There are two ways men have learned to fail at masculinity, and most guys I work with have lived both of them. Either you're the macho jerk, or you swing so hard away from that you land in what I call the new age wimp, all attunement and no spine, unable to set a boundary or name what you actually want, or you just lock everything down and go stoic, present in the room but feeling nothing at all. I sat down with Tripp on The New Man and we spent the hour in that territory, unpacking what Tony Porter years ago called the man box, this cultural checklist that tells us being a man means never showing vulnerability, and how so many of us grew up either becoming that or running from it so fast we abandoned ourselves in the process.
We got into why I think the fix has nothing to do with dialing masculinity down. What men need is more of the healthy kind, the kind that gives things direction. The masculine is supposed to be like a riverbank, giving the flow somewhere to go, not damming it and not disappearing entirely. I told the story of getting so vulnerable during a plant medicine ceremony that two men had to carry me to an outhouse, and what that did to my own capacity to lead once I understood what it feels like to have zero control over your body.
We also talked about carefrontation, telling a brother he's got spinach in his teeth because you love him too much to let him walk around like that, and why so many boys are growing up without older men nearby to show them how to handle themselves when life gets hard. That gap doesn't stay empty. It gets filled by the loudest voices online if we don't fill it with something real first.
Where in your own life have you been performing invulnerability instead of actually building the capacity to be strong?
This conversation originally aired on The New Man podcast. Tripp's amazing!
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Host (The New Man): Before we start the show, I want to thank the thousands of you. The thousands who have read this book will make you dangerous. Many of you have told me that the book's unique way of exploring fear, confidence and purpose has had a lasting impact. That it's much easier for you to get clarity and direction about what really matters and what you want to do in this lifetime. It's also amazing to hear that quite a few of you have read it multiple times and even bought copies for friends. So thank you again. Just in case you weren't aware, I created a free companion video course for the book. And in these videos I walk you through the big takeaways and practices from each chapter and I even cover some extra stuff that's not included in the book. Information on how to access the course is in newer versions of the book, and if you own an older version of the book and you don't know how to access the course, just hit me up via the contact [email protected] and we'll get you all set up. And one last thing, if you're one of the thousands who have already read the book, please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon so that others can decide if it's right for them. Again, thank you so much for reading this book will make you dangerous. And now, let's start the show.
Jason Lange: You are listening to the New man beyond the Macho jerk and the New Age wimp. Your host is men's coach Tripp Lenire.
Host (The New Man): How can you tell if you're too soft or too domineering as a man? Why are so many modern men afraid of their own masculinity? And how do we build a sense of purpose and belonging while knowing someone's really got our back? Since I started the New man Back in 2007, Peter, people have asked me how to be the New Man. I've never liked that question, or the broader one of how to be a man, because it implies that there's a formula to follow. I believe there are universal qualities to being a man, but it's not a checklist. What it means to be a man is unique to each of us, and that unique path is what lets us become who we genuinely are, instead of a bunch of clones with beards and guns. And I'm a guy with both a beard and guns. But I've learned that this perspective isn't entirely true. I met Jason Lange over 20 years ago. He was one of my first coaching clients, and I helped him start a men's group. He's still in to this day. Since then he's dedicated himself to men's work and now he leads groups and retreats of his own. I asked him to join me today to help me see what I'm missing about masculinity. Well, I'm glad to have you on here because I've got some confusion and I think you're the guy to help me out with this in that for many years, you know, people would ask like, you know, what does it mean to be the new man? How do you be the new man? How does one be the new man? And I always stayed out of that conversation. I never liked the how to be a man conversation. I never liked that checklist. And to me it spoke to something that was like, well, if I get masculinity right, then I'll be attractive. I won't be a wimp, I won't be a loser, I won't be a doormat. There was something and it would just. It seemed to run in parallel to the success kind of thing. If I'm successful, then I'll be enough. I'll be significant, I'll be attractive, I won't be a loser. No one can look down on me like that. So I just saw them as kind of two of the same lanes of give me a checklist for how to act and I'll get it right. And that, that was never what I wanted to help people with. I always wanted to help people be more of who they genuinely were. And I. And then the chips would fall where they fell in terms of whether you were masculine or feminine or whatever any of that stuff was. I just didn't care that much. But nonetheless, there's this big conversation going on around masculinity. You're a part of this conversation with your own offerings. And so I think I'm missing something. And I don't want to have a blind spot here, but it is a bit ironic that I've been hosting the new man for 20 plus years.
Jason Lange: That's great. I love it.
