The Social Athlete
A weekly podcast exploring the upper limits of social fitness and relationship success.
The Social Athlete
Jason Lange on Redefining Masculinity and Cultivating Authentic Male Connections
Jason is the founder of Evolutionary Men, an organization on the front lines of the men's mental health movement. This is a conversation I've been very eager to have…
Frequent listeners of this podcast will know that this is one of my persistent concerns. There is a crisis of male loneliness and isolation, not just in this country, but globally. What stands out to me more than anything is that it seems to be affecting men most adversely, specifically at the ages of 16 to 24. Young men are bearing the brunt of isolation and loneliness. That's pretty abnormal. Usually, the distributions that we see from male loneliness and isolation historically have been as men age, not at the beginning of their lives. This means that we're getting worse as a society at making men feel connected, not better. That's something that should concern all of us.
There are plenty of theories circulating out there as to why—smartphones, social media, porn, dating apps, etc. We get into all of that. We also get into the cultural headwinds that are making this conversation so complex in 2024—the ever-expanding and confusing definition of toxic masculinity, the apparent disconnect between what women say they want from men and what men actually experience in the dating world, and the shifting expectations of men as providers and leaders.
But ultimately, this is a conversation about how to move forward and how to live authentically as a man in a world that is renegotiating its relationship to masculinity. In seeming real time, we spend a lot of time unpacking the traditional models of masculinity, why current role models for masculinity are so hard to find, and then we explore what a new, modernized role model for masculinity might look like, one that honors the equality of women while also respecting the unique gifts and challenges that men face.
As you'll see, Jason's solution is as simple as it is powerful. Men need to spend more time together. I couldn't agree more. Jason speaks powerfully about the men's group work he has done and the first-hand transformations he's seen when men just start talking to each other. He explains how to build your own men's group, either formally or informally. He's got some really great ideas on how to do this, and he explains how to create greater depth in the male relationships that are already in your life.
This is not just a conversation for or about men. Masculinity and femininity are defined by their relationship to each other and, as you'll see in this conversation, so much of what men internalize and care about when it comes to masculinity is based on what women value, both implicitly and explicitly. So this is not just a conversation for men. It's also a conversation for any woman who has a man in their life that they care about or that cares about them. Restoring sanity and clarity to men is a project for all of us, and it's one we're all going to benefit from.
Hello and welcome to the Social Athlete. I'm your host, casey Wright. Today I'm going to be speaking with Jason Lang. Jason is founder of Evolutionary Men, an organization on the front lines of the men's mental health movement. This is a conversation I've been very eager to have.
Casey:Frequent listeners of this podcast will know that this is one of my persistent concerns. There is a crisis of male loneliness and isolation, not just in this country, but globally. What stands out to me more than anything is that it seems to be affecting men most adversely, specifically at the ages of 16 to 24. Young men are bearing the brunt of isolation and loneliness. That's pretty abnormal. Usually, the distributions that we see from male loneliness and isolation historically have been as men age, not at the beginning of their lives. This means that we're getting worse as a society at making men feel connected, not better. That's something that should concern all of us.
Casey:There are plenty of theories circulating out there as to why smartphones, social media, porn, dating apps we get into all of that. We also get into the cultural headwinds that are making this conversation so complex in 2024. The ever-expanding and a confusing definition of toxic masculinity. The apparent disconnect between what women say they want from men and what men actually experience in the dating world, and the shifting expectations of men as providers and leaders. But ultimately, this is a conversation about how to move forward and how to live authentically as a man in a world that is renegotiating its relationship to masculinity. In seeming real time, we spend a lot of time unpacking the traditional models of masculinity why current role models for masculinity are so hard to find, and then we explore what a new, modernized role model for masculinity might look like, one that honors the equality of women while also respecting the unique gifts and challenges that men face.
Casey:As you'll see, jason's solution is as simple as it is powerful. Men need to spend more time together. I couldn't agree more. Jason speaks powerfully about the men's group work he has done and the first-hand transformations he's seen when men just start talking to each other. He explains how to build your own men's group, either formally or informally. He's got some really great ideas on how to do this, and he explains how to create greater depth in the male relationships that are already in your life. You can learn more about Jason and the great work Evolutionary Men is doing at Evolutionarymen. That's just the way it's spelled Evolutionarymen, m-e-n.
Casey:And one final point before we get into this this is not just a conversation for or about men. Masculinity and femininity are defined by the relationship to each other and, as you'll see in this conversation, so much of what men internalize and care about when it comes to masculinity is based on what women value, both implicitly and explicitly. So this is not just a conversation for men. It's also a conversation for any woman who has a man in their life that they care about or that cares about them. Restoring sanity and clarity to men is a project for all of us, and it's one we're all going to benefit from. So, with no further delay, I bring you Jason Lane. Well, I'm really excited to have you here today, jason, because I think this is one of those issues that is so in the zeitgeist right now. It seems like everything from politics to football to everything is becoming about gender relations these days, and so I just and I know you're really an expert on this and have been thinking about this for quite some time now.
Casey:So I'm really curious to kind of get your just to start your top level kind of 50,000 foot view. What do you see as the real problems facing men right now that are unique to 2024?
Jason:Yeah, I think this is a pretty pivotal, pivotal moment for a lot of men, in that all of the things we had to kind of fall back on in terms of what it means to be a man or what we're expected to do in society or relationships, a lot of that's dissolving, right, the culture of the world is evolving in some ways, and I work with men in. One of the greatest pains a lot of men are experiencing is I don't know, like, how am I supposed to show up in this world? Right, what am I supposed to be? I don't want to be the macho jerk that you know so many guys had modeled for them. That's kind of just the dick, the guy that you know causes destruction, or me too, or that kind of stuff. So a lot of men are like kip to that. They're like, no, I don't want to be that.
Jason:But then there's also been this wave, you know, in the last couple of decades, of the reaction to that of what my friend Dr Glover calls the nice guy. Right, the man who's really safe, really sensitive, really attuned, often has a really hard time setting boundaries, speaking up for himself and doesn't often get recognized or get the things he wants in the world, and so a lot of men are just left wondering, like, well, how am I supposed to be? Like you know, I hear I'm supposed to be vulnerable and I'm vulnerable with my partner and they don't like it, and it's just very confusing for men, right, what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to show up in these moments. In you know, again, particularly, I work with a lot of men around relationships which are evolving, right?
Jason:It used to be, there were certain roles that were expected, and as long as you fulfilled that role, you were good to go. But things are a lot more complex now, right, and for the better. Like you know, gender dynamics have changed. Women have a lot more power and agency in their life, but that's left a lot of men like, well then, what do you need me for? Like, what should I do? And that's the big part of the leading edge of what I really try to help men discover is how they can be happy and fulfilled in life and still have a deep impact. Because, you know, almost every man I know wants to be of service in some kind of way to the world, but just gets left wondering, like, how do I do that? Now?
Casey:Yeah, no, it's such a great point. There's a lot to unpack there. I think one of the things that I'm struck by is that I think at first, when it was, you know, early stage feminism, I think every guy was on board with it, or I should say, most guys were on board with it. It's like, yes, equality, that makes sense. And now what I hear over and over again is just, it feels like it's gone too far and feel like that's the thing is like.
Casey:It feels like, you know, this idea of toxic masculinity has expanded so far to the point where it just includes anything that's being a man traditionally, you know, things like going golfing with the guys, or, you know, just explaining something to somebody who's a co worker, who might be female, is now mansplaining and nobody wants to be accused of that and and. But you bring up this really good point that so much of this is good and being conscious of the ways that men have interacted with women in a way that makes them feel left out and deprives them of the power they deserve in the workplace and the family personally, like this is all a good thing, and so I'm curious, you know, where do you feel like we should be giving into these cultural headwinds and where do you feel like we should be holding a line and saying, no, this is not toxic masculinity, this is just masculinity, you know yeah well, you know, one of the first and foremost things I believe in is it's up to us men to call out other men.
