Is an Authentic Intelligence made by 680 men an oxymoron?

The Dadosphere, is an experiment in shared experience, and like a real man, it won't give you the answer you want, it will tell you about itself, it's called Adjacent Honesty.

Instead of my usual re-ravelling of emotional threads dressed up as a newsletter, I’ve built something more useful, interesting and funnier than anything I’d write. Which pains me to admit. Especially the funnier bit.

It’s called The Dadosphere: an experiment in authentic intelligence, co-authored by 680 real men (and counting). No slop, no hallucinating, no bloody em-dashes.

Ask it anything about being, or becoming, a man. And just like a man, it won’t give you the answer you want. It’ll tell you about its own experience, but hopefully, its honest help will help you reach a better one of your own.

Or, to be specific, it’ll match one of 4,364 answers 680 men have given anonymously, indexed semantically and thematically across a database. Sounds pretty sexy, huh?

When asked about the worst advice they’ve ever received, men consistently said ‘man up’, or ‘bury your emotions’. And when I say consistently, I mean all of them.

Ask men the worst advice they ever got and it’s “man up” or “bury your emotions,” every. Single. Time.

Ask what they’d most like to pass on, or the question they’ve never dared ask, and it gets a lot more surprising.

One man’s response to What sort of man are you trying to become:

“I’d like to be more like Bandit from Bluey. What job does he even have? He spends his whole life playing with the kids.”

Amen to that, brother.

This all began with Hard As Nails, where the data kept landing on fatherhood, and where 80% of the men said they’re carrying something heavy with nowhere to put it.

So, being a man with a weakness for turning feelings into projects, I ran a literature review through NotebookLM, found the seven themes that sit behind men’s mental health, suicide and violence against women, asked hundreds of men about them, and got Claude to build the thing that matches it all up.

Here’s an example of how it works… This is me typing in a question that’s often on my somewhat distractible mind…

Here’s my question… How to be more present.

And then here’s the experience share, drawn from the database of four and a bit thousand, matched to the themes in my question, to prompt a bit of reflection…

Here’s the anonymous experience share matched to my question: Adjacent Honesty

I ran it past Dan Flanagan of Dad La Soul, who told me the dad space needs connecting, not cluttering, so I asked the men submitting experience to recommend services too, and now there’s a dad-irectory: three matched recommendations with every answer.

And here’s the three resources it then linked me to based on the same themes

Now, I could bang on about being a father of three who wants a dad-led resistance to the manosphere’s grift. I could go on about my own dead father (again), and whether building a digital one to ask questions of is something I should raise in therapy.

I could explain Adjacent Honesty, and why men will share far more sideways than they ever will through the horror of eye contact. I could, in other words, write you the exact newsletter I just promised not to.

But everything in the Dadosphere is wiser, funnier and more searchable than me, including this nice little mood film, me Claude and Runway made.

My reflections are in there, although the first got rejected by my own safeguarding policy for being “advice.” You’ll never know which are mine. It’s all anonymous.

So don’t read me. Go and ask: thedadosphere.com

Happy Father’s Day.

If you know a father figure and like the idea, please feel free to forward it to them:

Dear XX
I don't say this enough, and I never quite know how: I think you do a genuinely good job of it, amongst all the chaos of life. You've been a father figure to more people than you realise, and they're grateful even when they don't say so. So, this Father's Day, because I know you secretly love having your opinion asked, I'd like to share some of your wisdom. There's an experiment called The Dadosphere. Answer five questions (ten minutes, totally anonymous) and your lived experience joins a bank of honest advice for the 80% of men quietly carrying something they've never known who to ask. You're wise, flawed, wonderful and occasionally an idiot, which is to say exactly like the best men I know. The world could do with a bit of you in it. → thedadosphere.com




Thedadosphere.com literally is an experiment, made in spare time, but it touches on serious themes. If you have any feedback, observations, concerns or criticisms that could help improve it, please don’t hesitate to reply or reach out. Sam