INTERVIEW New Founding Building Companies That Promote Excellence Reject DEI
Summary
➡ The author emphasizes a holistic understanding of Artificial Intelligence and its potential to complement human function. They also explore technology’s nature as a tool that can be harnessed for good or evil, mirroring historical events and the necessity of infusing our values into these technologies. The discussion further delves into the role of Christians and conservatives in adopting and transforming technology for positive change, highlighting past trends of their dissatisfaction driving innovation. The framework for venture interest lies in businesses that cater to these consumer bases with innovative solutions while potentially disrupting incumbent industrial players.
➡ The conversation pertains to the observation of growing dissatisfaction towards corrupted, overpriced, and centrally controlled institutions, like education and healthcare, leading to opportunities in sectors that offer alternatives. From the venture capital aspect, the focus lies on investing in and supporting start-up companies that cater to neglected groups or needs, and also on matching trained professionals with companies seeking their skills. The future of businesses in the digital age is considered, specifically how they might evade rapidly escalating censorship and centralized control.
➡ The narrative explores the shift in trust within society due to trends like centralization, censorship, and social media influence. It also projects optimism about potential pushback and highlights potential roles for high-trust communities (like churches) in providing an ethical foundation and a high-trust environment in a rapidly digitizing, low-trust society. Lastly, it stresses the importance of retaining interpersonal relationships and presents ESG and DEI as inherently self-destructive versus striving for excellence.
➡ There is a call to action towards the Christian community to reclaim the values that are becoming sidelined in favor of Dei and ESG ideologies, emphasizing the need for decentralized, merit-based systems, and support for disruptive technologies like cryptocurrency. This summary also expressed concern over the current regime’s volatility, interpreted as signs of desperation, not stability, suggesting that such desperation could further their downfall.
➡ The text highlights the need for a strong, positive stand in promoting Christian values in society, encouraging Christians to confidently share their beliefs, without seeking endorsement from secular entities. The view supports a proactive, rather than merely defensive, approach towards cultural debates and societal change, putting forward the strong need for a distinct vision for society, based on these values.
➡ The discussion revolves around the lack of credibility of digital neutrality on platforms like Facebook and Google. It brings to light the inherent bias found in their algorithmic systems, and advises that Christians should assert their truth rather than seek neutrality. Additionally, it criticizes the decline of societal norms and quality of online content, advocating for the establishment of new businesses and institutions that uphold Christian and conservative values.
➡ The highlighted text emphasizes using free speech to liberate thoughts, implicitly suggesting not to ask questions. This appears to be an introduction to the ‘David Knight Show’.
Transcript
It doesn’t have to be this way. New Founding is bringing together those who are working to build something better, those who seek excellence of craft and like minded teams working towards an ambitious end. We’ve made hundreds of connections in the last few months introducing players in tech, finance, media, and law. If you want to hire motivated talent dedicated to excellence, not radical politics, if you want to escape brain dead workplaces and help build the great businesses of the 2020s, we’ll connect you.
Come join us in the New Founding Talent Network. Joining us now is Nate Fisher. He is CEO of a New Founding, and this is bringing together people who are entrepreneurs, people who are venture capitalists to fund this. But he’s got some very interesting ideas about setting up a parallel society. How do we take back our society? We’ve had all of our institutions taken over. And when we look at it from the business standpoint or educational standpoint, we all understand the institutions have been taken over, used against us.
So how do we build a society when we have nowhere else to go? We can’t immigrate to another place, so we build it parallel here. So joining us now is Nate Fisher. Thank you for joining us, sir. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. It’s great to talk about this. You know, when we look at this, as many people pointed out, the Marxists decided that they were going to march through the institutions.
They’ve pretty much done that, and they’ve pretty much taken over everything. And we have a situation now where we’re being canceled left and right. What do we do about this? What are you setting up here to help people essentially transcend what is set up here? In other words, you’re kind of oriented more I think when I look at your site, you’re more oriented towards solutions that are going to come up with something new that’s going to transcend it.
Rather than going back and trying to desperately take back these institutions that have been taken over, we create our own new institutions that are going to transcend it. Am I correct about that? That gets to the core. And what I’ll say is to me, and I use the parallel economy language at times, I think it’s helpful. It’s what a lot of people understand. Ultimately, I think a necessary condition is for us to have institutions that aren’t captured by the left.
A winning condition, a desirable one, is for us to actually gain the power to take back these institutions. But my view is we’re not going to do that. It is an absolute grind to do that in spaces where everything is an uphill battle. I mean, you’re playing by their rules. The entire design of bureaucracy is something that reflects the rules of the left. It is a managerial approach to organizations.
So my approach is either way we should be doing this. There’s huge opportunity to do this through the business sector and particularly through disruptive technology. So high level, if our enemies control every segment of society, every institution, which to a large extent they do, then rather than playing on a playing field that they control, the place that we should be focused more than anything else is the place where there’s the leverage to, if you succeed, reshuffle the deck in important ways.
I mean, think of it like if we were able to build the next Google, or even better, not just the next Google, but something that is to Google as much bigger than Google is, than Google was, than some of the predecessors that it displaced. And you look at the way technology evolves and there is likely to be a disruptor that is that significant in the future, in the not too distant future, in the coming decade.
So if we were able to get control of things at that scale, then that lets us not only create entire ways of navigating the world that are not under that thumb, but also really platforms that offer us the leverage to potentially put some of the same pressure on those institutions that the left was able to put on them when they captured them. And of know, when we look at that, the first thing that comes to my mind is artificial intelligence.
As people are looking at this and saying, well, is this a Google killer? There’s going to be something if it’s not that, there’s going to be something that has the potential to do that, even though they have a great deal of money. And so when you’re looking at this and you’re coming at it, I should have said from the very beginning, coming at this from a Christian perspective, not just a politically conservative perspective.
