Nate Fischer: Disruptive Technologies and the Moral Landscape for Artificial Intelligence

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Exploring Theology, Doctrine, and all of the Fascinating Subjects in Between, Broadcasting from an

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Undisclosed Location, Dead Men Walking starts now. Well hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking Podcast.

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Ephesians 2, dead in our sins and trespasses but now alive in Christ. Welcome to Dead Men Walking.

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So now that the business is out of the way, let's get to the meat of the program. Usually I might do a couple minutes, you know, maybe talk about how the week's going, but I want to get right into it because I'm excited about this gentleman.

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He's the CEO of Newfounding, which is a venture firm and talent network. You can find him on Twitter at Nate Fisher.

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He's also co -founder of American Reformer, I believe it's called. Yeah, it's Nate Fisher.

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Nate, how are you, sir? Doing well. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Give us like a minute or two on,

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I gave you a short bio, but let the listeners know if they don't know you. Give us a little bio on yourself so we know who we're talking to today.

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Sure. Well, I'll start with, since you started with what I'm doing now, I'll start with a very quick background.

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I grew up Christian, I grew up in upstate New York, homeschooled before it was cool, as I say.

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Yeah, me too. Let's go. Back when you had to worry about the cops coming to your house up there, if you...

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They came to my front door, yes. Did they? Well, I was just, I was just digging through yesterday.

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I was actually cleaning some old records and was digging through some stuff from my childhood, and I saw letters back and forth between Homeschool Legal Defense Association and the local school district about my alleged truancy or whatever, but it didn't hurt me too much.

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I survived, I grew in my faith as a result, I think, and I went to a Christian college, went to law school.

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I had always been interested in politics, always been interested in technology, and was always interested in business, and really realized during a summer in DC that politics at the time was a place where sort of careerists would climb their way to the top in a very boring way, and business, you make a non -consensus but correct bet, and you can make a lot of money.

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So I knew what I wanted to do, and I went into business, never practiced law, graduated in 2010 in the middle of the financial crisis, or sort of coming out of the financial crisis, moved to Florida, started buying apartment buildings, partnered with a classmate to start buying distressed apartment buildings in Florida and then

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Texas. And really our thesis was there were great demographics there, whatever the distress was at that moment, if we held on, it would come back, proved to be, it was an incredible way to get started, just jumping into starting a business in a very real space, in a sense, very practical from the beginning.

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So great education in business, that went very well. We ended up with about 7 ,000 apartments within three years, and a team of 300 people.

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And then looked for what to do next, because we weren't real estate guys. We were ultimately, what

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I've always been drawn to is what are going to be the big opportunities. During that time, met my wife, got married, we now have four kids, and homeschool.

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Nice. That drew me on sort of a path over several years of really looking for what the next big themes are going to be.

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And that drew me to two themes that sort of intersect. One is how technology is impacting, especially organization and trust.

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Business, especially dealing with contractors, is all about making trust -based judgments, essentially trust, credit, credibility, all in the same category.

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And I've been interested for a year, hiring, hiring is a good example of that. And I've been interested for years in how that is going to be changed.

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I think we all recognize there's a lot of problems with how that process has gone. It's really dominated by these sort of university cartels at this point that increasingly bureaucratize it.

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And I was very, very interested in what a alternative could be, how technology could actually help disrupt that in a positive way.

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And that really intersected during the Trump era, and especially 2020, with a recognition that my old assumption about politics was no longer true.

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Now you had the disruptive idea that Trump and the disruptive forces pushing aside the

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Mitt Romney careerist types. And that was actually a domain of major paradigm shift, driving major changes in the country.

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And actually, the intersection of those two was where there was real opportunity, because it was precisely people on the right, people who are largely alienated by current institutions, especially conservative

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Christians who are sort of profoundly desiring something else, who are going to be the most hungry early adopters of any new alternative model for the allocation of talent, for the matching of people outside of existing networks.

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So that led to New Founding, which is ultimately focused on talent and how do we match people and opportunities.

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And venture, in many ways, is just a higher end of that, because venture is about the opportunities when they're not existing businesses or when they're very early stage.

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So we're focused on ultimately finding alternative ways, alternative networks to build that can really provide a viable alternative all the way up to the top on the economic side.

