Never Close the Inquiry

Episode 58 - The Neophytes Bait Your Clicks: The American Dream Is DeadDepending on who you ask and how careful you are with your definitions, far more people will tell you the American Dream is dead than will wave the flag and insist it lives. In a recent AP poll, only 22% of respondents ages 18-30 claimed to believe the American Dream, defined simply as the idea that if you work hard, you’ll get ahead, is still achievable.My view, and that of the other Neophytes, is more nuanced, although we are not ourselves in full alignment. What has long separated America from its peers is its shocking wealth, yes, but also its lack of true class distinctions. We have quasi-classes and clubs and a storied history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination, but with hard, well-targeted work and a good chunk of luck, you can be born with nothing and die with just about everything. That has not historically been as common elsewhere, where your last name can mean something it just can’t, or so rarely can, here. To the extent the American Dream depends only on a lack of formal class barriers and the possibility of immense wealth, it lives.But there is no question the America of today is much more expensive than that of yesteryear. The cost of housing has risen dramatically. So too with education. More and more wealth shifts to the already wealthy. If the American Dream is financial stability, a picket fence, and occasional family vacations to Disney World, it is mathematically materially less accessible than it was fifty years ago. I don’t see how rapid AI advances will do anything but make that more true.Is there hope? Of course, and plenty of it. But the problems that have brought so many to a rather fatalistic point of view won’t be fixed by magic or quickly.Tune in to hear the Neophytes talk about all of it (well, as much of it as we remembered in the moment).For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 57 - The Neophytes: Hawaiian Mongeese and Trump’s Foreign PolicyIn 1883, sugar plantation owners in Hawaii imported mongooses from Jamaica—where the India-native species had been introduced a decade earlier—to eat the rats ravaging the sugarcane crops. It isn’t difficult to see where the plantation owners were coming from: crops good, rats bad, how kill rats?, mongoose like rats probably, I get mongooses, this definitely not backfire. But, as seems to so often be the case when we supreme beings mess with nature, there was a problem: Rats are nocturnal; mongooses are diurnal. When the rats were awake, the sugarcane fields were mercifully devoid of foreign predators, and when the mongooses were awake, their intended targets were asleep in their rat beds. So, the mongooses, being hungry and at rather a remarkable advantage on predator-free islands, ate lovely Hawaiian birds at every point of the bird lifecycle, from egg to chick to adult. In Jamaica, the same story: The mongooses ate the lizards and birds while the rats napped. The importers solved no problems while creating substantial new ones.That was not the original intended topic of the podcast, but it proved a useful introduction for a discussion about President Trump’s foreign policy, which, to date, appears to have solved few problems while creating substantial new ones. Tariffs have not filled our coffers and do not appear to be putting us on the road to re-emergence as a manufacturing powerhouse, but they have worsened our economic relationship with any number of close allies around the globe. Russia and Ukraine are still at war. Instead of one highly controversial conflict in the Middle East we now have two, the second of which is impacting domestic prices for more than just oil and its derivatives. We have galvanized Europe to spend more on its own defense, but not in a way that has brought us closer. In Venezuela, the military executed a stunning extradition of Nicolas Maduro and we now have an oil deal that could eventually bear significant fruit, but Maduro’s successor-cum-American-puppet Delcy Rodriguez is wildly unpopular and both she and the oil deal may be gone as soon as Venezuela holds an open and fair election; saving the deal may mean saving the Rodriguez government, which would come with its own massive issues.In a word, it-feels-like-things-could-be-going-better. Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 56 - The Neophytes: What Is Twitch and How Does It Influence Elections?First, we discuss incumbent newbie Senator Darline Graham’s win in her run-off in South Carolina’s Republican primary Tuesday evening. Her win came not long after she was booed during a debate for honestly admitting she couldn’t address a question about America’s national security interests in Taiwan and the South China Sea.Then, we turn to Twitch and the rise of streamers’ influence in politics. Leftist streamer Hasan Piker has been making life somewhat uncomfortable for Democrats recently, but he is just one of several young folks who have developed a substantial online-to-offline following via a path that, shall we say, might appear somewhat alien to Walter Cronkite. The strangest member of this perplexing new cohort might be Adin Ross, a 25-year-old fellow living in Florida who first gained popularity by playing NBA 2K online with Bronny James and has somehow translated video games into interviewing, among others, President Donald J. Trump. My personal favorite Ross moment might be him announcing via livestream that Andrew Tate had told him he would soon leave Romania, leading the Romanian authorities to arrest Tate and his brother Tristan.Anyway, I, as a relatively non-online person, do not understanding the streaming phenomenon. Mabes and Channing do, at least well enough to explain it to me. My short-form verdict: bad.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 55 - The Neophytes: Why Do Smart People Do Stupid Things?If the Financial Times is to be trusted, the $35 billion recently lost by AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness represents the biggest trading loss of all time by nearly $20 billion. Congratulations, Leopold Aschenbrenner! The debacle has given rise to some interesting questions, like how does a good essay convince a bunch of very rich people to give tens of billions of dollars to a 24-year-old with zero investing experience? And do they have any money left to give to me? I also have no investing experience, and I’m sure I could cobble together something about robots taking over the world by 2032.Jokes aside, this is not the first time an empirically brilliant person—Aschenbrenner graduated from Columbia at 19 as valedictorian—has made what turned out to be an enormous bet the wrong way and lost big. It happens all the time, and the failures of our best and brightest, including those who serve in the government, can take a weed-whacker to trust in expertise generally. The downstream effects of elite failures can be unpleasant, as much schadenfreude as some may feel initially.Anyway, the Situational Awareness, er, situation—plus the startup accelerator Y Combinator’s investment in a mosquito-killing drone you can pre-order for a mere $1100, or $50 per month if you prefer renting your pest control technology—prompted a pair of fundamental questions: Why do smart people do stupid things? And is there a way for us to avoid the same traps?Listen to hear the Neophytes try to figure it out.Disclaimer: This title may get reused for other episodes. We haven’t talked about Congress in a minute.Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon with commentary on current events and interviews with people from across the political spectrum. For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiryPlease like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 54 - The Neophytes: Trump, Mamdani, and CharismaThere is no question President Trump and Mayor Mamdani’s respective political positions differ somewhat, but there is also no question that both have succeeded where others would have failed because, for whatever reason, plenty of people are inclined to follow them. The Neophytes consider what exactly it means to be charismatic, who among other politicians might fairly be described as charismatic, and to what degree charisma is actually a good thing.