Jason:So if there is toxic masculinity presenting in relationships or workplaces or the culture, one big thing we can do is start stepping in and saying, hey, what's happening here is not cool, like that's not all right. And you know, it's not about cutting someone down but, as I like to say, or even calling out right, there's a culture of calling out. What I really believe in is the culture of calling forward Like, hey, something's happening here and I believe you have something more in you that better to offer here. Like, how can we recreate some harmony and whatever situation? So we want to call forward the best of each other.
Jason:And that's been hard. You know part of, I think, the pain and everything that's been unfurling is, for a long time it was up to women to call this stuff out, and so they had to take great risk right for their lives and for their career sometimes to name some of these things because other men weren't doing it. You know, that's the truth, and one of the ways we can become advocates is just calling out other men, saying, hey, man, what you're doing right there is shitty. That's not a good thing to do Doesn't mean you're shitty, but the behavior is shitty Right. I think there's been a collapse in our culture of shaming people versus behavior. When you shame a person, you don't leave them any room to grow or to come back into harmony, but we do want to shame the behavior. The other thing you know I want to speak about here that is so hard is part of the reason all of the energy goes to toxic masculine is. We could probably pull anyone off the street and you know they would know. Some have some thoughts about that, but if you ask people, well, what's a positive vision of masculinity Crickets? Nobody's there to talk about it.
Jason:There's very few archetypes in our culture, and that's one of the things that so many of us men are facing right now is just at a personal level. Many guys I know never really had a model for what a new kind of integrated, sensitive but also powerful man is in the world, right, a man who can set boundaries, who is open and aware to his impact but also doesn't just collapse and fall on the sword for every single thing. Because you know the delicate walk we have to do here as men is. We want to take responsibility for all the things men did before us, but we don't want to take the blame. We didn't cause it. But we can be responsible for helping to shift the culture away from it right In our one-on-one relationships and interactions and whatnot. And that's a hard thing to do. Not all men want to do that. Not all men want to take that level of responsibility on, because a lot has happened right To the planet, to cultures, to women. It's not that the masculine is responsible for right.
Jason:So I don't actually believe in a toxic masculine. I believe in a pathological masculine, which means masculinity that didn't grow the right way right. Something's out of alignment and generally what that's looked like in history is disconnection from the heart. Right, all the awful things men can do is when they're disconnected from their hearts. But when a man is disconnected from his heart and in his power, he's a great service to the world. And so we actually need you know sometimes this is a little heated, but I'm a firm believer we need more healthy masculinity in the culture right now. We don't need less men showing up, we need more men showing up in our power, in our softness as advocates, and that the world will do better with us showing up in those ways.
Casey:Yeah, I think. I guess my question would be then where is the line and how do you know the difference between you know what you're calling pathological masculinity, and what is effective masculinity, the type that we should be championing and looking towards? Do you see examples of that in the world that you can point to and you can say this is what I'm talking about? You know that guy right there. He's doing what I'm talking about.
Jason:Yeah, it's pretty rare, you know. I think that's one of the hard things. Like I said, we're particularly in such a here in the States, right, we're living in such a politically charged, devised time. We have so few people we can all agree on like, hey, that's a good human being, right there. And so we're left reaching into the past, right, people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, who these days, you know, I don't even know if they would be celebrated in the same ways, because they were complex human beings who had a lot of gifts and had some flaws themselves, you know.
Jason:But that, you know, what I tend to kind of point to is, when I say taking responsibility as men, that starts with ourselves. So, taking responsibility for my wounding and whatever it is, whatever cards I was dealt in life, right, some people had easy upbringing, some people had challenging upbringings, but as men, one of the first things we can do is take responsibility for what happened to me, so we can make the shift from becoming reactive presences in the world to respond, responsible presences in the world, right, which, when you really think about it the ability to respond consciously is very different than what a lot of you know so-called labeled toxic masculinity is. It's when a man is fused with his emotional experience and just reacts right, sometimes aggressively, sometimes mean in all different kinds of ways. So for us men to take responsibility means yeah, are we? You know a lot of guys don't want to hear this, but are we doing our inner work? Are we doing the work we need to do on ourselves as men to be able to show up grounded, open and deeply aware in any given moment? And if we are, that to me is a beautiful example of this kind of healthy masculinity.
Jason:That, yeah, man, it's tough. There's not too many examples. You know I often point guys to Dwayne Johnson, the rock. You know he's a guy out there these days who he carries the power and the bravado, but he's also totally sweet and sensitive and shows how he interacts with his daughters in a very different way than I think men of the past would have. Right, he's got that interiority online and you know he's one of the least controversial people I can point to of like, yeah, you right, you can feel that. Like, oh, a guy like that seems like he has integrity. I want to move through the world like that, and we don't have so many markers of that to point to, which is why you know part of why I'm so passionate about what I do right now is we need more of these healthy role models.
Casey:How much of that do you think is that there really these men just don't exist or that they're not doing the work they need to, and how much of that is that there's a culture that just doesn't want to see that or celebrate that as much as it used to.
Casey:Because you know, I was saw this tweet and not that I want to put too much credence in a tweet, but they were saying you know, name a television show from the last 30 years where the male figure is shown as competent, holding a good job, like blah blah blah, and it's like literally no one in the comments could do it. For 30 years there hasn't been a popular television show where the man is not shown as a bumbling idiot or a brute or something like that. And you know that wasn't the case when I was growing up. On TV there was an array of male role models, some that were bumbling idiots and some that seemed competent and good at their jobs and loved their families, and it just seems like there's not much of an appetite for that and I wonder, like, how much of this do you think is men not doing the work, and how much of it is a culture that's depriving us of any sort of celebration or any space to even see what that looks like.
Jason:Yeah, you know, it's both. I would say. There are men who are absolutely doing the work and I think the culture is shifting and we're starting to get more recognition of that. I definitely believe that's true and to be, you know, brutally honest, men are behind, and what I mean by that is so the women's lib movement you know feminism that burst on the scene in the 60s in particular, and women really got out there and they left the home and entered the workplace and developed themselves and were able to participate in a different way.
Jason:The men's work movement is much younger man. It started honestly, in the 90s with Robert Bly, was one of the first people who wrote Iron John and started presencing like, hey, you know, men are starting to be left behind in pain and there's some things we have to do to grow to keep up with the culture, just in the same way that women did. And so, you know, when I started this work in my 20s, in the mid 2000s, you ask someone, what's a men's group, what A church group, you know that was about the closest thing that existed Men's work. What do you mean? What's that Men's like? What Working outside? And now you know, 15 years later, it's happening Like there's a real movement here. It is showing up in articles, in the pain of men and the work men need to do, that the culture of men growing and changing has a home now and more and more men are showing up to this work every day in ways that they just weren't 15, 20 years ago. And again, I don't necessarily blame men for that. Men want to show up and we want to be a good, positive impact. The struggle for a lot of us is no one ever gave us the toolkit, no one ever gave us the instruction manual. For what does it mean? Right, most of us were just modeled these kind of outdated forms of masculinity that has some great kernels of truth in them, but also aren't quite sufficient anymore to create health and wellness honestly in our lives. So I do think it's both right.
Jason:It's easy to take the potshots at men, you know, in the culture and the comedy, and you know the dumb dad or the clueless dad. I think that's all there, and part of that is because it's taken a while longer. You know I mostly work with men, but I do do couples work and I've been in the couple space before, you know, and I can tell you man. You hit the age of 35 and you start going to some of these workshops where people are working on themselves and it's co-ed. 90% of the room is women saying we're all the conscious men Like, we're here, we're ready.
