A rant, Christopher Sweat Christopher Sweat

In this episode, I host Lee Edwards, a General Partner at Root Ventures in San Francisco. We discuss the political scene in San Francisco, the impact of AI on labor, Tesla, Waymo, the education system, and how we have traditionally adapted to disruptive technology. Lee invests in engineers who are starting companies that tackle the hard problems in software, such as developer tools and services, software infrastructure, applied AI and ML, and Computer Vision. In recent years, Lee has been a CTO at Teespring, a mechanical engineer at iRobot, a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, a Lead Engineer at SideTour (acquired by Groupon in 2013), and an engineering manager for GrouponLive. He graduated from Olin College of Engineering with a degree in Systems Engineering.
Connect with Lee - X/Twitter: terronk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leeredwards/ Root Ventures: https://root.vc/


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Avantika Mehra joined me to talk about her unique perspective on the future of technology. Avantika is an emerging leader, a technologist, and an interdisciplinary thinker. I think you will see this conversation as fun and an exercise in creative thinking. Avantika had originally inspired some of my thinking on the future of advanced economies, which included my thoughts on computers, the labor market, and the general societal impact technology will have. Avantika plays around with interesting frameworks and theories and applies them to industry with many existing practical technologies. She has a good sense of what is ahead. She spent her early career in consulting and technology startups and now spends her time in spatial computing (you may know this as AR/VR, though it is far more encompassing of multiple computing techniques.)
Avantika also has a substack, which you can find here.
And follow her on Twitter for more!
https://twitter.com/avaa411


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I host Dr. Kaleb Demerew to speak again, this time about a highly relevant topic, Red Sea Rivalries which he published here - https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/red-sea-rivalries/
This is a fascinating discussion that talks about the social, political, and maritime history of the Red Sea region, including European and Middle Eastern influence on the waterway.


We discuss the Houthis in Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, Turkey, Iran, Israel, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and many other powers who have influenced the region.
You can find more on Dr. Kaleb Demerew here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaldemerew/


Enjoy!


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It was awesome to host Pyotr for a nuanced and informative discussion on the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict. We dug deep into domestic U.S. politics, Russia foreign policy, Ukraine foreign policy, political polarization and more.
I hope you enjoy it!

You can find more from Pyort here:
https://twitter.com/PKurzin
https://www.youtube.com/@theglobalgambit/videos


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I hosted Mark Blyth, Brown University, and Sven Steinmo, University of Colorado Boulder (you remember Sven from his piece, Trump is not the Problem) to discuss their perspectives on austerity, democracy, dictators, protest, populism, knowledge economy, technology, advanced economies, and more! We dug deep into political dynamics in France, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, the United States, Israel, China, Italy, Turkey, etc. My friends in high finance will enjoy Mark Blyth's analysis!
Mark Blyth, is The William R. Rhodes ‘57 Professor of International Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is someone who may have heard through his collaboration with Nicholas Nasim Taleb in their piece, The Black Swan of Cairo: How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous. Or maybe in one of Mark’s many books like Great Transformations, Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Angrynomics, The Future of the Euro, and more. His research focuses on how uncertainty and randomness impact complex systems, particularly economic systems, and why people continue to believe stupid economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary.
Find Mark Blyth on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MkBlyth
and Sven Steinmo on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/SvenSteinmo
Thanks to Sven Steinmo for putting this together!

Watch the video version on YouTube here:

And look back at Sven Steinmo’s piece, Trump is not the Problem or his introduction to our platform.


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Written by Sven Steinmo
There is a lot of hand-wringing today about Donald Trump's potential to get elected as the next president of the United States (again). It's not only that people dislike his grandiose and narcissistic personality. Nor is it even that they fear that he will be on the ballot in November. The real fear these days is that he will undermine our hallowed Constitution. After all this narrative holds, the Constitution has made our country great, and we have the most democratic constitution in the world.
Ironically, the MAGA supporters of Donald Trump have a remarkably similar argument. But in their case, they think that our Constitution has already been undermined by the elites that run our political system. They believe the US Constitution was a profoundly democratic institution hampered by the “political elite.”
They are both wrong. The US Constitution was never a particularly democratic document. In fact, the US Constitution was constructed precisely because the elite in America in the latter part of the 18th century were terrified of democracy. The much beloved “checks and balances” were established precisely because America's elite believed that the democratic impulses unleashed by the Revolutionary War had gotten out of hand. Ask yourself, what is being checked in a system? Why is power divided power so profoundly in the American political system? The answer was, as Madison claimed, the “passions and the interests” of the uneducated masses needed to be checked.
“The essential truth," Richard Henry Lee observed, was that the Constitution was "a transfer of power from the many to the few."[i]  Or as historian Gordon Wood put it: “All of what the Federalists wanted out of the new central government seemed in the final analysis dependent upon the pre-requisite maintenance of aristocratic politics.”[ii]
In a very real sense, the Declaration of Independence motivated many average Americans to participate in the Revolutionary War. It should not be surprising that after the war, they thought that “all men are created equal” and that there should be no taxation without representation. They were most certainly not fighting for an elite-based political system that would leave out the vast majority of small property holders (not to speak of those without property).
And so, a small group of wealthy men (the majority of which were slaveholders, by the way) Designed a political system that would “pit faction against faction.” This was not a political system designed to make it easy to pass laws unless the elite had already agreed to them. It was instead a set of political institutions specifically and explicitly designed to ensure it would not be responsive to the majority's will.
James Otis, a prominent lawyer and Revolutionary leader, was blunt:.  "When the pot boils, the scum will rise to the top."   Gouverneur Morris, who was called the "Penman of the Constitution" and wrote its' preamble, was equally skeptical of the common man. Considering the Shays Rebellion, he complained, "[t]he mob begin to think and reason.  Poor reptiles!... they bask in the sun, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it.  The gentry begin to fear this."[iii]
The system checked power over domestic affairs, but America needed strong authority in foreign affairs.  Which at that time meant conquering a rich and profoundly fertile continent. So, our political system gave power to the President over foreign policy... (but let’s not forget that the President was not then, and is still not today, elected by average citizens.)
And in many ways, it worked. What became the United States of America, with its small population of only 3 million whites, came to dominate and control the richest piece of real estate on the planet. Literally, millions of Native Americans were killed, starved, and relocated so that the European settlers who flocked to this nation could take advantage of this bounty. After all, what did y