Ep 424: Why Christians Should Care About Bitcoin, with Jordan Bush

LCP Episode 424 – Jordan Bush.mp3

[00:00:03] Voiceover: Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo. Expand your imagination and tackle controversy head on. Let’s stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It’s time for the Libertarian Christian podcast.

[00:00:22] Doug Stuart: Welcome to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I am your host, Doug Stuart. And with me, I have a new friend of mine named Jordan Bush. Jordan, I’m really happy to to have you on today to talk about. If people are watching on YouTube, they would they would immediately notice what we’re going to talk about because it’s behind your shoulder. You have a Bitcoin counter and you have two books on bitcoin, which I know what they look like because they’re a little bit behind, a little bit further behind you we’re going to talk about Bitcoin here Jordan Jordan Bush thank you for thank you for being on the show Doug.

[00:00:52] Jordan Bush: Thank you for having me. Uh for my welcome I’m happy to return to the libertarian Christian, uh, network of podcasts.

[00:00:59] Doug Stuart: Yes. No. That’s great. Um, I’m happy to have you on. I don’t know how I missed you on the other episode. We were just talking about this offline. I was like, how did I miss that? You were already on our network. Uh, I guess that’s good. Our network is so big, I can’t even. That’s right. And I’m in charge. Love it. Uh, so that is good. Hey, we’re going to talk about Bitcoin, and I’m going to have to put in the standard disclaimer that we’re not offering financial advice nor telling you to invest in Bitcoin, because we will probably be very enthusiastic about it during this episode. Uh, you are your own agent and you can make your own decisions, dear listener, uh, we are not offering you specific financial advice, um, and, uh, nor do I do that on the side. I don’t know if you do, Jordan. Uh, but, uh. Okay. All right. So we don’t even do it on the side. So we’re not doing it in the show either. But we are going to talk about Bitcoin. And the biggest reason that I have you on Jordan is because I heard you on Preston Sprinkle’s podcast, Theology in the Raw.

[00:01:49] Doug Stuart: Uh, give an introduction about Bitcoin. And I’m I’m sure you’ve recounted that, you know, story several times. You can do whatever version of it you want to hear, but it was the single most succinct version of what Bitcoin is. Um, in my mind that I can tell someone else and say, hey, go listen to this episode, as opposed to go read this book, go read the go, listen to these five episodes, go listen to this podcast over, you know, and so after ten episodes, you’ll finally get it. Um, and what really struck me was there was a very human element to what the importance of Bitcoin was. It wasn’t just, oh, it’s a new form of money. Oh, it’s a it’s better than gold. It’s gold 2.0. And then people are like, well what does that mean. And because people don’t even have that frame of reference in mind of like, well, why would who cares about gold right now? Um, so when you I’ll just get us started here. What do you tell people when they ask you, well, why is Bitcoin so important to you and what exactly is it?

[00:02:45] Jordan Bush: Yeah. Um, one of the things that I find out that I find is that basically, Jesus, there’s something that Jesus said that’s really helpful when I talk to people about Bitcoin and it’s those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. And so you may be like what in the world? But like what Jesus was talking about is basically like if you if you think you’re well, then like, you’re not going to be looking for a doctor, whereas somebody who understands that they’re sick and understands that something is wrong, you know, physically, in their case, uh, with their body, they’re going to be quick to look for someone to help them, and they’re going to be receptive to somebody to to advice from somebody who’s in a position as a doctor or something along those lines. And so for Americans, uh, just, you know, jumping right in, Americans have had since the end of World War Two, uh, the extraordinary privilege of having the the world reserve currency of the world. Uh, and so this is called the exorbitant privilege. It was called that by by someone in the aftermath of World War Two, to be the only people who can legally print, uh, out of thin air, the world reserve currency. And so that privilege affords has afforded America a ton a ton of of blessings, uh, and conveniences that are not afforded to people all over the world. And so when a lot of Americans hear about Bitcoin for the first time, while still using what is by far the best currency in the world, uh, the most stable currency around the world, uh, you know, it’s it’s and they hear about a new currency.

[00:04:16] Jordan Bush: They’re kind of tempted to just immediately think, well, it seems like our our currency is going along, you know, working pretty well as it is. You know, maybe there’s some little hiccups here along the way, but it’s still there’s not a lot of urgency to go and abandon it in favor of something else. And so I think for a lot of people, you know, they they’re basically prejudiced. I said that in the most loving sense, prejudice, by virtue of their, you know, their situation, the situation they find themselves in. Uh, the other thing that doesn’t help is that at a popular level, we do not talk about at all what money is. We just kind of take for granted that we understand what money is. Yeah, it’s the thing you give in exchange for other things. And so it’s this very superficial, um, you know, like, uh, just like superficial above ground version of, of what money is because we just think about, well, this is what you can do. This is what money does. Yeah. And that’s obviously an important part of what, what money is. But there is just like there is and I would compare it to religion or the Christian faith. Like obviously Christianity produces certain things in our lives. It ought to have produce it ought to produce certain outcomes in our generosity. Uh, lives lived in a certain way. Uh, but there’s something underneath of that. And like, theology is underneath of that, and it produces these things. And so you can you can receive and you can actually produce these things without understanding to a certain degree, the underlying theology. Yeah. But there’s a.

[00:05:48] Doug Stuart: There’s a stable truth underneath all.

[00:05:50] Jordan Bush: Of it. Correct, correct. And the fact that you’re not aware of it doesn’t mean that it’s not important. And so one of the things and again, this is kind of my intro entry into this whole world was just I was a philosophy major in college and just I was just trying to understand what Bitcoin was and why it was created. And, and if you will, to to borrow and bring out a big philosophical word, the telos of Bitcoin. Like why did this, why does this thing exist? Like to what end was it created? Um, and so a lot of people just don’t have any kind of framework for that just within the dollar, you know, thinking about the dollar itself and money more broadly. And so it makes sense that they wouldn’t think about it at all in regards to Bitcoin. Um, so there’s a lot of things working against Americans understanding what Bitcoin is. Uh, which is again, counterintuitive but true.

[00:06:38] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Well, and some of your story had to do with some experiences you had overseas, right.

[00:06:43] Jordan Bush: Yeah. So I grew up in a Christian home, uh, my parents my dad was a first generation Christian. My mom was barely a second generation Christian, and so I grew up going to church. Every time the doors were open, we would go for Bible studies and church services and stuff. And so by the time I got to, um, you know, finishing up high school, uh, going to college, I had a desire to go to Bible college. I went there and surrendered my life, long story short, surrendered my life to be a missionary. Uh, during a missions conference the first year of that, of that Bible college. And prior to that point, I just if you would have asked me, hey, do you want to be a missionary? I would have said to you, uh, no, I’m not a missionary, I play basketball. Like, I don’t swing from vines. I don’t like camping or living in a treehouse like this is again. Now, if you would have asked me to articulate that, I would have said, well, that’s silly, but I don’t know why I think that about what a missionary is, but that’s kind of what what I thought. So got to the point where I just heard, regardless of what I was or didn’t enjoy doing or didn’t enjoy doing, was presented with the gospel and just the need for the gospel around the world. Uh, the guy who is speaking at this missions conference had grown up in a jungle tribe in the Philippines. His grandparents were headhunters.

[00:07:56] Jordan Bush: And, uh, again, when he was a very small child, a man came in who had actually gone to the same, uh, actually camp that also had the school that I went to, the Bible college that I went to. And so, long story short, he had surrendered his life to be a missionary at like 12 years old, grew up, went to Bible college, uh, got training to go be a missionary and went into this jungle tribe in the Philippines. Long story short, went in there, preached the gospel. Almost everyone becomes a Christian. And so this little guy, uh, who is there speaking very short in stature, he just basically said, I grew up surrounded by Christians like my saw. My parents and my grandparents lives radically changed. And so, long story short, he ended up going to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, got a degree in jungle aviation, and had the privilege to fly back into the Philippines with the first translation in his people’s own language of the Bible. And so he shared this and then got to his his, you know, preaching climax and basically said, you know, there are still over 6500 languages. This is, you know, the mid aughts, there are still 6500 languages that have no scripture translated into their language. And so he proceeded to take one of those, I don’t remember what it’s called, but the type of printer where it’s connected on the ends, and it’s got the little things that you tear off on the.

[00:09:07] Doug Stuart: Dot matrix printer.

[00:09:08] Jordan Bush: Dot matrix printer. So he kind of he had like a stack of these papers. He grabbed the first page that had a list of all these languages, and he threw it off the podium and it pulled the second page and it pulled the third page and it pulled the fourth page. And I just remember, I’m sitting there in the front row, I’m looking over at him like this. I’m on the left side and I’m just staring at this and, and I’m watching and just knowing that I was an absolute wretch in high school as a kid couldn’t give. I mean, a care in the world that I had so much access to the scriptures just wanted to live for myself. And, uh, and so as I’m watching this and thinking about this reality, I just remember thinking to myself like, Lord, if that’s true, then please let me be a missionary. I don’t know if I’m. I don’t know if I’m a missionary or not, but like, if that’s the reality, then then please let me be a missionary. So long story short, Lord was also working in my wife’s heart. We weren’t dating at that point. Uh, but a few years later we were at the same school and then we’re friends for a while, ended up starting to date and getting married, and we knew that both of us wanted to be missionaries.

[00:10:04] Jordan Bush: So about a year removed from college, uh, we started talking to a missions organization. Long story short, got accepted by them and started raising support to move to Montevideo, Uruguay. Uh, the Lord has a sense of humor, and so rather than going to an actual jungle, he sent us to an urban jungle, uh, one of the most secular countries in the Western Hemisphere. And so we moved there. And when we got there, we were expecting to be, uh, the Tim Keller’s of Montevideo, Uruguay, uh, very, you know, this very godless utopia. And we were going to come in there and be very winsome and, uh, and share the gospel in very non-offensive ways. And, uh, And so then we were surprised to find that half of our church members, within a very short period of time were Venezuelan immigrants. And so a lot of these Venezuelan immigrants, these were people who were doctors, economists, uh, normal and then a bunch of people who just had normal jobs who in some cases were making $100,000 a year in Venezuela, one of the wealthiest countries, again in South America. Uh, their gas, the price of their gas, even during as their currency was, was being hyperinflated their gas was still about $0.02 a gallon.

