The Pomp Podcast - #565: Jessica Vaugn on Bitcoin As Freedom

Episode Date: May 26, 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 fake news, Elon Musk, Miami, Federal Reserve, Laser Eyes, Relative Wealth, Optimism vs Realism, and how she is getting others into bitcoin.  ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com ======================= OKEx is a leading crypto exchange known for providing the most options for crypto traders and investors. Whether you want to trade spot, futures, options or swaps, OKEx gives you institutional-grade tools and a best-in-class trading engine. The platform offers credit and debit card funding options and supports 40 different fiat currencies, including EUR, CAD, GBP, TRY, INR and RUB, to name just a few. You can invest, trade, and earn yield, all within one place at okex.com. OKEx is not available to customers in the United States.  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  =======================

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. Now, 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 fake news, Elon Musk, Miami, the Federal Reserve, laser eyes relative wealth optimism versus realism and how she is getting others into bitcoin i really enjoyed this conversation with jessica and i hope you do as well before we get into the episode though i want to quickly talk about our sponsors first up is circle circle is a global financial

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or the Play Store. All right, let's get in this episode with Jessica. I hope you enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang i've got jessica here how are you i am so well we are doing this in miami you live in la i do what's the biggest difference you've seen so far between la and

Miami? Oh, it's been so nice to come and get, um, a taste of my old life. I was likening Miami to Santa Monica yesterday. It's so nice that people are happy and they're hanging out with each other and dancing and just relatively acting, you know, normal. So it's like a time machine to come here. What do you mean old life? Like what, what, what has changed in LA? Um, well I had customized my life into something i was i was pretty happy about um i mean los angeles is pretty great you know if you're if you're plugged into the into the scene and beaches and um free people and entrepreneurship and lots of opportunities everywhere you go and film production and um that's all done unless you're of course in a union so you can still do production if you're in a union so um it's it's

just nice to come here and live normally we moved a um a charity event that had been on pause for 16 months in hollywood and we knew that that wasn't um going to be available to us anytime soon so we moved the production down here in miami which was nice there's like 350 people no no um capacity count so yeah it was nice to come to sls this is exactly what uh the bitcoin conference is doing. They were in San Francisco for years and they've moved it to Miami because Miami is open and California is not. Yeah. What else are you going to do? I mean, it's a prime example of, of, you know, money goes where it's treated best. So why, why would the charity not as well? And why, why would Bitcoin conference not? What's the problem in California? Is it

literally just bad leadership? Is it like some sort of political, like, um, kind of consensus that's been reached is it the weather's too nice and therefore that brings like stupidity like what like just what's going on there well it looks like a fascist takeover to me so what do you mean by that well nobody um the the movies always primed us to believe that that um a fascistic takeover was going to come in the right wing right if you look at film um but it it came in the form of uh left-wing leadership and that was unexpected so what are the signs that you think point to like this is absolute chaos and nonsense and like this isn't going to be a temporary thing um well optimism is is a state of mind that i i had always self-identified with but as an optimist yes

so that's been been paused you know um so i just i don't i don't see anything that makes me think that it's going to go away anytime soon so you've become from an optimist to a pessimist and is that a realist a realist okay what is the difference between being a pessimist versus a realist well i just don't want to hold on to the vision that i had in la to believe that it's going to get better anytime soon i i feel like um you know a room full of new yorkers might tend to agree with me on that. Holding out for threads of hope is just holding me back from beginning a new life somewhere, you know, whether it be Texas or Florida. I'm only going to go to a red haven because that's just the only place I can go where I feel like any of my rights are going to be

protected. What do your friends think about all this? I'm assuming that most of your friends are in the kind of creative community in LA or Southern California. The assumption would be, or the generalization they're mostly democrats they mostly agree with a lot of these policies one is that true and two do they think that you've like gone crazy well you get a a certain amount of of uh criticism no matter what you do and i'm not particularly sensitive to that so it's been okay i it's hard to say i mean it's been 14 months now of the red pilling you know yielding orange pilling so um i guess that it's just i've swapped my friends out i don't know what to say i mean 14

months is a long time you can build a whole new life by then and that's what i've done in business they call it rotating the shareholder base meaning that hey all my shareholders were really into this one business strategy we're not going to go a different direction the way that we have to do that is we rotate the shareholder base we change out the people from the people who agree with strategy one and we find people who agree with strategy two sounds like that's what you're doing with your friend group is to some degree rotating the friend group so that the people who have different views you're just not as interested in that anymore and so you found new friends yeah when you've determined there's a problem with what's there i mean you have to have some

intentional um artistic freedom in your own life to realize that you're you're curating your life by who you fill your day with and and the causes you support and and the shows that you watch and you know i've i've all but turned that propaganda box off just it's a big youtube player for me now so um yeah so i i'm just it's not that i willingly wrote off any of my friends we're just not aligned in a way where when they write me i just don't i don't want to see them you know so i mean i guess that's do they like understand that and like want to stage interventions and they're like hey somebody go save her well it's interesting because despite the foundation you've built if you go against the mainstream narrative it's dangerous for them especially in an image-based

industry like like what i do so it just they don't they're not i don't know i guess it's a testament to the fact of how pervasive the the brainwashing has become so i've seen you tweet that people are the problem but that also means that people are the solution can you talk about that a little bit like what do you mean by that um people are the people are a lot of my personal problems i mean i'm i'm uh but also they're the solution because if you if you so people can repair themselves so they can become their own solution but also we're just here people think that acts of evil are committed by these um people that are somehow just straight from hell which is not true everything good that's happened in the world is done by regular people and regular people

