This is the FCB Podcast Network. As Masoda Day that we won't was said, then we won't was say all we got it? Does no one get take that away? Say it's gonna be okay? Prada Day that we won't was said, and then we won't was say all we got it? Does no one get take that away? Don was baide It's gonna be okay. Well, hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Just Listen to Yourself with Kara Davis. This is a plus J L T Y plus and I've got an interesting guest on me on with Me today. His name is Nate Fisher. Nate is the founder and CEO of Newfounding. Newfounding is a venture firm and talent network focused on building parallel economic institutions that enable cultural change. You know that work cultural got me in my mind. Nate also co founded American Reformer, which works to revitalize contemporary Protestant thought and institutions. And New Founding is a venture firm and a talent network building and supporting parallel economic institutions that enable cultural change. New Founding builds on high trust aligned communities to connect people and opportunities, creating economic networks that will be resilient to the broader collapse of trust in American institutions. That's the fancy way of saying, Nate's trying to make some change in this world. Welcome to the show, Nate, thank you for having me. Okay, So I get pitch guest pitches from media companies every single day, and when yours came across, I was really interested because when I clicked on the link to find out more about Newfounding, I realized it was an investment firm and it was really dedicated to opposing BEEI and ESG scoring, which is becoming a huge problem, which spreads out to people like me rite content creators, It blocks our ad dollars. All of this stuff has these huge consequences, and it's something that's going on underneath the surface for most Americans. So I found it really fascinating that, oh there is there are people out there with money who are willing to say, okay, we need to also compete in the investment sphere. So can you tell me a little bit more about that, about Newfounding and about what you seek to do and making change in the industry. Absolutely, and you are absolutely right that this bleeds through to your space in many ways. Media is one of the many ways. Media is one of the most politicized, but I say most politicized. What I saw. My background was business and investing, So I got started buying distressed real estate in Florida and Texas in twenty eleven and did that for about three years while it was really prices were really cheap, and yet I saw people continuing to move sort of a pro blue to red state political thesis. That wasn't that wasn't the predominant angle we were thinking about at the time. But I've always been in the business world looking for those opportunities for asymmetric impact. And what I saw in twenty really twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, twenty twenty was this growing politicization of the world. Everything is becoming politicized. Everything. Many sectors that we used to think of as sort of politics was secondary is on the surface, are now divided sharply divided over politics, and really in many cases with the institutions firmly embracing the left wing view, it just permeates everything. And and really you saw you see political conflict escalating across our culture. So it escalated in the political space, but escalated and what would formally be seen as as less political spaces like business. And for me, what drew me here was you saw that sort of deep underrepresentation of the right side here. So it's just a business. First off, it's just a business opportunity. There's a lot of Americans who are not being served by the institutions in business. They are looking for something they're alienated from brands they may have trusted. You think of bud Light, and it lost a huge number of potentially very loyal customers and those people are now up in the air. They haven't settled on some alternative. Now. I think beer might be a hard one to start a new startup, and that's probably going to be more more a thing for incumbent brands. But you see that pattern across across many, many, many domains. In many cases that means you have customers who would not have been up for grabs for decades or now up for grabs. That's a business opportunity. But more importantly, I think you also look at opportunity to change the country. And what appeals to me about business and particularly technology, is it can scale. And you see this in media you see this in media, where where digital distribution and digital networks have driven a rapid reshaping of the industry. You see something where the right message, where something that resonates with people in the right way, can rapidly gain scale, rapidly gain influence. And I think I look at our conventional political space and it's a mess. It's dysfunctional. I'm very glad there are people who are dedicating their careers to that, but there's going to be so many impediments to achieving change there. In many cases it feels like you're you're putting enormous effort into what's simply defensive. And so what I see is particularly venture and startups offer the potential to in some cases rapidly scale and rapidly offer a very meaningful alternative. They can in some cases even change the cultural discussion. Now, I think we're in the early stages. We haven't yet had a right a conservative google, but this is the space in some sense, when we're out of power in the establishment institutions. We should be excited at about anything that