[00:11:12] Jordan Bush: Uh, just incredible resources that they have. And so this is all going on, and we’re and despite their riches, despite all these things, uh, their political authorities, in order to get elected, continued to promise more and more free stuff. And the way that they funded this free stuff, because they didn’t have access to the world reserve currency like the United States was, uh, or did to print their own currency, which is the Bolivar. They continue to print more and more of it until after several years of this, the currency became worthless to the point where large quantities of these currency units were being thrown in dumpsters or repurposed for arts and crafts, things and all kinds of other things. And so this led many of them to flee the country. Many of them on foot, crossed the border with a little what little valuables that they had, uh, and tried, you know, they moved to other countries to try to get a job and then send money home and eventually bring their family with them, if possible. And so, as we were sitting there, we just saw firsthand the consequences of monetary debasement, uh, in currency devaluation and hyperinflation, all these things happening in real time in ways that were much more or much less theoretical and much less human, as you mentioned.

[00:12:21] Jordan Bush: Uh, so we had people who, again, were married. It was a lot of them were were fathers who left their wives and kids, uh, fathers get their, their imagining, uh, get a job and save some money and bring everybody within six months or a year. And in most cases, it took at least 2 or 3 years, sometimes more. And so you’re just seeing like this divided families. And so you’ve got moms being responsible for, for kids. And so we saw infidelity. We saw, you know, all kinds of awful things that, you know, we had. No, I had no concept for I’d never heard of currency debasement or, you know, had no one had told me that this was going to be something we were going to face on the mission field. And so the more that I just proceeded to see this, the more I started to ask questions, uh, very informally of like, why is this happening? Has this happened before? Uh, and then ironically, that that was part of what helped me to see the value proposition of Bitcoin when I found that about four years after we arrived in Uruguay.

[00:13:14] Doug Stuart: So, so during this time, um, you did you just want to look into it in particular, did you were there other things that you were just interested in? Like sort of my story is I think you and I both, um, if I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure you said that you got to Ron Paul by way of Glenn Beck. Yeah, yeah. You’re like the only other person I’ve ever heard say that. Because that’s me. That was me too. He had he had Ron Paul on. Yeah. And to talk about the the the economy. Yeah. And when I realized, uh, in seminary, uh, for me, that was around 2005, 2006, um, when I realized in seminary that, uh, if I wanted to care about social justice, which at the time and even today, I don’t really have too much of an allergic reaction to that phrase other than the fact that it’s been hijacked. Um, I realized that if I wanted to learn anything about social justice and some of the things that the left was wanting to say, it’s like, well, if I’m going to counter any of this because some of this doesn’t feel right and others have heard my story about this, um, I need to learn some economics. Yep. And I started with Ron Paul. That’s that’s kind of where I was. Um, so what was your story? Was it something that was just like you were also interested in Austrian economics? Was it was it literally almost what I just said. Uh, how was it for you?

[00:14:26] Jordan Bush: 2010? Uh, you know, or. Sorry, 2008. You know, that election Ron Paul runs, Obama runs on the other side. Uh, and just saw I mean, shout out to Ben Swan, uh, of uh, I can’t remember what the name of his show was called, but, uh, gosh, it’s gonna kill me. But he was like a he was a journalist working for some upstart outlet, and I think Cincinnati. Um, and again, so he was just talking about how the, the RNC was just totally screwing over Ron Paul and, uh, and just kind of, you know, talking about the Republican National Convention and all this kind of stuff. And so, so again, I’m listening to that. I’m largely neocon at that point, much to my shame. And, uh, and then.

[00:15:07] Doug Stuart: I mean, we all we we’re all sinners.

[00:15:10] Jordan Bush: So I’m just kind of hearing that. And then I’m hearing, like, Glenn Beck, I’m just on this, you know, early, early internet for me, I’m just kind of hearing, uh, you know, him talk about, uh, just the different corruption. He’s talking about more libertarian ideas. And then he also has, obviously ad breaks for gold and silver companies. So again, he the things that he was talking about resonated enough. And, you know, just as he’s talking about corruption, it resonated enough where there was some trust transfer. And so, uh, he was just talking about the importance of holding silver and gold and just something that the government couldn’t, couldn’t create more of. And, uh, you know, just like he just was talking about the importance of it. And so I again, resonated thought, okay, yeah, I should do that. Uh, what I, what I later would realize is that I was listening to the wrong upstart media outlet, uh, rather than The Blaze. I should have been listening to Russia Today, uh, because Russia Today had, uh, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, uh, from about 2011 on doing a daily, I believe, daily news show that featured and talked about Bitcoin from very early on. So I ended up I ended up, uh, in, I believe 2011 or 12. Uh, I ended up buying some, some gold and silver had was married and had a little bit of money at that point. So I, I promptly went to the local gold and silver, uh, dealer in my town, walked in the door, saw a girl in her early 20s sitting at the old school computer and on the back of her computer, she had a buy Bitcoin sticker.

[00:16:37] Jordan Bush: I proceeded to look at that. Walked right past her into the other room where the owner was, and he had a whole bunch, the whole mound of gold and silver coins behind him. And so one of the first questions I remember asking was, hey, like this Bitcoin thing, huh? It’s pretty wild. And he goes, yeah, it really is really interesting. Uh, and we just talked about it for probably 2 or 3 minutes. And then I did the responsible thing of just completely ignoring that and then going and unloading about $2,500 on, uh, I believe, silver coins, largely maple leafs, I think at that at that time. So that was, uh, I have the distinction of buying the top of the silver market at that point. Uh, now it’s gone up, I think, more than that. But I was I had bought the top for a good long time. And, uh, and so, yeah, that was 2012. It wasn’t until the end of the bull market in 2017 that I ended up really, uh, you know, buying any Bitcoin I bought, like, 100 bucks worth or something like that. So I literally I mean, I heard about it in 2012. Uh, I watched the one that really hurts me more was in 2015. I watched this documentary about Bitcoin and, you know, stuff that had happened with it. And it never occurred to me, never occurred to me. We had just arrived in Uruguay. It never occurred to me to buy any of it, despite the fact that it was trading in the hundreds of dollars at that point, I believe 5 or $600. Something along those lines.

[00:17:57] Doug Stuart: Yeah, that sounds about right.

[00:17:59] Jordan Bush: Yeah. And so, I mean, I look back at that and I’m like, how did you watch this entire incredible story of all the things that you can do with this? I was just was far too, uh, you know, submissive to, uh, to government, uh, than, you know, than than I should have been.

[00:18:12] Doug Stuart: You want to know why I didn’t buy during that period? I think it was like around 2013, I was introduced to Bitcoin, and, uh, the person who introduced me to bitcoin will remain nameless, but he knows who he is. Okay. Um, and, um, I didn’t know you could buy a fraction of a coin. Yeah. And at the time, I. I didn’t have 300 bucks to just spare on this gamble at the time. Right. It’s just.

[00:18:33] Jordan Bush: Like. Yeah.

[00:18:34] Doug Stuart: So I, I rib him every now and then. Why didn’t you tell me I could buy a quarter of a coin or a third of a coin? I could have spared 100, but now you would have the obvious.

[00:18:43] Jordan Bush: Response or something. Anyhow. You’re fine.

[00:18:45] Doug Stuart: Possibly there was no such thing as Coinbase. Uh, it was a very complicated thing at the time. Um, so in any case, that’s my that’s my like. Yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah. That’s my only defense is, is to blame someone else. Um.

[00:18:59] Jordan Bush: So yeah. So I ended up. I ended up buying, you know, uh, 100 bucks worth in the end of 2017. Bitcoin was probably at 10 or 12.

[00:19:06] Doug Stuart: What I did, that’s exactly what I did. I bought it at seven. Well the reason I remember is it was a 17 okay near the end of 17. And I had to watch it drop to what, 3400 bucks?

[00:19:16] Jordan Bush: Bingo.

[00:19:17] Doug Stuart: And I was just like, no, I’m gonna keep doing it. Nope. I’m just gonna dollar cost. Anyway, we’ll get to the some of the details here, so don’t keep telling your story.

[00:19:24] Jordan Bush: Yeah, I know, in my case. So I ended up buying a little bit just again. I spent a little bit of time on Twitter. I was pretty much a lurker at that point, but just saw the price going nuts and was just like, what is this thing like? What is going on? And so I bought some, saw it go up to 20 K. It was just like, what in the world is going on right now? But still had zero framework for what it was, you know, like why it was doing what it was doing. Uh, and so then about two months later, our we were part of a missionary team in Uruguay, and one of our, the other, the other family that was there with us ended up for, you know, for a few different reasons. They ended up having to go back to the States, right as we were preparing to take our first furlough. And so during that period, we were faced with a kind of a choice, which was either, hey, our teammates are leaving. They might not come back for a while, uh, if at all. And so our question was, where are we going to stay here? And I’m going to lead the church. Uh, or are we just going to kind of basically say, hey, this kind of fell apart. And so we’re going to come back to the States and regroup and just we just, you know, we’re at a point we had about 40 people in the church and just said, hey, you know, we’ll stay here and we’ll just see how it goes and just entrust it to the Lord.

[00:20:32] Jordan Bush: And so from about February of 20, 2018 until, um, May of 2019, I was just like totally dialed in, wasn’t thinking about totally forgot bitcoin, didn’t even think about it again. For another, you know, for a year and three months or whatever. Uh, and just because we were just I mean, this is what we’re all preaching in Spanish. We’re doing counseling, we’re doing, you know, wild counseling situations. And so we just got to the point where, you know, I just was at a point where I’m like, I don’t even have time to think about this. So did that back, you know, we go fast forward a year and a half and in May of 2019, Bitcoin comes back to life, goes back from 3500 up to nine grand. And I see it again. And I’m just at the point where again, we’re the church is more stable, I’m more stable in the role. And I just go, okay. Again, the philosophy major in me is like, time out. Like, what is this thing? What is going on here? Why does this exist beyond the again, beyond what it’s doing above the surface? Superficially. Uh, superficially. What is this thing? And so it was in about May that, uh, again, thankfully, I, I didn’t have a ton of money. We’re obviously missionaries. Uh, but we had been saving and, uh, had a little bit of money. And so I just basically spent about, I would say about three weeks, uh, trying to understand it. And after about 2 or 3 weeks, I was just, I talked to my wife and was like, yep.

