Oh, what a day. I'm sure it is in the fine mountains of Utah. Folks, we are live. Welcome
back to episode 19 of To the Unknown Pod. My name is Jordan Bush. I'm the executive director of TGFP
Media. We exist to help Christians understand and use Bitcoin for the glory of God and the good of
people everywhere. Today, we are not joined by Oshawa from Portland, but we are joined by a
couple of the finest Presbyterians I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. So I'll let them introduce
themselves. I'm Tim Fox, Executive Director of the Magnolia Foundation. I'm a Presbyterian
minister at Magnolia. We're trying to orange pill the church, help churches and Christian
ministries understand Bitcoin and hold on to it and use it. And I am Jim McAndrew. I'm a
deacon in the Presbyterian Church in America with Tim. And I am a software developer, technologist,
investor, entrepreneur, and I do tech support at Magnalia. I think you need to shill. What's your
day job? What's your other tech support job, Jim? I run a company that is software for drones,
but not the military industrial complex. It's DroneLink.com. Go check out Jim. Go find out
what he does. It's very fascinating. Uh, speaking of shilling, the first thing we're going to open
up with is we have four days left, a mere four days. We're at 95% funded on our kid's book,
the orange umbrella. We are thrilled to get this thing over the line. Two years of work,
way too long. Uh, we wrote the whole thing without AI. We illustrated the whole thing without AI,
uh, found a fine, um, just Jesus loving girl who, uh, who just is an incredible artist and did this
whole thing. So we are 117 backers. We are just under $600 away from our goal. We are super anxious
and excited to get that over the line. So if you want to be the one who brings us past the $12,500
mark, that would be incredible. There's an abbreviated shill. We're going to stop the
shilling right there because today we have something far more thrilling to talk about.
And that is, man, did anybody else see this bonkers Peter Thiel, Ross Douthit interview?
My words.
I just could not believe it.
For those of you who aren't aware, Peter Thiel, venture capitalist, one of the founders of PayPal, has money.
One of the founders of Palantir, a number of other Lord of the Rings named businesses that are semi-dystopian.
sat down for an interview with Ross Douthat, who's a New York Times contributor, famous Roman Catholic,
really interesting guy. Go read his work. They sat down and had one of the most unhinged conversations
that I've ever seen. So we're going to just kind of talk about that. And that's why,
if you look at the title, again, you might be thinking to yourself, who in the world would not
want the human race to continue, or who could have a doubt about whether or not they wanted the human
race to continue well, my friends.
Apparently Peter Thiel does.
Let's take a look at this video.
Let me share this.
Here we go. You would prefer the human race
to endure, right?
You're hesitant.
Yes? I don't know. I would...
I would...
There's so many
questions. Shouldn't the human race
survive?
Yes.
But
I also...
would, I also would like us to radically solve these problems.
And so, you know, it's always, I don't know, you know, yeah, transhumanism is this, you
know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed
into an immortal body.
and there's a critique of let's say the trans people in a sexual context or i don't know trans
bestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross dresses and a transsexual is someone where
you change your penis into a vagina and we can then debate how well those surgeries work but
we want more transformation than that it's the critique is not that it's weird and unnatural
It's so pathetically little.
And we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs.
We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.
And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way, the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this is these things don't go far enough.
Like the transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul.
You need to transform your whole self.
And so, um, right. But the other, wait, wait, wait, sorry. I, I generally agree with your,
what I think is your belief that religion should be a friend to science and ideas of scientific
progress. I think any idea of divine providence has to encompass the fact that we have progressed
and achieved and, and done things that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. But it still
also seems like, yeah, the promise of Christianity in the end is you get the perfected body and the
perfected soul through God's grace. And the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of
machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character. All right. Let's just let this breathe
a little bit. Okay. So again, they're sitting here talking about transhumanism. They're talking
on what this looked like. And, and I mean, I'm sure you have just so many things that we could
talk about, but I mean, what a wild, what a wild thing that Peter Thiel has to think of how he
wants to answer the question, do you want the human race to survive? And then to kind of start
talking about, yes, we do want to survive, but we want it to change in terms of, we want to move
transcending the body then trying to ground that somehow theologically which we haven't even gotten
to that that part yet but tim tim help us make help us make sense of this please right yeah i
mean it's the under duress finally having to admit yes but then says yes but but but but but
and then goes on to talk about some really freaky deaky stuff in terms yeah you know it sounds like
he's basically saying well yes but only insofar as it is a preliminary stage to something
better and something different.
So it's like, okay, yeah, well, I guess I need to have humans so that we can get to the next
thing that's better.
And then there's really goofy kind of conflation of that with the Christian doctrine of resurrection,
which is radically different than what he's talking about.
But yeah, just, I don't know.
I mean, it's in some ways, again, I don't know very much about Peter Thiel.
I think he may profess to be a Christian in some form, but I mean, this idea is not, you know, totally unheard of that humans don't deserve to survive or that they're a cancer on the earth.
I mean, in some ways, people really don't like the Christian doctrine of original sin, that humans are born fundamentally sinful and twisted and under God's judgment.
But in some ways, with things like this, there's a sort of recognition of the fact that there is something gross about humans and there's something wrong.
And that, yeah, I don't know. I bet if you asked him, do you think humans are under God's wrath?
He'd probably be like, oh no, that's not very nice.
Most kind of contemporary people think that's really old-fashioned to think that.
But then to turn around and say, well, we shouldn't continue existing, in some ways is a kind of implicit recognition of something like the Christian doctrine of original sin.
that something's wrong with us.
Something is deeply wrong with us.
But the Christian means something very different
by that than what he's saying.
Yeah, I think a lot of the pushback too,
it's like people pluck out the,
okay, people are born into sin
as if that was somehow the initial state.
As if like, why would God then,
like they just, people would object to like,
why would God make a world where everyone's sinful?
Like, and you're like, no, no, no.
You have to actually have to read the other,
the first two chapters before that, where it's like, no, no, God didn't make a world where everyone
got, this wasn't God's initial design in a real sense that we would, there would be a world of sin.
And so it's just like, it's, I've, I've interacted with people who would, would raise that objection.
