In this episode, I sit down with my friend and collaborator Luke to unpack the enduring myth of the Marlboro Man—and how it’s still shaping men’s lives today. We explore the fantasy of the rugged, independent cowboy and how it feeds into the “lone wolf” mentality so many men have been conditioned to admire. Luke shares some powerful reflections from his own background in Western culture and rural communities, where this archetype is alive and well. Together, we shine a light on the emotional cost of stoicism, the pressure to “just get to work,” and the way this legacy leaves so many men isolated and unsupported. This conversation is a call to reevaluate what real strength looks like—and how connection, not detachment, might just be the most courageous thing a man can choose.
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Jason Lange: Luke Adler: I've got this dream, Jason. I've got this dream where I want to get a horse, and I want to get a slice of land, and I want to get up on that horse, I want to get on that saddle, and I want to ride, and I want to herd up some cattle, and I want to smoke some Marlboro cigarettes. And I would like you to join me, Jason, as my friend, my cowboy friend. But I want you. I want you 40 acres away with some jaw in your mouth, some tobacco in your mouth. You know, maybe we'll get together and drive the cattle down, down the road, but I want my land. I want a nice, nice little woman there with me and some kids, some sheep. I want it. It's the American dream. And so, I mean, I'm here today to ask you, will you join me, my friend?
Jason Lange: This is the way.
Luke Adler: Oh, yeah.
Jason Lange: So today we're going to talk about the myth of the Marlboro man, which is closely associated to the myth of the lone wolf, something we've definitely talked about before, but this particular romantic ideation, I think, here in the west that still to this day persists in definitions and imagery of masculinity and what men are and who we should be and even what a lot of men aspire to be.
Luke Adler: I don't know if you know this about. About my family, Jason, but my. I know, you know, my family's been in the fashion industry for many decades, but one of the areas that my family works in is in the Western culture. So my dad's company has made leather products for. For brands like Wrangler and Ariat. And so I've been around. I've been around rodeos as a child and Western shows. And this is. This is a huge part of America, an American landscape. Still to this day. It's like. It shouldn't be that surprising, but really, all the areas outside of a city are rural zones where a lot people live, not still live. They live in this Western way. They have cattle, they have horses, they have ranches. I mean, certainly there's a ton of that around me here in Oregon and Colorado. There's still a lot of that there in. In the rangelands. And, you know, as a healthcare provider and a men's coach, I work with a lot of folks that, that live in the country and live in that lifestyle. And there is a kind of romanticism to it. When they come in and they tell me, you know, they're, they're eating off the garden and they have cows that they milk and they work hard and, you know, these are, these are folks that, that are really connected to the earth in a lot of ways. And they, they live close, close to kind of an older way of being. And, and with that. Interesting that there's a culture around things not changing. You know, let's keep things the way they have been. So when culture really moves quickly as it has in the last 60 years, you know, with, with the equivocation of, of gay rights and trans rights and marriage and so on and so forth, these things are really frightening in some ways to this culture that's lived close to the land. And yet, you know, when I work with men from that culture who have crises going on around their health, that that culture doesn't really support them emotionally. And there's a sense of, well, let's get you on drugs or let's get you something that can keep you going. Because a real man, a real man doesn't feel. A real man doesn't need to talk about his feelings. A real man just works. He puts it down. He shows up at 2am to the job site, you know, gets the logging machines up and running and starts pulling down timber. You know, and I'm not making this up. This is, this is something that I hear often. There's a lot of timber in Oregon. It's one of the big timber timber places on the planet. We produce a lot of Doug Fir lumber for the world. And, and, and these men are suffering in some ways, Jason, I think more than most men you and I work with, because the culture is like, shut your fucking mouth and get to work and talk about loneliness. Talk about the lone wolf. Talk about your latest statistic that you published recently. 80% of suicides are men. So let's get into the Marlboro man and what, what's really going on there and what that romanticism is really covering up.
