Interview With John Krotec of NeoMasculinity Solutions
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/21
John Krotec, co-founder of NeoMasculinity Solutions, is championing a new vision of masculinity focused on critical thinking and truth in the digital era. His initiative empowers men to embrace their roles as protectors and leaders while adapting to societal changes.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with John Krotec, co-founder of NeoMasculinity Solutions. First of all, every new idea has an inspiration. What was the origin of this initiative?
John Krotec: Thank you for having me, Scott. That is a great question. I did not know it at the time. However, in the summer of the third grade, when I was still in elementary school, I was sexually assaulted during a neighbourhood sleepover. Children should never be exposed to something like that. Still, I was already starting to question masculinity, human relationships, and trust. That was likely the foundational experience. I have been trying to figure out questions about human interactions all my life. What is the role of masculinity? What is the role of femininity? The roots of this initiative were born from that pain.
That is where it started. Later on, as I evolved — do we ever truly evolve? — as I got older, I began to find my place in the world. I was very successful, went off to school, and ran a successful business for a couple of decades. Then, I was involved in a traumatic brain injury accident. I do not recommend this — I was drinking and driving. Thankfully, I did not hurt anyone else, but I did hurt myself. That forced me to confront the dark, dirty secret I had been hiding for over 40 years. I finally integrated all that pain and questions and developed observational skills about human interaction that I had never considered before.
Let us fast forward a decade. It is an understatement to say that humans are now subjected to massive amounts of information. 24/7, 365 days a year, people are bombarded with various information, much of it unreliable. We are in a digital age of rapid-fire information. You see this as a journalist. You understand what is going on. I love that you and your colleagues are always searching for the truth.
What do you see when you look at societal issues beyond the information bombardment? Significant leadership issues are happening in the country, particularly with masculine leadership roles. We can debate the reasons, but it is evident. More recently, it seems like the family unit is under attack. The old traditions of patriarchy and similar structures are being aggressively challenged by ideological spin. And then you have men — when the word “masculinity” is mentioned, especially “neo-masculinity,” it is often preceded by the word “toxic.” For a while now, that has been the narrative. Even men, when they hear the term “masculinity,” immediately think of toxicity. We have researched bullying and ideology. It is a narrative designed to emasculate men.
Let us put that on the shelf for a moment, Scott. You are an intelligent guy. Consider this: Let us return to the time of sabre-toothed tigers and mastodons. Imagine all sitting in a cave — men, women, and children — with a fire going. We have just discovered fire.
We start by asking ourselves, traditionally, what the male role is. It is to protect his family from threats. So, suppose we are sitting in that cave, you and me, and we hear a sabre-toothed tiger. In that case, we grunt to each other, grab our spears, and go out to confront it, detoxing ourselves from fear for a short period to protect our families. As history has evolved, the mastodons and immediate threats have disappeared, but we have entered an information age.
Now, the new threats to our loved ones are information threats. We have identified five forms of unreliable information: misinformation, disinformation, misinformation, noisy information, and social media. And then we have AI.
So, those are the five forms of unreliable information. Then, we also have reliable information that allows us to find the truth. We are bombarded with all of this, and much confusion exists. We are in a time of great global uncertainty. In such times, people struggle — another understatement — to understand what is happening. For instance, if we take our information from Facebook, where we gather all of our news, chances are 90% of it is unreliable or has been manipulated in a way that confuses people.
Think about what you have been blessed with as a human being: intuition. The hair on your arms stands up when you hear something that sounds wrong. You get a gut feeling — “Holy cow, that does not sound right!” — you get goosebumps. That is your intuition.
Well, people are not tapping into their intuition. I am saying this rhetorically; they are not tapping into that. Instead, they are taking various forms of information at face value. This is creating division at levels we have never seen before. It is disrupting the family unit, the basic building block of any society. As a result, we see visceral hatred. If you and I were to talk, we would find more common ground than areas where we disagree. However, there is this visceral hatred, and humans are reactionary. Of course, this is all rhetorical. No one is doing due diligence in investigating the news they hear, searching for what is truthful, reliable, and credible.
So, you might ask, “Why is that?”
Well, when you divide people and break up the family, it creates an environment that makes it very easy to manipulate people’s freedoms, which can be taken away — the old conspiracy theory “they.” However, people in power, those who control our livelihoods, can divide us. The result is the loss of fundamental human rights and freedoms that we have been blessed with, which are nature-derived. We will not even get into its spiritual aspect. So, that is a long answer to a short question.
We decided to create an elementary handbook, a four-by-six-inch pocketbook, that we could put into the hands of men and women globally to give them the essential tools to evaluate information—not just on an intuitive level but also on a research level. The book explains the different types of information, where it comes from, who disseminates it, and the agenda.
