Rod Martin, former policy director for Governor Mike Huckabee and PayPal co-founder, argues that America's Christian founding ideals clash with ESG investing, which he views as advancing leftist agendas. He champions LSV investing to secure national interests against China while highlighting SpaceX's revolutionary cost reduction from $150 million to $700,000 per launch. This shift could enable millions to colonize the Moon and Mars by mid-century, accessing helium-3 and asteroid minerals to solve Earth's energy crises and eradicate poverty. Martin further suggests life expectancy might reach 750 years if random death causes are eliminated, framing space colonization as a modern Puritan exodus and recommending investments in Tesla and AppTech for energy diversification and censorship avoidance. Ultimately, this vision reimagines space exploration not merely as scientific advancement but as a divine mandate to expand human civilization under biblical principles. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Investing With Liberty And Values00:06:55
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
Hi, this is Pastor Joel with Right Response Ministries.
This is another episode of our podcast slash show called Theology Applied.
Today I'm privileged to have as a special guest Rod Martin.
I first met Rod Martin last fall at the Fight, Laugh, Feast conference in Franklin near Nashville, Tennessee.
And I've just been impressed by his work.
He's done a lot with the SBC.
He does a lot of partnering with Founders Ministries, with Tom Askell and Jared Longshore, who we greatly appreciate.
Jared Longshore. Sure, has been a guest on our show as well.
So, 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?
Well, sure.
Thank you.
I'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.
We have a background, our family of immigrants and poverty and farming and school teachers and things like that.
But My first job out of law school was as policy director for Governor Mike Huckabee.
And then I was part of starting PayPal.
And we do a bunch of things in biotech and internet spaces.
And we have a hedge fund.
And we're looking increasingly in the direction of an aerospace play.
And all of those things are possible because God has given us freedom in this country.
This is an amazing place.
It is not a perfect place, of course, but America was founded on what are unquestionably Christian ideas and ideals.
Perhaps none so plain as those enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.
They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, not by a constitution, not by a bill of rights, not by a government, but by their creator with unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And of course, pursuit of happiness was not just some Jeffersonian flourish, it was the idea that men and women are gifted differently.
That they have different visions planted in their hearts by the Lord, and that they should be free to pursue those visions and callings differently with different outcomes.
And that has been the glory of America that people can come here and be absolutely anything.
And it's the greatest society in the history of the world because of that.
What are a few of the up and coming industries that Christians should be prayerfully considering involvement or investing in?
What are you excited about right now?
No, there are an awful lot of things.
The thing I'm probably most excited about is what Elon Musk is doing at SpaceX, and we are looking at launching a company, pun intended, in that same general area in the next few years.
So I'll come right back to that.
There are a lot of opportunities right now.
The rate at which technology is progressing is accelerating.
Over 90% of the things that humans know.
Have been discovered just in the last 15 years.
It's unbelievable what's happening on many, many fronts.
And, you know, right now there's a very large and well financed trend on the left called ESG investing.
That's environmental, social justice, corporate governance based investing.
They are harnessing a shocking, shocking amount of money, trillions and trillions of investor dollars to basically advance leftist causes.
And to do so, sacrificing investor returns.
And you say, well, you know, I don't care about a bunch of fat cats' investor returns.
Who cares?
Well, yeah, but most investors aren't fat cats.
They're your grandma down in a retirement home in Sarasota.
And people don't realize that the biggest public shareholder in this country is CalPERS, you know, the California Public Employee Retirement System.
So these are just the little guys.
Most money in the market is little guys.
And it's important that their money not be harnessed to do things they don't believe in.
And also that their money get the best possible return, just like the parable of the talents and the parable of the madness.
So One of the things that we're advancing is something called LSV investing, liberty, security, values, which is more in line with where most Americans are trying to advance the ideas of liberty, certainly national security.
There are a lot of very hostile states in the world, but also many of them with very hostile worldviews.
