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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Episode 34 - The Neophytes Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, and…Dodge the Truth

The government is still shut down, the sun sets not long after lunch, and the Dodgers won the World Series—oh, and BYU is undefeated. Things could be better. On this latest episode of The Neophytes, Thomas and I discuss the shutdown, the World Series, a Word from our Sponsor (capitalizations intended), the meaning of life, and much more.

Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon with commentary on current events and interviews with people from across the political spectrum.

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Episode 33 - Prof. Jonas Anderson on Why We Should Be Concerned That Judges Are Competing for Cases

I’m not completely sure how to convince you to listen to a patent law professor and a bankruptcy lawyer nerd out about why competition between judges for cases threatens to seriously damage already-fragile public trust in the judiciary, but here goes:

In an ideal, utopian world, justice would be blind, or, failing that, consistent: the outcome of a case in a federal court in Arkansas would match that reached in Connecticut, or Michigan, or California.

But we do not live in an ideal world: America’s over 670 federal district court judges, over 170 federal appellate court judges, and nine Supreme Court justices, not to mention the litany of bankruptcy judges, administrative law judges, magistrates, and other public servants who comprise the human element of the federal judiciary, are people, not automatons, and a case’s location may play a major role in its outcome.

As such, if you, the potential plaintiff, have the ability to start your lawsuit in multiple places, you’re having your lawyers do a thorough job vetting your options. This process, called “forum shopping,” is common—skipping it would border on malpractice.

But what about forum selling? Some judges have gone to unusual lengths to attract certain kinds of cases, and while that might be problematic on its own, it gets worse. Every single judicial district in an American state includes multiple judges, but some districts allow you to file in a division which might include just one. In other words, there are places in the United States where a plaintiff can guarantee they’ll land before a judge who openly, obviously wants them there.

If it’s a patent case, maybe the impact on the nation writ large is limited, but what if the case is political? This isn't hypothetical—it's already happening, and there's no indication it will peter out on its own.

Prof. Jonas Anderson teaches patent law, intellectual property, trade secrets, civil procedure, and property at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. In 2024, he and his writing partner, Prof. Paul Gugliuzza of the University of Texas School of Law, published “Why Do Judges Compete for Cases?”, an analysis of why federal district court judges, public servants with lifetime appointments and fixed salaries, actually compete with each other for more work. Some of the reasons discussed are completely innocuous; some, perhaps less so.

Prof. Anderson and I had a grand old time discussing forum selling in patent cases, bankruptcy, and politics, and how to appropriately limit it—in other words, how to address a genuine threat to public trust in the federal judiciary.

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