Jason:We want a real relationship with a guy who's going to show up and be available, and there's not as many of them, and I work with men and one of the biggest things I have to do to reformat their brains is you got to realize, if you're a man who takes this responsibility and steps into his inner work of growth and healing, you are a rare commodity in the planet and you are actually the scarce thing. It totally flips their minds when it comes to dating and relationships. Oftentimes it's like, wow, I get to be picky Because I'm a guy who's ready to show up and do the work and is willing to put in the time to do that. So maybe not the clear answer you're looking for there, but yeah, both man, I think it's truly both.
Casey:Oh, it's great. It's interesting because I look at this as kind of a two-lane project. Right, there's a lane of trying to create a culture that identifies and celebrates the type of masculinity that we want to model, and that there are clearer guidelines, that this doesn't have to be such this intense, individualized project to figure out what masculinity is and find it in yourself. It would be nice if there were a little more just kind of some cultural guardrails that sort of steered men in that direction over time. But then to your point.
Casey:The second lane of the project, and the more urgent one for anybody listening, is doing the work on yourself to thrive in this world with all these new expectations. And so let's pivot to that, because I think it sounds like that's really where your expertise and your passion is is in figuring out how to take men who don't have this toolkit of communicating and doing deep work on themselves. So let's start with why is it that men kind of come to the table without these skill sets and how do they start? What's the first step for somebody who says, okay, I want to start, I want to be a more conscious guy, but I'm not really even sure what that looks like. You know where do I go from here?
Jason:Totally. I think this is, this is where a lot of men show up to me and oftentimes it's because they're in some kind of pain. Right they they're in pain around their relationship. Either they can't create or keep the type of relationship they want or they feel lost with work and purpose. And there's this feeling of I know I want something to be different, but I don't know where to start or how to start right. Like I can feel I'm not living my life up to the not even society's expectations, but to this, the sense that, like, I don't feel like I'm really living to my full capacity. And that is a painful, painful experience for a lot of men. And you know I one of the reasons I start, you know, and work with a lot of men around dating and relationships is that is one of the places men often get so in contact with their pain, they're willing to get help Right, and I'm like this this, this is brutal, this is painful.
Jason:I had a breakup where I got a divorce or I'm not able to attract a partner that will get men off the couch to change in a way that a lot of other things won't. You know, it was certainly part of my journey, and so it often starts there. And then, you know, men stepping in and this is part of what's hard is we're raised in not only a pretty hyper individualistic culture, right, when you think of here in America, the rugged cowboy, the Marlboro man, they just pick himself up by the bootstraps, doesn't need anybody. The lone wolf, you know we're fed that is. That is the ultimate marker of masculinity in a lot of ways and that gets mashed into us culturally that you know, a man is supposed to be tough and he's never supposed to show weakness. And asking for help, right, getting connected to other people is often interpreted as weakness, whether that's getting a therapist asking men because I don't know how to do this, I'm having some struggles here and we have all of this kind of weight coming against us. And you know, I know these are loaded terms again here, casey, but like one of the things often that doesn't get talked about enough, is this whole idea of this patriarchy thing right? It's just as damaging to us men as it is anything else, right? There's this whole checklist. They call the man box, that men are expected to mark off every box, and if you don't, you're not considered a man. And they have crazy amounts of research around this or how.
Jason:One of the kind of challenges for men is that, you know, if we look at how women develop, they've done the research and they've pulled people and mostly what marks the shift of a girl becoming a woman is her biology right. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but culturally we hold this thing that, oh, when her body changes, now she's a woman For men. Nope, a man. Just because he's in a man's body doesn't mean he's a man, right. There's all these societal expectations of how he's showing up, in his status and in his structure and his achievement that really get loaded on to us men, and this is the patriarchy in action, the same thing pushing those pressures on us. One of the pressures is you can't ever ask for help. You're not supposed to ask for help. Feelings are weak, so you never can show you're in any kind of pain. You got to be tough.
Jason:Most of what men are rewarded for in our culture and honestly, most of the world is being disembodied. We are rewarded for being disconnected from our bodies. Work harder. He works 70 hours a week. We work dangerous jobs. The most dangerous, like life-threatening jobs are often held by men. I know it's getting way more balanced now, but traditionally war has been where we sent male bodies to right, disposable male bodies, even elite sports, right. I mean, there's so much attention these days to what happens, right, we literally are sometimes killing men for our entertainment in the gladiatorial sense.
Jason:So men are generally rewarded for not being in our bodies and with that that's where our emotions live, right? So emotions start as sensations in our bodies. So as men we're like cultured out of our bodies and out of our emotions, and then we're not given any medicine or tools for how to deal with that. So what do men do? We turn to the only things our culture does say is okay, well, weed nowadays porn, masturbation, sex eating. We turn to things outside of us to change our inner feeling state, and that's where this idea of the rugged cowboy a lot of those guys were alcoholics and would drink themselves to death, right, and like die alone that's a real thing.
Jason:And so last thing I'll say here is we have this pressure to be hyper-individualistic, so more and more men, because so many of the structures in our society where we did get to bond with other men are falling away Social clubs, the church, to some extent even the workplace. Right, the move to work from home and work remotely. We're losing that there, and men in particular are really vulnerable to loneliness and disconnection because, inherently, when you know, again, this whole patriarchal system comes and tells us you know, you've got to be tough, you've got to be solid, you've got to be alone, the lone wolf is the one who survives, which is totally bullshit, you know. It's just stuff where fed and that has an impact. Right, the loneliness epidemic for men is like through the roof. Male suicides are through the roof.
Jason:Feeling lonely which is something that's possible even when you're around people, right, it's just as dangerous to smoke and a pack of cigarettes a day or being morbidly obese, like this stuff is real and it's really hitting us men heavily now. So to shift and to take responsibility and say, okay, I'm going to change this. We have to move against the gravity of these cultural expectations towards men, and one of the ways, you know, I'm really passionate about doing that is getting into groups and learning wow, other men can actually be my deepest allies, not just my competition, and when I'm part of a pack, I can actually accomplish more and thrive way more in the world.
Casey:I couldn't agree more and you know, if you've listened to previous episodes of this podcast, you know that is really the starting point for this podcast is how important our social fitness is to our overall fitness and how important relationships are to everything that we consider important, that we consider these subservient goals and really relationships are the ultimate goal and everything kind of proceeds from that. That's how we define ourselves, that's how we make sense of the world and, yeah, I think that really is falling off for men specifically and I think for a lot of the cultural reasons you explained. You know, one of the things I've always observed with men is and I know, like I see my fiance and she when she gets together with her girlfriends. They can get together literally just to talk and that's not weird at all, like they'll just come over, she'll have a FaceTime with her friend while they're just doing makeup and it's 30 minutes of talking about just what's going on in their days. There's no point in my future where I will ever get there with my friends and I wouldn't even want to. The first time one of my friends calls me to FaceTime me for 30 minutes while they're getting ready is probably the last time I'm talking to that friend right Like.
Casey:But what I've observed is that when you get guys together doing something, that they'll naturally start to talk. Get a poker night and, you know, a couple of cigars and some scotch and an hour in everyone's revealing their deepest, darkest secrets. Things are really worried about things from the childhood and all the rest. But I think that guys maybe need this sort of some sort of cultural artifact where we're not just going here to talk, we're going to do something together and then the talk kind of grows out of that. But I think that might be something that men need, that women don't. Is that something that you see?