And of course, China is probably the foremost of those.
And then values, which is our way of encapsulating Christian morality and Christian worldview.
LSV investing, we're training thousands of financial advisors right now.
We're about to announce a partnership with a major university that we're going to be doing the training in conjunction with very soon.
You'll know the name.
And so we're training financial advisors in this.
There are a lot of opportunities there, and they're not necessarily things you'd think of.
Like, for instance, there's a company that's working on building a liquefied natural gas terminal in Canada that would ship liquefied natural gas or LNG from Alberta.
To Germany.
You say, well, how the heck does that help anything?
Well, very simple.
First of all, it's just a good thing.
The more energy there is, the more opportunity there is to alleviate poverty.
And natural gas reduces everybody's carbon footprint if you're interested in that sort of thing.
It also dramatically increases the viability of the electric cars people are more and more wanting.
But the biggest thing, from my point of view, is national security.
If Germany is less dependent on Russian natural gas, That's a huge win for NATO and for the United States.
And oh, by the way, some companies here made money instead of some Russian oligarchs who want to assassinate their political enemies.
And so there are ways to invest that are not only very lucrative financially, but also very positive for the things we believe in and for the communities that we need to be loyal to.
Our own hometown, if we're to love our neighbor as ourselves, our first neighbors are the ones right around us, and we certainly want to keep them secure.
So there's that.
But let me circle back around to space.
What's happening right now is absolutely revolutionary.
Cheaper Launches Skyrocket Living Standards00:03:18
We are at a point that is like unto 1500.
Right after Columbus sailed, the technology has gone from unpowered rafts to sailing ships, and it's happened in the blink of an eye.
When Elon is able to launch fully reusable rockets on a regular basis, and he by himself at SpaceX launched more tonnage into space last year than.
All other launch providers in the world put together China, Russia, India, Japan, the European Space Agency, Boeing, Lockheed, everybody.
Elon launched more tonnage than they all did, and he did it cheaper than any of them could.
And what's happening is he's bringing the cost down.
So an Atlas V launch costs about $150 million, and it has cost roughly that for decades because there has been no incentive for Boeing and Lockheed to innovate at all.
They get cost plus contracts from the government, and they just Keep rolling in the dough.
Elon didn't have that.
Elon made about $180 million at PayPal and he plopped most of it into SpaceX, and that's all he gets.
NASA gets $20 million a year.
Elon gets $180 million one time and he plopped it into things that blow up in midair.
So, you know, he had to make it work or he's going out of business.
And so he did.
And it's amazing.
And here's what's happening long story short that launch that costs $150 million anywhere else you might want to go.
On a Falcon 9 costs about 62 million.
That's a huge savings to the taxpayer and to anybody else launching anything into space.
But wait, there's more because Elon's actually doing it for about 30 million.
So there's a huge profit in that.
And then wait, as his fleet of reusable rockets grows larger and they have more time on the vehicles, he's getting that cost down to what he's estimating to be about 700,000 a launch.
Now, What that means is the difference between the Atlas V at $150 million, the Falcon 9 at $700,000.
That's the difference almost exactly between buying a ticket on a 737 to fly from here to Dallas versus buying a 737, flying it to Dallas one time and scrapping it.
It's just a revolution.
And 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 in 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.
Poverty is going to vanish as we know it.
People's living standards are going to, forgive the term, skyrocket.
And all of that is a function of being able to reach things that have been whizzing past us forever.
A New Frontier Beyond Earth00:03:19
It's like the illustration I gave you with John D. Rockefeller.
The oil was in the ground for all those years.
The wealth wasn't in the ground, it was in his head.
It was the ability to bring it up, refine it, and ship it.
And that took some brilliant entrepreneurs to figure out how to do something that no one had ever thought of before.
That's what Elon's doing.
That's the most exciting technology in the world right now.
And it is going to mean that we extend the creation mandate, be fruitful and multiply affiliate, and subdue it.