Host (The New Man): And I'm just like, I don't fucking care about this masculinity conversation. So I don't want to push it away because I think there is something there, but I'm missing something. And I'll say one more thing. As a father to a daughter, I know you are too. That many aspects of what people say go along with being a man are things I want my daughter to possess. Strong character, courage, strength, integrity, responsibility. So I don't associate that with masculinity by any Means. So I need an upgrade. I need your help here. So are you open to that?
Jason Lange: Yeah, I love it.
Host (The New Man): Okay, great. All right. What am I missing?
Jason Lange: I mean, if anything, I would say maybe what you're missing is you've been living it. So, I mean, I think where I align with you is more the inside out approach. I mean, paradoxically, the most masculine guy is the guy who doesn't give a. What anyone thinks about him and just lives authentically. Right. And in the middle is, you know, the, the lingo, so to speak, that we. We talk about is the man box. Right. This guy Tony Porter out of the Bay Area, I think in the 90s, kind of coined it. He was doing, like, men's work in Oakland in the man box. Just this idea that culturally there's this box, and inside that box are a whole bunch of check boxes that you're supposed to check off. And as long as you check them off, you're a man. If you don't check them off, you're all the other things we can imagine. Right? And biggest one, Terry real's really big on this these days, is to me, to be a man means to be invulnerable, to not have feelings.
Host (The New Man): To be invulnerable. Yeah.
Jason Lange: To be invulnerable. Yeah. To never show vulnerability. Tough as nails. I mean, you and I are both here in the States, and it's part of our romantic mythos here, right? The. The. The lone cowboy out on the frontier. Tough as nails. Doesn't need anybody. Just goes, no. And I meet guys who celebrate that. They're like, yeah, I don't need anybody. And I'm like, oh, my God. I can. I know where that goes.
Host (The New Man): Yeah, right? Yeah. Don't be weak.
Jason Lange: Don't be weak. Right. And what that does to us internally and how we have to live. But so that man box, you know, it's this really interesting thing because I think we're starting to become aware of it as men and as a culture. And I. I don't have the. The name of it on. On me, but I can dig it up. There was a research study done a couple years ago. I thought. I thought it was fascinating where they asked both men and women what marks the transition from a boy to a man and what marks the transition from a girl to a woman in both sides. And I'm not saying this is right, but this is what the default culture was saying for girl to woman. It was based on physiology. Ah, she has her cycle, her body has developed. She can be pregnant. Now she's a woman. Yeah, right. For boys to men was not based on physiology. It was based on their behavior in their community. How are they actually showing up? And that gap, I think, is what is really coming to the surface in the culture right now. And the way I've seen it is many men I work with, right. I've trained heavily with Dr. Glover. I'm a so called nice guy. I'm in recovery. A lot of guys I work with that would claim that title grew up seeing the macho jerk or being impacted by the father, the uncle, the coach, the person who just did not care about the heart and often hurt them or bullied them or ostracized them. So there's this huge wave of, well, I don't want to be that. Right. So the allergy to that kind of stage one macho jerk masculinity swings to I want to be safe, I'll be really attuned. I want to be sensitive. I don't want to cause harm to anyone. I do not want to objectify. But what tends to happen there is we start to abandon ourselves. Right. We can't set boundaries. It's hard for me to name what I want. Conflict is really hard. I get resentful at people because they're not giving me what I want, even though I didn't ask for it. You know, all the things for the so called new age wimp or. Yeah, right again in the title there. And that doesn't work. So there's a whole generation that either grew that way because they experienced the macho jerk or now what I think you and I even talked about a while ago, even the younger guys I'm seeing, their MO was being raised in a me too culture of just every week a story about what dissociated, disconnected, disembodied, masculine men can do to women, to children, to the environment. And so the culture they're swimming in is, whoa, don't be that.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: And then, you know, there's. There's kind of that cowboy I just sometimes name as the third archetype of just the stoic. The I show up, but I just don't feel anything. Everything's on lockdown inside. And those are the three archetypes I see mostly playing out in culture. And they all fail. Men's health, frankly, just, well, being. So many guys come to me and they're like, I don't know what to be. Right. Like, how am I supposed to win? You know, it is kind of that equation, in a sense. But I Don't know how to win like this. Or my wife makes more money than me. She wants me to be vulnerable, and then I'm vulnerable. And then she's like, ew, I don't like your vulnerability. They get really confused, and no one's really taught us, so everybody's like, I don't know what to do. And now since there's been a vacuum, the loudest voices are the ones being heard, which are kind of the red pill manosphere. Go back to, you know, women as property, don't ever, you know, be vulnerable kind of shit just because they're the only ones talking. And so they're getting a lot of volume. And so what I see in my work and in the space is men are desperate to want to know what's the healthy way to show up. Where I don't have to abandon myself and I don't have to dominate anyone else. Right? Where I can actually be in relationship with myself, my family, my wife, my spouse, my environment. All of that.