also commit all the atrocities historically so despite the fact that there's a lot of bad people in the world do it well there's a lot of people doing bad things there's also a lot of people doing good things so they're the problem but they're also the solution how do you determine somebody doing an action whether it's good or bad is it just how you personally evaluate it and you may see an action as good and somebody else may see it as bad or do you think that there's like fundamental or inherent good and evil well i feel like i a lot of things were less detectable before so but now that you know the fascistic takeover is here it's it's it's separated people more so it's pretty evident to me and if i think that you're on the other side of that that i think

is detrimental to society, then it's really easy. I can just take you out of my life. And so then I'm naturally only feeding in and participating in conversation aligned with the people who at least recognize the same problems that I have. It doesn't mean that we're going to agree on everything. I mean, that's sort of ridiculous. If you're an individualist at all, then you respect these boundaries between people. So it's not that people have to be a duplicate. life would be pretty boring if everybody was a duplicate of me I mean I already have me all the time so I'm you know welcome I'm open to other ideas about things but there are some hard lines that I've just had to draw and if we don't um what are we what are we gonna do I mean how do

you evaluate like what information to consume versus not I know you're like a big fan of Tim Poole and there's a bunch of other folks that you've tweeted out over time is it just you're scrolling around on the internet you find something it's interesting and so you just spend more time on it and kind of consume more and more over time do you intentionally go like looking for certain type of information just like what i guess how do you form your content diet compared to just turn the tv on listen to whatever they tell you yeah well like i said i turned the tv off completely so that helps and community is something you build and curate over time and so of course um i'll watch your show and see the guests you bring on and then so that'll

make me want to follow them on twitter and then i see the content that they make and and a lot of it's just my natural um what i'm magnetized towards if i find it interesting i'll give it some time and and um so there's there's a nice like home base like joe rogan's kind of podcast home base so it's fun to see who his guests are and then go and follow them out do you listen to him as much as you used to know that he went to spotify uh no there's a lot of theories about about the same way controlled opposition uh just because i'm i'm a youtuber And so it doesn't mean that I won't follow people off of YouTube, just like, you know, some threats like Steven Crowder, you know, getting deleted and everybody getting censored so heavily. So I don't want to say that I'm going to stick with the with the platform more than the creators, because there's still a rightness and a wrongness that I'm going to side with on that.

um so i guess it was just the fact that spotify only recently got the infrastructure built to where through the television you could watch the podcast episodes and i like watching it i mean he's got that everything you know the studio and everything is made is made for consumption to watch the video too so it's great production yeah so i just wanted that and and um i would listen to some audio here and there because it wasn't that i couldn't have it it's just not it's not the process it's not i wouldn't listen to rogan while i'm driving or something even though i could if i was particularly interested so i'm happy that they put the video back up the whole idea of people being the solution uh you've also tweeted saying that uh in order for you to

trust somebody you have to know that they trust themselves i think it's a fascinating concept of just like if somebody doesn't trust themselves is that another way of just nicely saying like they're full of shit or do you mean something else by like whether somebody trusts themselves or not um i guess you could measure that in many different ways people are of course going to feel more confident about you if you're confident in your own opinion i mean you you know that as a as a natural born leader you can't you can't waffle and you can't um add too much doubt as to how you perceive things now it's silly to say that people can't have the freedom to change their mind because that's just adjusting to the new information you get um but people discredit

themselves with siding with things that i know to be untrue and they're doing it just because they're um you know little group are they virtue signaling yeah those types of things so when you deviate from what i know to be true as it's emerged in me um i'm just not interested in giving those people my time and attention because if you're a sellout then why would i want you it's almost like trust in yourself is really the measure of like authenticity like are you actually saying the things you believe or are you simply doing what you think other people want you to do yeah and if people show me that they have no integrity why would i keep them around the whole world is gone to hell because of the fact that you can buy everybody off so when i see that

i mean obviously we all have to make money and we all you know people have advertisers and that type of thing but i don't like the betrayal of integrity to do those things when you think about uh the worst perpetrators of this is there anybody who sticks out in your mind of like man i really was a fan of that person or i really consumed a lot of their content and now not so much yeah it's hard for me because um as somebody that consumes a lot of content and got a lot of good out of a lot of people yes there were people that it it really it really hurt it really hurt to know um all along i was taking information from people that had no integrity um but it doesn't mean i'm not grateful for what they gave me before because it was still valuable to me so i won't i won't

really itemize those people and that's fine i don't want to say their names but but um i do think about that every day but do you think that the um kind of giving up of the principles or the lack of integrity or having to categorize it was that more so like uh because they like sold out like corporations and it was like advertiser based stuff or was it more like political pressure social pressure like like almost unpack why they did it yeah it's all those things um there's a lot of writing on the wall and i know that that people were willing to betray beliefs that they they personally had in their own lives like dealing with you know communism in their country of origin and then to come here and get behind that agenda when they know they recognize it more

than anybody so how how dare you when i've listened to you stand on stages and talk about um what how amazing america is and how there are no excuses to not go and and be your best because of their own personal stories like then i'm extra offended more than people who never got it to begin with you know so a lot of this all centers around information um i think when we think of information we think of what we're being told uh that could be from corporations from politicians from mainstream media whatever uh if the news is fake imagine history how bad is it like if we had to measure it a hundred percent of the information we're told was fake 50 10 zero like just like how bad is the validity of the information we're receiving and

like that as a proxy for like how screwed up we are when we listen well i since i have been removing it out of my life completely um i don't know how to how to pick a number but um i mean if we're if it's a scale of one to ten of uh how screwed are we i mean we're at an 11 i think why so it doesn't mean that there aren't still people who are willing to put integrity first and um course correct as they see fit um it's not that those people don't exist in fact i collect them on purpose because that's how much i believe that's what can save us do you think that it's an intentional like rewriting of history like let's take let's just use the elephant in the room right uh there was a pandemic that pandemic led to this economic crisis uh we now 12 14 months later are

