Pablo Torre Finds Out - The 'Alpha' Myth, Debunked

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

From LeBron to Deion and Wall Street to Washington, one pervasive term has come to encapsulate a human desire for domination. Correspondent Bradley Campbell heads into the wild — with aerial wolf-hunting, bespoke bear-drugging, and more — to discover that the science behind the "alpha" … is based on a mistake. The new truth, however, may teach even and especially the most gentle among us how to become better leaders.Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Cx8spsfoUjo(If you are having thoughts of suicide, you can call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. And I looked up and here were two wolves charging towards me, maybe 100, 150 feet away or so. Then I realized that maybe I was in a little trouble. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraff Kings Network. I think about vocabulary a lot. Yeah, you do. You're a nerd. And for the listeners who don't know, there's a Twitter account. called the PTFO Dictionary, right?

That's right. Shout out to that listener, viewer in Israel, apparently, who watches and learns, unlike you. Okay. Not nice. What he does is he looks up these stupid words you say and he finds out what they mean, like symbolic and censorious and... Great word. Paranium and every... All these other weird words that you were saying on the show. So shout out to him. Yes, you do think about vocabulary a lot. Yes. And so I've been dying to do an episode about vocabulary. Okay. And I wanted to do one in specific about... about a word that I, I argue, Cortez, is the most influential term in all of sports. D's not? Close.

Would you describe yourself as an alpha male? As alpha males, you always got in the back of your mind saying, listen, I want to be recognized as the greatest in the game. You got two alphas in the prime of their careers. He's got that alpha mentality. I'm a competitive alpha dude. And we could have kept going, by the way. Like, that's just sports. NFL playoffs are going on. Everybody is feeling like an alpha or they want to. Well, so you say we could

keep going, right? That's something you said. Yeah, it goes into non-sports, politics. It's everywhere. What I thought of hearing that was you because what you may not know is that our producers here and myself, we've been keeping track of somebody who's been saying that word an awful lot. Go ahead and roll the tape. I wanted to be an alpha in this test because he's the alpha. Again, he's an alpha. Just like huge alpha, like dominant energy from you. The alpha of all alphas. All right. So what I want to explain, you said it.

A lot of times. The reason I have been saying it is because it's actually, first off, fuck you. Second of hope. The idea of dominance, okay, of being the stronger person, being the alpha. It's something that is instinct. instinctive and intuitive. That's why you wanted to talk to me? Like, biggest alpha mel to company?

For the record, by the way, for the podcast audience, not watching on YouTube or the Japanese Network. Cortez, I'm just noticing this now. He's speaking of vocabulary. What? Cortez is, he's wearing a fucking black pillow shirt that says heat culture on it. So before I left the house,

I also have a hat that says heat culture, and I put that on, and I looked in the mirror, and I said, I can't leave the house with a heat culture hat and a heat culture shirt. So I put in a libo hat instead. But this, idea of what he culture embodies and what alpha male signifies and what we're all trying to do by being the dominant person in any competitive environment, which is to say life. It turns out

that it all traces back to a book. This book, Cortez, what is it? What does it say on the cover of this book? Says the woof, the ecology and behavior of an endangered species. Did you say woof? It's how you pronounce wolf. It's how you pronounce wolf? Whatever, man. What is this accent? The wolf, the ecology and behavior of an endangered species. Hold on. It's spelled W-O-L-F. That's wolf. If the way you're pronouncing it is like timber wolf, that's a wolf.

Oh, my God. L-V-E. You went to college. F-A-U. A good college, allegedly. Let me see that for a second. That book is of a weird size. It's substantial.

Why is the font so far? fucking big, bro. Look at this. This is insane. It's like a textbook size. It is a large, fonted book with a large idea at the center of it.

When was that book written? It was published 1970. Okay. The author is El David Meach. What does L. stand for? I don't know.

A loser. Okay. Stop trying to out Alpha, the Alpha book guy. The point is, this gentleman, L. David Meach, is the foremost

wolf researcher on the planet. Okay. And so this book, I have been fascinated by it and reading it. Yes, it's large,

it's large letters because it's, look at these, there are wolf diagrams in it. Figure 13. Start reading, yeah, go ahead. Expressive positions of the wolf's tail.

And there's a picture of a wolf with its tail sticking straight up in the air and it says, self-confidence in social intercourse. That's what it looks like when a wolf

is feeling self-confident in social intercourse. This is a book about wolf sex? Well, yeah, actually, it is. Figure 14, presentation and withdrawal of the anal parts. I mean, is a diagram.

Why do you have that bookmark? You just saw that? You were like, I love this page. I wolf-eared it, the page. Dominant wolf in rear is presenting his anal area and has exerted control over the anal parts of the subordinate who is withdrawing his anal region. So, this is science.

This book, okay, the most interesting. influential most cited part, though, is the part that establishes the idea of the alpha wolf. This is where it comes from, this tome, this thing that spread out across America and the world to inform what it means to be dominant, to be masculine, to be the alpha male. And the issue with this book and its research is that that part is wrong. It's wrong? It is completely wrong, according to the guy who wrote the book himself. Huh.

And the problem has been for decades now that nobody will listen to him. Oh. So you're going to listen to him? Well, I'm going to listen to the guy we sent to listen to him. Who did you send to listen to him? The resident alpha in our office. So you sent me? That doesn't make sense, though.

