Are we seeing the revitalization of conservative civilization? All over the world has been a massive backlash against globalization, its leftist leadership, and its anti-cultural liberal values. And it's just the beginning. I'm Dr. Steve Turling. I believe the liberal globalist world is at its brink, and a new conservative age is rising. Join me every day as we examine these worldwide trends, discover answers to today's toughest challenges. And together, learn to live in the present in life of even better things to cover. This is Turley Talks. Biden campaign plunged into crisis. That was the headline of the New York Times on Friday morning after 50 million viewers witnessed with their own eyes what we've all been seeing for years now. And as good as it may be to see so many voters now finally coming to terms with reality, however hard that might be, the truth remains that Biden is a serious threat to our nation. The question now is what does it mean for the presidential race and ultimately America? While things are certainly looking pretty good for Trump right now, we have to make sure that we do our part to actively build a society where the timeless values of faith, family, and freedom can flourish. And that means we all need to be actively building up parallel economy and using our God-given resources wisely and faithfully. Today, I've got my friend and sponsor, Jordan Bush, of the Thank God for Bitcoin podcast. We have discussed what actions conservatives and Christians can take to prepare their homes and finances no matter what happens in November. And Jordan's actually part of an upcoming Bitcoin conference in Nashville. It's this July 24th and 25th. Just click on that link below to find out more and the register. It's going to be an amazing time. Jordan, great to see you, my friend. Thanks for being with us. No, thank you for having us. Yeah, it's awesome. We were chatting before the interview. We have lots of common friends and we swim around the same shores as it were. So it's really good to finally hook up with you here. So Jordan, dude, you're on the front lines of finance. I mean, particularly decentralized finance. I mean, why don't we just start with some macroeconomics here? Just by you giving us your initial thoughts on the debate and its aftermath. Yeah. I mean, the debate, again, I feel like a little bit like the mosquito and the nudist comedy, you know, like, where do you really begin? There's just so many places you can go. And so I get it. I'm writing that down. That's a good one. And just, there's so many, again, there's so many things where, I mean, you could just stay in the moment and just say, okay, I mean, there's such, I mean, you have one candidate who barely, I mean, arguably does not understand that he's even there participating. And then you have another candidate who, I mean, it just got, I mean, borderline, it's conceivable that he could end up in jail at some point. Yeah. And so just the reality of those two things is just incredible. Again, I also think, again, I'm just the reality. We have a former reality show participant. I mean, that jet still isn't lost on me. It's still just as a crazy world we live in. I think it's just, it's a difficult, it's a difficult thing to make sense of. And again, to try to explain to, you know, we have friends who live around the world. And they're constantly asking us questions of, you know, like, what's going on over there? So it's tough to know kind of what to say. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, one of the advantages, I think of being a constitutional republic is that we have elections. Yes. At least we still do now, right? Yeah. Yeah. And election years are their regular opportunities to think afresh about who and what we are as a constitutional republic. In your mind, what makes an election year, and especially one as pivotal as this one, really just the perfect time to discuss the relationship between God and government and money. Yeah. It's a fantastic question. And it's one I've thought a lot about. Honestly, I think in during elections, again, you hit the nail on the head. It's one of these points where periodically we're confronted with the need to, you know, just think about these issues. I mean, we can argue that we're dealing with them all the time. But when you're forced to get into a voting booth and to, you know, put your name behind a candidate, you really are forced to think about a lot of these more definitional issues. And I think that, you know, we're at a point in American history where we're at a point of definitional crisis. You know, for the last, you know, 20, 30 years, we've been just confronted with more and more of these questions of, you know, just existence of, you know, what is it to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? What is marriage? You know, and, you know, what is government? What are these, another, you know, what is the role of government? What should they do? How do we know? I think that, again, that question, more than any of these other ones, it's not just what are these things because at that point, any one of us can offer our opinion. But the question that a friend of ours, you know, Doug Wilson likes to ask is, you know, by what standard? How do I know? Is it anything other than just my opinion that's grounding, you know, my understanding of what these things are? And so I think that, you know, these questions of what is a man? What is a woman marriage government? Is another one of these? I think that's a big question that people are trying to wrestle with, especially now, is, you know, what is the role of the government? What should they do? What shouldn't they do? And I would say even underneath of that is another question that doesn't get asked anywhere near as much, but that is every bit as influential is this question of what is money. Because if you think about it, governments can't do anything that they can't fund. And so, you know, your understanding of what money is and where it comes from is foundational for understanding of what a government can do. Because again, it affects how much money they have. It affects, you know, basically what they're able to subsidize. Because money is one of these things where it allows us to subsidize beliefs that we have. And so again, as Christians, we look at the way, you know, the government's sending money around the world to fund things like