And we are live. Welcome to episode 26 of To the Unknown Pod. This is the podcast where,
again, we who are just dads and Bitcoiners and husbands and friends get together and just hang
out and talk about things that we found helpful on Twitter. My name is Jordan Bush. I am the
executive director of TGFP Media, which exists to help Christians understand and use Bitcoin
for the glory of God and the good of people everywhere. Today, I am joined by two-thirds
of the normal Tuesday crew, Oshawa Hawthorne, Ryan Finley. I'll allow you guys to introduce
yourselves just this once.
What's up, Jordan? Oshawa Hawthorne, executive director of Brilliance Labs. We're a startup
incubator for kingdom-focused projects in Portland, Oregon, and we're working on some
global projects with Bitcoin as well.
Hi, Jordan. Great to be here. My name is Ryan Finley, father of six. I'm an entrepreneur. I work with my kids a lot on their ventures. And yeah, it's good to be here.
grateful for you guys Ryan for those of you who who may have heard from the last episode we still
have uh have just opened we're just decided he's just kind of abandoned us so we're you can submit
your resume if you'd like to replace him if you think you do a good job make a video for us and
uh and we will we'll have that ready and consider Matt sorry who'd I say Ryan right yes Matt yeah
Matt, we miss you.
Bob, there's open auditions.
No, I was kidding.
Matt is in Italy with his wife and six kids, so they're having lots of fun over there.
Again, we'll have lots to talk about when he gets back.
He's been shooting us tweets, and what's going on there is pretty wild.
But today, guys, we are talking about low-time preference parenting.
This has become a pretty common theme on this podcast,
given how many kids we have between the four of us.
I believe as of last count, what was it?
Is it 20, 25?
I think 24 going at 25.
So yeah, just to get everybody up to speed.
Oh, go ahead.
Almost 25?
Are we almost to 25?
Well, we're pro-life people here, so we are 25, Ryan.
I don't know what's going on in Portland, okay, but what's going on in Portland, Kim?
so for those of you who are not keeping track at home
I have four kids with number five
due in about three weeks
Asho has eight kids
he has one who's about I guess
three months old and they just are getting
ready to drop off their oldest at college
six months old and then almost 19
wild and then
Ryan's got his oldest is 19 as well
youngest is four
Elijah just turned 19
yeah
oldest is almost 20
Yeah, I was 20. Okay. And then youngest is six?
Yeah.
Yeah. And then obviously, as we mentioned, Matt has six as well. So we have a bunch of kids. So
parenting is something that comes up a lot. And so we are blessed to be joined by two of the
speakers from the Bitcoin for Everyone conference, the Bitcoin conference in Portland a couple weeks
ago. Ryan and Ashwa had the opportunity to present about this exact topic. So we just thought,
you know what, this would be a great thing to talk about in more detail. And so I don't know,
well, I'll let you guys kind of take the floor and just kind of take it where you will.
Yeah. Well, first, as we get into that, I'd love to introduce my oldest,
who we're actually in South Bend, Indiana right now. We took the whole crew in our big transit van
driving east on a road trip to bring my oldest, Abigail, to college in Michigan.
So she's going to Hillsdale, which creates the most interesting conversations.
Either there's a blank look of like, okay, Michigan, okay, whatever, great, happy for you,
or sorry it happened.
like they just have no reference or or or there's two other common like extreme responses
one is like the wow you're i get to like they want to shake my hand you're a parent of a
hillsdale student what and like wow how do you do that or like oh i hear that's the that's where
all the future christian elite go to so like apparently there's some like secret elite club
that you get to join when you walk down the,
when you graduate from Hillsdale or something.
Or it's the opposite.
And this is actually, so my mom is not a believer.
She has some different perspectives on life and politics
than I have.
But she did her own little research
of where her granddaughter's going.
And apparently if you Google Hillsdale,
you find out that it's basically Donald Trump's school.
and uh and she's going to like the this is like uh or right indoctrination camp
uh and and i had to explain to her i said mom actually hillsdale's been around longer than
donald trump i've been like it's literally like as old as as like harvard and yale like it's been
around a long time donald trump will come and go um by god's grace hillsdale will still be there
so so yeah so she's going off to to school she's she's with me i don't know how much i gotta move
over the camera for her to say hi hey abigail hey abigail but how about this let's let's do
just a short interview i'll ask her a a single question actually about our our parenting
um session because she was there we had the whole crew like filling the room
with all our kids.
At the conference, yeah.
But Abigail,
what stood out to you
about our parenting talk?
Was there anything helpful or interesting
or totally inconsistent
with how we actually have parented
and lived our lives?
Like, what...
I'm trying to say,
what's easier for me to narrate
what you talked about
than to...
Off the top of my head, answer that.
I mean...
We're going to need you to speak in your presentation voice, Adelio.
Okay.
I mean, I think the strangest part was hearing him,
because I'm not as familiar with the Bitcoin community
and the people that were in the room.
It was as though he was talking to all of his friends
and people that all agreed with him,
but he was doing it in Portland, Oregon.
And so for me sitting there, it's like, okay, yeah,
this is all normal for dad to be saying this.
But has he quite realized who he's talking to?
So I don't know who it was.
I don't know if you noticed this, Ryan.
So there was at least one gal who walked out in the middle of our session.
It may have been before or after you said that women should stay at home.
And raise the kids while the dads go off and work.
We did say that.
