As the Manosphere Booms, Lori Jean Glass Runs a $5,000 ‘Man Camp’ in Sonoma Where a Mostly-Female Team Coaches Men in Vulnerability
· Thought Catalog
Updated 4 hours ago, July 6, 2026
For more than $5,000 a head, men spend five days in Sonoma, California doing morning yoga, one-on-one sessions, art therapy and roleplay at a retreat the life coach Lori Jean Glass calls a “man camp.” Her roster of roughly two dozen coaches is mostly women. CNN, which embedded reporters in the camp, called it “a counterweight to the manosphere,” noting that where those influencers preach strength, Glass promotes vulnerability.
CNN followed three grieving men through the program, among them Matt Sanders, a 61-year-old counselor mourning his father, who admits that same anger pulls at him too. “I really do feel a rage. A deeper rage,” he said. “It’s still a locker room out there. But now, it feels like it’s everywhere.” His verdict on the camp: “Men need this. Badly.”
Lori Jean Glass is a life coach, not a licensed therapist, and for over a decade she’s run mental-health retreats and worked with hundreds of men. Her program, Pivot, offers a five-day, male-only retreat in Sonoma that she calls a man camp, and the roughly two dozen coaches who run it are mostly women.
The days run on morning yoga, one-on-one sessions, group exercises, art therapy and roleplay, built around transactional analysis, the idea that childhood, adolescence and adulthood shape how we relate to ourselves. The signature exercise, “running the bases,” turns a baseball diamond into four life stages, and a participant speaks from each one.
CNN, which called the camp a counterweight to the manosphere, framed the stakes this way: for every five men who enter Glass’s camp, tens of millions watch influencers like Andrew Tate, Adin Ross and Myron Gaines, who preach making money, getting ripped and emotionally dominating their wives and girlfriends. Glass sees the fallout up close. “Men are being misunderstood as a result of it,” she said. “The gender war feels like a civil war to me.”
CNN lays out the numbers she’s working against. Gallup found that 1 in 4 young American men felt lonely the previous day. The Survey Center on American Life, part of the American Enterprise Institute, reported that about 1 in 6 men say they have no close friends, five times more than three decades earlier. And while men are less likely than women to be diagnosed with depression, they’re about four times more likely to die by suicide.
CNN reporters Rob Picheta and David Culver embedded in the camp, but only after Glass required them to go through the process themselves. They cried, bonded and shared alongside three grieving men: Matt Sanders, 61, a counselor from Tucson mourning his father, the former Buffalo Bills player and college coach Sam Sanders, who died this year; Jason Owens, 52, whose wife Sara died of breast cancer in October; and Geoff Granger, 42, anxious about his kids leaving for college.
Glass knows the terrain personally. She survived a suicide attempt in 1997 and lost her mother to suicide, and she’s spent the years since trying to hand other people a way through. She recently turned Pivot into a nonprofit, hoping to win grants and offer scholarships so the camp isn’t only for rich men. “I wish we could teach this in every junior high school across the country,” she said. “I want this to live beyond me.”
The essay one of the embedded reporters wrote landed on the same idea from the other direction: the “sphere” in manosphere is really a vacuum, millions of men with nowhere in person to go. “Men are missing men,” coach Deb Reid said.
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