[00:21:58] Jordan Bush: So here we go. Uh, 85% of our savings just boom. Right and right into Bitcoin, just like was like, I, I have enough where you know, we can we can get some and feel comfortable with it. And then over the next probably again we didn’t have tons of money but like that was percentage wise it was a lot. Uh and then over the next like seven, eight months. I just kind of went down the rabbit hole of Austrian econ, of just the technical, the technical side of it, the the historical side of why it was created and all these kind of things. And every single thing that I went down just gave, just gave me more. Um, I don’t know, just more conviction over, like, you know, this is a this is a remarkable thing, uh, that is a culmination of a whole host of different, different disciplines that because of that multi multidisciplinary, uh, you know, reality makes it difficult to understand where you can be an expert in one of these fields. But if you don’t also appreciate these other things, then you’re going to it’s going to, you know the case for Bitcoin is going to fall apart for you. You’re going to think it’s going to you know, going to fall going to fail. And and so just the more the more time that I spent listening to people both for and against, the more that I was just like, man, this is this is really a big deal. And, uh.

[00:23:13] Doug Stuart: Were there any were there any strongholds like that were sort of the last to give out, you know, like becoming a libertarian, you know, for a lot of people. I don’t I’m not claiming you’re libertarian. You can call yourself that if you want. But like, a lot of people are like, oh, the last thing was the war machine or the last thing was the fed or well, the Fed’s usually pretty early, but, um, you know, there’s always that like last stronghold of like, okay, finally I’ll let that one go. Were there any for you that that stand out in your memory? No.

[00:23:37] Jordan Bush: Um, again, like I told you, within, within 2 or 3 weeks, I was, you know, irresponsibly in but like, I.

[00:23:43] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Cage stage.

[00:23:44] Jordan Bush: Yeah. And it was just, it was just one of those things where I think, again, Ron Paul, Glenn Beck had, like, prepared me like they’d made the sound money case. So I was already in on sound money. Uh, you know, just the, you know, sound money and non-governmental money, like the fact that, like, governments could just declare that something has value just because of who they are. Yeah. Uh, and so that I already kind of had those those dominoes had kind of already fallen, uh, again, the history thing, I feel like being a Christian was a big help to of just like, thinking. I mean, just when I found out that, you know, what the situation that the United States found themselves in was very similar to, like the fall of the Roman Empire. I was like, oh, okay. And then just a lot of these kind of there just was a lot of dominoes that all kind of came together at the right time. And again, I still look back at that and I’m like, Lord, how in the world? I just the fact that there wasn’t more opposition, I feel like I almost feel guilty on that. I’m like, I feel like I should have been more I should have had more opposition. But it’s all worked out.

[00:24:40] Doug Stuart: So our mutual friend Jimmy Song said that people have the Bitcoin they deserve. Yeah, when I talked to him about it.

[00:24:46] Jordan Bush: He says it kind of tongue in cheek, but like, I honestly again, it’s one of these things where like the fact Jesus uses the phrase by chance at one point in one of the Gospels, uh, it’s it’s like, yeah, I don’t want to quibble over words. At the same time, I do think, I mean, the reality is that anything we have is a gift. There’s no such thing as, you know, getting the Bitcoin you deserve on the most, you know, most truthful level. But yeah.

[00:25:09] Doug Stuart: Well, I think his I think his whole point is that, uh you get what you deserve in the same way that Ron Paul says that, uh, you know, people get the elected officials, they they they deserve.

[00:25:18] Jordan Bush: Correct?

[00:25:19] Doug Stuart: Yes. It was like, oh, they asked for it. Kind of kind of thing. Or didn’t ask for it as as the case may be.

[00:25:23] Jordan Bush: Absolutely.

[00:25:24] Doug Stuart: Um, one of the things that I think a lot of people don’t connect is how is Bitcoin sound? Money. Yeah. Um, you know, I, you know, people discuss with you on Facebook because you and I are Facebook friends. I can see them saying, well, I don’t understand this whole Bitcoin thing as an investment. That phrase is being used a lot, you know, and I talk to, you know, my our family’s financial advisor and you know, they’re just kind of like well you know Bitcoin sounds like fun. But you know we have these strategies. And so they don’t see it as sound money. And I think a lot of people initially think of that is as not sound money, because it’s not a natural resource that is scarce, just like gold or silver or other precious metals. It was created somehow. Um, maybe, maybe dive in a little bit of that, um, on on anybody’s stronghold of, like, the idea of sound money.

[00:26:12] Jordan Bush: Yeah, it really is a hard thing because, again, the thing that I find more and more is that people have like half thought out objections and, and the same thing happens with Christianity. People have like half thought objections where, you know, they’ve never they have this thing they’ve heard culturally or it’s kind of been in the back of their mind. They might not they might never have vocalized it. And then really, like, heard themselves try to defend it. Uh, but like, yeah, one of these things of like bitcoin not being sound money, I mean sound sound money is kind of like colloquial or like, you know, just a way of saying, hey, there’s a finite number of this thing, there’s a finite amount of this. And in Bitcoin’s case, it’s actually more true than of something like silver and gold, because effectively, I mean, the reality is that there’s effectively an unlimited amount of silver and gold in that if the price of silver and gold got high enough, it would it would reach levels where, you know, different producers are incentivized economically to continue to seek out gold and silver and more and more places. Uh, and so again, the.

[00:27:12] Doug Stuart: Same way with oil. Yeah.

[00:27:14] Jordan Bush: Correct. Exactly. And so this is one of the very unique things that separates Bitcoin from these things. Now, again, this is the other thing that I’m careful to point out is there’s no such thing as like good and bad. Uh, you know, like good and bad things with, with relation to different investments. There’s a set of trade offs. And so like, I’m quick to say, like, hey, there are trade offs. Like there are things about which, uh, silver and gold are superior to Bitcoin. If, if the internet went down or, you know, we had a solar flare that fried all of our electricity, then yes, gold and silver would be a far superior option to Bitcoin in those events. Now, in the event that that doesn’t happen, then Bitcoin becomes superior to those things for a whole host of reasons that we can get into. Um, but again, to describe what separates Bitcoin from silver and gold in this event, uh, there’s something in the way that Bitcoin works that was programed in, in the beginning. And that’s called the difficulty adjustment. And so what happens is every ten days on average, uh, basically the Bitcoin software sends out and does an evaluation of how many Bitcoin mining computers are out there competing to try to mine Bitcoin.

[00:28:24] Jordan Bush: And it does an evaluation. And it basically let’s say uh, you know, let’s say one, you know basically uh today the Bitcoin it kind of evaluates and says, all right, there’s 550 people trying to mine 550 computers trying to mine Bitcoin. It establishes a level of difficulty for mining bitcoin that accounts for 550 people trying to mine bitcoin. Now, over the course of the next ten days, let’s say that the United States, in secret wanted to mine Bitcoin. And so they brought online, uh, you know, they doubled the hash rate, which is the doubled the amount of, uh, bitcoin mining computers trying to mine Bitcoin. They would have about a ten day window when they would have be able to have like an advantage, uh, of how much bitcoin they’ll be able to mine. They would be able to basically say, hey we have a lot of hash power, uh, and have a better chance of mining more Bitcoin for about ten days. But after those ten days, then the system would again reevaluate how many people were out there competing. And it would it would find okay, so rather than 550 now there’s 1000 or there’s 1100 mining computers. And it would increase the difficulty to make it, you know, to make it basically to produce at the end of the same period, it would produce the same amount of Bitcoin being mined, regardless of how many people are out there, uh, you know, competing for, for Bitcoin.

[00:29:43] Jordan Bush: So this is contrasted with something like, again, we talked about gold and silver. If the price of gold went to $5,000 tomorrow, which in this world, you know, is totally reasonable in clown world we live in, um, if that happened, then all of a sudden everyone in the world who can produce gold, they can get it up out of the ground, refine it and do all these kind of things for less than, you know, $5,000 an ounce is incentivized to do that until that is not the case anymore. There’s there’s effectively like a supply demand. You can reach a supply demand equilibrium with gold and silver and every other scarce thing in the world. But the only release valve for Bitcoin is, is like, is just demand, like it’s literally price discovery. So as there’s an increase in people buying bitcoin or, and or mining bitcoin, this is why you see the gyrations in the price of bitcoin. Because there is no way for supply to meet demand other than for that to be resolved other than the price going supersonic.

[00:30:45] Doug Stuart: I want to go back to something you said in. You said it was programed. Yeah. And it’s core programing. And I realized the whole solar flare thing or uh, EMP, um, those kinds of situations. Although I’m pretty sure Jimmy, when he was on with me, he explained that that actually wasn’t as big of a problem as a lot of people think with with Bitcoin. But that aside, the idea that it was programed as opposed to God created it, um, is is an objection to some people. It was created. I can’t touch it. If I have, I have gold a little bit, a tiny bit of gold upstairs. Right. Sorry. I just announced that I had gold in my house, but trust me, you’re better off. You’re better off stealing my computer. Um. Um, so I have a little bit. Right? But I can hold it. I can touch it. I can protect it. Um, I know that there are analogies to what I can that I can do with Bitcoin, but it does not feel as real to people. How do you overcome that?

[00:31:38] Jordan Bush: Yeah. Again this a lot of this comes down to your situations. Right. So in the situation that we have EMP or solar flare or you know whatever, then all of a sudden Bitcoin is less advantageous. But in the world that we currently live in and all of the actual the I would argue the far more pressing and likely threats to you, Bitcoin is far and away a better option. So here’s one example. So basically all of our Venezuelan brothers and sisters who had to flee the country, they had to flee on foot. So they had to cross. They had to walk across the border with a bag of their valuables, which if they had any kind of meaningful amount of silver, silver or gold, there were either state sanctioned thieves in the form of soldiers who know that there’s people marching across the border with valuables, or just run of the mill thieves who are waiting to rob people or threaten people who they think have valuables. Everyone’s in a in a very difficult situation. So there were people who were willing to to rob. So in those in those cases, and this is the case of millions of people around the world, the tangibility and physicality of gold, things like gold and silver actually become a liability rather than being something that’s beneficial. Um, so that would be the first way that I would discuss it is there are a whole this might not be your problem as an American, or you might think that this is not your problem as an American, but there are hundreds of millions that represent billions and billions, if not trillions of dollars of capital around the world that is facing this pressure, that Bitcoin is a far more appealing, uh, you know, basically, uh, tool to help them overcome these kind of threats.