Host (The New Man): Okay, that's a lot. That's a lot. Let's, let's take a, take, take some smaller bites out of that because it's really helpful for me. And I think the part that you named where my. Where there's a blind spot here was like, it was the inside out part versus an outside in. And I was definitely raised in an environment where there was a lot of the outside in. I can see that. Obviously, my dad's a cop and cowboy and a Marine, and I was raised around, you know, guys that got shit done and were willing to take risks. And so. But even beyond that, there were just. I was raised around men. My, my, my friends, dads were guys that were providers and did stuff.
Jason Lange: Right?
Host (The New Man): They, they, they got, they took care of their families and they took care of things. So. But I could imagine it if I grew up in an environment where that wasn't done or the men were emasculated in some way and living in front of it, either not there or living in front of a television or just not involved or whatever, then. Then there is this question mark. Mean to be masculine. And it's not enough to say, hey, it's at my essence and it'll just, it'll find a way to express itself. We need to have some kind of upbringing and some kind of training. Is that the right word that we would use?
Jason Lange: I would totally call it training. Right. It's the thing.
Host (The New Man): But it, but it also has to leave room for answering the question of who am I really? And not Just here's that checklist. That's the part that I've. I've got a problem with. It's like, go be this. Even if it's because there might be some element, like, that's not really who I am. But I think we're also wading into this, where we haven't really talked about what masculinity is. And so I'm curious how you define the traits of masculinity as it applies in more of a practical sense, not just the kind of essential typology that. That can get thrown around.
Jason Lange: Yeah. I mean, I'll start a little esoteric, and then I'll. I'll zoom in to practical. And how I often say it is. It's. Right. It is the part of us that's timeless and just aware. But where it becomes functional is the masculine masculinity wants to bring things to a close. It wants to complete things. So it wants to take the available range of everything and narrow it down until there's some kind of freedom or release. That's one of the simplest ways I can say it. And I think part of what we're wrestling with in the world today is these terms. Even, like, masculine and feminine, they used to be kind of just reduced to your biology. Oh, you're a woman, so you're this. You're a man, so you're this. That's all going right out the window right now. And I think that's fucking awesome. Right? There's more fluidity than ever. But paradoxically, when there's more fluidity, I think it's more important to understand what the energies actually are and that there's a time and place where we need to step into both. Right. There's a time and place where I just need to be able to relax and receive and not do anything. And there's a time and place where I gotta get done. Right. That I need to bring structure to the moment. Like, you know, particularly raising kids. Right. I'm living outside Boulder these days, and it's a real thing here of generations of kids being raised without any boundary. And the real suffering it's causing, like, it's a. It's. For such a highly educated, affluent area, there's shocking numbers of kids in distress in their teenage years. What do you see?
Host (The New Man): What's. What happens to a young person when they don't get that structure and they don't get those boundaries when. When the masculine is not available in the home?
Jason Lange: I think they keep turning up the volume to try to call in containment. So that's another way to think about what we're talking about. Right. The masculine provides containment. Right. So again, in kind of the woo metaphor, you know, David talks about this. The, the feminine is the river. The masculine is the river banks. Okay. You get to flow. And we're just going to give a little structure to the flow. Right. And boundaries are that. We're just going to give a little structure to the flow. Right. Out of everything possible, we're going to put a little limits that keep things safe and pointed towards some kind of wellness. Ideally, I think this is.
Host (The New Man): And I'm not the first one to point this out, but this is why many young people gravitate towards gangs in a certain way. It's like they don't have any structure at home. It's kind of chaotic. No one's there. There's no supervision. There's no rules, boundaries, limitations or anything like that. Then you go into a gang, it's highly structured. There's a hierarchy. There's, there's like, you do this and you mess up and there are consequences. They would rebel against that if that was something that they didn't. If they didn't yearn for.
Jason Lange: No. I say in a lot of the work I do and why I'm so big on men's groups is most men I know really want to feel two things, belonging and purpose. And something like a gang will give you both of those. I get to feel part of something and my presence somehow has a purpose. It has an impact. I can be the one to go do X, Y or Z. I, um. And when we don't have that, well, we see a whole generations of kids kind of one literally wandering without any guidance.