offers disruptive potential. It offers the power to sort of reshuffle the deck. You said something that really stuck with me. You said, we can't just be simply defensive, and this is a reason why I want to have you on the show. I'm not a finance person, an investment or business person. These topics don't typically interest me, but I'm being forced to be interested in them these days because all of this is integrative, right, So it's not just an issue of well, in one sphere you have guys like Nate who deal with the financial aspects of American life, and then the other you have chicks like Kira who just deal with infotainment and stuff like that. These are intimately connected. The boat spaces affect each other, and they affect the culture. So what we're allowed to see, what we're allowed to relate to. I think what you're talking about, and this was in your press packet as well, is a parallel economy. So I want to talk about this because other conservative pundits like myself have been talking about a parallel economy, particularly since the whole censorship debate exploded in twenty nineteen twenty. And you have guys like Dave Ruman and Dampongino and their investors who have set up alternative alternative youtubes, alternative studio networks doing what they can on the tech end. But I think this is something that everybody, particularly in this political audience, and I'll have you respond to this, should be concerned about. It isn't just about all boring, dry numbers. All of this stuff matters in the culture. And if we're just always playing defense but never making plans to infiltrate the industries that have been taken over or to create new opportunities for Americans to put their money elsewhere, if we're never making plans, then we're always starting eight steps behind. We're always on our back it And so it's this again. This might not sound like the most fascinating thing to talk about on a regular basis, but it has huge, huge, huge cultural implications. Absolutely, And I think what's interesting is you mentioned the cultural implications, and yes, it's business can sometimes feel like just numbers and many ways. In many ways, I think that itself is a little bit of an indictment of our financial system, of our current current economy, because at its heart, business is about entrepreneurial initiative. Yes, a lot of regular businesses are about going to work and doing fairly boring things, but at the same time, entrepreneurial creation is one of the most fundamentally human things you can do. You create something out of nothing. In many ways, we've seen our economy, I think, lose a lot of that entrepreneurial initiative, and it's it's become bureaucratic in a way that makes it more boring. And that itself, I think is a symptom of the same problems that lead to ESG and d I. ESG is just this idea that you can sort of re engineer the entire world from a spreadsheet, where you tweak some incentives here and there, and everything follows through. And that's a very bureaucratic mindset towards the economy. It's a very dead mindset. It's a manifestation of the same ideology that leads to a public health bureaucrat making you watch grandma die through plexiglass because it is somehow more efficient from a COVID mitigation standpoint. It's just a it's a dead approach to the economy. And I think what especially what you see in the venture in entrepreneurial space is you do see something that feels a little more exciting and alive, and it has profound impact and people realize that, but I think you also see it in the cultural impact it has. So there's almost a convergence between creators and media influencers and such, and startup founders and venture figures in a lot of a lot of forms of cultural influence. And you've seen that in Silicon Valley, where trends, management trends, even how people dress at the office and all that starts in places like Google, and as Google successful, that then bleeds out through the rest of corporate world. So it really is a cultural in some sense. These startups to become cultural beacons that shape how other businesses that are looking for a little bit of the entrepreneoururgy think about things. So it's a profoundly impactful place to be if we are successful, and that's the most important, we need to do it well. We need to do it just like in your business to you need to produce an excellent show. It's not just a matter of the content you're saying being being correct. There's an art to it, there's an excellence to it. But if you do it well, there's a high leverage in terms of cultural impact. I think there's this notion out there, particularly on the right, that there just isn't the money out there to support this kind of thing. It just feels like even people who might be self proclaimed conservatives or Republics, like a lot of these guys, these CEOs, they're they're pretty you know, at least fiscally conservative, but yet they still allow these these controversial decisions to be made for their brands that turn off customers. And there's this I think there's this idea that well, we just can't compete because you see all the Hollywood types and the Jeff Bezos of the world, and they're so they seem so committed to this agenda and so publicly expressive about it. It makes it feel overwhelming. And then when I look around in my space, I see plenty of conservatives and Republicans willing to give money to personalities. You know, I'm going to invest in this radio host or this talk show host, But I don't see conservatives equally willing to invest in like filmmaking