And you're just like, but wait, you, you can't just cherry pick parts of the story and then just
straw man them and beat them down. It's kind of like, no, you have to kind of see the full arc.
and Peter here seems to
you know be
just kind of cherry picking
and
speaking in such a way that I
again I wouldn't I can't speak
to this but like what seemed to be are you
trying to defend
are you like putting the carpet before the horse you're trying
to like did you start with this
presupposition this misunderstanding of
of you know what
the perfecting of human souls
and perfecting of humanity what this
process is going to look like and who's going to do it
and that's why you're building these companies or are you trying to build these companies
you know to because you think that that's going to help some i don't know i'm just super confused
as far as like where what is it who is influencing he's really uh influenced by gerard um like renee
gerard that's kind of there's you can find articles online about how um like he's talked about like
the scapegoat and he's like talked about a number of these things he's he's a thoughtful guy he's
actually i if i'm not mistaken he is a big funder of first things the the journal first things i
could i could be wrong but for some reason i i really think he is um player and elon were both
part of the paypal mafia yeah a lot of these ideas come from that small group of guys that were
early 2000s in the bay area yeah elon has stated things like humanity is like a consciousness
bootloader or an intelligence bootloader for the next iteration i don't i think what they kind of
wave their hands and say it's not really about the physical form it's about consciousness and they
don't really define what consciousness is but they just say it kind of takes one to know one
and consciousness is a good thing and it would be horrible if you know we were the only light
of consciousness in the universe and it got snuffed out which is part of the reason why
elon is doing spacex is because he wants to get us off this planet so consciousness doesn't get
snuffed out but the whole thing kind of falls apart right because it's like it can't really
define what consciousness is or why it's special and how it can exist separate from an actual body
that we've been given by a creator yeah yeah so peter he he definitely funds first things first
things is like a very thoughtful uh christian uh journal of of articles there's a bunch of a bunch
of good stuff in there um he's written he's written a number of things he's spoken about his faith uh
he's practicing homosexual on top of that so it is this interesting uh just a real interesting
kind of eclectic uh thinker and in person in in general i mean he was obviously been one of a large
funder for conservative politics and conservative causes on to a certain degree but then also is
working towards transhumanism which is i mean about as far from conservatism as you can imagine
um let's unless any of you have have anything else let's finish watching this little uh this
other little clip where things get even more wild uh likely to end up as a dystopian character
Well, uh, it's, let's, let's articulate this.
And you're going to have a heretical form of Christian, right?
Right.
That says something else.
I, I don't know.
I, I think the word nature does not occur once in the Old Testament.
And so, uh, you know, if you, if you, you know, um, and there is, you know, there is
a word in which, which the way I understand, you know, the,
you know, the Judeo-Christian inspiration is, it is about transcending nature. It is about
overcoming things. And, you know, and the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are
fallen. And that's a natural thing in a Christian sense is that you're messed up. And that's true.
But, you know, there's some ways that, you know, with God's help, you are supposed to transcend
that and overcome that tim i'll let you take the first crack at that what are your thoughts
um yeah i don't know i mean his weird dodge about the old testament doesn't use this word nature
um i haven't dug into i was just starting to pull up my my bible software to start
digging around on this i mean uh in some ways you know the greek language you know is quite
different than the Hebrew language, and you shouldn't expect to see one-to-one. I was going
to go back and look and see where and how this word pops up in the Greek translations of the
Old Testament that you get a few decades before Jesus. But it's a weird dodge, because the New
Testament certainly talks about it, and famously or infamously, Romans 1, Paul talking about
homosexuality being against nature.
And nature, biblically, not just being a way of describing the way things are,
but also a way of describing what things are moving toward and what they should be.
And in some ways, this raises the million-dollar question,
what is our purpose?
Is our purpose to endlessly upgrade ourselves by way of technology?
And God just says, well, as long as you upgrade yourself somehow or evolve yourself somehow, that's all good.
It is interesting that he says that we're naturally fallen.
I mean, in some ways, that's true theologically, at least as we exist now and the world exists now.
But sin is not proper to who we are.
There's nothing essential to humanity about sinfulness.
Jesus was not sinful, but he was the most human human who's ever lived.
and one day,
you know,
there will be,
you know,
untold
millions and billions
and trillions of people
who will not be sinful.
God will graciously
redeem them from sin
but they will still
be human
and they will be
in many ways
more human
than they are now.
You know,
there is a funny thing.
I mean,
you popped up this article
by him from First Things
something about
against Edenism
and the first line
was something about
the future's not going
to be like the past.
I don't know what he's getting at
in that article
but especially within
reformed Protestant theology,
there's an emphasis on
the state of redemption
not just being a return to the Garden of Eden,
but a transcendence of it.
That Adam and Eve,
by rebelling against God,
lost
their upgrade, so to speak,
to something that would have been much better
than what the Garden of Eden was.
I think a lot of Christians,
they kind of think,
oh yeah, heaven is just going to be like
going back to the Garden of Eden.
actually it's something better than what adam and you've had in the garden of eden and so there is
a sense in which uh peter thiel is kind of onto something of hey we will move on to something
greater but the million dollar question is how you do that and what exactly will it be is it just a
matter of technological power and knowledge you know i think far more than knowledge or power
although we'll certainly know more and i think we'll be a lot more powerful much more than those
things. It's, it is about wisdom. It is about knowing God. It's about seeing God. It's about
being with God far more than it is about our capabilities as a species, you know, supposedly
evolving into something better. Yeah. There's a, there's a famous, a famous, like contemporary
Christian music, a musician named Phil Wickham, and he's got a song where he, the, the chorus is
basically like, I want it. It goes like, I want it like it was back then. I want to be in Eden.
and it's this whole, it's like a really sappy song.
But so the kernel of truth there is,
I want to be with God.
I want to have unbroken fellowship with God.
Ooh, great.
Like we're with you.
Like that's great.
At the same time, to your point,
there's a number of theologians
who basically are saying like God's prohibition,
just like all of God's, most of God's prohibitions,
the prohibition of taking the fruit
was not a forever prohibition.
It was a temporal prohibition.
And once they passed the test, God's, you know, role, God's design for them and desire for them was that at some point they, when they reach maturity, they would take the fruit and they would, you know, join him.
And there's a, you know, an understanding that that is something that will happen, you know, at the end, we will be with God in the garden, we'll have unbroken fellowship with him.
And, but it is really interesting to try to, to think that that's something to be obtained by oneself rather than something that, rather than that being something that is attained for us by Jesus, which I think is what the, what Orthodox Christians, small Orthodox Christians would say.
I mean in the Garden of Eden
right after they sin
he's like we gotta
get them out of here
so they can't
take the tree of life
and
continue in this
state
forever
in some sense
it would be a horrible judgment
right
like allowing us to die
is
almost like a mercy
transhumanism is
at its core
trying to get around this curse and around this limitation that God put on us we have a limited number of years They would couch it sort of in the language of
oh, it would be so horrible if, you know,
intelligence or consciousness got snuffed out.
But really, they just want to live forever,
and they want to do it on their own terms.
And so it's at odds with Christianity.
It's a religion, basically.
If you don't believe in an afterlife,
If most of these people are atheists, it sounds like Peter has some sort of belief in at least part of what the Bible says.
But most of the people that are wrapped up in it are pretty staunch atheists or at least agnostic.
And so they're turning to the transhumanism to be immortal.
He said it himself.
Is it Brian Johnson?
Who's that creepy guy?
Brian Green, maybe?
Trying to live forever?
Yeah, like sucking his son's blood.
Like real weird stuff going on there.
well I mean the pope of transcommunism is Ray Kurzweil you know he's the guy that's talking
about the singularity all the time and that's where AI comes into things right because it's like
essentially and this is why Elon's doing Neuralink is they kind of view AI as creating
the next version of intelligence and it'll be godlike and the only way for us to
continue on with it is to be able to merge with it somehow with our intelligence and
I just don't see this at all.
