And we are live. Welcome to episode 28 of To the Unknown Pod. My name is Jordan Bush.
I'm the executive director of TGFB Media. And today I'm joined by two of the Island Boys,
Oshawa Hawthorne and Ryan Finley. I'll let you guys introduce yourself.
Hey, all. Oshawa Hawthorne, founder of Brilliance Labs. We're a Christian startup
incubator and we like to pursue solutions for problems being faced in in the world and we think
bitcoin's one of those uh those creative solutions hey i'm ryan finley uh entrepreneur uh father of
six and yeah it's good to be here good to have you back os how many kids do you have jordan
I have five as of this as of two days ago.
So we have my little daughter who shall remain unnamed for the sake of online privacy.
She was born.
We are thrilled that she joined us.
It was a surprise.
My wife loves to wait till the very end or wait till the birth to find out the gender.
And so we forced her gender upon her at about 2.30 a.m. on Sunday.
So, yeah, it was great.
My, let's see, my older daughter, so my second oldest, caught the baby as was planned.
So she did a great job.
And then prior to the new baby, my youngest cut the umbilical cord when it was time.
So he was a stud.
The oldest was the first one to hold her.
And then I can't remember what my middle guy, I can't remember what his responsibility was.
Everybody, we had like division of responsibility.
so uh mom and babe you're doing well grateful for for you guys and for your prayers um so we are
here we are here for episode 28 uh can you believe can you even believe it episode 28 matt is still
not with us matt is with his family uh touring around italy he's just enjoying spending some
good time out there just having lots of fun i believe he'll be there for a total of a month
which he's got to be i think he's only like we got another two months this guy my word so yeah
He's out there having a good time.
He should join us again soon.
But we are, again, for those of you who this is your first time stumbling across this, where in the world are you?
We basically, what we do is we spend time on Twitter every week.
And so rather than just have those periods just disappear into the ether, we try to redeem the time.
And so we use this podcast as, or these podcast episodes as a way to kind of debrief and talk about things that we found, especially thought-provoking or helpful.
And so this week, episode 28, we're going to be talking about atomized individualism and subsidized injustice.
There has been a ton of stories in the news that intersect with both of these topics.
And so we're just going to jump right in here and chat about them.
So the first thing we have is a poll from NBC News.
I know this is, for those of you who are regular listeners, NBC News is probably not a source of news you were anticipating coming across, anticipating us referencing.
But listen, we love to surprise.
So here we are.
A new NBC poll gave Gen Z a list of choices of how to define personal success.
Men who backed Donald Trump in 2024 rated having children at the top.
Women who backed Kamala Harris rated it second to last.
Okay, so let's take a look at this thing here.
So women who voted for Kamala Harris or voted Democrat, they've rated having a job or a career you find fulfilling as the most important criteria of their determining success.
Men who voted for Harris, very similar.
Women who voted for Trump, achieving financial independence was their top thing.
And then men who voted for Trump, you know, voted on having children as a sign of success.
This is wild.
We can see down here marriage is number four among those who voted for Trump, men who voted for Trump.
Women, we finally see it mentioned at number six, they're having children.
It's down for men who voted for Harris.
We have down at nine and ten have anything to do with marriage and having children.
And for women who voted for Harris, you have it down at 11 and 12.
Ash, this is one of the tweets that you shared.
Why did this stick out to you?
I mean, just wow. So first I would say it's like not surprising as, as like the difference there,
but the, how extreme it is, how stark the contrast is. And so I spent some time thinking about it
after I saw that. And I was on a call with a couple other Christians, a guy and a gal,
a little older than me. And they were talking about their adult kids. And they both happen to
have daughters. And they mentioned that, and their daughters are, I think, mid-30s,
down like the mid to lower 20s.
And I don't remember how many were married,
but only like the minority of them were married
and none of them had kids.
So two different Christian grandparent age people
with no grandkids and seven kids among the two of them.
And it just struck me like, wow, okay, no grandkids.
And I shared these stats.
with them. And I said, well, okay, this like, this kind of, um, confirm some of this. And there
was a, another poll that came out a couple of weeks ago or like a month ago about how, uh,
today 12% of 30 old, 30 year olds are married and own their house versus something like 50%
back in the fifties. And so, so I, I shared this and I said, Hey, this, this kind of connects to
your experience, right? You have daughters, uh, and I don't know their political affiliations. I
don't know even what their parenting styles were, but what I found most interesting is when they saw
these stats, which kind of confirmed the experience that they had of their adult daughters, the reasons
that they gave. So the first, the mom says, well, you know, when she says, when I was young,
we didn't think twice ever. You just assumed you got married young and you started having kids.
That was just what everyone did. And she says, well, now the younger generations realizes that
they have a choice. They can kind of do different things with their life. They can pursue a career
and it's just not assumed that they need to get married and have kids.
And so that was her perspective was just, oh, they have options now.
They've been liberated.
Yeah, exactly.
And she put a positive tone and a spin on that reality.
And then the guy, the potential grandfather who wasn't a grandfather yet,
he says, well, it's essentially, he says, it's the fascism.
It's Donald Trump taking away people's freedom.
And so, of course, no one wants to have kids and bring kids into the world in such a hostile environment.
And that's the reason that he gave.
Now, my...
It was climate change and climate doomerism back in the 70s, remember?
No, that's exactly what I...
So my response was, I mean, like...
It's always different.
I said fear-mongering.
We've had fear-mongering of why you shouldn't have kids my entire life.
And exactly.
You go through all the reasons.
For a while, it was nuclear war.
Then it was global warming.
Then it was holes in the ozone layers.
Acid rain.
Yeah, acid rain, peak oil.
I mean, it's overpopulation.
It's like think of the animals.
There's always been all this.