[00:33:10] Jordan Bush: Um, the other thing that I would say is, again, something like, uh, cash or gold and silver again, the physicality lends towards needing, uh, needing physical storage. So if you’re, you know, if you are, uh, you know, if you own physical gold and silver, you, you know, need to secure it, whether it’s buried in the backyard or do something. A lot of people want climate controlled things, especially with silver, because of its propensity to rust. Um, and then even or even if you’re sitting there and you’re aware of the geographical, uh, threats of like, you know, the United States pulling another 6102 and, you know, Executive Order 6102, requiring everyone to fork over their gold and silver, which I don’t think anyone should have done at that point. Uh, but even if that were to happen again, people were like, all right, that’s why I’m geographically isolating my gold and silver in Australia or in Switzerland or ruined or whatever.

[00:33:56] Jordan Bush: You still are forced to trust a third party with the bearer instrument. Sure, you know that you have. Yeah. So whereas with Bitcoin, I can take custody of the private keys for my Bitcoin, I can cross any border in the world. No one even knows that I have them. I can tattoo them on my body. I can memorize them. I could create a web page that has 12 pages and, you know, has like, uh, you know, a poem on each of these 12 pages. And I can include one of my seed words on this web page that I can access anywhere in the world, get to the country where I’m going, download any wallet, you know, any Bitcoin wallet that that I want, plug in these 12 words. And now I have access to I mean to effectively trillions, billions dollars whatever. Uh and nobody even knows that I have it. So there’s there’s again there are there are benefits to the tangibility. There are drawbacks to to the tangibility and the physicality. And so I think that a lot of people only emphasize they tend to, emphasize the benefits without emphasizing or acknowledging the the definite downsides to the physicality of something like gold and silver.

[00:35:02] Doug Stuart: Well, I like what you said. There’s always trade offs with whatever investment choices or money choices that you’re making. Yes. Um, you know, I want to go to the the story you told about the Venezuelans crossing the border with I. Am I recalling when you talked on the show they memorized there? Was it they did memory or did they do, like, little slips of paper? No. So. Well, I want to ask you that. Can you explain that story but then share any other stories? Because I think this is a there’s a missional type, uh, situation here where there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of benefit here.

[00:35:30] Jordan Bush: Correct. Yeah. So in the case of so I didn’t I didn’t make the claim just to clarify that any of the people that we knew had used Bitcoin. What I’m saying is they had the opportunity to the technology existed. They had the ability to but they again, because at that point in 2014 still almost nobody’s using Bitcoin. Um, so again, they could have definitely used it and could still use it to move money back and forth. That’s another use case, right? There was a sweet woman in our church. Her name was Sulema and Sulema. She was a single mom. Worked really hard, uh, long hours, made money. And when she told us one time that she went to send money home to Venezuela. And so, uh, when she told me this, I immediately my heart sunk because I knew what she had done. Uh, she I asked her, I was like, how did you send that money? Uh, and she said, well, I went to Western Union. And so I was like, how much did they charge you? Like, what was the what was the fees? And she said it was about, I think she paid $80 in fees to send $200. And so again, there’s a lot of people who, uh, and especially, I would say on the more left side of things who want to then they want to raise their fist and rage against the capitalists who are who are stealing money from, you know, just charging exorbitant fees, uh, to move money.

[00:36:40] Jordan Bush: And the reality is that Western Union is taking extraordinarily extraordinary risks to operate in places like Venezuela, where they’re undergoing crazy hyperinflation or in the middle of Africa. So they’re taking risks to be there and operate there. Operate a business there. And so they they charge accordingly. They price the risk and the fees that they charge. So that’s that’s just the reality. So with in the case of Bitcoin, the, the possibility and the I mean ease exists for her to basically take all of this money and spend less than a 1%, in some cases significantly less than 1% in fees to send that money not to an office in Venezuela that ends up being a honey hole where members of her family, yeah, were members of her family would have to physically enter. Meanwhile, again, there’s plenty of thieves there who know that the only reason you come here is to either pay your bills or get money, so they’re thereby putting yourself in danger. Rather than doing that with Bitcoin, you can send it from an app on your phone to an app on their phone. Everyone has cell phones and nobody has. Nobody’s the wiser.

[00:37:43] Jordan Bush: Nobody even knows that you have this. And so there’s a ton. There’s a ton of opportunity and a ton of value, just even on the most humanitarian level, just thinking about Bitcoin in humanitarian terms. But that’s that’s not the only case for Bitcoin. There are plenty of missional aspects for Bitcoin. And indeed, in the last few years, as we’ve been having these conversations with nonprofit organizations around the world, I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that some of the organizations, including very large organizations who are the most open to considering Bitcoin, are missionary organizations because they recognize the challenge of moving money around the world. There are there are many countries because of U.S. foreign policy whoring, you know, uh, whoring all over the world, starting conflicts all over the world where the SWIFT system, the US banking system doesn’t work. And so it’s not easy at all for these organizations to even send relief money into some of these places or send money in to fund their missionaries in all these different countries. Uh, and so there are a number of people that we know. I will not mention countries all over the world who the organizations recognize that we don’t have access to the SWIFT system. And so they recognize even before they ever talked with, you know, raving lunatic us to basically, you know, Tgfb and some of our affiliated organizations to kind of tell them about Bitcoin.

[00:39:05] Jordan Bush: Some of them have already discovered it and were using Bitcoin, just sending Bitcoin directly to the to the missionaries. They would then receive the Bitcoin and find a um and some of the worst cases there are like telegram or signal signal groups full of people who are also trying to escape hyperinflation and who at any given time are looking to either buy or sell Bitcoin for the local currency. Uh, and so they basically the missions organization sends him Bitcoin. He then goes into this, you know, into this peer to peer marketplace. Uh, that’s informal. They go and find each other and exchange bitcoin for the local currency. And Bob’s your uncle. Then they go and do whatever they need to do. And so there is a greater and greater, you know, more and more common as Bitcoin becomes, you know, more common and more understood. And, you know, all of these things happen that is just going to increase. Uh, and there’s just it’s much more difficult, uh, for governments to, to track down, uh, all of these things because it’s peer to peer, it’s open source software. Uh, there’s just, you know, anyone can can create their own wallet trivially, uh, trivially easy. It’s super. It’s very easy to do.

[00:40:11] Doug Stuart: Well, that brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is this this idea that Bitcoin fixes this. Right. It’s kind of a truism. And we even apply it to like beyond solving missionary mission agent, mission organizations, problems and so forth. But I mean, how far does that extend in your mind? Uh, because there’s a lot of things that like, you know, um, uh, Norman Horn, who’s founder of LCI, and he and I talk about this, there’s this, we just throw out that word. Well, Bitcoin fixes this, and we even talk about it in almost moral terms. Um, where do you go with that?

[00:40:40] Jordan Bush: Yeah. And this is I mean, this is Honestly, one of the things that happens is there’s a lot of people in Bitcoin circles who are not religious and have never been religious, and so when they see Bitcoin and they start to see the the ways that the incentive structure of Bitcoin produces changes in people, produces changes in incentives for governments, for businesses, uh, it is it is radical and profound how how the shift in the nature of the ethics of money production really has downstream effects that really, uh, are very of a lot of consequence. So here’s one example. So one, historically, one of the reasons why wars have ended is because one of the two sides of the conflict, if not both, run out of money. You know, if money is scarce, if people are using gold or silver as currency, you know, as money, uh, one of these sides will eventually run out of money because the conflict gets too, too expensive to continue to buy food and supply their men with weapons and whatever. And so they’re forced to concede, uh, or stop whoring. And for the last 120 years, you’ve seen the bloodiest century in human history, because it’s been the century of central banking, where you’ve effectively enabled deficit spending and enabled all kinds of other things because of, you know, the money isn’t scarcity. Yeah, right. And so, you know, so this is this is one consequence where if we return to scarce money, which is inevitable because you can you can’t taper a Ponzi. Uh, all of these, all of these fiat currencies are going to fail eventually. Uh, and so, you know, we’re going to be there’s an incentive to return, uh, and to be the first one to do it.

[00:42:13] Jordan Bush: Uh, one of the first ones to do it to return to scarce currency. Uh, as that happens, you know, you’re going to see governments forced to, uh, be far less passive aggressive in the funding of wars. Uh, I say passive aggressive because there’s only two ways for governments to operate. Governments aren’t productive. And so they have to they have to, you know, take money from their citizens. They can either be upfront about that and not passive aggressive by raising taxes and just basically telling their people, hey, we really think that we should do this as a country. And so we need you guys to fork over the money to make for to enable us to do it. Or in the case of, you know, non scarce currency including paper currencies, governments just they just, you know, just basically issue bonds and create debt and then push that out as far as they can into the future and steal, um, you know, just basically steal back value from the future and, you know, shackle, uh, generations of their kids and grandkids with debt that they’ll then have to pay off. Um, from a moral front, I say this all the time. Uh, the proverbs are clear that a godly man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children. Uh, if we are leaving trillions of dollars worth of debt to our children’s children, what does that say about us? It says that we’re very unrighteous men. And, you know, like an unrighteous people of very unclean lips. And so, um, so again, there’s 100 there’s 100 reasons why, you know, these things matter. Um.

[00:43:38] Doug Stuart: But how do you how do you. I mean, you can reveal what you want here, but I want to ask how you use it personally. Are you dollar cost averaging? Do you just throw in money? I mean, that’s kind of what I’m doing. And then I want to kind of get your thoughts. I realize we’re not going to give advice here, but I just want to kind of get your thoughts on a few things, which are things like using Bitcoin to donate, um, as opposed to waiting hodling and then donating actual fiat currency. Um, what circumstances how do you how do you personally live in a way that, you know, you talk about these things, but like, I don’t know, I’m just kind of curious.

[00:44:14] Jordan Bush: Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. Uh, nice try. Fed. Uh uh.

[00:44:20] Doug Stuart: I don’t know why I didn’t see that coming.

