Disputes in an Unruly World: Sean West on AI, Power, and What Comes Next

Transcript

Zach Abramowitz: So Sean, thanks for joining us today. Sean West, why don't you introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your work as an entrepreneur and kind of career getting to this point because you have an interesting story. 

Sean West: Thanks. Zach, Bridgette, such a privilege to be on I've been loving the podcast. I've been wanting to get on and today's the day. Thank you for having me. So, I'm co-founder of Hence Technologies. We are a software company that has had the better part of a decade in the legal industry, building more traditional software and more recently building geopolitically oriented software. My background really came from that geopolitical space. I was an analyst forecasting political events. I was deputy CEO of a big geopolitical risk company for a number of years before becoming an entrepreneur. What I've seen in the last couple of years with the potential and the reality of generative AI is the ability to disrupt many different types of industries, geopolitical risk being one of them.

And so, I've turned my attention a bit more back to something I know really well because the technology is so capable now of doing things we could have only dreamed of years ago. That the opportunities too ripe to not go after that space as well. I do a lot of stuff on the side or in supporting of the business, a lot of writing and things like that, which we can talk about too. But my core focus every day is building great software and solving some of the big challenges that are ahead of us as a society through that software. 

Zach Abramowitz: Yes, and what's interesting is, we asked this question of David Latt when we had a chance to interview him. Last year is, how do you describe yourself? Like writer, lawyer, entrepreneur, podcaster. So, when you describe yourself, because you are here also to talk about the book you've written, Unruly, do you consider yourself an author who's also a founder? A founder who's also an author? Walk us through that.

Sean West: Yes. Look, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a entrepreneur. Whether that's from building a business, whether that's an ideas entrepreneur, an intellectual entrepreneur, can be a policy entrepreneur. I've spent a lot of my life trying to, trying to think about how governments should deal with a lot of these issues. But I think of myself as an entrepreneur more than an innovator. Truly how do you build the right team and the right set of resources to change stuff? And my foray into tech in building Hence came from loving the optimism of the tech industry that problems could be solved, right? The poll in the political space. Let me tell you all the problems in the tech space. Let's go solve all the problems and hopefully get rich doing it. I really enjoyed that, that optimism. I've turned my lens back to writing, but some of that's been a vehicle just to capture the many conversations I have as an entrepreneur with super interesting people. Doing super interesting stuff. We can talk more in depth about Unruly, but so much of what I cover on the legal tech side in Unruly is finding people who've created really interesting products. Using AI, using traditional tech that I can forecast will have a societal impact in some period of time in the future because they're not necessarily trying to shift society. Some aren't but if you can force yourself, if I can force myself to think a little further out than the traditional entrepreneur, beyond my runway, beyond my next fundraise, and actually say like, how is society shifting?

How are things going to be different? I find that makes me a better entrepreneur. It makes me a better writer. Probably the purer sharper answer to your question would be, it really depends on the context, right? If I'm in a room of legal tech entrepreneurs, I probably tell them I'm an author. If I'm in a room of authors, I probably tell them I'm a tech founder, right? Because you always want to be a little different than the people that you're around to be more exciting and more interesting, and also not to be judged against their biases, but I think a lot of us I think a lot of us nowadays have multiple interests.Are you both entrepreneurs or podcasters or CEOs? The answer is just yes. That's just what you are. 

Bridget McCormack: It's great to see you, Sean. I'm so excited about this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. I am I don't think Unruly your recent book that's amazing.

I was thrilled to get to read it and review it. I don't think it could have been written by somebody who wasn't also a tech founder, an entrepreneur, a forecaster. There are people who can write great books, but that book is a lot more than a great book. It really is, I think, the result of all of those different roles. So would you describe for us for a minute, what does it mean to say we're living in an unruly world? Or for our listeners? I think Zach and I know, but, for our listeners, what does it mean to say we're living in an unruly world? How did we get here? What do you think the book does for leaders of businesses, governments, other organizations? That are living in the unruly world. 

Sean West: Sure. Thanks for the kind words both here and in your in your review of the book and your support along the way. What I was really trying to do with the book was say. Okay. The world is waking up to the fact that we live in a geopolitically volatile environment. There are a lot of businesses that have been shielded from that. It just didn't affect you right before tariffs you could point to if you ran like a coffee business, unless there were riots or labor issues where your coffee plantation was, you weren't necessarily like dealing with. Dealing with geopolitics on a minute by minute basis, but suddenly tariffs can bankrupt your entire business.