You talk about how do we catechize the bots? They are setting up artificial intelligence, they’re training it as you would train up a child, but it’s going to be a monster once it grows up. How do we take over that and how do we leverage, let’s say for example, artificial intelligence, how do we use that to bolster ourselves rather than become a victim to it? So I think you hit on a very interesting point that I’ll elaborate on, which is Christian, not just conservative, and I think a challenge that conservatives have faced and it’s really impeded our ability to deal with technology is in some sense conservatism.
Conservatism sidesteps some of the fundamental questions of where we should go. And it focuses on it allows us to avoid some of the what are really pretty serious debates and divides within the movement or things that need to be hashed out. And it sticks to conserving good things of the past, things we can all agree are good. The problem with that is that gives us a very little vision about what we should be aiming for.
And it leads to conservatives being naturally negatively disposed to our technology. So if you think about it, if your goal is to preserve good things of the past, technology is inherently your enemy. Technology guarantees that there is going to be an erosion, a creative destruction of many of the good traditions, good norms that we all agree are good. That’s happened throughout history. And so there’s sort of a natural suspicion of technology among conservatives.
But what it also leads to is also leads to our failure to play in that space, our failure to come up with a vision for what. So technology is going to continue to evolve. There is going to be innovation. The question I would say is what should that be used for? What should be the vision that we try to create with that technology? And if we’re not in that playing field at all, the left is the only one defining that.
So it’s no surprise that they no surprise that a lot of new technology is built and sort of the left fills that void. They’re the only ones even trying to catechize the bots and they end up taking over the domains disrupted by technology even more than the past ones. But as a Christian, we don’t have to be limited to that. As a Christian, I do have fundamental answers to this.
I believe that we have a very clear Dominion mandate. What does dominion look like? God calls us to that. We have a very clear understanding of the person. What is the right vision of technology that complements the person? The creation of technology is one of the most fundamentally human processes. It many ways sort of parallels God’s creation of the world. It is a creating something out of nothing.
And I think we can embrace that. And if we embrace that, suddenly we can realize that technology is something that we don’t need to be afraid of. It’s something that we actually have. We can develop a positive vision for what we should be aiming for. And it’s one of the most powerful levers we have available to change reshuffle. Kind of a world that right now seems stacked against us to disrupt our opponents in many ways.
So is AI a component of that? I think AI could be a component of that. I’m probably a little more of an AI. I won’t say I’m an AI pessimist. I’m not worried about AI the way some of these people are. I don’t think AI is going to be as transformative as some people assume. I don’t believe that AGI is going to come and displace sort of totally replace humans.
That comes back to my view of sort of the special nature of people as people made in the image of God, not just as sort of material beings. So I think an understanding of AI, an understanding of human nature, actually will allow us to develop AI that is actually complementary to humans, which is ultimately going to be a more effective use of the technology than if you believe it’s going to just totally replace humans, which is going to lead to all sorts of, I think, confusion about what it can be.
And probably unfulfilled promises, just like driverless cars remain an unfulfilled promise at a large scale. So I think a proper understanding of the technology, but what it does is absolutely these algorithms do play an enormous role in helping us navigate the world. Whether it’s sort of what are seen as AI algorithms today, or other curation algorithms, whether it’s the Google algorithm, whether it’s sort of Yelp deciding where you eat dinner or whatever, they play a role in navigating the world.
And we do need to catechize them with our values, like our positive vision should be baked into the value system that these algorithms help scale. I agree. When we look at it, fundamentally, technology is a tool, and it can be good or evil. And I think one of the things that I’ve noticed because I come from this from an engineering background and it always concerned me in engineering because it was so secular, I would see so many engineers who would just simply see it as a puzzle to be solved.
And they didn’t really care how it was going to be used, who was going to use it, or for what purpose. And I always had a problem with that. And I guess it kind of came to a head when I talked to Hugo DeGaris, who was a developer of artificial intelligence early on. I think he’s retired now, but he would pose the question to his scientific audiences and say he was not a believer.
And so he said, well, I think that we’re going to create something that is a Godlike intelligence, and it may wind up killing us. Would you do that? And he would ask his audience. That would be scientists and engineers, and they would always the majority of, vast majority of them would say, yes. He did that at a Christian conference that I was speaking at, and he said, this is the first time that people said no.
And so I think when Christians look at a tool like this or a technology or a group of companies and you see where these people are coming from, your reaction is to push back away from it rather than to say. Maybe there’s a tool that we could use to transcend this and to instill our values, which is what I think you’re talking about. Well, and I think you can go back to Genesis and you can see that God called us to dominion over the Earth.
We are called to a great deal of transformation and impact. I think it comes down to the intent, would you create a Godlike intelligence a, that’s not possible. You’re going to fail. God has more power. What they’re doing is they’re paralleling what was done at the Tower of Babel. They’re trying to create something. They can raise them to the heavens. And it was very obvious that God thoroughly frustrated their plans.
They have no understanding of the power that they’re up against. It’s a futile task. They failed. But at the same time, that has been an impulse of man since the dawn of time. That’s right. And yet when we look at this, if we looked at the Tower of Babel, for example, and say, well, your purpose is evil, and I don’t want to be involved in that venture, but we can look at this and say, but I like the way that you braced this.
You’ve got a new construction technique that I’ve not seen here before. I think I can use that to build something good that is not in rebellion to. So I think that’s really where we need to be. And I think when Reagan talked about the evil empire, he would say, well, we’re going to transcend them. And I think that needs to be our attitude, that we’re going to build something that is better, that we can build something that is better.
And rather than just understand people looking at this kind of arrogant attitude as you talk about kind of a Tower of Babel attitude, this pride, this Godlessness that is out there and our first instinct as Christians is to just totally reject it and to walk away rather than looking at this and saying, well, this could be dangerous to us. This is a tool that could be used against us.