I mean, Christianity basically says we're going to have new bodies and a new heaven and a new earth.
And that's how it's going to be.
We're going to be humans.
Jesus is a human still.
He's got a real body sitting at the right hand of God the Father right now.
So, yeah.
Again, I really think that's an important thing here.
I mean, as Christians, it's not that we don't see, you know, like it's not that there aren't issues or aren't problems that need to get dealt with.
But, you know, God has ways and God has means.
God has manner, he has ways of dealing with these things and he has a timeline.
And so again, this is, this is somewhat, this is related to my, it's pretty clear that God
doesn't want us to create our own immortality.
That's the whole point of Jesus dying on the cross for us.
Yeah, correct.
And then, and then on top of that, like so much of this, again, we can just bring it
back to like Bitcoin stuff.
Like so much of this is only possible because you have effectively unlimited money that's
created out of thin air to pursue all of these insane things. Like if you actually, if we actually
had scarce money, you know, there wouldn't be just all of this money just to play with.
You know, it's this coming at great sacrifice to future generations of, again, ironically,
it's similar to the Brian Johnson thing, right? Like this is God intended parents to lay down
their lives for children. And like the nature of sin in so many ways is basically forcing your
children to die for you. Like this is one of the, one of the problems with abortion is a functional,
You make your child die so that you can live whatever life you want.
Brian Johnson literally is making his son give him his blood and platelets so that he can rejuvenate himself.
It's a very spiritual thing that's happening, spiritual in a negative way.
But yeah, these are religious actions.
This is dogma.
uh there's a whole eschatology that's built in here uh which like an understanding of how things
are going to end uh in in pursuit of those things so yeah this is we're getting into into some wild
space here okay well i have a question for you guys um so you know human progress in technology
raises all kinds of ethical questions uh bovink he's a theologian that i like a lot he talks about
how one thing that makes humans unique with relationship to angels on the one hand or
animals on the other hand is that there is a sense in which humans develop and they progress
while still remaining essentially human. In other ways, we are quite different than people who lived
thousands of years ago, technologically, culturally, socially. In some ways, Boving talks about part of
the human mandate from Eden onward is to endlessly kind of unfold God's
creation and bring it into greater and greater conformity to him and increasing
kind of,
uh,
reflection of his image and his character.
Um,
you know,
you could take that in some really weird ways and go the Peter Thiel route of,
you know,
therefore,
you know,
just let it rip and,
you know,
any kind of progress is therefore fine.
Um,
but,
you know,
sometimes I've heard people push back and they say,
well,
uh,
okay, so there's things Christians are not supposed to do, or humans are, it's off limits for them,
and you shouldn't be playing God. You know, what about a pair of glasses? You know, you are
improving your vision. You're fixing your eyes, so to speak, by means of technology.
Are you refusing to submit to God as your eyes start to degrade if you get a pair of glasses?
How would you guys help people navigate these questions of where's the line between playing God?
You know, say, you know, we all kind of know there's probably a line somewhere of like, hey,
you just need to let yourself die at some point ethically instead of endlessly doing whatever you
can to extend your life but there's a lot of things that we do that probably too many of our
ancestors would look like wow you guys are really playing god and you know like um you know we were
just talking about somebody who's gone through this crazy bone marrow transplant this kind of
resurrection like experience of having all of your bone marrow reboosted somehow but i don't know how
do you guys help people navigate that in terms of what's playing god what's not um what does it
look like to submit to god say especially around issues of the end of life uh you want to jump in
or you want me to jump in before jim i i mean there's like kind of two categories in my mind
one is sort of more of a relative idea of to what how much of your resources and how much
of time and energy are you having to expend to sort of do this thing obviously we have technologies
available to us today that are unimaginable even just 100 years ago they're just totally common
place like we're just going to eat some penicillin or whatever and it'll knock out the
bacteria inside of us or and we don't get an infection we don't die and it costs nothing so
like i think that's fairly straightforward like yeah sure go ahead and do it but it's like if
you're sitting on three million dollars of retirement savings or something and you're just
going to burn the whole account down so you can live another six or 12 months it's probably not
the best use of those resources for long-term generational kingdom-minded work um to get an
extra six months and especially if you're like bedridden you have no quality of life i mean i
I don't know, maybe there's like special circumstances, but to me it's, so it's like this
continuum of something that costs next to nothing to it costs everything, right?
Um, the needle has got to be somewhere in between.
And then the second category of things is, is what you're doing, fundamentally changing
the nature of what you are or sort of how you think or how your mental process works.
I mean, even just the idea of like uploading your brain into a computer and then running
it at 10,000 times speed, you know, it's like, so I, it's like, it's still me maybe
somehow, even though I don't have a body, but now I'm able to live for 10,000 years
in the same time that other people experience one year,
like I think you sort of become,
it dehumanizes you at that point.
You can't really interact with other human beings anymore
in any reasonable way.
I mean, if you think about it,
like if you're trying to record a podcast
and you're this entity that runs its brain
at 10,000 times faster than everybody else,
like even just this string of sentences
that I've been saying for the last two minutes
would feel like two months to this thing.
And it just doesn't,
you've become fundamentally and categorically
like something different, right?
And I don't think that's what God intended for us to be.
I do think there,
when we get to the new heaven and the new earth
and we get glorified bodies,
we will feel more human than we've ever felt.
And when we look back at what it was like to live
as humans in this world
and under sort of the reign of sin,
it'll, we'll look back
and just feel like, man,
we were only like 1% humans.
Like this is what it's really like
to be a human, you know?
And there'll be like
some sort of vibrancy to it.
It's like we were living in black and white
and now we're living in color.
I think C.S. Lewis has a lot of these
analogies in his books.
So I think if you're sort of like
trying to turn the dials on that
and change something
with respect to like
space and time
and how fast you can run
and how intelligent you are
and things sort of become
orders of magnitude different
than where you're currently at,
you have crossed some sort of line.
Having said that,
like if Elon comes out
with the Geordi visors
and I can see infrared spectrum
or something like that,
I don't know.
I think that's pretty cool.
I'm cool with that.
Or restoring people's vision.
Like that's pretty cool.
Yeah, I think the thing where I would start, there's a couple ways that I would parse this. Tim, would this be considered casuistry or is that something slightly different?
I don't know. It depends what kind of casuistry we're talking about. Sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's crazy.
Yeah. So basically casuistry is basically trying to apply ethical principles, like trying to apply biblical principles to ethics as far as I'm understanding.
And you're basically trying to like triangulate what is, what is okay to do in certain situations.
The topic of ethics is like super fascinating to me.
It has become fascinating in the past few years.
Oliver O'Donovan, I don't know if you're familiar with any of his work.
If you're watching at home and ethic interests you, go grab Oliver O'Donovan.
He's written a ton of books.
