How men can develop confidence, competence, and quests to serve them well for a lifetime. A quote-driven compilation from my conversation with Brian on what the male nervous system actually needs Jeremy Fox, LPC Brian and I have been bouncing observations off each other on X for a while. When we finally sat down on his Sanity and Society podcast, the conversation moved faster than I expected. What follows is a compilation of what I think were the most clip-worthy lines from both of us, organized around the natural arc the conversation took. The framing is light. The quotes are doing the work. Where It Has Gone Wrong Brian opened with a wide-angle question: where, structurally, has the relationship between men and therapy broken down. My first answer was about venues. JEREMY: “The elimination of third spaces where you don’t have home and work, and now even that’s collapsed into one space. Men do really well with parallel play.” Brian picked up parallel play immediately and ran a clinical observation through it. BRIAN: “You put two men together and they’re building something or they’re chopping, they’re going to get vulnerable. They start talking about that, but they’re not looking at it.” The geometry of male connection is sideways rather than face-on. The activity is the medium. When the venues for shared activity vanish, the male coalition has nowhere to assemble, and what shows up in my consulting room is the downstream effect of that vacancy. Brian named the somatic component of it next. BRIAN: “So much of why men struggle today is because they are deeply, deeply disconnected from their own sense of pleasure, which exists in their body and is actually rooted in deep cultural homophobia.” I had not heard that exact framing before. BRIAN: “The moisture, the moisture, right? So many men are just so dry of the moisture of life, that Eros.” Coupling Off as the Default Male Strategy What men do, in the absence of a friendship coalition, is route the entire relational load onto a romantic partner. JEREMY: “Your best hope is to couple off, outsource the relational component to your wife, hope that that provides you a good social life, do stuff with other couples, maybe. But that’s not your only route to friendship as a guy.” Brian flagged the deeper cultural prohibition underneath that strategy. BRIAN: “The idea of relying on somebody as a man is such a thing there. We’re about to be the needless man.” He framed his own location on the cultural map honestly. BRIAN: “I’m kind of a 50 percent red pill, 50 percent therapy guy. I kind of split the difference a little bit because there’s a lot in there.” My corresponding observation was about the asymmetry between the sisterhood and the absence of any comparable brotherhood. JEREMY: “Some men, when they marry, it’s the wife and kid, they don’t pay forward or mentor other dudes. Women do that. There’s a sisterhood. There’s old wives’ tales. There’s women teaching other women how to attract, how to drop the handkerchief, so to speak.” Church culture illustrates the asymmetry at the scheduling level. JEREMY: “In the church, you’ll see tons of women’s Bible studies, which is amazing. And then you’ll see men’s stuff is usually sunrise, like start at six or seven, so that they’re not doing it at night and they can be home.” Self-Esteem and the Test Men Are Not Allowed to See Brian offered one of the cleanest lines of the conversation on the male route to a coherent sense of self. BRIAN: “For men, I feel that self-esteem is built through doing esteemable things. Where I feel like for women it’s way more relational.” I extended the point through the cultural script. JEREMY: “Women get told a lot, sometimes very directly, sometimes very rudely. Men aren’t given the answers to the test. Even if the answers are cruel and superficial, men are told figure out what’s on the test, but if you fail, you’re F’d.” Brian named the silent killer underneath this script. BRIAN: “The lie that there’s nothing expected of men in the world is a huge, huge thing. And it is a silent killer because it is communicated in every other way.” Anger, Aggression, and Meeting Amorality With Eyes Wide Open Brian opened the section on male aggression with what he frames as a cultural castration. BRIAN: “Men have been culturally conditioned away from their aggression, away from their anger, away from their sword. That fire in my belly, that is the same fuel that burns into my vitality.” My response leaned on the trauma piece. JEREMY: “Trauma teaches us to fear anything unknown or suspenseful. And that’s where fear of all male aggression or male anger or vitality comes from. It is trauma, and it’s curable, full stop.” The conversation moved to the meekness-versus-weakness distinction. The Christian formulation only works when the strength is real. JEREMY: “Meekness is not weakness. Meekness is a decision from