The Problem With Mere-Conservative Businesses | Apologia Radio Highlight

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We need to be, as Christians, and I'll give a little critique of how conservative business often operates, and maybe it's the conservative mindset, it's sort of a...

00:09

It's either a sort of negative filter, like we're just gonna cut out... We do business roughly the same way, but we don't support abortion, we don't support...

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We sort of cut out some things that we would see as problematic, but otherwise, we don't really have a significantly different view of business.

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And when we do, or alternatively, when people do decide to build something for Christians, it's often overly ghettoized in a sense, like you're just...

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You think of the stereotypical sort of Christian movies, and they're building something that... They're not even trying to make something that's sort of competitive nationally, it's just for a

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Christian audience. Or that even honors God. No, and it's... They'll accept a lower quality, they'll accept a lower quality standard.

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Exactly. Anytime you build a copycat business, you're usually... Conventionally in business, that's just never the recipe for winning.

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That's a recipe for at best carving out a little niche. And I think that's a problem. I think that's a problem in our mentality, and what we need is we need an alternative positive vision, we need a differentiated positive vision, and then we need to look for ways to win.

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Ultimately, we believe our approach is right, and we believe our approach is better, and if that's the case, why should we not go for the crown?

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If you're building a business, why should you not go for the dominant business? And where I see the major opportunities, there's really sort of two approaches.

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One is Christians as early adopters, conservatives and Christians as early adopters.

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If you're building, let's call it a new software platform, biggest thing you need is often those early customers.

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It's what builds the network effect, it's what lets the product take off, it's maybe that first institutional customer that allows you to gain the credibility and keep improving your product.

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And if you think about it, let's say you have better technology, but you need that. Well, who better to attract than a particularly dissatisfied group with the current lineup?

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So who's dissatisfied right now? It's going to be conservative Christians.

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They dislike the values of the existing ones, they don't trust the existing ones. They'll be willing to take that jump over to a new product or a new platform sooner than other people.

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That's a huge advantage if you can get those. And that's not new. So we talked about homeschooling earlier, who were the early adopters of the homeschooling movement when it was sort of riskiest and scariest?

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Conservative Christians, because they were the most dissatisfied with the status quo. Who were the first people to settle America really as a community and start building that?

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It was, you had sort of, I like to say you had the sort of libertarian individualists, like the trappers and the traders, more akin maybe to the people who are in crypto right now.

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But the first ones to move as a community were deeply religious, profoundly dissatisfied people like the

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Puritans and the Quakers. So if you can attract that community, that's often the edge you need to get your business off the ground.

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If it's a better piece of technology, if it's a better piece of software, there may be a clear path from that point to disrupting the incumbent, taking over a market segment.

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So that's sort of one of the key angles. Another one I really look at is where do we have a different viewpoint on the world?

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Christianity is not just a different set of values. I think this was perhaps a big central mistake of how

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Christianity was boiled down to in that positive world era, is it was really just a different set of values, positive and maybe neutral as well.

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We sort of look at the world the same way, but we think this is good, you think this is bad. Well, I don't think that's true.

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I think Christianity offers, in many cases, a substantially different view of reality.

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We actually understand important facts that the other side doesn't understand. And it's being very clear during COVID, we're not just people with different values.

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There's really different realities that the different sides are looking at. I would say it's very important in the technology world when you look at things like AI.

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AI has all sorts of implications for, potential implications for what types of work are automated.

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And I would say many in Silicon Valley have a very pessimistic view of humanity.

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They really believe that we're on track to being replaced by AI. Sam Altman of OpenAI, I don't think he would even mind if people were replaced by AI.

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They have a negative view of the person, certainly of most people up to and including themselves, though. We as Christians have a very different view of people.

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I believe that there's something special about people that is distinct, that is very different from anything that AI is going to produce.

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And they're not going to go away. And if you are building a startup that is in this space, you are going to build a very different, you're going to bet on a very different piece of technology if you believe that people can be replaced by AI and if you don't.

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And you're going to build, you might build software to replace people if you believe people are replaceable. If you don't, you're going to build software to serve and compliment people.

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If we're right and they're wrong, this company should be way more successful. It should be the winning player in a space, the company that ultimately is complimenting people.

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And that could be the next Facebook, the next Google, right? It could be the next trillion dollar company if you're taking a big enough swing and you're right about something important where most people in Silicon Valley are wrong.

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So I believe there's tremendous opportunities. And if we know that we know things the other side doesn't know, then it's crazy not to make big business bets on the basis of that.