But no, I think that's a great point,
is that we brought to it a Christian worldview
and a worldview that some would say is very traditional
in the sense that, yeah, dads should provide for their wives and kids.
and that if you want to not outsource parenting to the state and the government
and not have kids that are raised as essentially autonomous midwit,
then you actually have to invest in parenting them.
I mean, I think that's not a wrong conversation to have with people,
but it might have been a little easier if you'd had more time in which to explain your assumptions
and explain why they were good assumptions.
Because otherwise, you have to be talking to an audience that is either willing to listen to you
to see what on earth you're trying to get at or agrees with you.
I think she's right.
Yeah, I was, you know, yeah, I absolutely agree.
I think we were limited to, was it 20 minutes?
Five minutes?
30.
Yeah, that was challenging.
My main point there was just that there's nobody better in the world to raise their children than the mothers of those children.
And, yeah, there's a lot of voices in our culture that downplay that.
And I was just kind of sharing, not just from a Bitcoin perspective, because I think one of the things that parents who educate their own kids, they get to impart to those kids is like a high agency and an ability to think for themselves and really, really wrestle with things.
but also
yeah just what's actually best for those kids
and what's best for them long term
and I think
I don't think our culture understands
how much harm they do to kids
just sending them away from their parents
even from a really young age
and that's
yeah
so I was like
encouraging
yeah hoping to have an impact there
so
yeah
I just think it's one of these things, I mean, as somebody who was sitting there and thoroughly enjoying it, it was funny just to think about these things that you're saying, which would have been the most normal vanilla things in the entire world up until like five minutes ago.
they come across as very bracing like when you when you hear them like espouse and and again like
you guys weren't advocating radical things you're just basically again saying something like uh mom
should stay home like with their kids which again everybody practiced you know and everyone knew this
but i think one of the things that just yeah it was bracing hearing it all at at one time uh but
again, I'm, I'm, and this is a topic for another episode is I'm fully of the, I mean, I think this
is one of the things you see throughout the scriptures is you see like God's, God's people,
uh, speaking in very bracing ways that are very, uh, non PC and that, uh, are often offensive.
And, and again, you guys weren't even, you guys weren't even offensive at all in your presentation
or your manner or anything like that,
but just the content of what you were saying,
there definitely were people who were offended by it.
But again, actually, to the contrary, at the same time,
I think I was actually surprised about how little pushback you guys got.
And there were actually a fair number of people in the audience
who had had public school educations
who basically said it was the worst thing that ever happened to them.
And so I think that I, yeah, I do think that we're kind of getting to a point where you've had people who've experienced, they've experienced public school education, they've experienced a lot of the stuff that comes with that.
And because of how bad it was, they're willing to hear critiques of it and they're willing to consider alternatives to a degree that maybe they wouldn't have been before the kind of the cultural moment that we've been in early for the first time in recent cultural memory.
if if i 100 and if i could have if i could redo it i would have given you know a very applicable
illustration and i would have so portland is a huge animal city like everyone has dogs and cats
it's like and animal adoption is like the biggest thing in the world there and like i would have
brought up the fact that in general in nature um it is not controversial to say that uh baby
animals, baby birds and wildlife and dogs and cats and things like that are best raised by their
mothers. And it's not controversial. And actually, I mean, you literally will get people that will go
to war fighting for animals to be able to be raised by their mothers. But then when it comes
to humans, it's offensive to say in our culture today that children should be raised by their
mothers yeah now that's just absolutely insane and it's just so um and how we got there obviously
that's a longer discussion but um yeah anyways yeah awesome any other questions or ryan do you
have any questions for abigail any other things you want to you want to ask her
while you're thinking i'll ask one so abigail i mean you you've been you were homeschooled up
until what grade nine up until ninth grade and then you went to like a catholic school right
yeah technically not a catholic school but there were a lot of catholics there
okay so there's like a classical classical christian school okay um so what was what was
that transition like, did you feel, you know, equipped for that, you know, with, with homeschool?
I think one of the, one of the things that you hear, one of the pushbacks that you hear
from people who don't have any history with, with, uh, homeschooling is, well, what are you
going to do for social activities? Like what, you know, what are you, how are you going to
know how to talk to people basically, if you've been, you know, put in a closet for up until
you're in ninth grade? Uh, so, you know, what did, what did that look like? Uh, you know,
what were your, how did you feel, I guess, maybe leading up to that year about homeschool? Was it
something you enjoyed? Is it something that was, you know, wasn't your favorite or, you know,
and then when you did make the transition, what did, what did that, what was that like for you?
Yeah. Okay. So I have to explain a few things first before I can quite answer that question.
First, you have to consider that right before my ninth grade year was COVID. And so while we were,
and i'm in oregon and portland and so they lock down pretty much everything so and then also i'm
slightly more introverted than some people and i have a very large family yeah and so
the introvertedness means that i'm not your social butterfly that wants to be with people
all of the time and that doesn't have anything to do with me being homeschooled second is that i
I have such a large family that, I mean, my family was the size of my class when I did end up going to school.
So, that's a bunch of a difference.
And, okay, with the COVID thing, so I was homeschooled up until ninth grade.
And depending on the year, we do different homeschool co-ops, whether that was classical conversations or another one that we just, a bunch of moms started and has since faded away.
But once a week, I would have that school classroom-esque thing.
And then outside of school, there would be church or there'd be sports or there'd be friends' houses.
So I had that interaction.
I also had books, which are, believe it or not, especially if they're old books, actually good for that sort of thing.
Because you learn how to think and how people talk and you learn interesting things And then you being me you want to go tell everyone about those books And so it a helpful conversation starter
So you're saying you didn't need Taylor Swift in order to learn how to converse with your friends.