He's an Anglican guy, one of the most respected political philosophers today.
uh and so i i think like one of the the first question that i would that i would ask is like
uh am i sitting like in in trying to figure out should i pursue something so
in in the case of um you know in the case of the person who's uh trying to who's got you know
needs glasses or whatever how should i think about should we just should this person just
be content with the with their lot in life god has given them this weakness uh should we just
tell them to be content with that. I think there's reason to believe no. One of the reasons would be,
I mean, for example, Luke was a physician. God heals, like God frequently heals people. He
recognizes that in a sinful world, there's consequences to that, and yet God overcomes
them. And one of the ways that we can be like God is by imitating him in these ways, by using
things that are in his world and, you know, manipulating them, working them to be able
to help people.
I think that the big governing principle of this would be, again, so to say it negatively
would be, am I sinning?
To state it positively, it would be, am I loving God and am I loving my neighbor?
Am I, is the way that I'm, both what and how I'm considering acting in alignment with the
priorities and the ways that God has laid out that he wants people to act. So in the case of
transhumanism, you're having to get, in order to do this, so much of this is based on so much debt.
A lot of these guys are getting, they have all these stock and there's all this debt that's based
in, they're enabled to do all these things because they're able to get so much debt and they have so
much money that's built on debt. They leverage themselves. Elon's doing this. So the reality of
this is that in order to get this kind of debt, you fundamentally have to steal. And so there's a
large extent to this where I would say, well, a lot of this is just ruled out because the only
way it's possible is because you're stealing. You shouldn't have the ability to do the things
that you're considering because you don't have the resources to do them. So am I sinning? That'd
be, that'd be one thing. The positive framing would be, am I loving God and am I loving my
neighbor? So the question would be, why, why do you want to do what you're going to do? If you're,
if you're considering, if you're trying to fight off death because you're for yourself to the
example that Jim talked about, where you have 3 million bucks, you've got family, whatever you,
you know, think that all things being equal, you're probably going to die within six months.
You can either blow all that money to try to make some last ditch effort to survive, or you can,
you know, die in six months and then leave that to them, leave that to, you know, gospel ministry,
leave that to whatever. If the reason why you're pursuing whatever it is, is because of fear
or because of trying to, you know, you're afraid of, you know, whatever, sinfully afraid,
you're trying to avoid death, you're trying to, you know, whatever it is, that's actually
an indication you shouldn't be doing it. I think that that'd be one thing. Now, on the other hand,
But again, if you're sitting here and you're a physician and you see this person who's struggling, they can't see, and you're thinking, man, I want to love my neighbor.
I want to care for this person.
I have these resources.
What can we figure out about the I?
What can we figure out how to use the things that God has created?
And just coming in with the presupposition that God intends us to take the things that he's made and transform them in ways that do honor and serve him and do honor and love our neighbor.
I think like some of these presuppositions can actually lead you to basically want to and have the expectation and the presupposition that within the world, God has put things that are there to be transformed and can be used to be a blessing to people to alleviate suffering in a number of different ways.
There's a comment in the chat.
God doesn't want us to live long, healthy lives, but rather short lives with diseases.
I don't think that's what we're saying.
Tim, do you want to address that one?
No, I think what we are saying is that God has,
everything we do is ultimately under God's authority
and that God has kind of delegated his responsibility to us,
but there are strict limits.
Tolkien, in his famous lecture on fairy tales,
says basically the heart of the fairy tale is the ban, the prohibition.
there are certain things that you must not do.
And most fairy tales revolve around people crossing that line or bumping up against it somehow.
And again, this is why we're talking about this.
There is a wisdom, there's a lot of wisdom needed, but there's a lot of gray areas here.
What is the line between the kind of improvement in life that God blesses and commands
that Christians, of all people, should be deeply interested in improving life for their neighbors?
That's what Jordan's talking about of how do I make things better for people in the same way that God does that for us and gives those things to us.
But at the same time, there is a line somewhere where you can't try to become God by defeating death.
Only God can defeat death ultimately, and all of us will die.
There's no escape from death.
And what we're concerned about with the Peter Thiel stuff is that I think technology and computers and AI and space travel and all these things can give us the illusion that we now have the ability to defeat things that humans have never defeated.
But almost certainly this will lead to much worse outcomes and God will, if nothing else, pull a Tower of Babel and foil our plans and it'll be much worse than it was.
I mean, there's a lot of this in Tolkien, there's a lot of this in C.S. Lewis, kind of human hubris, trying to fly really close to the sun, so to speak, leading to disaster.
And I think there is an element of, especially around kind of end-of-life questions, there is an element of submitting to God and accepting what he has given you,
and accepting that we are sinful and fallen, even if, as Christians, we are redeemed and forgiven.
there is still a profound frailty to life and a weakness and death at the end of all of it
as something that God, even as Christians, still calls us to submit ourselves to instead of endlessly fighting against it.
But that doesn't mean death's a good thing, suffering's a good thing, we should all just be happy to suffer and die.
No, of course not.
Biblically, you lament suffering, you lament death, you hate death.
Jesus wept, you know, bitterly at the tomb of his friend, Lazarus. Jesus was terrified in the
Garden of Gethsemane to go to the cross. But ultimately with Jesus, you learn to say, you know,
not my will, but yours be done. And death, like Martin Luther says, for the Christian, death
becomes your friend because it's the gateway to paradise, even though it's still terrible and it's
awful. And yeah, that's what I would, that's what I would answer, how I would answer Sopranos fan 11
is like God, God wants to, you know, he, we, he will deliver us from suffering. He does not want
suffering. And so for the Christian, death does, you know, it is a gracious thing where God allows
suffering to end. And then we, you know, we enter into his presence and we get to be with him and
are delivered from suffering. Another thing, further, maybe complicating this a little bit,
is that God does, he does both seemingly design certain things. He designs things and permits
things to be used in ways in suffering that maybe he wouldn't under normal circumstances.
So one of the things obviously there tons of prohibitions against drunkenness in scripture This is clear We should not live in wanton drunkenness This is not good And yet in the Proverbs we basically hear that wine is for the suffering One of the benefits of drunkenness
is that it can help somebody who's in desperate pain. It can help numb some of that pain for them.
That's obviously a means to this larger end. That's a desire. The goal is to love your neighbor
and help them face these last days
and minimize their suffering.
At the same time, this should not,
and this is why we're Christians,
we don't fight against pain medications
or things like this.
But I still think this is,
it can be a slippery slope for people
who are like, see, see,
like here's this thing that's used in an illicit way
and that's a justification for wanting to,
for something, an analogy would be,
that I think would be more clear
to the average Christian would be the kind of thing that we're objecting to is basically the
kind of thing that basically looks at, um, that looks at aborted babies and says, Hey, look,
if we keep aborting all these babies, then we can have all of these stem cells, which we can do all
kinds of really good things with. And so it's, it's the, it's a version of sinning that grace
may abound. Like, look, we're going to, we're going to, you know, we're going to continue to
abort babies. Uh, we're going to kill, killed small children, and then we're going to use their
bodies for good. We're going to basically devote these and then people who are alive will be able
to benefit from, uh, from their deaths. And, and that will give us a net benefit to humanity.