[00:44:23] Jordan Bush: This is the libertarian podcast I should have. Yeah, this should never have episode one. So what I would say is. So the first, first thing that I would push back on is there are people who make the argument that basically there’s like a schism within the Bitcoin, a number of different schisms within Bitcoin. Uh, uh, just basically believers, uh, there’s some who basically and this there’s a, there’s a schism in Bitcoin a few, a number of years ago where there were the big blockers. These are people who prioritize, uh, the, uh, money as a medium of exchange. They prioritize that and say, this is really the most important property of money as a medium of exchange. And so we ought to want to spend our Bitcoin and we ought to structure, uh, the, the underlying, uh, and make decisions about the underlying way that Bitcoin works to account for the fact that we want as many people as possible to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. There’s another contingent of people within the Bitcoin world, uh, who basically see, uh, who see they do see the value of bitcoin as medium of exchange. They see that this is an important thing, but they basically see it as a as a logical extension, uh, Bitcoin as a store of value. And so it’s not to minimize the importance. It’s saying that there’s an order of operations in which these things ought to flow and that they do flow naturally. And so in the case of and those, those are the small blockers. And so basically they prioritize Bitcoin being decentralized, uh, above basically everything else.

[00:45:52] Jordan Bush: And so whereas you can, you can, you can make bigger blocks. Uh, but you sacrifice the ability for normal people to run an entire full node, uh, which is basically a list of, or a ledger entry of all the transactions. It takes up more space. If you if you run bigger Bitcoin blocks. And so there was a discussion. And so the small blockers ended up winning, uh, against all odds. Because a lot of the bigger entities, the mining companies, a lot of the Coinbase, a lot of these big companies in the space, they all actually wanted to move to big blocks. The small blockers were these little guys just individuals. Uh, and so they ended up winning out. And they they kind of their vision for what Bitcoin was designed to be won out. And so but still this this idea persists even in people who aren’t into Bitcoin. They think, well Bitcoin can’t really be that valuable yet because I can’t go use it to buy coffee or something along those lines. And so I mentioned this on Preston’s podcast and basically said that I’ve been trying to figure out why, like how to articulate the problem with this line of thinking. And the most profitable way and the most helpful, uh, you know, thing that the way that I explain it, to explain it, that makes the most sense to me is to think about in the term, think about it in the terms, think about money in terms of people. Because if I were to say to you, uh, you know, Doug, are our babies people, what would you say?

[00:47:16] Doug Stuart: Of course, of course.

[00:47:17] Jordan Bush: Yeah. No. Now, why are they people? Because they bear the image of God. Like, as a Christian, you would say they. They bear the image of God. They’re made in the image of God. So, yes, everyone who bears the image of God is a person. Now, at the same time, God has laid out from Genesis throughout the rest of the scriptures, he has defined what it means to be a human, and he lays out what what certain responsibilities and a certain telos for humanity. And so, again, if we go to, you know, if we look in Genesis, God says, let us make man in our own image. And then he says, let us be fruitful, let them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. So there’s a sense in which part of what it means to be human is to be fruitful and multiply. Now, Doug, I ask you, are babies able to be fruitful and multiply?

[00:48:00] Doug Stuart: Not as babies.

[00:48:02] Jordan Bush: Not as babies. Now does that, but does that make them by virtue of the fact that they can’t do something that God designed humans to do? Does that mean that they are not humans? No. The answer is obviously no. What that means is that God has also, in addition to having ways God has means. He’s ordained that there’s a certain maturity process that happens with people. And so there’s elements of what it means to be human that people are unable to act, are unable to enact until they arrive to a certain level of maturity. And so, so again, when we now. So then we look at people in their 20s and 30s or, you know, I guess it could be as early as their teens or whatever, uh, you’re able to reproduce at that stage. And so you’re able to have kids and you’re able to more. I don’t know if this is the right way to put this, but more fully, uh, act out what it means to be human than a baby is. You’re no less human. You’re still human, but you’re able to more, um, you know, maturely and fully obey God and do the things that God has called humans to do. Now, at the same time, uh, there are also people who are older. There’s also people who are in their 60s and 70s, and they have not just, you know, they have arrived at a different part and they they actually image forth God in ways that are even unique to normal young people who can who can physically reproduce because they they have wisdom and they have like they have reached a different level of maturity.

[00:49:24] Jordan Bush: And in that maturity. Ideally, they can embody an image forth God in an even more mature way that that isn’t available to even younger people who are mature in different senses. And so what we see within people, and what it means to be human, is that there’s a maturity process that is a natural process that happens over time. And I want to argue, and I’m working on a book to this end, that basically the same thing is true of money. There’s a natural process that that happened by which money is money becomes money. And then even more fully becomes money. And so we could articulate those in the three uses of money where money is a store of value. Money is a medium of exchange. And then eventually money arrives to the point within a culture where it becomes the unit of account. It becomes the thing by which you denominate everything else within society. That is a natural process of occurring. And so the fact that in the case of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is currently it is a store of value.

[00:50:21] Jordan Bush: People are buying it. People are valuing it as a larger market cap than silver as of this week, 2.4 trillion as of the other day to Silver’s 2.2 trillion. Absolutely astounding. Uh, still does not get old to me. Uh, Bitcoin is a store of value right now. Primarily people are looking to it as a store of value. With that said, every day that goes by, there’s more and more people as they value it. They’re willing and they have Bitcoin to give in exchange for other things. And as that process of adoption happens, more and more people are willing to receive Bitcoin as as a medium of exchange. And as that process happens and as adoption continues to grow, we’ll eventually get to a point in the Bitcoin mind, uh, the mind of bitcoiners, where a lot more things where people will start due to the failure of different fiat currencies. If you take the full bitcoin thesis due to the failure of fiat currencies, we’ll get to a point where people really will be denominating everything in Bitcoin. Um, and so again, it’s a matter of wait, it’s a matter of, you know, it’s a matter of waiting for this to happen naturally rather than forcing it to happen. These things are happening in real time without needing some sort of government to make them happen.

[00:51:29] Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so there’s people right now willing to accept bitcoin, whether it’s through the means that you were talking about a little bit. I don’t know, ten minutes ago or so about, you know what was the banking system Swift. Is that the Swift.

[00:51:43] Jordan Bush: System is just the US banking system. And then more recently, uh, the the BRICS nations just created their own thing that has an equally funny acronym, uh, remember what it is, but.

[00:51:55] Doug Stuart: So people are willing to bypass that and send and receive Bitcoin in that sense. Correct. Why is a person going to want to just Hodl and wait until it becomes money as the sort of denomination? Yeah. Um, as opposed to giving some of it away or anything like that, because there are I mean, obviously from from a financial standpoint, you can be you can poorly steward something that you have, even if it’s a store of wealth. And you also have the fact that the government is doing something with what you have in your Bitcoin. Um, I mean, I guess if it’s always in Bitcoin, are we just all waiting for the government to be abolished and then we can spend our bitcoin without any taxes taxable situation. Yeah I don’t know how to kind of parse that out. I mean how are you thinking about those things.

[00:52:40] Jordan Bush: Yeah even even today Bitcoin is taxed as property right. So it’s taxed it’s taxes taxes property. So it’s subject to capital gains and long term capital gains. So if you hold your bitcoin for longer than a year. So if you’re just a hodler and you treat bitcoin you asked how I treat bitcoin I treat bitcoin like long term savings. So if I need to sell some bitcoin I sell some bitcoin like in you know. But the the goal would be to hold bitcoin for at least a year so that I’m not subject to 40% capital gains, I’m only subject to 15% capital gains, whatever. At the same time, there is discussion both with the current administration and many other governments around the world. Um, on a game theory level, to treat, to give different tax treatment to Bitcoin in order to try to incentivize people who hold this asset, which people believe is going to become more and more pivotal to the, you know, the to the global economy. They want to attract holders of this asset to their to their nations. And so they’re offering, you know, different tax benefits, uh, to, to places that are willing to people who are willing to, to come there. So Portugal was one of the places that doesn’t tax Bitcoin. Uh, there’s a number of other countries that are, that are not charging capital gains on bitcoin to try to get the industry to move there, to get revenue through.

[00:53:51] Doug Stuart: What does that look like? What does that look like? Is that sort of like, uh, what was it? Peter Schiff moved to Puerto Rico because there’s like no property, that kind of thing. So does the does the. Okay, so hang on. I just want to get this. So there’s a missionary in Portugal I want to give them Bitcoin. Let’s say I give them, you know, $5,000 worth of bitcoin. Sure. What is that implication for me. And what is that implication for them.

[00:54:13] Jordan Bush: Yep. So you can depending on how you give it. Like you can still get a tax deductible receipt for for Bitcoin. And you can give Bitcoin and they can receive it as Bitcoin. All of the all of the legal and legal. And you know it’s legally and not physically but possible to you know to to do these transactions for them to receive Bitcoin and hold it and do whatever they want to. Um, so from that standpoint, there’s nothing on the part of the missionary. They’re not paying any if they receive, even if you just send it to them directly, they’re only responsible to pay taxes once they want to sell that Bitcoin and convert it to local currency. And they’re only charged based on the amount that that Bitcoin has increased in value. It’s not like they’re having to pay taxes on the actual amount that you send.

[00:54:57] Doug Stuart: It goes to 5500. They pay taxes on the 500.

[00:55:00] Jordan Bush: Correct. Exactly, exactly. And so that’s even just in the present environment. And like I said, there’s and again, sorry, that’s not true of Portugal. Portugal. That’s not the case. But even in the countries where Bitcoin is you’re forced to pay capital gains on it. Again. You’re still only forced to pay on that. Whatever the difference is between the so.

[00:55:17] Doug Stuart: Receiving so the so the increased. No I understand that okay I see um okay. I don’t have a follow up question to that in particular. Um, the um, well, let me look at my notes here. I had some other questions I wanted to ask you. And we’re like, almost out of time. We can keep talking if you want. I have plenty of time. Okay. No worries. All right. Well, uh, then then then I will. Then I will do that. Um, how do you see? I mean, what has been your experience when you talk to other Christians, whether I know I think you did like a money and economics conference or were you part of that was in Nashville, I think last year.

[00:55:52] Jordan Bush: Yep. So that was the Tgf-b conference. That was the third one we’ve done. Uh, it was in Nashville. And yeah, we, we had what’s.

[00:55:58] Doug Stuart: The response when you talk to Christians about this?

[00:56:00] Jordan Bush: Yeah. So, um, I would say the, the, the, the, the breathing out, I don’t know, we it just really depends. I mean, you really have a lot of people, again, as we mentioned, who just they don’t have any kind of real foundation upon which to have strongly held convictions about any of these things. A lot of it is just very surface level. Uh, like, what if the government bans it? You know, it’s like it’s objections like that. Uh, it’s also.

