Your Thursday Three Things for July 16, 2026
Wholesome doesn’t sell
Louis Theroux’s crew shot more than 3 hours of Elliot Hulse’s family life for the Netflix manosphere documentary, and 3 seconds survived the edit.
The film crew stayed at Elliot Hulse’s house long enough to shoot more than 3 hours of footage. His father is in it. His wife is in it. His kids are in it. They also filmed a friend of his, a man who came up rough, turned it around, and is now a solid husband and father.
Louis Theroux’s manosphere documentary dropped on Netflix in March. Elliot’s family made the film for 3 seconds.
His friend was cut completely.
The men who did make the cut were the ones saying the ugliest things into the camera. Will opens this week’s episode with the obvious question: is that because wholesome doesn’t sell, or is it something else?
Quick ask before we get into it. If you’ve seen the documentary, hit reply and give me one word for how it left you. Angry, curious, tired, whatever’s true. I’m collecting the answers for a follow-up piece.
Divorced men in chat rooms
Will took this one solo, and we put a disclaimer at the top of the episode. We don’t do that often. Elliot says things about men, women, and family that will make some of you nod and some of you want to throw your phone. Both reactions are welcome here.
The origin story he tells is a better one than the documentary gives you. Elliot started as a strength coach on YouTube in 2007, before the word manosphere existed. Young men would finish a workout at his gym and hang around, wanting to talk about women, careers, their fathers. Meanwhile, in AOL groups and on Reddit, older divorced men were passing down what they’d learned from their own wreckage. Elliot describes it as the cool uncle a lot of these kids never had. “Let me tell you something, kid. This is the way it really is.”
Then the pickup guys ran with that material, the algorithm found it, and the angriest room in the house became the public face. Elliot calls that room red pill rage, the youngest and most immature corner, and he doesn’t defend the lifestyle. “Somebody needs to kick you in your face and wake you up,” he says, and then in the same breath, “but you also got to grow up.” He believes most of the young men who wander in angry eventually go deeper, toward faith and family. He also thinks Andrew Tate is “an agent” playing a role. His word, on the record.
The vacuum underneath it all is real, and I’ve watched it from both sides. I spent 24 years in the Navy with a built-in brotherhood, older men correcting me hard and often, and when I retired in 2020 the silence where all that used to be was louder than I expected. A 22-year-old with no father in the house and no coach in his corner will take the first voice that sounds certain. The manosphere is full of certain-sounding voices.
Where Elliot loses me
Elliot’s map of history runs through Antonio Gramsci and Wilhelm Reich: feminism as a funded project to take out the father, Woodstock as a planted operation, the whole architecture. He says women should “learn how to be wives again.” And there’s this line: “any power that a woman has in the world is because men are protecting her.”
I’ll be straight with you about where I land. I’ve been divorced. My first marriage lasted 10 years, and I’ve had a long time since to sort through why it ended. Most of the reasons have my name on them. Nothing in Gramsci explains a husband who wasn’t paying attention. The marriage I have now, with my bride, who is probably the strongest person in our house (not probably… definitely!), works because of counseling, repair, and 2 people doing reps. Some of what Elliot files under natural law, I file under paying attention to the person you married.
And I’ll own my own math too. When I heard this episode, my first instinct was to calculate what releasing it might cost us. Which subscribers, which comment section. That’s the same algorithm logic I’m complaining about, running quietly in my own head, and I didn’t like meeting it there.
So here it is anyway. If you think I’m being unfair to Elliot, or too easy on him, reply and make your case. I read every one, and with your permission I’ll pull the sharpest pushback into a future Thursday. This audience is 60 to 70% men and I’d rather host the argument than pretend there isn’t one.
The window in Elliot’s office
Elliot’s office has a window that faces the front of the house. His 19-year-old daughter, the entrepreneur of the family, recently brought a new young man around, and Elliot watched her stop him at the front door. She wouldn’t take him another step until he came inside and said hello to her dad. Elliot had already met the kid once and liked him. It still touched him that she insisted.
That same household once produced a daughter who publicly called him a misogynist. His oldest, during a season when the voices in her feed hated everything he stands for. He says he understood what was happening, forgave it, and today they’re close and she’s building a marriage of her own. A family can hold that much disagreement and survive. That might be the quietest argument in the whole episode.
And whatever you make of Elliot’s ideology, listen to how he talks about the role itself. “It’s a fucking responsibility and it’s a hard look.” That’s leadership language. You can’t be an authority unless you revere authority. You can’t lead until you’ve been a good follower. In my world those show up as discipline and integrity on the DIAL. Elliot gets there through Genesis. Different maps, same terrain.
Somewhere on a hard drive there are 3 hours of footage of a father, a wife, kids, a friend who made it out. All that ordinary love, unusable...
What to do about it
Ask the youngest man in your orbit what he’s watching. Your son, your nephew, the newest guy on your team. Ask which voices he trusts, then listen for 10 minutes without correcting anything. What he defends will teach you more than what he watches.
Be the cool uncle on purpose. The manosphere grew because men with scars showed up for young men nobody else was talking to. Pick 1 younger man and make it concrete: the gym on Tuesday mornings, coffee once a month, a truck that needs brakes. Presence transfers in person.
Run the anger test on your feed for 3 days. After every masculinity-adjacent video or post, one question: am I better at something, or angrier at someone? Keep a tally on your phone. The ratio is information.
Take our free Awareness Self-Assessment. Outrage content works because you don’t notice your own state while it’s winding you up. The assessment takes about 5 minutes and shows you your baseline: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 below turns this into a full 7-day audit.
Reply with the name of a man who filled the gap for you. One name, one sentence about what he did. Will and I read every reply, and I’m gathering these for a future edition on mentorship. Some man out there deserves to have his quiet work said out loud.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Elliot Hulse was one of YouTube’s original strength coaches, on the platform since 2007, back when the questions after the workout were about women, fathers, and what to do with a life. Oldest of 4 boys, captain of his high school football team, he married his high school sweetheart at 23 and they’ve been building a family ever since, with daughters now 21, 19, and 16. He teaches men through his Elliot Hulse’s Wisdom channel on YouTube, and he appears, briefly, in Louis Theroux’s Netflix manosphere documentary. Will sat down with him solo for this one.
Watch on YouTube | Listen here
Three resources for the men the algorithm is fighting over
Resource 1: The DIAL test for the voices in his feed
