Episode 42 - Two of Three Neophytes Discuss Political Violence and Challenges to Norms

Well, we had another topic ready to go, and then someone tried to shoot the President again. So, the original plan went out the window, and Channing and I discussed the attempted shooting and political violence generally, pushing norms, the lack of true dealmakers in political office, and the consequences of a system that promotes ideological purity over the flexible pragmatism that moves us forward.

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Episode 41 - The Three Neophytes Again Discuss Iran and Maybe Some Ideas for Fixing Everything Wrong with our Politics

The Iran War/Conflict continues apace, and whether we have a clear objective and clear, palatable way to achieve it remains up for some debate. President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have yet to solve an increasingly severe communications problem, the President is feuding with the Pope and/or our Sovereign Lord Jesus Christ, and gas prices are going to have well-heeled liberals ready to look past that whole DOGE thing and give Elon Musk’s Tesla another chance. Chanman, Mabes, and I talk about all of it—what we lack in focus we make up for in, well, hopefully something.

This episode is not brought to you by Diet Dr. Pepper, some Monster coffee thing Mabes was drinking, and Cafe Rio, Utah’s best vaguely Mexican-inspired food, but it could be (if you known anyone at any of our non-sponsors, let us know).

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Episode 40 - The Three(!) Neophytes Discuss the Ongoing Conflict in Iran

In this episode, recorded Sunday afternoon in Salt Lake City, Thomas and I are joined by our longtime friend Channing Elggren for a robust back-and-forth on the conflagration in the Middle East: we discuss what this means for the United States, what it means for Iran, and what it means for the region writ large.

We don’t claim to be anything more than what we are: three friends, more than 7,000 air miles from danger, trying to figure out what to make of a world we will likely never experience except through a screen or the pages of a book. It is likely that more Iranians were killed during the January crackdown on protests than Americans lost their lives on 9/11 and in the entirety of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars that followed--I hope we, as Americans, never, ever forget how lucky we are; I hope further that our awareness of that luck informs a sense of responsibility, not one of superiority.

As to what that means, I don’t really know--I suppose that’s for us to figure out together.

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Episode 39 - The Neophytes Think the Feds Should Look into this Epstein Guy

Well, it’s been a tough few weeks for wealthy perverts/possible sex criminals/people who groveled for the money and attention of a definite sex criminal. In the words of not Shakespeare, this kind of seems like much ado about something.

Thomas and I spoke about a number of the people now linked to Epstein, whether there’s anything material in the files the government hasn’t released, whether it’s okay that the government doesn’t seem interested in investigating further, what impact this has on Americans’ faith in their government, and much more.

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Episode 38 - The Neophytes: Trump, Emirati Bribes(?), and Why We Decided to Purchase the Remaining 51% of World Liberty Financial

I’m not saying it was a bribe.

It is entirely possible that it makes good business and political sense to provide American-made AI chips to the United Arab Emirates. It is also possible that the rather shady Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and manager of a $1.3 trillion business portfolio, decided to purchase 49% of World Liberty Financial, a fledgling crypto/decentralized finance company owned primarily by the Trump family, out of pure self-interest without any regard for who owned it (oh—just days before President Trump’s inauguration).

But on a scale of 1 to This Looks Awfully Bribey, the brother of the UAE president sending a $187 million down payment to various Trump family-controlled entities mere months before the Trump administration reverses a Biden administration decision* and agrees to provide AI chips to the UAE is probably an 8.5.

*For what it’s worth, reversing a Biden administration decision is not necessarily a bad thing, and if I were a Republican I would say it should probably be the default approach. However, the Biden administration’s hesitation on providing the UAE with the requested AI chips stemmed from concerns the chips would make their way to the Chinese; the CEO of G42, the Sheikh’s AI company, is Peng Xiao, born in China, once a U.S. citizen and now a UAE citizen. “Not giving China valuable technology” is a bipartisan concern—we can only assume it was thoroughly addressed prior to the deal being finalized.

On this episode of the Neophytes, Thomas and I discuss, well, pretty much this.

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Episode 37 - A Voice in the Conservative Wilderness: Ben Connelly on Venezuela, ICE, and Ice (Greenland)

Ben Connelly—the podcast’s first non-Neophyte repeat guest!—is a brilliant writer and long-distance runner based out of one of Earth’s Top Cities Where Nick Hagen Once Lived, Charlottesville, Virginia. Though he spends most of his writing time working on the serialized novels, short stories, and essays he publishes on his Hardihood Books Substack, he also writes political essays on his Carrying the Fire Substack under the pseudonym John Grady Atreides.

Connelly is a self-described fusionist conservative, “fusionism” being the product of the union of libertarianism and traditionalism which dominated the Republican Party for much of the last fifty or so years. Connelly is deeply knowledgeable and thoroughly reasoned; I’m pretty sure he knows my positions better than I do—completely sure, if I’m being honest—and he states his own positions well enough that if the podcast were much longer I might accidentally come out ready to extol the virtues of Donald Rumsfeld.

Given the current populist, nationalist lean of the Republican Party, Connelly is a man without a comfortable political home, but I think he’s still a man worth listening to; on this, his second visit to the welcoming waters of open, Never-Closed Inquiries, we discussed Venezuela, Greenland, and what we might generically call ICE’s efforts in Minneapolis, plus a whole lot more.

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Episode 36 - The Neophytes Address Untimely Questions, Like Whether Lobbyists Are in League with the Forces of Darkness

To be honest, we did speak about Greenland, but our conversation was uninformed even by our standards, so the topics du this jour are impeachment and lobbyists—we will return to Greenland sometime around when the Cuban government is toppled (which, apparently, could be soon?).

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Episode 35 - Remaining Human in the Age of AI (Lawyering)

Kimball Parker is one of the kindest, most thrillingly sincere people I have ever met. Aside from that, he is also the CEO of SixFifty, an AI-powered employment law compliance platform; head of operations at Paychex, a payment processor which now owns SixFifty; and head of the AI Lab at the University of Chicago Law School—students in the AI Lab, like those who participated in the LawX Legal Design Lab Parker previously headed up at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, use AI to build tools for people who cannot afford attorneys. When it comes to artificial intelligence, especially with respect to its applications in the legal field, Parker really, really knows what he’s talking about.

But Parker, an English major at the University of Utah, 2013 graduate of the same University of Chicago Law School where he now teaches, and former associate in the Silicon Valley office of the elite litigation-focused firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, is as conscious of AI’s downsides as he is sanguine about its upsides. And that’s what much of our conversation focused on: what AI can’t do, what it shouldn’t do. AI is changing the world, and in the process it’s changing us. How much of that change is good? What limits should we draw on our own usage? On that of our children?

For what it’s worth, we recorded our conversation immediately after rehearsing a song we were going to sing in church—a song Parker wrote. If there’s anyone who can speak to maximizing the benefits we derive from AI while continuing to operate at the peak of our human license, it’s Kimball Parker.

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