African abortions. It's a horrifying thing, honestly. And so again, there's plenty of other things, wars all around the world. A bunch of other things, what you believe about the nature and the point of origin of money has widespread consequences for the way that we, you know, basically our experience of the world and the way that we affect other people around the world as well. Can I ask you, you know, what makes your emphasis on the podcast and even the upcoming conference on the 24th and 25th so fascinating is you do think theologically about money. And you're not, and it's not even thinking theologically about money. It's thinking theologically about tech, about industry, about DeFi. You name it. The conference is called Thank God for Bitcoin. Can you get this just like a, like just a little bit of a taste of like a theology of Bitcoin? What's behind that? Well, it's funny because again, you started out this conversation by saying, "Hey, Jordan, you're at the cutting edge of finance." And I just have to laugh because again, it's true. It's true in a very real sense. And at the same time, I never, I never thought that this was going to be kind of where I would be. It's just by way of just a quick introduction. I was a pastor and missionary living in Uruguay in South America. Help plant a small church down there, you know, reform Baptist Church and just was very content doing that. And then at some point, you know, when we got to Uruguay, we were anticipating, you know, Uruguay's a very secular, much more like being, much more like a small piece of Europe that you kind of just tacked on to South America. And so when we got there, we were thinking that that's what ministry was going to look like. It was ministering to atheists and agostics and that kind of thing. And I was a philosophy major in college and so I was looking forward to that. But then when we got there, we found that there were that almost, I mean, more than half of our church in the beginning were Venezuelan immigrants who had their currency, you know, devalued completely by their government through issuing more, making more and more promises and then printing money to fund those promises. And so we had more and more people who had to leave their country and leave their families behind and try to move to a different place to get a job and try to send money home. And so as we were trying to help, you know, our brothers and sisters in Christ pick up their, pick up the pieces of their lives after they were forced to flee, I just started to try to understand again this question of why is this happening? And, you know, what do we do about this beyond just the immediate, you know, providing foodstuffs and, you know, helping, you know, whether it's build furniture or just help people pay their bills, you know, why is this happening? And what do you really do about it? And so one of the things that I really just came to realize was just a lot of what we were seeing was not new. It was new to me because I lived in the United States where we have the best currency in the world for the last, you know, 100 years. And so I was immune to a lot of the things that we were seeing in the lives and, you know, lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ who were from Venezuela. But then as I started to look around and I started to do more research, I started to realize that this has happened in that sort of currency failure has happened in many countries around the world. And it's happened three and four times in the last 50 years alone. And so there's been more and more occasions where, again, governments get to get to the point where in order to continue to get elected, they make more and more promises to give free money to people. And because the money is just paper or digital representations, you know, of a money, rather than something that's scarce, that requires work to produce, the money just gets devalued to the point where it gets worthless. And people literally will throw it in the case of the paper of currency. Just throw it in the street or use it for art projects to try to sell in order to generate income. And so we saw the effect that this was having just on normal people. But I also, as a missionary, I also looked around and saw the spiritual climate in Uruguay. There's very few churches that were able to afford a building or to pay their pastors anything approaching a living wage. And the reason for that is because on average, the currency fails every 15 years. And so imagine you're a small business person or a church and you started this church. You started growing. There's people coming who are being generous and sacrificially giving of their time and giving of their, the fruit of their labor, they're giving money to this church. And the church starts to save up to buy a building for three or four years, five years, six years. And at some point in that, in that pattern, the currency fails. And if you're holding that money and if you're holding that value in currency, it becomes worthless. And so these churches and the ministers of the gospel are, and just normal businesses, normal people, normal organizations and institutions are just weakened. They're just have their knees cut out from under them and they have to start over from nothing. And so this is, I just saw this over and over again. And we just, you know, tried to figure out like, what do you actually do about this? I didn't have a good answer to that. And then in 2019, I just started going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole to try to understand what it was. Had no, I just was like, what is this thing? Just curiosity, right? Just, just curiosity. Like, what, what is this thing and why was it created? And, you know, with a little bit of research found that it was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Because the, the founder just saw this issue of, you know, you have, the government was able to bail out these profligate gambling banks with no repercussions. Nobody went to jail. None of these things. They were able to just to bail them out by printing more money and then giving it to them. And so basically the, the creator just saw this and said, Hey, this is, this is immoral and unjust. It devalues the currency held by normal people who are just out there living their lives and doing their jobs. And so, so I think this is where this comes to bear because again, it's one