Jason Lange: Yeah, it's a, it's an interesting intersection, right, of the man box and masculinity and particularly Western values and ideas of, you know, the United States in general, which I've, I've often summarized as the spirit of America is fuck you. Don't tell me what to do. Yeah, like, but there's like a wild independence here and there's generations of people who decided to leave their home and go across the world because as uncertain as that was, it was better than where they were. And so there's just this, you know, lineage of people who have taken risks, in a sense. But, you know, it's so interesting here in the States, you know, when you think about the American dream, it is often some kind of mansion on some land where you don't have to interact with people and you can fly around in a private jet. And the major thing that a lot of that success story paints is privacy. We are a country that values privacy over public connection. The dream is to be private and only have to interact with who you want to interact with. And that feeds into this kind of Marlboro man, right, who's free. He's not constrained by anyone. He manages his own time. He comes and goes as he pleases, right? One of the big things about the Marlboro man is he spends a lot of time alone. And then when he comes in, he comes in. And I think it points to, you know, this is a gross generalization, but I'm going to speak to it, that, you know, the gifts of a lot of Eastern cultures and the default of a lot of Eastern cultures are more communal. There's an orientation to the communal system, the family, the culture. And the west is more about the individual and differentiation, and there's a lot of good in that. So I'm not here to knock that. Right. It's incredible to be able to differentiate from a pathological system or a family or move away from somewhere and kind of start anew and fresh. But I think part of what we're here to talk about is what happens when that goes too far or when that's actually driven by wounding, which is, I think, a big part in the west. And why we're just seeing staggering numbers around isolation and loneliness and the impact, particularly on men and young men, that this new culture of extreme isolation now further, I don't know, enabled by technology, is allowing. And there's a romantic part of it, which is the other thing that, right, you and I talk about the lone wolf. We talk about the Marlboro man in one of the most challenging places to work with a guy around. That is when that's actually what he wants, right? He thinks it's an asset that he doesn't need anyone, never asks for help and is totally independent, right? There's this whole subculture, you know, in the US in particular, of living off the grid. I want to be totally independent from any system and self reliant which again, has some great stuff to it in terms of what it creates inside of us when we feel fully able to, you know, provide for ourselves. But I do think there's some shadow there in terms of what it points to in connections with other people and what we actually know as humans. We need to thrive.
Luke Adler: The place where, you know, in our work, which is relationally based. And it's about having deeper, more meaningful, connective relationships that make you resilient. And a word that, that we like to use is antifragile, meaning you have this. It's beyond resilience. You have this ability to get into discomfort, quote, unquote, discomfort emotionally, and actually find it, you know, not as uncomfortable as it once was. In fact, start to not mind emotional feeling, emotions in your body. That's kind of the essence of our work is like, oh, it's okay to be able to. It's okay to feel sadness and, and anger and fear and jealousy. In fact, it's healthy. And we are. Part of. Our goal is to gain more fluidity and fluency in that with men and with people writ large. When it comes to the Marlboro man, the Western man, the Andrew Tate culture, what is it? Red pill culture? You know, that kind of modernization of the modern, of the marble or man is to say, no, no, no, let's go, let's really triple down on non feeling and just hard masculine dictating. This is how it's going to be to the world, to women. And as I study that culture more and more, what I see around it is, is a lot of undeveloped.
Jason Lange: You.