Far, far beyond just planet Earth.
And it's going to happen pretty fast.
I was just thinking the other day, and I thought about Elon Musk.
It's so funny that you said all this, but I was just thinking, and I was like, man, when civil tyranny was, you know, ratcheting up in England, wasn't it fortunate in the providence of God that there was another place, geographic, physical place, that Christians could flee to?
And so I don't know if you know my story, but I just left.
I was pastoring in California for the last seven years or so, and my family and I, I was just.
I don't know.
I've got kids.
When people ask for my short answer, the short version of why I left California, I said, I have kids and I love them.
So, anyway, so we moved, we left California.
I was an electronic refugee.
So, we're in Texas now.
We're in Hutto, Texas.
We're basically about 45 minutes northeast of Austin, which Elon Musk also talked about that.
And I know Austin's super liberal, but we're in Williamson County.
It's more conservative, but there's a lot of opportunity here for ministry and economic opportunity.
And 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.
So, anyways, all that, you know, when England was.
Austin and Miami.
Those are going to be the centers of the universe.
Yep, I think you're right.
And 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.
And so, I look at the way our nation's going, and I haven't given up hope.
I think there's a lot of great stuff, and I think the potential for a resurgence, conservative biblical resurgence in our nation.
But I just, you know, Neither of us have a crystal ball, and neither of us are prophets or the son of a prophet.
And 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, you know, and that's, and Mars becomes the Christian planet.
Well, 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, when 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.
And that was not something you would have imagined under James I.
Building Ships For The Next Generation00:14:42
So the positive outworking of there being a frontier.
Was extremely, extremely consequential.
And I.
So 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, if 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.
How?
And practically, what does.
What does 500,000 people, for instance, on the moon and Mars do for Earth in terms of wealth?
Oh, I didn't say half a million.
I said a million.
And I think by the end of the century, it's going to be a multiple of that.
You're going to see some pretty dramatic things happen once this hits critical mass.
If you think about it a little bit like the trajectory of the airplane in the last century.
So the Wright brothers flew in 1903.
And you have some meaningful aircraft participating in World War I a decade later.
But the big thing in aircraft in that time span was the Zeppelin.
Nobody was really thinking about these airplanes as much more than toys for the most part.
But then in the 20s, you had some government contracts let for airmail, and they did it right.
They didn't do it the way NASA has handled Boeing and Lockheed.
They said, hey, if you meet the qualifications, We're going to pay you.
Just fly the blooming mail.
Well, that resulted in a plethora of companies that became airlines later and also airline manufacturers to fill the gap.
And by the 30s, you have meaningful airlines all over the world.
By the 40s, World War II started for America by some airplanes blowing up Pearl Harbor and ended for America when some airplanes flew all the way from Tinian to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
Two years after that, you're breaking the sound barrier.
A decade and a half after that, you're walking on the moon and flying on 747s.
Once it hits a certain critical mass, it just, forgive the term, takes off.
And that's how this is going to work.
So the question isn't, the question that is likely to get asked is yeah, but in space, where would you go?
It's not like you're going to fly to, you know, the equivalent of Disney World or London or something on the moon.
And that's true, except that's not what's going to happen.
What's going to happen is exactly like the early settlers coming to the Americas, where there were also no cities, there were also You know, everything had yet to be built.
They came looking for gold and they came looking for timber to build ships with, and they came looking for tobacco and, you know, all the things that could be found here.
And what we're looking at in space, there's one asteroid that NASA found a few years ago, just whizzing past us every single year, pretty nearby, that the early readings suggest is worth $1.6 trillion all by itself in metals.
There's a, there's a, Isotope called helium-3 that is almost impossible to find on Earth, but it's all over the surface of the moon.
Scientists tell us there's a pretty good chance that helium-3 is the key to large-scale, commercially viable fusion energy.
Well, that would solve all energy problems on Earth forever, right there, done.
