Subversion with 1517

Frederick Turner is a poet, philosopher and the Founders Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has authored more than two dozen poetry books and philosophical treatises. With Genesis and Apocalypse, he revived the epic poem by turning to science fiction and in his research, he has explored the nature of time, cosmology, evolution, and self-organizing complex systems.

He joins Subversion to discuss how to heal the divide between science and the arts through metaphor, poetry, and understanding the philosophical foundations of this divide.

Devon Zuegel (@devonzuegel) joins Michael Gibson (@WilliamBlake) to discuss urbanism, the life and death of great cities, NIMBYism vs. YIMBYism, and why cities like San Francisco make it hard to build new housing.

Jason Brennan joins Michael and Zak for the 23rd installment of Subversion. He is the author of When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice and has a radical conclusion from common-sense principles:

The conditions under which you can defend yourself from state actors are exactly the same as the conditions under which you can defend yourself from private actors.

In other words:

"Self-defense is the same for everybody."

Greg Schroy is an investor with Locke Mountain Ventures and the cofounder of nTopology, a 1517 Fund portfolio company. He joins the podcast to talk about what it's like being an angel investor and how you, as a founder, can do your due diligence on investors.

Micah Green is a Thiel Fellow and the founder, CEO, and president of Maidbot. He joins Subversion to talk about what it's like founding a hardware company, selling to Fortune 500 companies, and moving his team to Austin, TX in order to grow the company.

Marie Schneegans is the founder and CEO of Never Eat Alone (NeverEatAlone.io), an app that helps employees meet each other at major companies. She runs her company from Paris, France. Marie joins Subversion to talk about what it's like to start a company in a country typically not known for its startup culture, and how her company does business in Europe and the United States simultaneously.

Joe Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Loom (useLoom.com) joins Subversion to talk about building a consumer-facing product, pivoting from a totally different kind of product, and how Loom got their first traction by launching on Product Hunt.

Shriya Nevatia joins Subversion with 1517 to discuss how startups and founders can do customer discovery research and UX research.

Shriya studied Computer Science at Tufts University and got into UX Design through Human Factors Engineering, the General Assembly UX Design course, and the social entrepreneurship program Project Breaker. She did UX Research at the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and was a UX Intern at Pegasystems. She was the first employee at TenXList, later called Assembled, where she led UX Design for 4 product launches. Over the past 3 years, she's taught a 1-hour "Intro to UX Design" workshop at 10 hackathons for high school and college students.

Tam Pham is the author of two books and a 1517 Community member. He joins Subversion with 1517 to discuss how a young person, even a dropout with no formal credentials, can land their dream internship, can build an influential network, and can overcome a victim mentality.

Nick Arnett, 1517 Fund's Community Partner, joins for Part II of his conversation on getting taken seriously as a young person, starting a highly technical nonprofit without much technical experience, and how to get started outside of the Bay Area.

Tom Currier is the cofounder and CEO of Cabin, a solution to long travel times between regional cities. Tom joins the podcast to discuss why American cities don't have great regional transit options and how Cabin is providing a solution.

Nick Arnett is the Community Manager for 1517 Fund and a college opt-out. Nick tells his story of how he got started as a teenager and built an unconventional career. He tells how he got taken seriously as a young person and how to get started when you work in a place like Fort Wayne, Indiana -- definitely not San Francisco or New York City.

Shastri Mahadeo is the cofounder and CEO of Union Crate, a tech company that provides analytics for consumer goods companies. Shastri doesn't have your typical tech founder background, though. He never went to college, started working at 14, became a car technician, owned a nightclub and a restaurant, bribed dirty cops, and started a tea company -- all before starting Union Crate.

Shastri joins us to discuss how he started Union Crate from a background that was decidedly non-technical, non-startupy, and non-prestigious.

Max Lock is the founder and president of Fleet, in Portland, OR. He's a solo founder and makes the case in this conversation that maybe that's the best way to start a company. Max talks about how he makes decisions as a solo founder and some of the advantages - and disadvantages - of going at it alone.

Loomia CEO Janett Liriano joins the podcast to discuss how to think about loneliness as a dropout or founder, how to build a better relationship with yourself, and how to make friends.

Once you get out of school and into the real world, you'll have to learn a lot of skills that school conditioned out of you, like making friends (especially if you work alone) and figuring out how to grow without it being assigned to you.

This special bonus episode features 1517 Fund cofounder Michael Gibson.

2012 Thiel Fellow and Figma cofounder Dylan Field joins Michael to discuss how to find a cofounder, dropping out, and how to make the first important hires in a company.

How should you go about emailing or reaching out to early stage investors you've never met? Danielle Strachman sits down to discuss the do's and don'ts of reaching out to investors.

What should you look for in angel investors and how should you find them? In this week's episode of Doubleshot, Danielle Strachman discusses how angel investors are different than venture capitalists and what they might look for that would be different than what venture capitalists might look for.

How should you treat your board and interact with them? Is your board there to give you advice? How should you request advice from your board members?

In this episode of Subversion: Double Shot, Danielle discusses how successful startup founders interact with their boards and how working with your board is a great opportunity to step up as a leader.

Looking back at the past and making sense of practices from primitive societies is no simple task. It’s easy to see the weird, the odd, and the seemingly barbaric as relics of a time of lesser-rationality and to dismiss them as unnecessary or backwards. Yet cross-cultural interventions by societies seemingly more advanced than others often result in chaos, bloodshed, and a price paid for the hubris of the so-called civilized. What is there for modern people to learn from dead European explorers, human sacrifice, trial by ordeal, and cross-cultural experiments in fairness?

For this inaugural episode, we speak with Professors Peter Leeson and Joe Henrich, two experts at making sense of the seemingly senseless.

Peter Leeson is an economist at George Mason University and the author of several books on economic explanations of weird, odd, or unusual practices like piracy and human sacrifice. His most recent book, WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird, takes a look at rational agent explanations for trial by ordeal, “preowned wife sales,” and other weird cultural practices.

Joe Henrich brings a slightly different perspective to the table. He is an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who looks at how different cultural practices lend themselves to human evolution and social cooperation. His most recent book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, breaks down how cultural practices work as a “collective brain” to help ensure the success of a society or subculture.