Decoding the Gurus

We return for Part 2 of our Scott Galloway deep dive, where the vibes remain strong, the confidence unwavering, and the relationship with empirical evidence increasingly… decorative.
Returning to our Modern Wisdom safari, we continue navigating the forbidden terrain of men, masculinity, and male suffering: a topic so dangerous that it requires constant ritual disclaimers, whispered caveats, and the occasional nervous glance around the bar to make sure we can take out the other men if necessary.
We cover Scott's outline of his masculine Third Way: rejecting both the Right’s “Bring Back the Fifties” masculinity and the Left’s “Men Are the Problem” framework, in favour of a solution that might be described as Stern Dad Who’s Also Nice About It. Prepare to thrill at proposals of mandatory national service, kindness as a masculine superpower, and the radical idea that young people might benefit from not being economically crushed.
Things get spicier when we’re told what women really want and learn about the adaptive skill check of the female orgasm. Chris Williamson unveils a prepared essay on What Men Want which proves to be a moving piece of therapeutic slam poetry that somehow manages to combine manosphere grievance mongering with woke therapy talk. We learn how what men really just want to be told is “you are enough" and should be kind for kindness sake, but also should optimise their friend group such that they can properly signal their high mate quality and train hard enough to take out all other males in the bar.
Finally, we hit peak Decoding Mode as Scott’s statistics begin to escalate: boys are ten times more likely to kill themselves, father absence turns sons into inmates, daughters into promiscuous approval-seekers, and nearly every claim is delivered with total confidence and minimal concern for effect sizes, confounds, or whether the study actually exists. Decorative scholarship is in full bloom.
We do our best as two hyper-masculine men to separate reasonable concerns about boys, mentorship, and social policy from hyperbolic factoids, pop-psych inflation, and the familiar habit of smuggling moral arguments in under the banner of “what the science says.”
Bring your hunting knife and stoic daily diary. Take your testosterone injection. And get ready for some man talk!
Links
Modern Wisdom: The War On Men Isn’t Helping Anyone - Scott Galloway
The Diary of a CEO: Scott Galloway: We’re Raising The Most Unhappy Generation In History! Hard Work Doesn't Build Wealth

Academic papers/Sources Referenced
Culpin, I., Heuvelman, H., Rai, D., Pearson, R. M., Joinson, C., Heron, J., … Kwong, A. S. F. (2022). Father absence and trajectories of offspring mental health across adolescence and young adulthood: Findings from a UK-birth cohort. Journal of Affective Disorders, 314, 150–159.
Dekker, M. C., Ferdinand, R. F., van Lang, N. D. J., Bongers, I. L., van der Ende, J., & Verhulst, F. C. (2007). Developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms from early childhood to late adolescence: Gender differences and adult outcome. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48(7), 657–666.
Angelakis, I., Austin, J. L., & Gooding, P. (2020). Association of childhood maltreatment with suicide behaviors among young people: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA network open, 3(8), e2012563-e2012563.
Zhang, L., Wang, P., Liu, L., Wu, X., & Wang, W. (2026). Different roles of child abuse and neglect on emerging adult's nonsuicidal self-injury and suicidal ideation: sex difference through emotion regulation. Current...

We dig deep into the online world to DO OUR OWN RESEARCH and return with horrors never dreamt of by man.
The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 23 minutes).
Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Supplementary Material 42
00:00 Introduction
11:13 Rogan and Shane Gillis on Nick Fuentes vs Piers Morgan
17:49 Jimmy Carr's Physics Insights
24:00 The comedian shuffle
25:12 Andrew Huberman teams up with Goop!
30:41 Huberman injects his dog with testosterone.
32:09 Bryan Johnson and the secret longevity of the penis
35:41 The Science Behind Huberman's Careful Product Endorsements
39:48 The Statistics of Home Alone
41:22 Bryan Johnson's Love Tweet
46:24 Bryan Johnson's horrible treatment of his ex-fiancée
51:30 Andrea Botez and Influencer Health Research
57:41 Bespoke Treatments with Medical AIs
01:04:28 Self-Research, Stock Picking, and Gambling
01:07:47 Health Systems and their imperfections
01:12:37 Doing Your Own Research...
01:17:38 Matt's Content Recommendations
01:20:45 Outro
Links
NYT – How Trump Fixed On a Maduro Loyalist as Venezuela’s New Leader
Triggernometry – “A Revolution is Coming!” – Jimmy Carr
GQ – How Andrew Huberman, Goop Kitchen Collaborator, Is Staying Healthy in 2026
Vanity Fair – Why Bryan Johnson, Dave Asprey, and the Other Longevity Bros Are Obsessed With Penises
Luis Batalha – Tweet on the “Home Alone” paper
Bryan Johnson – “Love” tweet
Andrea Botez – Hearing Loss Update...