And then it's the wrong parties in charge.
So you got to like move, move to Canada.
Or if you're Rosie O'Donnell, I think she went to Germany or something like you got to you got to go somewhere else if the wrong party's in charge.
So that's obviously not the real reason.
And so I'm curious if it's not about just more options and better options and bad politics.
Why? Why are particularly progressive young women making this decision to not have kids and get married?
i i just think you we want to we want to pretend like we're all very intelligent and smart and and
that the environment that we're in and the you know the educational environment and the music
you listen to and the media you consume in the movies you consume like we want to act like we
can totally separate separate and parse those things out and the reality is that you cannot
like what you watch, what you like, the people who you are trained to respect, to look up to
whatever, you will become them. Okay. Like it's not, again, if the only way in which that is not
true. Now, again, how can I, how can I say that with uncertainty? Well, because sowing leads to
reaping. Like you, God is not mocked. You reap what you sow. That is going to happen. The only
way that that will not happen is if you are sowing other, if you're sowing other, sowing respect to
other places. And those things are mutually exclusive. Like there's things, there's other
people. So if you're sowing, for example, if you're sowing God, sowing seeds of respect and,
you know, love for God, then those can produce fruit as well. Those will produce fruit that can,
including in, even if they're not like disproportionately so, you know, they can
still produce good fruit by the mercy and grace of God. I talked about this on one of our previous
episodes, I went to public school. I had parents who loved the Lord, but I went to public school
and I mean, I could, again, my mother, my mother, my mother, I was talking to her today about the
baby. We introduced the baby over, over zoom or over, uh, you know, calls or video call. And, uh,
she mentioned that she had been listening to one of my podcasts. And I immediately thought of the
clip that I had seen, uh, mentioning that like my mother would be mortified if she knew half of the,
like half of the worst things that happened in, in public school. And I just think like,
when I, when I look back at my time in, in middle and high school and the things that went down and
just the, you know, like it is, it is truly the mercy and grace of God. And again, we were involved
in church. Uh, you know, my, my, my parents loved the Lord. They would, you know, they would talk
about things with us, but still the sheer amount of time that I spent, you know, in the hands of
And with my mind being submersed in, you know, with ideas that are completely hostile to reality, it is stunning to me.
And it should be stunning to all of us that there isn't more damage being done.
And with that being said, there still is tons of damage that's been done.
You know, one of the things that the scriptures talk about is the need for the renewing of your mind.
and obviously there's a component of that which happens supernaturally.
When you come to faith in Christ, like, you know, the Lord opens up the eyes of your heart,
opens up your mind, you know, and just basically starts to, you know,
he basically moves you from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of his beloved son.
He starts doing all the supernatural work.
And at the same time, and so there's a temptation for especially certain denominations
to put an emphasis on that supernatural work. And that's good to a point. The problem is the
scriptures are also super clear about there being a reaping and sowing effect. And so if you continue
to submerse your mind in falsehood and you continue to lend credence and allow yourself to be
influenced by lies and just by people who are wrong about the way that the world works,
You are going to see your mind conformed to the way that a lot of the world thinks, and you're going to be conformed to the falsehoods that the world falls into.
And so, again, it's hilarious to me and heartbreaking at the same time that some of the people who claim, especially on the progressive side, again, there are plenty of falsehoods and errors on the right among those who would vote for Republican candidates or whatever.
They have their own issues. But some of the people who claim to be the most enlightened, they all think the exact same thing.
and for you to not believe what they believe,
they cannot handle it.
They will scream at you.
They will try to get you canceled.
They'll do all these kinds of things.
And so again, all of these things,
all these ideas are producing just a ton of danger
and a ton of just groupthink and fear of people.
We're gonna get to some of the consequences of that
here in a little bit.
But yeah, I just think we underestimate the degree to which we are influenced and shaped and led by our broader culture.
oh man yeah no i i think it's um yeah it'd be very interesting uh i i don't know like we
underestimate the the power of the world's influence both through education and through peers
and um i thought it was i thought it was interesting that um
it still seems like amongst conservative voters from that from that poll it still seems like
women were influenced more by the world than than the young men uh you guys see that and i would
I'm just throwing it out there that I feel like we might have hit this tipping point for young men that things have gotten so absurd, even in the public education space, that you have young men that, again, their parents, even conservative parents, have sent their kids to public school.
And they're seeing things are so insane that they're like, this is like they're like throwing their hands up like, all right, I'm out.
like and they're checking out and so it's it's it's skewing the numbers um towards young males
which is which is awesome to see it's also sad because it's like dude that's a pretty crazy low
to hit that on their own like through their own like this is like young men's nationals like
like these are probably young men that were like encouraged to apologize for for being white for
being for uh for having or for wanting to be masculine uh for wanting to lead things like that
like at a certain point you're just like what in the heck are these guys talking what were these
people talking about like i'm just i was born this way um anyways i think uh yeah so so more
young men are just like are saying yeah this is this is bogus and rejecting it so we're just skewing
the numbers in my opinion what one other thing that i would want to add i'm going to bring that
chart back up here because what, again, this is a Bitcoin podcast, substantially. And so I do want
to kind of, I don't, again, I don't feel like we have to tie everything back to Bitcoin, but one of
the things that I would, I want to just point out is think about the time horizon. Think about the
time preference being displayed by these things, by these values. So if, if having children, and
again, even an even better indicator, I would say this could even be deficient because like raising
children and you know like I mean you know like having children is a very long is a very low time preference activity You know the first the first few years the children are cute and you know difficult in one way but then they get more difficult
in different ways as they grow older. And so, you know, thinking about marriage and thinking
about having kids, you're focused on the long-term. Some of these other things, it's just like,
I mean, like, look at this. I'm looking at the number three here. So having money to do the
things that you want to do, it's like, okay, the things that I want to do over what time horizon,
right? If you're talking about, I want to go have fun with my friends. Well, that's a very short,
a very low time or very high time preference desire. Having a career job, you could argue
that that's more of a long-term, you know, low, low time preference thing. You know, this takes
time to get education. It takes your time to work, work your way up, whatever. So maybe that's not
the worst. But I mean, a lot of these things, I just think you're the, yeah, a lot of these things,
it's people thinking for the longer term. I mean, we've talked about this a number of times on the
podcast, but just, again, I remember having a conversation with a friend of ours who's a
believer, you know, loves the Lord and, you know, is married, already has kids. And we just were
talking about the fact that, you know, one of the reasons historically why you've had kids
is so that you could have someone to take care of you when you got older.
