.Ask a parent what's going on with their Gen Z son, and you'll usually get a shrug, a worry, or both. On this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, host Marc Azoulay reconnects with an old friend, Joanna Lilley. She is a therapeutic consultant and host of the podcast Success is Subjective. She spends her days working directly with young adults navigating exactly this territory.

Joanna explains what a therapeutic consultant actually does (spoiler: it's not crisis intervention, and it's not long-term therapy either), then walks through what she's seeing across hundreds of conversations with Gen Z men: rising anxiety, isolation, screen-fueled body dysmorphia, and a wave of self-diagnosed mental health labels borrowed from 30-second TikTok clips. The conversation gets into the real danger of medicating a teenager based on an Instagram diagnosis, why young men are splitting into two extremes (rejecting masculinity entirely or diving headfirst into the manosphere), and why Joanna thinks the fix isn't more labels or more information, it's teaching young people how to actually think through a problem. It closes with concrete, practical advice for any parent wondering how to talk to their son about masculinity, gender, and mental health without shutting the conversation down.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

Follow us on social media: https://mtr.bio/mens-therapy-online.

Connect with JoannaWebsite: https://lilleyconsulting.com/ Resources MentionedSuccess is Subjective Podcast:https://www.successissubjective.org/ Individual Therapy:https://menstherapy.online/?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Service&utm_campaign=Individual_TherapyMen’s grouphttps://menstherapy.online/mens-groups/?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Service&utm_campaign=Mens_GroupsMTO Slackhttps://menstherapy.online/slack/?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Slack_CTA&utm_campaign=MTO_SlackWebsite:https://menstherapy.online/

Walk into a CrossFit box at 6 a.m. and you'll see men doing more than chasing a workout PR. According to men's coach and ex-pastor Jason Lyle, they're doing therapy without calling it that. On this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, host Marc Azoulay sits down with Jason, who spent ten years owning a CrossFit gym and now runs Sacred Grit, a men's coaching practice built around retreats, nervous system work, and one very cold morning ritual.

The conversation unpacks why modern comfort has left men's nervous systems overloaded and under-challenged, and why hard physical practices like CrossFit, cold water immersion, and breathwork aren't really about fitness at all, they're about teaching the body how to stay regulated under stress. Jason walks through the biology of the amygdala hijack, why men can run a hundred-mile trail race but freeze up in a hard conversation with their partner, and why regulation without honest self-examination just becomes another way to avoid the real work. It closes with Jason's take on where masculinity goes from here, and why he thinks accountability and honesty, not apology, are what get men there.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

Follow us on social media: https://mtr.bio/mens-therapy-online.

Connect with Jason

Website: https://thesacredgrit.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lyle.jason/

Resources Mentioned

The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter: https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Reclaim/dp/0593138767

Wild at Heart by John Eldredge: https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Heart-Revised-Updated-Discovering/dp/1400200393

Individual Therapy: https://menstherapy.online/?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Service&utm_campaign=Individual_Therapy

Men’s group: https://menstherapy.online/mens-groups/?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Service&utm_campaign=Mens_Groups

MTO Slack: https://menstherapy.online/slack/?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Slack_CTA&utm_campaign=MTO_Slack

Website: https://menstherapy.online/

Every time a testosterone clinic pops up along the highway, third-generation chiropractor Dr. Kyle Hulsebus gets the same question from patients: "Doc, is it low testosterone?" After years of testing men from their 20s to their 80s, his answer is almost always no. On this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, host Marc Azoulay sits down with Dr. Kyle to unpack why testosterone myths have become the default explanation for a much deeper problem: the existential crisis that quietly hits men around 40, when the life they built no longer feels like a fit.

Dr. Kyle created the 40 Over 40 program, a scattered mix of physical, mental, spiritual, and somatic practices for men entering midlife, deliberately unorganized because he doesn't believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. The conversation covers the two archetypes he sees most in his practice (the man who feels behind in life, and the man who did everything "right" yet still feels hollow), why he's skeptical of the term toxic masculinity, and why breathwork, not bloodwork, is where he tells almost everyone to start. It closes with a personal story about a friend who appeared to have it all and died by suicide, and what that taught Dr. Kyle about chasing an objective versus chasing a fantasy.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

Follow us on social media: https://mtr.bio/mens-therapy-online.

There's a pattern Coach Kevin Voisin keeps running into with his highest-performing clients: guys who can build a hundred-million-dollar business without blinking, then go home and have no idea how to navigate a conversation with their wife. The gap between those two skill sets, he says, comes down to the male ego, the same mental tool that sharpens ambition and decision-making early in life, but which, left unexamined, quietly hardens into a kind of prison most successful men don't even know they're living inside.