That wasn't a required travel to capture.
Whether it was a mixture of COVID or my being an introvert or...
You guys all had to wear masks your first video and masks.
No, there was no video.
That was only if people got sick.
Okay.
But yes.
So the transition between homeschool to five days a week, eight hours a day with lots of people I don't know.
School the whole day long.
Yeah.
Was a big transition.
And it took me an entire year to process all the teenage emotions.
It wasn't drama. I'm very thankful for that, but it was as it felt like drama because I was used to laid back homeschool kids.
Correct. Well, great. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. And so then what's the second part of that?
Second part was, you know, once you're, once you were in school, it took you a year to get adjusted.
You know, what was your, you know, how did you, you know, like the rest of your, your school year?
And then how do you feel like it prepared you for college?
Do you feel like it, I mean, are you happy?
Do you feel like you're prepped to go?
Or are you going to kind of be chasing your parents down the street in the van when they're pulling out of there?
I think I would have been far less prepared for college without it because it would have been that adjustment to five day a week school.
Maybe it's not actually eight hours a day because for some reason college is, for some reason you're like classes each day.
I'm not quite sure why.
maybe I'll discover the workload is actually more than I think it is
from what I've heard other alumni from my school saying
in general the first two years of college are supposedly much easier than they are for most people
given the rigor of the high school I went to
but then again Hillsdale is also known for its rigor
so we'll see what that is like
yeah
Ryan, any questions?
Hmm. Yeah, I would say, yeah, we talk a lot about, uh, I'd be, Abigail, I'd be curious to hear, um, things that you're most, um, encouraged by your generation and things you're most concerned about, uh, from your generation.
Just as, you know, you're out of high school now going into college and just kind of, it's like a moment of reflection between the two seasons of life.
Yeah, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on those two.
Or maybe you could start with the negative, maybe the concerned and then encouraged.
So we can end on a positive.
Yeah, it's easier to think of.
So here's a school-wise one.
So in school, we had to read both the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as a bunch of other philosophical works and all sorts of stuff. But the Iliad, I think it's, it must have been the Odyssey. And so I'm an avid reader and the curriculum at the school builds you up to such a point that these books aren't as overwhelmingly hard as they might be if you just crack them open.
on your own.
Yeah.
But I remember hearing
as we were in the middle of the Odyssey
that there were other classical schools in our area
that didn't actually read the Iliad and Odyssey,
but they read graphic novelizations of them
because they had found that they were too difficult to read
for their 11th and 12th grade students.
And while I do understand that our culture has, our reading capabilities have dwindled, yet there was an entire classroom of us that could do it.
And I was reading the Iliad at 12 with a whole other class people.
And so I love books.
And the lack of appreciation as well as the lack of ability for some of these older, more complex books is disappointing, sad.
it's also it's their loss for not being able to read these books that were
staples of curriculums set for centuries yeah it's an issue with thinking do you like that
the generation isn't being trained to think is it attention span is it vocabulary like what what is
i think it's probably all of them i don't know how much to lay at the foot of the teacher
for not being able to guide the class through it.
And depending on the translation you read,
some will be easier to read than others.
And in ages past, people wrote English grammar
in the same way the Romans used Latin grammar.
And as people have written more and more books,
we've stopped doing that and used more simpler language construction.
and so an older book will often be harder to follow because the verbs are in strange places
yeah but i do i do think this is one of those constant i mean you could see you see this
principle being fleshed out in like a hundred different places you see this in churches as
well you have churches who will again they'll try to dumb everything down to the lowest common
denominator and then they'll they'll present it you have other churches that again or they just
kind of, this is the standard, you know, we're not saying anybody who isn't up to this, you know,
is dumb or like, we're not making fun of them, but like, we're not going to, we're not going to
lower. And, and so, and, you know, there's just variety of philosophies and there's, there's
ideas that go with that. But I do think, yeah, the danger with just constantly trying to dumb
everything down for everyone is, I mean, it's going to have societal consequences and it is.
Uh, and then also, again, I think, so one of the things you're talking about is just the,
you know, you, your body nutritionally can get, can adapt itself to really whatever you're eating,
which is actually an extraordinary capability of the body. Like God has designed your body to be
able to get used to eating just utterly atrocious things and make do with it. Uh, and so you, you
see that just with the, the, you know, the, uh, you see that reflected in a similar way with the
people's, uh, the diet of their mind, right? Like, so if you, if you're consuming, uh, Taylor Swift
and, you know, her banal takes on romance and all these things, and if you're, you know, you're
consuming, uh, videos and all these kinds of things, you're, you're training your body and
your mind to expect and to desire and to enjoy certain things, uh, and, you know, training your
mind to, to, you know, be accustomed to a certain sort of thing and to not be accustomed to other
things. And, and so, yeah, I mean, you, you do want to like, that's something that doesn't change
quickly. Uh, and it's something that given that that's true, you, you should be want to, especially
in your, in your most formative years, you should be wanting, wanting to help students and, you know,
young people, you know, move along this process and, and be challenged to grow as much as they
can during that period. Uh, because if, if you're not, then it's just going to get harder once you
involve having to work for a living and all these other things, there's going to be the tendency to
just kind of drift with time, not sharpen up as time goes on. Yeah. I just pulled up that tweet
that said 25% of American high school students are functionally illiterate. Share that joker there,
Ryan. Share that joker on your list. I put it down. I put it down in the chat. Okay. Yeah.
40 to 60 percent of college freshmen need remedial math, English or both.
