Brett McKay founded The Art of Manliness in 2008 from a law school apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His first viral article, “How to Shave Like Your Grandpa,” hit the front page of Digg and crashed the site. He never took the bar. Eighteen years later, AoM remains the largest independent men’s interest site on the web, with over a thousand podcast episodes and a library of articles drawing on everything from Aristotle to schlocky mid-century ephemera that hasn’t been digitized and probably never will be. McKay studied classics at the University of Oklahoma, worked briefly for Thomson Reuters after law school, and quit after his first kid arrived. His wife Kate has co-written the site from the beginning.
McKay’s Substack, Dying Breed, launched in late 2024 and landed in the top 50 of Substack’s Culture category within its first year. It’s where he and Kate go deeper into media ecology and the kind of heavy philosophical and historical material that doesn’t fit AoM’s more practical format. We talked about starting a blog before Facebook pages existed, the Flanderization problem in online content, why most boys aren’t actually radicalized by Andrew Tate (most see him and left-wing counterparts as comic relief/background noise), the economics of competing against infinite content, and what serious writers can still do that LLMs can’t.
On Starting AoM in the Blogging Stone Age
McKay traces the origin to a Borders magazine rack during his 2L year.
“I was at the men’s magazine section reading magazines, not buying them. It’s why Borders went out of business. And I was like, these magazines, I don’t relate to them. It’s the same thing every month. How to get six pack abs. Sex tips.”
“I had been blogging a bit before that. I had a law school blog called the Frugal Law Student that had some success. Won the ABA best law student blog one year. And I was like, well, I can blog. I can start the men’s magazine that I’d want to read.”
The shaving article hit Digg, then Lifehacker, then Huffington Post.
“I remember being in Wills, Estates, and Trust not paying attention, and checking my stats, and my site crashed. I found out, yeah, this went on the front page of Digg.”
“By the time I graduated, I was making kind of enough where I could maybe make a living, but I was like, I can’t. I just spent three years and a lot of money getting a law degree. So I ended up working for Thomson Reuters. But then a year later, I had my kid, and I was like, I have to decide if I’m going to do this. So I decided to go all in on the blog.”
On the Flanderization of Internet Personalities
McKay’s explanation for how he’s avoided becoming a cartoon of himself over 18 years.
“It’s a whole Ned Flanders effect. They found out here’s his quirk, just ratchet that up. And I think you see a lot of times that’s what’s happened with people on the Internet. They find the thing that gets the attention, and they just lean into that. And that’s just not me.”
On Classical Manliness vs. the Cartoonish Kind
McKay studied classics as an undergrad and noticed the ancient and 19th-century writers talked about manliness in a fundamentally different register than late 20th-century men’s media.
“Whenever they talked about manliness, it wasn’t the sort of cartoonish way that people talked about it in the late 20th century. Manliness meant you’re just an all-around solid dude. People would compliment George Washington on his manliness, and it meant that he had this sort of comportment, this character, but also physical prowess.”
“My grandfather was a big inspiration. He worked for the U.S. Forest Service. He could go out with a pack horse for two weeks with nothing but a fishing rod and just survive. He was really handy, served in World War II. But he was just a really down-to-earth guy. And he was intellectually curious. He kept on reading books even when he was in his 90s. That’s the kind of guy I want to be.”
“The magazines, the stuff that’s out there, they’re not showing you how to be that kind of guy. And I just quickly discovered there was a lot of men out there who also felt the same way.”
On Staying Out of the Discourse
AoM predates the “gender discourse” wars by half a decade. McKay started publishing six or seven years before Gamergate, before the PUA wave crested, before MGTOW, before the current iteration of manosphere content.
“I’ve never been interested in that stuff. And consequently, we often get ignored because we’re not dropping any hot takes or anything like that. I’m old school. I’m very like my grandfather. He had his positions about life and things like that, but it wasn’t like his personality.”
“I don’t think it’s healthy for democracy for people to make politics their identity. It makes the stakes too high in any interaction that you have.”
“I’m very Johnny Carson-esque. I just want to provide useful info. I want to be useful for people and maybe entertaining and that’s it.”
On the revolving door of online panics:
“Before Gamergate, it was PUA, the pickup artist. Then men going their own way. And everyone thought, oh my gosh, this is it, this is terrible, what’s wrong with men? And it goes away. And then something else comes up. And now it’s this. And then people are freaking out about it, and then in a year they’ll forget about it, and then something else will come up.”
“I’m more interested in looking, okay, what’s the stuff that’s tried and true, that’s timeless, that’ll be relevant 20 years from now. I’m gonna stick to that.”
On the Gap Between Online Doom and Real Life
“In my lived experience, when I’m out there with regular people offline, I don’t see the stuff that people are talking about online. I see people just living their lives. Men and women getting together. A lot of them are doing well. Some of them have problems — that’s been like that since time immemorial.”
“The problem with the Internet is that it allows the minority of just cranks to all get together and be like, oh wow, I’m not the only one. And it gives the impression like there’s a ton of people like that. Well, no. I don’t think so. Most people are doing okay.”