You've done nothing wrong. You've not been involved politically, you're just a bystander. So people wait. We're waking up to the fact that the world is becoming geopolitically volatile. And I think what I realized as a tech founder, but also as someone who spent a huge amount of time over the last decade with lawyers was we'd be lucky if the only thing that was changing. Was the political environment. In fact, the political environment is shifting at the same time that technology, we're at the dawn of a truly transformational technological moment, and our concept of the law and of rule of law is fundamentally being tested and is shifting at the exact same time.

So I stepped back and said, sure I could write a book about geopolitical volatility, and you could call that book unruly as well. But actually what's really happening is something a little more sophisticated than that, which is that the rules of business are actually changing, and that's where the word unruly has a dual meaning in the title. Most executives grew up in an era of globalization where countries and companies fell over each other in a simultaneous rush to get rich by harmonizing rules and laws. If only we could convince X country to break down its trade barriers, their entire population will benefit and will get access to their markets, and they'll get better technology and will be better integrated and the world will be great.

Starting around 2016 with the election of Trump and with. With Brexit, we started to see that consensus fraying. And it's not just that history starts in the US or in the UK. We had seen this in other elements of the global economy, but really two of the core driving forces behind the post-war consensus of globalization. Suddenly said, actually maybe thumbs down we're not convinced that's going to be the pathway for the future. And when you start questioning rules and norms, they immediately lose value, particularly at an international level because they're often not binding. Once you tell your child I don't believe in Santa Claus.
The fact that sometimes presents show up on Christmas doesn't mean they now know. They don't believe in it. So when the US says we don't believe in the WTO anymore, really fundamentally. We may still be members, occasionally, we may try and troll someone by filing an action there, but we're going to put tariffs on the entire world and the WTO is going to be irrelevant in resolving it.

Suddenly, Brazil and Indonesia and other countries that have used the WTO say if nobody believes in this entity anymore, I better just go towards self-defense, right? Why do I even go through the entity? We see that not just in trade, we see that in the way war is conducted. We're seeing that in a whole host of different things. So what I really wanted to capture with the concept unruly, was we're living at a dawn of a new era. It's a new consensus. The globalization period from the fall of bear, from the fall of the Berlin wall till the fall of Bear Stearns is not the period we live in anymore. We live in a world where we're questioning all of that at the same time that we're doing that because a lot of people ended up without jobs and without benefiting from globalization. At the same time, this tech current is going to run through the entire economy. And raise the stakes of job security and job insecurity.

Politically, it's going to shift who the winners and losers are. And by the way, all the guardrails we thought we had in society to protect ourselves, the court systems and not just, I have an American accent. I carry more than one passport. But when you speak with an American accent, you tend to just think about US examples. Look at Mexico this week. They're directly electing all of the judges in the entire country. What citizen has any idea how to vote on 2,600 judicial races? I am pretty politically aware and I go into my elections in California and I have to bring crib notes about all the different things that are on the ballot because I can't possibly even as someone who cares about this, know. Now imagine asking the population to directly elect 2,600 judges. That is an unruly world. That's a world where a political party said, Hey, wouldn't it be great if we got rid of all the corrupt judges? By taking a moment of political strength for ourselves and asking everyone who they want to elect permanently to these roles, it's a very different world where the institutions no longer provide the protection and the populations are actually anesthetized. They're not really, everyone's at home watching unlimited Netflix. They're not actually getting angry about this yet. It'll take time. They'll eventually they'll know, but we're not there yet. 

Bridget McCormack: But did you watch Mountain Head this weekend or not? Did you guys watch Mountain Head or, I'm just checking.

You did. I know you did. Yes. 

Zach Abramowitz: But this is the, I think the you call them the anesthetics that the people are, I think that's a really fast, fascinating observation. And I think on the one hand we've seen, Netflix legalization of recreational drugs in some states. So I think that's certainly some, the population, it may take more to get the sort of, people onto the streets than it once did. But that's one theme and I think, obviously you discuss a multitude of themes and trends and currents moving in this direction. Before we even get to AI, I want to ask about tech, but not the sort of tech that we're looking at right now in terms of a cause. But perhaps are we seeing, do you think an, part of the unruly world, does that flow at all from social media and the kind of connected world that it created?