Jason:Oh, totally. The structure is very supportive and there is, you know, a real positive here in that men do tend to bond most deeply through a type of doing. You know I always tell this story about, a couple of years after I graduated college, a friend of mine from high school so I hadn't been in touch with him in a while got married and you know he had a bachelor party out in the Smoky Mountains. So I flew out there and you know it was like it had been maybe eight years since we had lived close to each other and so he had graduate school friends, he had undergrad friends, he had high school friends. You know we all get together there and it's, you know, everyone's kind of in their click and you know there's not like a lot of talking. We're hiking deep in the mountains and we get to a point where we have to cross the river and it's actually quite dangerous, like it's flowing, it's flowing fast, and so this is like, okay, everybody, we have to really be on point here and support each other to get across, because someone, if you slip, you're not coming back like straight up. And so you know we do that. It took 20 minutes Other side of that river, everybody's fucking best friends. Suddenly everyone's opened up. You know, we just thought we did that.
Jason:All the guard was kind of down, and I think that's one of the things that is starting to attract men to this idea of men's work and men's retreats is it gives us a structure to start connecting around and it helps to counterbalance, because I think what you're pointing to here is, as men we're generally, you know, because there are some positives there, but again there's some kind of cultural pressure to us that we're taught. We're taught to relate primarily to other men through triangulation. So the way you and I connect is by having our attention on a third thing, right, whether it's a sporting game and activity, you name it fishing, hunting there's a third thing that is the actual locust of our attention, and it's pretty rare that our attention is on each other directly and there's a positive for that. Like I said, there is a way we bond as men, but we do sometimes have to do some corrective medicine to sometimes like oh yeah, it is possible to just put your attention on someone and be like how's your life going? And for a lot of us men we've never felt safe to do that because you know locker room talk or the culture or whatever would like knock us down if we showed any, any vulnerability at all.
Jason:But what I found you know, I've been leading groups now for like a decade is when men get into the space they have a ton to say, like they have so much to express, because it's pretty rare for them to have a safe space where they can just, oh, here's all the ways that my life is hard and I'm struggling and I'm trying to make it work and it's just tough, and rarely do they have anyone to listen to them.
Jason:So the you know, the sweet spot I have found is when you kind of blend the two, when there's a little bit of a structure that then supports men, you know, really deepening their connections with each other and making part of that, their attention on each other. Whether that's, you know, the oldest one in the book man is sitting around a fire and men pouring their hearts into the flames, which kind of short circuits, some of that vulnerability stuff or things like men's work or just bringing, you know, depth interactions through men's groups, which can still be social, they can still be fun. You can go hiking, you can shoot pool, but you're adding this context of like well, let's talk about what's really going on in our lives all the while.
Casey:Yeah, no, I'm struck by the fact that so many of the traditional, like male bonding rituals are basically just guys getting together and sitting around and drinking, you know, whether it's, you know, going hunting or going fishing or going golfing. Very much of it is actually active. I mean, most of it you're just kind of standing around and drinking and talking to your friends and I think that that's what people are really getting out of it. I'm not sure how much everybody really loves the golfing, the fishing and the hunting as much as the male camaraderie, you know, but we seem to need that to your point, that triangulation, you know, in order to to, I think, create a safe space for guys who aren't used to doing that. Naturally no-transcript.
Jason:Yeah, and we can build up our capacity. So now you know, I got a speed dial of six to 10 men I could call at any moment, any time of the day and just be totally, 100% real with and they would gladly receive me in that moment. And that's honestly been a game changer for me going through some of the most stressful years of my life. Like, yeah, I feel resourced, I feel supported in that sense where we don't I don't have to construct an activity around it, just like, hey, man, I need to talk, Like you got me over Zoom or in person or something like that, and that's a real resource. And then, you know, we sprinkle in the other stuff too, which is also just fun. Right, it's fun to connect in these different ways as men around these different activities and whatnot.
Casey:Well, and it strikes me too that if you are only comfortable with doing the traditional, you know male bonding rituals, then you haven't really learned the type of communication that's going to work on the dating front, because that doesn't work when you start talking to women. And so I think this is really this is the front lines of gender relations, is dating right, and this is how a lot of men find their way to you. And I think this, to me, is where I think a lot of the misperceptions and confusion around gender relations and what it means to be a man. This is where a lot of it, I think, really where the rubber meets the road, because a lot of what you hear from society.
Casey:I remember this in high school right, when I talked to girls and you'd be like what are you looking for in a guy?
Casey:And they'd be like I want a sweet, sensitive, funny, caring, intelligent, you know, communicative. And then they'd end up with like the football guy who just grunts a few words and couldn't care less about them, right, and you're like there's a disconnect between what you're saying you want and what you're actually attracted to, and I think a lot of guys feel this that, yeah, you want a guy who goes to therapy and expresses feelings and does all this stuff, but the other day you want a guy who's going to kill the spider and not think twice about it. You want a guy who's going to pick up the check and not turn that into something like, and you want a guy who's tall and strong and maybe this is you know, and so I think that that disconnect is something that really gets guys hung up on. This is that the expectations for what the woman in my life wants are very different from what women at all want from me right now. And so how do how do you kind of coach men to understand that and think through that?
Jason:Yeah, part of what I work with men on is, you know, honestly, unwinding the beliefs of what is most valuable for them to bring into intimate relationships, whether it's with women, with men or anything in between.
Jason:Right, I talk a lot in the work I do about, you know, masculine and feminine energy, and the really important thing is those are not tied to biology. We all have masculine energy. We all have feminine energy. These are capacities within us, and part of the challenge in the world right now is it's we're growing more fluid around these things. So all the masculine attributes used to mean you had to be the man, you had to, you had to hold those same thing with the feminine, but now there's a lot more fluidity and the most successful couples I know understand that. And what I mean by that in in the dating world is you have to understand how to work with these energetics in order to create connection.
Jason:And for a lot of men you know they think, oh, I got to have a six pack abs, I got to have a sweet car, I got to be like crushing it in my job. You know these things that again kind of get pushed onto us and I got to always provide. That's actually not the case, right, you know there's increasingly large amounts of women out there who are like no, I don't need that, I don't need you to take care of me, I don't need you to pay the bills for me. I got to kick ass, job, I'm crushing it. Like that's not what I need from you. And the thing that kind of cuts through all of that is what I call presence, right, the main value we can bring as masculine beings is our presence, so our capacity to be just here, fully in the moment, connected with whoever I'm with, and it's like the nectar of the gods, right, like, I do workshops and I work with couples around this, and you can see the actual nervous system shift it makes when a man becomes present.
Jason:And a lot of us men really struggle with that, guess why? Because when we become present, we got to be connected to our bodies and our emotions and not just be up in our heads. And for so many of us men, we keep getting pushed and driven up into our ruminating heads and so oftentimes our literally our awareness is on our own thoughts, and guess what? That's not very attractive. People don't really feel good to be around that, right For sure.
Jason:So part of the shift I do with men is bringing them into the moment and that, when you can really be present in the moment, that is what feminine partners are longing for. They don't even need our advice. They don't often don't even need us to fix it anymore. They just want the man who's actually there, listening to them, feeling them, who can hold their attention on them. And it sounds simple, but it's actually quite a challenge. We have to develop our nervous systems with practice to be able to do this, and it's why I love working in the space. Like you said is, it's where the rubber meets the road. This is where it all shows up so fast, and it's really amazing to see how fast men in long-term relationships or guys I'm working with that are just dating. Once they start to understand some of these tools, the shifts can happen really fast and the connections can get a lot more authentic, deeper and truthfully when it's desired and consensual, erratically charged.
Casey:So you mentioned that. Oftentimes you'll hear from guys who say I heard that I was supposed to be vulnerable. I opened up and now it feels like I'm being punished for it. I've heard similar things from guys. What do you think is going on there? What's the explanation for guys who feel like they're doing the work and then, on the other end, they're not getting what they thought was going to come from it?
