By Ari David Blaff
Monday, April 13, 2026
Tucked at the end of his newest book, Notes
on Being a Man, Scott Galloway outlined for his sons “the three
legs” of what it means to be a good man: to protect, provide, and procreate.
Alarmed by the “crisis with the boys and young men just ahead of you,” he walks
his boys through what each of those attributes means. Being a man, he writes,
is a birthright in the most rewarding sense.
“You have an obligation to protect and advocate for
others, because you were born with advantages others don’t have,” Galloway
writes. He doesn’t wield privilege in a demeaning way: It’s an invitation to do
better and elevate those around you.
“I hope you embrace your strength, physical and mental,
as you go forward,” Galloway continues. “The most masculine people leave a
legacy of surplus value from a place of kindness, generosity, and strength.
They give more love, hope, and encouragement, pay more taxes, and create more
jobs than they get back.”
If this sounds different from the toxic pillars of the
oft-discussed “manosphere,”
it is. The unifying principle of the manosphere and its boosters—men like
Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and Myron Gaines—is an unabashed view that women
belong in the kitchen and that men should exercise absolute social control, all
of which is predictably laced with racism, antisemitism, and a general hatred
for men not like them.
Galloway is different. And he’s part of a new group of
podcasters, researchers, and public intellectuals I call the Gentlemanosphere.
The Gentlemanosphere has a straightforward mission
statement for men today: Raise your hand when you need help; get off screens
and into the real world; build communities with partners and friends; take
risks; express yourself emotionally; and look after your physical health.
This new anti-manosphere operates at two levels: from
within and outside traditional forms of authority. Figures such as Galloway,
researcher Richard Reeves, New York Times columnist David French, and
writer and academic Arthur Brooks advocate for boys and men from mainstream
perches in academia or major newspapers.
The second wing of the Gentlemanosphere consists of the
influencers circumventing the traditional gatekeepers of thought, exploring the
crisis—of meaning and purpose—that many men feel today.
These influencers bridge the gap with the establishment
wing of the Gentlemanosphere by speaking directly to everyday boys and men, and
include people such as podcaster Chris Williamson, writer Rob Henderson, and
former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink. These men offer young guys a space for
sustainable personal improvement beyond the cheap
upsells of cryptocurrency and online universities peddled by manosphere
personalities.
Together, these two wings actually seem to be helping
men.
***
Gentlemanosphere views aren’t new. The 2010s saw Adm. William
McRaven demand men start every day by making their beds, Jordan Peterson exhort
men to “clean your room!” and Willink famously advise listeners to meet
hardship with a simple “Good.” Although critics often dismiss such advice as platitudes equally suitable for boys
and girls, these messages resonate because they’re delivered at a frequency men
are attuned to hearing: discipline geared toward accomplishment.
But something has changed in recent years. The dawning
recognition that boys are not doing well—academically, socially, mentally—has
opened Americans to the reality that guys need help. New solutions. New ideas.
And proponents of the Gentlemanosphere are at the forefront of that
recognition: They see male struggles as worthy of our empathy and attention.
They offer antidotes beyond diagnoses of toxic masculinity or hegemonic
masculinity and don’t treat masculinity as a lethal diagnosis in need of
curing.
Another distinction of the Gentlemanosphere is that it
doesn’t see gender politics as zero-sum. Members believe that advancing the
cause of boys and men elevates girls and women. They see better men making
better husbands, better families, and healthier societies.
“Advocating for boys and men is not mutually exclusive to
advocating for girls and women,” Arthur Brooks, another public intellectual I
consider to be part of the Gentlemanosphere, told me. “For policymakers and
thought leaders, the goal should be to not cast away masculinity as ‘toxic’—or
to accuse femininity as being a militating force against men. No: We must
describe masculinity and femininity as mutually reinforcing, and help both
sexes find ways to rediscover meaning in their lives.”
***
Daring to articulate a vision of manhood today isn’t
widely encouraged. As Galloway experienced, few make it across the minefield of
gender politics unscathed.