There are things here that we could use that would be good, turned to good, and they may have meant it for evil, but let’s see what we can do to use this for good. And that’s a tricky thing to do, but I think that what you’re trying to do is apply Christian principles in that space to do something like that. Is that correct? Absolutely. And I think there’s several folds.
So one of the projects that I founded is called American Reformer, and it’s a nonprofit focused on restoring and revitalizing Protestant thinking and traditional Protestant thought, which has a rich tradition of addressing a lot of these questions. I mean, the Protestant Reformation really built on the printing press, very new technology, very early. It’s a great deal of leverage. So it’s certainly a tradition that understands how to use technology.
But I think a lot of that thought, a lot of the deeper thought there has been lost in the evangelical church today and really just a sort of culture that hasn’t emphasized it. It’s part of our tradition just as Catholics have a lot of thinking in that space and then the goal is to revitalize Christian institutions. Part of the goal is can we revitalize a church that can lead the way and provide the thought that can help shape and anchor any vision? And then I see Venture and a venture firm as a really great platform for sort of articulating this vision or at least taking sort of the first stabs of what a positive vision of technology should look like which includes our focus is particularly on those where there’s going to be sort of a meaningful political difference.
Like typically think of something where the early adopters would be Christians, conservatives, what have you and there’s a lot of cases where that’s actually likely to be the case. We are the ones who are the most dissatisfied with the status quo. If you think of previous sort of movements where people have exited en masse which is what you need to get early adopters for a new technology. Who were the first communities to come to America really as coherent communities and you could say gain a network effect here? It was deeply religious, profoundly dissatisfied communities.
I mean you had the sort of you had a few people who were economically motivated and such but it was the Puritans, the Quakers. Likewise, early adopters of the home school movement were Christian. I think there’s a lot of situations where if you have something new there’s a very reasonable chance that the most natural users of it again it’ll depend a little bit on the design. Is it built to centrally control or is it built to be a Tower of Babel? In that case we wouldn’t be.
But is it actually technology that offers things that we value greater decentralization that makes it harder for us to be censored? Is it technology that includes encryption or whatever things that sort of a dissident minority can be naturally expected to value? We’re the natural early adopters and as a result companies that know how to reach that market will have an edge in the competition if that is the technology that becomes the Google disruptor let’s say we may have an edge in that competition because we can get the early adopters first.
So going back to what we’re doing for Venture my interest is businesses where there’s a very specific thesis around reaching people like that with a product and it’s fine if it’s just a product that’s always going to be a sort of niche serving our customer base. I mean we’ve invested in a pro life health insurance company. It’s not necessarily a sector where there’s going to be mass disruption.
They do have a superior product in many ways. It has a lot of regulatory reasons that they’re aiming to make it cheaper than many of the other ones there. But it’s fine if it’s just an available product that provides cost effective insurance that fits your values, includes access to a network of doctors who aren’t going to force the vax on you or try to trans your kids, that’s fine.
But there’s other cases where there’s actually going to be a next generation technology that is maybe it’s initially serving our needs but it has the potential to move on and disrupt the incumbent players. So that’s really our focus. I see venture as the place where we can be ourselves articulating taking some stabs at some of the ideas we see as potentially transformative and then working with entrepreneurs who are really drawn to that and working experts in a particular domain and working out an actual business to realize that.
Yeah, and I think when we’ve looked at this we’ve seen a great deal of change in the homeschooling movement and educational stuff because we understand how corrupted and controlled the schools are as institutions and how they have become antithetical to education. But we now see, over the last three years, it seems to me like there’d be a lot of opportunity within the medical area, as you pointed out just now, because you’ve got a lot of people who are very dissatisfied with this corrupt medical institution that’s run on a very different it seems to me like there’s an opportunity and some people are starting to take advantage of this, have a completely different paradigm towards health care, and there’s a big desire for people to be able to get out of this dangerous, controlled, in many cases, kidnapping type of medical feel that’s there it’s overpriced and it is very authoritarian and centrally controlled and pushing products that many people do not regard as safe or effective.
And so it seems to me like there’s a real desperation out there for things to be restructured as well as a lot of people who refuse to take the vaccine mandate, who are trained medical professionals and would like to be a part of that on the service side. So I imagine there’s some opportunities in that as well. Now you put together, tell us a little bit about how your company operates before we get into some of the other ideas that you have about a parallel society.
You have opportunities for people to invest into the venture capital funding, is that correct? As well as investing in companies who have ideas. Tell us a little bit about that. Yes, the fundamental theme is venture and in some ways the fundamental theme is we fly the flag. We are willing to be very public about a vision that in the private sector a lot of people are drawn to but far fewer are public about their beliefs on.
I mean, there’s many, many people in elite levels of the private sector companies who recognize the problems. They recognize something needs to be done, but they’re not going to fly that flag very publicly at this point until the right opportunity comes along. And sometimes that right opportunity is they need to meet someone else, let’s say a potential business partner or potential employer. And so by flying that flag, we end up just being we get a lot of people coming to us, a lot of private DMs on Twitter, a lot of messages LinkedIn Twitter forms on our website or whatever coming to us, some of whom are people who are not public yet but will tell us a lot about themselves, a lot about their interests, a lot about their desires.
And then fundamentally a lot of this comes down to just putting together the matches, figure out what this person has to offer. It’s often incredibly valuable and what they need and can we offer. So the way we’ve sort of organized this into a few business lines. First we have a fund. We’ve launched a venture fund on Angelist, which is a platform that has become very popular in Silicon Valley for early stage funds.
Fairly libertarian in its culture too. So it’s one that is not likely to censor us. They were happy with the very explicitly political vision that we put out there. And it’s called a rolling fund where people can come in on a quarter by quarter basis and it’s accessible to basically high net worth accredited, but don’t need to be institutional scale investors and raise from that and then invest that into early stage companies with a conventional venture model.
