Dismantling the Mens Work Industry Episode 0 - Why I Recorded This Series

Before this series begins, I'd like to name exactly what this is, so there are no misunderstandings. Over the next few episodes, I'm going to dismantle the men's work industry from the inside out. The intent here is not to try and destroy it because I have no illusions that I could do that, and destruction is not the point anyway. The point is to show you what it actually is precisely and exactly without protection of the tradition or contempt for the men who followed it.

And I'm uniquely qualified to do this because I spent almost 30 years inside of this industry as a man doing the work, and as a licensed therapist watching thousands of other men do the same, and also participating with some of those men too. So this is not an outsider's critique. This is an accounting from someone who was there who followed all the frameworks who sat in the rooms where the results arrived. And this is what I found.

So you'll know the feeling I'm about to describe. It's simply there. At the end of the day, when the noise stops and there's nothing left to do and nowhere left to be, when you lay your head down and the room goes quiet and something underneath the quiet is not so quiet at all, a dis-ease and undercurrent. It's not exactly a pain or a depression.

It's something more like a persistent low frequency noise. That the man you're presenting to the world and the man you actually are have not yet been properly introduced. You've tried probably a lot of things. You've read a lot of books.

Some of them, maybe all of them. You've probably done a lot of work, or at least what the work said the work was. And you've followed their frameworks, adopted methods, applied strategies. Maybe you've attended retreats and circles and workshops.

Perhaps you've gone deep into a tradition and emerged from it with a more sophisticated vocabulary for what you're carrying. But the undercurrent is still there. And if you're honest and laying your head on a pillow at night is one of the few places where honesty becomes difficult to avoid, you know something about what you've been doing. You've been performing.

And you haven't been performing dishonestly. You've been doing so sincerely with genuine effort, but still performing nonetheless. Because every framework you've been given was underneath its particular language and promise, a set of instructions for how best to appear in the world. Because every framework you have been given was underneath its particular language and promise, a set of instructions for how to appear in the world, how to hold yourself, how to present the version of a man that the framework considered developed.

And somewhere you already know this. This series is for that man, the one who knows. I'd like to name something before I tell you who I am and what this series is. Something clinical.

Something that explains why you're still here after all the books and all the circles and all the genuine effort. He's what I've observed across 20 years of clinical work sitting across from thousands of men who have done serious, sincere work on themselves. The wound that drives a man to the frameworks is the same wound that does the selecting when he arrives. You didn't choose your frameworks randomly.

You chose them because something in them spoke the language that felt familiar. Tomasi spoke the language of a man whose wound says women cannot be trusted. Deata spoke the language of a man whose wound says he's not enough unless he has a mission that proves it. Bligh spoke the language of a man whose wound lives in the absent or inadequate father.

Glover spoke the language of a man who has suppressed himself so completely that he lost contact with what he actually wants. And Eldredge spoke the language of a man whose faith tradition told him his wildness was a problem to be managed. The framework did not attract the whole man. It attracted the fragment that recognized its own language.

And that same fragment, the one that selected the framework is the one that did the work inside the framework. Which means the work was always being done on the wrong layer. The fragment examined itself, refined itself, developed itself within the framework's terms. But the wound underneath the fragment was never examined at all.

It was simply provided with better language and more sophisticated management strategies. This is why you could follow a framework faithfully for years and arrive no closer to the thing you are actually reaching for. The fragment that was running your life was also the fragment doing the selecting. And it will never select the thing that threatens its own survival.

That's not a failure of your effort. It's simply a structural impossibility. No amount of work done within the framework addresses this. The framework was selected by the wound.

The framework speaks the wound's language. The framework followed faithfully, deepens the wound's articulation without once touching its structure. When I name this to men in therapy, something shifts. And it's not defensive either.

It's not the defensive shift of someone who's been challenged. It's much quieter. It's a kind of recognition in someone who's always known something, but never had precise enough language for it. The undercurrent persisted not because you did the work wrong.

It persisted because the work was pointed at the wrong target. Now, as I have not done throughout this whole series of transmissions on this podcast, I'm still not going to tell you my name. There's no face attached to this transmission and there won't be one. And if you've listened long enough, you know why.

What I will tell you is this. I've spent 20 years in the men's workspace. That's not observing it from the outside, but actually inside it, as a man doing the work myself, and as a licensed therapist who has sat with thousands of men doing it alongside me. I've read every book this series will examine, not as research, but as a man genuinely searching for what they claimed to offer.