Host (The New Man): Yeah, I, I often wondered if masculinity was really just maturity. You're smiling and nodding there. There's something that I was missing in that as well, that it's not just the mature male. It's a mature male with what? There's, there's. What would we add to that?
Jason Lange: I'm kind of with you in that ultimately it's all human work and we're all just developing to become great humans.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: And there's these two energetics, right?
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: Like the energetic of containment direction, like actual direction, providing direction. Hey, try this, do this. I'm with you. And let's figure it out together. Oh, you tried that didn't work. Well, let's figure it out together. Oh, man, you totally ate shit on that. Well, let's figure out what could we do different next time? So what it creates is a space of safety for failure and learning. So we get feedback. I hope you sort it out. We move forward. Myself and many men I work with, we never had that to fall back into. So life becomes this, like, oh, my God, I'm so afraid to do anything because if I up, it feels like I'm going to die and there's no net. And so if I do something, it has to be absolutely perfect and overthought and ruminated. Right. But that. That energy of direction, guidance, support. I'm with you. Like, let's just. Let's figure it out, right? Hey, here's a bunch of stuff. We don't know how to do it. Let's figure it out together. When men start to get that from each other, it's like their whole nervous systems relax. I see. Of just like, oh, I don't have to figure it out alone. Oh, my God. Thank God. So much easier than, you know, all the other things.
Host (The New Man): I have. I have so many stories of when I'm. When I've led groups and what it looks like working one on one on a particular challenge and then working with a group on a particular challenge and one on one, it can have this heaviness and this seriousness. We work on it in a group. It suddenly becomes play. It's just this like, oh, you're doing the scary thing. I'm doing the scary thing, too. Like, how can we cheer each other on? It's like, did you have that conversation? Yeah, you're going to have that. Like, I didn't. Low cooking. Go do it, man.
Jason Lange: Go do it.
Host (The New Man): It just has this like, let's go. Let's do it together. It's a lot harder to get that going one on one with somebody, but in the group, it's. There's this kind of like, yeah, let's go. Let's do it.
Jason Lange: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, when you think about even what play is, it's. It's learning without worrying about the outcome so much. It's like, oh, I get to try this. I get to learn that, you know, the. The research and the stories, you know, you get to. You see dogs tussling, like, and then, oh, that's the feedback. That was the line. So now I know I can tussle with you a certain amount, but not that much.
Host (The New Man): Right.
Jason Lange: And I think we're the same way. Right. We need to be able to tussle with life with each other and then get feedback, reorient, go back in play. I mean, it's so yeah. So malnourished in so many men I work with, it just like they're like. What is that?
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: What are you talking about?
Host (The New Man): Yeah, I think that. I think that you named this earlier, but the. The version of masculinity that we were brought up with was this kind of collusion that we're going to act like we're invulnerable. We're going to act like we've always got our. Together and it's okay to quietly suffer and. And we're all going to lie about it together, and we're all going to kind of be in this lie together. And I think that that, to me, like, that's how it occurs, is there's just this, like, collective lie about us being unhealthy together and we're martyring ourselves and playing the victim in that regard. But it looks tough and you just kind of stomach it rather than be weak, rather than be somebody who takes up space, rather than be vulnerable to this thing. So, like, if I'm going to share what's really going on for me, you're actually going to see me. So it's. It's more tough to. To hide all of that. And then, you know, I can call myself masculine now. I'm being a man.
Jason Lange: Yeah.
Host (The New Man): So to speak.
Jason Lange: Yeah. That posturing.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: Right. The. I'm fine.
Host (The New Man): Yeah. Do you buy into the idea of the toxic masculinity? I don't hear that much anymore. But is. Has it gone around?
Jason Lange: I. I don't know if I definitely hear it. I still hear it. It's venues. I don't buy it at all. Why not? I mean, it'd be the. To me, toxic means foundationally irredeemable and bad. What. What I say is pathological. There are versions of the masculine that have grown awry because they weren't given what they needed. Right. In a sense, it's like, yeah. Why do some of us men grow up disconnected from our hearts? Because we're raised in spaces and cultures and families where we'll get attacked if we do that. So our system adapts. It's not because masculinity is bad. It makes sense, what we adapted to.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: So to me, it's. It's, you know, somewhat controversial. But what I say these days is we don't need less masculinity. We need more healthy masculinity. We have more men who are showing up. Yeah. In their power, in their strength, in their hearts, wanting to contain and direct, but not from purely selfish impulses, but to to support. Right. In a lot of ways and to take care of. And. And so I don't believe in the toxic. And I think that itself is. It damages. It just damages so much because then there's no path back to anything.
