In this episode, Pastor Joel interviews Rod Martin, founder of Founders Ministries, a hedge fund focused on investing in technology and other emerging industries. They discuss how Christians can get involved in these emerging industries, and what they can do to invest in them.
00:00:36.160He does a lot of partnering with Founders Ministries, with Tom Askell and Jared Longshore, who we greatly appreciate.
00:00:42.360Jared Longshore has been a guest on our show as well.
00:00:45.120So without further ado, Rod Martin, would you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell our guest a little bit about who you are and what you do?
00:00:53.960I'm kind of prone to saying I'm just a poor kid from Arkansas, which is appropriate for what we're going to be talking about here in a minute.
00:01:02.700We have, you know, a background in our family of immigrants and, you know, poverty and farming and, you know, school teachers and things like that.
00:01:13.880But my first job out of law school was as policy director for Governor Mike Huckabee.
00:01:19.160and then I was part of starting PayPal and we do a bunch of things in biotech and internet spaces
00:01:25.240and we have a hedge fund that we're looking increasingly in the direction of an aerospace
00:01:30.720play and all of those things are possible because because God has given us freedom in this country
00:01:37.920this is an amazing place it is not a perfect place of course but America was founded on what
00:01:43.820are unquestionably christian ideas and ideals uh perhaps none so plain as those enunciated in the
00:01:51.820declaration of independence that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created
00:01:56.120equal they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights not by a constitution
00:02:02.940not by a bill of rights not by a government but by their creator with unalienable rights
00:02:08.880among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course,
00:02:13.620pursuit of happiness was not just some Jeffersonian flourish. It was the idea that
00:02:18.300men and women are gifted differently, that they have different visions planted in their hearts
00:02:24.400by the Lord, and that they should be free to pursue those visions and callings differently
00:02:30.280with different outcomes. And that has been the glory of America, that people can come here and
00:02:36.460be absolutely anything. And it's the greatest society in the history of the world because of
00:02:42.940that. What are a few of the up-and-coming industries that Christians should be prayerfully
00:02:47.420considering involvement or investing in? What are you excited about right now?
00:02:52.540No, there are an awful lot of things. The thing I'm probably most excited about
00:02:56.300is what Elon Musk is doing at SpaceX. And we are looking at launching a company,
00:03:03.200pun intended uh in that same general area uh in the next few years so i'll come right back to that
00:03:11.660there are a lot of opportunities right now the the rate at which technology is progressing is
00:03:18.000accelerating uh over 90 percent of the things that humans know have been discovered just in
00:03:24.240the last 15 years it's unbelievable what's happening on many many fronts and uh you know
00:03:30.380right now there's a very large and well-financed trend on the left called ESG investing. That's
00:03:38.700environmental, social justice, corporate governance-based investing. They are harnessing a
00:03:44.820shocking, shocking amount of money, trillions and trillions of investor dollars to basically
00:03:52.160advance leftist causes and to do so sacrificing investor returns. And you say, well, you know,
00:03:59.640I don't care about a bunch of fat cats investor returns. Who cares? Well, yeah, but most investors
00:04:05.760aren't fat cats. They're your grandma down in a retirement home in Sarasota. And people don't
00:04:12.520realize that. The biggest public shareholder in this country is CalPERS, the California Public
00:04:18.760Employee Retirement System. So these are just the little guys. Most money on the market is little
00:04:26.120guys and it's important that their money not be harnessed to do things they don't believe in
00:04:31.860and also that their money get the best possible return just like the parable of the talents and
00:04:37.980the parable of the mountains so uh one of the things that we're advancing is something called
00:04:42.940lsv investing liberty security values uh which is more in line with where most americans are
00:04:50.160trying to advance the ideas of liberty, certainly national security. There are a lot of very hostile
00:04:56.680states in the world, but also many of them with very hostile worldviews. And of course, China is0.92
00:05:02.680probably the foremost of those. And then values, which is our way of encapsulating Christian
00:05:09.680morality and Christian worldview. And LSV investing, we're training thousands of financial
00:05:16.860advisors right now. We're about to announce a partnership with a major university that we're
00:05:21.600going to be doing the training in conjunction with very soon. You'll know the name. And so
00:05:27.380we're training financial advisors in this. There are a lot of opportunities there and they're not
00:05:32.100necessarily things you'd think of. Like for instance, there's a company that's working
00:05:37.380on building a liquefied natural gas terminal in Canada that would ship liquefied natural gas or
00:05:43.280LNG from Alberta to Germany. And you say, well, how the heck does that help anything? Well, very