On this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay sits down with Kevin Voisin, who coaches high-performing men and executives through his Live Legend system. He's spoken on five continents about helping driven men get out of their own way, and he's currently building an app to bring that work to more people at scale. The conversation ranges from psychology to biology to a few unconventional teachers along the way, a study on cuttlefish mating behaviour, a season of the Netflix survival show Alone, a story about pushing his son's shoulder instead of spanking him, but it keeps circling back to one idea: ego, in the beginning, is what lets a man become someone. Left unchecked, it's what keeps him from becoming anyone else.

Voisin breaks a man's life down into five areas: fitness, faith, family, finance, and fun and pictures each one as either an engine pushing him forward or an anchor dragging him down. Most high-achieving men, he's found, have three strong engines and two anchors quietly sitting on the bottom, and their instinct when life slows down is almost always to add more engines instead of lifting the anchor. He also argues that "decision velocity is greater than decision accuracy," that perfectionism works like a horizon line the mind invents to help it navigate useful, but never something you can actually reach and that anger isn't an emotion men should starve into submission. It's energy that needs a healthy outlet, or it eventually finds an unhealthy one.

This isn't a takedown of ambition or a call to soften up. It's a look at why so many capable, accomplished men feel quietly stuck, and a practical map for getting the parts of their life that aren't working back in motion without blowing up the parts that are.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

Follow us on social media: https://mtr.bio/mens-therapy-online.

In 2025, Americans legally wagered more than $165 billion on sports, money moving through an industry that, outside of Nevada, didn't legally exist until 2018. Somewhere inside that number is a much harder one to see: how much of it isn't entertainment at all, but sports betting addiction quietly working its way through a generation of men who never thought they had a gambling problem. That's where this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast begins.

Marc Azoulay sits down with Dr. Michael Zhang. He is a psychologist who spent years treating gambling-related harm clinically before founding Incumental, a digital recovery support app built specifically for people in the thick of a gambling problem. The conversation moves fast, because the landscape it's describing is moving fast. Since the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, the activity has expanded from a Nevada-only market capped at roughly $5 billion a year to nationwide legal wagering near $167 billion last year alone about $150 billion of which gets paid back out, leaving roughly $17 billion in industry revenue, on top of another $18 billion or so collected annually in state gambling taxes.

This isn't just casinos and sportsbooks anymore, either. Dr. Zhang walks through how the same psychological mechanics now show up in prediction markets, cryptocurrency and CFD trading, and loot boxes built into video games aimed at kids, an entire ecosystem, as he puts it, that increasingly looks "set up to turn most people into gamblers."

The episode works through some of the key realities he's seen firsthand:

• An estimated one in three men under 30 bet on sports, and roughly one in three of those men show signs of a real problem with it.

• The actual test for a problem isn't whether someone wins or loses on a given night. It's whether, tracked over time, they're net negative, chasing those losses, and unable to stop even when they want to.

• Across the hundreds of clients Dr. Zhang has treated, average lifetime gambling losses run well over $100,000, with some in the hundreds of thousands and a few in the millions.

• Most of those clients also carried a comorbid depression or anxiety diagnosis that was largely driven by the gambling itself. When the gambling resolved, so did much of the mental health burden.

• At its root, problem gambling is rarely about the money. It's about self-worth. Gambling supplies a fast, fake "boost," when what a person actually needs is steady, internal "worth."

There's a saying that's common in recovery communities that Marc brings up midway through the conversation: addiction is sexy, and recovery is ugly. The gambling industry has spent a decade building frictionless, personalized, endlessly accessible products. Recovery support, by comparison, has often been clunky, stigmatized, and reactive, something you find only after you've already hit bottom, then found a lower bottom underneath that. Dr. Zhang's bet with Incumental is that recovery has to borrow the same tech-forward playbook the betting industry uses, just pointed in the opposite direction: short, guided audio sessions built to interrupt an urge in the moment it's happening, and an anonymous peer community partly staffed by people with lived experience who want to give back.

This episode isn't about shaming men who place a bet on a Sunday afternoon. It's about naming what happens when an entire industry is built on the premise that a casual bettor becomes a lifelong customer and giving men a real, accessible off-ramp before the losses end up defining the next decade of their lives.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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The numbers are hard to sit with. In the most recent year for which data were available, 53% of men who died in the United States did so before the age of 75. Not in a developing country. Not a century ago. Right now, in one of the wealthiest nations on earth, the majority of men are dying before they should. And a significant portion of those deaths are preventable.