thing to see it happening in third world countries all around the world. It's another thing to, and this is where it came home for me was in 2020, where, you know, President Trump initially and then President Biden after him ended up between the two of them creating more than 80% of all the dollars that were, that have ever existed were created, you know, as they airdrop money to people. And so that, that doesn't sound. I mean, just for, we'll say it again, 80% of all the money that's ever existed was created since 2020. And so I started to see a lot of the same things that I've become accustomed to seeing and hearing and talking with our, our Venezuelan brothers and sisters and then our, our European brothers and sisters. I started to see and all a lot of those things happening in the United States. You started to see the housing prices double, in some case triple depending on where they're at. And now why was that? Was that because the houses got so much better overnight? No, it's because there was much more currency competing for more or less the same number of houses. And so what this does is it just destroys, it destroys the purchasing power, you know, of normal people. And then as, you know, by extension churches and nonprofits and, and normal businesses. But, and again, this, it disproportionately affects nonprofit organizations because where for profit entities can raise their prices to, for a period of time, account for and make up for the purchasing power loss that they're experiencing. Non-profit organizations have to, are forced, they can't just raise their prices. So they have to go out and they have to go find either new donors to, to fund them new, you know, patrons of your church, of your Christian school, or whatever it is. Or they have to go out into their existing donor base and ask them to give, to be even more generous at a time when their own margins are being, are being cut. And so this is kind of what we're going to be, a lot of what we're going to be talking about is just, you know, here's this reality. Here's what's happening. Here's what's going on. Here's how different people around the world. So, you know, different, we're going to have college Christian college presidents who are there. We're going to have farmers who are there. We're going to talk about how just these, these monetary, just the effects of monetary policy, how it has downstream effects on people all over the world, including things that don't seem necessarily to have monetary consequences. Right. We're going to talk about that. And then we're going to get into this of, what does this have to do with Bitcoin? I'm going to be delivering, you know, an address that's entitled, "What hath Jerusalem to do with Bitcoin?" So, so truthfully in there. Exactly. So, again, that sounds, it sounds perfectly insane at the outset. But again, just in reality, it's far less insane than it sounds. Yeah. And, and this you asked about, you know, just money, like, what does this have to do with Bitcoin? Again, I think that the important thing for people to take away is that God made a world of scarcity. Mm-hmm. God made a world in which sewing leads to reaping. There is, there's a logical relationship between sewing and reaping. This hit me. I was, I was pastoring our church in Uruguay. I was doing sermon prep one, one day, and I was reading in the book of Galatians. And in the book of Galatians, chapter six, the apostle Paul says that God is not mocked for what a man sows that will he also reap. And so I started to think about, okay, how do I, how would I, you know, reframe that for somebody who doesn't have a lot of biblical background? And so I started to think about, okay, what, what are, so Paul was saying that God has so hardwired sewing and reaping into the fabric of the universe that to deny it is to mock God. Mm-hmm. And so I started to think about, what are some other examples of this? And so I started to think, okay, in Thessalonians, the apostle Paul talks about, he says, if one isn't willing to work, then neither should he eat. Mm-hmm. So Paul said there's a relationship there. Right. And he says, you know, what, because what is the point of food? Right. The point of food is to give you energy to then go out and work and provide for your family and for others. Right. Right. And so Paul's saying, if you're not doing, if you're not willing to sacrifice and do work, then neither should you get the thing that gives you more energy to be able to do that. Yeah. And so, and then you just start going down the line. You start looking at, you know, God has a logic to things like marriage and sex, you know, good things like children. God says you, you get married first, and then you experience the joys of sex and the joys of childbearing. And then we can even go just, we can even go to something like sin. In the Islamic faith, Allah can just forgive sins. He doesn't need, there doesn't need to be a sacrifice for sins. But Yahweh requires a sacrifice. There must be a, there's, there has to be a cost, you know, when they're sin. The soul that sins must die. And so in, in the Christian faith, you know, we see this, this sowing and reaping is something that it isn't to be run away from. It's to be embraced in God's ways. And basically God provides a way for God will provide for our needs as we submit to and acknowledge him. Yeah. And so this is the reality that hit me was this isn't just a good thing. This is a matter of faithfulness. This is a matter of humility. Yeah. Submitting to sowing and reaping is a matter of humility. And again, the, the click in my mind was just the reality, just realizing that fiat currency, which allows governments to create value out of thin air and fund whatever they want is not simply less than ideal. It's sinful. Yeah. It's a, it's a denial of sowing and reaping. It's basically setting aside a scarce world and trying to replace it with a world of their own, of their own making that corresponds with the way that they want to do with the way they want it to work. Yeah. They fund every war they want to abortions in Africa, you know, anything they want to do. And so again, so this is where this comes to bear with what you understand money to be. And if, you know, if you understand and see the importance of having scarce money, you're also going to have a scarce government as a result. Oh, there you go. Oh, I love that. That's a, that's a