The reaction to his book, which touches on his own
upbringing, lessons from fatherhood, and his experience becoming financially
independent, he told me, was “so severe and swift. Quite frankly, I was
expecting it; I wasn’t expecting it at this kind of volume. To be honest, it’s
a bit rattling,” Galloway added. “But what I tell myself is that—if you’re in
World War II,” he continued, “the pilots would say, when the flak gets most
intense, drop your bombs cause that means you’re over the target.”
Galloway likes that historical period. You can almost
imagine him strutting in some Patton-esque fatigues before a battle, amping the
troops up. Chatting shortly after his book was published in November, he was
unfiltered and happy to disclose his own perceived shortcomings. He
acknowledged that he isn’t a gender studies expert, and that his goal was to
share his experience of “where I think I got it right and where I think I got
it wrong.”
“To be honest, some of the criticism is valid and I try
to learn from it,” he said, pointing to pushback that his advice could be seen
as too narrow to apply to all men.
“The book is somewhat autobiographical, and I project
what’s worked for me—pursuing economic security, and finding a mate,” he added.
“Some criticism [is] that there are other paths, and ways to demonstrate
masculinity. Which is fair.”
He maintained he’s “never blamed women for men’s
problems,” and said the reasons for the failings of American men are diverse,
“including men of my generation not stepping up.”
Galloway also spoke candidly about everything from Donald
Trump being a poor mentor for men to how the suicide of a teen he knew led him
to the cause of young boys.
However, he was frustrated by attempts to link him with
influencers such as Andrew Tate because “their solution was to take women back
to the 50s.” He credited the “far right” for being among the first observers to
spot the problems faced by men, but denounced their ideology of conflating
“masculinity with coarseness and cruelty.”
“When you, in any way, advocate for men, there is an
understandable gag reflex that, Oh, he’s one of them,” Galloway said,
referring to the far right.
***
Lingering in the background of our conversation was a
recent essay in The New Yorker. “Bald, white, and jacked,”
journalist Jessica Winter opened the piece, describing Galloway as “an action
figure of the tech-and-finance overclass.” The article describes him as one of
“the ambassadors of the centrist manosphere,” a segment that praises “women’s
advancement and the feminist cause while insisting that men’s economic and
vocational anxieties are more naturally potent.”
Pilloried alongside Galloway in the article was the
aforementioned Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and
Men. Reeves, a polite Brit unfailingly open to conversation and bipartisanship,
is a major reason why governors across the country—Gavin Newsom, Wes Moore, and Spencer
Cox, to name a few—are talking about the well-being of boys. Winter derided his
2022 book, Of Boys and Men, as a “best-selling jeremiad,” which prompted
Reeves, a policy wonk, to joke
his book was “way too boring to qualify.”
Winter draws a contrast between the Galloway wing and the
Tate/Fuentes wing. But she seems to think that the latter is more effective,
because it articulates a more specific and accurate version of masculinity.
The right-wing manosphere knows
that masculinity is a series of dominance signals beamed from behind iridescent
Oakleys and the wheel of the most enormous pickup truck you’ve ever seen; it is
a smirking multimillionaire who “DESTROYS” a young woman at a college-hosted
debate; it is—must it be said?—an AR-15, openly carried.
While the “right-wing manosphere” wants tougher abortion
laws and traditional gender roles, “the squishier centrist side has no such
certainties,” she continues. Galloway’s construction of masculinity, Winter
argues, is “a state of mind and a lifestyle, one equally available to men and
women, and therefore impossible to define.”
“Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem
is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men
should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as
before,” she continues.
But it’s hard to read Galloway and Reeves and come away
with the impression that their efforts to raise awareness about men’s struggles
are a smokescreen for male supremacy. Take Reeves, for example. “One of the
great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than
women need men,” Reeves wrote in Of Boys and Men. Later, he writes:
“Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not.
Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess.”
Lisa Britton, a contributor at Evie, experienced
the very same binary thinking when she turned her passion for advocating for
girls and women and applied it to boys and men. While speaking with people
around Capitol Hill as part of her advocacy, one aide of then-Sen. John McCain
suggested she also look into what was happening with boys. Since then, Britton
has written extensively about the state of American men, from the shortcomings of the term “toxic masculinity” to misandrist advertising.