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And then American Reformer fits directly with that, which is we need to be deeply grounded in the historical

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Protestant tradition to come up with a positive alternative vision. In venture, you don't win by being sort of conservative when that merely means, say no, say slow down to things.

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You need an alternative positive vision to inspire people. What are they building toward? And that, again, has been a real passion of mine.

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Finally, Live in Dallas. I believe Dallas is the natural capital of Red America. A lot of work to do to really build that up.

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To the extent we have alternative networks, we need true alternative cities that have the scale to be alternatives to New York, to places like San Francisco and LA, because we can't keep going there in just little underground dissident networks there.

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We need an alternative. So I think this was a longer intro than you asked for, but it was running through a lot of threads that got me to where I am.

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Yeah. Well, look, I think we're going to be kindred spirits on this episode. We were talking a little bit about how you were homeschooled and I was homeschooled and cops come and knock on your door.

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So we have that in common. My mom and dad started in 1989 when I was in third or fourth grade,

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I think. And then obviously business. I'm a business owner. I'm in real estate. I'm a real estate broker, and I'm also a county commissioner.

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So I also too am involved and interested in business and politics and all those things.

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So I think we're going to have fun on this one. So can I, before we get into kind of what we really want to start talking about, which was technology,

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AI, things like that. So with New Founding, you're matching talent and you said you're looking at tech.

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Well, this will kind of segue into it. You're looking at technology on how that can match people. You're looking at disruptive technology.

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What's something at New Founding that you use that might be different or disruptive to make those matches?

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Are you using anything unique right now? So right now we're starting, and this is I think often the right practice with startups, even when they have a big tech vision, is start with something that's lower tech.

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Right now we're largely doing a lot of these matches manually, the human backend, as they say.

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And I think the differentiator is we are not focused on legacy credentials and legacy institutions as the point of matching.

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So right now the way we reach people is largely with our own media profile and then our presence shows like this, where there's going to be an audience that has, they have meaningfully different values.

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In many ways, they've reached the point over the last few years where when it comes to hiring, when it comes to finding a job, when it comes to other high value sort of business rule, high value transactions, values alignment has gone from more of a nice to have.

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People valued that five, 10 years ago to a must have. It's now a deeply motivating factor.

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And right now there's not a lot of institutions. There's really no institutions that at those sort of elite levels of finance and talent placement and matching co -founders and all of that are ones where you can really, there's a lot of institutions that mediate those transactions.

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Virtually all of those institutions have either embraced the left or have at least sort of stayed somewhat apolitical, or they've tried to remain sort of normie conservative, old school sort of conservative, where you don't really know if the person who's also in that network actually shares your values about the things that matter and actually share sort of a recognition with how broken the system is.

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And so our model is draw people to a distinct message.

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We can take a high public profile. Many of the people on both sides of this actually don't want to fly the flag themselves for various reasons.

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They both can come to us and we can make those introductions. Now that model points to what I really see as the disruptive model here.

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The disruptive model is route these transactions, route these interactions through aligned communities, through high trust networks.

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Basically independent media figures like you are one of the last pillars of trust that have survived as broader trust in institutions has collapsed.

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I think it's independent media figures and it's sometimes tight, high trust communities. And in many ways we see trust collapsing at the institutional level and we see trust either growing or remaining through these independent channels.

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And my goal is find ways to leverage more and more of these independent channels. Good example would be if you want to reach people, could you reach them through your church?

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Could you also advertise a job through five or 10 sort of concentric circles of aligned churches, whether they're churches, similar values in the same community, churches of sort of the same professed values around the country, depending on the need, maybe through 10 other sub stacks and podcasts that are also going to have people who share those values.

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And so it's really a return. Our goal is a return to a much more human way. And this is a theme of how

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I approach technology generally. It's a return to a much more human way of interacting with people.

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Traditionally, those sorts of networks were actually very significant networks in getting business done and finding opportunities in building your career.

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But they've gradually been crowded out by these sort of elite institutions, right?

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Instead of working up through your community, you now have to sort of compete to go to the highest rank school you can get to, which ultimately isn't sort of a hierarchy that's controlled by Harvard.