Because I think about, the bloodbath that followed the rise of the printing press and, I think we look back and think of that the printing press is, one of the great platform in inventions in history. When ideas are disseminated and now we find out actually people don't necessarily agree. Now you have more reasons potentially to go to war. So I'm curious if you think that part of the atmosphere that you describe, like where do you put social media and the unquote connected world? Did we become too over connected too quickly? 

Sean West: That's a great question. Look, I think we can trace a line through the Arab Spring and frankly through the election of populist leaders in a number of different countries, to say that sort of Web 2.0 social media reshaped a lot of the political infrastructure that existed in the world that happened, generally speaking in a context where rules and norms and this overarching. Dominance of western capitalism was prominent and where the US still wanted to be a guardian of sea lanes and like a guarantor of a guarantor of public goods and things like that. So we didn't notice it as much, but it certainly, has played a huge part over the last 15 years in the political climate.

And I know you bracketed let's get to AI and which is like deep fakes and all the weird stuff that can happen on social media. We'll get to that in a minute. The connectedness, I think, , has two core ramifications. Number one, it makes us all really aware of what people in our bubble actually think about what's going on in the world, which can mobilize people, but can often turn them into armchair activists where instead of spilling in the streets, they write a comment, they give a thumbs up, they feel like they've been politically engaged by sounding off. They've said the thing on LinkedIn, so they're not going to actually take any further action. Now, the second element of it, which is what we're experiencing today, certainly in the us, is that data exhaust leaves a huge amount of information for government leaders to mine and attempt to control if they want to shut off debate.

And so I quoted from the Great Ice Tea in a piece I wrote recently whose early nineties album might've been 89, 1990 album, freedom of speech. Just watch what you say, feels a lot like what we're living in America. You can say what you say at all. Nobody's showing up tomorrow, but good luck when your company finally gets tapped for a government grant and someone says you like 12 too many messages, right? We live in a world where all of your data is knowable by the powers that be. In COVID, we gave huge amounts of data to governments because we wanted to go eat at Pizza Hut, right? We wanted to leave our house for like things that, when you think about the amount of data you gave up and why you gave it up, if you knew it would be weaponized against you, you wouldn't have done necessarily, you could order delivery and not have to do contact tracing or whatever.

But we did it because we trusted governments, right? And I think social media has been a piece of that too, where unless you live in a super repressive regime, you've generally felt protected to say what you want. But in a world of extreme vetting and things like that, social media has this ability to send a chill through conversations as well. People who might post a courageous view you agree with, don't get the feedback they got even six months ago, or  12 months ago. When they do it, they get scared, right? Because all their friends aren't going to like and comment on their posts. It's too political. It's too dangerous. And so I think we have to look at the multiple, it's not a one way street with social media.We're more aware, but that may actually mobilize us less. Sometimes it mobilizes us more, but it depends on where we're at in the political cycle too. 

Bridget McCormack: Interesting. I'm so eager to get to like the Sean West prescription for all of this, but I think we have to do the AI piece first because I think you argue Sean, and I think we agree with you that, it's not only that AI complicates these other unruly aspects of our current geopolitical world. It does all of it, it does it in a degree that I don't think anybody's prepared for and I think you don't think anybody's prepared for. So can you talk a little bit about how you think AI is going to impact what you've already described as like a significant change in the way businesses have to think about navigating the world. 

Sean West: Sure. I think, we can apply it in so many different ways. I think it's it applies at a political level because the ability to create manipulative political content, not even necessarily deep fakes, just manipulative true content right is now limitless. We used to, I guess we used to have limits based on the fact that things were cheap, things were expensive. And when things are expensive, you do them less. If I need 12 engineers to spam a political candidate. With false claims or whatever. If I need someone to develop the dossier and like stage photos and things that's expensive. So the universe of people who do it is less it's the same with if I want to hire lawyers to attack my competitors. When things are expensive, they're restrained. We're living in a world where everything is becoming cheap, content's becoming cheap, content's becoming free, even high quality stuff is becoming both.

So that gives us the ability to start to say, okay, on every factor, my business depends on. How does that come into play? On political stability we'll use Romania as an example. They just reran their presidential election like this. Most people didn't watch this, but they said that there was foreign influence and manipulation through deep fakes by Russia in the first run of the election. So the Supreme Court threw out the election results and re-ran it. I can't imagine that happening in any number of other larger countries, larger economies. It's very difficult to actually imagine that happening. Yes. There's so much 

Zach Abramowitz: Chaos that like. A story like that, which should be front page kind of gets lost in the shuffle.