Like I almost equate it to like exercising, like running.
And I would say the majority of kids aren't reading books at all.
And so it's like functionally not being able to run or jog.
And then all of a sudden, yeah, it's that that's one thing that scares me.
And I've actually just even recently I've.
uh yeah i've been on a big push like encouraging all of our kids all six of them to be reading
multiple books at a time um and now even more consciously pushing them off their phones
less twitter less like uh especially the younger ones like no social media but the older ones
way like just weaning themselves off of it just uh just because it's not helpful at all and uh
Yeah, we're in a very dangerous trajectory when it comes to that.
Because, yeah, some of the most valuable things we can learn are A, God's Word, but also from dead authors who wrote really incredible books a long time ago.
But if people don't read, then they're not filling their mind with those books.
So, yeah, it's kind of a dangerous trend.
yeah and again just this go ahead run go ahead ash i was i'll find the the tweet um but
elon musk had uh several months ago he tweeted on um on the iliad
um or yeah so he just is this 8 24 24 um here actually i'll i will do let me put these
what's the best way to share i'll i'll put them in the i'll put them in the signal um
because some people might be listening and they're like like okay how irrelevant can you be or like
how just, okay, nerdy, irrelevant.
Okay, great.
You read the Iliad, but how helpful, how relevant is that?
And so here you have the richest man in the world saying,
can't recommend the Iliad enough.
Best is Penguin Audiobook.
and then I shared one more tweet
where he's listing other audiobook recommendations
and most of these are like the ancient literature
the story of civilization by Durant
I mean the Gaelic Wars by Caesar
Genghis Khan by Weatherford
Like, these are meaty, weighty books.
And I think it's easy to just imagine, like, Elon Musk is this technologist that spends all his day just, like, trolling on Twitter and doing these crazy, like, sprints to build a rocket ship and, like, taking risks and all this.
but surely he's not an intellectual.
Surely he's not sitting down reading
or listening to the audiobook of the Iliad
or the Gaelic Wars.
But maybe that's not what he's doing today.
Maybe that was a part of his formation
as a younger man.
I don't know for sure.
But either way,
these are the audiobooks he listens to.
These are the big ideas
and the thinkers that influenced him.
and for us to raise up the next generation.
I remember having this, it was a call, Ryan was on it.
Jordan, I don't think you were on this.
We were talking to a certain Bitcoin influencer guy
that has really strong opinions about parenting and Bitcoin
and a lot of things.
I won't mention his name,
but he was arguing against college
and there's really good reasons
why you won't send your kids to college.
In fact, the short list that I have of approved colleges, I can count on one hand, right?
So there's a lot of huge problems in higher education, including Christian higher education.
You're taking risks as you send your kids across the country.
There's huge advantages of building your home and family network near you, especially if you have a home business and a home farm and those various things.
but this guy was arguing for why like you need to just train your kids in becoming full stack
developers and you need to just press into computer programming and that's where all the
money is that's where they're going to be most like uh productive and efficient in their work and
and and i'm like dude if you have a whole community of like christian coders and that's all you have
you're going to be maybe very wealthy, but you're not going to influence society in the long term.
You're not going to have deep thinkers.
Who are going to be your pastors?
Who are going to be your philosophers and your theologians and your storytellers and your myth makers?
Like these are all these important culture-making elements of society that we still need in building a Christian society, even, lo, a Christian nation.
But that's for another conversation.
Yeah, it is.
But no, I think the pushback though would be, but Ashwa, we can make so much money and get our work done in such a small amount of time that we still have time to do other work.
You know, like I was just reading this article or it was listening to a video where these guys were talking about how the vast majority, some crazy percentage of just people who've influenced the world, including people who were experts in science and experts and other things.
Like most of them had like a lot of authors.
Churchill was one of them.
There's a bunch of authors who they basically wrote for three to four hours a day on average.
Like that was their work day.
And then they would move on to other aspects.
They'd work at other things.
And so, again, I don't know.
I can see.
I see exactly what you're saying.
It is true that if you're just basically saying, hey, all we needed to know is how to code.
And then that will fix everything.
And it's like, no.
At the same time, I do think, because I think, and this is a conversation for another day,
I think that we're getting to a point where people are going to have to, by necessity,
work multiple jobs.
I think a higher percentage, and I think you're going to have a higher percentage of pastors
specifically, because you mentioned that one.
I think you're going to have to, we're going to have an increasing percentage of pastors
who are going to be forced to, you know, forced into bivocational work, or at least to consider
those things and at least as part-time things just because of things like currency devaluation
and a lot of these effects. So yeah, I don't know. I think there's some truth there that I think is
worth considering but I definitely don think it as straightforward as yeah coding fixes everything because we looking at I just had a call this morning with one of our brothers uh in the the Christian in this we have this uh text group with a bunch of Christian Bitcoin guys
And he basically was like, Hey, I'm looking at like, he's a programmer, full stack developer.
And he's like, yeah, I'm looking at like four more years of being able to do my job and get,
you know, being able to get paid for my job. And then I'm, I'm like preparing my extra strategy for
when the AI programming is to the point
where they don't need me anymore.
And so I think that that's another real wake-up call
for the techno-optimists or the programming optimists
who just think that you can do that
and then forget about having to really do anything else
outside of that.
Yeah.
Well, awesome.
Abigail, thank you so much.
You are free to hang out or free to...
Wait, wait.
What was the optimistic thing?
Oh, okay.
What was, what, we, we can't leave people hanging.
We gotta.
What are you optimistic about with your generation, Abigail?