Britton described herself as “very progressive,” but
recalled her appeals about men to her fellow progressives falling on deaf ears.
“In the early days, anybody who was left-leaning did not
understand what I was doing. I lost friends; family members telling me to give
up. Like ‘Why? What are you doing? Who’s controlling you?’ They couldn’t
understand why I would be standing up for boys and men, really,” she said.
***
At a time when men make up the majority of premature
deaths, workplace injuries, the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the
academically struggling, an inability to see and speak about men undercuts our
ability to help them. As Galloway learned, anyone speaking to a male audience
is liable to be accused of manosphere propaganda.
“It’s not a thin line,” Galloway said. “It’s a razor and
you’re gonna fall and get cut no matter what you say, no matter how eloquent,
reasonable, how many land acknowledgments you do. You’re just gonna get cut
wading into this.”
Prominent men are covered on front pages—the Trumps and
Putins and CEOs—but everyday men are often presented through simplified tropes.
(Winter’s story predictably featured cartoonish graphics of moping men, some
curled in fetal positions.) Guys remain passive
actors in their own stories: written about, talked down to, and diagnosed by
mostly indifferent journalists. Mainstream outlets routinely
blame men for their own problems and rarely feature voices arguing otherwise.
This has pushed discourse beyond the control of
mainstream gatekeepers, fueling the rise of the second wing of the
Gentlemanosphere. Guys are hungry for thoughtful content, but the void left by
academia and mainstream media has led to the emergence of a vibrant ecosystem
of alternative voices.
Chris Williamson’s podcast, Modern Wisdom, talks
about everything from sobriety to finance, and it’s one of the most thoughtful
places where masculinity is discussed today. Williamson started the podcast
because “there was a vacuum of advice to men,” he told me. And he seems to have
been right: Williamson’s podcast was included
on Spotify’s “Top Global Shows” in 2025 alongside
The Joe Rogan Experience.
“We have a generation of fatherless homes. …Toward the
end of my 20s, I was looking around for a patriarch to teach me,” he said,
jokingly calling this phase of his life “Manopause” and saying it hits lots of
men approaching their 30s as they begin attaining early career success but
can’t escape a sense of emptiness.
Williamson reflected on his pre-podcast life success and
the lack of satisfaction he felt. He wanted to find the ground truth: what
actually made him, and often other men, happy and successful. “Modern Wisdom
is a thinly veiled autobiography masquerading as a podcast,” he said. Having
conversations with researchers on topics from the ethics of artificial intelligence to the social psychology of men is his way of getting at the
fundamental questions of life.
“Some may say academically less legitimate or even
intellectually less legitimate,” Williamson joked. “I would prefer to say,
closer to the common man or maybe a little bit more relatable.”
His journey, he feels, mirrors what many young guys feel
today. His audience, he said, comes from a “big cohort” of curious men who
aren’t “so sure” how they are doing in life and want to be the best versions of
themselves.
***
Williamson sketched out a history of the manosphere’s
evolution that has updated roughly every decade since the new millennium,
beginning with “first wave” pickup artists in the mid-2000s before shifting to the
“second wave” red-pill era in the 2010s. We are entering a third wave.
Williamson thinks some of the best voices of this third
wave are guys like Chris Bumstead, a six-time Mr. Olympia winner who openly
talks about self-doubt and vulnerability.
“He struggles with his emotions and he talks about how
uncertain he is,” Williamson, a close friend of Bumstead’s, said. “It’s messy
and I’ve tried to embody that as much as possible. The transparency in the
messiness of the process.”
Williamson also spoke about the wild success of the major
nodes of the Gentlemanosphere: Arthur Brooks (Harvard academic and Oprah
Winfrey coauthor), Reeves (creator of the first think tank on boys and men),
and Galloway (“rich as hell and biggest podcaster on the planet”).
“It would be very difficult to look at this group of
people and say, ‘Well, they don’t make things happen,’” Williamson said. “But
there is a gentleness, I think, in the messaging. Bringing people along for the
ride; not binding their ingroup together over the mutual hatred of an outgroup;
there is a gentleness with themselves when they fall short.”
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