#565: Jessica Vaugn on Bitcoin As Freedom

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. =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  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

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

  is Circle. 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, or USDC as it's known, which is the fastest-growing, regulated, fully-reserved dollar stablecoin in the world, now standing at more than $15 billion market cap, and is adding nearly $300 million of net new digital dollars in circulation every single week. The free Circle account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading DeFi and NFT marketplaces. I've had Jeremy, the CEO,

• 1:24Anthony Pompliano?

  on the podcast before, and I'm a really big fan of what Circle's doing. Stablecoins are obviously not only here to stay, but Circle is growing incredibly fast through that USDC. Go learn more at circle.com. Again, circle.com. Go check them out and let me know what you think. Next up are my friends over at OKX. Crypto moves fast, and many crypto-focused companies can't keep up. Crypto exchanges that cut through the noise are the ones that give you access wherever you are in the world to the cutting-edge projects emerging in this new asset class. If you're looking for an industry leader that gives you access to a huge variety of crypto assets, tools, and services, I'd recommend OKX. As we all know, Bitcoin and other crypto prices can be volatile. If you're riding these prices,

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  has built the most beautiful wallet in the entire space. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It's supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset's price history and your portfolio's performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Treasure Hardware Wallet, making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download, or

• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  search Exodus on the App Store or the Play Store. Again, visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download, or search Exodus on the App Store or the Play Store. All right, let's get into this episode with Jessica. I hope you enjoy this one.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang bang, I've got Jessica here. How are you?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  I am so well.

• 4:20Anthony Pompliano?

  We are doing this in Miami. You live in LA.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  I do.

• 4:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the biggest difference you've seen so far between LA and Miami?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Oh, it's been so nice to come and get 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.

• 4:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  And just relatively acting, you know, normal. So it's like a time machine to come here.

• 4:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean, "old life"? Like, what has changed in LA?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Well, I had customized my life into something I was, I was pretty happy about. I mean, Los Angeles is pretty great, you know? If you're, if you're plugged into the, into the scene and beaches and free people and entrepreneurship and lots of opportunities everywhere you go. And film production and 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 it's, it's just nice to come here and live normally. We moved a, a charity event that had been on pause for 16 months in Hollywood. And we knew that that wasn't going to be available to us anytime soon. So we moved the production down here in Miami, which was nice.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  It was like 350 people, no, no capacity count. So yeah, it was nice to come to SLS.

• 5:40Anthony Pompliano?

  This is exactly what 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.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. What else are you gonna 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?

• 5:58Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Well, it looks like a fascist takeover to me, so.

• 6:18Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean by that?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Well, nobody, um, the, the movies always primed us to believe that, that, um, a fascist takeover was going to come in the right wing, right? If you look at film. Um, but it, it came in the form of a left-wing. Leadership and that was unexpected, so.

• 6:37Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Um, well, optimism is is a state of mind that I I had always self identified with, but.

• 6:53Anthony Pompliano?

  As an optimist?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So you've become from an optimist to a pessimist and is that?

• 7:09Speaker 02

  A realist.

• 7:10Anthony Pompliano?

  A realist, okay. What is the difference between being a pessimist versus a realist?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  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. Um, holding out for threads of hope is is just holding me back from beginning a new life somewhere. You know, whether it be Texas or Florida, I'm 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.

• 7:43Anthony Pompliano?

  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. Uh, 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?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  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

• 8:13Speaker 02

  huh, 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 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.

• 8:32Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you've determined there's a problem with what's there, I mean, you have to have some intentional

• 9:06Speaker 02

  artistic freedom in your own life to realize that you're curating your life by who you fill your day with and the causes you support and the shows that you watch. And, you know, I've all but turned that propaganda box off. Just it's a big YouTube player for me now. So, um, yeah, so 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.

• 9:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Do they like, understand that and like want to stage interventions and they're like, hey, somebody go save her?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:07Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Um, people are the, people are a lot of my personal problems. I mean, I'm, I'm,

• 10:20Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 10:55Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  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, you respect these boundaries between people.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  So it's, 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 going to do? I mean,

• 12:10Anthony Pompliano?