McKay’s 15-year-old son watches Clavicular-type content. McKay asked him directly about its influence.
“I asked him, what do you and your friends actually think about this? He’s like, oh, they’re just clowns. We just — it’s just background comedy for them.”
On his son’s approach to dating:
“He said, not yet, because I just haven’t got to know any of these girls. He realized you can’t just decide this girl’s attractive — you have to actually know her personality, does she treat people with respect and kindness. I’m like, all right, you’re gonna do all right, kid.”
“If you read online stuff, you get the impression like all these boys do is think about their value in the sexual marketplace. I just don’t think most young men are thinking like that. If they’re watching that stuff, it’s a cartoon for them.”
On the Real Problem with Young Men
McKay works with teenagers at his church. The issues he see there aren’t radicalization.
“One of the biggest problems, it’s not so much like these young men are surging with hormones and doing crazy stuff. A lot of them, they’re almost anesthetized. They just don’t want to do anything. That’s the challenge — how do I get these young guys to have a bit of drive, have some ambition. When you and I were growing up, if you were bored, you went to go mix stuff up, to do something else, to go somewhere else.”
On Screens, Obsession, and the Golden Mean
“Because there’s no effort to find niche stuff, nothing’s niche anymore.”
On the male tendency toward obsessive fixation and the way screens have supercharged it:
“As a guy, you can get really into cranking on one thing. You could spend all day researching peptides and never taking them. You could be on YouTube commenting on everyone’s form without ever doing a rep.”
On What to Tell Your Kid About the Future
“My son asks me, Dad, what should I study in college? What should I do with my life? And I really — I tell him, I don’t know. I’m not sure what to tell you.”
“When I was in high school, I could ask my dad, what should I do? And he’d be like, well, you just apply for college and then you get a career, whatever you want to do, and you do that till you die. That’s not the world my son lives in.”
“I tell him, I’m figuring this out with you. If you have questions, we’ll have to figure it out together because I don’t know.”
On Gambling, Short-Term Thinking, and the Loss of Stewardship
“The online gambling among young men — it is terrible. Same with the crypto, the investing-as-gambling, the WallStreetBets type of stuff. These are young people who have lost any trust or hope, and they’ve said, well, my only ticket is a lottery ticket essentially.”
“One of the things I admire about those previous generations, they had a stewardship mindset. They were thinking about their children and their children’s children. Today we’re just thinking in quarters.”
On Competing Against Infinite Content
McKay’s podcast launched in 2009 and was once easily in Apple’s top 50 across the entire ecosystem.
“That’s not the case anymore. I’m lucky if I break a hundred in my category. There are podcasts backed by VC funding. They’ve got whole teams. I don’t have that.”
“I don’t think I could start the Art of Manliness today. I get people asking for advice, like, what do I need to do? I’m like, well, what you need to do is invent a time machine and go back to 2007 and start. There’s just too much competition for attention.”
“When I first started AoM, Facebook pages didn’t exist yet. Instagram didn’t exist yet. YouTube was just getting started. Pinterest didn’t exist.”
On AI, Writing, and What Humans Still Do
“I think what humans can do that AI still can’t do is that humans know how to ask the right questions. You can learn anything you want on a chatbot or LLM. But if you don’t know what to ask, you’re never going to know that stuff.”
“I’m constantly looking at the places that people aren’t, that the LLMs still aren’t looking at. Old magazines, old records, careful and close readings of things.”
“An LLM can crank out a how-to article on anything. But can you figure out how to make this how-to article personable, or present how to do something in a way that even an LLM wouldn’t think of?”
On the future of writing as a profession:
“We might be going back to the way writing was in the early 20th century, the 19th century. There weren’t really that many professional full-time writers. Most writers had a day job, they worked at a bank, they worked at a patent office, and then they wrote. They moonlighted.”
On the Swing Revival and Workout Music
The conversation detoured into the late-90s ska/swing revival: Squirrel Nut Zippers, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Royal Crown Revue, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy , et al.1 McKay’s been wearing out the Killers for workouts and committed on air to trying Squirrel Nut Zippers as lifting music (it works well for me!).
“When I was a kid, if you wanted to find that stuff, you had to go to some dank record store in downtown Oklahoma City and be around a bunch of weirdos and put your hands through all these CDs to find this stuff. Now, there’s no effort that you need to expend to find niche stuff.”
On Figuring It Out
“Going back to our history background, if you look at the long stream of history, other generations and societies have experienced what we’re experiencing. The railroad, the printing press, radio. You see all these disruptions and you’re like, this is the end of the world! But then people slowly figure it out. For the most part, people just figure it out day to day on their own.”
Brett McKay’s Art of Manliness has been publishing since 2008. Subscribe to Dying Breed for the deeper historical and philosophical work. He and Kate also discussed the first year of the Substack here.
The band I referenced that’s notable for covers is Me First and the Gimme Gimmes (listen to this number, for example).
