I went into this episode of Dr. Kibby McMahon's podcast expecting a takedown of Andrew Tate and a list of red flags. What I got was quieter and, honestly, more useful. It's a conversation aimed at parents who feel like they're watching their son drift somewhere they can't follow, and it spends as much time on why he's drifting as on what he's drifting toward.
The picture she paints at the start will be familiar to a lot of people. A teenage boy or young man suddenly lives at the gym. He's in the mirror a lot. He starts talking about being a "high-value man." He pulls back from family and friends, seems angrier and less happy, and says things about women that make you wince. And the parent is left asking two questions at once: where is this coming from, and how do I talk to him without pushing him further away?
A front door that looks harmless
One thing I appreciated is that McMahon doesn't pretend to be an insider. She admits that the more she tries to pin down what the manosphere is, the less sure she feels, and she half-expects comments telling her she doesn't get it. That humility made the rest of the episode easier to trust.
Her working definition is that it isn't one thing. It's a loose ecosystem of influencers, forums, programs and communities, from incel and "red pill" spaces to men's rights groups and pickup-artist advice. What ties it together is a view of gender as a hierarchy, and a promise that if you learn its secrets you can get fit, get money, get respect and get women.
The part that stuck with me is how people actually end up there. Nobody signs up to hate women. The entry point is usually something reasonable: a workout program, a motivation video, dating advice. She describes watching it happen on people's feeds, where one reel about building muscle fast leads the algorithm to serve up something a little more pointed, then something more pointed than that. It snowballs. By the time the hostile ideas show up, they arrive from a source the guy already trusts.
Why it lands
This is where the episode turns from warning to empathy, and I think it's the heart of it. McMahon is clear that a lot of young men are scared for good reasons. They worry about AI taking jobs, about the economy, about whether they'll ever build a career, support a family or find a partner. When you feel lost or behind, someone offering a simple formula is hard to resist. Cut your body fat, fix your jaw, become an alpha, and the pain goes away. It's a shortcut through feelings that are genuinely hard to sit with.
She singles out the men who are most vulnerable: the ones who've been rejected or shamed, especially by women. A humiliating breakup, nobody swiping on the apps, getting laughed at after asking someone out. Her point about rejection really stayed with me. People used to get turned down in person, over and over, and slowly got used to it. Now a lot of that happens alone, on a screen, and each rejection lands as its own crushing blow. So guys go looking online for something to make it hurt less, and the manosphere is waiting.
There's also the belonging piece. She notes that the institutions that used to give men a shared purpose, like religion or the military, don't hold the same place they once did. For a lonely kid, finding thousands of guys who say "what you're feeling isn't fair, and here's how to fix it" can feel like a lifeline. She doesn't wave that away, and I don't think parents should either.
What to watch for
McMahon walks through a handful of signs, and none of them are dramatic on their own. That's sort of the point.
Obsessive optimizing. Hours at the gym, lots of time in the mirror or studying photos, comparing himself to other guys, asking about plastic surgery. Boxes of creatine or other supplements showing up on the Amazon account. She makes a sharp observation here: we've been watching young women tie their worth to their looks for decades and barely blink. Now the same pressure is hitting boys, and the message is that a better jawline or bigger arms will heal the hurt underneath.
Harsh views of women and "lower" men. This is where the hierarchy thinking shows. Women become a threat, and so do men who are shorter, less fit or less successful. She cites a study from Sweden with a few hundred young men. Those shown a post framing women's rise as a threat to men were more likely afterward to dehumanize women, and the effect was strongest among men who'd been rejected before. It's a small, specific finding, but it shows how fast one message can hook into an old wound.
Pain turned into a cause. For me this was the most sobering part. A personal humiliation, like a girl saying no and laughing about it, becomes "women are destroying society." Shame gets converted into righteous anger, and the person never has to look at their own part or sit with the hurt. She draws a comparison to how resentment over hardship in 1930s Germany was redirected onto Jewish people. It's an uncomfortable comparison, but her point is about the mechanism: taking real pain and pointing it at a whole group is an old and dangerous move.
Pulling away. Less time with family, friends (especially friends who are girls) and old hobbies, and more time online and more secrecy. She also mentions something she sees in families she works with: sons becoming cruel toward their mothers or sisters, as if putting them down restores some sense of power.
She's careful to say the research is still young. It isn't clear whether the manosphere creates these attitudes or gives a home to feelings that were already there. Either way, it doesn't help.
Curiosity over control
The second half of the episode is practical, and it starts by gently talking parents out of their first instinct. When you're scared, you want to march in and say stop following these people, stop obsessing over your face, give me your phone. McMahon's point is that with teenagers and young men this usually backfires. Being told what to do in a one-sided way tends to make them dig in and defend whatever you're attacking.
What she suggests instead is curiosity. Play the clueless parent. Ask what this community is, what program he's following, what all the supplements are for. Let him teach you. And don't expect it to happen in one sitting. If he shrugs and says "it's nothing," she reads that as a way of protecting himself and keeping control of the conversation. Back off, then try again later from a different angle.
She calls the broader approach active mediation, and the phrase she keeps returning to is "help me understand." Instead of telling him the influencer is wrong, you put the idea on the table and ask what he makes of it. Does he actually believe women are why society is falling apart? Has he seen that in his own life? Which parts ring true and which don't? Even if he defends all of it in the moment, she thinks the question plants a seed.
Two things in this section felt especially wise to me. The first is not attacking the whole thing. If you say the manosphere is all garbage, you've lost him. She suggests acknowledging what's genuinely good: guys his age talking about their feelings, getting motivated, taking care of their bodies. Then you can say that the stuff about women sounds scary to you, and ask what he thinks.
The second is her favorite question: is this working? If he got into it to find a girlfriend, how's that going? Is believing women are less than human bringing him closer to the relationship he wants? Does he feel respected outside the community, or only inside it? She compares it to any fitness plan that starts as a way to feel better and slowly becomes an endless chase. The goal isn't to win the argument. It's to help him notice whether this is getting him what he came for.
Finally, she frames the way out as addition, not subtraction. Whatever the manosphere gives him, whether that's confidence, direction or belonging, the job is to help him find it in other places too. Friends at school, other communities, things he used to love. As she puts it from a therapist's view, you want more than one way to cope with the same need. If the program really improves his life, the improvement should show up outside of it.
When it's more than a phase
McMahon ends with a short but important note on when to escalate. Watch for signs of an eating disorder, like very rigid eating, eating far too little, or cutting out whole food groups. Watch for body dysmorphia, which she describes as fixating on one specific "flaw," like the nose, and never being satisfied even after it's changed. And take depression seriously: not getting out of bed, withdrawing, growing angrier, losing joy in everything.
If he talks about wanting to hurt himself or someone else, or there's any violence, that's the moment to get him real help. That might mean finding a therapist, or in the US, calling or texting 988, the mental health crisis line.
What I'm taking away
What I liked most about this episode is that it never treats young men as the enemy. McMahon is worried, and she says so plainly, but she keeps coming back to the loneliness and shame underneath all of it. The manosphere is giving these guys something they couldn't find elsewhere. The sad part is what it often costs them in return: the people and things that were already good in their lives.
If you're a parent in the middle of this, the message I'd hold onto is that you still have a role. Not as the one who confiscates the phone, but as the one who keeps asking, keeps listening, and keeps showing him there are other places to feel like he matters. She ends by inviting men who've been part of these spaces to share what actually helped them, and that openness feels like the right spirit to end on.