I've put much of it into practice in my own life. I've attended the Ben circles, the wilderness retreats, the breathwork sessions, the primal work. I tried the red pill method for several weeks until the disingenuousness of it became something I refused to continue performing. I've also run my own men's groups.

I've facilitated my own workshops. I've sat one-to-one with men in genuine crisis, men who had followed all of these frameworks faithfully and arrived at outcomes the frameworks had not prepared them for. And across those 20 years and thousands of men, across every format and tradition and framework that the men's workspace produced, one thing was consistent. The books they mentioned always the same books.

Deata, Tamasi, Bligh, Glover, Elridge, and occasionally, from the men who had gone deeper than most, more in Gillette. The men who mentioned more in Gillette all said the same thing. It touched something real, but it didn't quite get there. It was too abstract, too distant from where the wound actually lived.

And the men who mentioned all the others, and they mentioned all the others, said things that sounded like progress and described lives that were not progressing. Just better language for the same wound, more sophisticated performance of the same avoidance, a more disciplined version of the same man who had arrived before he found the book. I restrained myself from saying any of what you will hear in the next few episodes for almost 20 years, and I'm not restraining myself anymore because there's no need to, and I realize I never actually had to. By the time 2019 came in my life, I'd done a lot of what was available to be done in terms of men's work, 15 years as a therapist, two decades of my own work, and I reached a point that I suspect some of you listening have also reached, where you'd gone as far as the existing maps would take you, and you're standing at the edge of territory, none of them chartered.

That year, I wrote the first Excalibur book, and if I'm being honest, it was an active rebellion. It was a call to arms for men who had grown soft, reading material that asked absolutely nothing of them, and for me, at that time, it was necessary, but in time, I would realize that it was only the beginning. When that movement completed a number of years ago, I did something I had not done enough of in the preceding 30 years of adult life. I went quiet, literally four years of silence, stillness, sitting with 20 years of client notes and 30 years of my own life, my own experience.

I sat with every framework I had encountered, every man I sat with, every moment where something worked and every moment more numerous when something hadn't. And out of that silence came the next two books, and then I was writing, I realized I wasn't just writing for other men, I was writing for myself, pulling apart what had not worked in my own life, in the lives of men I'd walk with, and building a synthesis from what I had, going to places every other framework had touched and then retreated from, deciding to go further than anyone had ever gone before. Those two books became what is now the Excalibur Trinity, and what followed from the Trinity was another 12 books, over 600,000 words across 14 publications. I didn't write any of it because I had all the answers, I wrote it because I'd spent 20 years watching men reach for something real and being handed something insufficient, and I refused to continue to watch that and say nothing and do nothing, because saying nothing would have made me complicit in the damage, and doing nothing would have meant avoidance, and I'd been quietly complicit for long enough.

So this series examines the books that the men's work industry has built itself upon for the last three decades or so, Deeda, Tomasi, Bligh, Glover, Elridge, and Morin Gillette. These are the books men recommend to other men, these are the books that get passed around in circles and forums and therapy rooms and retreats. These are the books that have shaped what an entire generation of men believe masculine development looks like, and here's the honest observation that this series is built upon. A man who reads all of them will not become more integrated, he'll become more confused because they contradict each other, because each one claims to offer the answer and offers instead a partial truth pretending to be a complete one.

And the man standing in the middle of all of them, trying to synthesise what resonates and discard what doesn't, isn't growing, he's curating, and what's doing the curating is not his wisdom, it's his wound, selecting what confirms what it already believes, rejecting what would require it to change, giving the man the sensation of growth whilst leaving the root structure of what is fragmented, entirely undisturbed. This is why most men do not progress beyond a cherry-picked conglomeration of all of these books, and it's not because he's lazy or he's not trying, it's because the fragment that's running his life is also the fragment doing the selecting, and it will never select the thing that threatens its own survival. So to be clear, this series is not an attack on these books, or on the men who wrote them, or on the men who followed them. The men who wrote them were sincere, each of them saw something real, each of them named something worth naming, and each of them stopped short of the thing that would have made the ultimate difference.