Sean West: Yes. I mean I didn't even know about it until my software that tracks political events surfaced it for me as like an interesting manifestation of technology and politics. I said, what? I haven't read about this. Nobody's covering this. This is super interesting. So you've got it at a political level, from a business level.

I think we have to think not just about you, we can talk about how AI can be used to be weaponized against our businesses, but actually the biggest risk is that every company, whether brick and mortar, low tech or even on the exalted plateau of regulated services, knowledge services, everybody is going to be impacted by AI native competitors. So I put in a piece, I wrote this week, a picture of a humanoid barista making coffee, and it has facial recognition. So when you walk in, it actually knows who you are. That's a lot less awkward than the person at Starbucks being like, Sean, do you want seven pumps of syrup again? And you're like, whoa. Don't tell anyone I want that. Just, recognize me and do it. So low tech businesses like, oh, I'm always going to need a barista to make my coffee. Just as good as a coffee. No, you're not, actually, every business is potentially going to be affected. And if that's the case, then what we really need to do, and we'll get, I know you want to save prescriptions, but I think we have to really decide when we're talking about AI, are we talking about it from an efficiency point of view? Are we talking about it from a strategic point of view? From an efficiency point of view, this is a boon for everybody. We can all get more efficient. We can all do the work of 20 people with one person.

That doesn't mean you need to fire everyone. That just means your business can suddenly do the work of 2000 people with a staff of a hundred. It doesn't mean you have to split down. It means you 

Zach Abramowitz: can demand people's output, 20 x in terms. 

Sean West: Yes, exactly. It's not about time anymore, it's about output.

So efficiency, I think we're starting to wrap our hands around it and we're seeing even really `low tech businesses. I did a briefing with a law firm last week, and they were just starting, they have zero AI, they have a policy of zero AI, and they were saying, we're starting to test this. Where can we use AI to make our lawyers more efficient? Okay, I can walk you through 10 or 15 different applications of AI, but frankly, there are people like Zach who could probably give you a better briefing on how to do that or Bridget, it's like people who do it for a living, understanding this can really show you what everybody in the industry is doing.

I can give you the CliffsNotes to that, but what I can do is actually say to you, you're asking the wrong question. The right question you should be asking is not, can I make my business more efficient? Yes, you've already lost. You are way far behind. People are ahead of you. Your competitors are going to be doing it. What you really should be asking is someone building a business that will replace my business in five years? Because it has a different business model. Yes. And that's really uncomfortable for business leaders when it's you were organized like a law firm that acquires cases this way, and you're like, Hey, how can I use AI in my marketing stack to acquire more cases?  How can I, it's no. What if you're no longer needed? Because those cases can be settled without you. Yes, through some automated dispute resolution or something like that. The world is very different. I give that just as an example, like these are all foreseeable. You can see it.

It doesn't mean you're going to do it. It doesn't mean it'll exist. Doesn't mean it'll be cost effective, but we can see it. So when you're building an AI strategy that will necessarily take you five years to implement, are you asking strategic questions or are you just asking efficiency and productivity questions? If it's the former, you ought to do it because you'll die sooner otherwise. But if it's the former, you probably will come under pretty serious competitive pressure. Maybe you can be a boutique that deals with the richest clients will always pay to talk to the smartest people. So humans have a role in the future, but like the mass market, you will see.

And that's a very different dynamic than most businesses are thinking about. I put in the context of lawyers, because I'm talking to two of them, but now we'll apply that to every business in the entire economy. And that's really what we're facing. 

Bridget McCormack: But do you agree that lawyers might be a little bit more hesitant to think through those strategic questions?

I always say that you should be thinking about what do I do today that's no longer going to be needed tomorrow, and what is impossible today that I'm going to be able to do tomorrow? Because those are the questions, those are the ones that keep me up at night, but I feel like most lawyers are asking the question that the firm asked you last week, what are the other firms doing to bring efficiency to what we do right now? 

Zach Abramowitz: And should we buy Harvey? By the way, to add on to that point, Bridget, I've told firms before that there's a lot more to the strategy question of what tool do I buy? Which I think is where most lawyers are right now.