Host (The New Man): Well, it seemed like the, the recipe or the, the formula to correct the toxic masculinity was essentially to make them feminine.
Jason Lange: Yeah.
Host (The New Man): And I didn't. That. I didn't buy that equation either. And what you said was, we need more healthy versions of this. We need more, you know, embodied healthy versions rather than. You just need to be more like a feminine person.
Jason Lange: Yeah.
Host (The New Man): And I don't know. Yeah, those are two very different things.
Jason Lange: That doesn't work either, because then men feel disempowered. And frankly, a lot of women end up feeling like, I, I don't want to be around you.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: Right. I'm not getting what I could get from this relationship. And so you know how I think, you know, you and I come from a language of we just want to include that. I want to have a capacity to feel my body to be surrendered. I did. I was doing some plant medicine like a decade ago, and I remember one of the most vulnerable moments in my life, deep in the ceremony and I had to take a dump, and there was an outhouse. I could not get to the outhouse. I could not take down my pants. I could not do any of it. And I had to have two men lift me up, put myself on their shoulders, they walked me there, they took off my belt, they put me down on the toilet, and then they guided me back. And it was one of the most vulnerable things I've ever done as a man to just let myself be taken care of like that and acknowledge I can't do this. And what that did was increase my sensitivity for what it means to be in a body you don't have control over.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: Or you don't have capacity over or how vulnerable a position that is. And so for me, like, to be able to include that allows a fully different type of leadership. And I think it goes both ways, you know, for, for more feminine or oriented people to have the experience of how fucking hard it is to lead. You come up with this plan, you try to do this thing, it fails. Nobody's happy. And like, wow, it's. It's hard to know that your well being, like, is kind of resting with me right now. And what it creates, I think, is a mutual appreciation of, wow, we could both do this. And so the fact that you're gifting it to me, wow, that's so generous that I just get to be in this.
Host (The New Man): Well, it is. I, I can appreciate that. I, I, and, and I can appreciate the medicine story too, because the, there was, I had a really severe experience and it was so debilitating for me. I got on my knees and like, please fucking help me. Like in that moment. And I was part of someone who hadn't really embraced that second person. Like, there's somebody there that's going to meet me and help me. But it was just like, please fucking help me. And getting to that place of being so beaten up and just like. And then I did, I received help. But it was such a beautiful thing. There's no fucking way this guy was ever gonna allow that.
Jason Lange: Yeah, I think that's sometimes what it takes.
Host (The New Man): It does. It takes the two by four to the forehead, you know, or the nuts.
Jason Lange: Part of. I do sometimes get the guys coming bats, woo woo, da da da. You know, the men's work, all that stuff. And this the simple story I tell now, having had some experiences this myself, having just witnessed my father die in a Medicare facility, you know, totally incapable, taking care of himself. Many men be humbled by illnesses. I don't care how tough a man you think you are, every man in his life will be confronted at some point with not being able to just grind through. Whether it's illness, accident or old age, there will be a moment you cannot just push through. And at that moment, what you're going to find is what kind of capacity to receive and support in my life have I built? And where a lot of men come to me in crisis is the crisis hits and they don't have that network, so they have two huge emergencies at once. My life is falling apart and I have no support around me. Now I have to kind of deal with both in getting into good male community men's groups, as I teach is one way you can get ahead of that. Okay, I'm gonna start investing in relationships so that when I can't get my ass off the couch, someone will pick me up. And I trust that person to take care of me. And it's, it's a huge gap for so many men. You know, I had a guy come on retreat last year, we're doing breath work. He's like 50 years old, very successful doctor, bursts into tears afterwards. You know, there was a sitter for him and he's like, I have never once in my life ever felt like someone actually had my back. And that was the first time in 50 years I felt that and so much grief poured through him because he had to feel the cost of what living without that did to him. And so many men are out there, I think, in that space.
Host (The New Man): Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Jason Lange: All right.
Host (The New Man): I want to ask you about man boys. You mentioned it earlier, and I mean, first, is it a thing. Are we living in an age where this younger generation is coming up? Scott Galloway's talked about it a lot. I haven't witnessed it a lot. I'm raising a daughter, so I haven't been firsthand, haven't really seen it a lot, at least with the friends of mine that have sons. But I'm curious what your take is on it.