more things that can push the needle. So is it realistic to think that this money is out there? That is the million dollar question? And literally, yes, I think part of it is we're going to have to do this in a more capital efficient way. So there's a sense in which a mainstream sector, it's called it mainstream venture capital became over the years flushed with cash. It produced great returns investors reporting money into it. That wasn't necessarily how venture capital started. And there's a lot of debate about whether that's even good for startups to be given that much cash. There's an argument that they actually the entrepreneurs learn more valuable skills if they're forced to be a lot scrappy or early. I think the same. You see similar patterns in media. You see media where a lot of the best, a lot of the best independent creators built their profile with very very little money coming in, and they build it in a very scrappy way, even as a side job. So I think there's a skill that comes from doing things when you don't have a ton of money. They can be incredibly valuable. And you have technology changing in ways that means you can do increasingly powerful things, you can gain increasing distribution. Again, without a lot of money, you no longer need a highly produced show that can then be pitched to TV for distribution. You can do that digitally. I think the same is true of a lot of a lot of new products. So yes, I think that there's there's ways to do things despite the financial challenges. But the second thing is the perception you state is a huge one, and it's actually a huge one that affects both the investors but also effects the entrepreneurs. If we believe that the left is going to win, if we believe that it's sort of an all powerful force we're up against, why would you why would you devote your life to trying to build some entrepreneurial thing to challenge It's not a very comfortable way through to go through life, and you're sort of assuming it's destined to fail. I don't think that's the case, and that's part of what I's That's part of what I'm focused on doing, is showing people paths to actually change the direction. And this again goes to disruptive technology. You think back twenty years and you think of the landscape, You think of the companies. You think of the companies that were powerful. Facebook didn't exist, Google was in its infancy, Twitter didn't exists. In the last twenty years, you've had these platforms arise that have tremendous power. Google has power that exceeds many governments on Earth, and it didn't and it barely existed. Facebook didn't exist at all. So if we do leverage technology and you think of creators, you think of influencers like yourself, and you have the audience. I mean, all of these are social platforms. By and large, people come to see content, to see people they trust, to connect with people they trust. You have the ability to bring a significant number of people who want to see you, who want to who want to interact with you. And I think the point is like, if you can bring together people like that at a rapid clip, potentially around a new technology, and again, censorship is a real rest In many cases, we may be the groups that are most motivated to use some new technology. I use the crypto example. Crypto I think has had the rap on. It has been that it has not been a very useful product. It's been a lot of financial speculation, but they never really built something that anyone had a particular need to use, and it's a less convenient user experience. Well, I think that we as a movement do have a real need for censorship resistance. We as a movement do have a real need for parallel structures, parallel parallel systems, and there may be a real sense in which the next technology, the most some sort of decentralized alternative is best used. The best early people to use it are dissidents and conservatives and Christians. In such we're the ones who actually have the reason. And the example I give is who got up and moved to the New World. It was deeply religious, profoundly dissatisfied people. They were the first who as a community felt motivated enough to get up out of England and actually move to the New World. And they, as a result, helped set the tone and they gained a sort of commanding position in that and that's often going to be the case. It's often going to be it's often going to be people who have particular dissatisfaction or first to make that move. And if what we move to is not just something different. And this is why I'm ambivalent about the term parallel economy, because I don't want to just parallel what they built. I don't want to just build something different deally, I want to move to the next paradigm, move to the next generation technology. And we're now the early adopters there, and we're now setting the tone controlling the institutions, controlling the companies there, and if we play that well, we may go on to have the next Google and disrupt. And that's more than just running something small and parallel. That's something that can actually meaningfully tilt the playing field, which right now is tilted against us. Oh. I love that hot topics, the news of the day, in depth interviews, and a whole lot more. It's The Outlaws Radio Show. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcast today. That's out Laws The Outlaws Radio Show, an FCB podcast. I love that the idea of like, it's not just about the parallel economy, but we could establish the next Google. And I think you're what a great comparison to the to the New World. I wanted to just backtrack a bit and then we're going to move forward to the technology because I really am curious to talk to you about AI. But you said something. You said that uh oh noah, oh dear, I lost my place now, Oh, that that being a startup, that there's value in that. You know, we sort of place value in already established stuff these days, but we forget that the entrepreneurial entrepreneurial spirit is what dry's innovation and always hasn't. Perhaps in a way, one of the reasons America is less innovative these days is because people. People are the art. Bureaucracy provides so much and not very well as well, so it's just enough to keep people comfortable, but not make people hungry, and you gotta be hungry. I love that idea. It reminds the thing I was thinking of when you were talking Nate with Star Wars. I was thinking about George Lucas. He was a film student when he made the original Star Wars and there was no technology to film spaceships and do all of the creative and aesthetic work that he did. He had to go into the film schools and he found young, hungry kids who were in first and second year of school, and he pulled them out of school. He was like, come work on this project. This is what I want to do. Figure out how to do it. And that's what they did. They figured out how to do it. And of course those movies are classic, the first three in the trilogy, and we don't consider any of the other movies that have come since classics, even though they add the ultimate technology available to them. There's something soulless about it. So there is something to be said for starting with nothing and building something. It's attractive, you're hungry, you push, but you also are driven to please the customer, and that feels like that's something that's not happening at the feet, at the foot of this d EI ESG thing, like the customers last in all of this. Bud Light being of course the best example, but it's it's simply one. It's like, I don't matter as a consumer. I get that you need these investment dollars, and so that's why you're checking these boxes, right, these d I ESG boxes. You need the investments, But what are you investing in if there's no consumer left? Like, what's the endgame of that? It's it's moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. And that's what too much of our country has becoming. As you say, it's soul less. It's it's squeezed the life. They're almost literally squeezing the life out of the economy, and it's moving toward moving dollars around, moving interest rates around, moving metrics around, and they've forgotten about that. That Star Wars example is the perfect example. That is pure creativity. It's creating something out of nothing that that he's putting his soul into on the bet that that will please please people, and it resonates with people, and there's a charisma to that. All Right, Nate, let's move on to AI because this was part of the media packet that I was reading when I was studying up on you. And one of the things that you have been pushing for or that you're interested in, is how we as And there's also a faith based aspect to this that I see. I mean, you're definitely working in the Christian sphere as well, which of course appeals to me as a believer. But regardless, you say that AI has a place in i'll say alternative meaning media that would include right wing media, Christian media, stuff like stuff that's getting censored by the left. You say that that Christians, particularly but all of us on the right really need to start harnessing the power of AI instead of being afraid of it. I'm forty nine years old. I'm very afraid of AI. I mean, I grew up in the Terminator era, so I you know, all I see is is Sarah Connor looking out and watching the mushroom cloud. As you know, Skynet releases Armageddon on humanity. And that's how I when I hear AI, that's what I think. How are you? How are you suggesting that AI is something that we could use to our benefit that perhaps we or no one is really using well yet, Well, I'll go on two points there. So one point is, if AI is that powerful, you certainly want Christians to be the ones couple. So but secondly, I don't think AI is that. I don't think that's the right way to think of AI's power. I'm a little bit of an AI skeptic compared to a lot in Silicon Valley. I think that vision of AI is what people like Sam Altman, who's leading jack GPT open AI wants you to think. And I think there's several cynical reasons he wants. That is marketing, if he's talking, if he's scaring you with the power of AI, he's marketing his own company, is convincing companies that they need to they need to be paying people like him for their services. But it also leads to regular tolly lockin. He actually wants regulation that will limit it and will cement his position in control versus a lot of a lot of competitors. So there's a lot of cynical reasons you hear that, But I think it comes down in many ways to my vision of the person and my view as a Christian. I actually am just I'm a skeptic of claims that AI will replicate people in many of those ways. I think humans are created in the image of God, in with something that's truly distinct from what a material process like yah I will do. Hang on, I want to put I want to stop you right that there, and I'm going to let you continue. Don't lose that thought. I have a whiteboard that I write all my ideas from my podcasts on I'm looking at right now is to my left, and there is a note on here that says AI can't work the way we fear it works because man can't create good. We