The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW New Founding — Building Companies That Promote Excellence, Reject DEI

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Nate Fisher, founder of New Founding, on building a parallel society with companies and institutions that embrace merit, American ideals, and a positive vision in a society dominated by institutions that elevate ESG/DEI in opposition to those valuesFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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while the worst continue their campaigns for social activism, free salad bars, and doggy daycare. Engineer at Meta. 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 the 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 a 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 subject, and 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 um 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 is uh that gets to the core and what i'll what i'll say is to me uh and i use the parallel economy uh 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's just, 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 opportunities 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 next Google, but something that is to Google as much bigger 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 decades. 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 in the same pressure on those institutions that the left was able to put on them when they captured them. And of course, you 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 catechizeize the bots uh you know how do we get you know they are setting up artificial intelligence they're training it uh 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 um how do we uh leverage let's say for example artificial, 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 sidesteps some of the fundamental questions of where we should go. It allows us to avoid some of what are really pretty serious debates and

divides within the movement or things that need to be hashed out. 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 toward technology. So if you think about it, if your goal is to preserve good things to 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 so surprised 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 uh the creation of technology is one of the most fundamentally human processes it in many ways sort of parallels god's creation of the world it's a it is a creating something out of nothing and i think we can embrace that and if we embrace that certainly 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 uh to change uh 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 totally replace humans. That comes back to my view of the special nature of people as people made in the image of God, not just as 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.

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 de Garis, who was a developer of artificial intelligence early on. I think he's retired now.

But he said 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 vast majority of them would say yes. He did that at a Christian conference that I was speaking at.

And he said that's 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 that 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, you know, 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 know, you've got a new construction technique that I've not seen here before. I think I can use that to build something good, uh, that is not in rebellion to God. And so I think that's really where we need to be. And I think, you know, 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, uh, that we're going to build something that is better, uh, that we can build something that is better. And rather than just, um, you know, I 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 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, turn to good. And, you know, 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 a 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, 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 so part of it is, 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 I 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 a few people who were economically motivated and such, but a lot of it was the Puritans, the Quakers.

Likewise, early adopters of the homeschool 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, and it'll depend a little bit on the design, is it built to centrally control? Or is it built to be a tower of baffle? 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 as a technology that includes encryption or whatever. Things that sort of a dissonant 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. all companies that know how to reach that market will have an edge in the competition if that is the technology that becomes the the google disruptor let's say we may have an edge in that competition because we can get the early adopters first so uh going back to what what we're doing for venture my interest is is businesses where there's a very specific thesis around reaching people like that uh with the product it's fine if it's just a product that's always going to be a sort of niche serving our customer base.

We've invested in a pro-life health insurance company. That'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 vaccine 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, you know, 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 and controlled the schools are as institutions and how they become antithetical

to education uh but you know 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 uh just 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, to 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 field 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 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. So we really have, 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.

I mean, there's many, many people in elite 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 that? And 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 AngelList, 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 uh raised from that and then invest that into early stage companies uh 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 because we have this network so uh we invested in this pro-life health insurance company where we led their pre-seed round. We'll probably be investing in another company very soon, again, leading their pre-seed 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 and 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. You can't, 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 uh away from sort of the current medical system it's not just about it's not just about sort of explicitly things that would be seen as sort of traditionally like liberal values it's uh a lot of it is people recognize sort of the corruption of the whole system and there's some trends that reshaping how they think about it we understand those 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 splitting, 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 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, you can 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 were 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 really, 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, you know, when we look at where we are right now, as you were saying, when you're describing this, there's a lot of lot of people whose values are aligned with ours, but they're afraid to speak out.

You know, this is, you know, 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, you know, even though there's nothing criminal about it, it is 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 and um and how it's going to accelerate i think well so how do you see the future of business in a digital age like this where there is a lot of centralized control you know when i first started looking we look at the internet initially uh the the rise of the personal computer i'm 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 are, 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 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. I mean, 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 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 a uh a i think a major blow to uh the censorship regime regime i don't know that 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 DEI HR 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 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 effectively control of one of these digital platforms is almost sort of monarchical and in position i mean he is acting as a sort of monarch of twitter he took he took control of what was essentially a digital government and meaningfully changed its policy

uh 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 yeah I mean you look at the trend it's been a long time outside I spent a year visiting 65 countries around the world in 2015 uh talking to had hundreds of meetings really trying to get a sense of global patterns global Trends and what I saw was uh 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 that 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. And so 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 just continue to build relationships and community in a way that is increasingly scarce