Jason Lange: Yeah, I think it's a. It's a real thing. I thought. I don't think it can be reduced solely to boys. And just what I mean by that is some of the over parentification our society has been in. Right. I. There's this funny thing called the free range kids movement, Right. Which is about one of the fastest ways for kids to build resiliency and social skills is you just let them go play and they're going to get hurt and they're going to hurt each other's feelings. And the moment you put the ref in, they lose a lot of that skill building.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: And you know, I feel lucky. I was at like the tail end of the, okay, come back at dinner, like out in the neighborhood just looking at pornos and playing with knives and all kinds of crazy shit that now I'm like, I don't know if I want my son doing that. But it taught me things. Right. I had to build relationships and I think there's just been a lack of places for kids to play and fail.
Host (The New Man): Okay. So you don't see it as just a boy thing. I think that I can appreciate that.
Jason Lange: Yeah. Well, and here's the other thing where I will say the boy part I do think comes in. And you know, Robert Bly wrote About this in Ira John back in the 90s is part of what has shifted in that rites of passage sense is it's pretty rare for boys to get to spend time around older men now, the way our culture is set up. But it used to be back in the day, you know, obviously generalities here, but different cultures did it differently. But often boys and girls would kind of be together until like eight or nine, often raised by women and aunts and. And then there'd be a point where it's like, okay, you're off with the dad's taking you now. You're going off to be with the men, and you're going to be in the shop, you're going to spend all day with men. You're going to see how dad handles himself when a customer scams him or when he's sleepy or tired. And you're going to start to kind of learn what it means to be a man in your community. And a lot of that's gone away. It's certainly changing. But for a long time, the majority of elementary school teachers were women. More and more, you know, fatherless sons is a huge thing where more and more little boys were raised. Raised by women. And that's not a problem. It's just there's a certain nutrient they don't necessarily get in that kind.
Host (The New Man): I think it's a big problem. I mean.
Jason Lange: Yeah. Unless you consciously bring it.
Host (The New Man): Yeah, you've got to bring it, for sure. Yeah. I think it's a huge problem that they don't have it.
Jason Lange: Woman who, yeah, she's, like, divorced her son, doesn't really have a father. And so she. She, like, went out into town, went to the skate shop. He was a little into skating, Was like, I need you to hire my son and mentor him in the skate shop.
Host (The New Man): Right.
Jason Lange: And his life totally flourished from there. He had a little bit of mentorship, Someone looking out for him, saying, no, here's how you handle the thing. Here's how you do this thing.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: And so it's not that it's impossible for a mom, but I meet many moms now who are like, what do I do with my son? Where can I bring him? Like, I know I can't. There's something he's aching for that I can't bring.
Host (The New Man): Good.
Jason Lange: And I think there's a massive gap in that space in our world right now that thankfully, the call is being heard. And, yeah, there's a lot of energy around rites of passage stuff for young boys right now. And people who are waking up to, if we don't provide this for them, what, they're gonna go find it elsewhere in gangs, in the manosphere, in wherever. So let's. Let's create healthy spaces for young boys to spend time with healthy older men. Right. And I experienced this in my 20s, right around the time I met you. You know, of Robert Masters. He ended up being one of my mentors, and I did a weekend with him. And I mean, I was 26, and I remember walking into the room and having the bodily experience of that's what I want to be when I grow up. And it Wasn't necessarily what he was doing, even though I do a lot of that now. It was the way he was being. He was, like, really chill. He was very direct. He had obviously a strong connection with his wife. Like, there was just a way he was in the room that I was like, oh, that's what I want. I want to be that. And if we're not around that, you never know. We don't know what to do. Right. And then we get sucked into our phones, and then we're, like, spending all this time online and afraid to go out and date or, you know, all these real things that are, I think, are true. But I don't blame the boys for it. I blame the culture for not giving us space for the boys to learn what they need to learn.
Host (The New Man): I don't know. This comes up as there's a fear of that masculine father energy. And I think that there's been a pushback, rightfully so. Because it can be overbearing in the culture. Yeah. And. But then there's like, no, we're not going to raise. I'm not going to raise my child with that. And you kind of. In the same way you said how nice guys can. Kind of. The nice guy syndrome can start with, like, I'm not going to be one of those. But then they throw the baby out with the bathwater, and then we miss that altogether. And. Yeah, I was having a. I was over. I overheard a conversation with a couple of men talking about some young men in their house. They each had young men in their house that weren't getting jobs and weren't getting. Weren't going anywhere in life. And it was like. And I was like, why don't you do X, Y, and Z? It seemed really obvious to me. Like, I've. I had. My dad walked me to the Golden Corral when I was 14. He's like, Hire him. He's like, well, we can't. He's not 15 yet. Hire him. Do it under the. Under the radar. Like, I can't have him sitting around the house. So, like, these were kids in their 20s, and it was like, yeah, no, we can't just like, why can't they have a job? No, we can't do that. It was this resistance to challenging or pushing the young man as if he was fragile. I don't. It was really confusing for me. And I don't know if that's something you've witnessed, too, but it seems. It seems like it's part of a certain culture that is afraid of setting Those boundaries or challenging the young man as if there's something that will be lost or. I'm not sure what the consequence is there.