already being told all kinds of crazy things that if you go back and look are 180 degrees different than what we're being told at the time so literally the world health organization don't wear a mask now wear a mask now you know hey in certain situations whatever you can just go point by point by point and it almost feels like we're getting like gas lit to some degree as to what they were telling us a year ago well they've established that they're willing to lie to us i mean i knew that i wrote dr fauci off when he decided for the sake of having masks available to the people that need like why can't you treat us like adults obviously we wanted medical community to have them and and um but to to say okay well the crowd's gonna do this if we tell

them that so it's okay to lie to them like no it's not okay you discredit yourself when you lie to us i mean we're adults who want who want everybody to live like what how could you do that to us all you've done is discredit yourself as any kind of authority yeah what about on the economic side it feels like that's even worse yeah well i'm i for me i feel that they had certain types of changes they wanted to see in the world and so there's a series of events that they set into motion so that they could achieve certain things that they wanted so when you look at like agenda 2030 these bullet points of um you can kind of see the policy now getting to those end what is the agenda what is agenda 2030 oh man i feel like we've i don't know that could be a

whole episode all right how do i even begin yeah um well have you ever watched videos about like the world economic forum and in there um it's it's the it's the communist utopia that they dream about really yeah there's ted talks about it all kinds of and is agenda 2030 like a written document or is it just like oh yeah no it's it's what they're it's what they're trying to create in the world and what is the general like i should have came with i should have came with charts and graphs what is the general idea they basically are just trying to become more surveillance and yes and less power for people yes so it looks to me like all the governments are just trying to cooperate with each other they're not going to go to war with each other anymore is i

think what they're doing they're going to go to war with the people because that's how they can ensure that their power structures are never challenged again and with things like the internet all that we have really too much ability to threaten them because if we understood the truth we wouldn't want any of those people leading us do you know who dave column is does that name sound familiar? He's a professor at Cornell and he writes a end of year review every year. And it's very, very long. It's, you know, 20, 30, 40 pages. And he's just got a different way of viewing the world in it. A number of times he talks about collusion and he says that collusion has this negative connotation, right? If I say to you that those people are colluding, then most

people will say oh you're a conspiracy theorist well it got the word got a bad rap because of course with um the three-year very expensive lie about a russian collusion but collusion just means coordination yes so then he takes a step further and he says a conspiracy theorist is a negative term because you are basically uh speculating on something but he said but if people are conspiring and you call them out a conspiracy theorist is not a negative connotation you're simply calling out fact you're calling out truth they're conspiring to do something and it sounds like this agenda 2030 is basically collusion or end or conspiring between countries in order to see something happen and it hides in plain sight it's not that it's not that um this is anything

that's not public information that's what's so wild to me but but when you see the end goals in mind you can work back backwards from all of everything that the the un policies and all these things and why do you think it is that that we know there's actual concentration camps in in china and we do nothing i mean who how are we the good guys well how is that possible criticize them at all you know for ethnic cleansing all these things like i all of a sudden i don't believe anything that the left ever said you know i but so like to use that as an example uh undeniable fact that this is happening as far as i understand there's nobody who has a theory or evidence that points to it not being true yeah yet we the united states is the police of the world do nothing about

it well and i'm kind of torn on what to do about that because i understand uh the libertarian concepts of of not going and being the world's police and and the um you know the entire military industrial complex behind that and and the fact that that's not always operated by great people that are well-meaning um so i'm torn somewhere between that and the idea that if we're going to do anything why why wouldn't we go deal with that well if we're going to drop bombs in syria then we probably should go deal with this yeah it seems it could be something the rest of the entire world would get behind about maybe we want to go liberate these people i mean there's an entire and that's a should be a bipartisan type thing that's not a left or right type concept that's

just if we're going to take this stance in the world regardless of where it happens we should be willing to uh operate along those principles yeah it violates all i mean all of the principles that we have i mean why would why wouldn't we want to handle that and if nothing else i mean Maybe we can't strong arm the rest of the world into anything we should give that pursuit up, but we could economically consequent those types of things. But people don't want to do it. That's what makes me so sad about entrepreneurs that do these deals. It's like any time you do these things with China, you're funding the enemy. You're literally funding the enemy.

Why can't when I shop on Amazon, can I not search criteria about I want my plastic crap made in India? so why can't i give them my money instead i have to give it to china because oh that's miraculously not a feature that's supported what is the solution to like geopolitics right and what i mean by that is live on an island and make our own stuff is it something that a government can solve or is it something that actually the people have to just say look the government cannot solve this they don't want to solve this they may even potentially be conspiring including with each other and therefore i actually need to look out for myself my family and just handle things my on my own the free market offers so many solutions

that's why the consolidation of market options is so awful for me is there a free market left um well in theory i don't know what i don't know what the term would be to call it um a heavily regulated manipulated free market what do you mean by that i guess i just mean the options about um incentivizing that don't have to do with putting guns to people's heads because once now that we're we're um a nuclearized world i mean you can end the world at any point especially because everybody's got all their allies so what are we going to do except use the free market well i don't so i'm from i'm from the school of thought of there are no free markets left in the world except for bitcoin right and the reason being every single other one is

manipulated governed you know there's something there that prevents it from being a truly free market uh you can argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing but it's true bitcoin is the price can be manipulated at times i'm sure right people sell things buy things whatever just supply and demand but from a pure 24 7 365 no kind of external uh governance of it as a market structure it is a free market that's why it's so perfect that's why bitcoin is the hope that i needed does that guarantee that it ascends to global reserve status it it for me it doesn't matter because i'm going to get behind what's right regardless of the likelihood it has of success and if we could all do that we could all make the world a better place but people want to

get behind they people are are just obsessed with being historically accurate when well but we're so powerful we just have to choose the right thing and then we can affect the outcome but people just want to gamble on what's going to be likely and go behind that camp. And that's, it's a terrible way to make decisions. So basically it's the trade-off between Bitcoin as almost a religion or a political set of beliefs or some sort of socio kind of focused effort versus it as a financial asset and a potential profit center. Yeah. I mean, I came to Bitcoin as a way to cope with the depression of the reality of everything I learned the last year.