can only try to replicate. We can't be God. That's amazing that you said that, because that's exactly what I've been thinking. It's our nature. We are made in the image of God. We as creators can do some of what in some sense I think we can channel some of what God did when he created Earth in Genesis. One we can we can replicate that, but that's not a product of our purely, that's not a product of something that we can replicate into computer. That is, I think a product of the image of God in us. I what AI is that its essences, is a predictive algorithm. It's predicting what a in some sense I think the way the way I understand it is you think of chack JPT and it turns out a few more word on another word, and it's essentially predicting what a college educated professional would say given the inputs and given the prior words. And when you think of it that way, that's really not that powerful. It's powerful in it's going to be transformative, and I think it could be transformative in ways that things like the Internet are transformative. The Internet was incredibly transformative, but a lot of the actual interactions facilitating in the Internet we're far more mundane. It's not like the Internet itself as agency in a way that is that is resembling the sort of fear of a godlike AI. It's more like a very large volume of pervasive things that change many, many aspects of society. And that's important, and that's a disruptive technology, and it will change many many things, but it's still something that we can control as humans. And the question becomes who controls it? I mean, the way the way one of my colleagues is put it is. The fundamental question of of our age, of the digital age will be who catechizes the bots? Because these bots are not values less. I mean, the example I'll give is Google. You go to Google, you type in a search term. There must be a number one result. There must be a number two result, there must be a number ten results. There must be a value system that says why the number one result is ahead of the number two results. That is not possibly a values neutral technology. You can think of something like the telephone system is values neutral. It's a common carrier and it calls who can actually to who you wanted to call. But an algorithm that ranks things or predicts things is not values neutral. There must be a value system. So then the question comes down whose values. The Wokes realize this. Actually they were very big, especially after Trump's election. They realize that Facebook algorithms were heavily responsible for giving people what they wanted. They were optimized for engagement ofstensibly a sort of neutral. It's not neutral. It's the kind of thing engineers come up with, but it's not seen as political. And what it turns out that gay people is it gave people a lot of trump and they didn't like that. They realize that the digital age is not neutral. It elevates something and engagement is something, and so they pushed for what they call AI ethics, And really what they want is they want to catechize the bods of the digital age with their religion, a religion that is a religion that suppresses hate, as they call it, and a religion that's going to with a set of value that will essentially elevate things they care about. I think many Christians were kind of behind the curve on that, and they argued for neutrality without realizing that neutrality is impossible in this age. So the question becomes is the Google algorithm and are all of the algorithms that govern our life, including the millions and billions of new ones that will be present as AI prolip rates, are they elevating good things or bad things? And we want them to elevate good things. And if we elevate good things in many ways, I think that can make a more appealing product that I can get next to sort of a separate question, but why I actually think Christians have a particular advantage in business? And AI questions, Well, yeah, I mean, then let's just go right to that. Tell me why do Christians have a particular advantage? And definitely curious, so it goes to the question that it goes to the point you made about human nature earlier. So any bit so I think there's been and this is another area where I thinks have accepted subconsciously. They've accepted a leftist framing that's been highly detrimental to them. So in many cases, I think if you look over the last twenty years, maybe more, I think there's a pervasive mindset among Christians that we have different values than the left. We sort of assume the world operates in similar ways, and then we just think different things are good, and they think that We think some things are good, They think other things are good. We think things are bad, they think they're good. That's an insufficient way of looking at things, and I think that concedes too much of the framing. We don't just believe in different values. We actually believe the world works in different ways. We have a different view of human nature. We have a different view of how humans and how communities operate, and we believe that those things have profoundly important impact on the world. And if that's the case, if you truly believe that you understand the world better than the other side does, there's should be business and investment bets you can make where you expect to be right in very important ways where they're wrong, which means we should be able to win when it comes to venture. And I think AI is a particularly interesting example because AI applications are deeply dependent on your view of the person. If