  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 and 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?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  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, 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, what I'm magnetized towards. If I find it interesting, I'll give it some time. And, and 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.

• 13:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you listen to him as much as you used to now that he went to Spotify?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Uh, no, there's a lot of theories about, about that being 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, 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, I'm going to side with on that. 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.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  It's great production.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I just wanted that. And, and 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, I'm happy that they put the video back up.

• 14:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The whole idea of people being the solution. You've also tweeted saying that 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?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  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. But people discredit themselves with siding with things that I know to be untrue, and they're doing it just because they're, you know, little group.

• 15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Are they virtue signaling?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, those types of things. So when you deviate from what I know to be true as it's emerged in me, 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 in my life?

• 15:39Anthony Pompliano?

  It's almost like trust in yourself is really the measure of authenticity. Like, are you actually saying the things you believe? Or are you simply doing what you think other people want you to do?

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if people show me that they have no integrity, why would I keep them around? The whole world has 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.

• 16:08Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about 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?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard for me because 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 really, it really hurt. It really hurt to know all along I was taking information from people that had no integrity. 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.

• 16:48Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fine.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  I don't want to say their names, but, but I do think about that every day.

• 16:53Anthony Pompliano?

  But do you think that the kind of giving up of the principles or the lack of integrity, or however you want to categorize it, was that more so like 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?

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all those things. 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 what, how amazing America is and how there are no excuses to not go 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?

• 17:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So a lot of this all centers around information. I think when we think of information, we think of what we're being told. That could be from corporations, from politicians, from mainstream media, whatever. If the news is fake, imagine history. How bad is it? Like, if we had to measure it, 100% of the information we're told is 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?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Well, I, since I have been removing it out of my life completely, I don't know how to, how to pick a number, but, I mean, if we're, if it's a scale of 1 to 10 of how screwed are we, I mean, we're at an 11, I think.

• 18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  So it doesn't mean that there aren't still people who are willing to put integrity first and course correct as they see fit. 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.

• 18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  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? There was a pandemic. That pandemic led to this economic crisis. 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 were 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, gaslit to some degree as to what they were telling us a year ago.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  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 it. Like, why can't you treat us like adults? Obviously, we wanted medical community to have them and, and, 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.

• 20:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What about on the economic side? It feels like that's even worse.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  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, you can kind of see the policy now getting to those end destinations.

• 20:32Anthony Pompliano?

  What is Agenda 2030?

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I feel like we've, I don't know, that could be a whole episode.

• 20:39Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Wow, how do I even begin? Yeah, well, have you ever watched videos about like the World Economic Forum and, and their, it's, it's the, it's the communist utopia that they dream about?

• 20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's Ted Talks about it, all kinds of videos.

• 20:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Agenda 2030, like a written document? Or is it just like a?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, it's, it's what they're, it's what they're trying to create in the world.

• 21:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And what is the general, like?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  I should have came with, I should have came with charts and graphs.

• 21:08Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the general idea? They basically are just trying to become more surveillance and?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And less powerful people?

• 21:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you know who Dave Cullum is? Does that name sound familiar?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 21:49Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 22:04Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Well, it got a, the word got a bad rap because of course with the three-year, very expensive lie about a Russian collusion. But collusion just means coordination.

• 22:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. So then he takes a step further and he says, a conspiracy theorist is a negative term because you are basically 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 and/or conspiring between countries in order to see something happen.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  And it hides in plain sight. It's not that, it's not that 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 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?

• 23:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, how is that possible?

• 23:28Speaker 02

  We can't 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?

• 23:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But, so like to use that as an example, 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.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yet we, the United States, as the police of the world, do nothing about it.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Well, and I'm kind of torn on what to do about that because I understand the libertarian concepts of, of not going and being the world's police and, and the, 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. 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?

• 24:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, if we're going to drop bombs in Syria, then we probably should go deal with this.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  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...