Jason:Yeah. So I'm going to tie this back again to part of our previous conversation in terms of the man box and some of the patriarchy and how us men are taught not to share vulnerability or feelings, particularly with other men. So the bind it puts us in is, for a lot of men, the only place we feel safe to actually get into our emotional space is with our intimate partner. Right, it's with a woman who can listen to us or helps pull this stuff out of us, and they want us to be vulnerable and then we finally lay it all out there and then for a lot of women, they don't know what to do with it. Right, they're like whoa, oh my God, you're really scared, or you feel really lost, or you're really depressed, Like, what do I do? Do you need me to fix it? Do you need me to help it? And that can put them into a stress state and then sometimes they don't want to do. Then the man feels abandoned. Like you told me, you wanted my vulnerability and I brought it out here and that's a hard bind and so part of why I work so hard with men, I say creating deep connections with other men is an investment in your intimate relationship. As a guy, I like to think in analogies here, and so if you think of like a single, what is the single circuit right? Single circuit is electricity just flows through that one point. If that point breaks, it doesn't work. A parallel circuit you have many points right, so the energy can flow in different ways and if anyone node breaks, the whole system functions. The problem with a lot of men is we bring, we hold back our vulnerability so much in life that finally our intimate partner asks for it and we lay it all on their feet and it's a single circuit. And then they're like whoa, you want me to hold that with you? Like I don't know what to do, and it puts a lot of stress and pressure on the relationship. Versus what I find is, as men get resourced, particularly connecting with other men, to bring their heartache, their vulnerability, their fears, they can get in touch with that in a deep way. They can get clear about what they need, what they're feeling, what they're experiencing, particularly with other men. It's where we can be messy, it's where we don't have to hold it together. As you know, I've literally collapsed into snot piles of tears with men before some of the most painful parts of my life and I'm grateful for that. And then in that work I get to get clear in my body here's what's happening, here's what's hard, here's what I'm working on, and then I bring that back to my partner. Yeah, I'm really hurting right now. I did.
Jason:My wife and I had this conversation pretty early in our marriage. I was pivoting to becoming a coach and to make some very wise moves financially and it was in a really hard place and we wanted to have a kid and it was stressing her out and me out and I was racking up debt and even doing this work I still defaulted to the withdrawal, just not sharing my pain with her, not sharing the pain with my friends, and that freaked her out. She felt abandoned and so she just sat me down and she's like what's going on, what's the plan? And luckily I'd done enough practice that in that moment I was able to get resourced and really feel deep connect. I had had a few conversations with some guys in my men's group and I was able to just say to her in two sentences you know, I'm just at a place in my life right now where I feel like I'm losing in every arena and it hurts and I want to be winning and I'm working really hard to try to shift that. And you know what happened? Her whole body relaxed. Oh, that's what's true. You feel like you're losing. It's not me, it's not our relationship, it's that threat. And she could feel I was resourced beyond her.
Jason:I think that's the big key here For a lot of men. If we don't have the resource around us and we bring our vulnerability, all of that pressure gets put on our intimate partner. And you know it's a little crass, but I say what it often does. And what's hard is it shifts our partners into mother mode. But do you want me to take care of you? And mother and lover are not often compatible.
Jason:It's not that we can't ever bring our vulnerabilities, but it's totally different to bring like here's where I'm struggling, here's where I'm in pain and I'm resourced. You know, for me I got a coach, I got a therapist, I got men's groups. These are all men and people who are helping me figure this out. So I don't need you to solve this with me, I just need you to know what's true for me. And that often creates deep relaxation in women and in the feminine. You know just that feeling of you know a man has a network around him and that's part of the struggle. So many men don't these days don't have that network and so a woman can feel that and that vulnerability can be too heavy in a sense. But when we're resourced and when there's other people holding that with us I've just shown that it, or I've just experienced and seen it comes across totally differently in the sharing and relationship and then women really do often feel closer and let into our world.
Casey:That makes a lot of sense that you need to sort of diversify your relational portfolio so you're not dumping all on one person. And then I think there's also I mean, this has been my own experience they're just the issues of being a man that only a man is going to fully understand, and I imagine that's true for women as well. Right, there's just some things that when it talks to, like, when you talk about that pressure of losing and winning, I'm sure your wife can understand that, but not on the same way that a man can understand that. That, like your whole identity has wrapped up and winning and losing and what that means and what that feels like and how hard it is to say that out loud, right, like that's the type of thing that I think, where, when you have a connection with a guy, there's just going to be a different resonance to that and you need to have that register in your life.
Casey:I'm curious for guys who are listening to this and saying I love that, I want that. If I tried to initiate this with my friends, there's no way they'd be receptive to it. You know, what do you say to them? Do you start from scratch? Do you find a local men's group that is already doing this type of work, or do you say no, there's a way that you can kind of create this or cultivate in your friend group gradually, or there's a series of steps. You can do it. You know what's the best place to get started.
Jason:Yeah, I hate to be that guy again, but I'm gonna say both, and what I mean by that is what I love about men's groups is they are one of the ultimate decentralized technologies. All you need to start a men's group is you and two other guys. You don't have to wait right. The group I've been in here in Los Angeles since 2014,. It's how it started. It's me and two other guys who we got together and we said, hey, we wanna start meeting and going deeper in our lives. And so we set a time and a date and we started meeting and then we, as we met and interacted with guys we thought might be a good fit, we invited them in, right, some guys checked it out and they were like, great, I went in. Other guys checked it out. They're like, hey, no, this isn't for us. But over time, we magnetized the right guys and we've had an incredibly stable group for a number of years now eight guys that just like clockwork every other Monday and that you can just do that. There's all kinds of structures.
Jason:I help support men in how to create groups and depth of groups and whatnot, but the truth is, the most simple thing is to just pick a time and place where you're gonna get together and you're gonna talk about what's really going on in your life. That's it right. And oftentimes the two ways I see this show up in groups are sometimes we need support, which means we're struggling and we just need a little support. We need to vent, we need to get some things out. Sometimes we need some advice or some feedback. Other times we need accountability. Right, it's not just all support, it's also like hey, here's something important. I don't wanna move forward in my life and I need you guys to help keep me accountable, cause I know the tricks I play on myself or the patterns I get into right. And those groups can be wildly effective too, and oftentimes we need both at different times, so you can just start for one Then.
Jason:That said, a powerful thing about men's work this growing movement I'm talking about, and why it's so valuable, is because so few of us men have had modeled for us a healthier manifestation of like, really deeply embodied, present, powerful and sensitive masculinity. We don't know how to become that cause. We've never seen it right. So one of the great things about men's work is you can get into spaces and meet men like that, and it was transformative for me. Right, I was 26 and I did a men's group and there was a guy who was in his 60s there leading it and, I kid you not, five minutes into being in that room, I was like, oh my God, that's what I wanna be when I'm 60. The way this guy is moving through the room, how he's holding space, how he's talking, how he's breathing his presence, whatever he's been doing, like sign me up, cause that's where I wanna end up. I wanna have that capacity. I could feel it in my nervous system, right.
Jason:And, as I often say, masculinity is a transmission. When we're around it, we get the download of it and for many of us men, once we're immersed in it, suddenly the light bulbs go off of different ways to be. So, also, going to some existing groups or even some men's work workshops, where you get to be around guys, frankly, who are deeper than you, right, who have done more work on their nervous system, to be present, to be sensitive, to be aware, where you can see a man who is maybe completely experiencing grief and sadness but 100% still feels trustable in his power. Right, where you're like, wow, I've never seen that before. Right, this is a man who's deeply feeling, but he doesn't feel collapsed, he doesn't feel lost in his grief, In same thing with anger and a lot of these different things that we just never have modeled for us.