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 53 - The Neophytes Pirro Into the Nation’s SoulIt’s been a tough week for U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, one of the federal government’s top veterans of cable television. She did the wrong thing by going forward with indictments based on what she could have then known was insufficient evidence, did the right thing by dropping them via a 20-page legal mea culpa, and did the hard thing by standing up to the President and still(?)-Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in an Oval Office showdown. All in all, a whole lot of consternation that could have been avoided by (i) a competent initial renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool; (ii) an honest assessment of the damage and subsequent competent fix of the Reflecting Pool; or (iii) fully reviewing available evidence before making rather bold pronouncements on national television.After discussing Kansas voters’ rejection of an elected Supreme Court, Channing and I dig into the problem of choosing people for their compliance over their competence.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 52 - The Neophytes: So…How Socialist Is Democratic Socialism?Democratic socialists are surging, which is more than can be said for their more moderate political cousins. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is as talented a communicator as Democrats have had since President Barack Obama (who, unlike Mamdani, was not born in Africa), and the whole Graham Platner thing notwithstanding, DSA or DSA-supported candidates are going to be on more ballots this November than ever before. But what does it mean to be a Democratic Socialist (or democratic socialist), and what does it mean for Democrats that, at this uniquely vulnerable time for Republicans, candidates in key districts will be associated with calls to defund the entire Department of Defense?Much of what the DSA supports is legitimately popular—single payer healthcare tends to poll well, for example. And to the DSA’s genuine credit, its members stand for something, and their enthusiasm in campaign volunteering is unmatched. But it is difficult to imagine broad support for a party that wants to abolish prisons, various forms of law enforcement, and, ultimately, capitalism. It puts the famously competent, well-run, popular, not even remotely struggling Democratic Party in a bit of a pickle, and hands the famously competent, well-run, popular, not even remotely struggling Republican Party a lifeline.Here to talk about all of it, resident know-nothings and non-socialists Channing and Nick.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 51 - Why Christopher Nolan Matters: Two Nerds Sincerely Nerd Out About Their Favorite DirectorChristopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been in theaters since July 17th. Though it has already made approximately 8 bajillion dollars and earned rave reviews from most critics and lowly theater attendees, the film has fanned the eternal flame of the online culture war and is not without its detractors, including, notably, Emily Wilson, the best-selling translator from whom Nolan took at least some of his inspiration.If you are interested in a lengthy, contentious debate regarding the film’s merits or what it has to say about our politics, this is not the podcast for you. If you are interested in a thorough recitation of Christopher Nolan’s entire oeuvre and a fun discussion (i.e., we were having a blast) between two longtime fans as to why he matters to film and perhaps should matter to all of us, then look no further—you’re home.As luck would have it, my personal doctor, Dr. Justin Coles, happens to be (i) a friend since elementary school, (ii) a film major (I may or may not have appeared in one of his student films), and (iii) one of Earth’s biggest Christopher Nolan fans. We were in high school when Nolan burst into the mainstream with Batman Begins and The Prestige, and boy, did those movies make an impact on juvenile us. For 105 glorious minutes on this most recent Sunday (yes, both of us have already seen The Odyssey, him twice), we walked in delightful detail through Nolan’s entire career, from Following to The Dark Knight to Interstellar to Oppenheimer to The Odyssey, plus all the movies in between, and went back on forth on why Nolan matters to us, to film, and maybe to you.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 50! The Neophytes Never Close the Self-Inquiry But Not in a Bad WayEach of us has political biases. Figuring out (and confessing) what those biases are is interesting and difficult enough, but figuring out where they originally came from might be the real trick. For this special, historical, entirely unprecedented, unyieldingly riveting 50th episode of the Never Close the Inquiry podcast, the Neophytes take Thomas, our resident radical leftist, and Channing, our resident moderate righty, and ask a simple question: Why?As per usual, we left A looking for B and ended up somewhere around 13. That said, as natural—i.e., disjointed—as our conversations may be, there is a real point to asking each other and ourselves what our biases are, where they came from, and why they push us toward specific policies, especially where our basic moral framework may not provide clear political guidance. Perhaps this can be dismissed as a view based off little more than anecdotal evidence, but I believe that the better we understand our own instincts and their origin, the slower we are to judgment of the instincts of others, and the more inclined we are to seek to understand them. It is true that there is far more that unites us than divides us, but that fundamental reality can hide behind the clouds when we don’t understand why anyone believes what they believe.So, call this episode an attempt to model what we’d like to see repeated at scale.Not brought to you by Dr. Pepper and A&W, but we’d like it to be, so if you know anyone, let us know.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 49 - The Neophytes: The Complicated Legacy of Lindsey GrahamAt one point or another over the past decade, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Teflon Don of the Senate, offended just about everybody. He delivered emphatic broadsides both for and against President Trump, took moderate positions, took less moderate positions, and stuck to his (warning: pun) guns as to hawkish views not currently in vogue among the Republican base. Despite what mostly-reasonable observers could interpret as craven flip-flopping to ingratiate himself with whoever happened to be in charge, the eminently quotable, genuinely charming Graham never suffered a truly serious challenge in a primary or general election, and remained of influence with wildly different administrations of both parties. Perhaps of most interest to us, the easily distracted Neophytes, Graham seems to have been adored by his colleagues on both sides of the aisle. The same cannot be said of plenty of those colleagues.And perhaps in that last bit there are useful lessons: among others, that serious disagreement on matters of policy need not bar us from being friends, AND that being friends can make it a heck of a lot easier to move toward agreement on matters of policy. I stand by my view that people are much more persuadable when they feel—and actually are—understood, and that it’s much easier to produce that understanding by asking sincere, open, curious questions than by analyzing from afar with “anyone who believes XYZ must be evil or, at best, stupid” as a starting point.Side note: the seat now occupied by the late senator’s sister was previously held by Strom Thurmond, a real piece of work who did not leave the Senate until he was 100. That seat held a grand total of four individual buttcheeks over a 70 year span.