• 24:36Anthony Pompliano?

  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 operate along those principles.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  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, these deals. It's like anytime you do these things with China, like you, 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.

• 25:33Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the solution to like geopolitics, right? And what I mean by that is...

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Live on an island and make our own stuff.

• 25:42Anthony Pompliano?

  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, colluding with each other, and therefore I actually need to look out for myself, my family, and just handle things on my own."

• 25:59Speaker 02

  The free market offers so many solutions. That's why the consolidation of market options is so awful for me.

• 26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a free market left?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Well, in theory, I don't know what, I don't know what the term would be to call it, a heavily regulated, manipulated free market.

• 26:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean by that?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  I guess I just mean the options about incentivizing that don't have to do with putting guns to people's heads because, once, now that we're, we're 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?

• 26:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I don't.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  It's the nonviolent option.

• 26:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So 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. 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 governance of it as a market structure, it is a free market.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  That's why it's so perfect. That's why Bitcoin is the hope that I needed.

• 27:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Does that guarantee that it ascends to global reserve status?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 27:56Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your take on Elon Musk and Bitcoin?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  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, there's so much organic nature to the way that successful people...

• 29:09Speaker 02

  strategize what they're doing, that it's hard to look at it on the surface and decipher everything that's going on.

• 29:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean?

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Um, who really knows what Elon Musk's, um, how he's gonna get from point A to point B, the path that he takes, um, more times than not, it works out.

• 29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Does it matter anymore? Like, what Elon's opinion about Bitcoin is, or the actions he take, do they actually matter anymore?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  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 Dogecoin dropped real bad from the disclosure on SNL that it was 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.

• 30:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Um, but he's gaming it a little bit, so. But, but the, I, I feel like he put in there, he would put in his messages about, you know, this is suspended, we're not gonna not do Bitcoin, I'm not selling my Bitcoin, we're not getting out of it.

• 30:35Anthony Pompliano?

  It's kind of a, don't listen to what he's-

• 30:37Speaker 02

  He's too smart, he's too smart to know, um, 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.

• 30:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think he actually understands that?

• 30:55Speaker 02

  I, of course.

• 30:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Of course. Yeah, I mean-

• 30:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I would've said, of course, too, until Saturday.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that he is, I think that it's possible that he-

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Doesn't understand the fallout that it's happening in us about our confidence in him because it looks like an attack. But I think he's just dropping the value so he can buy more is what I'm hoping.

• 31:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So that would be the bull case or like the positive outcome here is the price dropped. 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.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I understand that people's, people aren't that forgiving about him and attitude. I think he's, 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, I sold all my Bitcoin and 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 quite possible.

• 32:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think about the response from Bitcoiners?

• 32:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, should it be a negative response in like, hey, you're attacking us, let's attack back? Should it be a, let's take the high ground and we want to be your friend?

• 32:18Speaker 02

  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 Twitter feed is, is a pretty schizophrenic about it just due to, but, but then I realized I panicked, 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 meddling in his own ways and he's sliding, you know, a game of chess, that type of thing and.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  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. Cause 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.

• 33:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of stimulus checks, uh, are we just addicted now to the monetary stimulus? Like, can we ever stop this?

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, for me, all of this has to do with trying to usher in universal basic income.

• 34:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain that.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, can we, can we just call it what it is? Is that not socialism?

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, definitely. That's definitely, but back to 2030, you really got to see all that and you can, you can see it.

• 34:22Anthony Pompliano?

  If it's socialism, why are we not allowed to say that it's socialism?

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Well, no, I'm, 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 falling at that.

• 34:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  To deny that is not very honest.

• 34:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Agreed. Uh, and is it fair to say that socialism doesn't work?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Of course. How, I mean, how many more accounts of it do you need? I mean, whether it's 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.

• 35:01Anthony Pompliano?

  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, "Well, you weren't screaming when they were handing out money to the Wall Street firms." And in fact, I was.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Actually, I was saying that that was just as bad and that was just socialism for rich people. And so it feels like 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, 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."