Luke Adler: Know, parts of our being that, that are, for lack of a better word, lack maturity emotionally. And so there's a way in which the psychology of the marble or man, when it comes to relationship, has these expectations of, you know, women should just know what I'm thinking. They should just acquiesce to my moods when I contract and when I choose to just be quiet and withdraw and not speak. That's because I'm strong and tough and I don't need to talk when reality is I don't know how to talk. I don't have the tools, I don't have the skills. I'm actually undeveloped in this area. But the shadow of it is to say is to rebrand it as, this is strength, this is stoicism. And the truth is it's not. It's a place within, within our development that's very young and we romanticize that and we, we push women, women around and we push Culture around. We play this really interesting competitive game. The Marlboro man does. And, you know, any one of us can be pushed back into that because it's. It's our training where we. We almost get into this competitive. We do get into this competitive dynamic with people, with women, where we. We don't want to be the first one to appear weak. So what happens relationally is women have to get bigger, they have to get louder, they have to get, quote, unquote, more dramatic to elicit some kind of response, to be able to feel us and have a sense of. Of where we're at as men. And we mentioned just think, well, this is. We're winning the game. We're winning if we don't show weakness. And in fact, what's really happening is our debility, our weakness, our. Our fragility is. Is being pushed deeper and deeper and deeper into the shadow. And this is the. This is the relational wounding of the Marlboro man is we insist that we're strong. We insist that we're tough only to cover up this deep, deep, tender place that's not very strong and that's not very tough, and that can really only develop strength in an environment that helps it heal. And of course, it's all in the romanticism. We want our land. We want to communicate with animals, with cows and dogs and sheep, because they're safe to be with. Right. Start opening up with the cows. I know some Marlboro Men that have deep relationships with their cattle. They'll sing songs to their cattle, but it comes to their wives. Zip the lip, potato chip. They're just. They don't know how to articulate. And it's an interesting branding of American culture. And of course, at a political level, we see it now where you're not only not speaking, you're going to forward an entirely different narrative to say, actually, this is what's true and kind of make gaslighting the new value of America, meaning I can just make up whatever I want and beat you with it because I'm that tough. And, you know, it's an interesting crossroads we're finding ourselves here, literally around what constitutes reality.
Jason Lange: Yeah, it's something I've been thinking and sharing a lot about. I'll say a manifestation of this is, you know, leading via domination is actually weak. And what I mean by that is when we don't have the capacity to relationally connect with someone and create like a win win, we'll just try to override. Right. So it's. Well, you know, to some Sense to some sense. It's easier to be an authoritarian than a democratic leader, because you don't have to get in there, hear different perspectives, try to get people on the same page and govern effectively. And there's ways we do this in our life, individual lives as men in that kind of more marbled. This is the way, right? I make this decision, and everyone must follow me. And sometimes I'm not even gonna tell you the reasoning behind that because I'm just gonna be silent. And I think there is that real fear of relationality that sometimes causes that pullback. Cause there's, you know, there's more risk and there's. There's more unknowns when we get connected in these way as men. And that the Marlboro man energy is that energy of I never have to reveal my process, right? I can just share the outcome because process itself is messy. We get it wrong sometimes, and it invites feedback, right? Which is a really important thing for growth. And the Marmoral man doesn't really leave a lot of room for that in our culture. The other thing you were mentioning that I really want to point to, you know, we've talked about this resilience, antifragile thing is the cost. So, yes, you can take on a frame of being tough. The way we do that is rigidity, right? We tighten up, and that can feel like resilience, Right? And we talked about this in one of our previous episodes. You know, he's a really tough, strong man. It's like a slab of iron. But no matter what the material is, you hit it hard enough, long enough, it will break and it will shatter. If it's just taking the impact, the impact. Antifragile, like we talk about, is about working with that energy and redirecting it and actually getting stronger with each impact. But the thing, you know, I mean, it's right there in the name of the Marlboro man, and even in a lot of the imagery is the road to toughness is through numbness, right? It's the substance, it's the smoking, it's the jacking myself up, it's the numbing myself down with alcohol or weed these days. It's. This is where the Marlboro man, in a sense, does perpetuate. And, you know, people get all. All around hissy around these terms the other day, but they perpetuate the patriarchy in that the belief that the male body is disposable, that it's an object, it's