We return to the podcast circuit in 2026 to examine Scott Galloway: NYU professor, prolific podcaster, and, more recently, part-time life coach for struggling young men.
Joining him on an episode of Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson, we are invited into one of the few remaining forbidden conversational spaces: men, masculinity, and men’s problems. You may have been misled by the relentless popularity of Joe Rogan, Modern Wisdom, The Tucker Carlson Show, Triggernometry, The Diary of a CEO, Huberman Lab, and several dozen adjacent properties into thinking these topics are already discussed at length on a near-weekly basis. Alas, this turns out to be a dangerous illusion.
In reality, even mentioning men’s issues requires an extended ritual acknowledgement of women, failure to perform which risks immediate cancellation. Braving these cultural headwinds, we wade into manly dialogue about masculinity, sex differences, and male malaise. Along the way, we ponder the intricacies of culture war evolutionary psychology, anthropological wars over Man the Hunter, optimised dosages for manly whingeing, and whether making boys learn French verb conjugations qualifies as a human rights abuse.
So get your notebooks ready for some important notes from two of the most masculine men in the modern male podcasting space. Men...
Links
Modern Wisdom: The War On Men Isn’t Helping Anyone - Scott Galloway
The Diary of a CEO: Scott Galloway: We’re Raising The Most Unhappy Generation In History! Hard Work Doesn't Build Wealth

Academic papers Referenced
Changes in gender-based hiring bias (large meta-analysis): Schaerer, M., Du Plessis, C., Nguyen, M. H. B., Van Aert, R. C., Tiokhin, L., Lakens, D., … Gender Audits Forecasting Collaboration. (2023). On the trajectory of discrimination: A meta-analysis and forecasting survey capturing 44 years of field experiments on gender and hiring decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 179, 104280.
Epidemiology of alcohol use disorder by marital status (US, NESARC-III): Grant, B. F., Goldstein, R. B., Saha, T. D., et al. (2015). Epidemiology of DSM-5 Alcohol Use Disorder: Results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions III. JAMA Psychiatry, 72(8), 757–766.
Protective effects of marriage on life expectancy (US Medicare sample): Jia, H., & Lubetkin, E. I. (2020). Life expectancy and active life expectancy by marital status among older US adults: Results from the US Medicare Health Outcome Survey (HOS). SSM – Population Health, 12, 100642.
Widowhood and well-being (contrary to claims of increased happiness): Adena, M., Hamermesh, D., Myck, M., & Oczkowska, M. (2023). Home alone: Widows’ well-being and time. Journal of Happiness Studies, 24(2), 813–838.
Meta-analysis of the widowhood effect on mortality (men and women): Shor, E., Roelfs, D. J., Curreli, M., Clemow, L., Burg, M. M., & Schwartz, J. E. (2012). Widowhood and mortality: A meta-analysis and meta-regression. Demography, 49(2), 575–606.
Marriage and life satisfaction across the life course (multi-country): Mikucka, M. (2016). The life satisfaction advantage of being married and gender specialization....

In this festive descent into methodological despair, Chris and Matt convene a secret cabal of elite psychology podcasters within the Decoding Cloister, operating under the distant yet reassuring gaze of Arch-Wizard Paul Bloom, whose role is largely ceremonial but nonetheless morally binding.
Joining them are Dave Pizarro (Very Bad Wizards) and Michael Inzlicht (Two Psychologists Four Beers, emeritus), for what can only be described as an end-of-year audit of social psychology’s moral character.
What follows is a mixture of intense hubris, disciplinary self-loathing, and revolutionary insights, delivered via one of the most sadistic Christmas quizzes ever devised. The quiz format allows the episode to do what psychology does best: create the feeling of measurement while hovering dangerously close to intuition.
Alongside the quiz, we engage in some meta-commentary and sensemaking reflections on audience capture and the state of psychology-themed podcasts in 2025. In other words, it’s Christmas, so naturally everyone is discussing perverse incentives, damaged reputations, and the slow moral corrosion of institutions.
So join us, won’t you? For the first International Congress on Psychology-Themed Podcasting and Gurus…
Links
Mickey's Substack
Mickey's Work and Play Lab
Two Psychologists Four Beers
Very Bad Wizards
Uhlmann, E. L., Pizarro, D. A., & Diermeier, D. (2015). A person-centered approach to moral judgment. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(1), 72-81.
Ovsyannikova, D., de Mello, V. O., & Inzlicht, M. (2025). Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans. Communications Psychology, 3(1), 4.

References
Alter, A. L., Oppenheimer, D. M., Epley, N., & Eyre, R. N. (2007). Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(4), 569–576.
Aarts, H., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2003). The silence of the library: Environment, situational norm, and social behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(1), 18–28.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment. Cognition, 2(2), 243–256.
Resnick, B. (2018, June 13). The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. Vox.
Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. University of Minnesota Press.

In this special Christmas episode, Helen’s annual Guru Quiz returns, lightly dusted with Trump, podcast tours, and the unsettling realisation that the Guru-sphere and the MAGA-sphere have quietly fused into a single, monetised, vibes-based organism.
That's right, the regular decoding team are joined by renowned journalist, author, podcaster... and occasional DTG quiz master, Helen Lewis, who once again brings her festive cheer, an uncanny ability to identify exactly who will be unbearable next year, and a quiz designed to torture Matt.
Points are awarded, dignity is lost, and Matt briefly considers revising for the quiz before remembering that preparation has never helped him before.
The episode also covers MAGA and UK political manoeuvres, the movers and shakers of the Gurusphere in 2025, and a lament for the collapse of the ancient boundary between editorial content and hawking pants.
So join us for a festive episode about gurus, geniuses, authoritarian comedy festivals, and the slow erosion of shame. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night... and that includes you, Bubbles!
Links
Helen Lewis on Substack
Helen's Article on the Riyadh Comedy Festival
Helen's Article on Olivia Nuzzi's Book
The Genius Myth
That Dave Chappelle picture