The Quintessential Gentleman Launches a New Podcast Series Where Black Men Are Heard, Seen, and Celebrated in Full

Quintessentially Speaking is not just another podcast with Black men holding microphones. It is a deliberate, culture-forward series built on a specific premise: that Black men deserve a space where they are heard in full color, not flattened, not filtered, and not presented through the lens of trauma or dysfunction that dominates too much of the media landscape that claims to represent them.

Hosted by Eric Keith, founder of The Quintessential Gentleman, and co-host Jonathan Wells, Team USA alum, Big Ten champion, and Hallmark reality television personality, the show is produced by NAACP Award-winning producer Garrick Wade with story producer Justin Jenkins. It launches as the audio extension of everything The Quintessential Gentleman has been building since 2016: a platform where Black male excellence is not the exception but the entire point.

The debut episode features just the two hosts, Eric and Jonathan, getting into it with each other first, setting the foundation before the guests arrive. Starting with episode two, the show brings in some of the most compelling voices in culture, politics, wellness, and entrepreneurship for conversations that go exactly where this platform was built to go.

“We are not going to be pitting Black men against Black women because I’m not interested in that,” Keith said in the debut episode, setting the tone before the first real conversation even began. It’s not just a content disclaimer. It’s a values statement, an early signal of what the show would not be, in service of being clear about what it would.

In the debut episode, Keith opened up about the origin of The Quintessential Gentleman itself, a story that is both personal and representative of a gap in how Black men have been shown in American media. He launched the platform in 2016 because he was tired of the dominant depictions: the school-to-prison pipeline, absentee fathers, Black men being killed by police on cellphone footage shared across social media.

None of those images reflected the men he actually knew.

“I wanted to create a space for Black men exclusively to either read about themselves, success stories, lifestyle,” Keith said. “I just wanted to show Black men excellence. The reason is because during that time, there were so many different things that were depicting Black men in the media as, you know, one, Black men going to jail … I was so tired of seeing all of those depictions of Black men, knowing that me, my friend group, my father, my uncle, the people that I know don’t live like that.”

The Quintessential Gentleman was his third business. He was 27 years old and living in New York, trying to figure out what kind of space he could build that would celebrate the men he actually knew.

The dynamic between Keith and Wells gives the show its texture. Keith is the cultural architect, the entrepreneur, creative executive, and community builder who built The Quintessential Gentleman from the ground up to over 100,000 Instagram followers, 100,000 monthly website visitors, and 20 million social media impressions. Wells is the athlete who became something else: a man who navigated predominantly white spaces while still working out what Blackness meant for him personally.

Quintessentially Speaking is built to go deep on topics that sit at the intersection of culture, identity, and lived experience for Black men in 2026. The debut episode touches on vulnerability, emotional growth, identity in predominantly white spaces, the complexity of family dynamics, and what it means to build something from nothing over and over again.

Future episodes will expand into entrepreneurship, wellness, social impact, and entertainment through the guests the show has assembled for its first season.

Season one will feature actor Jimmy Akingbola, whose credits span British and American television; political strategist Kamau Marshall, one of the most respected voices in progressive politics; Dr. Brian Nwannunu, bringing perspectives on wellness and identity; and entrepreneur Rodney Williams, whose career at the intersection of business and culture reflects the audience the show is built for.

Each guest brings a different dimension of Black male experience into the conversation, which is precisely the point.

“I do not want this to be another group of Black men that got podcast mics,” Keith said in the debut episode. “But it’s just important for us to have a real conversation about some real topics and the real things we have going on.”

Quintessentially Speaking is available now. New episodes drop regularly on all major podcast platforms. Listen below.

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