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 48 - The Neophytes: In Which the President Adds Graham Platner to the US Men’s National TeamThe terrific and inspiring US Men’s National Team’s foray in the World Cup ended with President Trump-centered controversy and a thumping at the feet of foreign waffle-makers, the ceasefire in Iran has ceased, and Graham Platner is on the outs in Maine after having been accused of, among other things, rape. Just weeks ago, we questioned where the line was regarding the character and past actions of a candidate, or whether there even was a line. Turns out, there is, both for the Neophytes and national Democrats, and Mr. Platner is on the wrong side of it. Platner did not drop out until the day after we recorded, but to parrot my younger self explaining to teachers, my parents, and, later, my bosses why I didn’t need to write anything down, we got the gist of it.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 47 - The Neophytes Learn Politics from Jalen Brunson and Exult in Their Newfound SpaceX RichesThe Neophytes—each of whom invested in SpaceX at the age of 12—question who on earth would voluntarily wear Snapchat’s new $2200 Snap Specs, discuss the SpaceX IPO, and talk about what Knicks star and NBA champion Jalen Brunson can teach us about the limitations of using current metrics to forecast future development.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe!  Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 46 - The Neophytes Get a Tad Bleak About the Importance of Character in PoliticiansSo what would you do in 2028 if it turned out one or both of JD Vance and Gavin Newsom (hypothetically, the candidates) were revealed to likely be responsible for a string of unexplained decades-old disappearances in a remote corner of the Ozarks or Sierra Nevadas?All else being equal, virtually everyone would choose a politician of high character over one of low character. But all else is never equal, and we are too often presented a choice between a mediocre person who shares few of our political views and a worse person who shares more.So what do you do? If experience and this conversation are any guide, most people, on both and every side of the political aisle, will pull the lever on matching political views almost no matter what.I’m not sure what that says about us or our system, but it isn’t fantastic.On the bright side, each us enjoyed a delicious low calorie beverage during the recording of this podcast.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 45 - The Neophytes Masculinely Discuss MasculinityWarning: the audio is a tad echoey because the SD card, afraid of this conversation being made public, self-corroded and didn’t record anything. Sadly for the card, we believe in redundancies—in this case, the iPhone which recorded the video.On Saturday, I read “Progressives Don’t Understand Masculinity” by the Last Blue Dog here on Substack. I read the transcript of the podcast discussion that prompted the article. Then, an hour or so later, I attended FitCon, which, per its name, is a fitness-focused convention with various competitions—Crossfit, boxing, strongman, roller derby, and literal armored combat, among others—and dozens of vendors selling supplements and apparel. The convention, of which I am a huge fan—yes, a very good friend happens to own it, but it actually is great—was very well-attended, and mostly by people who probably agree progressives don’t understand masculinity. That all got the ball rolling, and Mabes, Channing, and I, all straight white dudes, decided to talk about America’s masculinity crisis, what Democrats are missing, and what we think it means to be a man. Naturally, the conversation ended up going in many different directions, perhaps none of which really have all that much to do with politics, but what is the point of the podcast format if not to start with one plan and end with another entirely?Two more points:* I could not be a bigger fan of the Art of Manliness, which, per its tagline, “provides useful, actionable, no-fluff content to help men become better men in all areas of their life.” I would add that their content is refreshingly, remarkably apolitical and non-toxic (or however you want to put it). The husband and wife behind the website and podcast, Brett and Kate McKay, are here on Substack. I think them very much worth a follow.* The podcast ends with a reading of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It’s my favorite didactic poem and the only one I have memorized. At some point, I might write a whole series of articles on the virtues it articulates.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 44 - The Neophytes Get Awfully Prudish About Prediction MarketsPrediction markets, like Polymarket and Kalshi, allow users to purchase shares in certain real-world outcomes; or, in human speak, to bet on stuff. Like, all sorts of stuff. For example, a US special operations soldier recently made over $400,000 betting on the removal from office of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The soldier is in a fair amount of trouble—he’s been indicted for unlawful use of confidential information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, and wire fraud—but his punishment, and the new frontiers of insider trading, are kind of beside the point. The point is that people—you, me, high schoolers, government employees, nuns probably—can place bets on stuff like the deaths of political leaders, the length of the war in Iran, the price of gas in a month, and all sorts of other strange stuff that has always been the subject of private bets, but never anything of this scale.As it turns out, we, the Neophytes, don’t like it. We’re not necessarily opposed to gambling, especially if it’s done with honor in the shadows with an offshore bookie probably in Thailand, but this brave new world where every sporting event is sponsored by a sportsbook and millions of people without fully developed prefrontal cortexes can lose money betting on the temperature in New York is not to our puritanical taste.But all of this raises legitimate questions: is there a valid use case for prediction markets? Do they provide something of real value? Or even if they don’t, to what degree should the government restrict them, if any?Anyway, please download the official Neophytes app to place a bet on the number of comments this episode generates.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 43 - Ultramarathons and the Joy of the DifficultUltramarathoner, trainer, and nutritionist Jesse Rich and I have known each other since we were old enough to consciously know people. He was the one who unwittingly sparked my own love of fitness more than 25 years ago when he and a few of our fellow Cub Scouts could do more pullups than me on the bar at his house. More recently, Jesse has made a name for himself in the long distance trail running community. Among more than a dozen other podium finishes, he won the 2025 Run Rabbit Run 100 in and well around Steamboat Springs, Colorado. In isolation, it's hard to measure what his winning time of 17 hours and 43 minutes means--it's only when you see the runner-up came in over 83 minutes behind and 54 of 109 racers never finished at all that the magnitude of the accomplishment really starts to sink in (for the record, I had to look all that up). I invited Jesse on the podcast to talk about his running but also about the records set at the 2026 London Marathon, where three male runners broke the previous all time record and two broke the fabled two hour mark, and the top female runner broke the all time women's world record. And we did talk about that and the advances in nutrition that seem to have enabled it, but what started as a running-focused conversation became something much wider.Jesse runs absolutely incredible distances, often alone, with no phone and no music. He spends more uninterrupted time with his thoughts than I likely have in my entire life. I couldn't help but be thrown back to a recent interview I did with attorney and AI entrepreneur Kimball Parker, who spoke of living to the peak of our license as humans even as we are able, if we so choose, to cede more and more ground to computers. I don't think we all need to run ultramarathons, but I hope we can learn something from those who do. I left our conversation genuinely inspired--in part to run further and higher, but more generally to consciously test and raise my limits and do everything I can to remain human.Technology is great, but so are we.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 42 - Two of Three Neophytes Discuss Political Violence and Challenges to NormsWell, 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.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 41 - The Three Neophytes Again Discuss Iran and Maybe Some Ideas for Fixing Everything Wrong with our PoliticsThe 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).For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 40 - The Three(!) Neophytes Discuss the Ongoing Conflict in IranIn 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.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 39 - The Neophytes Think the Feds Should Look into this Epstein GuyWell, 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.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 38 - The Neophytes: Trump, Emirati Bribes(?), and Why We Decided to Purchase the Remaining 51% of World Liberty FinancialI’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.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