00:05:49.880simple. First of all, it's just a good thing. The more energy there is, the more opportunity there
00:05:57.880is to alleviate poverty. And natural gas reduces everybody's carbon footprint, if you're interested
00:06:03.540in that sort of thing. It also dramatically increases the viability of the electric cars
00:06:09.340people are more and more wanting but the biggest thing from my point of view is national security
00:06:13.980if germany is less dependent on russian natural gas that's a huge win for nato and for the united
00:06:21.780states and oh by the way some companies here made money instead of some russian oligarchs who want
00:06:26.800to you know assassinate their political enemies and so so there are ways to invest that are not
00:06:32.080only very lucrative financially but also very positive for the things we believe in and for
00:06:38.160the communities that we need to be loyal to. Our own hometown, if we're to love our neighbor as
00:06:43.680ourself, our first neighbors are the ones right around us, and we certainly want to keep them
00:06:48.400secure. So there's that, but let me circle back around to space. What's happening right now
00:06:53.580is absolutely revolutionary. We are at a point that is like unto 1500, you know, right after
00:07:00.600Columbus sailed. The technology has gone from unpowered rafts to sailing ships, and it's
00:07:08.980happened in the blink of an eye. When Elon is able to launch fully reusable rockets on a regular
00:07:16.460basis, and he by himself at SpaceX launched more tonnage into space last year than all other launch
00:07:25.040providers in the world put together china russia india japan the european space agency boeing
00:07:31.680lockheed everybody elon launched more tonnage than they all did and he did it cheaper than any
00:07:38.660of them could and what's happening is is he's bringing the cost down so an atlas 5 launch
00:07:44.300costs about 150 million dollars and it has cost roughly that for decades because there has been
00:07:51.280no incentive for Boeing and Lockheed to innovate at all. They get cost plus contracts from the
00:07:56.620government and they just keep rolling in the dough. Elon didn't have that. Elon made about
00:08:02.980$180 million at PayPal and he plopped most of it into SpaceX and that's all he gets. NASA gets
00:08:09.700$20 million a year. Elon gets $180 million one time and he plopped it into things that blow up
00:08:16.580in midair so you know he had to make it work and or he's going out of business and so he did and
00:08:23.640it's it's amazing and here's what's happening long story short that launch that costs 150 million
00:08:30.940dollars anywhere else you might want to go on a falcon 9 costs about 62 million that's a huge
00:08:38.980savings to the taxpayer and to anybody else launching anything into space but wait there's
00:08:43.740more because elon's actually doing it for about 30 million so there's a huge profit in that and
00:08:50.440then wait as his fleet of reusable rockets grows larger and they have more time on the on the
00:08:59.840vehicles he's getting that cost down to what he's estimating to be about 700 000 a launch now what
00:09:07.600that means is the difference between you know the atlas fab at 150 million the falcon 9 at 700 000
00:09:14.660that's the difference almost exactly between buying a ticket on a 737 to fly from here to dallas
00:09:21.540versus buying a 737 flying it to dallas one time and scrapping it i mean it's just it's a revolution
00:09:31.760And what that means is we are literally headed toward at least a million people living and working in space by mid-century, access to a shocking amount of stuff, near-Earth asteroids on the moon, et cetera, things that will bring down the price of nearly everything, not just a little, an incredible, incredible percentage, such that everyone in the world, everyone in the world is going to be dramatically affected by that.
00:09:59.820poverty is going to vanish as we know it people's living standards are going to forgive the term
00:10:07.300skyrocket and all of that is a function of being able to reach things that have been whizzing past
00:10:13.620us forever it's like the illustration i gave you with john d rockefeller the oil was in the ground
00:10:19.040for all those years the wealth wasn't in the ground it was in his head it was the ability
00:10:26.340to bring it up, refine it, and ship it, and that took some brilliant entrepreneurs to figure out
00:10:33.900how to do something that no one had ever thought of before. That's what Elon's doing. That's the
00:10:38.200most exciting technology in the world right now, and it is going to mean that we extend the creation
00:10:43.600mandate, be fruitful and multiply, fill the open, subdue it, far, far beyond just planet Earth,
00:10:48.880and it's going to happen pretty fast. I was just thinking the other day, and I thought about
00:10:53.880Elon Musk. It's so funny that you said all this, but I was just thinking, I was like, man,
00:10:58.980when civil tyranny was, you know, ratcheting up in England, wasn't it fortunate in the
00:11:06.200providence of God that there was another place, geographic, physical place that Christians could
00:11:12.320flee to? And so I don't know if you know my story, but I just left. I was pastoring in California
00:11:16.520for the last seven years or so. And my family and I, I was just, I don't know, I've got kids.
00:11:22.380When people ask for, you know, my short answer, the short version of why I left California, I said, I have kids and I love them.
00:11:37.180We're basically about 45 minutes northeast of Austin, which Elon Musk also talked about that.