in an atomized world. 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. It's 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 just kind of getting the job done most of the world you would you wouldn't dream of putting down a 20 000 deposit for a hundred thousand dollar job before the work's

been done i mean the assumption is you'd never see the guy again uh 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, it 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 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 an 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 work. 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 or I won't call it a Google buster. I'll say it's something as to Google, what Google might've 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. 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 to, 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. 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 is much more of a sort of individualized entertainment feed. 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 your 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, 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 community level but it's not but it's sort of as necessary rather than i sort of attempting to pull them as quickly as possible into that that broad uh ether so to speak yeah when we look at this we need to understand and we should not be uh 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.

They're, you know, they're going to be 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 is really should be heartening to us that we can take this back and we can, 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,

you know, Christians would come together in a community, and they would, you know, 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 inculcate 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. They have embraced suicidal ideologies. That is limiting their competence. It's limiting their effectiveness. I also I 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's a that is a show of force. That is a that is a regime that is confident enough it can crack down on its enemies. It's desperation. It's desperation, isn't it? 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've 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, I look at other things like that. That is a bigger and bigger departure from norms that ultimately just sort of objectively increases the range of possible outcomes in both directions. That's not the move of a stable self-confident regime. A stable self-confident regime is not they're 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 that is

that is people who feel desperation and it's people who ultimately i think are setting the stage for uh for greater volatility that could uh very quickly uh i think they know their own weakness in some ways, and they're actually accelerating things that could lead to their own demise. You know, when you talk about your, 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 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?

It's a good question. I think that is, I'm very interested in blockchain. I'm probably, in some ways, I'm probably more interested in it than AI, because I think that it is particularly focused on targeting many of the centers of regime control. I mean, you think of Bitcoin, and it is directly challenging 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 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. It's actually, I mean, the US bundles of cash are far more effective for money laundering than Bitcoin is. So 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. Jeremy Allaire, M.D.: And increasingly, there's evident political pressure that pushes back 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 with 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, to 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, and 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't you don't have the belief in the effectiveness of of your actions uh 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 uh realize our numbers realize that uh 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 homeschool, 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 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 uh we have real numbers here and we have uh we have real uh I think a real foundation this is what American Reform is trying to do is 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 is if we're a conservative, I mean, 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 like 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 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 uh very clear and ultimately 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, right? It's an open question whether we believe that, whether it's, 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 higher, what is a sort of higher vision of society or a lower vision of society at the very least? And we should be, we should be painting pictures of what the elevated vision looks like and rallying people to, to go create that. I agree. As one person said, I forget who it was that said that 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 can 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 don't, 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, you know, 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, you know, that type of standard that's going to advance what we want to see our culture look like and work on that, I think. 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 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. 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. Harvard does not know what truth means. They do not know what an education means anymore. As an institution, they become so disconnected. I 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 a philosophy department. So why do you want Yale's approval? The right approach would be it could be a small college, but they could express 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 about 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 seem to have uh things that were more exciting things that were more uh more attractive in many ways i i think part of that was sort of an application on the part of conservatives part of it was just where they were in their their arc there was 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 yeah 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, you know, it's an act of desperation. You know, 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. You know, say, well, what are you protesting? Oh, you're racist. You know, they just start throwing FFs 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. Yep. Well, I will say, to some extent, there are areas where there's no neutrality, and I think that's actually, 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 thought fought for a neutral public square in the 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 there was no sense that you'd have a sort of

public square 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 realized this 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 you 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 if you look at google go to google you type in a search term you have a number one search result you have number two search result number 10 etc there must be a value system within google about why one is better than two that cannot be there's no neutrality there i mean you go type in the search term is jesus? 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 Bible, it becomes realize you have to catechize the bot. It 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, 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 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. And Matt Drudge, he went from presenting the – he doesn't write anything, but he's got – 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. It 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, you know, 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, are going to do everything they can to stop that. But in most cases, it's going to be a, 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 we're at with 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 gonna be nudging in one direction and going back to Google my favorite my favorite example ranked search terms that's not that's not coercive in the the legal sense but it certainly nudges you toward a particular uh 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 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. as we have a breakdown of any sort of norms and standards in society, you're just 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're looking for, they still are looking for something that they sort of intuitively recognize is 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 look what they want and increasingly they're going to be 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 uh 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. Financial support or simply telling others about the show causes this dangerous information to spread farther. People have to trust me. I mean, trust the science. Wear your mask.

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