Episode 59 - The Neophytes Sow Panic: Robots Are Coming to Kill Us All

“Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?”

“Yes I would, Kent.”

Sage, timely counsel from the Simpsons. Anyway, you likely have read a bit about recent developments in the world of artificial intelligence—something about creating new video games with a single prompt and also annihilating our species before we even have a chance to vote on President Trump’s third term, let alone his fourth. AI executives have responded to whistleblowers’ fears by confirming them and calling for a global slowdown in development, which has provoked a strong response from just about everyone except our lawmakers. If this predicament has a precedent, I’m not sure what it is. Say what you will about nukes, they typically don’t drop themselves.

Tune in to hear the Neophytes debate all of it as guided by my 23 AI-Related Observations and General Rules of Questionable Efficacy.

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Episode 58 - The Neophytes Bait Your Clicks: The American Dream Is Dead

Depending 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).

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Episode 57 - The Neophytes: Hawaiian Mongeese and Trump’s Foreign Policy

In 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.

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.

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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. 

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Episode 54 - The Neophytes: Trump, Mamdani, and Charisma

There 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.

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Episode 53 - The Neophytes Pirro Into the Nation’s Soul

It’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.

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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.

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Episode 51 - Why Christopher Nolan Matters: Two Nerds Sincerely Nerd Out About Their Favorite Director

Christopher 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.

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Episode 50! The Neophytes Never Close the Self-Inquiry But Not in a Bad Way

Each 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.

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