We have developed the “Human Intuition Sniff Test.” It is a simple process that men and women can use to evaluate the type of information they encounter. The idea is to find the truth and empower men to be masculine and women to be feminine. There is a definition of “neo-masculinity” online, and I am not going to say who put that out there, but the definition…
Krotec: In general, if a man is to be masculine, he must embrace the changing social norms. That makes sense. However, what happens if that changing social norm is based on ideology and not on science, DNA, or things that are actual, concrete facts grounded in logic, reason, and even common sense?
Imagine empowering men globally to protect their families from unreliable information. We thought this would be an excellent global solution. We have it in English now and also in Spanish and German. We are working on Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, French, and Hebrew. We are preparing multiple language versions to distribute. We launched softly about two and a half weeks ago with this Sentinel Handbook.
Men need to become sentinels of information — essentially, gatekeepers or guards. The same goes for women; this is not exclusive to men. That is why we like the term “neo-masculine,” because a woman can be neo-masculine, too, which means she is protecting her loved ones. It is really that simple. These are gender roles that have been recognized and passed on for eons. It has nothing to do with sex; sex is a whole different category of discussion. This is a way to empower people to fulfill the roles nature defined for them.
Someone once asked me, “Where does transgender fit into this?” Well, anyone can be a follower of neo-masculinity. Anyone. Because it is fundamentally an information analysis system and an opportunity for people to empower themselves with fundamental knowledge to do what they need. Ultimately, it is about protecting their loved ones.
So, whether you live in a country or a city, are married with kids, or are in any situation, you first want to protect your loved ones from threats. If we strip it down, those roles are what humans do.
When it comes to violence, yes, there are toxic men, toxic women, and toxic people in general. We studied this intensely — for example, Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” and the “36 Stratagems,” 3,000-year-old Chinese philosophies on combat, not just physical combat. They also cover how to resolve conflicts within your family. We dissected all the different chapters: what you do in business and how you handle office politics. It does not always lead to violence. A true warrior — and still some out there — will draw their sword as a last resort.
We often hear, “Real men do not…”—but that is nonsense. Real men eat quiche, and so do real women. Yes, exactly. So, good for you. However, we have many hypotheses and truthful ways to live a life that forces have usurped. I am not a conspiracy guy; I know what I see. These forces have another purpose. Generally speaking, throughout history, it has always been about power and control over the lives of others.
Moreover, the people who seek that — those who will do anything for power — are weaker than the subjects they want to control because they are not fully capable of their emotional state. Nobody desires complete power and control over others unless there is a glitch in their mind or heart. This is not a judgment; it is just reality based on science.
I apologize for being so long-winded; I had a coffee a little while ago. That is where this came from. It had its roots in pain. The solution for me was to figure things out to help people. We have some knowledgeable people on our team, both men and women.
We are fully committed to a global movement to empower people with the tools to analyze information for truth. Suppose a man is to fulfill his role as a protector, a sentinel of information. In that case, these tools can be handy. If he hears something that is not based on science, seems untruthful, or does not even make common sense, he can reject it — not with violence, but with a mindset. “That is not true; there is no way.” For example, saying, “All Canadians have a lisp when they say certain words” — that is probably not a good example — or “All white people are racist.”
No, they are not. I know plenty of white people who are not racist. I am one of them. If we hear an ideological spin like that, more than likely, it is 100% propaganda. I am going to say, “No, that is not true. I am not going to buy that.” When I served in the military, we came from every walk of life, all skin colours. Let me tell you, we did not have time to be racist. If you were, you would have problems — not only on the battlefield but also in the garrison.
So, we hear these ideological spins and want to give men and women the tools to analyze them and determine what is truthful and what is not. You might like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and I might like the Pittsburgh Steelers. You and I could end up in a fight over games, scores, and players, but in that visceral hatred, we lose sight of the fact that we both love football.
We find ourselves in human history with so much debate and uncertainty. The hatred is at extreme levels, and propaganda is far beyond the scope of normality. The world needs leadership, and it needs men to step up. We cannot do it alone. Women have to join us, and we have to join them.
Does any of that make sense, Scott?
Jacobsen: Yes, so the core idea you are getting at, from the first response, is that you were acknowledging later that toxic men and women do exist. Typically, people think of violence, unified violence, anger, and so on as a poisonous personality type. That is what people generally refer to when they talk about “toxic masculinity” or a “toxic man.” However, at the start, you noted that “toxic” can have another interpretation: some people feel emasculated by it. That is another point of view on it.
So, you acknowledge that it is good to combat these things, but we must also be careful about how we apply that combat. You are more focused on finding people, particularly men, who can orient themselves around protecting those they love by acting as a filter for information.