Yeah.
The funny thing is, is that I'm actually not on social media a lot.
And so I don't, most of the things I draw on are from my own experience.
And it's hard to say a lot about the culture as a whole or the generation as a whole.
because of that.
I mean...
What about like, I know you do your
current events or current
popular issues
class last year and you guys spent a lot of time
thinking about current events.
We wrote the Code of Hammurabi.
The Code of Hammurabi.
Yes, it wasn't current events.
It's
world issues. That's not even
country issues
or global issues.
that's in the sense of world as in you have like car world or family world or it's more the group
of people thing idea and so the social like the social fabric issue that you would then go right
about was actually find uh find something that helps the social fabric here i i have even maybe
a perhaps more interesting question
that will tell you to our audience about Bitcoin.
And this is a hopeful thing.
So Abigail,
so we've spent time talking about Bitcoin.
You actually listen in a lot to like Uncle Ryan and I
when we're talking about Bitcoin
and when Jordan comes over and hangs out.
How has Bitcoin shaped your view of the future?
and how are you using Bitcoin in your life
as you're going off to college?
Well, I mean, it's such a topic of conversation in the household
that you can't get away from it.
And so you have to become a couple.
Well done, Ash.
And so that then means that it's an automatic part
of how I think about finances.
and so
yeah
it's
how do we teach you kids about
investing and how
did that lead into
having a week time?
We were given a weekly and then it was
a monthly and then it was a sometimes
I don't know when allowance
and it had three
jars and they had
construction paper wrapped around them and
taped on and had names on them and one
was giving, one was spending, one was savings. And I don't quite remember the dibbing up portion,
but it was 50% or more was in savings. And then the giving and spending might have been equal.
I don't remember. But for the longest while, the savings jar was never touched. And then,
I don't know how old I was, but we started talking about Apple stocks and investing money.
And then at one point, he wanted to convince me to help you buy an iPad for education purposes, and I didn't want to.
And then Bitcoin became a topic of conversation, and by that point, there was no allowance, and it was just money I'd made by working.
But, yes.
And has saving in Bitcoin served you well?
Very well, yes.
Yes.
So how much Bitcoin do you have?
I'm not going to tell you that
Well done
But I have to test
I'd also like to know the opportunity cost of that iPad purchase
If you would have just purchased Bitcoin
What would be worth like 20 grand
How much would an iPad have been like $300?
Yeah, I don't even remember that
It was a random conversation.
I don't think you really won an iPad.
When I was orange-pilling Osh, my main foe was Apple stock.
That was the giant that I had to slay to convince Osh.
I was buying Apple stock since before the iPhone came out.
It served me well.
Yeah.
yeah
and we had to get over
Benjamin Graham might not have
encouraged people to buy
Bitcoin
above $1,000 investor
ask me Benjamin Graham
alright well thank you again Abigail we appreciate you
and we're praying for you as you go off to school
yeah
talk soon Abigail
good luck
Yeah, and next time, Ryan, you're going to bring a couple of your boys on, or Jordan.
Yeah.
I'm going to bring someone on.
Yeah, my oldest is sick right now.
But yeah, we need to get at least one or two men in here.
Ash, how much more time do you have, man?
I can do like 20 minutes.
Okay, cool.
All right.
So in terms of other things, so I mean, you guys, I know you guys have your presentation
that you guys gave at the conference.
is there anything that you guys want to just share from that
I mean just things you feel like
would be given the conversations we've already had
that you guys want to
play or show up
Ryan you want to talk about the goal and kind of break down
that the Lewis quote
does that sound good
I'm going to pull it up
yeah
that Lewis quote
what we tried to do
so I kind of laid the philosophical
foundation
of low time preference parenting
and then Ryan worked through the practical how-tos.
So I asked this question.
I said, what is the goal of low-time preference parenting?
What do we want our kids to be like as adults, right?
And the issue that I observe is we know, okay,
we don't just want to breed NPCs and midwits,
but we go about the process very haphazardly
and not intentionally. And there's not a clear goal that parents have. And so I tried to lay out
what we thought was a foundational goal. And you'll notice it's not explicitly Christian,
because we didn't have a particularly Christian audience. But at the same time, it is built on a
Christian worldview. And so this is a quote. It's actually from the Hillsdale College Honor Code.
and we think this is a pretty good goal to shoot towards in in raising kids and it uh it goes like
this that this the student is honorable in conduct honest in word and deed dutiful in study and
service and respectful of the rights of others through education the student rises to self
government and that was this idea that we we keyed in on and in particular i think that there's a
a good bridge to your average Bitcoiner where they're like, yes, sovereign individual,
self-government. That sounds great. But I don't think, I think Bitcoin only gets you half of the
way there. Libertarianism only gets you half of the way there. It helps you not be the, just the
state kind of cookie cutter midwit, but it doesn't get you the root of self-government, which is
virtue, which is what the honor code calls the liberty of the soul. So here's a little bit more
unpacking of that honor code. Self-government is a challenge with the promise of a rich reward,
liberty of the soul. A soul enjoys liberty when it is ordered, when its passions are ruled by
reason and its habit is virtue. The college exists for the improvement and ultimate happiness
of its students. So here they're arguing that this idea of self-government has a foundation to it.
It has a reward to it, which is liberty of the soul, and it has a foundation. And that foundation
is passions that are ruled by reason and a habit of virtue. And that that leads to this ultimate
happiness. And then this is the quote that we actually didn't have time to really tease out,
but I think it'll be really interesting to talk about on this.