But we’re going to provide really probably a degree more value add than a lot of investors because we have this network. So we invested in this pro life health insurance company. We led their precede round. We’ll probably be investing in another company very soon. Again leading their precede round. And in both cases we’re able to really do a lot in terms of introducing them to potential partners, advise them on how to reach potential customers in a space where it’s just not well developed.
You can’t go to a marketing firm and say, hey, I want to market to Christians and conservatives. I mean, most mainstream marketing firms don’t even know how to think about that or if they do, they’ll have a very sort of simplistic, naive view about that. And it’s not easy partially because the commercial intermediaries have actually blocked it. So in many cases there’s not established ad net. Like you can’t use established ad networks, there’s no network to reach most of these people.
It ends up being a lot of independent, I mean, understanding how to reach different independent podcast advertisers influencers other partnerships, often creative or earned media efforts so we’ll be able to work with these people to understand their audience. You mentioned the trends in medicine where people are moving away from away from sort of the current medical system and it’s not just about sort of explicitly things that would be seen as sort of traditionally like liberal values.
A lot of it is people recognize sort of the corruption of the whole system and there’s some trends that are reshaping how they think about it. We understand those kind of things. So basically for involvement people can invest in the fund. We turn around and invest the money in companies in this space and we’ve really become the go to desired partner for companies that fit this profile. Then we do a few more things.
So we do what we call Venture Studio where we’re actually participants in the founding of the company. So you can make a venture fund like we write a check to the company, our fund gets an ownership stake. We end up giving majority of that money back to the investors. We take a split of that. Venture Studio we as new founding will actually be effectively a co founder of the company and that’s going to be done in a few cases where we have real strategic value to add.
Maybe it’s not a company that requires the same level of capital intensity but it’s much more about the connections and much more about some of the business acumen. And we’ll jump in there and we’ll actually help launch it. Then we have advisory where we’ll work with think of it as sort of investment banking advisory or fractional CFO. We actually just helped advise on a deal that closed where it was a $7 million acquisition by some people we’ve been working with previously in other capacities, and they had this opportunity to buy this company, and we represented them on the transaction and have investment bankers who have been through that process before and we’re able to provide just significant advice and execution throughout the process.
And then finally we’ll do talent placement. So we have this broader network, and part of that is our talent network, where people can come to us, they can sign up for our network, and we talk to companies that are looking for good people who are going to be values aligned. And we can serve them, we can help fill their roles. So it’s ultimately, as you can see for all of them there’s a lot of making matches and there’s a lot of providing that business and strategic advisory services to companies and really across the board trying to just accelerate the growth of this sector.
Well, I think that’s very important because we look at where we are right now, as you were saying when you’re describing this there’s a lot of people whose values are aligned with ours but they’re afraid to speak out. This is the danger of how extensive the takeover has been of our institutions and everything else in terms of the cancel culture and censorship and that type of thing. And so it’s important to have some kind of a clearinghouse in a sense what you’re doing.
You’ve already got kind of a parallel structure here, but it’s also kind of even though there’s nothing criminal about it, it still kind of has to be kind of underground in order to get past the censorship and the canceling that is there. It truly is amazing to see how rapidly this has been put in and how it’s going to accelerate, I think. So how do you see the future of business in a digital age like this where there is a lot of centralized control? When I first started looking, we look at the internet, initially, the rise of the personal computer.
I’m old enough that I began when it was mainframe computers, and I thought, what an amazing liberation now that we have personal computers. And it worked that way for a while, but then through the social media networks and other things like that, they were able to establish search engines, they were able to reestablish the centralized control again. What do we do to get away from this centralizing trend? Very good question.
And I think it’s hard to know exactly how any disruptive technology plays out. That’s sort of the nature of it. There’s dynamics that make it very hard to predict precisely. So what I tend to look at is I tend to look at sort of at the macro level, what are the sort of trends, what are the factors that are likely to shape outcomes? And what I would say is, yes, certainly the Web 2.
0, the social media was a sharp divergence from what was seen as the early promise of the Internet, which was all about liberation and really freeing people to have access to information. Now I think there’s an extent to which that did play out right. I think that what Facebook in particular did during the Trump during 2016 in playing a role in the election of Trump was shocking to a lot of people in Silicon Valley because it showed that this technology was not invariably going to lead in a progressive direction the way they imagined it.
Facebook’s mission was to make the world a more open and connected place. And lo and behold, what does that do? It opens up channels for a large, very frustrated group in the country that had really been shut out of whose messages have been shut out of mainstream media, and combined with someone who knew how to play that media very well. Trump it actually allowed this movement to grow rapidly, just like you saw that with Brexit.
And so in many ways, even the centralized technologies did actually open things up. What you saw was a sharp reaction where they realized, where a very political group realized they needed to get control of these and they needed to impose censorship. But then you’ve had fighting back. I mean, elon buying Twitter has certainly been, I think, a major blow to the censorship regime. I don’t know how long Twitter is going to remain open.
I don’t. Know exactly how it plays out. I think there’s very good reasons why Elon will have to, and I believe he realizes this, he will have to go to war with the regime fundamentally or he will never achieve his goals. If he has to impose deihr policies, he’s never going to get to Mars and he knows that. So I think there’s a reason for optimism. Whether or not sort of his vision would fully align with mine is another question.
But there’s going to be people who are going to recognize that they need to push back and effectively control of one of these digital platforms is almost sort of monarchial in position. He is acting as a sort of monarch of Twitter. He took control of what was essentially a digital government and meaningfully changed its policy. Now what is going to change the direction of things here’s? Sort of the fundamental resource that I see when I look at it is we are becoming a low trust society in many ways.
You look at the trend I spent a long time outside, I spent a year visiting 65 countries around the world in 2015, talking to, had hundreds of meetings, really trying to get a sense of global patterns, global trends. And what I saw was really more than anything sort of what the dynamics you see in low trust societies were. And the distressing thing is you’re seeing trends in America that are in the same direction.