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.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 36 - The Neophytes Address Untimely Questions, Like Whether Lobbyists Are in League with the Forces of DarknessTo 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?).For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

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.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiryPlease like, rate, comment, and subscribe Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 34 - The Neophytes Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, and…Dodge the TruthThe 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. For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 33 - Prof. Jonas Anderson on Why We Should Be Concerned That Judges Are Competing for CasesI’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.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 32 - The Neophytes Self-Diagnose: Why Are We Libs?In this episode, Thomas and I try to figure out where exactly our political beliefs came from: we have a sense of what we believe, but why do we believe it? Why do we want to believe it? Did we come up with everything on our own, or are we regurgitating something we were taught growing up? And if we can get to the root of why we believe what we believe, can we figure out how to change—or how to change someone else?As tends to be painfully obvious, we are not experts. We’re two friends trying to figure things out—two friends of particular backgrounds, particular strengths and weaknesses, and strong opinions, loosely held. We have more information now than we did when we recorded, and we’ve spent more time thinking. Our conversation would be different if we held it again today. And that’s the point: we’re trying to convey that it’s okay not to know, it’s okay to keep learning, and it’s okay to change your mind.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 31 - The Neophytes Have Never Been to Epstein IslandAnd should we, for some inexplicable reason, show up in the Epstein Files, we direct all inquiries to our legal counsel (me).In this episode, Thomas and I discuss, well, the Epstein Files: the controversy, why President Trump is so reluctant to have them released, what we think is most likely in there, and whether there’s an upside to humans’ ability to be blank slates and adapt to their moral environment.We are not experts. We’re two friends trying to figure things out — two friends of particular backgrounds, particular strengths and weaknesses, and strong opinions, loosely held. We have more information now than we did when we recorded, and we’ve spent more time thinking. Our conversation would be different if we held it again today. And that’s the point: we’re trying to convey that it’s okay not to know, it’s okay to keep learning, and it’s okay to change your mind.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 30 - The Neophytes Talk the Big Beautiful Bill, Trolling, Trust in the Government, and American PrideIn this episode, Thomas and I discuss the Big Beautiful Bill, my (perhaps hypocritical) hatred of trolling, diminished trust in the federal government, and Democrats’ cratering sense of American pride.We are not experts. We’re two friends trying to figure things out—two friends of particular backgrounds, particular strengths and weaknesses, and strong opinions, loosely held. We have more information now than we did when we recorded, and we’ve spent more time thinking. Our conversation would be different if we held it again today. And that’s the point: we’re trying to convey that it’s okay not to know, it’s okay to keep learning, and it’s okay to change your mind.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 29 - The Neophytes Talk Protests, Immigration, Political Violence, and MoreThe Neophytes are back! Our many fan is overwhelmed with excitement. In this episode, Thomas and I discuss the latest in current events: protests against ICE and kings, Donald Trump’s birthday, political violence, and conflict in the Middle East.Let me reiterate our standard caveat with more force than usual: we are really, really not experts. We’re two friends trying to figure things out—two friends of particular backgrounds, particular strengths and weaknesses, and strong opinions, loosely held. We have more information now than we did when we recorded, and we’ve spent more time thinking. Our conversation would be different if we held it again today. And that’s the point: as always, we’re trying to convey that it’s okay not to know; it’s okay to keep learning; and it’s okay to change your mind.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiryPlease like, rate, comment, and subscribe Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 28 - K-12 Education Expert Karen Vaites On Reversing America’s Decline in Reading AchievementSince 1969, the National Assessment Governing Board has been conducting the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the “Nation’s Report Card”. In 2024, fourth grade reading scores hit their lowest mark in 20 years, with 40% of tested students scoring “below NAEP basic”; eighth grade reading scores hit their lowest mark ever, with 33% of tested students scoring below basic. Some of the blame for the low scores goes to the pandemic: from 2019 to 2024, 49 of 50 states lost ground in reading achievement, with Maine students leading the pack by dropping a full grade level on average. But not all the news is bad. Some states—four in particular—weathered the pandemic comparatively well. That, in and of itself, likely isn’t surprising. What likely is surprising is which states proved abnormally resilient: Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama.And that’s why I wanted to talk to Karen Vaites, the writer behind the School Yourself newsletter and the founder of the Curriculum Insight Project (both School Yourself and the Curriculum Insight Project can be found here on Substack). Karen, the mother of an elementary school student and daughter of a principal-turned-curriculum director, didn’t set out to become a K-12 education expert and advocate, but once a path presented itself, she leaned in. After beginning her career in the technology startup world, she served as chief marketing officer for a series of three K-12 startups, then shifted full-time into advocacy work.Over the course of an information-packed hour—Karen knows more about K-12 education policy than I do about, well, maybe anything—we discussed the “Southern Surge,” why the backslide on reading scores started well before the pandemic, No Child Left Behind and Common Core, the impact of technology on classroom learning, what the data said about keeping schools open during the pandemic, and plenty more.