Hey, Ash.
Yeah.
Hey, Ash, go back a little bit.
Go back to that last, because you were breaking up a little bit.
So I just want to, for the sake of the audio, I just want to read it.
Because if people are watching, then they can see it.
But if they're just listening, there you go.
So the last part, so I'll read the last two sentences.
It says, a soul enjoys liberty when it is ordered,
when its passions are ruled by reason and its habit is virtue.
The college exists for the improvement and ultimate happiness of its students.
so yeah that's i mean it's excellent okay next page yeah so the reward of of self-government is
liberty of the soul and the the path to it the foundation of it is is a rightly ordered soul
right with passions ruled with virtue as a habit now here's that lewis quote he says i believe man
is happier and happy in a richer way if he yeah my my connection keeps disconnecting you're you're
breaking up you sound like you're in the what are you what are you robotic my connections in and out
go for you read it you you're speaking in tongues uh okay i'll read it i believe man is happier
This is C.S. Lewis. I believe man is happier and happier in a richer way if he has the, quote, the freeborn, sorry, the freeborn mind, end quote.
But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing.
For economic independence allows an education not controlled by government.
And in adult life, it is the man who needs and asks nothing of the government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.
who will talk like that when the state is everyone's schoolmaster and employer
i mean this quote is just absolutely bonkers i mean this is uh we one of my one of my favorite
uh sayings is that the logic is a time machine and it is literally like c.s lewis got in a time
machine and teleported to year of our lord 2025 took a look took a quick peek around and then hop
back in and went back and bend this because i mean this is we're seeing this all over the place
You know, before before what's it called? What was the big funding apparatus? America.
Big, beautiful bill. No, the one that got revealed to be just like slush fund for.
Oh, USAID. USAID. Before that kind of got found out. I mean, you have all these people who are on the government dime.
They're sitting there and again, they're terrified of losing this money. So they're not going to say anything against the government to risk losing it.
And there's a whole host of whole host more examples where this exact principle is at work.
Like whoever, if you take the king's coin, you are the king's man.
Like that's how this works in a lot of cases.
And so, again, Lewis understood this.
He articulated the danger in this.
And so, yeah, who will talk?
Who will tell the government that they disagree?
And who will stand up to the government when the government's paying their bills?
At the end of the day, Lewis basically said, yeah, it's going to be tough to do that.
and you're going to basically have the,
basically people are going to be able to call you
if it's true or not.
They're going to be able to say,
hey, you're being hypocritical.
You're telling me not to depend the state
while you're taking, you're on the stage.
Which is a huge reason why we're Bitcoiners
because the state has been allowed to get as big as it is
because of monetary debasement
and they're printing unlimited amounts of money
to fund the ever-growing deficit,
which if people were straight taxed
for all the money that they were spending,
there would have already been several revolutions
between when they first started this debacle,
whatever it was, 125 years ago.
112.
112 years ago.
Yeah.
And that really is the issue, right?
It's this, and we've talked about this before,
It's this passive aggressive form of taxation, secret taxation.
So we're just going to call it something different.
We're going to, I mean, there's, this is, this is very, it's very ancient, right?
This is, this is, I mean, when you see Satan in the garden, what does he do?
He literally, you know, basically, basically says, did God really say that?
You know, he asked Eve, like what God has told them.
And then he says, did God really say that?
And so he's, he's playing with the words.
He's redefining language. And this is this is what you see governments doing. You see governments doing the same thing. They're changing the nature of tax. Oh, this isn't really a tax. You know, we're not going to treat this like a tax. And that means that it's not a tax. It's like, no, that's not how that works. You know, this still this still is a tax. It functions just like a tax.
So even if you don't want to call it that because it's unpopular and will help people to see the reality of what's going on, it still hasn't changed the underlying reality.
Ash, welcome back.
Thank you.
Sorry.
Try again.
You're good.
Do we want to rapid fire through some of those end slides or what do you guys think?
Yeah.
Let's do it.
I can go, you can just, just touch on.
I do want to say one more thing because this is,
and this is worthy of its own episode too, is all of us as,
as Americans and people in the West, like we,
we want practical solutions. Okay. And there,
there absolutely is a place for this, especially in,
in Christian circles. I think there's like, there's, I know for me,
like one of the things that I started looking for practical resources around
parenting and practical resources, meaning like resources that could give me practices that I
could start implementing into my home, into my family. So, you know, that will help produce the
type of outcomes that we see the scriptures say that we should seek and just that will produce
good outcomes. And so there's nothing wrong with desiring those and we do need lots of those.
At the same time, and so there's one group of people who needs to hear that.
At the same time there is you know there a danger to only looking for pragmatic things and for always looking for these very again dumbed down lowest common denominator you know solutions rather than you know being going reading deeply and thinking deeply
and becoming a different type of person. You know, God, he does want us to have practical things and
we do need to implement practical solutions and practical, you know, practices in our lives,
But it's not, you should be very suspicious of your desire to want that too much.
because again, there's a lot of this where a lot of parenting and a lot of marriage and a lot of
just being a human is just, it's got to do with relationship. It's got to do with, you know,
reading and changing as you read the scriptures and changing as you spend time with other people
and spend time with other books as Abigail was mentioning. So I think that, you know,
those are both dangers to be aware of. And it's for you to have the wisdom to distinguish which
of those you are more naturally bent towards appreciating. And, you know, once you figure out
which one you're more naturally bent towards appreciating, then, hey, then maybe, okay, I'm
going to intentionally spend more time over here. So, yeah, I just want to say that because these
are very practical solutions that Ryan talked about at the end. And there's, for some people,
it's like, yeah, you definitely need these. And so, you know, free yourself by finding these and,
and being able to have the wisdom of other people who've walked before you in order to help implement some things.