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Well, you can always find experts that will side with whatever side that you want to promote. I mean, that's why you can hire them. Think about court, I mean, there's all kinds of questionable experts. So getting economists to agree with whichever side of the aisle you're on is pretty easy.

• 35:59Anthony Pompliano?

  How do they miss so badly on things like job reports and inflation?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Well, they know, I mean, 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, they have some void of understanding. I mean, they're picked for a reason. 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, you know, believe this is a good thing and this administration's going to do a, do a good job for them because that's who hired them and.

• 36:43Anthony Pompliano?

  The most.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  It's intellectual, it's more intellectual dishonesty, which is why they need taken down.

• 36:48Anthony Pompliano?

  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 was 225,000 or 250,000.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Well, if.

• 36:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Like 75% miss.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  If every, yeah, yeah, they should, I mean, in any other circumstance, they would be fired for their incompetence.

• 37:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Like that's a 25 on the test. Like that is a big fat F minus. You may not get invited back to class.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that the comparable? Is the Federal Reserve central banker is comparable to a meteorologist?

• 37:30Speaker 02

  I haven't thought that out, but neither of them have any consequences for being wrong in how many people get to say that and still keep their jobs.

• 37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Is it something where the Federal Reserve in their predictions of economic performance? Whether it's jobs, whether it's inflation, interest rate, 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 4%, then it's either 4% or it's not. Or should we think of it more directionally? And just 4% is higher than where we are. And so they're directionally correct, but the number doesn't actually matter.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  They've entirely discredited themselves. I don't know why anybody would make any decisions based on anything they say.

• 38:11Anthony Pompliano?

  There's, there's 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.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy. I would never measure anything they say. I, I watch it for the, the, I guess. Interesting insights it'll give me as to how, how much they're willing to lie to people. But that's really only just a scale, just because I'm curious.

• 38:47Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 38:54Speaker 02

  They're, they're just like the news media. They're just willing to support the cause because they know they, you know, they know who feeds them.

• 39:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you want to know the one hill that I'm willing to die on around all this?

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Hmm, yes.

• 39:05Anthony Pompliano?

  The financial media is a mouthpiece for the state.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. There's no distinction. There's no, that's state media for sure. That's why I turned it off.

• 39:12Anthony Pompliano?

  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, all that 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, that's one end of the spectrum.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  That's the only side of the spectrum that I'm willing to entertain.

• 39:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. There's a second other extreme end of the spectrum, which 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 people with skin in the game or the players in the market. So a hedge fund manager writes a report and says, I believe X to be true and therefore we've staked $10 million 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 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.

• 40:38Anthony Pompliano?

  The players in the market, they're just making financial bets. They have complete skin in the game. And if they're right, they benefit. If they're wrong, they get hurt.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:47Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:01Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  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, and it clouds the truth and it's, it's really too bad, but you know, ever since we reward clicks. Truth is clouded.

• 41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Even retractions get so buried. I mean, nobody really.

• 41:45Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:58Anthony Pompliano?

  The second thing is that when you are wrong, there's no retractions and there's no punishment for being wrong.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So here's the best part of this whole thing. There's two specific journalists that I'll put in air quotes. Those journalists 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 an 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

• 42:59Anthony Pompliano?

  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 journalists.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  It's just another way to make a little extra money and that's, that's why the news is just something now I. You give no credibility. Like, how can I?

• 43:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It is literally the corporate media.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:28Anthony Pompliano?

  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. It's frankly, it's disgusting.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  I still listen to you because you're willing to say that. So when you see a sellout, you should say that.

• 43:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I do, and then everyone gets really mad.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  It's okay.

• 43:47Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  It's a network that's self-rewarding.

• 44:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you know why they're a propaganda machine?

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Why?

• 44:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Because the owner of the organization is a billionaire, and that billionaire has financial interest.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And that media arm is there to protect his financial interest.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:22Anthony Pompliano?

