LinkedIn Sucks and You Know It

PLUS: How Jason Khalipa Sees It, Why We Love Smoking Meat & more...

Author

Greg Scheinman
August 17, 2025

Presented By:

Meet honey with bioactive benefits: Mānuka Honey

Mānuka honey is a rare superhoney from New Zealand, rich in MGO, prebiotics, and antioxidants. And Manukora makes the purest, high grade Mānuka honey with nutrients to support your immunity, digestion & more. Supports optimal digestive health. Prebiotics fuel for good gut bacteria, supporting digestion and overall immune health. Aids a healthy inflammatory response. Antioxidants (Polyphenols) aid in supporting a balanced response to oxidative stress. Maintains a high-functioning immune system Methylglyoxal (MGO) is the key antibacterial compound that is unique to Mānuka honey.  This is honey with superpowers. And it tastes great.  Use it on oatmeal, pancakes & waffles, over greek yogurt & fruit in beverages, or take a spoonful a day just for all the benefits. Use code MidlifeMale at our link HERE.

Morning, Greg here!

Welcome to Midlife Male, the fastest-growing, #1 newsletter and lifestyle brand for men 40+. Hundreds of readers are joining us every day for actionable, relatable columns, exclusive interviews and stories you’ll find nowhere else to help you maximize the rest of your life. If a fellow MLM reader shared this with you, subscribe here:

In Today’s Issue of Midlife Male:

  • Viewpoint: LinkedIn Sucks and You Know It

  • Manologue: Why We’re Rightly Obsessed With Smoking Meat

  • ‘How I See It’ with Jason Khalipa, Train Hard Founder, Crossfit Champion

  • 6Fs: 10 Steps to a Successful Wardrobe, One Last Week Before the Empty Nest, The Words that Kill Businesses, & More

Let’s get to it!

LinkedIn Sucks and You Know It

LinkedIn has become a boring, shallow wasteland of AI-generated drivel. It’s turning thought leaders into thoughtless comment machines, writers into robots, and confident, secure, capable individuals into insecure, engagement-seeking circle jerkers who feel a necessity to hype someone up every day in exchange for being shown some love back.

I used to be on the platform a lot because I found value there, but lately the notifications I’m getting aren’t meaningful connections, they’re to let me know someone’s bot is checking out my profile three, sometimes four times a day. If this is you, here’s the best advice I can give you: stop.

And the flurry of AI comments? Don’t get me started.

“Great value in this post.”

Really? Genius commentary!

All of this is a bad look. Particularly in middle age (where we’re supposed to give far fewer f*cks about this stuff). 

Here’s a better idea: Be a producer, not a consumer.

Do the thing. Write the thing. Eat the food. Build the business. Do your actual job. Go to the gym. Climb the mountain. Spend time with people who really matter. Listen to music…

Curate your consumption. If what I do lands with you…

Why We’re Rightly Obsessed with Smoking Meat (Check Out My Smoke Rings!)

It’s 5:15AM. It’s dark. Crickets echo across the lawn. Moonlight washes the backyard, bright enough so I don’t need my phone flashlight or the patio flood lights on to begin my masterpiece. I take a deep breath, the last that won’t leave a hickory scent in my nostrils for about two days, and fire up my smoker.

Small streams of gray puff out of the back vent as the heat kicks in and the air starts to flow. I slowly unwrap the plastic around the nine-pound brisket that sat in my fridge all night. The blend of salt and pepper and brown sugar and onion and garlic powder and paprika has turned the slab of meat a burnt orange color.

My wife. My son. My daughter. My neighbors. My brother across town who’s coming over with his family later. They’re all asleep. Nobody’s around to witness the ‘before’ shot of the brisket so I take a picture of it under the stars like it’s my kid’s first day of school.

Shit. The lighting wasn’t great. I delete it, position the brisket at the center of the grill shelf and take another photo. There. Much better. I attach the photo to a text chain with my brother and various friends with the words, “It’s on.”

Damn I’m proud of myself. The smoker temp finally reads 225. I slide the thermometer into the side of the meat, place it on the grill and close the cover. We’re nine or so hours away from eating. Right on schedule.

I turn to stare at the moon. I grunt. I bang my chest to honor our cavemen ancestors, for I am a grown suburban man in 2025. I don’t hunt my own food. I don’t skin and carve the carcass. I don’t pack out the meat. But I can take a hunk of beef, nurture it, rub it, wrap it, care for it, rest it, and turn it into a delicious carnivore creation that would make homo erectus, homo habilis, and every other primate in our bloodline proud.

And I’m not alone. 

Millions of men, mostly over 40, mostly domesticated dudes working on laptops during the week, have picked up the hobby of smoking large quantities of meat for large quantities of family members and friends in their backyards. 

We get up early. We spend lots of money. We take immense pride in our brisket and ribs and rubs.

The question is: 

Why? Why the hell are we all doing this? And why is it so awesome? The answer is…

‘How I See It’ with Jason Khalipa

Last week, I sat down with Jason Khalipa for a Midlife Male LIVE interview.

Back in my CrossFit days, Khalipa was a beast, a legend. Now he’s about to turn 40, and I’m closing in on 53. When I hit 40, I was fired up to be in the “Masters” division, the youngest in the 40–44 bracket. I’d do the CrossFit Open and check my rankings in my age group, my region, the country, even the world. I held my own.