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Ultimately, you're trying to basically get into Harvard or get into something that has followed the same formula as Harvard in that rank.

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Then you go to McKinsey or whatever, you rise your way at McKinsey or you rise your way at Ernst & Young or whatever and EY.

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And ultimately, you're sort of going through these institutions, very bureaucratic, very large scale institutions, very hostile in their values institutions.

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And ultimately, that in turn is sort of the source of someone in your own community wants to hire like a mid -level person at a company, then they sort of expect they have to pull from those.

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So we've sort of replaced this area where you can rise by building trust in your community with one where you have to sort of invest everything in rising and gaining the credentials of these outside credentialing institutions, trust meeting institutions.

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And then your own community has to sort of draw back on these credentials, which gives a tremendous power to these outside ones.

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So my view is, how do we use technology, above all, how do we use technology to essentially shift the power back to just increase the convenience, increase the scale of these human networks that remain high trust, that people still have confidence in, that in many cases actually share your values, unlike these distant institutions, and that have been crowded out in a globalized economy by the ability of the larger ones to scale.

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And so it's not even in some ways about revolutionary technology itself. It's much more about just build technology, build technology to amplify what we have done for a long time that has worked well.

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Yeah. There's a couple of things there that you said that are interesting. One, it sounds like you're saying, which I would assume, but I see pretty often in your space, that you need to have a pretty solid worldview when you're connecting talent and doing things like that.

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I know the left definitely has a worldview. I've never understood companies that try to stay apolitical or kind of in the middle or don't want to say, everyone has a worldview.

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So why aren't we having companies come out with that worldview and say, well, this is what it is? And now if it's a leftist or progressive worldview,

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I would vehemently disagree with it. If it's someone like you who has a biblical worldview, a Christian worldview,

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I would say, yeah, let's support that company. We need more of those. We don't really have a lot of those in the

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Christian space. And I'm not trying to pigeonhole you as a Christian company, but with a proper worldview, right?

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It sounds like our worldviews probably line up pretty closely. And I would say I'm surprised that more companies aren't kind of,

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I don't want to say attacking, but entering in to that type of ideal that you're doing at your company.

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With that being said, let's shift into technology a little bit, because you said it interests you, you use it.

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Should we have a positive outlook on technology as believers? Because I got to tell you,

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I talk to a lot of believers mostly outside of the Reformed persuasion, but look at technology almost as end times, horrible, we can't use technology, it's from Satan himself kind of deal.

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And I go, well, no, I'm with the thank God for Bitcoin guys, I'm with the using platforms.

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And like you said, the people who their trust has eroded in the kind of legacy media, you have podcasters and sub stacks and Twitter people and guys like you are in the

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CEO space where people will trust them and listen to them. I'm all for using that technology.

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Do you think we should have a positive outlook on technology and use it to the glory of God then? So absolutely.

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This actually, I think, illustrates sort of a conflict between the traditional conservative vision and the

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Christian vision. I mean, it's right in Genesis 1, the dominion mandate, the cultural mandate. Technology is a core part of, it's one of the key levers by which we can accomplish that.

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When we create, I mean, we are made in the image of God. The first thing God did is he created our own creation.

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Not just creation, not just sort of work with your hands and make something that's a well established thing, but God created things out of nothing.

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He created entire concepts out of nothing. And that idea of creating an innovative vision is one of the most fundamentally human things we can do as we reflect that aspect of our nature made in the image of God.

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So I think it's very clear that this is something that is natural to Christians, is good for Christians.

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The question comes down, it's a lever. It's a lever, just like financial leverage in a way. And it can be used for good or ill, just like military leverage, right?

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You can use it for good or ill. The question is, are you using it to accomplish that Genesis 1 vision, a proper vision?

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Or are you using it for something much more like the Tower of Babel? In many ways, which is much more, I think, transhumanism, right?

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In many ways, those are just the two sort of poles of technology. Now, I think there's sort of additional reasons that we should be friendly to technology.

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We are at a profound disadvantage in many, many, many domains of society. We have these legacy institutions across the board controlled by our enemies.

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Why should we not absolutely embrace any sort of disruptive technology?

