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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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.

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Episode 31 - The Neophytes Have Never Been to Epstein Island

And 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 

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Episode 30 - The Neophytes Talk the Big Beautiful Bill, Trolling, Trust in the Government, and American Pride

In 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 

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Episode 29 - The Neophytes Talk Protests, Immigration, Political Violence, and More

The 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 @neverclosetheinquiry

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Episode 28 - K-12 Education Expert Karen Vaites On Reversing America’s Decline in Reading Achievement

Since 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.

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Episode 27 - EU Parliament Member Johan Van Overtveldt on The Icarus Curse

It 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.

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Episode 26 - Ben Connelly on Traditional Conservatism and Why It Matters

What 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.

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Episode 25 - Griffin Gooch on Restoring Trust in Religious Institutions

Trust 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?

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