Yeah. Thank you.
Just like a philosophy.
I would say that. Yeah.
We were reading, we were finishing up Ecclesiastes this morning.
And yeah, the challenge to fear God and obey his commandments is like,
ultimately, if you want the fountain and the source of a lot of these encouragements,
a lot of these, yeah, that's where they came from.
And it was like I said at the beginning of the talk, like almost all the topics that we were bringing up in our very quick talk, you could talk about each one of them for an hour or three, you know.
So it's just like, if anything, yeah, they're just, they were there, put in there to encourage and maybe it'd be helpful to some who are watching, listening.
So I'll read the assumptions really quick and then hand it over to Ryan.
If I break up, you guys just start talking.
Because, yeah, I don't know when the connection comes.
Sounds good now.
But the assumptions we had is stacking kids is even more rewarding than stacking sats.
We believe that children are a blessing.
The efficiencies of scale also apply to having kids.
Above three is free.
is how I like to say it.
Now, the reality of how expensive my life is right now
kind of begs to differ,
but there are efficiencies of scale
and it's not as hard as you people think.
They usually tap out too early.
And as long as you,
I mean, you've stewarded well the health of your wife
and I'll be controversial
and you don't vaccinate your kids
so that they don't get all jacked up and crazy.
like if you're able to set trajectories of discipline well and you teach authority to
your kids this is what i say there's good and bad authority you need to teach the difference
um and and then finally if you start with discipline before they are two you can trust
them with freedom when they are 16 by god's grace we've never had a terrible twos and
like yes the kids get moody kids have ups and downs and and going through puberty is always
going to be a challenge, but it doesn't have to be a catastrophe. And you can open up the options
and provide freedom because you can trust your 16-year-old because you've taught them discipline
and wisdom from when they were young. So those are my assumptions that I shared. And then here's
some practical advice. Ryan, you can just tell me if you want me to go forward or not.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, be consistently low time preference yourself. You know, the reality is, uh, you don't expect your kids to be something that you're not. Like, if you have weaknesses, your kids are going to have those same weaknesses. And so, yeah, it's a good, um, yeah. I said the kids will copy what we do much more than what we say. Um, yeah, we got to take care of ourselves, our culture, the things that love is, you know, completely forgetting about yourself.
and it's actually not.
Like, you know, it's the whole, the plane's going down,
you know, the oxygen mask, put it on yourself first.
It enables you to take care of others around you.
And it's the same thing with parents.
Like, father and mother, like, you need to take care of yourself,
you know, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
And if you don't, you don't have anything to pour out into your children.
And that has massive implications for the rest of their life.
And it changes your home.
it changes their you know everything so just encourage parents to to take care of themselves
and um yeah life's a race it's a journey aspire to finish well so think about the end often and
pace yourself and uh yeah encouraging you know a happy marriage good marriages are you know it's
a result of proof of work and not somehow finding a perfect match i mean our culture through trash
movies uh you know that everyone's been deceived into thinking oh you know there's this perfect
person out there that's going to complete me and it's the exact opposite um marriage is a refining
incredible institution that god created and um they take a ton of work um but
so like we proof of work like for bitcoiners um but yeah but it's one of the most like uh the
biggest things that children need. They need a stable, like they need their parents to have a
stable marriage. Um, I know this is a hard truth. Divorce is the ultimate rug pull on children. Um,
man, the most painful thing a child could possibly go through. Um, yeah, just encouraging,
uh, you know, couples to date their spouse weekly, guard that time, huge, huge long-term payoff.
yeah this is where I got to walk out at this point where I was encouraging mom to stay home
and I'm just like I when I say this I'm you know I'm not trying to jump into the culture war I'm
just literally you know I'm thinking about like the two three four five year old kids I think about
my six-year-old daughter she's as happy as you could possibly imagine and it's because she gets
to spend an enormous amount of time with my wife every day. And so I say that with, you know,
with that on my heart. And maybe I can encourage a couple of parents out there to just to revisit it.
There is a cost to it. You have to like budget around it and you have to reduce your expenses.
And somehow, you know, the Lord will provide, you know, if your goal is to honor him. And
yeah, dad has the freedom and the flexibility to be in children's life. I think that that's
such a big one like literally redesign your life backwards figure out how to pull that off it's you
know the more that that that could happen or if it's a even like in choosing career i mean there's
careers that pull dads away from their families for six months at a time and i'm like dude that's
that's tough like uh yeah yeah it just it is and it again i've got buddies uh you know i've got
buddies who are in the military, you know, again, this is, this is like something where,
you know, again, they're people, people make decisions and they're in situations. And so
like there, there's two sets of things, right? Like there's, there's prescriptive and there's
descriptive. There's a lot of the things that are talked about here that you're talking about,
where it's like, all right, Hey, these things are just true. Like these things are just
actually true. If with mom staying home, Hey, someone's going to be influencing your kids
all day long. Like it's either going to be somebody who is, who cares about them and whose
well-being is directly tied to their well-being.
And so you have mutual incentive alignment.
Or it's going to be somebody who doesn't necessarily have that.
And so there's going to be other things.
So this is not to be like personal.
This is not like any of these kind of things.
There just really are consequences to these things.