So in a world like that, people no longer trust institutions. Increasingly that means they don’t trust the truth that comes out of universities. It’ll be, I think, a slower process, but they won’t trust the credentials of those universities. Print they certainly don’t trust government arbors of truth. Increasingly they don’t actually even trust the big centralized platforms. And there’s also sort of the collapse of trust at the basic level, like just less confidence that some sort of stranger you do business with is going to follow through or is going to be competent.
So what does that mean? It means that trust is going to be scarce. The way I look at it is we Christian conservatives particularly have communities often organized around churches, church communities that remain sort of distinct higher trust communities where they have a different set of norms. They reject some of the dynamics that are driving this drop. In many cases they continue to build relationships and community in a way that is increasingly scarce in an atomized world.
And so these communities now have something that is going to become scarcer and scarcer and more valuable in society. And that is how exactly things play out is harder to predict, but that is an asset that we can recognize is going to become more and more strategically valuable. It’s going to become more and more valuable for ourselves. Meaning the more we’re able to fork away from these mainstream trends, the more we’ll be able to continue to do business as you would in a high trust society, right? Let’s say in a low trust society, you could never call a contractor and discount on getting the job done.
True. In most of the world you wouldn’t dream of putting down a $20,000 deposit for $100,000 job before the work has been done. I mean, the assumption is you’d never see the guy again. But if you’re able to get a recommendation through your church and you know that person is a member in good standing, they value that membership could be very different. That person now has a lot more incentives to maintain a different set of norms.
They have an ethical foundation that’s no longer common in society to maintain it. So it lets us preserve our way of life sort of in parallel in these parallel networks, but even more that now serves as the foundation for something that others in society are going to value more and more. So example I give is back in the 17th century, the Quakers were famously high trust in England.
In a world that was lower trust, so many, many people wanted to do business with them as intermediaries. If you’re doing a transaction that requires a lot of trust, you want to do it through people you know can be trusted to follow through on their word. And if it’s a complex transaction, you really need sort of multiples of those people involved. And our communities can serve as repositories of trust that I think will increasingly be sought out for these high trust intermediary roles as that becomes scarcer elsewhere.
So if I’m thinking of the nature of any sort of disruptive platform that is a Google buster, it is something I won’t call it a Google buster, I’ll say it’s something as to google what Google might have been to the more powerful companies in the past. It’s sort of a new platform that becomes even more powerful even if it’s in a different domain. That’s going to be what it builds on.
It’s going to be building on communities like that. It’s going to be leveraging that trust and it’s going to be providing them the tools to really leverage that trust to play a broader role in society as more people seek them out. Yeah, that’s very important. I think if they atomize us, it seems like if we look at their strategy to control people, it is to isolate each and every one of us so that we are only connected to them and to keep us from making connections to each other.
So it seems to me like that kind of community, that kind of trust, those kind of interpersonal relationships, anything that can facilitate that is antithetical to what they’re trying to do in terms of centralized control, right? Absolutely. And I think the centralized thing is a key question. If it’s highly centralized, then you essentially rely on algorithmic mediation. So it’s actually interesting, even Facebook has changed the newsfeed algorithm.
So the newsfeed algorithm looks more like the TikTok algorithm, which is less of a communal social algorithm and it’s much more of a sort of individualized entertainment feed. And I think that’s for any platform that breaks down those communities or doesn’t really build on those communities, that’s the invariable trend is that they’re going to move in the direction of really that computer being your counterparty, being intermediary. Whereas if it’s technology, and it can often be simpler technology in some ways that facilitates, that serves these people as communities, then you’re strengthening that community engagement.
And the nodes, the centers of power are no longer one giant centralized algorithm, but they’re really the distributed communities that exist. And then you facilitate the sort of the connections needed for them to engage in larger scale or more sophisticated transactions that necessarily go beyond that community level. But it’s sort of as necessary rather than sort of attempting to pull them as quickly as possible into that broad ether, so to speak.
Yeah. When we look at this, we need to understand, and we should not be disheartened by the fact that the institutions are controlled by people whose values are antithetical to ours, because their values are inherently self destructive. When you look at ESG and Dei, those are things that don’t lead to excellence. They cannot sustain themselves. Those are going to be the seeds of their destruction. And even those types of things, even if we don’t pay attention to the fact that as Christians, we’ve got god on our side who can do anything that he wants to do, that’s the key thing.
But even when we look at their values and how they have essentially placed on a pedestal or an altar or made a god out of Dei and ESG and things like that, that really should be heartening to us, that we can take this back. And if we strive for excellence and if we work for that, and if we have commonality with that, it’s a very hopeful situation. We’ve always had in the past, christian organizations that would, christians would come together in a community and they would build hospitals, they’d build schools and things like that.
Alexis de Tocqueville when he came, he said, this is the thing about America that’s very different. They don’t wait for the government to do an approach. They get together. If they see a need, they get together in the community and they build it. And that’s really the kind of mindset that we need to uncle locate now, isn’t it? Absolutely, and I think ultimately we should be hopeful. I mean, in many ways I think the regime is fragile.
The regime is far more fragile than people assume. Yes, they have embraced suicidal ideologies. That is limiting their competence, it’s limiting their mean. This is sort of another way of looking at it, coming from more of a financial angle. But you look at the arrest of Trump and you look at other moves like that and a lot of people would say that is a show of force. That is a regime that is confident enough, it can crack down on its enemies.
It’s desperation. It’s desperation isn’t say I would say it’s much more like desperation. I think that if you think about it almost from a financial perspective, it’s a bigger departure from the past. It’s sort of an increase in volatility. So you think of sort of a change from norms. I mean they had what was seen as sort of a steady progressive trend in history sharply interrupted by things like Trump.