And so it's worth doing like, that's the kind of, uh, illicit, you know, sinful, uh, ends justify
the means thinking that I think we're, we're trying to get at. I'll just add, I've lived through
many many years of debilitating
chronic pain like to
the point where you can hardly even roll over
in bed without just being in agony
and
first of all those are
some of the closest times I've ever felt
to the Lord
as sort of
counterintuitive as that sounds
and then the verses like
in Colossians you know this light
momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal
weight of glory just becomes
so vivid in that
moment in that context because you just realize as humans living here and now it just feels like
this is never going to end and this is all there is and our life is so long and the suffering is so
unbearable um and then you just remind yourself these promises and the fact that we are going to
you know jesus went to prepare a room for us in his father's house and for the vast majority
of our existence as immortals. God created us as immortal. We are immortal. We will be in this
glorified body. It's almost just even too hard to comprehend when you think about a trillion years
in the future, having lived trillions of years, effectively, trying to think back to this time
where we live 70, 80 years, maybe. It's just like this tiny little sliver of our existence.
it's almost even hard to believe
that we'll be able to remember it at all
you know
so I don't know I just take great comfort
in that in those moments
yeah we're destined
we're destined for glory guys
like this
I love being alive
and I love seeking after God's will
for like what it is that we're supposed to be doing here
now he has us here for a reason
but this is transient
In the words of Janet Yellen, this is transient, man.
All right.
We've got one more teal clip we have to show,
and then we can move on.
Let's see here.
I believe it is this one,
where Peter starts talking about the Antichrist.
This is my very specific question for you, right?
You're an investor in AI.
You're, you know, you're deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies
of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on, right?
And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to
power and using the fear of technological change to sort of impose order on the world,
I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you were building, right?
Like, wouldn't the Antichrist be like, great, you know, we're not going to have any more technological progress,
but I really like what Palantir has done so far, right?
Isn't that a concern?
Wouldn't that be the, you know, the irony of history would be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist
accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
Yeah.
there are all these different
scenarios. I obviously don't think that that's what I'm doing.
I mean, to be clear, I don't think that's what you're doing either.
I'm interested in how you get to a world willing to
submit to permanent authoritarian rule.
Well, but
again, there are these different gradations of
this we can describe, but
But is this so preposterous, what I've just told you, as a broad account of the stagnation that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism?
This is 1 Thessalonians 5.3.
The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.
And we've submitted.
this is yeah so yeah i can guarantee you that you were not expecting a uh a thessalonians
reference but man peter just lives to leaves lives to please man he just sees loves throwing
us theological cabinet please tim make sense of that for us well i mean i think
yeah i think to his point there can be different flavors of peace and safety you know this is kind
of like the 1984 account of the world versus the Brave New World account of the world of
totalitarianism.
There is a strong kind of outwardly very masculine brute force form of totalitarianism, you know,
that comes with its own promise of peace and safety in 1984, Big Brother, you know, crushing
your face forever and ever.
Or there's this more kind of feminine maternal nurturing form of totalitarianism that comes
through technological, you know, peace and safety.
And, you know, we will kind of make sure
everyone breeds correctly.
And we all have our drugs and our sex
and our entertainment.
And, you know, in a lot of ways,
our world looks a lot more like the latter,
Brave New World, you know,
it looks like a lot more likely,
at least in the West,
that people would be kind of allured
by technological progress and ease and comfort.
So, but I think they're both dangerous.
I mean, there's all kinds of ways
you can promise peace and safety
through the strong man or through, you know, the nanny state.
But they're both huge problems and dangers.
And both of them, you know, to use the word antichrist,
something that stands in the place of Christ,
you know, only Christ can be Christ.
And Jesus warns, he says, yeah, in the last days, watch out.
A lot of guys are coming claiming I'm the Christ, I'm the Christ.
And, you know, obviously that was happening a lot in the first century
around the destruction of the temple.
But there's an element of that, that there's all kinds of ways
that people come promising to be the Messiah.
Elon Musk says
you know my way
is the messianic way forward
and
Sam Altman says
no my way is the messianic way forward
and it's like
I think as Christians
we're called to be
wary of all of it
this is the classic
technologist
take
they've got hammers
and everything is a nail
it's the same thing happens
in Bitcoin
Bitcoin is the ultimate hammer
and all the world's problems
are nails
so
it's no different
are you guys familiar
Slavoj Zizek
and
mm-hmm okay so he's like a philosopher he's a slovenly mess of a man uh but his last name is
spelled z-i-z-e-k but one of the things he um one of the things he talks about is basically
uh he just basically says something to the effect of listen we can learn us us atheists can learn a
lot from the christians they do lots of they've done lots of good things and really cool things
and we should imitate them and so uh yeah there's just this is one of the things where it's like and
Now, again, Peter's not an avowed atheist.
But I mean, just looking at,
to look at the world
and just to try to just look at Christianity
and just say, all right,
we're gonna pluck out these things.
And then we're just gonna just try to copy paste them
into our own conception of the world.
Here, this actually, it's proof texting.
It's like, we're gonna find this verse
and then, ooh, this suits Palantir.
This suits Palantir's purposes.
Here, we can just quote this one.
Uh, and I mean, just to, it's just wild to hear scripture being quoted.
Uh, I mean, very, very weird, very, uh, odd days that we're in.
You can, it's super interesting.
The, the world in which we're living in, where people are trying to, trying to reconcile
with their own brokenness, trying to reconcile with, uh, a world in flux and trying to figure
out how to make sense and order it.
and again, to some degree, recognizing that that is part of what God wants to do,
but doing it with a hermeneutical approach that I think is horrifying.
So hopefully we can get Peter some better theology and help him kind of make sense of Thessalonians better.
Tim, have you ever preached through Thessalonians?
I never had.
to just all the weird eschatology stuff.
It's like, I don't know.
That's tricky.
Tim, you're born for such a time of this.
Let's go.
We just need to start preaching through the Thessalonians.
We actually do have a,
we have actually shockingly
a few different connections to Peter Thiel,
if you can believe that.
I know like three degrees,
three different people
who are literally friends of Peter Thiel.
So it's potentially possible
for us to actually get at them.
So that might be something we should do maybe.
Yeah, I was not expecting Antichrist talk either.
That was wild.
Anyhow, guys, wild things are happening.
God opens up opportunities for us to talk about all kinds of stuff.
Let's keep moving here.
The next thing we have, Tim, this is one that you shared.
Let me, it's a Presby cast.
Who would have seen this one coming that you guys would share this?
I'll let you tee this up.
um okay presby cast i just thought this interesting this guy is a uh he's a ruling
elder in the pca or some people call these guys lay elders um it's just made me think of a lot of
people i know in kind of bitcoin world um he says uh a warning and encouragement for those returning
to christianity in the last several years you know with a nod to some of these guys like peter
teal or joe rogan or guys like that who are interested in christianity but or maybe missing
what it's really about.