[00:56:28] Doug Stuart: I think we’re past that, that that, uh, threshold though.

[00:56:30] Jordan Bush: Sure. I don’t think there’s still people who. There’s still plenty of people, especially around the world, who who are much more skeptical of that.

[00:56:36] Doug Stuart: No. I mean, in the United States, I feel like, again, administrations can do different things. But I think even with the Biden administration not doing some sort of active action on, uh, squashes squashing it, uh, kind of as a signal that, like, they know that they can’t even really do this.

[00:56:53] Jordan Bush: So then another objection would be just the volatility. Like Bitcoin is so volatile. I’m going to wait till it’s not volatile anymore. And my objection to that is guys listen like it basically objecting to Bitcoin’s volatility and reacting to Bitcoin’s volatility by not purchasing any of it makes about as much sense as objecting to kids, the volatility of children or babies, and not having kids because of how volatile they are in the short term. Like when you have kids, you just price it really good. When you have babies, you just price in the fact that they’re going to be super volatile for a good period of time. And so what you do is you just price in accordingly. You don’t have you don’t go and adopt 12 kids at one time. You know, most people just in God’s providence, most people only have one kid at a time. And so then you just kind of, you know, price it in and you do it that way. Um, so again, there’s there’s a bunch of other objections, but I would say the average person, I mean, the situation now, it’s it really it just breaks my heart in a lot of ways. Uh, because in the last four years that I’ve been or the last five years that I’ve been talking to people about Bitcoin and trying to get people to buy Bitcoin as, as uh, non wide eyed and you know, uh, you know, insanely, uh, screaming at people as I can I don’t I don’t want to do that.

[00:58:06] Jordan Bush: Um the value of Bitcoin has gone up about 12 weeks since I first got into Bitcoin. And so for a lot of people, if they’re if they’re looking at trying to get a whole bitcoin like in for for most people my age and younger, they’re just looking at this like we’re cooked. Like there’s no way I can’t I’m never going to have a Bitcoin. And so then what happens is they they take that and they’re like all right I’m priced out of Bitcoin. But I’m I’m not completely priced out of something like Ethereum or XRP or you know whatever. And so this unit is called unit bias basically drives people to not for any like principled reason but just it’s this visceral I feel like I’m missing I missed the boat reason they kind of are thrown into the arms or run into the arms of all these other cryptocurrencies, uh, that were created for reasons that are not the same as Bitcoin and do not operate in any where, you know, in any way near the same, uh, under the same constraints as Bitcoin operates. And so so that’s something that I run into a lot just trying to answer those questions for people.

[00:59:11] Doug Stuart: Um, well, isn’t the objection overcome by what I realized? You know, again, like I said, 2013, I didn’t realize I didn’t have to buy one whole coin. I could buy a little bit of one. Uh, that objection is like.

[00:59:21] Jordan Bush: Doug, I wish it did. Well, there’s a lot of people who they look at the fact they’re like, I can go buy, uh, if I, I don’t know what XRP’s price is today because I value my brain cells. But, like, they go and look they look at XRP and they’re like, listen, I can buy 2 million XRP, right? And they’re just like, Holy cow. Like I’m an XRP millionaire. And so they you know, and so like that that literally drives people. They’re like okay XRP for example will be the next Bitcoin. And so I’ll ride the wave as Bitcoin succeeds. All these other you know Bitcoin’s tide will raise all boats. And it’s just it’s fallacies. It’s just bad economic understanding that drives people to take action that doesn’t logically follow but is understandable. And I’m sympathetic to at the same time.

[01:00:04] Doug Stuart: Yeah. No. Okay. I see you can have empathy for people who, like, want to think that way. Um, you know, you want to reach something that’s achievable. Um, so, you know, that’s good. That’s for sure. Um, do you in terms of, like, mass adoption over the course of the next 10 to 20 years? I mean, do you have any sort of like, predictions? I want to say predictions. I don’t know.

[01:00:25] Jordan Bush: Prophecy, false.

[01:00:26] Doug Stuart: Prophecies. Yeah. We’ll go with what’s your false prophecy about Bitcoin? I mean, there is a sense in which you kind of wonder if everybody’s looking at this and you have, um, you have, uh, large corporations. Well, just corporations buying it and holding some percentage. I mean, now big financial firms are saying, you know, you should have at least a couple percent of your assets in Bitcoin, okay. Is it is it ever going to become the currency or is it just going to become the best store of value only. And we’re not going to trade on it.

[01:00:56] Jordan Bush: And well, one of the things that I would hope has come across is like I, I do not talk tgfb, you know, “Thank God for Bitcoin” is the name of the book we wrote over my left shoulder. Yeah like that. You know, we we don’t sell bitcoin. You know we we are like an educational thing educational entity. And so we don’t talk about price predictions like this is not something where like obviously we think that I mean we think that the value of the dollar denominated value of Bitcoin is going only going to go up because of just monetary policy, like Bitcoin has no top, because fiat has no bottom, like they’re going to have to continue to print money because of the nature of to service debt, to do all these things. Like they can’t stop printing money. It just isn’t it isn’t possible.

[01:01:39] Doug Stuart: Even outside of that, it’s probably still more valuable. Yeah, that doesn’t have to be your reason. Why? Because I don’t I don’t think anybody listening to this show has some, like, glimmer of hope that that’s going to change. But even if it did change, it’s still worth it.

[01:01:51] Jordan Bush: Yes. And so and so this is where again, some of this comes back to like when I talk to people, I’m, I’m actually like frustratingly, uh, philosophy major, which is, again, I think there’s lots of ethical. I think one of the most underappreciated and understudied, uh, topics in the world today, in terms of how consequential it is on our everyday lives, is something called the ethics of money production. Uh, it is like all of us recognize that there’s ethical, um, there’s ethical questions and concerns about what you do with your money. So if I were to go out and, you know, take my hard earned money and then, you know, blow it on prostitutes and cocaine, like everyone would recognize, oh, this is immoral. Like what you’re doing is immoral. Um, at the same time, what is nowhere near as recognized is that the there is an there are ethical concerns with how money is created. Uh, and so my introduction to this, this idea came through a book called “The Ethics of Money Production” by an Austrian economist named George Guido Hülsmann. Uh, he’s an Austrian fellow or a fellow who teaches at a university in, um, let’s see, Germany, you know, in France, He’s German, teaches at a university in France. He wrote this book. And what this book does is it unpacks the the work of a 15th century Catholic bishop named Nicolas Oresme. And Nicholas Oresme was a Catholic bishop who basically objected to the prince of the country he was in, which always escapes me.

[01:03:18] Jordan Bush: What country it was. But he just basically objected to this prince because the prince was doing this. He basically they had a whole bunch of currency units that were, I believe, somewhere nearing 99% silver. And so over time, the prince had the realization where, man, if we just introduce, you know, 1 or 2% of a base or metal into the monetary supply, we can increase the amount of currency units and effectively have more purchasing power. And I can benefit from that at the expense of everybody else. So it’s the initial form of, of inflation. And so everyone else. And so over time that percentage goes from one or 2 to 3 to 4 to 5, and then ends up getting to the point where, you know, people have lost sight of why we even had 100% silver or 100% gold in the first place. And so as this is happening, Nicolas Oresme like, makes a public spectacle and just basically denounces the prince and says to him, hey, uh, you’re you’re violating this obscure, uh, Old Testament passage, namely the eighth commandment, sir, uh, your your stealing. And so this, this is the idea that I just think is super underappreciated by Christians is that it is morally reprehensible for governments to, to, you know, award themselves unilaterally, uh, godlike power in, in giving themselves the ability to create currency out of thin air that is completely separated from any kind of production cost that goes into the production of that currency, whereas something like gold and silver would require self-denial and actual sacrifice of scarce resources through, you know, going basically paying men to go dig it up out of the ground, to refine it, to have, you know, pay for the tools that enable them to do that.

[01:04:56] Jordan Bush: Uh, A process of of imprinting. Uh, you know, whatever it is, the amount of the on the coins and all these different things, there’s a production cost to gold and silver. There is no production cost or almost no production cost to fiat currency. You can take the same piece of paper and put a one on it. Take an identical piece of paper, put 100 on it, and for some reason this is now worth 100% more than the other, or 100 times more than this other one. That that is morally reprehensible on the grounds that it violates the way that God has designed people to operate in the world. Uh, this this idea came to like, clarity in my mind. I was I was in Uruguay. I’d been in Bitcoin for less than a year, and I was still doing sermon prep. I was pastoring our church was in the book of Galatians. Get to the end.

[01:05:41] Jordan Bush: And the apostle Paul says that God is not mocked for what a man sows, that will he also reap. And so we had a lot of new believers in our church, and I just began trying to like, think about and trying to, like, flesh out. Okay, how do I explain this to new Christians? What does it mean that God is not mocked for what a man sows, that he will also reap? And so I just rephrased it in my mind as, okay, so God has so hardwired this principle of sowing and reaping into the fabric of the universe, that to deny this is to mock him. So then I started reflecting to myself, okay, so so if this is so obvious, God, there’s got to be examples of this everywhere. So what are some of these examples? And you know, the first one that came to mind was the apostle Paul talking to the church in Thessalonica. And he says to them, if one will not work, then neither should he eat. So the Apostle Paul is basically saying, the point of food is to give you energy to work. And if you’re not willing to, to steward the energy that you receive from eating in order to work, then you shouldn’t receive the food in the first place. And if you don’t do that for long enough, you’re obviously going to die. And so this is so there’s a principle of sowing and reaping there.

[01:06:44] Jordan Bush: There’s a fixed relationship between sowing and reaping there. And over and over again I just started seeing these everywhere in the scriptures. There’s all kinds. All kinds of these things. You know, God has an order to the to sexuality. You know God and he has an order where we get you get married first, and then you enjoy sexuality. And when we reverse those things, if we try to, if we try to reap sexual activity and having children outside of the outside of the bounds that which God has designed them to be enjoyed within, then it introduces all kinds of problems, both into our personal lives and at a societal and national level, eventually. And so I continue to go down and just find, you know, logic itself is bound in sowing and reaping. It bound up in sowing and reaping. If this, then this, that, that is the logic of sowing and reaping. You can’t just get an outcome because you want it. Uh, there are trade offs to everything, so actions have consequences. So the the as a pastor, this culminated, I thought to myself, man, it would be great if there was one example of sowing and reaping that had something to do with Jesus. Because as a pastor, you know, you always want to culminate with with something, something to do with Jesus. It tends to have.