So philosophically, Bitcoin is just stunning and perfect. And there's obvious, I have no base in finance. I've had to crunch, understand the general nature of what's going on. So I don't know how we get from point A to point B, but I believe in it and I am getting behind it. What's your take on Elon Musk and Bitcoin? Oh, that's a tough one. I think the Bitcoin maximalists are, they have a brand established to be defenders of Bitcoin, and they absolutely have a right to take the opinions they take.

There's so much organic nature to the way that successful people strategize what they're doing that it's hard to look at it on the surface and decipher everything that's going on. What do you mean? Who really knows what Elon Musk's, how he's going to get from point A to point B, the path that he takes. More times than not, it works out. does it matter anymore like what elon's opinion about bitcoin is or the actions he take do they actually matter anymore well what i think of elon musk doesn't really matter but the value that he

still offers yes is still there i mean i to me intuitively it looks like he was just trying to compensate for the fact that um dogecoin dropped real bad from the um disclosure on snl that it was a a meme coin i mean i thought people knew that you know but so i i feel like he was just compensating for his other things that he'd contributed to to you know the sending it a direction he didn't want it to go he just wanted to recover some of that now it's unfortunate at the cost of bitcoin i mean we really don't like that because we philosophically know that bitcoin is the only answer it's not a game to us um but he's gaming it a little bit so but but the i feel like he put in there he would put in his messages about you know this is suspended we're not going

to not do bitcoin i'm not selling my bitcoin we're not getting out of it um it's kind of like he's too smart to know i'm it's not like he doesn't get what dogecoin is and the fact that it's just a copy of bitcoin without any of the structural elements that make bitcoin something that can save the world he's smart enough to know that so those types of answers are strange do you think he actually understands that of course i don't know of course yeah i would have said of course too until saturday yeah yeah yeah no i think that he is i think that it's possible that he doesn't understand the um the fallout that it's it's happening that's happening in us about our confidence in him because it looks like an attack um but i think he's just dropping

the value so he can buy more is what i'm hoping so that would be the bull case for like the positive outcome here is the price drop they bought more they come out they tell people that they bought more and everyone kind of forgives all of this and says hey they were just trying to buy more yeah and i um understand that people's people aren't that forgiving about him in attitude um i think he's i i think that there were the threads in there he put in there that he used the word suspended and instead of you know i'm a band i sold all my bitcoin i swapped it all out there obviously the dogecoin like he but he's also playing with his influence he's measuring his influence and i don't know if he plans on you know launching a coin of his own and he's just

getting some bearing for his influence which is is quite possible so what do you think about the response from bitcoiners like should it be a negative response and like hey you're attacking us let's attack back should it be uh let's take the high ground and we want to be your friend i've gone through a whole range of emotions about it and it depends on what i'm measuring at the time i mean my my twitter feed is is a pretty schizophrenic about it just due to but but then I realized I pan my intuitive perception of what he was doing was well I don't really know how to measure what he's doing because he's doing he's he's meddling in his own ways and he's sliding you know a game of chess that type of thing and um I don't know I I don't want to write him off

completely if he had said yes I sold all my bitcoin all this and then led people down some path about trashing bitcoin i think that i think that he needed a viable he needed to make it believable enough that people would buy doge so so he went with the whole oh big the old played out arguments about bitcoin he knows that we use renewable energy he knows all this stuff like how much more does a human being have to do in business over 50 years on this planet for you to have some default mode to realize they they do understand what's happening and all that stuff is just i don't know chessboard types of things but i i will say that it's extremely self-serving to sacrifice bitcoin at least in the perception of people that don't understand it because all

those you know the new money investors are going to go and put their stimulus checks in doge and there's nothing behind it it has no solution why wouldn't you just keep your trash fiat to begin with like there's nothing there it's just fun for people they're just they're just gaming it speaking of stimulus checks uh are we just addicted now to the monetary stimulus like can we ever stop this yeah well for me all of this has to do with trying to usher in universal basic income okay explain that well i mean they had set the stage for it i mean um andrew yang making it a whole point of his of his campaign um i mean can we just call what it is is that not socialism oh yeah definitely that's definitely but back to 2030 you really got to see all that

you can you can see it if it's socialism why are we not allowed to say that it's socialism well no i mean a fraction um a faction of the democratic party wrote it into their name i mean democratic socialism is what bernie sanders is so we are calling it that okay to deny that is not very honest agreed uh and is it fair to say that socialism doesn't work of course how i mean how many more counts of it do you need i mean whether it's uh communism or socialism is a is a only a minor distinction but i mean think about all the deaths in the 20th century alone i mean like 100 million the body count so one of the things that i always go to when i talk about this in terms of like socialism from the government to the actual like individual is everyone starts yelling and

screaming and saying uh well you weren't screaming when they were handing out money to the wall street firms and in fact i was right actually i was saying that that was just as bad and that was just socialism for rich people uh and so it feels like uh all the capitalists on wall street actually showed face of being socialist over the last 12 months but so did every single person who was cheering this on and i just have this like um this vision in my head of like the historians writing the history books and they're like and look at this the economists cheered them on while the federal reserve pushed millions of people into poverty well you can always find experts that will side with whatever side that you want to promote i mean that's why they you can hire them