a thing, right? In Marlboro Men, this. This. This Quality of man actually perpetuates that, that my body is a thing. It's a thing that gets in the way of me and that I can override. And so. Right. That, that stat, I, I learned recently that was about men who heavily identify with stoic ideals, which are kind of right there with the Marlboro man, right. Essentially there's good parts of it, but, you know, mind over matter. And this kind of I don't need anyone or never share anything, don't feel emotion, twice as likely to commit suicide, right? Because what we're doing is we're disconnecting from all that inside. And you can only medicate that so heavily. And in a lot of ways, suicide for men is the ultimate medication. It's. It is the off switch that men turn to when they have no other way to be present and metabolize the tension and strife inside themselves. But we, we see this. I know you see it in people you work with. We see it in older clients. We work with the cost to the body. Whether it's uppers or downers, men will grind their bodies. And when you think of the Marlboro man, you don't think about a beaming vitality, healthy, flexible yogi, right? Which might be the other extreme. You think of kind of a tight, rigid guy, right, Whose body has a certain shape and can move with some power. But it's not fluid, right? It's not open. It's carrying a lot of heaviness. That's part of where his presence comes from. You can feel how much he's holding, how much he's seen. But it's not healthy, right? And it hurts. And again, the trick with all this stuff is when we push back against the Marlboro man, it's not to say there's not important things about self agency in resiliency and not collapsing into victimhood and just needing other people to take care of you. That's not at all it. What we're saying is just as the people who are often attracted to that are actually reacting to the polar of the totally collapsed man, they're just going on the other side. And what we're talking about is there's something in the middle. And the middle is actually way more powerful. When a man can bring that resiliency and self agency online, connect to others, learn how to work with the emotions that go beyond resilient to antifragile, right? Where I have a system around me and, you know, I'll just end this note with, it's a beat I've hit before on this podcast and we've talked about, but it really applies to the Marlboro man, which is, I don't care how tough you think you are, there will be a day your body fails you as a man where you cannot just physically push through. Could be old age, it could be illness, it could be an accident, but there will be a moment, and that is the moment where you have to have some kind of system or community to catch you. And that is a moment where we're seeing a lot of men fall through the cracks in our hyper Western individualized culture right now, where when shit hits the fan for men, none of the traditional support structures are there for them. They haven't known how to plug into them, and they fall fast, including all the way to just ending, right? Ending their lives.
Luke Adler: Jason I want to connect this to kind of a more modernization of the Marlboro man, which I think you can really help to flush out. There's a version of it in our generation and our generation more so the generations right below us of, of the technocratic Marlboro Man. So, so the, the, the tough guy, the tough intellectual ones and zeros coding guy, who is shut down, who is withdrawn, who is isolated, but is really good with technology, and of course, is. Is influenced by whatever algorithm is. Is pushing masculinity, which we talked about, Andrew Tate, you know, Jordan Peterson and some of the bigger podcasters in this space and teachers, where the same thing is occurring. People are. Men are. These men are isolated. These men are lone wolves. These men are doubling down with a certain kind of. It's not the same kind of toughness as the Marlboro man, but it's the, it's the isolation, it's the insistence that this is the way. Let me just push through with, with technology to not deal with interacting with human beings and getting connected. And in fact, that. The part of that generation that scares me the most is, I guess they're underdeveloped relationally in a not so dissimilar way as the Marlboro man, but at least the Marlboro man is like, directly you to everyone. You know, like, you off. Leave me alone. Whereas the technocratic, this kind of like, I don't want to talk to you. Get away from me. I don't know how to be around human beings. Which leads to this isolation and kind of an even different kind of subset of personality that's, you know, where awkwardness has become an actual state of being. And there's not an ability to even relate face to face like, it's a culture that's built primarily around text, texting or emailing or, you know, Internet communication, which has its own set of rules and its own set of dynamics around how you're allowed to behave. And sometimes I get a little confused around that territory because I'm kind of a Marlboro man in the sense of, I believe communication is on the phone, on a zoom call or face to face. That's communication. Anything else, anything other than that is just exchanging data. And if you start to have emotional conversations on a data platform, I mean, I just can't give that any credence. But I feel like you might have some ability to illuminate that and connect it to marble or culture. That kind of technocratic.
Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, in a sense, I think the shift is, you know, that traditional Marlboro men, back in the day, when you did need something and occasionally would, right, I got to go into town, I got to get a new saddle or whatever. To go all the way with that metaphor, you still have to talk to somebody. Right. So there is a, like, visceral connection. Even if it's rare, there's face to face. The shift we're seeing is increasingly mediated relationships, meaning it's not. There's something in between the connection. Right. Texting online technology that gives us can create a false sense of connection or relationship, but it's not actually. Right. What's very different about connecting over text or email than in person? You can take your time to really think about the words and how you're going to calculate it and what you're going to say. There can be a lot less room for messiness in some ways. It's not that it's perfect, but it's a different style of communication than, I'm right here in front of you right now and we're having a conversation. I might take 20 minutes to respond to you, or I may take three hours to post something on a. A forum or social media platform. So it adds a layer of abstraction in. What I would say with that is, yeah, there's more control and less messiness, which, again, changes than the skill set you're. You're building. And you know, it's coming, it's coming fast. I think the. The men in particular are already being drawn to AI in relationships in a way that they're way more susceptible for because you don't have to have a messy interaction. Yeah, right. An AI is not gonna read your body language wrong or that there's a way it's Always going to give you what you want. Yeah, right. So there's less potential for conflict or messiness or getting it wrong, in a sense, which is kind of the male dream. And I see it, you know, I see it happening, and it's a real thing where it's another layer of abstraction where we don't have to deal with the messiness of both ourselves and another human being. And I think that's one of the skills that, you know, we really emphasize in our heart of shadow program is the capacity to stay connected when we're feeling messy or when we're in a relationally messy moment. And that energy is charged. Right. So the Marlboro man will just cut off from it. Other than maybe anger, you know, it's kind of the one okay thing for that guy is he can be. He can be angry, but everything else, he'll just cut off from it. What we're saying is, no, go deeper into it and learn to stay connected. And, you know, I heard. I was on talking to this other guy, and it kind of blew me away where he gave me a reframe that I really liked of, you know, a lot of men's work culture. It's about going into your edge and hit your edge and go beyond your edge. And this thing was, well, another way to think about it. And I think this is what we do in the nervous system. Training and shadow work in particular is actually what you're doing is you're expanding your comfort zone, so you're increasing the range of discomfort that you feel comfortable in. So if you and I are having a moment of conflict or me and my wife are in it, rather than that being too much, and I'm going to withdraw, which is what a lot of men do, or just explode or get reactive. I've increased my comfort zone. Say, ooh, yeah, this is a new territory. There's a lot of energy here. But I feel comfortable staying in connection and present when I'm pissed off or she's pissed off or disappointed or whatever that might be. That's the kind of skill and capacity, I think, that the Marlboro men don't cultivate relationally and that the new technocrats are not doing as well. They just. They don't want to have to look someone in the eye and be messy. What they want is an AI to make a decision, and then it's more efficient. Right. But connection and efficiency aren't always hand in hand. Sometimes it's more like art. It's like being messy, and you have to Open yourself up to hurt. Like, that's just, that's what relationship takes. And, you know, I think that's what a lot of men want to not have to experience. And so they'll push it down.
