#278 | John Jennings; Is inflation or deflation coming? | OCD and SSRIs

About this episode

John Jennings, president of St. Louis Trust Company and author of "The Uncertainty Solution," returns for a wide-ranging conversation that opens as a trust-and-estate thought experiment (how a trustee could quietly exploit beneficiaries) before turning into an extended debate about inflation. Jennings, defending the mainstream economic view, walks through CPI construction, the Fed's dual mandate, why deflation is treated as worse than inflation, and why stocks have historically outpaced inflation better than gold or real estate. Vance pushes back throughout, arguing that inflation punishes savers and pressures people into risk they wouldn't otherwise take, and the two spend real time on Bitcoin, full nodes, and Vance's experience running his own node to verify the blockchain firsthand. The back half pivots sharply: Jennings opens up in detail about his own lifelong OCD, the specific compulsions (mailbox-checking, marathon training, a Led Zeppelin-only phase), his daughter's four-month intensive OCD treatment program including brain scans and neurofeedback, and the brutal cost and access gap in America's mental health system. The episode closes on his new book and his conviction that a simple two-fund portfolio can outperform complexity.

“But I think like the Fed has played all sorts of games with the inflation rate, such as what they include in on the consumer price index. So is healthcare included in on it? Is housing? What is, what happens when you start getting Netflix in, now people aren't renting from Blockbuster or they aren't buying DVDs, so how do you make these trade offs? And to me they can make that number and have made that number whatever they want it to be.”

“You have this system where it's like you, you are not enabled to save it. If you save it, you are actually losing money and the government is stealing that money or, or that's my perception of it, right? The government is pulling its value out, and so they're pushing you to invest that into the market.”

“It's like, almost like in the matrix when like Neo and the others, they'd see all the binary code, and that meant something to them, right? They could read binary code... And once you have a node and it's running, then you can flip open your computer and say, Hey, I wanna make sure my node is fully synchronized.”

Key moments

• Jennings walks through, hypothetically, how a trustee could legally-but-unethically enrich himself by starving beneficiaries of required disclosures or self-dealing into his own business (institutions).
• Vance argues inflation effectively forces people to invest rather than save, calling it a form of government-driven wealth transfer (money).
• The two debate what CPI should and shouldn't include, with Vance arguing the Fed can shape the number to say whatever it wants (money).
• Jennings explains why the Fed strips out food and energy prices from core inflation, framing high energy/food costs as disinflationary elsewhere in the budget.
• Vance describes setting up his own Bitcoin full node on a Raspberry Pi, downloading the entire blockchain over five and a half days, and how that direct verification changed his understanding of decentralization (money).
• Vance distinguishes Bitcoin's "immaculate conception" distribution from other cryptocurrencies' ICOs, calling it a once-in-humanity event.
• Jennings opens up about decades of OCD — Led Zeppelin-only listening in high school, compulsive mailbox checking, and structuring travel and work around marathon training to avoid panic attacks.
• Jennings describes his daughter's four-month partial-hospitalization OCD program, including a specialist reading her brain scan cold and correctly diagnosing a "5.1 standard deviation" OCD signature.
• Jennings calls America's mental health system broken, contrasting the "flying private" experience his family could afford against the "flying economy" or no-flight reality most families face (institutions).

Notable quotes

“You have this system where it's like you are not enabled to save it. If you save it, you are actually losing money and the government is stealing that money.”

“This computer is down fully, it is not doing anything else... it took five and a half days to download all of the transactions.”

“Earlier this week I spent three hours watching Beavis and Butthead... I was laughing so hard I couldn't talk.”

“So if you look at mental health system in America, it's just completely broken... you kind of have the flying first class or actually like almost like flying private.”

Predictions made in this episode

• Bitcoin and Ethereum's current dominance will not necessarily persist; early leaders in a new technology industry typically end up with less than 10% market share a decade later as fast followers overtake them.