Sean West: Yes. Look, I think legal tech is having a moment, but the reason that valuations are really high is because the potential adoption curve is so far behind. Yes, that you can actually map out, there's runway. All these are going to have to play catch up. So this will scale across the entire industry.

Everyone is very far behind, which means when AI native companies start to come forward. The competitive landscape's entirely different. Let me give you by analogy, let me give you an example. In the geopolitical world. Yes. So in my old life, I had a team of about a hundred analysts, and if you wanted to work with us, it costs you somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000 a month to talk to all my analysts and help us do stuff. And we weren't doing lobbying. We were just doing analysis. You'd want to talk to the smartest person on Brazil, the smartest person on Russia. That person has limited time. So if you want to talk to them you become a client, you talk to them, and that's what it is. But there's a pyramid structure, like in any business, all those folks are supported by people who do the basic research and do a lot of the blocking and tackling and the writing. That entirely has been wiped away. Our new geopolitical tool that we've launched, Hence Global, it writes a daily update, far better than I would've written when I was a junior analyst. Let me not denigrate other junior analysts. When I was a junior analyst, I worked for five or ten major corporations, and I would write them a monthly briefing on politics.

But even if they had a hundred facilities. I'm a human. I can't look at everything happening in the world and remember, this is going to be really meaningful for your Guatemala city facility or whatever. I'm thinking of your biggest facilities. I have my own biases, but the AI never fails. When a political event happens and the AI is asking, does a client have exposure? It gets it right every single time. So even though you read it and sometimes you're like, whoa, this is not exactly how I would've framed it. The value provided for virtually no money is extremely high, and so as an AI native geopolitical tracking service where I can offer my tools for $100 a month, not a $100,000 a month. Or something like that. There's a whole lot of the market that's going to say, Hey, that sounds like a better deal. Even if I leave a little bit on the table, I'll go pick up fractional resource for what I've left on the table. Now bring that back to legal. Self-service tools, we're not there yet, but a lot of in-house teams are starting to ask, how can I replace my law firm?

And this is the real challenge that I think we're facing in the legal industry is that law firms are saying, how do I use AI to be more efficient so I can preserve my high profit margin, my beautiful offices, all of my perks, right? How do I do that? Not necessarily how do I pass that on to the client, right? Some are, but not most of them are not. Or they're not doing it transparently yet where the client's sort of saying, okay, I'll see if my law firms get a lot more efficient if I get the same work I got yesterday for free. Or sorry for 20% off that's free money. That sounds great. I'll continue. But if the law firm's not doing that, and then a new company comes and says, we can just equip you to do all your own reviews of X, Y, or Z, as a corporation, you have to try it as a guardian of the business. Like you want to know if it works, it's terrifying, and by the way, it will work. 

Zach Abramowitz: It's a terrifying prospect though, right? For a lot of these attorneys, and I say attorneys, I think you could apply this, across, knowledge work for sure. We're not used to making less. The idea is you continue to make more and more each year until you retire.

So that what you start thinking as you're describing. Sean about the business, you're thinking in terms of and of course I will make the same and or more than I've made up until now, where let's be real. If you continue doing this, even if you change, it might mean that people make less, at least in the short term. And I think this kind of feeds into the themes that you were talking about before, because we're already over here, as society, juggling multiple balls in the air while, running on top of, a pogo stick. It's already nerve wracking.

As excited as I think we all are about AI and we're all like working on AI, there is a sense of this is going to create maybe a little too much disruption. 

Sean West: No, I completely agree. I have a rule that I have to take a shot every time someone says Javons Paradox. But, it's one of these things that gets thrown around oh no, it'll all be okay because as the work gets cheaper, we'll all want more work. And it's maybe that's true, but guess what? Like I can hold up an economic textbook that tells you we all get richer from trade. And everybody who's broke as a result of trade is really angry and has political power. Now think about that. When white collar workers no longer have work, they have money and they have political power, they have resources, they will get angry.