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 27 - EU Parliament Member Johan Van Overtveldt on The Icarus CurseIt isn’t every day you get to talk to one of the 720 members of the European Parliament, one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union. For me, it has happened once: a week ago, when I spoke to Johan Van Overtveldt, now in his second five-year term representing Belgium in the Parliament and serving as chair of the Parliament’s budget committee. Van Overtveldt, who previously served as Belgium’s Minister of Finance, their version of America’s Secretary of the Treasury, is a conservative: at home, he’s a member of the New Flemish Alliance, and in Parliament, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group.European and American conservatives have their similarities, but the match isn’t perfect. I asked Member Van Overtveldt how he would categorize himself in American terms and I’ll let him speak for himself, but for now, think a generous Reagan, but supportive of gay marriage and concerned about climate change.Prior to transitioning into politics, Van Overtveldt worked in banking, he worked in finance, and he spent decades as an economic journalist. There’s a reason he was minister of finance and is now chair of the budgetary committee—he really knows his stuff, and he has the industry connections and pragmatic approach you’d expect of someone who spent a career outside politics.Van Overtveldt has also written a number of books. His first came from his dissertation—he received his PhD in applied economics from the University of Antwerp—which he wrote on the Chicago School of Economics—Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, and so forth.I spoke to him about his most recent book, The Icarus Curse: How Western Democracies Derailed and How to Get Back on Track. The basic premise is that western democracies, very much including the United States, have been living beyond their means for generations, and are reaching a point of true policy exhaustion. What started as John Maynard Keynes’s innovation of deficit spending to stimulate aggregate demand when demand fell—like during a financial crisis—became an excuse for politicians to make promise after promise after promise—without, it should be noted, ever fully delivering what people have now come to expect of their government. In 1964, 77% of Americans trusted their government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time; by 1979, that was 27%, and it hasn’t exceeded 24% since before President Obama took office. Only part of that is about the mismatch between what people have come to expect of their government and what the government can actually deliver, but it’s a real part.This isn’t one party’s fault. On the one hand you have Democrats: happy to spend, but ultimately uncomfortable with raising taxes; on the other, you have Republicans: happy to cut taxes, but less good at actually cutting spending, and there’s a strong argument to be made that what they are trying to cut—it’s not just fraud, waste, and abuse—is exactly the sort of public investment spending you shouldn’t be cutting. President Trump and congressional Republicans argue that the Big Beautiful Bill will stimulate the economy so much that tax revenues will eventually wipe out what the Congressional Budget Office projects as an additional $2.4 trillion on the deficit side of the ledger over the next ten years, but how confident are you that’s actually the case? I’m not an economist, I’m not an actuary, and I’m not a politician, but it sounds more like wishful thinking than real math.Ultimately, the pied piper is going to come calling. There will come a financial meltdown, or a war, or a series of natural disasters that we don’t have the borrowing capacity to simply paper over. So what do we do? How do we gird ourselves against the unpredictable crises to come? Well, those questions are why I wanted to talk to Johan Van Overtveldt.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 26 - Ben Connelly on Traditional Conservatism and Why It MattersWhat does “traditional conservatism” mean to you? How has conservatism changed since President Trump came on the scene? Did it need to change?One of the downsides of having just two mainstream parties, one of which has permanently claimed the mantle of conservatism and the other that of liberalism, is that those words come to mean whatever the parties say they do at the particular moment. What “conservative” and “liberal” mean today is different from what they meant in the 1920s, and 1960s, and 1980s. Is that a problem? Well, it depends. I’m not of the view the parties should never depart from traditional principles, but I do think it’s helpful to know what those principles are, and to understand when and why they’re being laid aside.It’s also helpful to have clear and articulate exponents for each set of principles, people that can serve as reference points so we have a sense of where we’re going and can effectively question whether we should change directions. I am not a traditional conservative; Ben Connelly, a writer based in a city I love very much, Charlottesville, Virginia, is. He writes two Substack newsletters: Hardihood Books, an online magazine for short fiction and persuasive nonfiction, and Carrying the Fire, where Ben, under the pseudonym John Grady Atreides, defends “the principles of American conservatism, which George Will rightly described as the project of conserving the American Founding. In a world of actors seeking to destroy and uproot, conservatism (rightly understood) preserves and protects that which is good.”To Ben, preserving traditional conservatism means extolling the virtues of free enterprise; individual liberty and natural rights; ordered liberty; limited government; civil society; American constitutionalism; the rule of law; American leadership abroad; strong defense; patriotism; Western civilization; tradition and a measured pace of change; religious faith; and, well, virtue. Ben comes by his views and intellectual heft honestly—his father is a celebrated emeritus professor of politics at Washington and Lee University.I had Ben on the podcast for a fun, highly informative conversation on traditional conservatism: what it is, why it matters, what its limitations are, and how it differs from the conservatism of the modern Republican Party.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 25 - Griffin Gooch on Restoring Trust in Religious InstitutionsTrust in the government is low, and has been for a long time. Moral individualism, a sort of autonomy from traditional authorities, is high and rising. Where some have lost their faith in institutions, others never had it.A major part of that story is the decline of participation in religion. As of a 2021-2023 survey period, approximately 30% of Americans attended religious services weekly, down from 42% 20 years earlier. Though there is some indication members of Generation Z are significantly less likely to identify as atheists than their parents, they are more likely to identify as spiritual, not necessarily as religious. From data courtesy of Substack’s own Ryan Burge, the writer and scholar behind Graphs About Religion and the author of multiple books regarding Americans’ church attendance and non-attendance, Gen Zers are the least likely to attend weekly and the most likely to attend never; I am not aware of a reason we should expect that to change anytime soon.Griffin Gooch is a self-described “almost fully-trained theologian”—completing his in-process doctorate at the University of Aberdeen will make it official. Griffin teaches at Northpoint College in Michigan and is the brains behind no fewer than three separate Substack newsletters:* Reality Theology with Griffin Gooch, where his “aim is to connect academic disciplines that try to describe reality (psychology, sociology, philosophy, personal development, artistic studies, and so on) with a theological worldview.”* The Remarkable Ordinary, where Griffin publishes “ordinary stories of Christian kindness, hospitality, and integrity[,]” with the aim of providing “anti-moral failure, anti-church scandal, anti-Christian hypocrisy journalism.”