And that's not because they were dishonest, but because the thing they stopped short of is the hardest thing there is to ask of a man. This series is the first honest autopsy conducted by someone who loved the patient, not to bury what was good in it, but to understand precisely why the patient is still unwell. I want to be honest about why I could not continue to stay silent. I've watched tens of thousands of men through my direct work, through the communities I've been part of, through the reach of what I have built, follow these frameworks with genuine sincerity, and I've watched what they all produced.

Men more isolated at the end of years of men's work than what they were at the beginning. Men whose partners had left them, not despite the framework, but in some precise clinical sense because of it. Men who had learned to articulate their wound with increasing sophistication while the wound itself remained untouched. And men who had sat in circle for years and went home to the same broken relationships, the same quiet suffering, the same undercurrent, but now with rich vocabulary for why it was there.

Men who had read Tomasi and become more armoured, men who had read Deodor and become more absent while performing presence. Men who had sat in Blaise tradition for 15 years and learned to beautifully grieve without the grief ever becoming a passage. I've watched all of this in detail for two decades and I've watched the industry that produced these frameworks continue to grow, continue to sell, continue to tell men that the next book, the next retreat, the next circle, the next framework would be the one that finally delivered what all the previous ones had promised. It's no wonder men are left still searching because the answers they were looking for do not exist in any of these books they never did.

Because the men who wrote them without exception handed men a new identity to perform rather than a process to descend through. They gave men something to become rather than something to examine and becoming is always faster, always more comfortable and always more marketable and commercially viable than examining. This is what I call the performance of growth, the illusion of empowerment, the sophisticated avoidance pretending to be development and I'm calling it now for what it is. I've not spoken about this publicly before now because I didn't believe I had yet earned the right to fully do so.

And I don't want you to think that's false modesty, it's just a standard that I hold for myself. To speak with authority about what does not work you must first have genuinely tried to make it work. To point at what's missing you must first have built something that addresses what's missing. To dismantle a structure in front of the men who are living inside it you must first be able to offer them solid ground to stand on when the structure comes down.

20 years as a therapist, 30 years as an adult man navigating the same territory these books claim to map. Thousands of men worked with directly over 600,000 words written across 14 books, a full philosophical framework, stress tested in my own life before it was offered to anyone else's. As far as I'm aware I have left no stone unturned. And so now I speak not to diminish what's come before or to make myself larger by making others smaller but because the men who need something different deserve to hear from someone who's been where they are gone further and come back with something that actually holds.

I will also speak knowing that not everyone who finds this series will be ready for what it says. Some men are too comfortable inside the performance to want the performance named. Some have too much invested in the identity the framework gave them to consider what the identity is costing them. Some will hear this first episode and dismiss it and return to what's familiar.

That's fine. This is not for everyone. It is for the man who's ready, the one who already knows at some level that he's not yet fully admitted to himself that the performance is not the man that the undercurrent will not resolve by reading another book that teaches him a better way to perform. That man doesn't need to be told he's ready he already knows.

Nine episodes follow this one. The first six examine the canon books one by one. Deaida, Tamasi, Blaia, Glaia, Elridge, Morin, Gillette. Each is a precise clinical examination built from research direct observation from 20 years of sitting in rooms with men that these frameworks produced.

Episode seven does something none of the previous six do. It will name the mechanism that makes these frameworks so difficult to leave even when a man already knows they're not working. The brotherhood that forms around them the built-in self sealing that makes departure feel like regression. The identity investment that makes leaving feel like losing your very self.

This is the episode for the man who's been nodding for six episodes and still can't bring himself to make the call. Episode eight will assemble the complete picture. It names the single pattern underneath all six frameworks and it does what no individual clinical autopsy can do. It names what an entire generation of men following this canon did to the women and the children around them and also themselves.

And this is again not an accusation of these men. It's simply a clinical truth about what this industry built. Episode nine is then the answer. Not a framework or a prescription.

The answer to the question all eight episodes before it will be building towards. What does genuine men's work actually require? I want to end this episode where I began at that undercurrent, the one that's there when the noise stops. I'd like to tell you that it's not a malfunction.

It's not evidence that you're broken or that something is fundamentally wrong with you. But it is a signal, persistent, precise and entirely accurate. It's telling you that the man you are and the man you're presenting to the world have not yet been introduced. Every framework in this series gave you a more sophisticated way to manage the gap between them.

But none of them closed it. This is what this series is about. It's something in what you heard today landed. There's a free book that I wrote that will show you why.

It's called Before Approaching the Threshold. It's free and it's linked in the show notes. Welcome to the architect speaks.