think about court i mean it's all kinds of questionable experts so getting economists to agree with whichever side of the aisle you're on is pretty easy how do they miss so badly on things like job reports and inflation well they know i mean the back to you have to assume i mean janet yellen and you know chairman powell and all those people they it's not like they have some void of understanding i mean they're just intentional they're just told they have a directive and so they are trying to make people not panic they know exactly what it's going to do and they have to seem optimistic and they have to say these things because they need people to um you know believe this is a good thing and this administration is going to do a

do a good job for them because that's who hired them and the the most it's intellectual it's more intellectual dishonesty which is why they need taken down the most insane example of this was the job report in i think it was may or april where they thought there was going to be a million new jobs added to the economy and there's 225 000 or 250 000 well if 75 miss if every yeah yeah they should i mean in any other circumstance they would be fired for their incompetence like that's a 25 on the test yeah right like that is a big fat f minus yeah well like you may not get invited back to class yeah well they don't have to they don't they don't have to the federal reserve and meteorologists they don't have to actually be accurate for them to sustain their

positions i mean is that the comparable is the federal reserve uh central banker is comparable to a meteorologist i haven't thought that out but neither of them have any consequences for being wrong and how many people get to say that and still keep their jobs yeah is it something where the federal reserve uh in their predictions of economic performance um whether it's jobs whether it's inflation interest rate uh kind of impact whatever we should adhere to the actual like accuracy of what they're saying so if you say hey i think it's going to be four percent then it's either four percent or it's not or should we think of it more directionally and just four percent is higher than where we are and so they're directionally correct but the

number doesn't actually matter they've entirely discredited themselves i don't know why anybody would make any decisions based on anything they say there's there's uh press conferences literally They sit there and people analyze every single word they say. Did they say the word dovish or not? What color is his tie? Like I've literally seen these reports that show if they wear a certain color of their tie or they say a certain word or whatever, it's supposed to signal something to the market, which sounds fucking insane. Yeah, it's crazy. I would never measure anything they say.

I watch it for the, I guess, interesting insights it'll give me as to how much they're willing to lie to people. But that's really only just a scale, just because I'm curious. What does that tell you? If they're willing to lie more than usual, does that tell you that things are worse, better? Like, what do you take away from that? They're just like the news media. They're just willing to support the cause because they know who feeds them. Do you want to know the one hill that I'm willing to die on around all this?

Yes. The financial media is a mouthpiece for the state. Oh, absolutely. There's no distinction. That's state media for sure. That's why I turned it off. So in August of 2020, I wrote this thing publicly and those that were red pilled were like spot on. Everyone else said I stooped too low.

I was going after people and stuff. And what I wrote was there's three types of people who create content in the finance industry. There are the journalists who do actual journalism. I have a story. I go, I interview all of the people in the story. I'm unbiased. I fact check. i present it it's not my opinion it's the facts of the story you as the reader can read it and

you can determine what you believe from it there uh that's one end of the spectrum that's the only side of the spectrum that i'm willing to entertain okay there's a second other extreme end of the spectrum which uh people usually don't think of as finance media but i think you'll agree with this one as well which is what i call the uh people with skin in the game or the players in the market so uh a hedge fund manager writes a report and says i believe x to be true and therefore we've staked 10 million dollars on this outcome or it is a person who buys bitcoin and says i think that bitcoin is going to become more adopted because abc whatever reason the way that you uh kind of put a distinction on these people is if they are wrong there's financial consequences

right so journalists have no financial exposure no skin in the game but they're doing unbiased content the players in the market they're just making financial bets they have complete skin of the game and if they're right they benefit if they're wrong they get hurt yeah those two ends of the spectrum i think people generally agree with okay we understand who they are we get it but there's a group in the middle and i actually think these people in the middle are part of the problem they're the biggest part of the problem which is they're the bloggers masquerading as journalists right so these are the people who don't do journalism don't fact check things they write their opinion as if as if it is fact and then they publish under the title

of journalist and then they get cited as a source that's credible and and this is how the lies disseminate and how they they're just oh this person's on our side of the war and it clouds the truth and it's it's really too bad but um you know ever since we reward clicks truth is clouded the worst part is that these people are constantly wrong and there are no repercussions if you're a journalist doing journalism and you're wrong that means it's inaccurate and therefore you are either fired or you have to retract it and correct it even retractions get so buried i mean nobody really agreed but at least there's a path to correcting the inaccuracy when you are a blogger masquerading as a journalist first of all the media companies are lying because they do not

put the opinion pieces in the opinion section they put them as journalism yeah the second thing is that when you are wrong there's no retractions and there's no punishment for being wrong although all of the news is editorializing the opinion you know and you get approved and put on cnn based upon not your ability to relay the truth but your ability to be on their side of the culture war that's the credibility resume that they so here's the best part of this whole thing there's two specific journalists that i'll put in air quotes those journalists uh work at a very large media company i wrote this article with them and a number of their colleagues in mind they just launched under that media brand a blog a very well-known financial media organization now has

two of their people one is a editor and the other is a financial journalist they said we are launching our blog we are going back to blogging and they are now going to go build out this whole thing but they still publish on the main site under the title of journalist and the pieces aren't labeled as opinion and therefore when you look at that you realize that that organization has lost all credibility because they are allowing non-journalists to pretend to be journalist it's just another way to make a little extra money and and that's that's why the news is just something now i you give no credibility like how can i it is literally the corporate media yeah and not only are they wrong they financially get people hurt all the time and they're complete sellouts right

i mean like that's all it is i mean it's frankly it's disgusting right i still listen to you because you're willing to say that so when you see a sellout you should say that i do and then everyone gets really mad it's okay trust me i've been saying it for a long time i don't care I think that the part that becomes a little bit further down this path is when you then say these same people, if you go look at what they're writing, they literally parrot the talking points of the state. They are a propaganda machine. It's a network that's self-rewarding.