That's not the only motivation that you would have kids,
but it certainly was one of the motivations
because, again, you're going to get old.
The reality is that contrary to America,
where we don't talk about getting old,
we don't talk about dying at all,
we're going to get old.
And you're not going to have,
the vast majority of people due to currency devaluation,
the basement, all this kind of stuff,
you're not going to have enough money to retire.
You're not going to have enough, sorry,
You're not going to necessarily have enough money to go into a retirement home and stay there for any length of period of time, nor are you going to want to do that.
And so I just think so many people are just totally underestimating and have just been so gaslit and fed just high time preference lies.
And, you know, you have to have this car.
You have to have this kind of clothes.
You have to go to these, go have these experiences.
And you're literally missing out.
the time period where you could be having kids at an age when you're young, you know, and where
you're going to be able to enjoy each other and, you know, do a lot of these things. You're just
totally being gaslit into missing out of some of these things that for all, so many people all
throughout history, this has been a huge source of finding meaning and a huge source of joy and a
huge source of, you know, a number of different things. And so again, I just look at this and
it is just, it's heartbreaking. And again, the, the chickens are going to come home to roost.
The chickens are going to come home to roost here within the next 10 years. People are going to
realize, oh shoot, you know, I'm, I missed out on my, I missed out on my window or I'm still going
to do this. And then they're going to, they're going to turn to increasingly dystopian, uh,
ways to try to make up for lost time, which is, you know, some of the, uh, you know, a lot of the,
you know, ways to have kids that are, that are, that exist and they're out there that
are morally dubious that we can should we should get into in a future episode so the scriptures say
where your treasure is there your heart will be also and i would argue that you can see the heart
of this issue at what has replaced being married and having children in the lives of these women
so it's entirely inverse it's upside down and they've stopped believing that children are a
blessing and have instead put fulfilling job career and having money to do the things you want
as number one and two, and then having emotional stability, self-care, right? So I've bought into
the world's lie that I can be like a man. I can have a fulfilling meaning and identity through
climbing the corporate ladder, getting rich, and then the unknown, unexpected consequence is
I feel like I'm going crazy. I'm trying to live my life in a way I'm not designed to,
and so I'm an emotional wreck. And so now that's why number three is emotional stability,
because they feel unstable. If you're emotionally just fine, that doesn't even make the list,
Right? So they're making themselves go crazy because they're living contrary to how God designed them. And their heart is in greed and finding a fulfilling life through what consumerism can purchase them.
And I would argue, and Ryan, you can take on this if you want, it goes all the way back to the sexual revolution and into the late 60s, early 70s.
And this whole idea of, okay, women need to not find identity.
Sorry, I need to get some water.
Here, okay, I got some water.
I'll finish the thought and then you jump on.
so what happened in 1971 okay every bitcoin is going to say well we got off the gold standard
and then we're gonna they're gonna sync up all these charts to show all the the economic and
social mayhem that emerged at that point well ryan what else happened right around around that time
that could be another causation for the breaking down of society.
Yeah, I mean, there was, you know, probably one of the biggest ones was no-fault divorce.
I think it was, it says that California's 1969 law was a pioneer.
The wave of states adopting no-fault divorce swept through the nation through the 70s.
This allowed for the unilateral disillusion of marriage for vague reasons like irreconcilable differences, things like that.
And I think at the root of it, the easier you make divorce, the more you undermine marriage itself as something that's just kind of optional.
Like it's, and, but again, that's undermining God's design for families and it's undermining God's design for children to have two parents and to grow up in a safe, secure environment.
And the destruction that that's caused is like incomprehensible.
and so um yeah you had the breakdown of our money but you also had a serious breakdown of families
um back then and and i wouldn't say that like we were talking about before we started that wasn't
the beginning of it i mean satan's been out to destroy the family since the beginning of time
and to separate, to destroy.
And, I mean, you go back,
like education of children used to be a thing
that families took responsibility for.
What happened with the public education?
Oh, hey, hey, you do your thing.
We'll take care of educating the kids.
And it's like, ah.
All of a sudden it's like, well, is it just education?
And so it was like it siloed that little compartment.
and they're like, oh, well, it couldn't be so bad, right?
I mean, they'll teach impartial things.
They won't be in this.
It's like, no.
It was like the full force of the world went into that education
and it had a devastating impact.
I would say, you know, we've talked about it before,
but it's like of the kids I went to church with,
I mean, you probably, I don't know, 75% of them
walked away from the Lord that went to public school.
And we had our lives filled with religious activities,
going to church, youth groups and all that kind of stuff.
And so, yeah, again, like we were talking about at the beginning
and Jordan was talking about, like, we vastly underestimate the impact
of separating kids from their parents and how destructive that is
and separating children from their dad or separating children from their mom.
It's like, dude, it's an atomic bomb going off in the family.