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Disruptive technology, by its very nature, is something that can change the balance of power. It can disrupt the incumbents.

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And when those incumbents almost uniformly hate us, then disruptive technology should be one of our greatest friends.

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It should be the tool that if we use it more effectively than they do, at the very least, the mere existence of a disruptive technology offers the potential to reshuffle the deck.

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And that gives us an opportunity. If we embrace it, then we actually can be in the game there.

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Now, I think conservatives, and this is a sort of interesting theory, conservatives have been suspicious of technology because sort of they try to sidestep those fundamental questions of what should we aspire to?

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What are the fundamental values we aim for? And they largely just try to conserve the good things that have been preserved over time.

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And technology fundamentally undermines that. By its very nature, technology essentially guarantees that conservatives will lose because whatever is a sort of good norm or tradition is going to be disrupted by technology sooner or later.

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Now, if that technology is also guided by the same sort of fundamental principles, virtuous fundamental principles, there's no reason that what replaces it is going to be worse.

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It could be better. But if your view sort of stops at let's preserve the good things of the past, technology is absolutely a threat.

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It's an enemy. And so I think you see this sort of tension where conservatives are suspicious of technology, but we're in a world where I think it's widely recognized, increasingly widely recognized on the right that conservatism, it has failed.

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It has failed to preserve much of what we have fought for and we need something more.

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So I think that opens the door to a lot of questions around what should we be using things for?

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And then finally, one last thing is I think we have some tremendous advantages with technology. We understand the person better.

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And so much of technology comes down to the nature of the person. If you're trying to beat someone, if you're trying to win a competition, then we should absolutely look at what is our enemy's

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Achilles heel. And the Achilles heel of people in Silicon Valley is they have a profoundly pessimistic view of the human person.

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They don't understand the human person the way we do. They don't understand that creation, the image of God. And they overall have a pessimistic view that assumes that AI can replace almost every aspect of people.

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And so they're constantly trying to build technology to replace the person if you believe that technology, if you believe in a low view of the person, you're going to try to replace the person.

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I believe that's not true. I believe that there's tremendous potential there that in many cases, technology has not been designed to capture and to leverage.

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And if we do so, we should be able to build more powerful, more productive, more valuable networks than the other side.

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And we should be the winners in many of those games of disruption. Yeah. And I think if you look through history, believers have been accepting of disruptive technologies.

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The printing press is a great example. One of the first books printed, the Bible, and it was used to advance the gospel throughout the world.

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And that was a very disruptive technology. Bring literature to the masses, things like that. I would also say,

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I don't know if you agree with this, but it kind of popped into my head when you were talking. I've been talking for two or three years now, and probably before that, that conservatism is almost dead because they don't really know what their worldview is based on.

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They had some principles and look at, I grew up in my twenties calling myself a conservative. I'm not ashamed to say that.

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I was also working through the Bible when the Lord saved me at 20. I said the sinner's prayer at seven and was saved at 24 and working through reformed theology and worldview and general equity and theonomy and all these different things.

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But conservatism, what does it stand on? And if they're going to reject technology, which I don't believe we can as believers or as the general public, they're going to be left behind.

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And then you see major conservative outlets like Daily Wire and these other things and PragerU and all these things coming up where they're celebrating the adoption of a gay marriage and with Ruben and Prager a couple of weeks ago saying, hey, porn isn't bad as long as you're not committing adultery.

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These are the guys that are speaking for conservatism and they've already given way. And I think it's because the foundation of their worldview,

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I don't know what they, it's not founded really on anything except some principles that say, hey, like you said, let's preserve the good things of the past when technology's changing and the world's changing.

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With that being said, one of the big concerns I have moving forward is AI, artificial intelligence.

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We've seen this especially over the last year with the chatbots and Elon Musk bringing it to the forefront with some of the technologies he's coming in with.

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And we did an episode on this probably six months ago. So you can go back and listen to it if any of the listeners want to.

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But just talking about me, I have concerns with who is setting the worldview for the

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AI. Now, I'm not super technical, so I'm not sure exactly how it works. But I wanted your thoughts on if I have cars that are self -driving, that are based on AI or software

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AI writing things, AI doing all these tasks, they have to have some type of worldview.