And so there are things out there that aren't here, but all the things that are here, not trees and grass, obviously, but In terms of minerals and such, all the things that are here are there and way more of them.
So it's just a matter of being able to get to them affordably, which is what that cost per pound to orbit problem that Elon is solving is all about, and then getting the stuff back or processing it and manufacturing in space itself, which is where you're going to start getting those large populations.
Truly, you want to do that.
And I don't have it in for Pittsburgh or anything.
I want their industry to thrive too, and it will.
But The environmental problems that we're seeing right now.
If you're talking about we don't want to open a mine in Colorado because it'll pollute such and such stream, well, it ain't going to pollute a stream on an asteroid.
It's not going to cause any problems with drinking water on the moon.
And so there are a bunch of second and third order problems that get solved, but it's the plenitude that is just off the chart.
And that starts, you know, I'm holding an iPhone here and we're talking on computers.
And if the materials that go into this thing, Suddenly cost 10% of what they cost today.
I can promise you, Apple's not going to stop building $1,500 iPhones.
They're going to give you a $1,500 iPhone that does 10 times as much.
And 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.
So 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.
But barring that, there's an enormous opportunity here for all of humanity to experience a renaissance.
And if not, then yeah, maybe we're the Puritans who go to Mars and start Massachusetts Bay.
Right.
Yeah.
No, that's super helpful.
Cause I was just thinking in practical terms, like, I was just thinking with space, like, even if we can get the cost down, what is on the moon that has value?
So the helium three, I had, you know, I. Literally.
I was like, are we just going to collect moon dust?
And does moon dust do something?
Does it, you know, is it like fairy dust that makes us fly?
Like, how is it valuable?
So, I, yeah, okay.
But not only that, again, remember it's a process of discovery.
There are countless things you can do in space that you can't do here because, for instance, there are all kinds of materials processes, manufacturing processes that would work in zero or micro gravity much differently than on Earth.
So, there are compounds like, for instance, pharmaceuticals.
That you could combine in space that you could not ever do on Earth.
And that gives you just an enormous opportunity to cure diseases and push back the curse in the most practical way that could not ever be done if we don't go there.
But we also don't know what we will find.
For instance, when the Spanish came to the New World, they discovered things like the tomato.
Well, nobody was expecting the tomato, but can you imagine Italy without Italian food?
I mean, that's kind of how things were up until the 1500s.
And then suddenly we have spaghetti and lasagna and all the things that we're known for.
You say, well, that's a silly thing.
It's not that silly.
I can't count all the Italian restaurants down the street.
So, you know, the whole world is better when we discover all of the treasures that God has baked into the cake of the universe.
And we're on the brink of finding a bunch of new ones.
Amen.
It's a bigger cake than maybe we previously thought.
And that's because we.
We serve a bigger God than we often are willing to thank.
All right, Rod.
Well, thank you so much.
This has been super helpful.
And, well, let me just do this in terms of kind of a bonus.
We've already kind of been talking about it, and I think our guests are going to be really blessed to listen, our viewers.
But is there any last kind of maybe, you know, like with going to space and those kinds of things, what are some good companies?
I guess Tesla with Elon Musk, what are some good companies that Christians should.
I know you don't want to give.
Maybe financial advice, but what are some things that maybe Christians should consider investment in?
Is that a question you feel comfortable answering?
Sure.
I 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.
We are teaching principles of liberty, security, values, or LSV investing to thousands of financial advisors.
It is very, very helpful and it is very Christian based.
And we have a lot of amazing people involved in that Air Force and Space Force generals, and all kinds of amazing people.
The world's leading expert on financial terrorism is one of our faculty members.
And so get your financial advisor to learn some things about where the world is going right now.
LSV investing is a thing and it's going to be a very big one.
So there's that.
Individual companies, Yeah, the tech sector is very strong and it will continue to be, but I'm more interested in things that create the new world than in things like another Twitter.