The sort of Neo Luddite, the 2025 Neo Luddite crowd actually has access and they have the ability to have influence. And that sets up a real societal challenge between the owners of the AI and the rest of society on a lot of levels. So I think that's pretty problematic. So that's that's like my nice little tiptoe round Javons Paradox, which is it may be right or wrong, I'm not sure it's right when it comes to legal work. It may be right or wrong, but it actually doesn't matter because we're going to feel the disruption in our lifetime. Now, sitting down and talking to a room full of millionaires. And you actually have two messages you have to deliver. One of them is you may just make hundreds of thousands of dollars, not millions in the future because some AI will eat away at your very comfortable business. So that's an uncomfortable message to deliver. Zach, you articulated it, but the harder one I think is to say you have a lot of moves and a lot of what I tried to do in Unruly is say, you can fight back against all this. If you see it coming, you have a lot of resources, you have a lot of power. The problem for law firms in particular is they're organized as partnerships, so they actually have to invest out of today's money to be successful in the future. They also are restricted by Rule 5.4 from offering equity. So, if I can go hire a team of engineers from Google to make my law firm super successful, I'm actually going to have to pay them millions of dollars because I am forbidden from giving them equity.

Bridget McCormack: Yes. 

Sean West: So as a result, what you end up with is under investment, which leads to subpar technology teams. In a lot of these places, not all of them, I have friends in the industry who are great, but like writ large, you're, you've underinvested for the opportunity and that just means that folks who can go raise venture to compete against you are they're going to have the inside track because they're going to be able to deploy effective capital to winning where you can't. And so, I think the biggest challenge is that mental challenge of a law firm, which is to say is this adjacent to the future for us? Or is this something we really want to invest in? And if you're a firm that can make the investments because you're so big, then you will. And that's what we're seeing, that's where you're starting to see the separation between the top 10 or 20 or 30 companies. They can run incubators, they can have a finger on the pulse, they can invest in legal tech investment funds, they can do all that stuff. And then there's absolutely everybody else in the market, which is a lion's share of the revenue of the market.

And it's a lot harder in that regard. So, what ends up happening? Do people get gobbled up? Do we just get does private equity come in some way? They convince Trump to loosen 5.4 and now they can buy law firms. That's not. That could happen in the next year. Trump already hate law firms 

Zach Abramowitz: Arizona law firms.

Bridget McCormack: Yes. It's already happened in Arizona and there are a couple other states considering it. So I think that's totally foreseeable, honestly. Yes. 

Sean West: And so do they gobble everybody up and then they put a private equity funded tech layer in there that suddenly, maybe, but that's like pretty catastrophic.

Zach Abramowitz: Similar to what happened with many doctor's practices. Over the last decade we could see something similar coming in law. I'm curious because I know that you've talked with Bridget in the past and me as well about Frances Kellor and the sort of very idealistic approach to dispute resolution. For those who don't know Frances Kellor, one of the founders of the American Arbitration Association. Where do you think you know, all of the themes that you discuss in Unruly, about chaos, about fragmentation, about rising toxicity. What, where can dispute resolution potentially be, not necessarily a cure all, but at least a cure some for the for the issues that you discussed and the challenges that you discussed.

Bridget McCormack: And to hop on before you answer Sean, it seems it seems inevitable that there'll be more and more disputes on the one hand, although you could imagine technology building systems where resolutions could be self-executing on the chain. So I think there's like a lot of different ways it goes, but what is the role of, better dispute resolution how do you see that as prescriptive at all to everything we're facing?

Sean West: Yes, it's a fantastic question. Look, I read Francis Keller's book after speaking with both of you all on it. And what really stood out to me was this idea that if you want to bolster the tenants of a harmonious society, then you probably want to have less disputes. You don't want neighbors hating each other, fighting with each other. And as a result. Alternative dispute mechanisms allow people to settle things amicably. And actually, bury the hatchet on some level. And I think, I think that's one model you could you can see the Chinese version of that, which is to say in order to have a harmonious society, they've put legal, like legal tech robots in their courts. That basically discourage you from filing claims. They're like, there's 80% chance you will going to lose. You're going to lose, you should settle this, right? because they don't want to have lots and lots of claims. But if you think about it from like a global perspective, certainly in a world of wars and economic carnage, if we all respected each other, which is required when you're when you're subscribing to the same set of rules that you respect.

The arbiter, then we would have much more resolution that would build up to the geopolitical level. Now, contrast that vision with what we live in today. And I describe Trump as a front stabber, right? He's not a back stabber, he just stabs people in the front. That's what he does. And I've heard this phrase in a couple of different contexts. Anthony Scaramucci is his press secretary described being front stabbed by Trump when he was fired after, I think it was 11 days. 

