Episode 45 - The Neophytes Masculinely Discuss Masculinity

Warning: 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.

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Episode 44 - The Neophytes Get Awfully Prudish About Prediction Markets

Prediction 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.

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Episode 43 - Ultramarathons and the Joy of the Difficult

Ultramarathoner, 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.

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