So, yeah, you, I mean, you've got, okay, so you, we had World War II,
okay which world war ii what was it when was it was world war one started right after the creation
of the federal reserve in 1930 and then uh world war ii we ended up having you know we we have to
send men overseas and so women have to step up and you know they they start going to you know
produce things for for the war effort which again you can debate you can debate that whole thing but
you're like all right you know this is this is a this was ostensibly a good thing great okay great
This is a good thing. We're all working together. And then you come home, right? And then the war ends. And you've given, you have a whole segment of society of women who've gotten this taste of productive, of working outside of the home and making money and contributing to something really important, which again, these are not trivial things at all.
Like this is, this is, you know, the answer is not just stay home and get in front of a stove.
Like this is, and CR Wiley has talked about this a lot.
Like they're, you know, basically the households used to be economic, little economic engines.
These were, you know, you have families that would have small businesses.
Yeah, they were productive.
And so you did have this, you know, working together, you know, husbands and wives who
were united behind the common cause and, you know, working together to make that happen.
So you have that happening.
And then after the war goes on, you have the temptation and lots of incentivization by the government to – they're looking at this and saying, hey, look, if we can get wives into the workplace, we can significantly increase our GDP.
And again, we can look at these stats and look how much more productive – look how much more money that we can make in these companies and all these different places.
and so again it's this short term focus it's not looking at well what consequences is this
going to have on family like if you know if parents aren't raising kids well then somebody's
going to be raising the kids okay well yeah so it's going to be public schools or it's going to
be family members or whatever and so you're completely outsourcing the formative years
of your children's lives shaping not just their minds but also their hearts and their loves and
all these kind of other things you're outsourcing that and putting them in putting those that shaping
influence in the hands of people who do not have a well-aligned incentive structure to train them
and raise them in a way, in the way that you would if you were there with them. And so this is
something where I think, again, we significantly underestimate the role that that has played. I
mean, we could mention the Roe versus Wade decision that happened in 1973. That was another
thing that was right there that shaped- Something else right before that.
72 was the legalization of contraception for unmarried people.
Yep.
Isn't that crazy?
There was a day when only married people could buy contraception.
Yep.
And again, this sounds insane.
And again, if this sounds insane to you, this is the crazy thing.
If this sounds insane to you, first of all, you don't know history.
And then second of all, it's just demonstrating how successful the brainwashing has been to act on the hands of our culture and governing influences to just train you in a way of looking at the world to the degree that it is unthinkable that the world could operate any other way.
like that that is the thing that is is again and i think this is where again i really appreciate
bitcoiners bitcoiners have started and more than a lot of people they have woken up to and see this
brainwashing that's happened at certain levels at the level of money and then they see the
downstream consequences um and i see a lot of bitcoiners who are having families and you know
want to have kids quicker uh they don't want to you know they don't want to buy into these things
And yet, like, again, I just would, the thing that I see is, listen, this rabbit hole goes very, very, very deep. It goes very, very deep. And again, I would argue that Christians have a lot, Christians have a lot to add, a lot to basically contribute in this way.
because again, we have a view of the world
that's existed for thousands of years.
You know, we have, you know,
just conceptions of what the good life looks like
that are laid out for us
that aren't just the result of convenience
over a very short time horizon.
You have God who's laid out the way
that the world ought to work for thousands of years.
We have thousands of years of examples,
both positive and negative,
of the consequences of either listening to and obeying his voice or disobeying and creating our
own reality. And I think that this is something that people are going to, these chickens are
going to come, they're coming home to roost and people are really, this is already what we see,
people who you would never have expected. You know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, Russell Brand,
Joe Rogan, people who were just openly mocking religion, mocking Christianity, even just a few years ago, are now kind of just seeing the consequences of just being our own gods and are reacting against it.
And so I think that, again, I'm encouraged by all these things, but it is, again, it's shocking to see the consequences.
all right so let's see here ashua you've got a couple other a couple other uh tweets on this
front let me share uh we've already done quite a bit but we'll just maybe we'll just just to see
how long we want to spin on them here we go ashua let you read this one yeah here we go
this is more to the video um okay so do the the lewis quote yes
let's find it here share this tab instead okay this is quote from the four loves
from an article by american reformer by joe rigney who we're trying to get on the program
here in the near future yeah so i'll i'll just read it briefly um this is from lewis four loves
it is therefore easy to see why authority frowns on friendship every real friendship is a sort of
secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted claptrap,
or of faddists against accepted good sense, of real artists against popular ugliness,
or of charlatans against civilized taste, of good men against the badness of society,
or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to top people.
In each knot of friends there is a sectional public opinion
Which fortifies its members against the public opinion of the community in general
Each therefore is a pocket of potential resistance
Men who have real friends are less easy to manage
Or get at harder for good authorities to correct or for bad authorities to corrupt
Hence if our masters by force or by propaganda about togetherness
or by unobtrusively making privacy and unplanned leisure impossible,
ever succeed in producing a world where all are companions and none are friends,
they will have removed certain dangers and will also have taken from us
what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude.
So my quick comment about this,
And Rigini uses it in reference to this idea of masculine Christianity in the public sphere and exercising, kind of proactively making a difference and seeking to see Christ's kingdom and Christian ethics displayed in the public space.
And he argues that it can be done alone You need friendships You need community And this is where we see the breaking apart of the family and the war on children is I would argue Satan primary strategy I love how Lewis uses this idea of the top people a the elites the secular pluralist elites that don have their own kids
and so need to control yours and mine through governmental and social and media structures.
the tools that they have to control only work when people are isolated.
And when you have a strong family structure, a strong marriage, you have strong churches,
and you have strong local neighborhoods, people stick together. There's a mutual benefit.
They have symbiotic communities.
And they don't have to all be, they don't have to be homogenous.
They don't have to look the same.
But they still have the same ends in mind.