It says,
the normal trajectory
for the faithful
is to find a settled home
in a local church.
Finding online affinity groups,
being based,
or heavily,
newly radical political
social views
is not enough.
A new taste
for singing psalms
as opposed to praise jingles.
Aversion to seed oils,
becoming woke
about Israel or race
or whatever.
None of these things
are the fruit of the spirit.
If your spiritual journey
does not end
in the sometimes boring
or horrors,
a borderline boomerish
local church,
you may still be on the wrong road.
I just thought that there's a good amount of wisdom in that.
And this is kind of one of my little hobby horses
is trying to encourage Bitcoiners
to just embrace the kind of normy boringness
of being a Christian and of the local church
for all the things that may frustrate you about the church
and frustrate me about the church.
Jesus loves the church and died for it.
And local churches are wonderful.
And we all like Bitcoiners.
We like hanging out with Bitcoiners
because it's hard when everyone thinks you're insane
and people get excited to come across other Bitcoiners,
but you should be deeply involved in a local church
as frustrating as it may be because it's wonderful
and God does so much for us through people
who are different than you and have different perspectives
and different experiences and different generations.
It's just a beautiful, wonderful thing.
So yeah, I don't know.
I just like the way he said that.
I think sometimes people can get a little too
kind of fixated on certain aspects of Christianity,
especially Christian ethics and,
oh this thing about following jesus or this thing about god's laws it's so based and it's so cool
and it's like okay yeah we should be excited about that but um yeah you know most of all you know do
you love christ you know is he is he a priority in your life you know are you knowing him more and
more and more and obviously a lot of that can be way overdone uh emotionally or kind of sentimentally
in terms of you know this kind of jesus my boyfriend mega churchy stuff but like you know
And you never, ever get beyond knowing Christ and drawing closer to him and delighting in him.
As a Christian, this is the whole point.
This is going to be the best thing about heaven.
It's not that there's no fiat and no sin and that all your buddies will be there.
But the best thing about heaven is that Christ is there.
Yeah.
And so, you know, reflecting that now in your life.
And if the church is the body of Christ with all of its failures and its sins,
then you should be deeply invested in the church and love the church.
yeah you should definitely be going to church but then also the flip side is you don't have to be
like some super christian missionary to uruguay or something you know to like
to get into heaven yeah yeah yeah yeah i do i do think go ahead i was gonna say jim and i were
recently talking about this famous uh diedrich bonhoeffer quote he is a famous uh lutheran
pastor in the 30s uh resisted hitler tried to kill him in prison because of trying to
involved in a plot to kill him um got executed right before the end of the war but he has this
little book on christian community and you know bonhoeffer had some weird stuff theologically but
you know one of his famous lines from this book on christian community is about how the person who
loves their idea of community more than the community itself destroys the community and um
i don't know it's not just a bitcoiner problem it's it's a you know a problem among all kinds of
very zealous, motivated, idealistic people.
But yeah, this idea of what you think the church should be
or what Christian community should be,
and you just kind of end up becoming just frustrated and jaded
and just a complete pain in the rear end to everybody around you
instead of just accepting your boring, normal, sinful community
that God's given you.
Yep.
That book is Life Together.
I remember reading that quote and it was just wild.
It's just such a timely word.
And I do think as well, I mean, the reality is, again, if you are a new Christian, you ought to think about, no matter how clearly you think you see things, you ought to think about yourself as a child.
Like you're a child spiritually.
And the reality is that children need older people.
And so there's a real sense both that you, whether you recognize it or not, you need older people.
You need people who've walked with the Lord for longer.
God, there's tons of scriptures that talk about the wisdom of the age, the wisdom of
the gray hair.
There's tons of, you just need wisdom and experience.
On top of that, those aged people and people who've walked with the Lord longer need you.
Like they need, like God works.
The way that he works is like we all can encourage each other.
And so the fact like if you're some random Bitcoiner who found yourself becoming a Christian, like there are churches that need reminders that God just plucks people out of.
God has normal ways.
The normal way is, you know, you grow up as a kid and you hear the scriptures and you come to trust in Jesus and you grow up.
And that's God's normative way.
But God definitely works, still just saves people out of seemingly nowhere.
And so like just the reminder of that and the encouragement that comes from, you know, your testimony.
In the book of Revelation, it talks about basically the saints overcame by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony.
This is a powerful thing.
And so there's a real sense in which you need others and there's a sense in which others need you.
And so you need to see God working in others.
You need to have a sounding board for the struggles that you're having.
These are all really, really important things.
And just to mock or just don't think you need a church that doesn't seem as based as you wished it would be is just a huge error.
So, yeah, good word.
Appreciate that, Tim.
Now, should we address the elephant in the room?
I mean, Bitcoin is absolutely ripping right now.
I'm not even paying attention.
Yeah, we're almost to 1.6, 1.16.5 now.
Oh, my gosh.
so I'm looking at oh my gosh okay well um yeah I mean it's great I just I don't know somehow
the lord is putting on my heart to just like get this off my chest right now please do not
ape him with tons of leverage right now just please don't do it like don't don't do it like
it's great.
Bitcoin's going up.
We all want it to go up,
but like,
just don't,
don't do it.
Yeah.
Amen.
Go touch grass,
as the kids say.
Go touch grass,
eat some ribeyes,
go to the lake.
Don't smoke grass.
All right.
Now,
again,
you're in searing pain.
In speaking to other timeless wisdom,
let's check out a tweet from James Wood.
It's,
it's almost always a good,
a good thing to do.
Just go find a James Wood tweet.
Most of the time,
Talk about on your podcast with your bros.
You need some tweets.
Just go dig into James Wood.
You're probably going to find lots of Augustine.
Speaking of people who go find wisdom from the ages James is a friend He again we keep finding ourselves surrounded with Presbyterians James let see what James has to say Tim this is yours I let you do it Go for it
Okay.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so I just saw this.
James Wood, I think he's writing a book right now
on St. Augustine.
And this is a fifth century bishop
and pastor in North Africa.
He had this quote.
This one here you're showing us
is a response to a guy.
He had this quote where he basically says,
hey, why does God allow
for there to be good kingdoms and bad kingdoms in the world.
You know, we all hope and pray for good, godly kingdoms
submitted to Christ and doing his will.
But, you know, most people for most of history
have lived under very bad kings and kingdoms.
And, you know, there's a lot of things
about our political environment now
that are terrible and regrettable and awful
and cause all kinds of suffering for people.
So James Wood put this quote from Augustine,
why does God allow that?
And he basically said, you know,
He wants to continually train people not to yearn for these things in the sense of putting your ultimate hopes in them, that this is what life is all about. It's about ease and comfort and prosperity in this world.
some guy replied to him and said
no that's dumb
you know it's a good thing to want to have
godly good political
rule in this world
and James Wood
basically
wrote back and said no no no no
of course no one's saying that that doesn't matter
but we need to
I thought this was
interesting in the middle of this page
Augustine also recognizes how fragile
and unstable these arrangements are at this time
God raises up a Constantine
and for the Anabaptists in the room,
James Wood thinks that's a good thing.