We need proper information because we live in an information age dominated by an information-based propaganda system. With that in mind, we need people, whether men in families or otherwise, to adopt orientations that make them critical information analyzers.
This is especially true at various levels, whether dealing with misinformation, disinformation, misinformation, etc. It is also about ensuring that only reliable information gets through — or, as you did not explicitly say, sifting through the five types of wrong information to find any good parts that may exist. So that is the orientation. You want to go more comprehensive in scope, but you are starting small as an organization or movement.
You have a title, slogans, an image, a logo, music on the website, and so on. So, what are you orienting yourself toward in terms of early scope? Who is your target audience as you start this organization and get it going, particularly regarding developing critically thinking men?
Krotec: You are very intuitive and intelligent because you hit the nail on the head. One of our tenets is the “freedom of critical thought.” People might ask, “What does that mean?” Well, you can think freely and ask questions. We were taught the scientific method in school, encouraging us to ask questions. We were not supposed to take everything we were told as truth; we were supposed to question it. So, everyone can exercise this freedom of critical thought.
What we wanted to do takes this a step further. People often say that the biggest threat to propaganda is people who can think critically, think for themselves, and analyze what they are being told. Another intuitive point you made is finding the truth in misinformation, disinformation, or propaganda. That requires due diligence.
The greatest challenge is often the path of least resistance. When we take that path and do not exercise due diligence, we accept information as the truth and move on. When I was in grade school, high school, or college, I generally sensed that the news you were getting from journalists and news outlets was honest and truthful. Their job was to present the truth in their stories. That has shifted along the way. It has shifted even more in the digital age, where everything is computerized, and information can be accessed at the touch of a button. Now, we have AI-generated photographs and all sorts of things that can distort reality. We need to stay alert to stay alive.
The family is central; our hashtags are #Family, #Education, and #Truth. The family is the foundation of any society, anywhere on the planet. Traditional religions focus on the family. Even the UN, a bureaucratic, secular organization, has foundational documents that refer to the family as the fundamental unit of society. The conclusion is generally the same whether you come from a religious traditionalist or internationalist secular perspective.
Yes, we also have a law of science — the second law of thermodynamics. In layperson’s terms, it says that every system will eventually descend into chaos and disorder over time (since time is a constant). Systems degrade; it is a scientific law of the universe. Life is the only thing that keeps these systems in a state of flow or balance, particularly the human organism, which can think critically and devise solutions to fix broken systems. Some people believe this life force is the spiritual side, helping us escape these cycles of chaos that have existed since the beginning.
Organizations sometimes reach different conclusions, and that is a different discussion for another time. Sometimes, we do not know why we receive certain information or why it is presented to us in a certain way. One of the biggest current battles is over gender identity news and the information circulating about there being 30 or 40 genders. I saw something on Twitter the other day…
There was a man — or a man who thought he was a cow. He dressed up in a cow suit and was eating grass. Excuse me, Scott, but that form of mental aberration makes no sense. However, the sad part is that the algorithms allow that content to rise to the top. Some of these videos and things we see…
Suppose an alien were to land and see TikTok, for instance; those were the human beings they encountered immediately. What do you think they would think about the human race? You do not have to answer that. However, it is very… troubling.
This is not to digress, but the internet and social media have aggravated these aberrations. They have manifested people’s mental challenges, or whatever we want to call them. This is another thing: when it comes to algorithms and our studies on them, we have found that algorithms can be manipulated to distort the truth.
At one point, I Googled it and found a story about a man who pretended to be a cow in a milking competition. Oh my gosh, this guy was eating grass! It was labelled as satire, and Snopes confirmed that it was satire, but yes, this man was wearing a cow suit and doing it. It is the same guy who shows up in other contexts.
Social media often values posts that are valuable to society. Meanwhile, suppose you and I post something accurate or helpful to people. In that case, it sinks to the bottom while all these other things rise to the top based on algorithms coded by a human being. Why they would do that, I do not know. We can have different opinions on that.
Have you ever seen the movie “The Social Dilemma”?
Jacobsen: Is that the one about Facebook?
Krotec: Yes, it was about social media. They used Facebook as a case study, but it included developers of these social media platforms. They talked about how they do not let their kids use social media and explained how the algorithms work. That is just one source, but then there was Dr. Calder.
Jacobsen: Is that where they hire psychologists to help the algorithms be more effective by hijacking the reward system?
Krotec: Yes, exactly. It was an exciting movie. Then, you start to see the effects of information overload. We have studied the human brain and how it processes the intake of electrical synapses, what the brain does when it receives information, and the fact that the human organism cannot handle the massive amount of news. It is unbelievable.