By 44, I was the oldest in the division. I was beat up, broken down, not recovering well, still chasing PRs every day, and realizing my body and priorities were out of alignment. I’ve since become a believer in basics over biohacking, focusing on longevity and sustainability. That’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed following Jason’s evolution.

He’s grown as a husband, father, entrepreneur, and athlete. What he’s building with Train Hard is a blueprint for men moving from their 30s into their 40s and beyond. From his morning men’s club workouts to the simplicity of the burpee, not as a fad but as a fundamental skill, he’s living and leading by example.

We talked a lot about what it means to be a man and how providing doesn’t just mean bringing home a paycheck. You can pay every bill and send your kids to the best schools and still be absent in the ways that actually matter.

“Not showing up as a husband drains the home. Not showing up as a father buries it.”

The real job of being a dad and husband is showing up every day.
It’s putting your phone away at dinner.
It’s walking through the door after work and staying present.

Jason has learned this through trial and error, the same way most of us have, that at certain times, between work and life goals, he left nothing in the tank for his family. I’ve been there, too.

Jason knows what it’s like to build a global brand and then step back to focus on what truly matters. His daughter’s battle with leukemia saw him training in the hospital parking lot so he could be present for her and still take care of himself. He’s a jiu-jitsu practitioner, a consistent worker, and a man who values loyalty, accountability, and substance over style.

In a world that rewards talk over action, Jason is a refreshing example of discipline, consistency, and simply putting in the work.

Enjoy my conversation with CrossFit champion, author, husband, father, and founder of Train Hard, Jason Khalipa.

One Last Week Before the Empty Nest

From Greg:

We had all four of us home together for the first time in far too long. It wasn’t a vacation, unless you count funding our dentist’s kids’ college tuition. (Wisdom teeth, cap, root canal… you get the idea.) But the time together was priceless. My favorite night? Sitting on the couch between both boys, binge-watching Entourage until we fell asleep. Next up: road-tripping Auden back to Boulder, then heading to LA to move Harper into his dorm. Read the full piece on savoring that final week here.

The Power of Showing Up

For a lot of men in midlife, the hardest part of working out isn’t the workout, it’s motivation and will to train. Group exercise solves that. You schedule it, you pay for it, you walk through the door and follow the program. The coaching, clock, and community are built in. Whether it’s yoga, CrossFit, boxing, spin, Pilates, boot camps, Orangetheory, or F45, the real magic is the connection. You see the same faces, push each other, and over time realize it’s hard to beat the guy who keeps showing up. 

Greg’s Houston picks: yoga at Valor, XPT Pool workout, and Gains class at The Preserve every week.

The Words That Kill Business

The most dangerous words in business aren’t “we failed” or “we’re broke.” They’re: “We can’t talk about that.” Warren Buffett famously said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Protect yours. Read more in the full article here.

Big, Bold, and Baked

Don’t fear good carbs. Sunrise Flour Mill’s new Big & Baked Waffle Mix—made with organic heritage wheat and in collaboration with “Big Boi” from Outkast—is weekend splurge perfection. Light, crisp, and flavorful. We add a couple scoops of Mindbodygreen vanilla protein powder to the mix and top with Manukora Honey instead of syrup. Golden.

From Startup Uniform to Success Wardrobe

Rinske Fris is a men’s personal stylist who helps founders upgrade their style and simplify their wardrobes so they can lead like their next-level selves. At MLM, fashion is about confidence and how we see ourselves and how others see us. Greg sat down with Rinske to talk style strategy and learn more about her 1:1 Curated Reset experience. Read it here.

Ruck into the Red Rocks

XPT Cathedral Rock: 26.2 miles of rucking through Sedona’s iconic red-rock desert, bookended by two days of XPT’s elite performance training. The expedition ends at Cathedral Rock, long believed to amplify energy and transformation. Fun is physical challenge, natural beauty, great people, and plenty of breathwork, sauna, and cold plunges. Use code MIDLIFEXPT for $300 off and join Greg in Sedona this December.

Read Our MOST POPULAR Cover Stories:

MLM Founder: Greg Scheinman / Follow Greg on Instagram & LinkedIn

MLM Editor-in-Chief: Jon Finkel / Follow Jon on Twitter/X and Instagram

PS: WANT TO HELP US GROW? SHARE THIS ISSUE AND GET OUR FREE STYLE GUIDE!

As you’re reading this right now we are likely to cross 22,000 weekly readers. It seems like just yesterday we were at 2,000, but thanks to your incredible word of mouth we’re growing by thousands of readers every month and now we’ve got enough readers to fill one of our favorite towns on earth: Jackson, Wyoming.

Yes, that’s right. There are as many readers of Midlife Male in the US as there are residents of the home of Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.

By the Fall we’ll likely be at 30,000 readers and our goal for 2025 is to surpass 50,000 readers. With your help, we can do it.

If you read Midlife Male most weeks and you loved this issue, we encourage you to share it with just ONE guy you know who would like it. That’s it.

One share would mean a ton to us.

Let’s call it our Midlife Male Gentlemen’s Agreement:

We’ll keep writing the #1 newsletter for midlife men for free and if you get anything out of it, our ask is that you pass it along to another guy who’d enjoy it too.

And if you do, we’re going to email you our popular Summer Style Guide as a thank you.

Deal? Deal!

Use this link to share with your brother, buddy, colleague, friend, training partner or whoever you think would enjoy it and we’ll send you the Style Guide right away.

Thanks!

Greg & Jon

Reply

or to participate.