You could think of that as sort of a higher volatility in politics, a much broader range of sort of possible outcomes and they’re certainly in many ways they seem in control of many things right now and they’re more and more sharply departing from norms. But when volatility increases, it doesn’t mean that it just increases in one direction. Like the range of potential outcomes grows in both directions. And so I look at things like the arrest of Trump, I look at other things like that and that is a bigger and bigger departure from norms that ultimately just sort of objectively increases the range of possible outcomes in both directions.
And that’s not the move of a stable self confident regime. A stable self confident regime is not they are going to want to sort of slowly and carefully move in their direction and not do anything that sort of rocks the boat because if you’re in control you don’t want to rock the boat. No, that is people who feel desperation and it’s people who ultimately I think are setting the stage for greater volatility that could very quickly I think they know their own weakness in some ways and they’re actually accelerating things that could lead to their own demise.
When you talk about on your website and you say about our firm, you say we explicitly oppose Dei ESG and the bureaucratization of American Business culture. And I think again, as we talk about the fact that Dei and ESG is about denying merit and sows the seeds of its own destruction, the same thing is true of bureaucracies as well and central planning. We have always been able in the past America has been able to transcend the centrally planned economies.
If we look at north versus South Korea, one country split, same people, same background, but a different system, one that is tightly centrally controlled and bureaucratic. Same thing with east and West Germany. And so we know that having something that is decentralized, something that is based on merit, not bureaucracy and that type of thing, we know that that’s a winning position. And so that should be a very hopeful thing.
You say you promote a culture of entrepreneurship and excellence, betting on great companies and products and customers disfavored by corrosive ideologies. It’s a very hopeful strategy, I think and talk to us a little bit about what you see in terms of let’s talk about a disruptive technology that is teetering and could go either way and that is cryptocurrency. We have CBDC which is a big specter of complete and total surveillance and control of everything that we do and they have targeted cryptocurrency for extinction.
But then there’s other aspects of the blockchain that perhaps might be used. How do you see that developing? So it’s a good question. I think that is I’m very interested in blockchain. In some ways I’m probably more interested in it than AI because I think that it’s particularly focused on targeting many of the centers of regime control. You think of Bitcoin and it is directly challenging a control of the currency which is ultimately probably the strongest source of present regime power.
And I’m optimistic. I think that Bitcoin is an incredibly powerful technology. It’s certainly one that has, I think it doesn’t just have the technical promise and there’s obviously always stuff that needs to be worked out in sort of the technology of any of these things at an earlier stage. But it also has a culture that I think aligns with and tends to draw the sort of people who are skeptics of the central control and it’s by nature international, so the more international something like that is, the harder it is for it to be stamped out in any one location.
So I look at that and I see that and I think that a lot of the attacks on it are just spurious. I mean, they say that it can be used for criminal activity or whatever, but it’s traceable. The US bundles of cash are far more effective exactly for money laundering than Bitcoin is what it really is. It’s not about secrecy or anything, it’s about not being something that can be arbitrarily shut down by financial institutions that are increasingly politicized, not being something that can be sort of systematically taxed and debased.
So I look at that and I see a lot of potential, I see a lot of excitement in the community, I see a lot of very serious people, serious thinkers doing very serious things in the Bitcoin world and increasingly there’s evident political pressure that pushes back really against the regulators who want to shut it down. I mean, people know that a CBDC is something that can be a powerful tool for essentially just increasing the totalitarian capability of the current system.
That is not something that’s just going to be let in easily given the mood there. So I look at it, I see obviously it could be used, some of these things could be used for, they could be used for harming us, but the vast majority of the space is really culturally aligned and I think technologically aligned with directionally where we need to go. That’s true, yeah, it does have some issues of privacy that people don’t realize but like you said, culturally they’re aligned with us in many ways in terms of decentralization and liberty, and there are some things that we can use in that space.
What would you say to the Christian right as a movement? What needs to change in the way we approach things and our perspective in order to win, whatever that means or win the culture? I think part of it is actually try. I mean, I think one big problem so one big challenge in the Christian right is they’ve been politically neutered in many ways, I think accepted theologies that are intentionally politically neutering.
So you look at a lot of and there’s a lot of different things you can tie this to. I mean, I would say a pessimistic eschatology can lead to a mindset where you just put your head down and kind of expect things are going to get worse. And it’s one that ultimately is very undermining of human agency because you don’t really have the belief in the effectiveness of your actions.
But second of all, even aside from that, I think most Christians intuitively recognize that there’s a problem here and that they want it to change, realize that we can be effective, realize our numbers, realize that ultimately this is a war that we’re in. I mean, you have a lot of people who I think would be very patriotic about signing up. Increasingly, I think that these people have been alienated by the military, but they wouldn’t have hesitated to pick up arms and make great sacrifices to fight for the defense of the country, but otherwise are fairly uninterested in politics.
I mean, a lot of Christians really, maybe aside from the exception of abortion, just really are not very interested in politics. Are not very focused on politics. You home school, let’s say, or you go to Christian school, so you’re not really interested in what happens to the school board. Well, you’re paying for it, and it’s educating the people who are going to be coworkers or employers or whatever.
So we should care about it. It’s going to shape the culture of the town that someone lives in. So we should care about all of those things, and we should recognize that we have real numbers here and we have real, I think, a real foundation. This is what American reform is trying to do is sort of restore the foundation that makes clear how Christian doctrine speaks to any number of institutions.
It has clear visions not just of abortion, but how you should think about all sorts of issues around what government should ideally be doing and how government should be approaching things. So get political would be one of the top ones. And then second of all, embrace a positive vision. I think this is a big thing. My view is a conservative impulse is a good impulse. It’s a prudent impulse in a world where we recognize that man has fallen.
If we recognize we’re fallen, we’re wise not to sort of recklessly go and try to just constantly change everything from the ground up that should be there. But we should also have Christians who are part of the vanguard, who are pushing out a positive vision, who are really aspiring for what we should build. You actually do see a lot of these people in the crypto world and I think that we need a lot more.