But he also raises up a Julian,
Julian the apostate, Roman emperor.
Augustine calls us to relate properly to these goods,
real goods.
It's a good thing to have a good king
in a good political situation,
but we need to, I thought this was good,
we need to hold them somewhat loosely
without losing our firm hope in the full
and permanent realization of our desires,
even political desires in the eschaton,
in the age to come,
in the redemption of all things.
which in some ways are partially experienced now in the church as kind of a foretaste of the new creation to come.
So anyways, just another reminder to all of my Bitcoiner friends out there, whether you're a Christian or not,
having things work out economically and socially and politically in this world is a good thing.
We should try our best to aim for them, but ultimately they will disappoint us and they will be frustrated in all kinds of ways.
And our ultimate hope is in the age to come.
the eternal weight of glory beyond all compare. Yeah. I think it, again, looking at, looking at
even sufferings, you know, Jim, you were talking about looking at sufferings as a gift and as
something for you to steward, something that is pointing you somewhere. I think that's, it's also
helpful to think about political situations in that way as well. Like if you, again, Paul talks
about the apostle Paul talks about, like, if you, if you have your freedom, use it, like don't,
don't seek to be enslaved again.
Like use your freedom to,
to serve the Lord.
Um,
and so it's not,
he's not basically asking you to love your slavery or love your,
your bummer situation that you're in,
but he just basically is advocating.
Yeah.
If you're Bonhoeffer.
Yes.
Like if you're Bonhoeffer,
you can kill Hitler.
Right.
So we're good with killing Hitler,
right?
And to,
he couldn't,
but yeah.
And to escape suffering,
suffering is not a good thing.
Uh,
no Christian should say death is wonderful or suffering is great or wonderful. But at the same
time, we also recognize that we live under God's wise, but often mysterious rule. And all of us
can look back and you ask yourself, what were the times in my life when I drew closest to God,
when I knew Christ the most? Well, probably if I had to guess 99 times out of 100, it wasn't the
good times in your life. It was the bad times. It was the suffering. C.S. Lewis says somewhere,
I think it's in his book on pain, that God whispers to us in our pleasures, but shouts to us in our pain.
And we wish that wasn't the case, but it's what we need.
You know, we're dense and we're slow and we wander.
God uses our pain to draw us back to himself.
It's like Solzhenitsyn, you know, in Gulag Archipelago talks about being in the Soviet prison system.
learning to love his cell,
learning to thank God for it
because he realizes that
if he had never been put
into the concentration camps,
he would have, you know,
never become interested in God
and used to see the good of it.
But, you know, at the same time,
spends his entire life
talking about how horrible it is
and trying to get rid of it.
But, you know,
Shining light on it.
In history, how God uses suffering.
Suffering is not good,
but he uses it.
I've sometimes wondered, you know,
maybe one of the reasons
that modern Western,
especially Americans,
are so profoundly depressed and unhappy and anxious and isolated in spite of all of their
material affluence and financial affluence overall compared to the world and compared to history.
Maybe in some ways this is baked into the cake of God allowing us to suffer so that we don't forget
who he is and how much we need him. You can fix things materially and economically and financially.
I know we all think the financial system is terrible and it's awful and it is, but in a lot of ways, most people in history would be happy to trade with us for our physical and our financial comforts that we have. But even so, we're a lot more unhappy than almost anybody who's ever lived. And I wonder if part of that is God kind of needling us and reminding us that you have not arrived and you won't arrive on your own. You need me.
yeah i really appreciate james james so there's this whole big conversation we haven't we talked
about it like tangentially and it'd be fun to do this in in greater detail at some point but
just this whole track people trying to correct or you know reckon with what is the appropriate
role of christian thinking about you know nationalism thinking about uh you know their
their citizenship here on earth like what does this look like uh how much should we embrace it
and James has been a helpful voice.
Another voice, this was not planned,
but another voice has been Miles Smith.
I think they are friends.
And Miles had, he shared basically this
kind of on the other end of the spectrum.
He's quoting for a reading
from one of David Platt's new books,
apparently, that Miles was not too big a fan of.
So it says, this claim from David Platt,
so let's just read this.
We'll kind of just skip down.
It's the second to last paragraph.
David Platt's, my contention in this chapter is simple.
While many factors contribute to gospel poverty in jungles, villages, and megacities around the world, one of the primary reasons, if not the primary reason, that billions of people remain unreached by the gospel is that the global purpose of God has always faced resistance from the nationalistic people of God.
Yeah.
So then Miles is his pushback here.
This claim from David Platt that isolated tribes at all haven't heard the gospel because of nationalism is completely idiotic without regards to how one feels or defines or feels about nationalism.
The Royal Navy did much to Christianize Africa as missionary.
This is, I mean, we could go a whole bunch of, go ahead.
I just said, uh-oh.
Yeah.
That's a bad word.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I mean, you could, we, we, we're, we're going to be, TGP's going to be releasing something
that's tangentially related to this, but yeah, this is one of these things where
they're like, nationalism is the boogeyman. It's like, it's the boogeyman right now. Everyone,
it's just associated with, oh, you know, Hitler. That's the only, the only possible, you know,
thing that you can have. Globalism is great. We won't look at any of the negative things that come
with globalism, but we're just going to make nationalism. If you, if you have any kind of
uh, love for your country, uh, or if you think that it's anything other than a completely
adulterated bad thing, uh, you, you're, you're anti-Christian and this is just, just so ridiculous.
So, um, yeah, I don't know. This is, we could, we could talk a lot more. Jim, I don't know if
you have anything to, to add to this. Um, I, I mean, I, I can agree the Royal Navy did a lot to
help well yeah that was kind of like what we're saying before it's not to excuse or justify things
that were genuinely sinful or caused all kinds of suffering you know okay yeah there's a lot of
problems with imperialism and you can look back and it's easy to look back on your ancestors and
dump on them and talk about how horrible they are but it's like at minimum you can also say
god used these things yeah in history you know and then even more than that you could say actually
there was good things that they did and it wasn't all bad. And to learn to appreciate that and
recognize there's some nuance there and it's, it's not all a hundred percent good, a hundred
percent evil, but yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's like, I will say, you know, probably most of us
and most Christians, I mean, Jordan, you've been a missionary. I've been a missionary. Um, most of
us probably do need to care more about the lost and do need to care more throughout the nations.
And David Platt, I think, you know, is being very heavy handed with kind of laying, really laying on the guilt trip about how you're big, bad Americans, you don't do enough. But it's like, yeah, you know, there is a good reminder there of it's not just about us. And it's not just about like, well, I'm all good. So I don't know. I'm giving one and a half cheers to David Platt. We probably should care more about evangelism and reaching the lost.
But that's not what he's saying. He's saying that the primary reason is because people don't want to share the gospel.
That's totally crazy.
Is because they're like, oh, we love America too much. America is more important.
I think there's another quote that Bill Smith had posted where David Platt says in this new book, you know, if you're not willing to move your entire family to the Middle East.