Do you know why they're a propaganda machine? Why? Because the owner of the organization is a billionaire and that billionaire has financial interest. Yes. And that media arm is there to protect his financial interests. Yes. And we don't call that out because they hide and say, we're doing journalism.

We have a firewall between the financial interest and our media publication. But when you actually look at it, that's not true. And not only are they protecting his financial interests, they're also continuing to parrot the talking points of the state, which desensitizes people to what the state is doing, to what the central bank is doing. And when you get into this whole spiraling out of control, you realize now we're sitting here and over the last 12 months, 14 months, everyone who is red pilled, who's in the Bitcoin community has been yelling and screaming that inflation was coming. These same idiots were writing last year saying inflation wasn't coming. Yeah.

Now they're saying it's transitory. Influencers. Right? Yeah. Now it's not going to be here forever. Even to the point of some of them saying that when prices of consumer goods are going up or commodities are going up has nothing to do with inflation yeah because once you take the intellectually honest approach of knowing cause and effect and going on camera and saying it

then people are like well maybe we shouldn't print money maybe it's not the greatest thing to do so then they get pushed back and they don't want that they want to just squash any narrative of any kind of decisive alternative opinion because then they don't have to deal with it what's the solution uh bitcoin why well decentralized finance takes away the power they have to to do all the puppeteering that they do all over the world and run all these things and i urge everybody to unplug the television that really helps it really helps so is part of this that you can't fight head-on kind of the bullshit and so instead you have to use technology and build technology to basically take away kind of the wind out of the sails and that's how you build a

better world is you don't go toe-to-toe with this stuff you literally just say we're going to build a new system completely uh insulated from all of this nonsense well you can only help yourself and you can join the people that are committed to truth so bitcoin is perfect for that it says it's another self-sorting mechanism for me that's been um good to find people who have other entrepreneurial endeavors and sort of dive into that or, or find thought leaders in that are inside of Bitcoin. Um, I never cared about anything about economics, but of course I've, I've picked economic, um, economists to, to, um, read their books, to understand finance in a, in a broader sense. Um, but Bitcoiners, because they are truth forward people

and that really matters to me. So it's been a really great self sorting mechanism for that. Is there an element of, whether it's the media, traditional financial players, or just the average consumer, they don't want to see Bitcoin be successful because it would violate their worldview? Well, a lot of people don't understand that going against or not supporting Bitcoin is just to stay with the power structure in place that are running the whole world. so if you don't understand that anything's broken about it of course you don't see the value of bitcoin you would just buy gold is that something that can be changed like if you just educate those people on what absolutely they change their mind well they have to see what's broken in the world and for me um i got red pilled which led me to the to the orange pill of of bitcoin so that's a path that i understand and i see it a lot um and i like it because i understand it um

yeah one of the things that i know you've talked about is this idea of like relative wealth and even here in the united states somebody who continues to get pushed into poverty based on the united states standards is still some of the richest people in the world is that important or does that person not really care about the relative basis and they're just saying i can't afford food gas you know rent we're just so blessed that we have no contrast to understanding I mean, I went to India and seeing it made me love America so much, you know, to just see how much the bulk of the people there don't have anything they need. And we've done a great job about resolving absolute poverty in the world. Nobody wants to talk about that because we have all this relative poverty in America.

But we have we have solved so many problems in the last decade. um what's a good example just the fact that and i can't remember the actual numbers about it but however many people like live below like a dollar a day and that's come up to now there's a such a great amount of people that that are at least at least they've come up to five dollars a day which is still you can't live in america for that because of how everything costs but to have resolved the fact that a lot of people now have clean water they can drink and these these kinds of things. So I like that there's some projects in place where they're trying to get phones in the hands of people in Central America so that they can be on the blockchain, so that they can

have Bitcoin and work in their communities to solve some quality of life problems that way. But there's barriers to that working. Like if they don't have affordable electricity, how can they even power a cell phone? I mean, we've got a lot of infrastructure barriers to break down but we can do it that's what's so fun about bitcoiners is is they're entrepreneurial people that have can can have a bigger vision yeah when you think about uh bitcoin and the bitcoin community isn't an ethos driven thing like these people come from all kinds of different walks of life different education different uh skill sets jobs uh different places in the world in many cases speak different languages uh different religions different color of their

skin. Like everything is so different. It's such a diverse group of people, but they come together and it's not about a financial asset. It's more about an ethos. Yeah. I, um, as a person that bought into Bitcoin for the philosophical aspects of it, it's just beautiful. And that's why I want to get behind their businesses, even the unrelated endeavors. How do we get your old friends to understand or to become educated, or at least to be more sympathetic to this view of the world versus maybe the view of the world that they have well they're just victims to media propaganda and if we can't fix that which is why i'm like okay unplug the television would would really help um for me um i remember i knew something was wrong with the media that they weren't

entirely honest with how they tried to smear somebody like jordan peterson i was like this isn't normal because i i'm my undergrads in psych so i had gravitated towards his older content just him lecturing you know who who can who can afford that kind of tutoring so i just started watching that and then but then all the the social aspects that developed around 2017 um the politicization of what he was saying and and just the character assassination on somebody i knew that was a really good person i knew something was wrong so everybody's got to have those things where they find out that the media lied to them about this this or that and have personal consequences for having believed the media, because then you'll feel that sense of betrayal