I mean, if Christians are some people are, I think, temperamentally going to be conservative. They are just naturally they want to focus on that type of thing, that’s great. But that doesn’t need to be the defining identity of our movement. The defining identity of our movement should be a positive vision for how society should be organized. That is a sharp, very clear, and ultimately, I think, much more attractive alternative to what the left puts out there as their vision of progress.
So they define progress their way. We should be defining what an elevated vision of society? I don’t know that I would embrace the word progress. I think that has a particular there’s a particular sort of framework built into that. They’ve kind of stolen that word just like they stole the word liberal. Liberal used to mean that you liberated people. It’s an open question. I don’t know that I would think of it even necessarily in terms of progress because I don’t believe that history moves in one direction so much as we certainly have a vision of sort of what an elevated vision of life looks like.
What is a sort of higher vision of society, or a lower vision of society at the very least. And we should be painting pictures of what the elevated vision looks like and rallying people to go create that. I agree. As one person said, I forget who it was that said it. You can’t win a culture war if you don’t have a culture. And we have retreated from this.
We are ashamed of what our beliefs are because we’ve been criticized and we have a very compelling vision and we should be looking at ways that we can move that forward, that we could project that out, explain it to people. It is not a threatening vision to people, quite frankly. Their centralized control vision is a very threatening thing. And I think one of the things that we can learn from the left get your opinion on this, seems like the left has a very they’ve got their set of values and they’re values based really.
I don’t agree with their values, but they push those values out. Whereas we say, well, just don’t change anything. I just don’t want to see any change here. And if we have values, we’re not trying to advance those values as the left is. We’re just trying to keep things from changing. That’s a conservative perspective. Whereas we need to go on the offense and we need to say these are our values, these are why these values are good, and then how are we going to best establish these values? And I think unless we do that, we’re going to lose.
And we’ve been losing because we’ve not been doing that. I think we have to have that vision, project that vision, work on that vision and try to push that forward, which is what the left does. But we don’t do that as conservatives and clearly the conservatives. That’s really kind of a political position. That’s why I think it’s very important for us to look at this from a Christian position because they have principles.
We have as Christians, we have principles and things that we want to advance. And you have to have that. You have to have some standard that you’re going to try to advance. Think of it as a flag or whatever, that type of standard that’s going to advance what we want to see our culture look like and work on that. I think that’s what you’re doing. Absolutely. And it’s a self confidence that goes with that.
And I think that’s a huge part of it. I think the self confidence to know that your values are better than the other side in many cases, we know that it is the truth. We know that we have the truth. And I think education is a great place to look at this. You look at a lot of Christian colleges and they have a sort of palpable inferiority complex.
They covet the endorsement of institutions like Harvard. And you look at institutions like Harvard, and Harvard does not know what truth means. They do not know what an education means anymore. As an institution, they become so mean. Yale has a professor like Jason Stanley in their philosophy department. Totally ridiculous guy. I mean, just comically ignorant by any standard of history, any sort of standard of education, and he’s in the philosophy department.
So why do you want Yale’s approval? The right approach would be it could be a small college, but they should be expressing contempt for these institutions and really very self confidently saying, if no one else knows how to define truth, we’ll define our own standard. We understand truth better than anyone else out here. We understand what education means. So we’re going to be our own judge. We’re not going to brag out how many graduates we get into Harvard grad programs or how many sort of prestigious degrees our faculty have, when all that means is you’re really submitting to the standards of people who don’t even know what an education means.
So I think there’s that self confidence is really an absolutely crucial position, and it comes from knowing that our values, knowing that we are right, knowing that we have the better vision of life, which increasingly all you have to do is look at the left. I think for a while, for a long time, the left did seem to have things that were more exciting things that were more attractive.
In many ways, I think part of that was sort of an abdication on the part of conservatives. Part of it was just where they were in their arc. There were sort of some baked in values. But really at this point, I mean, you look at what Dei is putting out, and it’s literally ugly. And you look at these people, there’s a great deal of hubris that they have, and they act as if they are 100% right, and yet you know that they know that they’re not right because they won’t engage you in debate.
As you pointed out. It’s an act of desperation when you look at politics, and when they try to they don’t want to engage in debate. They want to just shut down and cancel everything. And we see this whenever you go up and engage them at a protest, say, well, what are you protesting? Please. Oh, you’re racist. They just start throwing effeth at sets at you. They don’t want to defend their position.
They don’t want to debate what you have to say, which is really coming from a position of deep insecurity and desperation. And so we need to understand that even though the facade that they present is one of arrogance and complete confidence, that on the inside, they don’t have that at all. And so there is a vulnerability there. And so we need to work on what we need to understand in terms of our foundation, I think.
And then once we are confident, unlike them internally, and once we’re confident in our position with God, then that’s a foundation on which we can stand and conquer. And we should move from that and project those values out to other people without trying to control them, without making any mandates on them. But we hold it out there as a standard to be achieved. And that’s the way that Christian society has always advanced in the past, I believe.
Yes, well, I will say to some extent there are areas where there’s no neutrality, and I think that’s an important one too. So if you ask me what I would say about Christians, we’ve been conservative, but we’ve also sort of, at best, fought for a neutral public square. We bought into a lot of the assumptions in the 20th century of secularism, which are totally out of step with American history, where there was no sense that you’d have a sort of public square cleansed of God, for instance.
And what I think is actually happening in the digital age, and this is interesting, is you’re starting to see people realize there is no neutrality. The left realizes ahead of us. So this goes to going back to the Facebook example. After the Facebook let’s say the Facebook algorithms played a role in elevating pro Trump content, amplifying pro Trump content that helped elect Trump. People realize that there’s no neutrality.
