Open YouTube on any given night and the algorithm will serve you a buffet of men telling women hard truths. Some of it is wise. Some of it is cruel. A lot of it is built to make you angry enough to keep watching.

Two names come up again and again: Tony Robbins and the late Kevin Samuels. Both men looked women in the eye and challenged what they expect from men. Both got blunt. Both took heat from women. Yet the public remembers them very differently. Tony still fills arenas. Kevin, who died in May 2022, remains one of the most polarizing voices in the history of online dating advice.

So why the difference? And more important, brother, what can you take from it as you rebuild your life after divorce?

Kevin Samuels started out talking to men. He built his business as an image consultant for men who wanted an upgrade. His early YouTube videos had titles like “Get Yourself Together” and “Reinvent Yourself,” and one told Black men to cut their hair or stay at the bottom. He went after men who chased women with no plan and no backbone. Those videos drew modest audiences.

Then on December 9, 2020, he posted a Zoom conversation with a successful North Carolina business owner named Dell and told her she was “average at best.” It became his first video to pass a million views. His channel took off, and his content shifted toward women.

Samuels had his own explanation for that. In a 2021 interview with VladTV, he said, “People don’t tell women the truth these days. We have no problem telling average men you ain’t crap.”

A lot of men heard that and nodded. They’d spent years hearing what was wrong with them. Here was a man saying hard things to the other side of the room.

His critics read the same story another way. A column in the South Florida Times argued that YouTube analytics and viral fame pushed him further down that road: the videos about women paid, so he made more of them. Over time, even some of his own followers said he went easier on men. When he told men who wouldn’t pay for a date to keep their broke selves at home, MadameNoire covered it as a rare moment.

Many women, and especially Black women, felt he was aiming at them. He told women who reached 35 unmarried that they were “leftover.” He rated women’s looks on camera. The Root accused him of building a following on contempt for women and pointed out that he was twice divorced while setting standards for everyone else.

After his death, NBC News reported on how sharply the community split over him. Matchmaker Julie Wadley explained that many Black men saw him as a hero because he said to women what most men weren’t saying, while many others found him demeaning. NBC also spoke with a Houston man who watched Samuels with his wife of 11 years. She often agreed with him.

Supporters and critics both had evidence on their side. He gave some people advice they needed. He also hurt people who came to him looking for help.

Tony Robbins has said plenty to women that would make a room squirm. He teaches that every relationship runs on the pull between masculine and feminine energy. On The Tony Robbins Podcast, he has described how women under stress can take on masculine energy as protection, which can shut down the very leadership they say they want from a man. He curses. He gets in people’s faces. He tells hard truths to people who paid good money to hear something softer.

And he has been burned for it. In 2018, at one of his “Unleash the Power Within” seminars, he suggested that some women used the #MeToo movement to feel significant through victimhood. An audience member named Nanine McCool, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, stood up and challenged him. Video of the exchange went viral, and #MeToo founder Tarana Burke publicly criticized him. Within weeks Robbins apologized and said he still had much to learn.

So what separates the two men in the public’s eyes? A few things stand out.

He confronts men just as hard. Men at his events get called out for ego, for checking out at home, and for failing to lead with love.

He teaches with a woman beside him. Tony and his wife, Sage, run relationship interventions together. When a woman sits in the hot seat, she hears a woman’s voice in the room too.

He frames it as one relationship with two people in it. When he challenges a woman, the goal he says out loud is a better relationship for both partners.

He owned it when he crossed the line. The 2018 apology didn’t end the criticism. It did show he was willing to listen.

Relationship researcher John Gottman spent decades studying couples in his lab at the University of Washington. One of his most famous findings, published with Sybil Carrère in the journal Family Process in 1999, showed that how a couple behaved in the first three minutes of a conflict discussion predicted whether they would divorce. Gottman also found that contempt is the single strongest predictor of divorce.

In plain terms, people can take a hard truth when they feel respected. When they feel mocked, they armor up, and nothing gets through.

That’s where most people draw the line between these two men. Tony’s toughest moments with women usually come with the belief that she can change and that the relationship is worth saving. Kevin’s most viral moments often ended with a woman ranked and dismissed.

To be fair, Kevin’s supporters would say his bluntness was respect. He treated women as grown adults who could handle the truth, and some women thanked him for it. That’s worth sitting with. Yet the women who walked away hurt far outnumbered the ones who walked away helped. When you set out to change someone and they end up shutting down instead, the way you said it is a big part of the problem.

Here’s the part that hits closest to home for us.

In 2021, researchers Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel, and Sander van der Linden published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called “Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media.” Posts attacking the other side got shared far more than posts about one’s own side. A separate 2021 study led by William Brady at Yale, published in Science Advances, found that people who got likes and shares for outraged posts went on to post more outrage.

The machine rewards the creator for heat. It rewards you with a hit of feeling right. And a recently divorced man carrying fresh wounds is its favorite customer.

So ask yourself after you close the video: Do I feel more capable of loving someone well? Or do I just feel more justified?

Some of what Tony and Kevin said is true. Some women carry unrealistic expectations of men. So do some men about women. Some women resist being led, and some men never earned the right to lead. Some marriages had emotional cruelty running one way, and plenty had it running both ways. A man who wants a real comeback can hear all of that without letting any of it become his excuse.

Every great coach has yelled at a player. The players who grew were the ones who knew the coach believed in them. Tough love works when the person on the receiving end can feel both parts.

Tony Robbins and Kevin Samuels both put hard truths on the table. What you do with them is up to you. Take the truth. Leave the contempt. Then go have the conversation that scares you a little.

Your move, brother.