Jason Lange: I think it's a big part of the nice guy syndrome in terms of I don't want to make someone else uncomfortable because I don't want to have to sit with the discomfort.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: So it's like, right, your job to
Host (The New Man): be the good guy, though. You got to be the dad.
Jason Lange: You want to be the dad, you want to be the right. I mean, I use his term all the time now. Terry Real talks about. And this is such a longing that once I see men get it, they're like, oh, my God, I didn't know how bad I wanted that calls it carefrontation, right? Spinach in the teeth thing. Like. Like, you're like, dude, Jason, you came on the show, man, you got a big piece of spinach in your teeth. You kind of look like an idiot. And I'm like, oh, oh, I'm so embarrassed. I've been walking around all day. But thank you. I trust you more. I'm like, hey, thank you for telling me the thing. No one else told me you were willing to make me uncomfortable because you love and care about me. That's. That's part of the energy, I think of that. That fatherly, masculine, like, no, I'm not. We don't have to avoid the discomfort. There's a way, I think men's groups in particular can be a great place for men to start to get that. That, hey, man, you know, I remember moments of you doing it to guys in our men's group when you were leading it of like, hey, you've kind of been checking in about this thing for a while now saying you want to change it, and it's not changing. So, like, what's up? You know, it's a pretty friendly way to say it, but there was kind of like, you know, my bullshit detectors going off. Like, I remember, you know, you would literally sniff sometimes, right? Smelling a little bullshit here. And we need that, I think, as men, because, you know, my self deception is incredibly sophisticated. If, you know, if I could, I'd just be sitting around eating pizza, jerking off all day like that. If I was left to my own devices, there's a part of me that would do that. And so I need loving accountability. And I think parents in particular really need to be able to bring that. That, hey, I love you so much that I'm gonna keep you in martial arts. I know you're gonna hate me for it. Right. My daughter's in it and she just got to see like the black belts and every kid was like, I'm so glad to my parents because there were so many times I didn't want to come and I really hated it, but you made me come. And now I'm so glad you made me come.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: And that's like the other side of that because what it teaches, right, that life's not always going to be fun. We want to have fun, but sometimes you got to stick with it and do uncomfortable things. And that's a practice. And I don't think boys are getting enough of that. They're not. There's not safe enough spaces for them to fail with people who are going to push them when they need to be pushed and held when they need to be held. Right.
Host (The New Man): Yeah. Let's talk about men's work. I see you carrying the torch and kind of taking it from where guys like me had taken it for a while and moving it forward. So I'm curious what you have seen that has changed in the last, I don't know, 20 years. I don't remember when I started the group that you were in with the rest of those guys, but I would love to hear how you see things changing in, in the realm of men's work.
Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing is I think there's just a groundswell of it now. You know, when, when you first helped us start a group outside of like Boulder, if you men's group, it was an a group or some kind of church group there, there, there just wasn't much. You know, the Robert Bly and those guys there was like that burst in the 90s of kind of mankind and mythopoetic. But if that vibration didn't land for you, there's not really anywhere to go in a lot of ways. And so what's changed now is I think there's so much more attention to. Men are in pain and we need new tools to deal with it. And I think that's part of the swell of men's work. Right. I do see it evolving in the sense of. I think it's a lot more trauma informed now. You know, like my mentor when he started, you know, he was, he was out of the Rajneesh kind of wild west
Host (The New Man): going on.
Jason Lange: Yeah. Whatever it takes to crack something open. And you know, you go and you know, his gift was he actually went too far. So later in his life he knew how to not go too far because he had gone too far. And so I see A lot more just awareness about, like, how trauma lives in the body and ctpsd. And, you know, about half the guys that come to me are, like, nice guys who need to kind of find their balls and their power and their. No, but a lot of the guys that come to me are guys who just literally need to know how to open up their body and feel and express and, like, move. Not like a robot.
Host (The New Man): Yeah. I always felt that the work of the men's group was to take the burden off of the wife to be the bad guy. Yeah.
Jason Lange: That's a great way to put it. Totally.
Host (The New Man): Telling the story earlier of, like, I can't. I have no idea what the context was, but, like, that. That thing. We haven't changed. It's bothering the. Out of her, too.
Jason Lange: Yeah.