They succeed when those around them succeed.
And that's what I would argue our culture and the secular society is trying to entirely separate people so that they're easier to control.
yeah this go ahead ryan yeah no no i'd say yeah yeah you definitely see it with i i feel like
the influence of the world especially on children is so strong that it's only intentional parents
that can overcome it and i say that as i used to be a youth pastor and i had this realization i
don't know it's probably a year or so in spending 60 hours a week pouring into my kids and i i had
this realization that like it didn't matter how hard i worked and how much time i spent like it
was almost impossible to overcome the enormous influence that parents have on their children or
that they don't have like you know it's the vacuum of like if they're not influencing their kids
the enormous influence that the world,
the people they hang out with, their peers,
where they're being educated,
that influence is so great that it's just like,
I literally, I know it wasn't all wasted,
but it just felt like vanity.
And yeah, yeah.
So I see it.
Who we hang out with every day
is actually really, really important.
Where we spend our time
and who we spend our time with.
Yeah, it really, I mean, just what we're all getting at
is just the sense of identity
and the sense of just, you know,
the question of like, who am I?
You know, and for a lot of us, we think as individuals,
we think as individual men or women.
And again, there's truth there.
There's truth in that reality.
We are individuals.
We bear the image of God.
We are individual people.
who are called by God to live and be faithful with the individual gifts that we have.
And so that's all true.
The problem is it's a partial truth because there are other elements to our identity
that are equally as important, just as important as our individual identity.
And I think part of this stems from the reality that we did not choose to be born.
Like everything that is most important about you and most central to you maintaining your life, you had no part in choosing.
You didn't choose when to be born, where to be born, to whom to be born.
You know, just all of these things.
You didn't choose to have a functioning heart, lungs, brain, you know, kidneys, all of these things.
Everything that is most central to who you are, you did not choose.
You had no part in choosing. You had no part in deciding about those things. And so again, part of the reason, I mean, another example of this is you didn't choose your parents. You didn't choose to be born. Your parents, to varying degrees, chose to have you.
So, you know, your mother, again, this is a stark and sad reality.
It's like we're seeing now more than ever, well, I don't know, that's even debatable,
but now more than ever.
But you're seeing just the choice that women have to kill their children.
This is something that hasn't always existed, always existed.
But now it's, you have a greater, I would say, I would imagine a greater percentage,
you know, now happening than ever before.
certainly the approval and applauding at high levels of society, you see it happening. And so,
yeah, I just think the reality of the fact that, again, individuals are important,
but the most important unit of measure within God's economy is the family. Like, you know,
God, the first thing God did, yes, he created individuals, and then shortly thereafter,
he made a family. And so again, we live in a culture that pits those two things against each
other and acts like the individual identity is the identity that supersedes and is more important
than everything else. And so the article that Rigney mentions quotes that C.S. Lewis. It also
is kind of building off an idea that Pastor Doug Wilson has talked about, the idea of atomistic
individualism, which is part of where our title comes from. So this idea of the fundamental model
that we use to think about ourselves is very atomistic. As in like the atom is the smallest
unit of the building block of all things. And so we think about that. And yet the metaphor that the
scriptures go to over and over again to describe and to shape how we think about what it means to
be human is much more organic than that. So it's something more of like a tree. People are called,
And Psalm 1 talks about a righteous man is like a tree who produces fruit in its season.
And so we see these metaphors.
And so these are much more organic.
These are much more interconnected.
So a tree relies on its roots.
It relies on soil.
It relies on things that are outside of its control.
It requires sunshine and rain.
And so there's far more interconnectedness at the root of what it means to be human than the Adam metaphor actually conveys.
And so this is something where, again, we need to find the freedom that comes with learning from God.
What is an apt metaphor?
What is a more truthful metaphor, a more broad and all-encompassing metaphor, and then allow him to train how we think about ourselves and how we think about what it means to be human?
Ash, do you want to do this, Michael Foster?
or do we want to kind of skip it because we've kind of already yeah i mean you could do uh the
what i quoted from his yeah let's see here is that so just right at the end he he makes the point
and he he so he talks about the different seasons in their family life and particularly
times of poverty times where like like during the 08 crash they had to move back
uh in with family and live in a basement and and just the the the struggles and the lean years
and and how it's um as he looks back on it uh he shares this he says it all starts small
it snowballs it grows so put your hand to the work and don't despise the day of small beginnings
and and then i added to that from ecclesiastes better is the end of a thing than its beginning
and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit and it just it just struck me
as i look back on my own family life so we'll celebrate 20 years this year and um i mean for
the first time we're going to be able to get to travel we're going to go to switzerland
and have some time as a couple together
and just remembering some of the crazy lean years,
very challenging seasons,
and how faithfulness,
or in its contrast, sinfulness,
it starts small,
and then the power of exponential growth,
which as Bitcoiners, you understand that,
of just hodling and how it's not a passive thing. It needs to be an active effort to work. And the
same thing happens when you make decisions in your marriage, in your parenting of just like
the small little things of faithfulness of what do you do when you get home from work? Or how do
you tuck your kids in at night? How do you pray with your wife? Like there's just little things.
How do you do family devotions?
What's your pattern of church attendance?
How do you discipline your kids?
There's all these little things that you're like,
I'm going to do this 50,000 times over my lifetime.
But the exponential result of those 50,000 little faithfulnesses
in the moment, what in the moment was an annoyance
or like this is genuinely inconvenient,
actually is what snowballs into a really fruitful life.
So I'm thankful for him sharing that.
And I know you guys have stories like that as well.
I'd love to hear them.
Yeah.
Yeah, my wife and I just celebrated 21 years of marriage this last week.