strong men to lead in a righteous way. If you’re weak, you can’t really be meek, because you’re just afraid. You can only be righteous when you’re deciding against evil, not when you’re too scared to do evil.” Brian brought the dark triad framework in, and offered a coinage worth sitting with. BRIAN: “I only know true empathy through my own impulse for sadism. I only know altruism through my own instinct to be self-oriented and self-serving. You have to go through the negative polarities of this triangle to flip it on its head to get that light triad lifestyle.” Then he made the move that I think will travel furthest from this episode. BRIAN: “There are amoral men that exist, and a lot of these men run the f*****g world. I believe that there is a necessity for the good men to meet that amorality with eyes wide open. With eyes wide f*****g open.” I underscored the point from the religious tradition. JEREMY: “Anger isn’t a sin. The Bible says be angry and sin not. Great men throughout the Old Testament and the New have had anger. Peter cut off someone’s ear who was trying to arrest Christ on the day He was apprehended in Gethsemane.” Eros and the Body Brian returned the conversation to the body, which is where his most original work lives. BRIAN: “The people who are most seductive, they’re seducing life.” He described his own physical practice as a non-negotiable. BRIAN: “I have to have like skin-to-skin male contact in my life. Like pickup basketball, like wrestling, like activity. There is something singular that exists within a fully male space that has permissiveness for some of the aggression, some of the anger, some of the loudness, some of the messiness.” And then he named the political reason this is rare. BRIAN: “Groups of men that are cohesive and aligned and together in a group is very dangerous, right? To people. So I think it’s discounted. I think some of it is kind of intentional. They want men alone. They want them stripped away from the Eros.” My addition was about what happens to men who lose access to sensory aliveness entirely. JEREMY: “Men are paying for these retreats to go basically LARP, to live-action role-play as a soldier. They’re transmuting their desire for pleasure into this sort of almost desire for pain. There is a craving that men have to be in touch with sensory experiences, and the men who are the driest make really good defenders in some ways, or really good sacrifices, but they don’t have the Eros, they don’t have the joie de vivre.” Why Dating Apps Are the Wrong Fishing Rod Brian made one of the more original somatic observations of the conversation. BRIAN: “We’ve all been so trained and conditioned to this visual instinct, this visual impulse, this visual attraction. And I think that it really, really discounts our biology. Attraction is way more pheromonal, energetic.” My version of the same problem was structural. JEREMY: “We’re scaling and optimizing for addictiveness whenever it’s apps. Now that they’ve opened Pandora’s box on the trading-card facet of, get a little card, swipe left or right on it, that’s just the thing now. When that was discovered, that became the arms race ticket of the most addictive thing to suck the most of your time and money.” And the emotional consequence is exactly the kind of all-or-nothing mood pattern that I see clinically. JEREMY: “It’s almost like you acquire borderline personality disorder from dating apps, where everything becomes so all-or-nothing. There’s no savoring the experience. It becomes either your partner of all time, or, my gosh, what a waste.” Brian named the projection problem that compounds it. BRIAN: “You think you already know who this person is because of their job and they like this, and they show up and you’re showing up with this full loaded chamber of expectation and ideal.” My closing point on this section was about what the nervous system was actually designed to do. JEREMY: “Our nervous systems are not evolved for constant, chronic stress. Acute stress to fight and flee, fine. When you fled, your brain gets the signal, okay, I’m out of the danger. But chronic stress constant is so damaging and warps our sense of safety and what we move toward.” The Manosphere Filled the Vacuum the Field Left Open Brian raised the Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary. I had already responded to it with Dr. Paul. My take: the documentary surveys the surface and never explains why people wanted the Manosphere there in the first place. My deeper diagnosis ran underneath the documentary entirely. JEREMY: “We’ve taught men to hate each other and have a hyper-scarcity mindset. If you want to destroy people, you need to teach them to isolate. Teach them not to be excellent, to kind of just sit around and do nothing, give them endless dopamine, visual stimuli, and teach them that other men are always their enemies. An