Jason:So starting a group but then also finding ways to experience other men who are a little farther along the journey is one of the quickest accelerants I've seen, because then we get it in our body pretty fast. We have all these mirror neurons and stuff and it's like you feel it. The thing with masculine presence is it's a felt body experience, right? Wow, I noticed when I'm around this person I feel more here, I feel safer, I feel more relaxed, I feel more grounded. That's the impact masculine presence can have. And once we feel in our bodies, as we receive that transmission from another, it's like we have a set point in our lives to. Okay, now I can go work on cultivating this in my own life, because I kind of know what it feels like.
Casey:Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm really getting into the logistics of this. So, if you're a guy who's listening in Albuquerque, is there a website you can go to where you can see available men's groups, or is there a way that you recommend for somebody who wants to start one? What's the how do you glob onto something that's already existing or get something started?
Jason:Yeah, it's a great question and it's one of the ones I get the most now and part of where my work is headed. I wish there was like a global directory, but there's not quite yet. And men's group is kind of like meditation. You're like, hey, I meditate. It's like well, what kind? There's endless varieties of meditation. And men's group is the same way. But what I would say is meetupcom, particularly if you're in bigger cities, we'll often have listings for men's groups and men's work.
Jason:You can find Google is certainly your friend oftentimes going into wellness spaces, so meditation centers or yoga studios, the old cork boards sometimes they'll be up there like local men's group, you know like, come check it out or men's weekend or men's day workshop. Going to those places is gonna be the fastest way. You can even then start to find guys who might be interested in that kind of thing. I certainly support men in starting groups. I'm working on a program around that. I've run a number of groups myself. And then there's lots of organizations out there. Like I said, this movement you know it used to be small but it's taken off the biggest one you know, which has been going through a lot of the transformations but really does have a presence in most major cities is the mankind project. So you can Google mankindorg and find their weekend workshops and then they have groups, but there's lots of different ones at this point. So you know.
Jason:The other great thing is, unlike you know, 15 years ago, in a sense because of technology even the way you and I are connecting there's a lot more available to guys who might not have had access to this kind of stuff, depending on where they're living. And while I'm a huge proponent to the power of being in the same room together, it's really it does something. It's kind of where the deepest work I find can happen. You know you can get exceptional results even from a virtual group. You know I've learned over the years of the pandemic like, yeah, you can get a lot of the shifts and for a lot of guys that are parents or ability jobs, you know it's a lot more accessible for them to just tune in over Zoom or something like that. So Google's your friend.
Jason:You know you can certainly check out my work at evolutionarymen. It's starting to talk to other men in your community like, hey, have you done any men's work? Do you know of any men's groups? They're more and more out there and you know it's certainly part of my mission to get every man into a group, so I'm a huge advocate for, like you know, there's workshops, there's things you can learn. I'm working on programs but the truth is it is decentralized. So if you just need some tips, how do I start, like, how do I write the email? What structure do we use? I'm always available for that if guys ever want to reach out.
Casey:Great. So I want to talk to you a little bit about kind of dating and go to some modern trends around dating that I think are definitely challenges for men right now. First, I just want to get your thought on dating apps. How has this affected the relationship of men and women and just kind of the whole mess that we're in in terms of men and women trying to find each other?
Jason:Yeah, man, these things are tough. I think the first important thing to say is you know the most popular apps these days. You got to remember they're optimized for engagement, not for results, so they are optimized to keep you coming back to the app. Right, that's what success for Tinder or some of these companies is, and that's not necessarily working in your favor. These are dopamine machines, right, feeding us the hook. Maybe it's this one, maybe it's this one.
Jason:One more notification so it creates a lot of stress on our nervous system and for a lot of men, part of the hard work I do with them is you know I got this from one of my mentors, Dr Robert Glover that one of the fallacies men can fall for is we want a woman to be our whole lynchilada, right, so our relationship becomes everything. And the truth is you just want a partnership, whether you're a man or a woman, to be the icing on the cake. You don't want it to be the cake, and so a lot of the deep work I do with men is online dating is not enough. What is the structural change you're bringing to your life? To be happy, content, fulfilled, connected and feel whole in it? And lo and behold when you emphasize that stuff, you become more attractive and you start to create more connections in your organic community and getting into spaces where you're gonna meet like-minded people, including partners. So by no means against online dating, but I work pretty hard with guys that I tell them. You know, at this point it should be no more than 20%. No more than 20% of your time or energy should be devoted to the apps, and first thing you should do anytime you join an app is turn off all the notifications, turn off every notification and once a day you pick a time block where you go in, you do your online dating work for 20 minutes, whatever, and then you're out and then the rest of the day is yours. So you change the energetic direction to you being at the bit of the notifications, to I control my space and time and I go in and do the work and I come back in a day and it is so liberating for a lot of guys I work with to not have that constant hook, because it is also just hard. You know you can.
Jason:You know there's always heat here, because it's not easy for women either, right? I can tell you my wife works with women and the horror stories are real and true. But with men there is a difference in that, you know, a woman puts up, oftentimes, a profile. She'll get, you know, 100 matches in a day. Like literally can't even keep up.
Jason:Men I work with, you know, handsome, successful guys. Maybe a couple of matches a week, they're lucky. And then beyond that, like actually getting connection is tough, like the cards are pretty stacked against men's favor in just the dynamics of that fast, swipe online world. And that's hard on men and their nervous systems, which is why I say you got to take care of it. You got to take care of yourself, right, and you can't have that be your everything.
Jason:So it's really important to control how you're engaging with these.
Jason:You know dopamine, hijacking technologies in a sense, in that you know it's fine if you meet someone online, but again, the more lit up and engaged in your life is you want to have a life to invite a partner back into.
Jason:So connection, community, passions, activities, and so it's like a double win because if you emphasize that and you do meet someone online, boom, you're plugging them into this rich life of satisfaction that you already have going, and if you don't meet someone online, by spending your time in the spaces you're passionate about, you're likely to meet people anyway, right Men who might have single friends, different women, et cetera, and I've seen that just be a big game changer for men. But it is hard and I've worked with a lot of men who, you know, just get beaten down after you know a year of very few matches or endless first dates and they're just like this sucks. So some guys I know just say you know what? I'm not going to do it that way. I'm just going to step off the online thing and just keep putting my energy into the real world and for some men that works.
Casey:It's funny because there's this weird thing that's happening where I think everyone kind of agrees and it's been a couple of years now since I've been on the apps. Me and my fiance have been together now for a little over two years, although we met on hinge. So you know I have very like ambivalent, you know, kind of thoughts about what it means and what the value of it is. But it's really interesting because a lot of what I see happening is that nobody's really satisfied with dating apps but they've taken over so much that all of the other ways we used to meet people just seem weird now. Like when I was first dating, going up to a girl and being like and striking up a conversation with her was not a big deal.
Casey:Now I would never do that Like I mean, obviously I'd never do that because I'm in a relationship. But if I was on the dating market I would feel really uncomfortable just approaching a stranger to bar and talking to them because it's like, well, you know, match with me on an app like a normal person. You creep, like what are you doing here, you know? So it's kind of this interesting juxtaposition where I think we all agree that we want something better, but we've kind of taken away everything that was better as a cultural norm at this point, you know. So what's your advice to guys or girls for that matter who say I would love to meet somebody in the real world, but I'm not sure how to do that?