And yeah, I mean, that's a really powerful point.
like uh things that are seemingly insignificant it's like it's the little it's like the little
time of prayer with your wife uh it's how your family starts your day it's it's the little the
moments that you you put into your schedule for your kids the conversations things like that
in and of themselves each one it doesn't seem like oh it's this giant mountain of importance
um but yeah you're right like what happens when that compounds over two three five ten years it's
like it's i mean it's massive like if you want to talk about like where you're going to see fruit
after five or ten years of faithfully doing something it's going to be those things that
you faithfully do every day and so man if i could pass on and i think you guys would probably agree
it's like pass on advice to younger couples especially all those things that seem kind of
insignificant they're actually extremely important and like do whatever it takes to faithfully
do them every single day like intentionally uh and it's it's exactly it's like stacking stats i
mean one of the reasons we talk so much about parents parenting and kids and stuff on on this
podcast is like our treasure isn't bitcoin and at the end of the day like we could stack all the
bitcoin in the world and you know forfeit our soul like that's not where we're at and so like i i um
anyways that's why we talk so much about all these other things because it's so much all these other
things are so much more important than bitcoin um but yeah uh the small things do them do them
faithfully um get into the habit the rhythm of doing them every day um and yeah just like stacking
stacking sets are going to like, you're going to reap the reward of, of, of your faithfulness.
And the other, I mean, again, I was just going to say the other thing that I, so like the,
the, the temptation for people who, uh, who hear both of these excellent and very true and good
points is it's one of going to be one of a couple of things could be, uh, frustrating. It could be
just like mocking, like, okay, you know, that's, yeah, that's so easy for you, blah, blah, blah,
which is all silly. Um, on top of that, it could also just be like, well, that's impossible. That's
impossible for normal people. You don't know my situation. And, or you could be somewhat more
heartbroken postured than that is like, well, Hey, I've mad, I've made bad decisions. You know,
I've, I've sowed lots of bad seeds. And so what, you know, what do I do? And the thing that I would
encourage you with as somebody who's made bad decisions, you know, for all my good ones, you
know, I've, I've made bad ones too. And it's just like, don't underestimate, like, do not
underestimate the joy that God gives and that God gets from, you know, basically from taking
somebody who humbly comes and just basically confesses their utter lack of deservedness,
uh, to, to make up for lost time. You know, there, there's a, one of the passage passages
that in the scripture, it talks about God restoring the years that the locusts have eaten.
And so again, it's just this idea of you've planted, you worked, the locust destroyed everything left, you just ravaged it, left nothing.
And the Lord just loves, he loves to make up for lost time and to reap in ways that only he can.
And so, again, just like pouring out your heart before the Lord in whatever area it is, whether it's your marriage or parenting or whatever it is, again, the Lord, he can do a lot with a little.
And again, it's a similar thing compared to Bitcoin.
There's people who are looking at Bitcoin at $112,000.
They're like, well, this is pointless.
Yeah, I missed it.
I missed it.
This is pointless.
I screwed up Bitcoin.
I missed it.
I missed my opportunity.
And they can just get jaded and just quit.
and again it's never too late in the case of your family it's never too late to do the right thing
you know this isn't just like uh i'm gonna i want this outcome in the end it's like no the lord is
is good and true and worthy of your worship and worthy of your obedience and and trust and all
these kind of things and uh he yeah there's he's he's fully capable of just doing way more than you
can ask or think so take heart yeah did i had i had that that's what a big part of my um i want
to say it was a fire five six years ago i had uh the lord really convicted me just in like areas
that i had been lacking in leadership especially in our family and um it was super sobering because
like my boys were becoming teenagers and i felt like dude what in the world i totally screwed up
Like I missed out, like I blew it in a lot of these areas, just not, not being consistent, not leading well.
And, um, but I, I humbled myself before the Lord and, and cried out for help.
And, and you're a hundred percent right, Jordan, like the Lord loves to redeem the time.
And I definitely would say the last five years, I was very intentional spending a lot of extra time with, with my kids and my family, just trying, trying to make up for, um,
some of the years that I didn't do a good job. And, um, and I,
and I feel like that that can be done at any age. I mean, don't,
don't be discouraged, like, um, be encouraged that you're, you're,
you're having things exposed in your heart and, um, yeah,
trust the Lord to redeem things going forward.
Yeah. All right. We are 50 minutes in here.
I'm going to make it a executive call here.
We're going to postpone the conversation about the Ukrainian girl.
Man, if you guys have been following that story, just absolutely heartbreaking, infuriating.
Just a lot of, honestly, downstream consequences of a lot of the things we've been talking about.
So we'll push that until the next episode with the Island Boys here.
In conclusion, I do.
We got a couple other short ones we can do So one of them was this example here or was this tweet or this is a story I think somebody tweeted about it and then it ended up finding its way I don know I actually have
the tweet. I have, let's see here. It is about the American dream. Let's look here. The American
dream, the 2025 American dream will cost you $5 million. And thanks to the Opportunity Cost app,
We can see that as of today, that would be 44.91 Bitcoin.
Now, again, you may be thinking to yourself, what in the world does that consist of?
Here we are right here.
The America dream, including homeownership, retirement, raising children, a wedding, a wedding.
Listen to these.
Look at these people who have not reproduced at all.
A wedding, my word.
New cars, health care, pets, annual vacations, now roughly totals $5 million.
Okay, ready? This is hilarious. Here we go. These calculations assume a college-educated dual income. Here we go. We just talked about. Assume college-educated dual income household capable of sustaining these ambitions. That's not all they're anticipating. Here we go. Retirement alone, $1.6 million. Look what they're accounting for. Accounting for a 2.5% annual inflation increase. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't we all just kill for a 2.5% real inflation increase?
um again this is bonkers we should we we've got to start at the top let's like let's let's look at
starting at the title of this article down to some of the details how many things are anti-marriage
anti-human yeah let's go here we go uh start at the top the five million figure it's literally
the most sensational the american dream it's like well you're not going to be able to have a family
you're not going to be able to do it.
