Two men were born in Scotland in 1723, a county apart. They joined the same Edinburgh club, kept the same friends, and worked from the same premise about what commercial life does to a people. They never agreed about the remedy, and the disagreement is more specific and more difficult than it is usually made to sound.

David Evans is the founder and managing partner of Sentiero Ventures, an early-stage venture fund outside Dallas that invests in business software where artificial intelligence is the core of the product rather than a feature bolted onto it. Before the fund he was an operator. He has been writing software since the early 1990s, built and sold a national digital signage network, and founded EasySeat, an online ticket resale business that reached the Inc. 500 and sold in 2015.

Episode 12 of Self-Evident opens Arc Four and the Scottish arc. It begins with the conditions: a kingdom that lost Darien and then argued itself into a union it did not agree about, a Kirk that put a schoolmaster in nearly every lowland parish because Presbyterian doctrine required ordinary people to read Scripture themselves, and that in the same generation urged the vigorous execution of the law against a twenty-year-old student named Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for blasphemy