Jason:Yeah, totally, I mostly work with men here, but I do think this applies to both. That's why I just think it's so key to get a clue into what you're passionate about and then start to like where are you physically spending time? So you can create like pretty easy, you know, charts here of where am I physically spending my time and how likely am I to meet someone of the opposite sex whose values I might align with there. So, you know, you can kind of map that out. And the truth is, for a lot of guys I work with, some of them come from the culture of just meeting someone at the bar, but they're at a point in their life where they're looking for something a little deeper, right. Or they've been with some partners who are highly volatile or, you know and this goes for both sides where they're like you know, when you think about it, a bar is a pretty awful place to potentially meet a partner is just kind of shooting from the hip, hoping, hey, like you're attractive, but I hope our values line up right and you're the kind of person I want to be with. And what I tend to push men to is get into the inner work world, man, personal growth and transformation. When you start going into those spaces, many of which are co-ed, you start spending time around other people who are taking responsibility for their healing and growth, and it's totally different, right, when you come into a relationship with someone who's already growth oriented, meaning they understand that life is a process of growing and changing and that relationships, in particular, are going to throw everything in your face and force you to confront anything that's unhealed. You know, often in your system and your attachment styles and things like that, and so I'm a big proponent of men, you know, going to meditation classes, going to yoga classes, going to sound baths, going to cacao ceremonies. You can meet co-ed people there who are showing up in a different way and looking for something different. I'm also a huge fan of I used to leave this stuff here in LA.
Jason:There's a body of work called authentic relating, which is not necessarily just about dating, but it's about how people can connect at a deeper level which I know is something you're pretty passionate about and increase our relational fitness. For, like, how do you be authentic with other people in a culture that really, you know, particularly in McDonald's America just kind of pushes us up to? How are you? I'm okay. How are you? I'm okay.
Jason:But to pierce that level of realness takes it takes some training and language education, right, and how to do that. So I push a lot of the guys towards, and women too, like you can literally just Google authentic relating your city and you'll. You know, big cities in particular will have something now and I guarantee, if you go to that kind of event you're going to meet a type of person at a very different frequency than you'd meet in a bar. And you know it's fine. If you meet someone in a bar, I'm just saying you have you're, you're filtering a lot more right, you've got a lot more gold dig and so speak there to like sift through to find the great stuff.
Casey:Yeah, I mean, a bar is a weird place where you're like the only thing we really know about each other is that we might both have drinking problems, right Like exactly, it's not really a great, great landing spot.
Casey:So I'm curious, like to me, the problems of men can also, it seems like a little bit be separated generationally at this point Seems like there's this whole suite of problems that affect men that are like just the generation below me and I think it's really just the generation that grew up with smartphones and always available porn and dating apps and it's just it's this whole other mess of problems and it's interesting, like all I don't know a lot of people like this.
Casey:So all of my information from this comes from online forums and hearing people talk about this and I wonder if I'm even just even have the right impression of this. But the amount of guys that I will hear just say that they are completely directionless, like, and they'll respond specifically to the piece of advice you gave where it's like, you know, just follow your passion. They're like, I'm passionate about porn and video games. I'm not going to meet somebody doing that Like, how do you think of, do you see this, this epidemic of kind of this directionless man, this, this younger guy who just doesn't even know what to care about, and how do you start with somebody like that who literally it's not? Oh, I need to invest more in my passion. I need to develop something resembling a passion.
Jason:Yeah, this is a great, great question and something I do work with guys around purpose, because you know this is one. This is one of those things that there's a lot of gift in there. But, man, we were kind of sold a sold a poison pill here around the. You know, even I love them. But Joseph Campbell like, follow your bliss. Right, you got to find your deepest purpose, which is your deepest passion, the thing you love doing, and that that's what you need to do in life. And if you don't find that, you know you're not a success or you're a slave to the system or whatever that might be. And the crazy thing is the actual research shows it's the other way around. So we don't start doing something that's our deepest passion and we become like successful at it, what they and feel rewarded in it.
Jason:What the research shows is that passion, the kind of passion that actually sticks. It comes the other way around. You start doing something and you get really good at it and in the process of developing competence and mastery in it, you get more and more passionate about it, right? So this is, you know, this guy, cal Newport it's written a lot about this and some other people, but it's the shift to thinking in terms of a craftsman mindset of you know, whatever craft I pick, my life's work is to keep improving that craft. And the crazy thing is, to some extent it doesn't matter what your craft is. Now you want to have something that's not totally against your values or alignment, and so oftentimes what I say to men is you just got to pick something. It's going to change and you can never predict where you're going to end up. But by throwing yourself into something it's going to like kind of force you down a path that you can never predict. And so you just got to be willing to commit and invest and grow and get support. And this idea that we have to be deeply passionate about it, it causes such a disservice because then it's like oh, this isn't my deepest passion, so I'm not really going to work hard at work because I don't really want to be in this job anyway. And they can, you know, really get guys in this bind. So for one, there's just knowing that oftentimes passion comes after the investment of time and they've pulled so many people in, the ones that are most fulfilled by their careers. This is often the case. They're like I never thought I would have been it, but it just kind of came to me and then I got really into it and now I'm super competent in it and I'm healthily rewarded financially for it and it gives my life, you know meaning.
Jason:The other thing that, having all that said, I've often found, as I do, deep work with men is sometimes the work that we feel most motivated to really bring our full selves to. So in some sense our deepest purpose often has roots in whatever our deepest pain is right. So whatever we experienced growing up, where we didn't get certain nutrients or have certain things we wanted, we in our bodies know the pain of that lack. So we're, in a sense, very motivated to make sure other people don't have to experience that. And we have the embodied experience of, theoretically, how to get through it. So for a lot of people it's like whatever pain or issue that you have in your life that you're really struggling with. If you figure that out, other people will pay you for that. Hey, you figured out how to do X, so I'll pay you for that. So this is why, again, I pushed guys onto the inner growth path, because as you get more in touch with yourself and your pain, like me.
Jason:Lo and behold. You know I had a lot of my needs provided for me as a kid, but I lived in a house of a lot of emotional disconnection, where I wasn't really in my body. There was no relational capacity in my family. And so what am I super passionate about now? It's helping to get people connected. You know, I imagine you and I share some DNA in some way around that, around the importance of like knowing what it's like to not have relational fitness or connection and then being really inspired to support others in getting that. So for me, you know, it comes naturally to me to just love helping people feel more connected to themselves, to others, and that's kind of where my career has moved.
Jason:Did I pick that 20 years ago? No, I studied film. I invested decades of my life into being a filmmaker, but this is where my journey took me and because I had to figure out some pretty challenging things to get to a place in my life where I feel like I'm thriving, that's where I actually feel like I have the most capacity to offer other people now. So in a big part of my masteries, you know, so to speak, came from I've sat in thousands of hours of men's groups at this point, initially for my own well-being right. It was because I need this to heal, and in that process I got super interested in them, learning about them, experiencing them, and then it was a natural pivot to me to start offering them to other men, because now I'm always on the lookout for, oh my God, I want to learn new things and how can I bring it to the guys and how fun this will be, and it is a passion for me. Now that's partly come from just dedicating to myself, to it after all these years. Does that help?
Casey:Absolutely. I think it's such a powerful idea, the idea of, instead of thinking what am I good at, think about what am I obsessed with, because it's given me a lot of pain over my life, right, and that if you can find that solution, not only will you have the solution, you'll have every step in between. I remember hearing the practice stories of when Michael Jordan was a coach briefly and he'd be on the floor and he'd just be like, okay, so what you do is then you just fade away, go like this and then just slam over the guy's head and they're like we can't do that Totally. You can't really be a good coach if you're actually just naturally gifted at something. And then his teammate, steve Kerr, who is barely a bench player, is one of the best coaches in the NBA now because he knows what it's like to be a bench player. He knows what's struggling and gets to the NBA. He knows what it's like to worry about your next contract. He knows every single dimension of being an NBA player because he's had to go the whole path.