I mean, you have an algorithm that gives people what they want to see. That’s engagement that’s not neutral, that is going to advance a certain type of content. The left certainly wanted to impose their own values, but particularly you think of the nature of an algorithmic feed itself, and by its very nature, its job is to rank and curate things for you. So you look at google, go to google, you type in a search term, you have a number one search result, you have a number two search result, number ten, et cetera.
There must be a value system within google about why one is better than two. There’s no neutrality there. I mean, you go type in the search term is Jesus, god, and ultimately a search engine condenses things. The top result either says yes or no. There’s no possibility in the sort of greatest summarized version of it for neutrality there. And I think as people realize, as the left realizes that, they realize you have to catechize the bot becomes a religious war to catechize the bot.
So in many cases, think of the digital algorithms as equivalent to the sort of norms in society where we may have had a strong tradition of toleration. I think the anglo world has had a very strong tradition of religious toleration, but there’s still the sort of norms and customs throughout society that nudge you in certain directions, that normalize certain beliefs as the sort of default or expected belief.
And I think the algorithm, in many ways, the algorithmic curation that is going to shape just all aspects of society fits in that. And either those norms cannot be neutral. Either they reflect Christian truth or they reflect some other set of values. So I think it’ll be helpful actually for christians to move beyond simply fighting for neutrality and actually realize that in many of these domains we should be fighting for the truth.
We should have confidence in the truth well enough to fight for it, and there isn’t going to be neutral. So if we try to leave it neutral, it’s just going to be filled by, filled by an ideology that is not ours and is invariably going to be hostile to us. I agree. Yeah. I think neutrality is alive when you’re talking about education, when you’re talking about journalism and that type of thing beyond google.
Take a look at Matt drudge. He is aggregating the news. And I’ve said this from the beginning. The whole idea that they keep trying to sell people is like, oh, we’re completely neutral. Well, if you believe that in terms of being a journalist, then you’re either incredibly naive and ignorant yourself, unaware of your biases and prejudice, or you’re lying to somebody because you really do have those biases and prejudices.
And we can see it in Matt drudge. He went from presenting he doesn’t write anything, but what he selects to show to you is either from a conservative bent or now from a leftist bent. And. This has always been the case, is also the case when you look at religion in the public square, they said we’re going to be neutral by purging religion out of the public square.
Well, that’s not neutrality. What you’re now doing is you’re pushing a religion of secular humanism. But I think that when we look at this, as you point out, christianity has had a history of being tolerant of differences but still having very strongly held values that we hold dear. And I think that’s one of the key things. I think we have gotten to the point where tolerance of different opinions is really not the value that’s holding forth.
What we’re really putting out is the fact that we’re apathetic, we don’t really care. And so it isn’t that we’re tolerant, we just don’t care anymore about these fundamental values. And so we have to reclaim those things on a personal basis. And then once we reclaim those things, we will have a very firm foundation. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to ram those things down somebody’s throat. Now, if you have a situation like, for example, abortion, there is going to be a conflict there.
And people who believe that is murder, as I do, are going to do everything they can to stop that. But in most cases it’s going to be this is our positive vision of the world. And if you don’t want to join us, you don’t have to join us, but we’re going to do this. And I think that’s a key part of what you’re trying to do with the Venture fund is to transcend this kind of decaying society that is there.
It really is to me. I look at our society right now, looks like a very big tree, that you may not realize it, but the entire insides have been eaten out by a bug and it’s just waiting for a breeze to come along and blow the whole thing over on your house. That’s kind of where I think society right now. I agree. And I think that what’s interesting is more and more is going to be that soft nudging.
It’s going to be nudging in one direction. And going back to Google, my favorite example ranked search terms. That’s not coercive in the legal sense, but it certainly nudges you toward a particular one. Result is ranked higher than the other one. And people go there for a reason. Because going to the idea of Matt Drudge it can’t be neutral. Neutral in the age of the Internet is entirely spam.
I mean, you’re going to be totally inundated by spam. So you’re looking for someone to judge by some standard. This is worth my reading, this is worth my seeing. What is that standard? Is that standard? The truth? Is that standard a particular ideology? Is that standard something purely sort of reflexive like engagement, like the more time you spend on it, the better it must be, which I think is that’s the sort of thing engineers like because it allows them to sort of sidestep the questions they really don’t know how to answer.
But that points to the vulnerability of these companies. I mean, you go to Google and Google, you go there to see them rank websites, presumably looking for truth or looking for something good or useful. I would argue Google lacks the foundation, they lack the Epistemological foundation to actually know how to answer those questions. They really don’t know how to distinguish spam from non spam ultimately. If you don’t know how to define what is good, then that is what distinguishes spam from non spam ultimately.
And people just spammers just get really good at sort of playing to the algorithm if you don’t have an objective standard, if it just becomes sort of a reflexive one. So I think a big vulnerability is they lack the ability to actually discriminate in ways that people are looking for. And so increasingly, as we have a breakdown of any sort of norms and standards in society, you’re going to see a degradation of quality in all sorts of spaces, and that includes a degradation in the quality of the goodness of information out there.
The truth value, the moral value. According to even people who might not see themselves as Christian, they still are looking for something that they sort of intuitively recognize is good in many cases. Obviously, some are not. Some are truly looking for evil and platforms that don’t know how to provide that are not going to be able to get people what they want. And increasingly they’re going to produce dissatisfaction.
And that is an opportunity for us to capitalize on and for us to show them a better vision, show them better alternatives. Absolutely. New Founding is about building the future, about responding to market signals from a Christian and conservative perspective, about getting around the cancel culture and promoting a culture of excellence and merit. And I think that we need to understand that we are really in a better position than many of us think because of those values that we hold.
The question is, how do we implement those values into new businesses, into new systems, into new institutions? And I think New Founding has an important role to play in that. Thank you so much for joining us, Nate. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Nate Fisher. Thank you. Thank you for having me, David. Thank you. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking super spreader. If you’ve been exposed to logic by listening to The David Knight Show, please do your part and try not to spread it.
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