A long time ago, there was a movie called “What the Bleep Do We Know?” That might be a good one for you to look into as part of your research.
Jacobsen: Oh, I remember that one. Yes, that was a long time ago.
Krotec: That was a good movie because they got brilliant people — real brainiacs — and asked them about life. None of them could dispute the fact that there was something they could not explain. Moreover, that might have been the spiritual side of the human organism. There were some things they could not deny. These were astrophysicists, biologists, and other brilliant scientists. Of course, the religious community often wants people to think that science is somehow evil. I have heard that from many different religious organizations and beliefs — “Stay away from science!”
However, science is the universe. If we want to discuss this further, I did a TEDx talk called “The Male Leadership Crisis and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” It touches upon leadership in a way that, if you critically think about it, makes sense. Somehow, we have stepped outside of our roles as human organisms.
I can speak from my life; I sometimes thought I knew everything. Then, there were times when I realized I knew nothing. However, somewhere in between, there is a sense of reality and a practice of humility that everyone on this planet — I do not care what culture they come from, whether it is Canada, the United States, or Brazil — we all have.
Human capabilities and human needs — food, shelter, the basics. If we were to take a step back and look at each other as fellow human beings, we would realize that I did not ask to be born, and you did not ask to be born. We are all struggling with many of the same issues — different countries and different leadership.
People who lead those conversations or groups could do a lot to improve the human condition positively. I am not a soothsayer of doom. I have had an exciting and blessed life in that I have had more opportunities than the average person. Most Canadians I know fall into that realm, too. There has been much disparity.
Many disparate groups have been stepped on throughout world history. We cannot rectify what has already been done; it is in the past. We can only affect today and, hopefully, tomorrow if we are still around. It sounds very idealistic, but the reality is that if we all become idealistic, we all can do something good—not only for ourselves but in an unselfish way for our families, our communities, our countries, our states or provinces, and this planet.
I refuse to believe that what is happening in today’s world, with so much visceral hatred, is the end game. I do not see it that way. I do not know much about the WEF, but I see and read things. We are not headed for a one-world government. Something like that is impossible because of all the various groups on the planet. We already have universalized intergovernmental systems like the United Nations or the World Health Organization, which have long existed. The United Nations, for example, has been around longer than you and I have been alive since World War Two.
Jacobsen: Yes, and World War One, actually, with the League of Nations.
Krotec: People talk about globalism in these kinds of organizations, but they already exist. It is democratic, where a member state has a vote in various bodies of the United Nations. So, people fear it might happen, but it is already happening.
Even if you take socialism, communism, or capitalism — or variants of these systems — we could discuss governance. Still, history shows that none of these systems has worked 100% according to what they were designed to do. All three systems have cases where certain groups are boxed out due to human nature.
If you look at Lenin and Marx’s early writings, like “The Communist Manifesto,” these guys were in college; they had never run a business but had an interesting concept. By human nature, there will always be people who contribute to the system, people who need help, and people who do not need help and do not contribute. That has always been a problem in socialism, communism, and even capitalism on both large and small scales. Canada, for example, has capitalism but social safety nets to offset the opposing extremes. A lot of Western European countries are like that, too. So your point is correct; they do not exist in silos. All these systems, to some degree, coexist simultaneously.
Jacobsen: Yes, that is true.
Krotec: I am not here to take a political stand, but let me use an example. We will wrap up in two minutes, so keep it brief. Elon Musk did that thing last night with Donald Trump, right?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Krotec: But then the EU Commissioner for Belgium threatened to arrest Elon Musk for putting out disinformation. That would be like me sending an email to Trudeau saying, “If you do not run things the way we want in America, we are going to come to Canada and rescue you.” We are seeing such outrageous behaviour. However, the point is that if we stick to something positive, we will achieve positive results.
Jacobsen: So, what is your one-minute statement?
Krotec: Think for yourself, stand up, and reject.
Reject misinformation, reject threats to your family — incredibly informational threats. Fulfill your role; do not be toxic; be smart. Use the intelligence you are blessed with to do what you need to protect what you love, primarily your family and the people you care about. If we can do that alongside women, we could have one fantastic planet, couldn’t we? We could work together and make things better for everyone, families included.
Think about your parents, your parents. Think about the values they instilled in you. I will leave it at that.
Jacobsen: So, I will get this as a transcript for you, and then we can polish it up, too, if you like.
Krotec: Scott, I respect your decision-making and your position. Do what you do, man. You have got to roll with it all. You are a journalist first and foremost, and truth is always in your billfold.
Jacobsen: Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
Krotec: I appreciate you, man. I appreciate Canada, too. We love you guys.
Jacobsen: Thanks, John.
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