Your life is ruined, Ryan,
unless you have $5 million.
Defeated.
You only live once,
go on the cruise,
go gambling.
Like, you're not going to be able
to do it.
$5 million.
It's like everyone just checks out.
Anyone who's actually still paying attention
to the mainstream media
is like checked out right off the bat.
Oh, yeah.
And then scroll down where it lists
raising kids and how expensive they are.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
It's going to be great.
Hold on.
So we've got, we already mentioned.
Okay, so a wedding.
Now, again,
how many weddings are we going to have
between the three of us
lord willing uh let's see ashua's eight uh ryan's six and jordan's five so far so we're we're just
we might as well just quit right now we might as well just give up guys uh it's doomed so so so so
hold on well like go back up though every single one of these things is like i would i mean it's
hard to like what is what some people spend on some of these things is like five to ten times
more and obviously there's more even higher than what it can cost like being a part of a local
church where like you have a community helping you pull off the wedding you can get sometimes you can
get the venue you get married hey like actually getting married in your church like your church
probably isn't going to charge you you know four or five thousand dollars like the whole thing about
destination wedding but like new cars buy 30 20 30 year old cars health care uh that's like
eat healthy food you you know by god's grace you won't need like again every single one of these
don't like pets they're anti-human they're so stinking expensive there's literally if you
somebody needs to do research on them the more pets people have the less kids they can have
they're so stinking expensive and again they're just like i had i remember like 20 years ago i had
a mentor of mine he was like super down on pets and i was like man it's so weird and it's like
but he was super up on having kids and i actually see it they're at they're at war with each other
like if push comes to shove and you have a whole bunch of pets like they're really really expensive
it's like to take care of to feed you know that bills and stuff like that and it's like oh well
we can't afford to have any more kids.
Anyways.
Yeah.
But it,
it,
you just keep going and it's like every single one of them is just like,
if you have this,
like the world's view of all these things,
like,
yeah,
it's extremely expensive unless you,
you have other priorities.
Yeah.
Again,
just the,
you're like,
who is setting these standards?
Like who,
who is saying this?
You know,
what is the measuring stick they're using?
It's totally unsustainable.
So there's healthcare,
care. 414,000, Ash. If you don't have that, have fun staying poor. You're good to go. Again,
this is just totally overlooking. Now, again, it is true that it is expensive to eat healthy.
That's the sad reality. It is expensive to eat healthy, but there's ways to do this
much more economically. If you, again, have prioritized and with your house, you bought a
house that gives you a little bit of land, you can grow, even with relatively small amount of
land, you can grow vegetables to significantly bring down your food costs.
Chickens, eggs.
Yeah, chickens, eggs.
I mean, just a bunch of things that you can do to significantly chip away at this.
Well, first of all, chip away at your food costs.
But then also on top of that, the downstream effects is you can take care of your health
care at the same time.
So again, this is just like if you just fiat to the max, you just ignore causes of things
ignore causation and uh and just try to solve everything with spending the most money possible
this is what it would look like a lot of a lot i would probably what do you guys say
the percentage of health care costs that are directly tied to eating just trash food
i mean it's oh yeah 80 yeah 90 sure like just eat really really healthy and just go down the
rabbit hole yeah you look at i mean look at the greatest causes of death right it'd be like heart
disease. That's pretty much totally food. Uh, you've got cancers and stuff like that. That's
what a lot of that has to do with food. Uh, another thing, like not, not fasting,
like the fasting is one way to help these things. And you know, the scriptures talk about it a lot.
Pretty much every religion talks about it a lot. Uh, the United States doesn't. And so that that's
going to have downstream consequences, uh, homeownership. Check this out guys. Uh, you know
that if you don't have a million dollars,
you're not able to have a home.
Here we are.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
This is why, again,
if you have a culture
that puts up with an absolute
100% broken housing system,
they're putting up with
our culture being anti-human.
Because they're absolutely right.
I mean, when you make housing
too expensive for people
and especially families to afford.
Guess what?
They have smaller families
or no family at all.
You guys want to mention anything
about the raising children in college thing here?
Well, I did the math on this
and it's $40,000 a year per kid.
Averaged out over 22 years
if you're paying for college.
Nice.
How are we doing?
Are we under or over budget?
$40,000 a year per kid.
So basically what you're saying is in order to be a parent, you have to have Bitcoin or else you're not going to be able to be a good parent.
You can't.
They're making the case for Bitcoin before our very eyes.
The thing that killed me is when I found out that, because we've almost cooled our kids all the way through.
I found out that the public education system gets like somewhere anywhere between like 15 and 20 something thousand dollars per student per year.
And I'm just looking back.
Honey, how much do we spend per kid per year?
And it's like, it's like not even a hundred.
It's like a hundred dollars maybe on a few workbooks and some books.
It's like, but like, but then the results that we've gotten at like one, whatever it is, I don't even know the, one, one hundredth or one thousandth of the cost.
Yeah. In Florida, there is a scholarship program that basically didn't...
Whoever put it through is basically...
It's not fair that homeschool families have to continue to contribute to public schools.
We're not taking advantage of them. Why in the world are we paying for them?
And so the solution was basically to say, all right...
Amen.
Yeah, but we're going to give homeschool families $7,500 per student in order to cover and help cover homeschool costs and stuff like that.
And so there's a lot of this that's like, I mean, again, it makes sense.
You're like, okay, we're like $2,500 short because the state still gives $10,000, I believe, a little bit more than that, $10,000 for every public school student.