nice, can I, there's the not correct. And so that's the reality. And so again, we're just trying to help people look at and march down and think through the logical, just the logical consequences of some of the things that the scriptures teach. I've heard it that there's interesting analogy there with credit as well. I'm sure we could use credit and all kinds of good and fruitful ways. But if we're not careful, credit does seem to invert the pattern of fasting first, then feasting, you know, Friday, it's Friday, first, then Sunday. And credit tends to say, Oh, feast all you want now. And then we'll make you fast later to make up for that feasting. And it just seems to, it's really, it seems to, it's almost, it's pernicious. It turns it turns the whole thing on its head, it seems. It is. It's a completely different world than the one that God made. We had Neil Kashkari, who worked for, you know, the Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve of the Treasury, but just came out and said that debt is just money. We owe ourselves. You know, he just comes out and says this. Now, on the one hand, we have our Lord saying that, you know, through the apostle Paul, telling us to, Oh, no man, anything, okay, this is, this is clearly, this is Bible. This is just plain as day. Oh, no man, anything. And then we have Neil Kashkari telling us that that is just money we owe ourselves. You can't hold both those at the same time. Now, again, there are, I'm not saying that there is no, there's no case for debt. But again, I think it's entered into far too frivolously. We've been far too, I would say, you know, Stockholm syndrome into accepting this as just a normal part. It's just normal that you take out $200,000 in loans before you go to school. It's just normal in order to take out half a million dollars to buy a house. And so I just think that these are things that are not normal throughout all of human history. These are, we are far and away the exception and there's consequences to that. And so that we're going to be talking about a lot of the ways in which, you know, having a money that is not scarce has affected things like education, it's affected things like food, it's affected things like health care. It just fleshes itself out in all kinds of ways that are that are harmful and that have other downstream effects that we're that we're dealing with all over the place. One thing I, this will have to be for another interview here, but one thing I think this awesome rabbit trail we could actually go down is this notion of archeofuturism, archeofutur money. It comes from Guillaume Phi, I was writing, yeah, back in the 1990s. His concept was better than how he actually developed it. But it was just so fasted that basically the future is going to be about going back. Yeah. Future is going to be about marrying tradition and technology. Yeah. It's like that's, you guys are like, you're not just on the front lines of finance, you are on the front lines of archeofuturism. I mean, you're really doing it. And it's so, oh, it's so cool. Yeah. And I would say, that makes sense. And I would say, yeah, this is, I mean, honestly, when we talk about, talk to people about Bitcoin, when we talk to Christians about Bitcoin, it's really Bitcoin is this ancient thing. Right. It's got a lot of the characteristics of gold, but it's got this modern packaging that helps to overcome some of the, some of the weaknesses that, that allowed gold to be co-opted the way that it, you know, gold is money to be co-opted. And so again, we look at Bitcoin as one tool in the tool belt. It's not a panacea. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't fix everything, but it does fix a number of things and provide strategic tools. I'll give you one example. I had the privilege to interview BJ Dictor, who was the spokesperson for the Canadian trucker protest. And so when I, when I interviewed him, basically what he told us was, you know, we had hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars donated to us. And Justin Trudeau decided that we were enemies of the state and so they debunked us. And so the only money that they were able to access was the Bitcoin that was donated to them. Wow. And so, and so I just basically, I said to him, I was like, BJ, honestly, I'm not going to claim all the blame or all the credit. I don't know which to call it, but I had literally been praying for something like the Canadian trucker protest that happened because it would demonstrate the value proposition of Bitcoin in ways that nothing, it would grab people's attention in ways that nothing else would. And so I talked to churches and pastors and I said this to Doug Wilson was, you know, Doug, like we live in a day and age in which for saying things that five minutes ago was just obvious to everyone, maybe up the nature of how a boy can become a girl, you know, basically, or whether or not that's possible, you can be debunked for that. Yeah. And so I said, what would you do tomorrow? Yeah. If, you know, you preach a sermon just from the scriptures and you come out and say something, the government, you know, the bank debanks you, how would you pay salaries tomorrow? Right. How would you fund your missionaries who you're funding over the around the world over the long term, you'd probably be fine because the courts have been a bastion for sanity, bastion of sanity, largely, but still, in the meantime, it's going to be very difficult. And so as we talk to people, we just say, hey, we're living in a different world and you need to reconcile with the fact that you're living in a different world and Bitcoin is one tool to have in your tool belt. I love it. Again, as we prepare for November and beyond, it is absolutely imperative for all courageous patriots to focus on building a resilient parallel economy and safeguarding our financial futures for faith, family and freedom, Georgian and his team at the Thank God for Bitcoin Conference are doing just that. And they want to share all of their wonderful insight that you just got a taste of here with you July 24th and 25th, click on that link below. Check out all the details in this amazing upcoming conference in Nashville. You're going to love it July 24th and 25th. It's going to be a game changer for you guys. We're going to thank you so much for being with us. Amazing stuff. It's celebrating the rise of a new conservative age. (upbeat music)