Oh my God.
If you're not a real Christian.
Like what?
Okay, no, that's not true.
But Jesus does call a lot of us to do really hard things.
Arguably all of us.
You know, does it mean you have to go to Saudi Arabia to be a missionary?
No.
But I do think there is an element of like, yeah, following Jesus is hard and it's costly.
Yes.
We all, we 100% agree.
Like this is, but to attribute like nationalism, like what he's aiming at is Israel in the Old Testament when they, you know, or like in, you know, Jesus's time where they hated the Gentiles.
and they didn't want the gospel to go to them.
I wouldn't even say that they didn't want to
because it was the Pharisees.
And then some of the early church,
there was confusion over what does this look like?
What does the inclusion of the Gentiles look like?
But to even describe that as if they were somehow hostile,
I mean, Paul is going out and he's a missionary.
He's sending other people on missions trips.
like this this is an insane thing to say this is yeah i mean david platt come on guy we yeah
this is just not good all right um we can move on there from there miles thank you we will be
tagging you below maybe we can get some of these guys on on the show we can we can definitely
hopefully get james at some point um let's see where do we want to go from here we've got uh
you got caitlin long i say we leave that one uh let's let's look at a listen speaking of
nationalism let's look at a collapsing german uh ponzi pension system that's that's a great one
the uh the threads write themselves here uh let me see here
this is professor saint ong uh or onge onge something i don't know how to pronounce it
uh let's germany's pension ponzi is collapsing and america is not far behind the warning comes
from one Thomas Colby Zero Edge,
who notes that Germany's pension scheme
is already out of money.
It's staying only by annual
123 billion euro infusions
from the federal budget.
That's a quarter of Germany's federal budget.
So in U.S. terms,
it's like transferring an annual
trillion and a half
to Social Security's whole.
The problem is Germany has a so-called
pay-as-you-go pension system,
meaning they spent all the surpluses
in the first couple decades,
the buildup of the Ponzi. Then when it hits zero, they have to plug the hole from current taxes.
By the way, American Social Security works exactly the same way with our zero point set to hit in
about eight to ten years. But it's already hit in Germany for three reasons. A shrinking work
course, Germans aren't having babies, soaring government spending driven by low-income welfare
gobbling migrants, along with massive increases in military spending. And third, suicidal green
energy policies, destroying jobs and economic growth. That pays for it all. So Germany has just
46 million workers, but has 21 million pensioners. That's growing by about half a million a year.
In other words, there's just two workers for every retiree in Germany. As for spending,
migrant unemployment benefits alone cost about $200 billion a year in U.S. terms,
throw in remedial schooling, many of them can't read, free housing and free health care,
and that could double. On top, NATO members just pledged to triple military spending to
pacify Trump, which would cost Germany, again in US terms, hundreds of billions per year.
Meanwhile, the German economy has been limping at just 1.2% growth for a decade now,
thanks to massive overregulation and a government that takes half of GDP.
Industrial output is actually below what it was in 2013. It nosedived in 2020,
when Germany effectively banned fossil fuels and nuclear,
shutting down generation plants one by one.
So far, they have shuttered nearly 14% of power generation.
This has nearly tripled energy prices,
which destroyed productivity in energy-intensive manufacturing like steel and cars.
It's now 20% below where it was in 2019.
Manufacturing lost 120,000 jobs in the last year alone.
U.S. terms, that's like losing half a million.
That's all matters because Donald Trump is doing everything he can to lure German industry
to the U.S., along with their five and a half million jobs with lower red tape and taxes,
lower energy prices, and a big, beautiful tariff umbrella.
So what's next brought to you by I Trust Capital.
For now, Germany will keep popping up the Ponzi by hiking.
All right, there we go.
So Peter is outlying this problem.
He's basically saying, hey, some of this is of our own making, right?
Some of this, and this is where, again, there's people who just want to put this all in the hands of immigrants.
Oh, we have so many immigrants.
They're the problem.
That's the only problem.
We should just talk about immigrants all the time and be frustrated with them.
And kind of what he's saying is, yeah, but you haven't been having kids.
And so a lot of these populations, whether it's in the United States or around the globe, a lot of these places in Europe, they haven't been having kids.
And so they don't have people to, you know, replace and be, you know, tax, not even taxpayers, but just like to be working, to be contributing cogs of the wheel, basically, as far as they're concerned.
And so, yeah, this is a whole thing of like, you can choose your actions, but you don't get to choose your consequences.
And so-
In some ways, it's like a national level picture of what we were talking about earlier with kind of the Peter Thiel.
oh if we
you can therefore
you should
and we can just
kind of solve our way
out of all these problems
and it's like
you ultimately
hit reality
and you hit math
and you hit God
ultimately
and they
you know
all these things
are being done
with great intentions
you know
in the
kind of
Chesterton says somewhere
you know
the problem with the modern world
is that
the Christian virtues
have run mad
you know
we kind of
overemphasize some Christian virtues
at the expense of others
and
you end up destroying yourself
even though
you could look at it
and say
oh no
but we're all about compassion and empathy and we're going to help the poor and it's like you
know that that's a really sad thing is that ends up hurting the weakest and the poorest most of all
and you know this is why we're so excited about bitcoin and trying to help people especially you
know savers and people who are trying to save for the future because it's like yeah these people
probably get their pensions but it will be in printed worthless euros that they won't be able
to buy anything with.
Yeah.
Nothing stops this train.
And with that,
we will stop this pod.
We are grateful for you guys.
Thank you for taking part
in episode 19
of To the Unknown Pod.
We'll be back,
hopefully with Oshawa
and the Island Boys
on Tuesday.
Again, if you're listening to this
and you like what you're hearing
and you'd like to hear more
and you'd like to incentivize us
to do more,
one way that you can do that
is by going and leaving reviews
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Those are the two most influential podcast sites.
And then you can also like these live videos on YouTube.
We are grateful for you all.
If you're listening, Jordan needs to finish this Kickstarter campaign.
That's right.
Another $600.
Peter Thiel, come on.
Absolutely, yes.
Peter, actually, all you have to do is you can choose any of the tiers,
and then once you get to check out, you can actually choose to donate even more.
So just feel free to throw a few hundred million at that.
This will be a much better use than putting it towards Palantir.
Jim will be much happier
Jordan will get you
a custom inscription
on the Bitcoin blockchain
to sign your book
I would not
I would turn down
hundreds of millions of dollars
rather than put an inscription
on Bitcoin blockchain
that's a good question
we should talk about that next time
is it worth
would you
would you accept
a hundred million dollars
and do an inscription
this is
this is Satan
standing on top of the temple
telling Jesus to jump
you know
look at all the good
that'll come
I don't know if it's quite
on that level
man does not live
by inscriptions alone
for sure
anyhow we are
grateful for you guys Jim Tim thank you guys
go check out Magnolia Doubt Foundation
and see what
they're doing they're doing a lot of good work
we are grateful for you we'll see you in the next episode
of To The Unknown Pod