[01:07:54] Doug Stuart: Well, as a good pastor who wanted to be the next Tim Keller in Uruguay. Yes, definitely.

[01:07:59] Jordan Bush: And so so I just started to think about the nature of of salvation within Christianity and contrasting it with the nature of salvation in, you know, the death of Christ in another religion, like something like Islam. So within Islam, uh, Allah does not. Allah can just unilaterally forgive sins. He can just basically say, declare your sins are forgiven. This is why they object to the need of Jesus having to die on the cross, because they just said this wasn’t necessary. Allah can just say your sins are forgiven. There’s no need for a sacrifice to die for sins. But within Christianity, the scriptures say that the soul is the soul that sins must die. You know, a God. You know, like basically there, there, there. Unless, I mean, sin has a cost. God will. He will penalize.

[01:08:43] Doug Stuart: Sin. Something has to bear the cost.

[01:08:45] Jordan Bush: Something. Someone has to pay the cost. There is no free lunch as it relates to and there’s no shortcutting salvation and forgiveness. And so in the Christian economy of these of salvation, Jesus, it’s not that, you know, forgiveness is just free. It’s that Jesus pays the cost of salvation. He he maintains this relationship between sowing and reaping. Jesus reaps what we have sown, and by extension, we reap what Jesus has sown. And so just getting just seeing that this, you know, this relationship between sowing and reaping is everywhere. It just blew my mind because I grew up in church and never thought about, you know, these, these concepts in, in economic terms. And so as I started to look, you know, upon reaching that conclusion, I started to look at fiat currency. And what really just floored me was that fiat currency is basically a denial of sowing and reaping. It’s governments and central banks trying to basically deny that actions have consequences. They basically say, say this to the effect of we actually had um, Oh, shoot. What is his name? He’s one of the, uh, Treasury secretaries or somebody. Uh, Neel Kashkari, who during the Covid thing, when they printed a whole bunch of money, uh, he just basically said something to the effect that debt is just money we owe ourselves. This this is something that literally came from the mouth of a.

[01:10:04] Doug Stuart: Supposedly.

[01:10:05] Jordan Bush: Smart person. And so just this whole idea, you know, the scriptures talk in no uncertain terms about the danger of debt. The scriptures do not trivialize debt at all. Our culture, our current monetary system, trivializes debt. Debt is just a formality. It’s a necessary part of the economy. It’s something that you should you should do. And this is just. This is just completely at odds with the scriptures. And so as a side effect of this, one of the consequences of, of just living in a system where we normalize debt is that we marginalize the scriptures. Yeah. And so we look at a verse, we look at, you know, we as we’re teaching our kids. And, you know, the apostle Paul says, you know, he just is kind of a little bit wishy washy. He says, oh owe no man anything except to love one another. It’s very clear, like Paul. Paul’s like, hey, don’t don’t have debt except for the debt to love each other. And we look at that. And if you live in a debt normalized society, you look at that and you’re like, you know, you’re tempted to just go, well, that was in that time. And now we’re in this time. And and so you just get to the point where, whether you want to or not, you’re marginalizing what the Scripture says. And the reason why we’re okay, marginalizing it to a degree, is because we’re looking at the consequences. And the consequences don’t seem so bad when you’re in the middle of this, especially when you’re in the United States, who is.

[01:11:18] Doug Stuart: Sort of like arrogance of like, well, you know, like I can think of like a teenager saying, oh, you know what? I’ll have premarital sex. I can handle it. I’m mature. Yeah, like I can handle it.

[01:11:26] Jordan Bush: How bad could it possibly be?

[01:11:27] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:11:28] Jordan Bush: Yeah. And so this is this is just something where again. So this this again has nothing to do with the pragmatic of I want to save myself from the incoming fiat doom. And like, this is just like, this is just a moral argument that is grounded in the scriptures and grounded in, you know, history. And so I think there’s a Christians have an obligation to be salt and light. And this is one very timely way in which Christians can be salt and light. Now the question is, why does why does this matter? Because one of the things that the ability for the United States government to just print money out of thin air. One of the effects is that they can fund wars that are fought forever. They can fund gay and trans education in public schools forever because they have money to, to to fund it. They can they can fund African abortions by the millions because they’re just printing the money out of thin air. And so I just think if in terms of the most efficient use of, uh, of, uh, of energy and political capital, like when you do knock down this domino to return to, you know, the earlier thing about Bitcoin fixes this. If you can knock down the domino of unlimited money, you’re able to knock down a whole lot more than your than a lot of people would initially think.

[01:12:41] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Do you think Bitcoin will be one of the reasons we could get rid of the fed like that? It will become more acceptable to do that.

[01:12:47] Jordan Bush: I think people.

[01:12:48] Doug Stuart: As opposed to just like oh yeah, we all heard Ron Paul talk about it.

[01:12:52] Jordan Bush: Yeah. I think one of the things like Bitcoin reveals that the Emperor has no clothes. Like that’s one of the things where it just realized, like when you just think about the fact in our, in our modern secular utopia that our current monetary, monetary policy is determined every few weeks by effectively a monetary priest coming out to a podium and announcing what the cost of capital will be. Like it’s it’s unhinged. Yeah. It’s so wild when you think about that. And so I think that as especially as the consequences of, of this policy of these fed policies come to their, you know, as they start to wane and people start to see the real consequences of them. I think people I think the pushback is going to be swift from a lot of people. And so so I’m hopeful. Again, I’m not like some sort of utopianist where I think Bitcoin is going to fix everything. I do not think that. I think there is, uh, one, one entity that’s going to fix everything. And he is a person. Uh, and he is the, uh, he is the potentate who we will worship for all of eternity, which is why I would not identify as a libertarian, uh, because we’re going to be worshiping in a benevolent dictatorship. For all. For all. Uh.

[01:14:00] Doug Stuart: Oh, man. We’re gonna have to have another conversation about this. Well, I want to. I’ll leave that hanging. Maybe. Maybe we’ll record a bonus or something, I don’t know. So, uh, no, I’ll leave that hanging because I want to talk. Do you remember, uh, Dwight Peterson?

[01:14:16] Jordan Bush: I do.

[01:14:17] Doug Stuart: Was he okay? If I’m not mistaken, coach? Okay, so I was, um. I’m pretty sure it was him. He was preaching on that same passage in Galatians, uh, at Bible college. You and I, uh, turned out, uh, we have a Glenn Beck to Ron Paul connection. We both are now orphans of the same college. That never made it for the past last year. Um, and, um, he. So, you know, you know how the they taught us you got to see what the therefore is there for, you know, in, in hermeneutics and exegesis, uh, after Paul gets talking about finish talking about you reap what you sow. He says, therefore do not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time you will reap a harvest. And most of the time as a teenager, you’re told, hey, you’re going to reap what you sow. Don’t sin, you’re going to reap what you sow. Don’t sin, don’t, don’t, you know, don’t, uh, you know, trade future pleasures for current pleasures, all of that. Right. But the point of the letter is to encourage people to do the right thing. The point of the letter was, hey, you need to continue doing good because you will reap this. And so there, that pastoral, I just remember, I’m pretty sure it was Dwight Peterson who, who, uh, was preaching that and I just it’s always stuck with me. One of the handful of things that, you know, you kind of keep with you for years and years to come, uh, out of college, uh, because most of us don’t remember most of it. But you do remember some of those seminal moments. And I remember thinking, okay, if I’m ever discouraged about doing what’s right and doing what’s good, that and that I should not become weary in doing that. Good. Uh, whatever that is. And that’s not, um. Yeah, that is not a, uh, a, uh, third degrees away from telling everybody to huddle here. I’m just saying that that the, the principle that you’re talking about, you brought up that I make the connection 100%.

[01:15:58] Jordan Bush: And I agree, and I think one of the one of the things that has happened to the, to the American church is like we are there is such a doomer ism within the American church. It’s like we just expect everything to get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And like, we just expect that there there’s just unending, unceasing periods where everything just gets awful. And it’s just like, man, I’m not saying everything’s going to be great at any given point. I’m not saying everything’s going to be great, but there has been periods throughout Christian history, church history where there is extraordinary, like fruitfulness on the gospel front and extraordinarily like revealing of the impotence of ungodly authorities. And so like I, like I just I look at Bitcoin again not not to like be dramatic but like I just look at it as like one. It’s just been for me like one like this. This reminder could be there even apart from this. But like, it’s just one reminder that these governments and central banks want to present this unified front of this seriousness and like, competence and power. Yeah. And in reality, like it’s a clown show like it is, they’re literally making it up as they go along in ways doing whatever is most convenient for them over any like short term time horizon. And so again, like there’s there’s a verse, it’s um, uh, let’s see, it’s uh, Psalm two and it basically says, you know, the kings of the earth set themselves against the Lord and against his anointed, and they want to basically break his chains and throw them off them. So it’s basically this idea of like, God has made a world where he’s restraining them and they want to break off these, these shackles that are restraining them so that they can do whatever they want to. Yeah, yeah. And so again, like when I look at bitcoin it’s just way too.

[01:17:37] Doug Stuart: That’s why I am a libertarian Jordan.

[01:17:39] Jordan Bush: Exactly. Yes. It’s way too funny to me that just if you just objectively look at the situation, you have governments around the world, their, their ultimate form of strength is their currency. And as all of these national currencies around the world are all starting to fail, the one currency that’s starting to ascend is the one that none of them control. It’s the one that none of them came up with. It’s the one that none of them get credit for. And it’s this one that’s just, again, free market chosen. Every libertarian said Amen. Like free market chosen. It’s nobody is forced to use Bitcoin. Everyone is just this is I say this all the time. Uh uh, what’s his name? Uh, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, ruined a perfectly good illustration of mine, which, as a former pastor, is unforgivable. Uh, but he basically said, you know, until El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, every single Bitcoin transaction that had ever taken place was completely voluntarily. It was completely voluntary. And so what is like what is the like when God calls us to love one another? He wants us to voluntarily choose to love each other. He wants us to voluntarily love each other. And he wants this love to to express itself in all sorts of ways. And so within Bitcoin, like people are choosing it not because someone is forcing someone’s putting a gun to their head and making them choose it. They’re choosing it because it’s providing something that these existing currencies and existing other things are not providing them. And so they’re being served by Bitcoin even in a limited capacity. And so this is it’s communicating something far bigger and more important than just the monetary reality that it’s communicating.