Casey:And I think this idea that you can actually learn something better when you start from a lower point than when you start from a higher point is something that I think is it's a powerful idea, that I think it alludes a lot of people, but I love that you brought that up and I think it does give you just another way in If you think what am I if you can't think about what you're passionate about? Think about what's causing you a lot of pain and maybe start there. I love that.
Jason:Totally. Yeah. I love how you tie that together and, again, that's part of why a lot of the work I focus on is relationships. That was my journey. I was a virgin until I was 26. I had so much pain around connecting to women, feeling comfortable in my body. It was brutal for me and it's what really kicked off my self growth journey and it's actually why a lot of men come to me and work with me now because they're like a coach who's, like you know, was getting women from 16 with no problem. There's no use to me in that right, because that's not a journey that is reflective of my journey. So a lot of guys come to me because they're like, wow, you didn't feel capable in this arena and now you have a smoking hot wife and a kid. Like that's part of the journey. I want to go on. So I'm right with you there and again, all tied into.
Jason:You know, my pain has ended up really guiding my purpose in some sense, because I'm super passionate. Like it was so hard for me where I'm like man, if I could. Just, you know, one of the reasons I have one of the programs I do is that I could take everything I learned and put it into one thing to try to make that a little easier for another guy. I feel like my life is, you know, going. Well, what a gift to give. So it is a great place to kind of clue into like where is your pain? Because you're going to often have a natural passion there for supporting other people in it. And then at that point it's like you just kind of pick something and you start going and that deeper satisfaction and fulfillment, like you build that over time through building the competence and the mastery and then getting rewarded for it, and it is something delicate I have to work with men on right that it's like you can't. You know it's easy to sit on the sidelines and hope for the perfect job, but it almost never is going to come right. There are some men who you know the greatest gifts they give to the world are in line with how they receive financial compensation, but that's not always the case.
Jason:I know many men who are living deep, deep purpose in their life and it's totally separate from how they pay the bills. Right the two. What their day job allows them to do is gives them the fuel, the economic resource to keep pursuing their purpose, because not every purpose is going to lead to dollars in your bank, right? You know I got a friend who just likes making chocolate, like really good chocolate for people, and he's deeply on purpose just giving away chocolate to friends and he's, you know, creating a whole network around that. Or for many guys I work with, you know they just want to be a better father than they had, like that.
Jason:My purpose is to raise my kids differently than I was raised, and so whatever job I have to do so I can be present for my kids, that's on purpose, right. So it's a lot more nuanced than the stuff we were spoon fed that, I think, really does a lot of harm, particularly to younger kids. That you know, if you don't love it, it's not your purpose, and then, well, I don't love it, this thing is hard, so then I don't want to do it until we don't do anything right and we get stuck. And then all the while we're getting bombarded by all this new supernormal stimuli that our nervous systems just are not. We have not caught up evolutionarily to have antibodies to the level of dopamine that we're just flooded by in our culture these days, and so people get overloaded and their nervous systems and that's, you know, detoxifying. That, in a sense, is also part of what I do with men to just you got to get centered, you got to take control of your space, and then you can start to set direction from there.
Casey:I love that, so I'm learning something on this interview that you have a film background. I also studied film in college, so cool yeah. So I'm curious this is kind of coming up a little bit of a tangent here, but I'm curious do you have any movies that you look at that you see as being representative of again, kind of like a man in the world or masculinity in the world? That is really what we want to model in the world, because I think sometimes fictional examples serve better than real world examples because they can be clean and pure, you know, and so I'm wondering if you can think of any fictional examples that you look at is like this is a a modern role model from masculinity.
Jason:Totally. One of the films I point to from I think it was maybe 2016 was Moonlight, which I think won the Oscar that year. But it's incredibly deep and nuanced and what I love about it is it shows that a man can be big and tough and hard and still have a sense of interiority, still feel vulnerable, still want things, still feel soft. And the fact that that was put up on the screen I was like oh, hell, yeah, like that's just like a straight shot into the culture, because it, you know, having it come through, you know somebody who in the last part of that movie is very physically intimidating, Like you're, like that's a fucking man, you know, in all those old man box senses. But then through that is pushed this whole interiority, this inner world.
Jason:I was like that is great, because that's giving a whole bunch of people permission to know that those two things do not have to be mutually exclusive. Right, the new wave of man is fucking powerful. We are connected to our power, we are connected to our sex, we are connected to our desires, we are connected to our boundaries and we're connected to our hearts, so we understand the impact we have on other people. We're aware we're sensitive, right, and when we have that sweet spot it's pretty unstoppable. So definitely check out Moonlight if you haven't already to. You know, see in a different way a version of the man box as well that this young boy who becomes a man is really having to fight against the culture he was raised in to be his true self.
Casey:Yeah, no, I definitely. A very thought-provoking meditation on what it means to be a man and how society relates to that. So great, great pick. How about have you seen all the Oscar favorites this year?
Jason:I actually haven't. I'm not totally kept up. I'm a little behind. Fair enough. Fair enough Trying to catch up, yeah.
Casey:I was going to ask you if you had an Oscar pick, but I won't hold you.
Jason:Oscar nom. So here let's take a look. I probably didn't see a whole bunch of them. Since having the kid, my film going has gone way, way down. Oh yeah, I've only seen like three or four of these. I mean, I was definitely quite impacted by Oppenheimer, for sure, I haven't seen Killers of the Flower Moon yet. I've seen the Holdovers Barbie. Those were both great. Oh, Past Lives. If I could cast my vote, it would totally be Past Lives.
Casey:One of the amazing movies. So that's one of the lists that I haven't seen, so I'll check that out, but yeah, I think it's-.
Jason:So good, so good.
Casey:Okay, awesome, I love it. Well, that's pretty much all I had on my list. Is there anything else you wanted to cover before we wrap up our conversation here?
Jason:No, I just love this man and I love this term even of your show and everything you're bringing here around. The social athlete and relational fitness man men need it, we need it.
Casey:We absolutely do, we all do.
Jason:The thing I talk about, this work is we've been fed this myth of the lone wolf and the truth, just like in nature, is the lone wolf is actually the one that dies first, that's the one that was kicked out and that's the one that's not going to survive as long, and we have to kind of work against that programming as men and, as I say, particularly male community, like I'm such a big proponent of it, doesn't make life easier, but it makes it a lot better. Suddenly, we have a lot more resource to deal with all the stress of life that's going to come at you no matter what, and what I've found is connection is often the antidote for almost everything. When we feel connected, we have so much more resiliency, and that's the thing we really want to cultivate resiliency. And resiliency requires connection, and I just love that You're tuned into that 100%.
Casey:I think a lot of what's happened in our current environment is that we just have so many ways to get. What used to be met through relationships get met through apps and other types of things, and so, yeah, it used to be.
Casey:if I wanted to have my dog walked, I needed to cultivate a relationship with somebody in the neighborhood, and they would, you know my dog walker and I'd have to give him a Christmas gift and we'd have to know each other and I'd have to ask him questions about them and they'd ask me questions about me. But now I just go on an app and I order a dog walker. The need gets met, but the relationship falls away and maybe one time that's not a problem. But when that happens over and over and, over and over again and the whole social fabric that was kind of this background support system evaporates, you know what we're left with, I think, is what you brought up, where we start putting so much more pressure on the relationships that maintain. You know the ones that are still there. Now there's so much more pressure on them because we're so much less diversified relationally.
Jason:It's a great way to put it. I love that.
Casey:Well, awesome. Thank you, Jason. This has been fantastic. I really appreciate it.
Jason:Awesome, casey, really pleasure to be here.