you believe that AI is going to replace people, if it's going to keep rising the way some of the some of the fear mongers actually say, to the point it's going to replace people, you're going to bet on certain types of technologies that are bets that it can succeed in replacing people. I don't believe it's going to succeed in that. If I believe that humans are have something special that's not going to be replaced by a AI, I'm going to be more drawn to technologies that complement and empower people. And if we're right and they're wrong, then our startups are probably going to be the ones that are the winners as things shake out here. And that's because because this is an area where our understanding of human nature plays such an important role. This is an area where we should see a particularly big edge for Christians who have that correct understanding of human anture. And I'll give a slightly older example, but engineers and economists have had this idea that brokers are just an inefficiency and the transaction cost that can be disintermediate. They've had this idea for fifty years or more. Constantly. Silicon Valley has been trying to replace brokers across society, real estate brokers, all sorts of things, and time and time and time again, they've failed because what they fail to realize is they're actually playing a foundly important role in creating and brokering and bridging trust in communities and incredibly complex ways. They're not just an inefficiency and a transaction costs the way an engineer might look at them, and their misunderstanding about how communities function and about how human trust functions has led them to make ultimately unsuccessful attempts many, many times. And if you have a better understanding of that you're instead going to build technology that empowers and compliments and leverages these brokers. So let's say a real estate broker can be more efficient, can do more deals. You're going to get rid of their busy work and empower them to do what is really the special sauces that they do best with higher leverage. And I think that's an example of the kind of thing where you see that kind of opportunity across the space, where a correct understanding will give us a leg up when it comes to things like venture investing. So going back to your question about money, Ultimately, as we start to demonstrate that, as we start to gain a better track record, as we as our early venture funds are deployed into companies that actually have an advantage like that, you're going to see more money blogs. People are looking for success, they're looking for track record, and as we're able to first demonstrate sort of the basic edge we go for customers who are alienated, but over time that leads to actual advantages when picking new technologies, money will follow. Americans are many investors, even if institutions are increasing increasingly captured by ESG, many many many investors. Ultimately, what returns they need returns. I could carry this conversation on for another half hour, but I think my computer is about to die, so I'm gonna have to say goodbye now. N I would love to talk to you more about this, though. I had so many more questions and this is fascinating. I think conservatives and Christians really need to dig into this a little bit more before we go. Would you tell everybody where they can find out more about you and what you're doing. Absolutely so. I'm active on Twitter. You can follow me at Nate A. Fisher on Twitter, and you can go to our website Newfounding dot com and new Founding talks about our venture fund. We just launched a venture fund. We're looking for We're working for entrepreneurs. We're looking for especially entrepreneurs who we're doing something directly adjacent to this with this political valence to it. We're looking for investors. We actually have a fund that's open to open to all credit investors. We are we have a talent network where we are attempting to get people out of world companies into non world companies, particularly executives, engineers, people operating people interested in getting into early stage companies. So go to our website Newfounding dot com. You can go to Twitter. We have a podcast where we interview founders, and as you do that, there's there's sort of more and more in the ecosystem that we are attempting to expose people to and bring them together. Part of being a venture firm as we're constantly talking to people doing interesting things, exploring ideas that could actually have impact like this. That's amazing. Well, I will definitely reach out to have you back, and I want to continue this discussion on AI particularly. I think it's very useful. Well, thanks so much for joining the show, Nate, and best of luck to you out there in your adventures in money. Thanks for having it here. This was great. I enjoyed this my pleasure. Hey, everybody, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast, give it a rating and review. Follow me on Twitter at Realcura Davis. Please sign up for my substack Justcura Davis dot com, and go ahead and buy my book if you haven't already drawing lines why conservatives need to battle fiercely in the arena of ideas. Catch you next time on j l T. Why I Pray Masoda Day that we won't was Sade and we want to say all we got it, does no one get Tatowa is gonna be okay. Day that we wont was made and we want to say all we got it does no one was made? It's gonna be okay. This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network where Real Talk lives visitors online at FCB podcasts dot com, m