  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 interest, 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.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Now they're saying it's transitory.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Influencers.

• 45:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, 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.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the solution?

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Bitcoin.

• 45:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Well, decentralized finance takes away the power they have 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.

• 45:59Anthony Pompliano?

  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 insulated from all of this nonsense"?

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Well, you can only help yourself and you can join the people that are committed to truth. So Bitcoin is perfect for that. It's another self-sorting mechanism for me that's been good to find people who have other entrepreneurial endeavors and sort of dive into that, or find thought leaders that are inside of Bitcoin. I never cared about anything about economics, but of course I've picked economists to read their books, to understand finance in a broader sense. 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.

• 47:03Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 47:15Speaker 02

  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?

• 47:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that something that can be changed? Like if you just educate those people on what Bitcoin is?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 47:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And they change their mind?

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Well, they have to see what's broken in the world. And for me, I got red pilled, which led me to the, to the orange pill of Bitcoin. So that's a path that I understand and I see it a lot. And I like it because I understand it.

• 47:59Anthony Pompliano?

  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, hey, I can't afford food, gas, you know, rent?

• 48:20Speaker 02

  We're just so blessed that we have no contrast of understanding. I mean, I, 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.

• 48:54Anthony Pompliano?

  What's a good example?

• 48:56Speaker 02

  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 $5 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, there's barriers to that working.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Like if they don't have affordable electricity, how can they even power a cellphone? I mean, we've got a lot of infrastructure barriers to.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Breakdown, but we can do it. That's what's so fun about Bitcoiners is they're entrepreneurial people that have, can have a bigger vision.

• 49:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When you think about Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community, isn't it an ethos-driven thing? Like, these people come from all kinds of different walks of life, different education, different skillsets, jobs, different places in the world, in many cases, speak different languages, 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?

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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 unrelated endeavors.

• 50:37Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 50:48Speaker 02

  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 really help. For me, 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 my undergrad's in psych, so I had gravitated towards his older content, just him lecturing. You know, who can afford that kind of tutoring? So I just started watching that. But then all the social aspects that developed around 2017, the politicization of what he was saying,

• 51:27Speaker 02

  and just the character assassination on somebody I knew that was a really good person, I knew that 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,

• 52:12Speaker 02

  that's persuasive yet.

• 52:14Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, you know, woke-ism 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.

• 52:37Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  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, 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, um, a staged situation where these smaller factions of people, they're never going to threaten the power system. In a surveillance state, you can't.

• 53:32Anthony Pompliano?

  In the US, could there be a third political party that could actually viably put a president into the administration?

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Not unless more people unplug the television. Because it affects your perspective on absolutely everything. So they have a dominance on, they have a lock on attention. So how could even a libertarian ever get the time of day 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.

• 54:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it would just be a violation of the world views.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  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 just another example of it's state-run media.

• 54:35Anthony Pompliano?

  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 kind of a liking for that type of content?

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Well, I don't even know how we would do that because you have to then be allowed to be on TV. You know, 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 can be pulled from the mainstream. And thank God they do, because that's outreach still.

• 55:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It's crazy just to think about how important control of the actual infrastructure is, right?

• 55:33Speaker 02

  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, and politics are like that. Like, think about Mitt Romney, just kind of siding with the establishment machine, especially lately. So it, it makes me look at history differently to where I thought in, in 2008, Mitt Romney would have given us such a different America than, um, than Obama. But really, when you look at how Mitt Romney is voting now, you see that

• 56:16Speaker 02

  that's still more illusion of choice. It's just packaging that's different.

• 56:19Anthony Pompliano?

  What changed? Do you think he changed? Or do you think your perspective on him changed?

• 56:23Speaker 02

  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. He would have rendered us relatively similar outcomes.

• 56:40Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And everyone laughed at him.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Everyone thought that was so funny.

• 56:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think, uh, Obama may have even said, this isn't, you know, the 1980s.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  The 1970 call, the Cold War wants their policy back.

• 56:58Anthony Pompliano?