00:11:43.760And I know Austin's super liberal, but we're in Williamson County.
00:11:46.680It's more conservative, but there's a lot of opportunity here for ministry and economic opportunity.
00:11:51.200And Elon Musk even said with Joe Rogan recently, he said, you know, that Austin, he thinks, argues it's going to be the biggest mega boom town in the United States of America in the last 50 years.
00:12:01.140And so anyways, all that, you know, when England was.
00:12:10.320And so with England, you know, back in the, you know, racketing up, you know, back in the founding of our nation, you know, the United States, racketing up, you know, persecution and civil tyranny and all these kinds of things, there was a place to go.
00:12:23.240And so I look at the way our nation's going and I haven't given up hope.
00:12:28.680And I think the potential for a resurgence, conservative, biblical resurgence in our nation.
00:12:33.780But I just, you know, neither of us have a crystal ball and neither of us are prophets or the son of a prophet.
00:12:38.760And so we don't know exactly what's going to happen. And I just I think as you were talking, I just kept thinking, well, maybe, you know, maybe the next generation of Puritans, maybe we just go to Mars and Mars becomes the Christian planet.0.94
00:12:53.500Well, it probably won't be me. It'll probably be the grandkids. But, you know, I want to build the ships they fly on. And we're going to have that opportunity. And that is an inherently positive thing, historically speaking.0.79
00:13:09.500When the Puritans came to America, that did not have the immediate impact perhaps on England that one might have hoped, but the long-term consequences of that were a democratic England that respected the civil and human rights of all people.
00:13:28.840And that was not something you would have imagined under James I.
00:13:33.480So the positive outworking of there being a frontier was extremely, extremely consequential.
00:13:43.580So break that down real quick practically for me, like the layman, the ordinary person like me, because you were saying earlier that by having half a million people work in space and bringing that cost down from $150 million to $700,000 for I think you call it the Falcon 9 and all these different things.
00:13:58.840If we can get that many people in space, that many people working in space, you specifically said that it would virtually eradicate poverty as we know it and drastically raise the standard of living, at least at some level, globally.
00:14:22.900And I think by the end of the century, it's going to be a multiple of that.
00:14:27.520You're going to see some pretty dramatic things happen once this hits critical mass.
00:14:32.640If you think about it a little bit like the trajectory of the airplane in the last century.
00:14:40.920So the Wright brothers flew in 1903 and you have some meaningful aircraft participating in World War I a decade later.
00:14:50.920but you know the the big thing in in aircraft in that time span was the zeppelin you know nobody
00:15:00.160was really thinking about these airplanes as much more than than uh toys for the most part but then
00:15:05.740in the 20s uh you had some government contracts left for air mail and they did it right they
00:15:11.420didn't do it the way nasa has handled uh boeing and lockheed they they said hey if you meet the
00:15:16.780qualifications, we're going to pay you. Just fly the bloom and mail. Well, that resulted in a
00:15:22.840plethora of companies that became airlines later and also airline manufacturers to fill the gap.
00:15:30.700And by the 30s, you have meaningful airlines all over the world. By the 40s, World War II started
00:15:38.900for America by some airplanes blowing up Pearl Harbor and ended for America when some airplanes
00:15:46.120flew all the way from Tinian to drop atomic bombs on Japan two years after that you're breaking the
00:15:52.140sound barrier a decade and a half after that you're walking on the moon and flying on 747s
00:15:57.300once it hits a certain critical mass it just forgive the term takes off and that's how this
00:16:03.200is going to work so the question isn't uh the question that is likely to get asked is yeah but
00:16:08.740in space where would you go it's not like you're going to fly to you know the equivalent of uh
00:16:13.840disney world or london or something on the moon and that's true except that's not what's going
00:16:21.460to happen what's going to happen is exactly like the early settlers coming to the americas where
00:16:28.000there were also no cities there were also you know everything had yet to be built they came
00:16:33.820looking for gold and they came looking for timber to build ships with and they came looking for
00:16:39.680tobacco and you know all the things that that could be found here and what we're looking at
00:16:44.920in space there's there's one asteroid that nasa found a few years ago just whizzing past us every
00:16:51.740single year uh pretty nearby that the early readings suggest is worth 1.6 trillion dollars
00:17:00.660all by itself in metals uh there's a there's a isotope called helium 3 that is uh almost
00:17:08.540impossible to find on earth but it's all over the surface of the moon uh the scientists tell us
00:17:14.420there's a pretty good chance that helium three uh is the key to large-scale commercially viable
00:17:22.140fusion energy well that would solve all energy problems on earth forever right there done and
00:17:28.340you know so there are things out there that aren't here but all the things that are here
00:17:33.960not not trees and grass obviously but but in terms of minerals and such all the things that are here
00:17:41.000are there and way more of them so it's just a matter of being able to get to them affordably
00:17:46.840which is what that cost per pound to orbit problem that Elon is solving is all about
00:17:51.340and then getting the stuff back or processing it and manufacturing in space itself which is where
00:17:57.940you're going to start getting those large populations truly you'll want to do that and
00:18:02.560And I don't have it in for Pittsburgh or anything.