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How are they getting that worldview? You know, a quick example was if you have a

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Tesla that's, let's say, totally automated, it's 10 years from now, and they're going to rear -end a truck in front of you.

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And they can either rear -end and possibly say, I'm going to kill the passengers, veer to the left and kill an elderly woman, or veer to the right and kill a pregnant woman.

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Who's programming that decision on who should I injure, who should I not, what life is more valuable, which one isn't?

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Now, that sounds like an absurd example, but we're going to get there one day, and probably very quickly. So those are the questions

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I have about AI. What are you seeing in that space, and what kind are your concerns? Or do you have any on artificial intelligence moving forward?

24:14

Well, absolutely. And the example you give, I think, I mean, the one where it's easy to see AI pressure is, let's say, the two people that you could choose are two different races.

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You can easily imagine a case being made that there needs to be a sort of value hierarchy.

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But I'll say, I think that the first question is sort of AI itself, the nature of technology, of different types of technology can advance different outcomes.

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And I think Teal had a line that was something like, Bitcoin is libertarian, or crypto is libertarian, and AI is communist.

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So there's a sense in which, I mean, it makes sense. One is kind of like the

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Second Amendment. The cryptography is a distribution of power broadly that empowers individuals.

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And AI enables the centralized decision making, the centralized making of decisions like the one you just described there.

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So I don't see that as necessarily, I mean, I think I'm not a sort of,

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I'm not a pure libertarian. So I don't think that we should just sort of be suspicious of AI, because it's going to be making collective decisions.

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In fact, I think it's helpful for people to realize, as you said, there is no such thing as neutrality going back to companies.

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AI is going to blow up this fantasy of a sort of neutral public square that conservatives have.

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It's another cop out of conservatives, right? They've sort of, they've tried to pretend that we can just focus on procedural neutrality, and we can focus on fighting for sort of the neutral public square and make room for our space, make room for our values.

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But there's no neutral public square. And I would use, I think for AI, it's actually even easier than sort of who the

26:05

Tesla decides to kill is the bigger question of just what a search engine ranks. A search engine is leveraging a lot of these algorithms.

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And you type something in a search engine, and there must be a number one value. There must be a number two value. There therefore must be a value system that determines that one is better than two.

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And that's a question that determines everything from what restaurant people eat at, what content they consume, what facts they believe to be true, right?

26:31

And so Yelp, for instance, is deciding what restaurants live and die. Whether or not you use

26:36

Yelp, if on the margins it directs enough people, that determines who lives and dies. And so that's, and Yelp, by the way, has a checkbox in their thing for whether there's gender neutral bathrooms there.

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Does that factor into their sort of overall Yelp score in their ranking? I don't know, but I bet it does.

26:54

They don't necessarily tell us the role it plays, but that may be a factor in determining what restaurants live and die.

26:59

Well, I would say we're seeing that right now with algorithms though too. That's not something in the future. We're seeing that type of algorithm being put into play with Google and other search engines as well.

27:08

Exactly. So that value question is already, I think it's in the nature of digital disruption. And so this idea that, now,

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I think that's sort of disturbing to a lot of people who like to think, well, I'm not being shaped by technology. I'm an autonomous individual or whatever.

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It's never been true of anyone. You've always been shaped by your community. You've always been shaped by norms. So this question of who catechizes the bots, as a colleague,

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James Poulos, likes to put it, is actually a restoration of this classic question of what's the sort of civic religion of a society.

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And every society, every culture has had these values. And as much as we've liked to pretend that we can have this sort of liberal neutrality or whatever, we've already been catechized as a society with a set of values.

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AI just sort of, AI doubles. Down on that has it sort of more efficiently scaled to more segments of society.

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But it's raising questions that have been questions as old as time. And so I think that who is going to, the fundamental question of our era will be that question of who catechizes the algorithms.

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What religion ultimately catechizes the algorithms. And just the ethic and morality of it is what's concerning about me.

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And AI will have to have some type of, whether it's artificial or not, an ethic and morality.

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Right now, we all pretty much agree on, well, if you're born, that murder is wrong.

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We still agree on that mostly in this country. That's a pretty big philosophical statement, but there's a lot of little things underneath there that can get lost in who's programming that ethic.