  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, or answer. Um, how much of the geopolitical stuff and the media stuff and the financial stuff is centrally planned, masterfully 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.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Well, for me, all of it looks controlled. It all looks like controlled opposition and, you know.

• 57:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Who's in control then?

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, the Fed.

• 57:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Does Jerome Powell run the world?

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of bankers in their interconnected circle 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 gonna turn those guns on the people. And 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.

• 58:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you long-term bullish or bearish in the United States?

• 58:23Speaker 02

  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 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 Bitcoiners will give me that. Sometimes they're like, why do you have to politicize

• 59:07Speaker 02

  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 gonna be politically charged in that way, because it's a solution for me. But if anybody can do it, it's America. But I'm concerned if they succeed in disarming us, it's over.

• 59:26Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like if we stay true to the American ethos and the American ideals...

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Can we get back to it?

• 59:33Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  Well, everything's politicized now. I mean, the DOJ is compromised. I mean, what, can you pick anything that's not? I mean, we, we're not getting fair trials here on biased media coverage. There's nothing 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 people, when people want to 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 enjoy.

• 1:00:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Have those things changed? Or has it always been this way? Now the internet has just exposed them?

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Uh, it's emboldened a lot of people to say that 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 founded on immoral principles of immoral men. And, and we've remedied a lot over time through our constitutional amendments. 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

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  that it seems like it could be a negotiated detail.

• 1:01:15Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Well, people at that income bracket certainly manage their marriages well. So 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 I think that it might be something, people are forgiving about infidel, the public is, they'll see that and 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 buying up all the farmland and all this.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  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 a drug addiction, or something that the public is just like, "Oh, 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. But it's all really just 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.

• 1:02:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  I want to choose my words carefully. I just don't trust him, all, 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 created the computer, and then he created the virus, and then he sold us 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

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  to be able to dictate every aspect of our life, which is what they want to do.

• 1:03:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think they're smart enough to coordinate all this?

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I, I think that it's, 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?

• 1:04:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I forget who tweeted it.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  It's not an accident. Successful people don't get there by accident. It's not.

• 1:04:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I forget who tweeted it, but somebody said Bill Gates is the greatest rehab of a personal like perspective of somebody, right? Like his personal image 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.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Well, he can financially incentivize anything. Like what element of reach is out of his, like nothing. That's who runs the world is people that have that much influence and power and resources that it's unlimited potential. They can recover anything.

• 1:04:52Anthony Pompliano?

  The best argument that I've heard about all the philanthropy is are you really giving money away if you keep getting richer and richer?

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:05:05Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  He's 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.

• 1:05:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It's true.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  And all he does is deepen the powers that he actually has. And some people are just truly, they're truly just communists at heart. I mean, that's not to be minimized.

• 1:05:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you feel like you're free? Or do you feel like you're beholden to an idea, a group, a person?

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  Me?

• 1:05:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  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 I don't form personally lucrative alliances that now have dictated my,

• 1:05:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Bill Gates isn't shoveling money to you under the table?

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, I, 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.

• 1:06:38Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a guy who came on the podcast, his name's Mackenzie, from Canada. He lays like wood flooring and tile. He's just what you would call an average Joe. And that's, he literally DM'd 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 been pitched this 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 he's got, I think he has two young children and a wife. He's so, you know, nervous and excited about doing the podcast that literally he has, his wife take his children, I think their dog, like out of the house so that he can do the podcast and the whole thing, right?

• 1:07:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And we go through the whole podcast and he says a bunch of really smart stuff, but nothing that was like out of the ordinary. And towards the end, he hits me with, he goes, 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.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  Well, that's what's so hard about 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 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.

• 1:08:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  Uh, Jessica Vaughn, all the social networking sites, you can find me there.

• 1:08:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Where do you put the most content, on Twitter?

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Um, definitely a Twitter addict, so yeah, Twitter handle Jessica Vaughn.

• 1:08:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, 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.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's because I have a deep sense of 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.

• 1:09:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I think you're doing a great job, so just keep going.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.