That is where this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast begins. Marc Azoulay sits down with Peter Fisher and Brian P. Heilman. They are researchers and co-authors of Movember's landmark report, The Real Face of Men's Health. It is the most comprehensive examination of men's health in the United States in recent memory. The report draws on national health data, a survey of over 4,000 men about their primary care experiences, and a separate survey of informal caregivers, spouses, family members, and close friends, who quietly manage the health of the men in their lives. What it uncovers is a picture that is equal parts alarming and clarifying.

The male loneliness epidemic is not just a talking point. It is a measurable health crisis. The number of men who report having even one close friend has fallen so sharply over the past two decades that today, only one in eight men would say they have a close friend at all. Not many friends. Any close friend. And that isolation does not stay emotional. It gets physical. It becomes fatal.

The episode works through the key findings from the report:

• Suicide ranks fourth as a cause of premature death for men in the US, with men dying by suicide four times more often than women.

• White men show a uniquely persistent suicide risk that does not decline with age the way it does for every other racial and ethnic group

• Accidental deaths, substance use, and risky behavior connect directly back to masculine norms that discourage men from seeking help before they hit a wall.

• Black men face a disproportionately higher lifetime risk of prostate cancer, with community-level outreach still failing to reach them early enough.

• But the conversation does not stop at what is going wrong. It also challenges a framing that has dominated the field for years.

The phrase "toxic masculinity" was meant to open a door. For a lot of men, it shut one. When 80% of the research tools used to study masculinity measure it as a deficit, where scoring higher means worse health outcomes, it creates a research environment, and eventually a cultural one, where being a man is framed almost entirely as a problem to manage. Men feel lectured, not engaged. They disengage from care rather than move toward it.

Peter and Brian are working to change that. Their team at Movember is currently developing the Healthy Manhood Index. It is a new measurement tool built around strength-based, aspirational ideas of what it means to be a man, not just a catalogue of behaviors to avoid. The goal is simple but significant: higher scores should mean better health. Masculinity should point toward something worth becoming, not just something to dismantle.

The episode closes with concrete, actionable steps — for men themselves, for the people who love them, and for anyone paying attention to what is quietly happening at the community and policy level. The ALEC method. The 988 crisis line. The Men and Mind clinical training program launching in California. The Men Sheds model. State-level task forces in Florida, Utah, and Tennessee doing real work that national conversation has not yet caught up to.

This episode is not about shaming men for being men. It is about taking seriously what it costs when men's health is treated as an afterthought. And what becomes possible when we finally stop accepting early death as inevitable.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Something is off for Gen Z men right now. It can look like confidence on the surface, online presence, gym routines, and a few matches on the apps. But underneath all of that, there is often a young man who does not know who he is, who feels invisible in his own friendships, and who is watching his dating life go nowhere without understanding why.

If you have a question for Marc you can email us at [email protected] and we'll include it in a future episode.

That is where this conversation goes.

In this episode of Men's Therapy Online, Marc Azoulay answers real questions from gen z men about the things therapists rarely address directly: what kind of therapy actually works for a man who already overthinks everything, why dating apps are engineered to keep you failing, how to stop doom scrolling and start building something real, and what it actually takes to go deeper in male friendships without it feeling forced.

The episode makes one thing clear quickly: Gen Z men are not struggling because they are weak or broken. They are struggling because they are being pulled in too many directions at once. They are being told to be emotionally aware but not soft, vulnerable but not needy, a leader but never dominant. And most of the answers being served to them online are either designed to monetize their pain or to sell them an identity that was never theirs to begin with.

It shows up when a man:

• Spends hours online every day but feels more isolated every week

• Gets matches and responses on the apps, but keeps getting ghosted before anything real develops

• Wants closer friendships but cannot figure out how to move past jokes, memes, and sports talk

• Tries to figure out what kind of man he wants to be and ends up more confused than when he started

• Not because he is doing something wrong, but because he has been trying to build himself from the outside in, following the loudest voices instead of the quietest, most honest one he has.

That is the deeper problem here. When your sense of self is built on what you consume instead of what you do, when your relationships mostly live in comment sections and DMs, and when the friction and difficulty that actually build character have been engineered out of your daily life, you end up feeling empty without being able to name exactly why.

Marc walks through what it looks like to start changing that. He covers how to find the right type of therapy for a mind that already knows everything but still cannot change, the mechanics behind dating app design and why it is built to keep you swiping, what actually creates attraction versus what kills it, the evolutionary reason men need to do things together before they can go deep emotionally, and what gen z men specifically need to start doing to build a life they are proud of.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

Follow us on social media: https://mtr.bio/mens-therapy-online.

Anger. Rage. Aggression. Modern psychology has spent decades telling men these are problems to fix. That is exactly where this conversation pushes back.