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We have a split in this country on if murder is wrong for the pre -born. I mean, that's insanity to me, but that's a discussion we continue to keep having.

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So will AI, I know I'm talking about big issues here, but those big issues of murder and rape and all these criminal things that we classify as wrong.

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We've seen over the last 30 to 40 years, especially in the last five to 10 years, that things that we thought 20 years ago would never become legal are now legal.

29:20

So yeah, so that's the concern I'm having with AI and how do we as believers go, look at, we can use that technology.

29:26

But I think it goes back to your point. We need to be in those spaces. We can't put our head in the ground and go, well,

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I don't want anything to do with AI. It's evil, or it could be evil, or it could be bad. Instead, why aren't we leaders in that space?

29:37

Kind of like what your company's doing and what you've been doing sounds like your entire professional life. Yep. Well, and I think that the left absolutely recognizes this.

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So all of the sort of AI ethics, as it's called, is by and large a bunch of people on the woke left who recognize that neutrality.

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And there's no neutrality. And so what you tended to see engineers default to with their algorithms was the sort of things that engineers understand, like engagement.

30:04

So they'll catechize, so to speak, the Facebook algorithms to maximize the engagement of people, to give you the content that you're going to be most engaged with, because that's a very easy, measurable metric.

30:14

Well, the AI ethics people on the left, the woke AI people, realize that that is giving conservatives more conservative content, right?

30:22

It's giving Trump fans more Trump fan content. And that helped spread. That actually helped disrupt the monopoly of the legacy media in a way that helped elect

30:31

Trump. And that may not have been the attention of the people who created those algorithms, but they were engineers creating algorithms based on a sort of engineering level goal, like engagement.

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And so they came in and they said, no, this can't be neutral. We need to impose values here. And those values, of course, were leftist values.

30:49

They want algorithms that sort of de -emphasize hate and all that stuff, which obviously we know what that means.

30:56

And so whereas you have a lot of people who are conservatives who go back to say, well, we need the big tech platforms to stay neutral.

31:05

Well, neutral is not possible. That's not, as we've said, it's not possible. We're essentially arguing for something that can't happen rather than recognizing the reality of it.

31:14

Now, I think what we want most likely in a space like AI is we're not at a point today where we have enough power to actually get the big tech platforms to have their algorithms reflect our values.

31:29

Now, Twitter is an exception there where I think there's someone who's much, much friendlier to at least some degree of alternative values or pluralism.

31:40

But I think the best is, can we go for a system where there's multiple

31:46

AIs, where it's a degree of pluralism? Because the alternative is centralized

31:51

AI with centralized values, really converging toward a CCP model, which is probably the biggest threat we face today.

32:00

An alternative is something where there's open source AI models. And again, they're going to use, just like they use the threat of global warming and rising sea and all sorts of catastrophic apocalyptic destruction as a pretext to control every aspect of our lives economically.

32:19

They're going to use the threat of AI -driven apocalypse of AGI to try to regulate anything that's independent.

32:32

They're going to try to essentially force it into a set of bounds that are controlled very centrally by these largest companies.

32:39

That is ultimately a way of imposing, again, CCP level control of every aspect of our lives.

32:47

We need, just like Bitcoin allows a distribution of the power of money, we need a distribution of the power of AI.

32:57

And there's a lot of open questions about whether this is possible. It may be that it's not possible. But in the short term,

33:03

I think the biggest thing we should be fighting is centrally controlled AI by the companies that we know are going to do that in a terrible way.

33:11

No, absolutely. And look, you're absolutely right. Large governments, even small governments,

33:18

Jefferson called them necessary evils. They want to centralize power. I don't know if you're familiar with FedNow that the

33:24

Biden administration is looking at implementing next year, but it's essentially a way to track all digital payments online.

33:31

So not only can they tax them, but they can track what you're buying, selling after market, even if it's something on, let's say,

33:37

Facebook marketplace, and you've already purchased it, paid sales tax on it. You want to sell an old coffee table for $50.

33:44

Guess what? It's getting taxed. It's going in our data servers. And we know that when you bought it, when you sold it, and if you reported on it.

33:51

So that's something that's reactionary to crypto in one sense. And that's a very small part of it.