Host (The New Man): And it's like she's trusting him less and less because he keeps saying he's gonna do a thing, and it's not happening. It's like, well, if we can take that on, it's like. And hold him to that. And then she gets true. And then they're like, I hate Tripp and the guys in the group. It's like, it's okay.
Jason Lange: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Host (The New Man): Those guys are dicks, you know, in a loving sense. And it's like, oh, sorry, honey, you're going through that. But she's like, yes, good. Finally, you know, holding.
Jason Lange: We can hear it.
Host (The New Man): Yeah.
Jason Lange: Often in a different way. I remember, you know, my first experiences of therapy were like talk therapy just kind of did it. And what I quickly discovered is I was very sophisticated in my hiding. Like, I could throw a bone of vulnerability and just ride the way. That was a good session, right? Yeah, totally. And then I got into men's group, Right. When there's eight other faces looking at you, it just takes one person to feel the dissonance. Like, no, you're totally full of. I don't believe it at all. And then it's like, yeah. Or when a whole group, you know, the other way I see this really hit me. And a lot of men is even on the positive side of, hey, man, you're really hard on yourself. No, I'm not. Like, I. There's all the reasons I'm a piece of. Like, you don't understand. When eight men say, you're really hard on yourself, suddenly the equation is either those eight guys are full of shit, or maybe my self image is a little distorted. In one of the healing moves I see in a group is when I learn that, wow, sometimes I might want to trust what they're seeing more than how I see myself. And it's not about giving over, you know, sovereignty in that sense.
Host (The New Man): But it's great information, though.
Jason Lange: They can identify that stuff. And then, oh, my God, my self image has to update, and I see it in retreat all the time. Guys come in, have some wonderful experience of themselves, their power, their openness, and then inevitably they're going to forget. But the beauty of a group is they all remember, hey, man, I know what I saw. I know what I felt. I know who you are. What do we need to get back there?
Host (The New Man): Beautiful. So give us a sense of the work that you do, the offerings that you have, and the things that you lead men through.
Jason Lange: Most of what I do is men's groups and men's work in that frame. I do do some private work, but usually I'm kind of trying to get guys into a group simultaneously because I just see men accelerate their growth there. But I have one men's group that's basically online, and it's for dating and relationships. It's. Yeah. I mean, how do I. How do I create a juicy, hot, sexy relationship with my wife or a new dating partner in this day and age where I don't know how to do that because I don't want to be that guy? And I also don't want to be a pushover. Like, what does it mean to be able to healthily lead a relationship? And it's really all the stuff I wish I'd had when I was like, 20, crammed into kind of a men's group program of, hey, here's what moved the needle for me. That's. That's one of the gateways I do. I do a men's group for guys around, just shadow work. So really getting into that deep, kind of emotional stuff we don't want to touch or we're afraid to touch, that we're carrying around really often for decades. And we do that in the context of a men's group. So we take you super deep, and on retreat, we do the deepest work. And then what I've just found is we go so deep in those. Those groups last for life. It's just that kind of, oh, my God, you saw me going to this naughty place or the raging plate. Like, you're my bro for life now. Like, and I saw you step into something. I saw you terrified to step in. So I'm here for you, man, because I see how brave you are. And that's called the Heart of Shadow, and I just love it. It's just my favorite work to get in there with guys. And we do so much play too, right? You get in there and then you just start having fun and so, so delightful. And then I have a Labor Day retreat, which I actually have coming up in two months, which is just four days in nature, doing embodiment practices, shadow work, getting connected to other men. That's pretty rigorous in terms of it wears down the best of man in the sense that the defense is eventually just, okay, fuck it, here I am. Yeah, I'm all in. And those are the main three that I'm doing right now. And I have other things percolating as to how to bring more and more men into the movement.
Host (The New Man): Very cool. Well, Jason, man, it's been great to catch up with you. I'm just really excited. I couldn't help but keep kind of rewind back to, you know, I've known you a long time. It's just great feeling you step into this leader, leadership role and you're serving the out of so many people. And I'm just really proud of you and for you and happy for those that are that are working with you. Man. Thank you for doing this.
Jason Lange: Oh, thanks so much for being here. I wouldn't be here without your guidance. You know, you stepped in in a really formative moment in my life and helped me get some direction. And like I was saying, you, my experience of you is you embody this work from the inside out. You can be direct, you can be sensitive, you can be all of the things. And that was one of the imprints that I got to carry forward and lives through me to all the men I work with now.
Host (The New Man): Wow. Love you, buddy. Thank you so much. If these interviews are helping you, please leave a positive review on whatever podcast app you use so that others can discover the show more easily. Easily.
