last question you could ask me one is aliens are you a believer or a non-believer oh i believe in possibility i i've been i've always just been so open-minded

that it was okay for me to be wrong with whatever i thought and also my conception of if there's aliens if there's a god if this or that it doesn't change the reality of what actually is so everybody can just have their opinion and it's fine right that is i would say i would say there's probably intelligent life out there somewhere that is a fantastic way to answer that question and no one has ever answered it that way so i will take it what uh what question you have for me to uh to finish up well um now that i own some bitcoin what's next what do i gotta do just wait for a dip buy some more keep buying bitcoin everybody uh will come in now that i bought bitcoin and try to convince me about other altcoins and people come in and be like no no

don't do that i will let you make your own choices but uh i think that what you will find is that every bitcoiner uh believes the same two things they never own enough and they don't want the u.s dollar price to go up because they want to buy more so uh it's a very uh interesting dynamic but uh now look i think it's a it's a game of accumulation when you have a finite asset uh and just dollar cost averaging right you get your paycheck and uh just take whatever percentage whether it's you know half a percent or some material percentage you just buy bitcoin and convert the dollars into bitcoin and uh you keep going right what um what wallet or platforms do you recommend for me so i think that uh for you specifically given that uh you're coming at this

this from kind of a learning perspective uh i think it's important to go about all right so there's uh hardware wallets uh there's kind of cold storage and then uh there's uh there's hot storage you can also use things um like block buy to earn interest on on your bitcoin um but i think that the the key piece is less about like any one platform i think it's much more about understanding you know hey there's four or five different ways you can custody the assets and going and doing right i think that's probably like if i was in your shoes uh and kind of um very very early on the thing i wish i'd done way earlier than i really did was go and understand okay what exactly does cold storage like how do i do it right because as you go through that experience there

can you do it you learn a ton right and you learn so much more than if you would have just read about it then same thing with uh hardware it's like how do i do it right and uh if you wanted to get really uh ambitious you can even set up a bitcoin node right and again like there's people online for sure you can find folks who can help you do it but like going through that process and understanding how a node works and why it's important i think would just give you like the crash course of actually like the hands-on experience uh that reading online you just can't imitate yeah excellent well that gives me something to do since like i said i've got a lot of free time right now so um but i appreciate all the insights love watching your podcasts for sure

where can we send people to find you on the internet if they want to uh to reach out or consume some of the content yeah follow me twitter instagram clubhouse jessica von von is v-a-u-g-n there's no h but yeah that's where you can find me awesome listen jessica thank you so much for doing this. I'll see you again in the future. Thanks again for the great introductory Zoom experience.