* The Deadly Seven, a “collaborative, limited run Substack on the Seven Deadly Sins and their relevance to twenty-first century modernity.”As an elder member of Gen Z, former committed atheist, and now-even-more-committed Christian—and a good, good man—Gooch seems well-situated to speak to the fundamental question at the heart of all of this: once institutions have lost—perhaps forfeited—the people’s trust, how do they get it back?For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 24 - Decentralization as an Answer to a Polarized MediaThere are many who believe our fractured, hyperpartisan media landscape is hurting the country and hurting us.Don Templeman is doing something about it. When most of us hear “blockchain,” we think of cryptocurrency, or maybe something involving Legos—not so with Don. As an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, he studied computer science and served as business manager for the student newspaper. In Ethereum’s blockchain technology, he saw the potential for a decentralized media platform—for independent journalism with all the funding of a traditional newsroom, but without the editorial direction.The problem in 2016 was financial—Ethereum’s per-transaction cost was prohibitively expensive, and would have required subscribers to the new platform to pay hundreds of dollars a month for writers to see any return. Don put his idea on the backburner, and began working in finance in New York City.But in the last couple of years, Ethereum’s per-transaction cost dropped precipitously, and what was only theoretically possible before became actually possible. Don left his job to begin Aemula, the company he’d been thinking about for over a decade.Aemula, in Don’s own words, is “a decentralized protocol for independent journalism on a mission to reverse the trend of polarization in media. Writers, editors, and contributors can collaborate freely, access institutional-grade community resources, and publish directly to paid subscribers while retaining ownership and creative control of their work. Readers gain the freedom to explore new perspectives by accessing the work of all independent journalists through a single $10/month subscription. Everyone can trust that the entire ecosystem is verifiably neutral, free from outside influence, and governed by a robust moderation protocol. Aemula is focused on building a diverse, incentive-aligned community of real people sharing real news directly from the source.”I’m not a tech guy, but I can get on board with “verifiably neutral” and “free from outside influence”—all of my articles are published on Aemula not long after they go out on Substack.I had Don on to talk about all of it—about Aemula, blockchain, media polarization, using AI to write code, and much more.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 23 - Former Rep. Ben McAdams on Congressional Function and Dysfunction, Ideas for Reform, Pelosi, Biden, Trump, and So Much MoreI hope he wouldn’t take offense to my saying this, but Ben McAdams is a wonk. He’s kind, he’s smart, he’s pragmatic, and he really, really knows his stuff. He represented Utah’s 4th District in Congress from January 2019 to January 2021 during the back half of President Trump’s first term. To get there, he ran through the gauntlet of an R+19 district, beating a popular incumbent by 674 votes. The flagrantly gerrymandered 4th District was the most conservative district in the entire country to be represented by a Democrat over those two years. He lost his race for reelection by a few thousand, which might seem like a large margin once you hear 674, but was the fifth-closest out of the 435 races run in 2020.Born and raised in Utah, McAdams was bitten by the political bug in undergrad at the University of Utah, when encouragement from a professor and the free buddy pass of a friend who worked for Delta brought him to President Bill Clinton’s second inaugural address in January 1997. That prompted McAdams to intern for Ralph Becker, then a member of Utah’s state senate. After graduation, he attended Columbia Law School—as did his wife, whom he had known since high school and married before leaving Utah—and spent a few years practicing at one of Wall Street’s top firms, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, before returning to Utah. Not long later, he was poached from a new firm by his old boss, Becker, now mayor of Salt Lake City. McAdams served as a senior advisor to Becker, and spearheaded efforts to gain the conservative state legislature’s agreement to stand aside and let the mayor lead Salt Lake City in keeping with the more progressive politics of its residents. That led McAdams to his own stint in the state senate, and then to a term and a half as mayor of Salt Lake County—the second term being interrupted by the fact he needed to be sworn in as a member of the United States House of Representatives.Now out of politics, McAdams is having what seems to be an awfully good time using his background in law and especially as a county mayor to advise state, county, and city governments on creating revenue and other public benefits from government-owned real estate through public-private partnerships. As it turns out—perhaps this isn’t a surprise—governments often hold millions and even billions of dollars worth of real estate that isn’t really benefiting much of anyone—and that they might not even know about. McAdams is trying to change that—to help other governments do what he did when he led Salt Lake County.McAdams joined me last week to discuss his path to politics, what it was like running for and serving in Congress, why he didn’t support Representative Nancy Pelosi in her bid to again serve as Speaker of the House, and his views on the Biden administration and the Trump administration so far.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 22 - Zachary Elwood on the What, Why, and How of Depolarization “America is deeply divided. We don't just disagree on the issues; we increasingly view people on the ‘other side’ as profoundly immoral and dangerous. This leads to many of us seeing ‘beating the other side’ as taking precedence over everything else. In our anger and fear, we can act in aggressive, unfair, and insulting ways ways — often without being aware of how our behaviors affect our adversaries.To avoid worst-case scenarios of chaos, dysfunction, and violence, we need more people — from politicians to pundits to everyday citizens — to have a better understanding of how toxic conflict works and how it grows. We need more people to see that much of our contempt and fear is based on distorted, overly pessimistic views of the ‘other side.’ We need more people to see how our overly negative views of each other create a self-reinforcing feedback cycle of conflict.”That’s from the book jacket of Defusing American Anger: A Guide to Understanding Our Fellow Citizens and Reducing Us-vs-Them Polarization, by Zachary Elwood.  Zach is a former professional poker player, the author of three books on poker tells and two books on depolarization, and, in my view, perhaps the most consistent and productive depolarization advocate on Substack today.In a wide-ranging conversation, Zach and I discussed why the point of depolarization isn’t to argue less, but to argue better, and walked through practical tips for people who want to help depolarize our politics while pushing hard to advocate for their views and expand their coalitions.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