33:58

But that kind of leads me into our very last subject here as we kind of wrap this up. Because I know you said you're interested in politics.

34:04

I'm a locally elected county commissioner. I've been a liaison in our state capitol. I've worked on national campaigns, campaign manager for a few state -run senators and things like that.

34:15

Always been interested in it. In high school, I wrote a senior thesis on the buying of Congress. So always very interested in the hypocrisy of elected officials and things like that.

34:24

Now we're seeing, I'm in the camp of what false choice do

34:31

I want? A or B, the Democrats or Republicans? I see it on a local level, state level, and national level.

34:38

And it's looked like the two parties are quickly, quickly eroding into the same party. Some would argue it's been that way for maybe a decade or longer.

34:47

Why has that happened? Maybe get your opinion on that. And what is our response to that?

34:52

Because they have such a stranglehold on the money, on the power, that it's very hard for third, fourth, fifth parties to even enter.

35:04

How do we combat that? And what does it mean when we see both parties? They both have some distinctives.

35:11

Republicans don't even run on tax cuts anymore. They're pretty much just running on anti -trans woke stuff if they can get some votes.

35:18

And some pro -life people that never come through. That's what they run on. The left is just running wild.

35:24

What do we do in those situations like we're at now to where it seems like it's two sides of the same coin?

35:31

Our main parties are eroding. I think going back to what you said with Trump, I knew he was going to win.

35:37

I pat myself on the back every day. He was at 3 % polling. My father and I had a discussion. We said if there was just someone that essentially was when

35:45

Romney was running and he apologized to Obama for having a book full of women. I don't know if you remember that.

35:51

Of women to be able to go to and hire. And he apologized for that and for earning $200 million.

35:59

And my father and I said in 2000, I think it was a seven. If there was just a president that came out and said, yeah,

36:04

I'm really wealthy. And it's because I use the system and I don't care and I don't want to pay taxes. He'll win.

36:10

And then a few years later, Trump runs and essentially says that. He was part of that disruptor of our two major parties eroding and people fed up with it.

36:18

So what do we do as believers when we see those parties eroding? How do we respond politically? What do you think?

36:25

So several thoughts here. I mean, one is, I think the party itself in many ways is an institution. That's just another vehicle for it's an outlet for competition.

36:34

And ultimately, I'm not ready to give up on the Republican Party. I think it's worthwhile to it's worthwhile.

36:40

It is a vehicle that certainly has checked a lot of a lot of bad things. It's failed to check many others.

36:48

But even if we view the national level as sort of at best defensive, we want to have a presence there.

36:54

We should also be competing. We should be competing to potentially view it as an institution that we can capture and we can turn. But at the same time, there's a reason

37:01

I'm focused where I am. And I view politics fundamentally as more than just electoral politics. I view politics fundamentally as all of these questions of how do you organize society?

37:09

So I'd actually say private sector is an outlet. What I'm doing, I view as profoundly political.

37:16

Focusing on technology and the direction of technology and the values that are going to shape AI is a profoundly political question.

37:23

And so I see it as likely that there's fewer structural impediments to organizing people on a large scale and essentially accumulating power quickly through a lot of private sector driven means, whether they are independent media, whether they're networks that help leverage and scale, add an economic layer onto a lot of these independent communities that are growing.

37:48

And yet that's power that just as much is political, especially as we start to get into questions like building the technology that actually shapes.

37:58

I mean, the policy, I would say the policy that goes into Google's algorithm that determines what's ranked how is at least as important a policy in many cases as policy, as laws that are passed by Congress, the people there who are shipping that are at least as powerful.

38:14

So I wouldn't view politics as sort of a fundamentally distinct domain. I would say classic electoral politics is obviously a different space.

38:21

And then I would say the other domain that we know matters. And this is what I say, I don't know what the structure of politics and of power will be post digital disruption.

38:33

We've seen profound disruptions before. You referenced the printing press. After the printing press, you had Protestant Reformation, you had the 30

38:38

Years War. You had a fundamentally different shift from a medieval society, a feudal society,

38:44

I should say, to a Westphalian one where there was much more integrated government. We're going to see profound disruption of the entire structure of sovereignty based on digital disruption.