and you'll know something's not right. So what we have to do is not forcibly tell people they're being lied to, but we do need to point out some things. When they say something, you know, you could take the leading logic to the end that they are going to self-discover that they're being lied to but you have to do it without you know it's hard because i haven't i haven't refined it to an art that's that's persuasive yet yeah is it just some of this is like a political or like a religion aspect to it and no matter what facts you tell them they just won't change their mind yeah um you know wokeism is a cult it's a religion we have a we have a god-shaped hole in our heart and if you take that out and you strip that out of the culture people are going to put something

in there and they've they've nominated being woke is this whole idea of woke ism tearing apart the fabric of society like is it literally pulling people apart making it so divisive that everyone is distracted with each other rather than what the real problems are yeah and that's how you of course power structures in place turn the people on each other so that they will do their bidding and attack and kill and destroy their opposition inside i mean i feel like the reason the reason China is unplugged from the internet for the rest of the world is so they can't tell us when all these things are happening because they've gone through it. And they, you know, they're never going to escape the CCP. I mean, it's like a hundred year reign now. They have other political

parties, but they, but you know, those other political parties aren't allowed to come into power. It's just more like a stage situation where these smaller factions of people, they're never going to threaten the power system in a surveillance state you can't in the u.s could there be a third political party that could actually viably put a president into the administration um not unless more people unplug the television because it affects your perspective on absolutely everything so they have a dominance on they have a a lock on um attention so how how could even a how could even a libertarian ever get the the the time of day on on the network tv that's controlled centrally they don't want that i mean they won't even let austrian economists go on the

shows to talk about why the fed is wrong they don't they just won't put them on tv will just be a violation of the world views right well they don't because they hold the keys to the information in the population why would they equip any type of dissent against their opinion they won't do it which is why centralized control of the media is it is just another example of it's state-run media and do we need to then build decentralized aspects of the media and have that austrian economist or a political party candidate or whoever build the relationship directly with the audience or do we need to try to go launch national television stations that, you know, have a, um, kind of a liking for that type of content or, well, I don't even know how we would

do that because you have to then be allowed to be on TV. You know, you, you, your network can literally be unplugged. Your app availability can just be pulled from an app store and there's only two app stores. So everything is so centralized in that way. Like, what do we, what do we do? I mean, it's hard for people to even be YouTube compliant. And so they're willing to be censored in a way just to reach who's, you know, out there that that can be pulled from the mainstream. And thank God they do, because that's outreach still. Yeah. It's crazy just to think about how important control of the actual infrastructure is. Right. Well, and when you see it in anything, you can see it in everything.

So it's all the same. But you realize how few of options there are for anything. I mean, go to a grocery store and it looks like you have all these choices, but like five mega brands own absolutely everything in the grocery store. So you think you have all this choice, but you really don't. It's an illusion. And politics are like that. Like think about Mitt Romney just kind of siding with the establishment machine, especially lately. So it makes me look at history differently to where I thought in 2008, Mitt Romney would have given us such a different America than than Obama. But really, when you look at how Mitt Romney is voting now, you see that that's still more illusion of choice. It's just packaging that's different. What changed? Do you think he changed? Do you think your perspective on him changed? No, my, um, when you get, when you get away from it, when you can tune out the media telling you polluting your perspective on everything, you can realize that there's no, there's no

choice there. You would have rendered us relatively similar outcomes. I'll never forget, uh, there was a debate between him and Obama and they asked who is the greatest adversary. And he said, Russia. Yeah. And everyone laughed at him. Everyone thought that was so funny.

and i think uh obama may have even said this isn't you know this set in 1970 called the cold war wants their policy back yeah whatever he said right and now all of a sudden it looks like that actually may have been a pretty prescient you know kind of conversation or answer um how much of the geopolitical stuff and the media stuff and the financial stuff is centrally planned masterly planned by some elite group versus just literally there's a bunch of stupidity that is pervasive across these organizations and so they just constantly do dumb easy things that optimize for short-term decision making well for me all of it looks controlled it all looks like controlled opposition and you know who's in control then yeah um the fed

does jerome power yeah there's a there's a lot of uh bankers in their interconnected uh circle of of people in place so and it's just everybody coordinating because they know if they can coordinate then they can't they can't be taken down which means okay well then you have to choose to not go to war with these people that are helping you out and so then it's very cooperative And that's why they're going to turn those guns on the people, especially in a surveillance state. You can you can contain all the opposition in a way where you can make sure that nobody's gunning for your spot of power and your spot of influence. And all you have to do is play nice with the other powers that be. Are you long term bullish or bearish in the United States?

Well. It's hard for me because I love my country. I just see the writing on the wall. So that's why I don't identify as an optimist anymore. we've gotten so far away from our founding principles everybody's for sale it's depressing this is still the best country in the world and i am so blessed to have been born here and there's nowhere i would like to go so it's hard for me when with the bitcoiners and their bohemian attitude about floating around the world all this stuff that's that's all nice and stuff but what about what about america i mean then you see how aggressive it's happening in canada all these things like there's nowhere to go so we can't unplug and and bitcoiners will give me that

sometimes they're like why do you have to politicize everything well this was my path to how i got here to know that bitcoin was a solution for me so my perspective is is going to be politically charged in that way because it's a solution for me but um if anybody can do it it's america but i'm concerned if they succeed in disarming us it's over it feels like if we stay true to the american ethos and the american ideals can we get back to it we would be in great shape if we give those up and follow the path of where a lot of leadership wants us to go we're screwed well everything's politicized now i mean the the doj is compromised i mean what can you pick anything that's not i mean we we're not getting fair trials here unbiased media coverage there's

nothing is is untainted so either we have a constitution that protects individual rights or we don't and all these discussions like i immediately just when when people when people want to um pull the plug on respecting the constitution like it's a hard stop for me i mean i can't listen to you after that because that's a slippery slope like that's the protection that we love that grants us all the other rights that we have those things changed or is it always been this way now the internet has just exposed them uh it's emboldened a lot of people to say that um there is no ethical basis to the constitution i mean that was a surprise to me that that many people have been willing to be like oh you know america's nice and all but it was uh