It's not that those things don't matter.
Twitter's had a lot of impact and it's certainly been a good investment, but there are infrastructure things I think that matter a lot.
You saw what happened to Parler being thrown off Amazon's Amazon Web Services.
There are some plays where we can build out a server infrastructure sufficient to keep our team from getting canceled.
There's a company we just took a stake in called AppTech, which is a payment processor, but they're doing a bunch of other things.
They've got a product that will compete with Shopify, a bunch of other things like that.
And they're not going to throw you off the platform for being a Christian.
And that's increasingly a problem with PayPal and a lot of the other major providers.
So, there are those kinds of things that are kind of defensive plays.
But then there are these massive opportunities right now where we're really pushing back the curse in some interesting ways.
And yeah, I think Tesla is a very good stock.
And different people have different reasons for liking it.
Certainly, the environmentalist crowd thinks that somehow burning coal to generate electricity to run your car is better than burning gasoline.
I really don't understand that logic at all, but good for them.
They should buy a Tesla.
That's nice.
Make my stock go up.
But the bigger thing, Is that Tesla is creating a product that diversifies the energy mix necessary to keep an auto fleet running.
And that is a big national security play.
Back in the 70s, when we were held hostage by OPEC and all these Middle Eastern countries just decided not to sell us oil, that put a crimp in the United States economy that was very hard to overcome, nearly brought us to our knees, not once, but twice.
Tesla is a play on diversifying the kinds of energy.
That can run a modern economy.
And that's a positive thing.
SpaceX isn't public, but Virgin Galactic is.
And there are a number of space plays right now that I think could be very, very strong over the next several years and certainly several decades.
And I really believe that we're going to see an explosion in life extension technology.
And people have not taken this as seriously, perhaps, as they should, because it sounds like science fiction.
But we had a young blood cover of Newsweek this past week, and things are starting to creep in.
We are showing scientifically that you can reverse the biological age of a human being.
There are technologies that are already available that can meaningfully become perhaps not a fountain of youth, but maybe a fountain of middle age and reverse your apparent age, even if you're in your 60s or 70s to something more like 40.
These things are not entirely mainstream yet, but the science is advancing extremely rapidly.
We're in the biotech sector pretty heavily right now.
And I can just tell you, there are some miraculous things coming down the pike quicker than people think.
And it really will change the world.
I'll just say one last thing on that.
My friend Patrick Cox, who for years wrote the transformative technology alert and probably reads more medical journals than any living human being.
Patrick did a statistical analysis on what human life expectancy would be if you could factor out all of the things that, you know, just could randomly happen, like getting hit by a bus or, you know, catching COVID or something like that.
And based on the data available, he calculated that human life expectancy could be as much as 750 years if you could control for those things.
Well, that's starting to look a lot like Genesis.
You know, God created us.
God made us a certain way.
When science starts figuring out some of the mechanisms of action on some of these things, you're going to see something that looks more and more and more like scripture and not different from scripture.
And while I don't think you're going to see anybody with a 700 year lifespan anytime soon, it is perfectly possible that you and I could live to 120.
I probably need to go on a diet to achieve that, but still, you know, in our lifetime, that's very feasible.
120 is real.
And we're seeing people live that long, but you could see that extended to a large percentage of the population.
And in my grandchildren's age, 150 is very reasonable, not as a shriveled up prune who can't do anything and is in a wheelchair, but actually with a similarly lengthy health span.
Small Changes Solve Big Problems00:01:01
And it just changes everything.
If you could increase productive human life expectancy just three years, where people are actually productive and working during that time, it would completely solve all the actuarial problems we have with Social Security and Medicare.
So, just small incremental change is really dramatic in what it does for all mankind.
And we're going to see things that are a lot bigger than small.
Super interesting.
Rod, thank you so much for coming on the show.
We really appreciate it.
Hey, you bet.
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