38:54

And I don't know if we know what that looks like, but I do know there's two layers that matter. One will be the digital, and we must be fighting for the digital.

39:02

And the other will be the local. So you talked about being a county commissioner. Who you live next to will always matter.

39:08

It doesn't matter what digital world you're operating in. If your neighbor is good, that's good.

39:13

If your neighbor's bad, that's bad. And so I think that we should absolutely be fighting for local institutions.

39:21

We should be fighting for our counties. Those counties can be significant. They can be significant bastions against tyranny, right?

39:29

You have sheriffs blocking COVID mechanisms. And so, in many ways, at the local level, there's very real, very practical political questions you can get into.

39:41

In many ways, the sort of party apparatus is also a little bit less rigid.

39:47

There's a lot more room for sort of a broader range to happen through one, whether it's sort of a disruptive side of one party.

39:56

So I think that we obviously need to continue fighting in politics.

40:02

We certainly must be, I think, reemphasizing the local, which is an area that I think the right has often done a very poor job of fighting in.

40:12

Part of it is sort of the intellectual conservative world really directs people towards sort of judges and the

40:17

Supreme Court and the Constitution and all that stuff. And so people sort of, their ambitions are channeled toward things like go to law school and become a clerk.

40:25

Well, how about actually gain control of a local institution that you can meaningfully change that is going to meaningfully affect what your family's life is like, whether your kids can use the library, whether the park is sort of safe and that's actual property available for you to live a better life.

40:50

And then alongside that sort of my focus is on the business and technology realm, where again,

40:58

I believe that's actually the most open domain for a lot of what are still political battles that will be fought that shape the nature of the digital era.

41:09

Awesome. All right, let's wrap this up. Nate, thanks so much for taking time with us today, being here on Dead Men Walking Podcast.

41:15

Why don't you give us a final thought for a listener out there listening, they're interested in what you're talking about. They're interested in technology or politics or business ownership.

41:23

Give us a final thought on something you might say to them, either encourage them or put them on the right track and then throw out your socials for us and where people can get a hold of you if you want them to contact you online.

41:34

Sure. Well, my final thought is I encourage those who are stepping up.

41:40

I think that it takes a minority of people to change things, especially the more we can organize, the more that we can do business with other people who are aligned with our values, the more that we can work with them, we can get together with them and connect in other ways.

41:54

That is building networks that have the ability to be incredibly powerful and robust in the face of much broader disruption.

42:04

And it doesn't take nearly a majority of people to change the direction of a society.

42:10

Most people are going to go along with the flow. So if we're able to build those, if we're able to build things that are set up to survive what can be a profoundly disruptive time, we can shape not just our own lives during that period, but potentially have those remain the anchors that a lot of the rest of society reorganizes around.

42:33

In terms of what we're doing, fundamentally, you can go to newfounding .com, talent placement. We have a talent network.

42:39

We have an incredible network of very, very strong people. So if you own a business and you're looking to hire, there is an opportunity going through values -aligned networks to hire a higher caliber of people than have often been available to small businesses for the last couple of decades.

42:55

We focus on engineers, professionals, executives. We have a growing number of those.

43:00

If you're looking for a job, again, with aligned people, we can help you find one. So go to newfounding .com.

43:06

We match founders and investors with our deal room. I would love to have you sign up there.

43:12

And then finally, my social is Twitter is the main place that I'm active, at Nate A.

43:18

Fisher on Twitter. And I talk a lot about that. I talk a lot about what

43:24

I'm doing on the American reformer side and on the Christian side. So I would love to stay in touch through that.

43:31

Awesome. Nate, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. This was a great conversation. Absolutely.

43:37

And guys, thank you for listening to another episode of Dead Man Walking Podcast. We appreciate all of your comments, all of sharing with friends and telling a friend.

43:46

And we'll link everything up Nate talked about on the podcast episode.

43:52

All his socials will be there too. So make sure you give him a follow and engage with him. Check out what he's doing.

43:58

We really are excited about guys like that and what they're doing in those spaces. As always, guys, we appreciate you.

44:04

We love you. And remember the chief and a man to glorify God and enjoy him forever. God bless.