[01:19:23] Doug Stuart: So I want to give you a chance to talk about your book, upcoming book called “The Orange Umbrella”. Yeah. Uh, would you would you like to share? I’m sorry. I haven’t been able to sort of just, you know, deftly weave it into our conversation. But I do want people to know about that, um, because I know it’s an important project.

[01:19:37] Jordan Bush: I am a horrible marketer. Uh, I’m like, I would much rather, again, just much rather talk about, you know, just like missions and like other things that are affecting people’s lives and so like but yeah, at the same time, we do have a number of books that we’ve written. So over my I guess it’s left on this side. We have thank God for Bitcoin as the Orange Book. Um, we wrote that book, right. Uh, I guess right at the end of 2021 had the extraordinary privilege of experiencing every Protestants dream, which was that in God’s providence, the book came out the same week as a book by the Pope, and our book was outselling the Pope in the first couple of weeks. And so we said, take that, Bishop of Rome. Where are where, you know, where are you at? Uh, so Luther, Luther rejoiced. And, uh, over my other shoulder, uh, earlier this year, we published this book called “The Gospel According to Bitcoin”, which is just basically saying, it’s nothing. We don’t believe Bitcoin is some sort of utopian vision or whatever. But basically we’re thank God for Bitcoin was written to basically help explain the moral case for Bitcoin. Uh, and just what money is more broadly, uh, that’s what it’s designed to do to a Christian audience. This book is designed to explain the value of Christianity and the value of the gospel, and explain the gospel to a largely Bitcoin audience. So if you thought a book for Christians about Bitcoin was niche, boy, do we have an even more niche book for you over here, which basically just basically uses and just, you know, looks at money more broadly and Bitcoin in particular as a parable, uh, that, you know, there’s a reason why Jesus chose money as a parable a lot.

[01:21:08] Jordan Bush: There’s a whole bunch of ways in which money relates to our life, and there’s a whole bunch of things and a whole bunch of ways in which Bitcoin does the same thing. So we wrote that book for that reason. But then the book, as you mentioned, that we are I’m, you know, getting, getting ready to release, it’s called our first kids book, um, called, uh, “The Orange Umbrella” is designed to again, just tell the story of money at a very high level and a humorous and, uh, you know, rhyming way. Uh, I wrote the I wrote the text, and I have a buddy who’s worked in the entertainment industry and, you know, worked in Hollywood and a bunch of stuff for his whole career. Worked on a couple, uh, worked on, well, one, one TV show that I would imagine a lot of your audience has heard. Uh, it was his very first job. He worked on the first two seasons of a show called Rick and Morty. Have you ever heard of that? That show? I have never, I will confess, I’ve never seen this show. I’ve heard that there’s not great things about it, but he he did work on the first two seasons of it. So he’s he’s worked in that industry. He knows what that looks like. And so we ended up writing this kid’s book and the the Cliff notes version of it is basically there’s an island where it never rains.

[01:22:10] Jordan Bush: It rained one time, a long time ago, and when it did, it was so bad that people, just all the people who were on the island, just basically said, hey, we need to come up with an umbrella, we need to create umbrellas. And so they started coming up with ideas and just trying to figure out what the umbrella should be made of and what should it look like. And so over time, as they were discussing, they just disagreed. They disagreed on what the ideal umbrella should look like. And so they ended up rather than working together, they all kind of splintered off and each of them made their own umbrellas. And so you have one guy who made a green umbrella. And so the green umbrella is the largest in the lightest umbrella. You know, of any of them? Uh, it’s, you know, the easiest to carry around, and it’s great. And then there’s a golden umbrella. And so the golden umbrella has is the first one that was made. And it’s, it’s, you know, heavy and that’s, you know, gives it strength and all these kinds of things. And then there’s, uh, there’s an umbrella that’s actually a house. This woman made an umbrella that looks like a house. Uh, and so and then there’s a guy. My favorite one is there’s a guy who, during the first storm, hit his head and doesn’t remember that the storm happened. And so he’s like a conspiracy theory. He thinks that rain is just a giant conspiracy theory. It never actually happened. And so all of these people wasting their time building umbrellas is just a giant psyop.

[01:23:26] Jordan Bush: Um, and so all of this is happening. They’re making their umbrellas. And then meanwhile, there’s a there’s a, you know, our heroine’s. There’s two little kids whose parents died during the storm, and and so they’re just kind of been left on their own because the derelict adults in their lives are too busy arguing and making their own umbrellas as vanity projects. Uh, and so the story is basically, you know, every day they go up and down this mountain. They get to the bottom. One day they’re there, and all of a sudden, walking up the beach towards them comes a guy holding an orange umbrella. And so then just basically the orange umbrella announces, orange umbrella man announces that, uh, there’s going to be a storm coming that’s worse than any storm they’ve ever seen. Uh, none of them are ready for it. And so he’s got an orange umbrella. He’s happy to give it to him. And, uh, and so then the rest of the story is just what happens when when the storm comes, you know, and all of the umbrellas are put to the test. What happens? Um, so, as you can probably imagine, with at least the first two. Yeah, you’re just basically comparing fiat currency as the green umbrella. Gold is the golden umbrella. The, uh, basically the house shaped umbrella is just real estate, uh, as a store of value. And then the, you know, the the tricky one. Yeah. The conspiracy theory guy is just, hey, I’m not going to worry about the future. I’m just going to kind of.

[01:24:38] Doug Stuart: So does he have a tinfoil hat? Because that’s all he needs.

[01:24:40] Jordan Bush: I did I did think about giving him a tinfoil umbrella. I should have done it, but we just we just didn’t. He just kind of doesn’t have any uh, he just basically thinks that he’s. He’s like, if it rains, then I’ll be able to swim, you know, I’ll be able to survive it. And, you know, he’s putting his his confidence in himself. Yeah. Um, so. Yeah. So that’s kind of the story. That’s great. Yeah. So. So, yeah. So the goal is to get it published by the end of the week or end of the end of the year.

[01:25:04] Doug Stuart: End of the week. Great.

[01:25:05] Jordan Bush: Yeah. No, not the end of the week and end of the year. And, uh, the whole thing, it was actually illustrated, um, by a friend of ours, illustrated by an American by hand, uh, written by Americans using. No. No. Chatgpt. No anything. Uh, the whole thing rhymes. Uh, I was, uh.

[01:25:21] Doug Stuart: So it’s a good American poem.

[01:25:24] Jordan Bush: It’s a good American poem. Uh, and again, we just recognize it’s a I try to be as winsome as possible and acknowledging, like, again, the same thing we talked about. It’s not like all of these umbrellas. There’s there’s truth in what everyone is saying. Like, all of them have their strengths and they have their weaknesses. And so they’re, you know, the problem with anybody is just if you have unacknowledged weaknesses. And so, um, so yeah, so we just the story just kind of what happens when everything comes to a head and and again, if you’re, if you’re a Christian, if you’re a Christian, you’ll get this book and appreciate this book on a level that nobody else will. Like there’s just things that you’ll pick up on that other people won’t. Um, if you’re a bitcoiner, there’s things that you’ll pick on that that other people won’t. Uh, and then even if you’re just, uh, you don’t like Bitcoin at all and you’re just, you know, you just pick up this book. It’s a, it’s a funny story that will hopefully tug on your heartstrings at certain points and, uh, just get you, get you to appreciate like, the again, the principles that that undergird what money is and why.

[01:26:22] Doug Stuart: So that’s really great. That’s really great. Well, Jordan, I appreciate you coming on to talk about this. Where can where can our listeners or viewers, uh, follow your work, um, and support your projects, that kind of thing?

[01:26:32] Jordan Bush: Yeah, I appreciate that, Doug. Thank you again for having me. Uh, again, I don’t take this lightly. Like I know there’s scarce. You guys have scarce, uh, broadcasting time, and, you know, you’re taking time away from your family to to record this. Um, you can find out more on our website, which is just, uh, we’re actually getting ready to undergo a, like, an overhaul. So I’m very anxious for that because we’ve got, like, some, like, buggy codes and stuff. Um, but you can do that. And then on top of that we have, uh, the “Thank God for Bitcoin” podcast, uh, which is, you know, we just record podcast talking about both Bitcoin in particular and then interviewing people in the Bitcoin space. Uh, talking about again, bitcoin adjacent things as well. Um, so we’ve done a bunch of podcasts about that. And then I think beyond that, yeah, You can go find the books on Amazon anywhere. Anywhere books are sold. You can do that. And then again, we’re going to be doing a conference in. It’s either going to be Dallas or Fort Worth in in April of this coming year. Okay. Um, and so again, if you’re, if you’re in the area or just interested in these topics at all, then you’re, you’re welcome to come there. And so tickets will be available within the next I believe in the next month. They should be up.

[01:27:33] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Excellent. Okay.

[01:27:35] Jordan Bush: And then Twitter I guess Twitter’s the Twitter’s the place where you can find me the easiest. So JM writes on Twitter.

[01:27:41] Doug Stuart: Awesome. Excellent. Well, I appreciate you joining us for this and I hope I’ll hopefully we’ll have you back. And, uh, we’ll keep talking about your little ticker behind you over your right shoulder. Uh, will be even higher. Maybe maybe seven digits, I don’t know. We’ll see. Hopefully I won’t.

[01:27:58] Jordan Bush: Be seven digits within the next year. But again, yeah, it’s things are getting nuts on a whole bunch of levels. So it wouldn’t surprise me if things were crazier later this year.

[01:28:08] Doug Stuart: Yeah, well, we’ll find out.

[01:28:09] Jordan Bush: Yep. All right. Thank you ma’am.

[01:28:12] Doug Stuart: Thank you.

[01:28:15] Voiceover: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast. If you liked today’s episode, we encourage you to rate us on Apple Podcasts to help expand our audience. If you want to reach out to us, email us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com. You can also reach us at @LCIOfficial on Twitter. And of course we are on Facebook and have an active group. You are welcome to join. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.

[01:28:39] Voiceover: The Libertarian Christian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. If you’d like to find out more about LCI, visit us on the web at libertarianchristians.com. The voiceovers are by Matt Bellis and Kathryn Williams. As of episode 115, our audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out at podsworthmedia.com.

LCI uses automated transcripts from various sources. If you see a significant error, please let us know.