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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Episode 42 - Two of Three Neophytes Discuss Political Violence and Challenges to Norms

Well, 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.

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Episode 41 - The Three Neophytes Again Discuss Iran and Maybe Some Ideas for Fixing Everything Wrong with our Politics

The 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).

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Episode 40 - The Three(!) Neophytes Discuss the Ongoing Conflict in Iran

In this episode, recorded Sunday afternoon in Salt Lake City, Thomas and I are joined by our longtime friend Channing Elggren for a robust back-and-forth on the conflagration in the Middle East: we discuss what this means for the United States, what it means for Iran, and what it means for the region writ large.

We don’t claim to be anything more than what we are: three friends, more than 7,000 air miles from danger, trying to figure out what to make of a world we will likely never experience except through a screen or the pages of a book. It is likely that more Iranians were killed during the January crackdown on protests than Americans lost their lives on 9/11 and in the entirety of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars that followed--I hope we, as Americans, never, ever forget how lucky we are; I hope further that our awareness of that luck informs a sense of responsibility, not one of superiority.

As to what that means, I don’t really know--I suppose that’s for us to figure out together.

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Episode 39 - The Neophytes Think the Feds Should Look into this Epstein Guy

Well, it’s been a tough few weeks for wealthy perverts/possible sex criminals/people who groveled for the money and attention of a definite sex criminal. In the words of not Shakespeare, this kind of seems like much ado about something.

Thomas and I spoke about a number of the people now linked to Epstein, whether there’s anything material in the files the government hasn’t released, whether it’s okay that the government doesn’t seem interested in investigating further, what impact this has on Americans’ faith in their government, and much more.

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Episode 38 - The Neophytes: Trump, Emirati Bribes(?), and Why We Decided to Purchase the Remaining 51% of World Liberty Financial

I’m not saying it was a bribe.

It is entirely possible that it makes good business and political sense to provide American-made AI chips to the United Arab Emirates. It is also possible that the rather shady Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and manager of a $1.3 trillion business portfolio, decided to purchase 49% of World Liberty Financial, a fledgling crypto/decentralized finance company owned primarily by the Trump family, out of pure self-interest without any regard for who owned it (oh—just days before President Trump’s inauguration).

But on a scale of 1 to This Looks Awfully Bribey, the brother of the UAE president sending a $187 million down payment to various Trump family-controlled entities mere months before the Trump administration reverses a Biden administration decision* and agrees to provide AI chips to the UAE is probably an 8.5.

*For what it’s worth, reversing a Biden administration decision is not necessarily a bad thing, and if I were a Republican I would say it should probably be the default approach. However, the Biden administration’s hesitation on providing the UAE with the requested AI chips stemmed from concerns the chips would make their way to the Chinese; the CEO of G42, the Sheikh’s AI company, is Peng Xiao, born in China, once a U.S. citizen and now a UAE citizen. “Not giving China valuable technology” is a bipartisan concern—we can only assume it was thoroughly addressed prior to the deal being finalized.

On this episode of the Neophytes, Thomas and I discuss, well, pretty much this.

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