The Neophytes Talk AI, Which, If Any Robots See This, We Support and Think Is Really GreatIn this fourth episode of The Neophytes, Thomas and I discuss artificial intelligence.  Put briefly, I’m concerned.  I’m concerned not just about what AI will do to the job market—in the long run, new technologies have historically created as many jobs as they destroyed or altered, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be short term pain—but about what it will do to us.  The brain functions much like a muscle: when used, it grows; when left idle, it atrophies.  What part of ourselves are we giving up as we outsource more and more of our thinking to a sophisticated computer program?  What does that mean for K-12 education policy?  What does that mean for adults in the workforce?  What does that mean for seniors working to fend off age-related decline?Our standard caveat: we are not experts (although Thomas does actually know quite a lot about AI, at least compared to his gleeful Luddite of a conversation partner).  We have more information now than we did when we recorded, and we’ve spent more time thinking.  Our conversation would be different if we held it again today.  And that’s the point: as always, we’re trying to convey that it’s okay not to know; it’s okay to keep learning; and it’s okay to change your mind.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 20 - Jeff Howell on Knocking 5,000 Doors Running for State OfficeJeff Howell already had a lot going on: he was a father to three young boys (now four) with his wife, Caitlin; a sales manager at Workday; and an involved member of his Salt Lake community, volunteering at his sons’ elementary school and coaching youth sports teams.  But, in 2024, he saw an opening and decided to follow in his father’s footsteps—Scott Howell served three terms in the Utah State Senate and was Utah’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in the 2000 and 2012 elections—by running as a Democrat for an open position in the Utah House of Representatives.The campaign was grueling.  Running for state office isn’t like running for national office, where campaigning is often a full-time job (Howell knew this from personal experience, having worked on Congressman Ro Khanna’s unsuccessful initial run for office in 2014).  No—Howell somehow fit his very-heavy-on-door-knocking campaign into what were already full days—typically, by sacrificing sleep.He didn’t win, losing a close primary in a Democrat-dominated district, but it doesn’t seem like Howell’s story ends here.  I’m not placing any formal bets, especially on timing, but the sort of person optimistic enough to run for office in the first place is often the sort of person optimistic enough to give it another go.  Howell and I spoke about why he decided to run, highlights from the campaign, what it felt like to lose, why he thinks a moderate approach is important, and how he feels about the current state of our national politics.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 19 - The Indispensability of Free Speech with FIRE’s Nico PerrinoNico Perrino, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, is a busy man.  For many of us who came of political age in the 2010s, FIRE first entered the scene as a stalwart opponent of campus speech codes and defender of students subjected to discipline on account of protected speech.  With Democrats in the White House, free speech was often viewed as a Republican issue, and FIRE an activist organization dedicated to this conservative cause.  But that was never really accurate—it was founded by a liberal and is staffed by people from edge to edge of the political spectrum—and with President Trump again in power, FIRE has been busier than at any point since Perrino joined them full-time in 2012, working in the courts of law and public opinion to prevent the deportation of legal residents on account of their protected speech, oppose the president’s executive orders targeting specific law firms and rhetorical assaults on the media, and fight the implementation of new campus speech codes.Perrino, the creator and host of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, was kind enough to join me for an hour to talk about the early experiences that led him to FIRE, our shared appreciation as religious fellows for the great Christopher Hitchens, the most restrictive actions of the Obama and Biden administrations, the same of the Trump administrations, and why all of it matters.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

In this third episode of The Neophytes, recorded on April 23rd, Thomas and I discuss Katy Perry (the famed singer/astronaut), the symbolic value of an all-female space flight, William Shatner, the overview effect, and why we should or shouldn’t pay attention to celebrities’ views on politics, then ended with our reflections, as non-Catholics, on the passing of Pope Francis.Our standard caveat: we are not experts. We have more information now than we did then, and we’ve spent more time thinking about it. Our conversation today would be different than our conversation held on the 23rd. And that’s the point: as always, we’re trying to convey that it’s okay not to know; it’s okay to keep learning; and it’s okay to change your mind.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 17 - Khaair Morrison on Malcolm X, Family, Activism in New York City, and the Moment for DemocratsKhaair Morrison is a man of multiple worlds.In one, he’s an activist of notable talent and remarkable heritage: his grandfather, Abdullah Abdur-Razzaq, was a longtime friend and associate of Malcolm X, and served as his close aide and chief secretary in the last year of his life (in interview here); his grandmother, Ora Abdur-Razzaq, dissatisfied with the educational opportunities available to her children, began a home school in 1971 that grew into Cush Campus Schools, a private school for inner-city youth that was still going strong when Khaair was a student more than three decades later; and Khaair himself was making moves when he was just 15, heading a successful student-led push to prevent New York taking away free metro cards for high schoolers—here he is to the right of Jay Walder, then head of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.In another, he’s a corporate lawyer, an up-and-coming talent in a white shoe, white collar world. After law school at Howard University, he went to Skadden, where we met as summer associates and then became friends as first-year mergers & acquisitions lawyers. From Skadden, he jumped to Freshfields, another international powerhouse, and to Debevoise & Plimpton, again a top firm. Recently, he took the leap into private equity.And finally, to the extent this is separable from either of the prior two, he’s a gifted political connector; Khaair knows everybody, and everybody knows Khaair. I attended a few political fundraisers during my time in New York—each time, at the invitation of one Khaair Morrison.In a fun two hours that could have been four, Khaair and I touched on a portion of his family background, how he got his start in political involvement, his frustrations with and recommendations for the Democratic Party, why he tends to get along well with Republicans, and a whole lot more.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

The Neophytes Talk Abrego GarciaIn this second episode of The Neophytes, recorded on April 16th, Thomas and I discuss the Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia case, which I wrote about on Friday, April 18th. We walk through some of the different laws at play, what the administration is signaling and why, why this might be an issue and why it might not, and potential upsides and downsides to the strong approach.Our standard caveat: we are not experts. We have more information now than we did then, and we’ve spent more time thinking about it. Our conversation today would be different than our conversation held on the 16th. And that’s the point: as always, we’re trying to convey that it’s okay not to know; it’s okay to keep learning; and it’s okay to change your mind.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 15 - Getting Dangerously Pro-Labor With the Guy Who Unionized Baseball’s Minor LeaguesHarry Marino—former minor league pitcher, former attorney at D.C.’s elite of the elite, Williams & Connolly LLP, and co-captain with yours truly of the Men’s Gold team for the 34th Annual UVA Law Softball Invitational held in 2017 (trust me—between 0.3 to 1.6 times cooler than it sounds)—is one cool dude.In Harry’s first season in the minors, he made $3,300.  That stuck with him.  Eight years later, in 2020, he left Williams & Connolly to become the executive director of Advocates for Minor Leaguers.  After two years of organizing, he helped minor league baseball players form a union and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement that more than doubled pay for all players and guaranteed free housing, meals, transportation, and other benefits.  Those improvements matter to me—I have two cousins playing professional baseball, and they are direct beneficiaries of Harry’s work.Since that point, Harry’s aim has expanded.  