Bridget McCormack: 11 days, 

Sean West: I actually had a colleague once yell at me like, where I come from, we stab people in the front. And I was like, whoa, that's a weird thing to say. Like he was accusing me of stabbing you in the back. But it was like why is that a good thing? That sounds bad too. That is the mentality we live in, which is you bloody someone's nose and then you say, let's be friends. And it's a huge contrast to this world of peaceful dispute resolution. So there's a real question here. If you want political change do you wring your hands and say the politicians are really mean, and that's a bad thing? Or do you actually start building civil society institutions that get citizens to realize that they actually value the things that they're losing.

And so I think, I actually think it's a pretty prime time for reinvestment in things that on a local level or regional level, people will not object to. Nobody wants to go to court, everybody wants to get what's due to them. 

Zach Abramowitz: The one bipartisan thing that still exists. 

Sean West: Yes, exactly. And so I think there's a role to play for organizations that feel local, that feel close to home, that feel like resolution, that then reminds people that we're all part of the same country, whether, whether your neighbor supported Trump or was anti-Trump, if their fence has moved three inches onto your property, somebody's got to pay someone. And you got to figure that out, right? But you don't want to pay lawyers in the middle if you don't have to. I think that vision, we can shed a tear for the fact that we don't live in the world that Francis Keller outlined because we're in a world where trade wars don't get resolved at the WTO and where the Russia UCAN conflict is more likely to be solved by Saudi Arabia in the middle than it is to be solved By the UN right? It's like a very different world than we've ever had. But at the end of the day, there's only so much tolerance for conflict that people have. And the pendulum, may or may not swing back politically when you start thinking about surveillance cultures and the ability for decisive political advantage, but it will swing back from a societal point of view in that people don't like being angry.

Most people don't like being angry. They like getting resolution. So, I think that's important. Now, how does AI play into that? If you can offer a cheap and effective and trustworthy dispute resolution, people will take it. There's no reason why they wouldn't. I write in the book about my own dispute with an insurance company where they refused to acknowledge I had a concussion, even though I presented multiple diagnoses of concussion. And so I had to arm myself with legal AI to create a demand letter and write a fake complaint. I could file. I settled with them a week ago for 11 times their initial offer. But if I could have just said, look, I'm going to send this to dispute resolution. We're not going to go to court. We're going to get this resolved. It's going to cost each of us a thousand dollars out of the settlement or whatever it's going to cost. But I know I had a concussion, like that's not debatable. To me and the doctors know I did, so I know you're just being a jerk using your corporate power against me. Of course I'd go to dispute resolution, but today my only alternative was to get a personal injury lawyer to jump in the middle and extend it by an extra year and have to go testify and probably be encouraged to fabricate symptoms I didn't have. And I don't want to do that, I don't want to do that. So Yes, I think that's an important element of this. 

Zach Abramowitz: Where can people find Unruly? 

Sean West: There are a lot of different ways to digest your Unruly. You can purchase it from a local bookstore, which local bookstores have slapped my hand for never starting with that.

But I think you can purchase that. Your favorite local bookstore? It is in Shops online. It is of course available on Amazon. There is an audible version, which I was not selected to narrate. So for all of you who loved my voice in this podcast, do not be jarred. When you listen to the audio version, a voice actor was selected over me for it. So that's an interesting lesson of book writing. There's a Kindle version as well. Someday there may be a children's coloring book, but we're not there yet. 

Bridget McCormack: Where's the best place for people to follow you? Tell them about your substack. And best place to keep up with Sean West.

Sean West: Thanks. So I've got a substack geo legal.substack.com. If you sign up and reply to any of my messages, I will reply to you. There's a human on the other side of all of those substacks. You can check out Hence@Hence.ai to learn more about what we're doing. And if you're curious about some of this AI drafted political analysis, I have a LinkedIn newsletter I launched a few weeks ago, the Unruly Daily, entirely generated by AI.My AI writes the entire thing. But it's got well over a thousand people. I have nearly as many people signed up to follow my AI generated newsletter. I signed up to read my weekly thing I pour my heart into. So that taught me something about the quality of my content. But you can check that out too, and I'd love to engage with all of your listeners in any of those for them.

Bridget McCormack: Fantastic. Thanks so much, Sean. 

Sean West: Thanks. It's been a pleasure.