And then there's obviously going to be people listening to this
who because of their decisions up to this point,
they're going to be like,
all right, well, I do have to be gone for a few months at a time
or something like that,
depending on a few times every couple of years
just something like that. And so, you know, this really is just something to, it's like, all right,
so, you know, maybe this is, maybe this is an opportunity to, you know, to rethink my, and to
rethink career trajectory, or maybe this is an opportunity to, you know, to basically compensate
and be like, okay, you know, if I'm absolutely in this situation, there's nothing I can do about it
for the next, you know, this, for at least the next year and a half or something, you know, where
I'm going to be gone for a couple months or a few months or whatever, then how can I,
you know, as I'm presenting this to the Lord and basically saying, Lord, this was not a good
choice. Like I recognize like, this is not producing, uh, this is all, this is incentivizing
outcomes that I, that are not good. Uh, please help me to find a way out. Uh, and then please
help me to be faithful with what the situation that I'm in right now. And in the meantime,
uh, you know, this is not like, this is not a, what you guys are describing is not something
where it's like, all right, well, you know, we're, the ship has sailed on this, on this idea. Like
it's not like that at all. And I know that you guys aren't saying that at all, but for people who,
who are, you know, listening, like this is not some sort of rigid, uh, you know, one size fits
all. If you're not, if you're not a hundred percent perfect at this, then, you know, forget you.
Like that's not what's going on here. Like these are just, this is wisdom, practical wisdom,
you know, from, you know, millennia. Yeah. Yeah. And coming out of like, yeah, I just,
we put those down there. Like I've been a dad for 20, almost 20 years now. I still a lot to learn,
obviously. I don't have everything figured out. Yeah. But it's just, in general, it's just,
it's encouraging parents to consider the incredible treasure that children are,
an incredible responsibility that we have as fathers and mothers to raise our kids well,
to fear God and to love Him and obey His commandments, and also to take on the responsibility
of training them, educating them, and discipling them. And those are huge, like, those are the
most important tasks in our life. And at the end of our lives, like, realistically, they will be,
like our greatest accomplishments in the world.
And,
and in,
in light of that,
wrestle with each area of life,
like what is most helpful,
you know,
to my wife and my kids,
not making them an idol,
but just being a good steward of them.
And yeah.
And I think there's just too often we,
yeah,
we,
we get tempted to,
yeah,
to treasure other things and,
and to make other things more important.
And, you know, and we just, yeah, we should always be fighting back.
And I would say our culture is probably one of the, is the biggest, the culture in this world is the biggest source of endless temptations to divide our time and, yeah, and our efforts.
Hey, guys, I got to run and pick up my brother-in-law from the airport.
I emailed you guys the slides if you want to keep talking about them or if you want to do part two next week.
Yeah, we're going to get it closed down here.
But Ash, before you go, we do have one question from Juradical.
He's wondering if Hillsdale accepts Bitcoin.
Yeah, so I actually tagged them on Twitter to talk about that.
I haven't got an answer yet.
So I will be looking into it.
Help them make it happen.
Yeah, I mean, so by God's grace, student debt is a big issue.
And I strongly encourage my older kids, if they want to consider college, they got to do it without debt.
She basically, I don't want to, yeah.
I'll just say, well, she's going to get out of school without debt.
I'll just say it like that.
And so that's a huge gift.
And Bitcoin is a small part of that being able to be an option for her.
um so so yeah whether they accept it or whether whether daddy accepts it and then
pays for the other i think i yeah i we should we should talk in the future kind of what you were
describing to me of like kind of your your plan for her handling her her bitcoin stuff i feel like
excuse me i feel like people would really benefit from hearing that if you're if you're willing to
share um but yeah so geradical great question uh we will we'll get back to you uh please hold our
feed to the fire, we will report back. Again, we are super grateful for you guys. If you guys are
not following Ash, Ryan, and I, and Matt as well on Twitter, go follow us over there. If you have
not, if you're watching this on YouTube, like and subscribe. This is one way you can incentivize
our benevolent overlord algorithm overlords to continue to lead the faithful to more of this
content we uh again follow us on twitter as well you can find us there you can follow tgfb
it's thank god for btc on twitter and we will be back soon on the next episode hey hey big big day
today was the vice president of brazil hold hold in a copy of thank god for bitcoin that was quite
the yeah i was trying to find it right yeah dude you can go if you need to go um it says that oh
But yeah, we've just set up.
Oh, gosh.
Well, can you leave it open?
Yeah.
Here we go.
We've got Vice President of Brazil spotted with Thank God for Bitcoin book.
I believe it's the Brazilian copy or the Portuguese translation.
That's amazing.
Yeah, just wild.
So that means...
Did you know?
Do you know?
I don't...
Do you know?
I do not.
I know that was...
That's amazing.
That was one of the first translations was Portuguese.
Wow.
So, yeah, that's the vice president of Brazil.
We do know, I believe Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has at least two copies.
I want to say he has three copies.
We've had a number of people give him the book.
Yeah, we're, oh, man, should we announce this?
Who got that into their hands?
I honestly don't know.
Whoever got that translation, I would imagine.
Like, there's a pretty passionate, pretty passionate.
We're going to split them out.
Yeah, we need to get them a shout out.
Yeah, we do have a very interesting and very exciting announcement
that we're going to be making about TGFB, the book here,
should be within the next couple of months.
Oh, awesome.
So, yeah, we are just crazy, something that's going on.
So we are grateful for that, and we'll have more news in the future.
So, again, we'll see you on Thursday.
We'll be back with the Mountain Presby's on episode 27 of To the Unknown Pod.
We'll talk to you guys later.