He founded Sports Solidarity, which, among what can currently be made public, is currently working on negotiations for the players in Dwayne Johnson’s United Football League, and continues to look for other industries where workers may benefit from collective bargaining.Harry and I spoke on April 3rd about his experience organizing the minors and where things should go from here.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 14 - Alan Monsen on RNCs, CPACs, and How the Republican Party Has ChangedAlan Monsen has attended every Republican National Convention since 2008, when he was a 23-year-old political science student at the University of Utah. Since that point, Alan has lived a life: he received a master’s degree in war studies and international relations from King’s College, London, and a master’s degree in finance from the University of Utah; ran as a Republican for a Democrat-dominated seat in Utah’s state senate; and has worked a variety of jobs in the public and private sectors, including as a financial crimes specialist at Wells Fargo, senior analyst at Goldman Sachs, financial regulator for the state of Utah, and, now, as a director at a local real estate development and investment firm.I invited him over to talk about his experience attending the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference, which took place from February 19-22 in Washington, D.C., but our conversation went far beyond that, from Alan’s background to the future of the Republican Party.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

The Neophytes Talk TariffsIn this inaugural episode of The Neophytes, longtime friend Thomas Mabey and I talk tariffs: what Trump is trying to do, why he's trying to do it, and whether all of this is likely to work. Thomas and I aren't experts—that's kind of the whole point. We recorded the conversation on April 5, 2025; if we recorded it again today, it would be different, and not just because it would be awfully hard to repeat everything we said word for word. We have more information now (whenever “now” happens to be”) than we did then—the story has continued to develop, and we’ve kept reading.The message we’re trying to convey is that it’s okay not to know; it’s okay to keep learning; and it’s okay to change your mind. The fact that you believed something before doesn’t mean that, when presented with new information, or upon reconsideration, you’re still locked into that prior view. It’s okay, in other words, to never close the inquiry.For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 12 - Rick Robison: From CIA Agent to Conservative Education ActivistRick Robison has lived an interesting life. Initially recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s while on a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo, he spent years in the Middle East and surrounding areas as a CIA field operative, and later worked as a military contractor during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.Today, Rick is a conservative educator and education activist. A man of deep Christian faith, he is CEO of The Legacy Generation and author of the Heroes for Freedom manuals, a set of resources on 100 men and women, some of them virtually unknown, who made particularly important contributions to the effort to create a free America.Rick has known me virtually my entire life, and he was kind enough to come over and talk to me at some length both about how he ended up in the CIA and the work he’s doing now. As could be said with every interview I do, even if you disagree with him—and some listeners will—I think it’s important to try to understand where people are coming from and to consider whether they’re seeing something you’re not.Please listen and feel free to make your thoughts known in the comments!For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 11 - A Pharmacist's Take on the American Pharmaceutical IndustryBenjamin Jolley is an independent pharmacist from a family of independent pharmacists—the first Jolley’s Compounding Pharmacy in Salt Lake City was founded by his grandfather, Joel, in 1954.  Benjamin is a Senior Fellow for Healthcare at the American Economic Liberties Project and writes a newsletter about the pharmaceutical industry, Ramblings of a pharmacist, which is read by a number of influential people in the government and private sector.Conveniently, Benjamin and I have known each other since kindergarten.  I had him over two weeks ago to get a pharmacist’s view on the Byzantine bizarro world of the American pharmaceutical system.  And believe me: it’s complicated.  Despite years as outside counsel for a pharmaceutical manufacturer, I didn’t know the half of it, and maybe not the third.Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon with commentary on current events and interviews with people from across the political spectrum. For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiryPlease like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 10 - Professor Paul Mahoney - Why Securities Regulation FailsProfessor Paul Mahoney has taught at the University of Virginia School of Law since 1990; he served as the school's dean from 2008-2016.  Professor Mahoney's area of expertise is securities regulation, and in 2015, he published Wasting a Crisis: Why Securities Regulation Fails, which offers a compelling conservative critique of financial regulation from the Obama administration right back to the New Deal era.  I previously interviewed Professor Mehrsa Baradaran about her book, The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, which offers a serious critique of the government's approach to securities regulation and response to the 2008 financial crisis, but from a progressive perspective; I view this interview with Professor Mahoney as the conservative companion to that prior conversation.There are many issues on which conservatives and liberals can't agree on what's wrong with the current system.  This is one where at least some conservatives and liberals do agree on the problem, but propose very different solutions.  Enjoy! Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon with commentary on current events and interviews with people from across the political spectrum. For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 9 - Moral Individualism with Professors K. Patterson and C. KarpowitzMoral individualism—a measure of our autonomy from any external authority, be it the government, our family, a religion, science, friends, or something else—has been increasing over time.  We see manifestations of this everywhere across the political spectrum, from general exhortations to “live your truth” or “do your own research” to entire movements based on the idea that our institutions can no longer be trusted.  Moral individualism, as an index that can be measured, is the creation of Professors Kelly Patterson and Chris Karpowitz of Brigham Young University.  Their book on the subject doesn’t come out until this summer, but I was able to catch up with them to discuss the preview they included in an article published in 2023 in the Cambridge University Press’s Perspectives on Politics.  I had a heck of a time talking to them, and look forward to speaking with them again after the book comes out.  These ideas really, really matter: how do you hold a society together when core institutions lose their authority?  How do you restore that authority once it is lost, especially when it was lost for good reason?Please listen and share your thoughts in the comments (and enjoy the occasional Paris sirens in the background—Professor Patterson has the good fortune to currently be teaching in France).Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon with commentary on current events and interviews with people from across the political spectrum. For more content and to subscribe to the Never Close the Inquiry newsletter, please visit neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com and follow on instagram @neverclosetheinquiry Please like, rate, comment, and subscribe! Get full access to Never Close the Inquiry at neverclosetheinquiry.substack.com/subscribe