That's where that money goes.
That's in Florida?
That's in Florida.
So the homeschool parents, it's 15 to 20 per student in Oregon.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's like every state's different, but it's like, it's insane.
But so, so again, we're still getting jobs by about $2,500.
But even still, I mean, it's, you just look at this and you're like, man, this is, this
is our tax.
This is how much money every year is, is that we're, we're spending on these things.
Like it's crazy.
Mishallocated resources.
It's the biggest waste of money ever.
Do we have any, anything else here?
new cars.
Yeah.
How many
have any of you guys
bought a new car ever?
No.
Neither.
Never bought a new car.
I think when I least
could afford it.
I did.
Yeah.
As a college student
I remember you had
a nice tundra
as like a
a broke
college student
Ryan.
He was car rich
and portfolio poor.
He's matured a lot
over the years.
I want to say that.
Yeah.
no i think our yeah our average car is 20 plus years old yeah we we we actually have a newer
newer car we got back from the states but we literally bought at the worst the top of the
vehicle market in 2021 or 2022 2022 i think the worst timing ever and so our mortgage our interest
rate is awful on the loan like the whole thing it was just horrendous we just were thinking we
don't want to get something that's not good quality and then have to owe a bunch on it whatever
I would recommend
again the
the economics of this
are getting not great
but
if you can afford
one of those
extended warranties
our
this saved our bacon
with this
with this van
multiple times over
we probably
I think it cost us
$2,500
and
I think we spent
at least like
$8,000 worth of repairs
on this thing
so it ended up being
a tremendous deal
I shared
if anybody has
to
buy
older Toyotas
that's like the i think i shared a meme about it it's like the the mid-curve one it's like yeah
yeah yeah bmws and jaguar all these things are in the middle and then on the both sides it's toyota
they cost a little bit more money it's because they they basically never break and they last
forever and so save yourself a mountain of of money by just buying older toyotas yeah and
spend your resources elsewhere.
Annual vacations.
Ash, you just mentioned that you're taking your,
I believe your first vacation with your wife.
Is that right?
That's what you're...
No, no.
We've done family vacations.
I just came back from a road trip across the country for a month.
Yes.
I'm talking about what these people who wrote this article
would consider a real vacation.
You're taking your first one.
We go to Hawaii too, but we like mooch off our friends there.
You get one vacation for 20 years.
I'm not saying this in judgment.
I'm saying like, listen, we've never done like a proper, you know, like vacation, a thousand, you know, thousands of dollars vacation either.
Yeah.
But yeah, so there's that one.
What else we got here?
Owning pets.
This is hilarious.
Oh, dude.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
So I think we need to talk about, on another call, early retirement extreme and some of those life hacks for living efficiently, for thinking frugally and being wise.
So Bitcoin solves the excess cash flow and savings.
But there's some other things there to think through of how not to just buy into the consumer system.
And the honesty is, if we're advocating for large families, it really is expensive.
It's expensive.
I tell guys at my church, hey, above three is free.
And there are efficiencies of scale within having kids.
But it doesn't change the fact that life has gotten more and more expensive.
And so how do you think through doing that well?
It's worth talking about.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Let's see.
I think that's everything.
Man, we have another fun topic to talk about.
This is, what are these laws?
Alienation of affection lawsuits.
Man, we could get into so many things.
Those are, basically, there's six states in these United States where you can sue.
Like, if somebody, you know, cheats on your partner, if somebody, like, home wrecks your family, you can sue them and get, basically, the civil lawsuit and make money off of it.
but this is something we were going to talk about.
We don't have time.
We'll have to save that for another day.
We are grateful for you guys.
Grateful for your listening to episode 28
of To the Unknown Pod,
part of the Thank God for Bitcoin podcast.
We will join you.
We'll be back, I believe, again this week.
We'll have Tim and Jim.
Tim is fret, or sorry,
Jim will be fresh off of a retreat
with some of the best and brightest in Bitcoin.
He's been hanging out in the woods with these guys
talking about who knows what.
and so we'll be
we'll get him back
for a debrief
and that'll be lots to find
and who knows what Tim's doing
Tim's reading books
almost assuredly
so
those of you who look forward
to our Mountain Presby's
they'll be back on Thursday
so
grateful for you guys
Ash, Ryan
appreciate you guys
I'll let you guys have
the last word
go for it
thank God for Jesus
amen
yeah
TGFJ
um i actually i will do one more thing here so this coming this coming tuesday we are going to
be sitting down for an episode with doug casey i'm sorry not not matt smith doug smith uh doug
casey and matt smith wrote this book called the preparation uh we're talking about college and the
cost of college these guys wrote this book uh they have a basically a different approach to
the college years and what it looks like to prepare to go out into the world uh this is not
anything what you're expecting. I listened to a couple of podcasts. Matt recorded a podcast with
Tom Woods, who's an Austrian economist and Roman Catholic guy and super interesting.
And what's his name? Tom Woods came away from this. There's a clip from this interview where
he said, I have all the degrees, all the fancy education from all the places that anybody would
want. I would trade it in a heartbeat to implement the plan that you guys have laid out in this book.
And so I just reached out to Matt.
I got the book and then reached out to him and he's like, hey, I'd love to come on.
So he's going to come on on Tuesday, this coming Tuesday, a week from today.
And we're going to talk about what that plan looks like, what it doesn't look like, and
what his son's experience has been as kind of the guinea pig of this plan.
So lots of really cool and thoughtful things, especially if you've appreciated anything that
you've heard from these podcast episodes, you're going to love.
I walked away just stunned.
I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever heard of in my life.
so we'll talk to him
on the next episode
with
of
with the
who are you
the island boys
on Tuesday
so we'll see you guys then
we appreciate y'all