In this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay sits down with Mike LeBlanc. He is a Marine veteran, Harvard graduate, founder of a humanoid robotics company, and author of What If Anger Is the Answer. He challenges the cultural narrative that has pathologized male anger and makes the case that suppressing it is not the solution. It is the source of the problem.

The episode makes one thing clear early on. Anger is not the same as violence. A man who feels rage is not dangerous by default. And a culture that conditions men to swallow every difficult emotion is not producing calmer, healthier men. It is producing depressed ones.

What LeBlanc describes draws directly from the ancient Greeks. Unlike modern psychology, which splits the human soul into two parts: the rational and the impulsive, the Greeks identified a third. They called it thymos. It is the seat of drive, ambition, and command. It is where masculine purpose actually lives. And stripping it out does not make a man more civilized. It makes him directionless.

This shows up when a man in your life, or when you yourself:

• Feels constantly told to calm down, breathe through it, or take a bubble bath

• Has been dismissed the moment emotion showed up, even when the emotion was justified

• Drifts into cynicism, isolation, or numbness and cannot identify why

• Senses something is being wasted but cannot name what it is

• Has never had a mentor, a rite of passage, or a moment that moved him from boy to man

• This is not a character flaw. This is a generation of men handed a framework that was never built for them.

Marc and LeBlanc trace the full arc, from the Marine Corps training that transforms raw anger into leadership, to the entrepreneurial initiation that demands the same reckoning, to the practical discipline of consistency that LeBlanc argues is the only thing that actually changes a life. They also go deep on parenting, on what healthy discipline looks like when chronic resentment is the far more dangerous alternative, and on why getting angry, truly, honestly angry, may be the first real step out of depression that many men have never been permitted to take.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Narcissist. Psychopath. Sociopath. These words are everywhere right now, and most of the time, they are being used incorrectly. That is where this conversation starts.

In this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay sits down with Dr. Peter Salerno. He is a clinical expert and author of The Nature and Nurture of Narcissism. He cuts through the noise of social media diagnosis culture and gets to what these personality disorders actually look like. He highlights how they operate and why they are so hard to identify and treat.

The episode makes one thing clear early on. A narcissist is not just someone with a big ego. A sociopath is not just someone cold or distant. And a psychopath is not a movie villain. These are real clinical conditions with distinct traits, and conflating them does real damage to the people trying to make sense of what they experienced.

What Dr. Salerno describes is something more unsettling than most people expect. Many of these individuals are not suffering in the way we assume. They possess superiority and victim mentality. Some of them genuinely like who they are. The manipulation is not a coping mechanism. For many, it is a strategy, and it is working. That realization changes everything about how you understand narcissistic abuse.

It shows up when someone in your life:

• Makes you question what you saw, heard, or felt

• Shows you with affection early on, then slowly pulls it away

• Presents as charming to everyone else while making you feel like you are losing your mind

• Reacts with rage or cold contempt the moment you push back

• They consistently position themselves as the victim while causing harm

This is not emotional immaturity. This is a pattern. And according to Dr. Salerno, that pattern has biological and genetic roots that traditional talk therapy was never designed to reach.

Marc and Dr. Salerno explore the future of the field, the limits of current treatment, and why integrating brain-based research with the traditional trauma model may be the only way forward for clinicians who are tired of referring these patients out and calling it a day.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Masculine energy in relationships is something most men have never been properly taught. They’ve been handed two versions, one that’s domineering and one that’s completely hollowed out. Neither works. The first drives his partner away. The second bores her. What actually works is something most men have never been taught: how to embody masculine energy in a way that is grounded, leading, and genuinely connective.

That's what this episode is about.

In this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay talks with GS Youngblood, men's coach, relationship expert, and author of The Masculine in Relationship, about what positive masculinity looks like inside a real partnership and why so many men are getting it wrong without realizing it.

GS built his Masculine Blueprint after his own marriage fell apart. What he found was that the failure wasn’t about being a bad person. It was about not being grounded, not leading, and not knowing how to build real emotional connection with his partner. His framework is the answer he wishes he had then.

The blueprint has three pillars:

• Respond vs react: Stay grounded when she is emotional. Stop being reactive.

• Provide structure: Lead in the relationship. Know your needs and act on them.

• Create safety: Build emotional connection and emotional safety so she can actually relax into the relationship.

GS and Marc also get into nice guy syndrome, polarity in relationships, nervous system regulation, sexual leadership, and what emotional leadership actually looks like the morning after a fight. This isn’t theory. It’s a practical, honest conversation about what it takes to be the man a relationship needs.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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