00:18:05.060I want their industry to thrive too, and it will.
00:18:08.020But the environmental problems that we're seeing right now,
00:18:11.700if you're talking about we don't want to open a mine in Colorado
00:18:14.680because it'll pollute such and such stream,
00:18:17.400well, it ain't going to pollute a stream on an asteroid.
00:18:20.440It's not going to cause any problems with drinking water on the moon.
00:18:25.420And so there are a bunch of second and third order problems that get solved,
00:18:29.860but it's the plentitude that is just off the chart and that starts you know i'm holding an
00:18:36.700iphone here and we're we're talking on computers right and if the materials that go into this thing
00:18:42.720suddenly cost 10 of what they cost today but i can promise you apple's not going to stop building
00:18:50.3001500 iphones they're going to give you a 1500 iphone that does 10 times as much
00:18:55.800And so everyone, both materially and non-materially, becomes vastly wealthier. Everything gets better in very much the same way that happened after the colonization of the New World.
00:19:10.500So we're going into a golden age if we don't squander it. If we go into that socialist nightmare that they're trying to push us into, everyone will be poor and persecuted together.
00:19:23.620but barring that there's an enormous opportunity here for all of humanity to experience a
00:19:29.640renaissance and if not then yeah maybe we're the puritans who go to mars and start massachusetts
00:19:36.700bay right yeah no that's that's super helpful because i was just thinking in practical terms
00:19:42.160like i was just thinking with space like even if we can get the cost down what what is on the moon
00:19:47.100that has value so the helium three i had you know literally about that so that okay because i was
00:19:53.120like are we just going to collect moon dust and does does moon dust do something does it is like
00:19:57.780fairy dust it makes us like how how is it valuable so i yeah okay but not only that again remember
00:20:04.860it's a process of discovery there are countless things you can do in space that you can't do here
00:20:10.380because they're for instance there are all kinds of materials processes manufacturing processes
00:20:15.740that would work in zero or microgravity much differently than on earth so there are compounds
00:20:24.160like for instance pharmaceuticals that you could combine in space that you could not ever do on
00:20:29.820earth and that gives you just an enormous opportunity to cure diseases and and push back
00:20:36.860the curse in the most practical way that could not ever be done if we don't go there but we also
00:20:42.840don't know what we will find for instance when when the spanish came to the new world they
00:20:48.820discovered things like the tomato well nobody was expecting the tomato but can you imagine
00:20:54.520italy without italian food i mean that's kind of how things were up until the 1500s and then
00:21:01.220suddenly we have spaghetti and lasagna and all the things that that were known for it you say
00:21:06.100well that's a silly thing it's not that silly i can't count all the italian restaurants down the
00:21:11.040so you know the whole world is better when we discover all of the treasures that god has baked
00:21:19.000into the cake of the universe and we're on the brink of finding a bunch of new ones amen it's a
00:21:24.560bigger it's our it's a bigger cake than maybe we previously thought and that's because we we serve
00:21:29.740a bigger god than we often are willing to think so all right rod well thank you so much this has
00:21:35.500been super helpful and uh well let me just do this uh in terms of kind of a bonus we've already
00:21:42.880kind of been talking about it and i think our guests are going to be really uh blessed to listen
00:21:47.080um our our viewers but um is there is there any last kind of maybe you know like with going to
00:21:53.840space and those kind of things what what are some good companies i guess tesla with elon what are
00:21:59.300some good companies that christians should i know you don't want to give maybe financial advice but
00:22:04.720What are some things that maybe Christians should consider investment in?
00:22:09.840Is that a question you feel comfortable answering?0.96
00:22:12.660I mean, first of all, if you have a financial advisor, I would encourage you to ask your financial advisor to get trained and certified by the NSIC Institute, the National Security Investment Consultant Institute, which I serve on the board on.
00:22:28.000We are teaching principles of liberty security values or LSV investing to thousands of financial advisors.
00:22:37.900It is very, very helpful and it is very Christian based.
00:22:41.600And we have a lot of amazing people involved in that, the Air Force and Space Force generals and all kinds of amazing people.
00:22:50.000The world's leading expert on financial terrorism is one of our faculty members.
00:22:55.880And so get your financial advisor to learn some things about where the world is going right now.
00:23:03.900LSV investing is a thing, and it's going to be a very big one.