Luke Adler: I think that the, the home. The home kind of driving at home here, the through line here. And I've heard this in the technosphere, every technology is built around really one principle. And that principle is, how can we create a more frictionless experience? That's the word they use in sales, reduce friction. If you look at grubhub, for example, it's so little interaction with, with anyone. You just open your front door and there's food. And if you look at buying a plane ticket, you can do. You don't even have to. You don't have to go to your gate anymore, right? You just. It's on your phone. You don't have to talk to anyone. Just show them your phone. Phone. So the, the. The phone is the mediator between everything. And Are those things nice? Yeah, they're, they're, they're kind of cool. Uber is another example, right? It's like. And the car just magically shows up and, and there. So there's this principle around how do I make everything in the technosphere less comfortable? And the Marlboro man is, how do I not deal with anyone's bullshit and just control my own? And you really nailed it with all. All of those systems are built around not having to confront hurt or pain. And of course, the end result. The end result for the end user in both of these scenarios is pain. And I'll say a very poignant and kind of frightening pain, because I've worked with this man at the end of his life. I've worked with this man in his 60s, and I've worked with this man in his 70s, and I've worked with this man in his last breaths. I'm working with a man in that state. The thing that he tells me the most is he's so lonely and he's pushed everyone out of his life because he's been tough or he hasn't wanted to interact with anyone. And all he wants is a friend. And he says to me, the only friends I have are the people I pay to listen to me. And so I go to doctor's appointments now all the time, just for connection. And of course, it's a controlled relationship. There are rules, there are parameters that make it a safe relationship. And this is what the Marlboro man, the technocratic man, the frictionless man, trades on his pain is to say, you know what? Actually, they don't even have this thought I was going to say, you know what? I'll deal with this pain someday. They don't say that. They think, I don't want to deal with this pain right now. But the truth is that someday, like you said, Jason, the emotional state that you're faced with is this deep grief, this isolation and loneliness, and it's painful. It's painful to be around a man like that and to see, wow, this is what a lifetime of this kind of behavior leads to. And of course, it has to be medicated. There's often alcohol. There's. If not alcohol, there's usually marijuana. There's whatever the body can withstand, you know, and inevitably some kind of exiting state. And, you know, our message is, it doesn't have to be that way. Pain is inevitable. Pain is the curriculum. That is what we're here to deal with. And our message to men, this is a challenge, is let's deal with it. Let's face it, you want to be tough. You want to have a. You want to have peace. The pathway is together. The pathway is to work it out. And Heart of Shadow is. Is one of those pathways and pillars of presence, another program you're offering with men who are trying to find that connection in partnership and some of the other things you're offering. So I'll drop it there and let you take us home.
Jason Lange: Yeah, I think you just named it in that the paradox for the Marlboro man, or a lot of what we're fed as men is. I was just talking to my friend Robert Glover recently, and he's like, yeah, you know, it's. It's your rough edges that I'm attracted to. Right. It's actually the parts of you that are in pain or not perfect that are the very way to connection. It's how I feel connected to you. If you're perfect, robot, machine, there's nothing to connect to. Because I'm like, that's not me. I got all this goo inside and dark shit, and I don't know what to do with it. Right. But when you start talking about it, I'm like, oh, yeah, I got that too. Right. This is what we really see that is fundamentally different. And particularly what we do in the Heart of Shadow is we connect around pain first and not in, like, a victimy. Da, da, da. We go and we directly confront our pain, which is so counter to what men are taught. And lo and behold, when men do that in community with consciousness, bravery Courage, love, deep presence. It's bonding as fuck. It actually creates a deep level of connection in brotherhood that is so different than what most men experience. But it's counter to. We think we have to get away from our pain, and our pain is the scariest thing to connect with other people around. So I'm going to numb it or just pretend like I don't have it. Whereas it's actually the very pathway to this deeper kind of connection. So on, you know, your, your. Your deathbed, quite literally, you feel held and known and seen in your experience in this lifetime. And you're not going, you know, crossing that threshold alone, in a sense. And you've metabolized a certain amount of pain and realized, I don't have to just hold this alone. And in fact, when we. When we share pain healthily with each other, it actually becomes fuel for our lives. Like we're talking about. This is that antifragile thing, the thing we think we want to avoid. When we start to turn towards it in community with other men, it actually generates energy. This is the thing we see every time we run a retreat. Guys go into grief, anger, rage, fear, and they come out more alive and more connected to each other. And again, that's very different from that. You know, I'm just gonna kind of slowly withering, tanned, getting more rigid energy of that Marlboro man as he ages. It does not have to be that way. So we strongly suggest, you know, if you've never experienced this kind of thing, whether it's with us or not, you know, you gotta turn towards your pain. And the most powerful way to do that is gonna be with other deep men. We got another Heart of Shadow coming up this fall. You can enroll now. Spots are very limited in this program. It's the deepest thing you and I offer, and it will rewrite your story around what it means to be antifragile as a man, that you think you can be tough alone. But you can be something far beyond tough when you have the right brotherhood around you. And that'[email protected].
Luke Adler: Thanks, brother.
Jason Lange: If you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary men. Apply.