founded on immoral principles of immoral men and and we've remedied a lot over time through our a constitutional amendment so how can can you say that we haven't dealt with those things the mistakes of our history we've righted them through amendments so people want to trivialize the document but that's the reason that we have any protections at all and so it's really concerning to me that it seems like it could be a negotiated detail before i let you go i have one last topic i want to talk about bill gates melinda gates seems to just every second like there's something new that comes out here uh what's your take on this whole thing well um people with that income bracket certainly manage their marriage as well so i i'm inclined to

believe that people like bill gates have been living their lives doing whatever they wanted to relatively you know freely anyway so um i think that it might be something um people are forgiving about infidel the public is they'll see that and they'll they'll forgive if you know but it's also i feel like a distraction from the other things that he knew there was too much attention about his other positions about things like vaccines and and buying up all the farmland and all this so anytime they throw something out there in the media and they want to make the conversation about somebody like Bill Gates about infidelity in their marriage or drug addiction or something that the public is just like oh well I relate to that that happened to my parents or you know

something like this and so so then all of a sudden then you have all these like little defenders that are out there being like Bill Gates is a great man who has done so much philosophically for our you know all this stuff about you know levels of altruism or something um but it's all really just um bringing the charge down in us about what we're really should be bothered by which is what are his plans for the world because they're not they're not good by my estimation why i want to choose my words carefully i just don't trust him all the all like oh you're talking about who runs the world i just feel like somebody who had accumulated all this money from creating a technology where he he created the computer and then he created the virus and then he sold us the

the antivirus like that's a template for what he's doing with this which is why i feel like the pandemic was controlled on purpose for vaccine industry and to bring about all the loss of personal freedoms that we have to get on the other side of that for them to be able to dictate every aspect of our life, which is what they want to do. Do you think they're smart enough to coordinate all this? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that it's remarkably unfair to the successes of somebody like bill gates to minimize his intelligence now i just believe that he's built up the credibility over time like what what would i need to see to believe that he has that level of influence i forget who tweeted it it's not an accident successful people

don't get there by accident it's not yeah i forget who tweeted it but somebody said bill gates is uh the greatest rehab of a personal like, uh, perspective of somebody, right? Like his personal image, uh, or his public image has been rehabilitated and it's been a major focus and he's probably done it better than anyone in the world. Well, he can financially incentivize anything like what element of reach is out of his kit, like nothing. That's who runs the world is people that have that much influence and power

and um resources that it's unlimited potential they can recover anything the best argument that i've heard uh about all the philanthropy is are you really giving money away if you keep getting richer and richer right now the counter argument to that right and actually probably one that i'm sympathetic to is well you would have been way richer if you hadn't given away anything also forming alliances and allegiances and how could you ever do that better than funding people in their own the things that they care about because then those people are all beholden to you it's true and all he does is deepen the powers that he actually has and some people are just truly uh they're truly just communists at heart i mean that's not to be

minimized do you feel like you're free or do you feel like you're beholden to an idea a group a person me yeah oh well the greatest thing about having been a starving artist all my life is that i'm free i mean obviously there's things in place that i hadn't ever really noticed about but um i don't form personally lucrative alliances that now have dictated my you know gates isn't shoveling money to you under the table yeah no i mean i uh you know drive a ford mustang and and live in a in a house with other people you know what I mean like I don't I don't have anything that I'm protecting or trying to grow other than obviously keep more money in the checking account than I spend type thing like I don't have big designer visions on you know these empire levels

of of self-gain and I couldn't live with myself if I got what I wanted that way but a lot of people are and that's why i walk away from them very fast there's a guy who came on the podcast named mckenzie uh from canada he uh lays like wood flooring and tile uh he's just what you would call an average joe and that's he literally dm me on twitter and goes hey if you ever want like an average joe kind of citizen to come on the podcast and talk about bitcoin i'd love to do it and ben pitched us 30 40 times i don't know why i picked this one but i picked him and said hey let's do it he gets on the podcast and uh he's got i think it's two young children and a wife uh he's so you know nervous and excited about doing the podcast that literally he has uh his

wife take his children i think their dog like out of the house so that he can do the podcast yeah the whole thing right and we go through the whole uh podcast and he says uh a bunch of really smart stuff but nothing that was like out of the ordinary and towards the end he hits me with he look all i want is a better life for me and my family i don't want to take over the world and i think of that one sentence all the time because i actually think that's majority of people well that's what's so hard about uh now when you can sort of see through politics more than i could 15 months ago it's really hard to support any of them because anybody that deserves power wouldn't seek it so that's why things that are decentralized are so beautiful to me now because it's a

uncorruptible formats are rare because people in power always deepen their power and that's what they build so i'm interested in helping people build things that don't centralize power in every aspect where can we send people to find you on the internet uh jessica vaughn all the social networking sites you can find me there where do you put the most content on twitter um definitely a twitter addict so yeah twitter handle jessica vaughn all right thank you so much for doing this we're definitely gonna do it again in the future uh i feel like you are the one person i know in the world who got red pilled the hardest over the last 12 14 months uh and it's cool to watch but i also think you're willing to just talk about it yeah that's because i have a deep sense

betrayal and so if you can just activate that in people some kind of way then then um recovered liberals are going to be better red pill um uh disseminators of that perspective because we are operating with having been insulted by what we were fed for so long so i'm just trying to correct all the things that i did like voting for democrats for a number of years anytime i think i'm super smart i remember that it took shutting the world down and waving their hand before i realized what was up and that wasn't very smart but i'm trying to correct all of that contribution to the world i think you're doing a great job so just keep going thanks for having me