I would have known about this. As much as your polo shirt suggests, that you are both an alpha and also the manager of the worst radio shack in America there is someone Stop laughing for this. Jesus Christ and he's waiting to the soundproof glass.

And he's waiting on the other side of the soundproof glass. Very good. Bradley Campbell, thank you for taking on this assignment and drinking, which you just confessed off microphone, to be dandelion tea. Thanks, Boblo. No, I appreciate the embrace. Yes, yes. You're a valued part of the Metal Arc media community, you are many things.

What you are not known as by the various people on the other side of this glass here is an alpha. No, no, I keep my past hidden. That's right. That's right. I don't know if they appreciate what I'm about to show the people watching on YouTube in the Drag Tings Network. Because you now, Bradley Campbell, are like short-sleeved button-down podcast guy. You're a narrative podcast producer. Yeah, I'm the reporter.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm the guy at the coffee shop ordering a pour-over. Absolutely. Before, though, you were this, and I just need a stress that your hair is shorter, your quads are Godzilla-sized. There's so much alpha in you, Radley. Like, how old are you in this photograph? I mean, I'm 18. Where are you?

Because you're running a tank top and the shortest shorts showing off those quadzillas, and you look like you're a part of the fucking super soldier program. Oh, yeah, that's like 180 pounds of Trump rally. Just coming at you, looking at that photo. But now I'm at the Dallas High School track. I'm running the anchor of the 4x100 relay. Vains pulsating.

How does one look like that? I mean, well, that was, it was haybucking season. So, like, after I was done with tracking the meat, we go over to Mr. Hatfield, late Mr. Hatfield's, like one of his farms. Because you're from rural... Rural Oregon. It's a super rural Oregon.

Dallas. Yeah, just like Texas, sort of bigger the buckle, the closer to God sort of place. To pick up extra money, we'd buck hay. So we just roll around in field. Buck Hay toss it up on the back of a trailer and do that, I don't know, two, three hours after all of our workouts. But yeah, you just, you get gagged. Yeah, gacked is absolutely what is next to this photo in the dictionary,

right next to another term, which we conscripted you to investigate. Because you. you, hey, hey, Bucker, former high school, track athlete, quarterback, all of these things. We sent you back out into nature, into rural America. Yep. To investigate how it is that we all became obsessed with the idea of the alpha. Yeah, you guys sent me out to the great state of Minnesota.

Out to St. Paul campus at the University of Minnesota. That's where I met our main character for the story. story, Alpha Dave. My name is Dave Meach. I'm a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and I've been a wolf biologist since 1958. He's amazing. He's 87 years old.

You wouldn't know it, though, super sprightly. He walked up to, not walked up, he bounded up to the second floor into his office, pushing desks and tables around to, like, get our shoot going. Baller. How is it that this 87-year-old man became the forefather of the alpha wolf? Oh, man, he is the preeminent wolf biologist. And it goes all the way back to 1958. He was a PhD student at Purdue University.

And he was tasked with going to an island called Isle Royal. It's an island in Lake Superior. And he was there to track timber wolves. as part of a research study for his PhD slash dissertation. But he had the right, you know, kind of resume for it. Because he could guard Carl Anthony Towns. No, no. I don't know if he got.

I wouldn't put it past him. I wouldn't put it past him. But no, no, no. I think the biggest reason is because, one, he had the brain for it. He went to Cornell University, people's Ivy. That's right. They have an ag school. They do.

Is it the only one, I think, with the ag school? Yeah, yeah, yeah. God bless Cornell. I mean, we're not. We're not having an ag school over at Harvard University, Bradley. Come on. We're not bucking hay over there. So anyway, he had the brain.

But even more importantly for this, is that he had experience beforehand trapping bears. Trapping bears. Yeah. So he would go out into the woods, had a whole method for how to stock bears in order to tag them. And this is before the era of dart pistols and dart. rifles. So how is this man? Yes. Wrangling a bear before the advent of all the technologies that I would assume one would use to trap a bear. You've seen Looney Tunes, right? Of course. You know like the old school traps? We would, you know, bait them and set them out in the woods along old forest roads.

And when a bear got caught in one of those, then we had to subdue the bear, drug it, and put air tags on it. his team would jump out, wrestle the bear, grab the bear's feet essentially to spread eagle the thing. Ridiculous. And then get up close and then knock the bear out with drugs by hand. A bespoke bear drugging. So I do want to point out that this Dave Meach character, the scientist, who is the preeminent wolf researcher and apparently an expert bear trapper,

himself major alpha energy so far. Oh, huge, huge back in the day. Which made him the perfect PhD candidate to set loose on an island to track down timber wolves. Which are for people who only know the timber wolves through like, I don't know, NBA. Drafting three point guards before Steph Curry? They're a lot scarier than that.

Yeah, Johnny Flynn's like jump shot. So anyway, um, Isle Royal is this undisturbed place that had a pack of timber wolves that one day came over on an ice bridge, they believe, to inhabit the island in Hunt Moose. Wow. So he is there to research these wolves. This is like him, in a sense, finding his calling. Oh, my gosh. He's in seventh heaven.

He would have been, like, bound around the island pretending to be a wolf. I like backing stuff. He would pack food, pack around, and then go as far as he could, set up camp, try and track wolves the whole summer. So I'm imagining this badass who in order to study the wolf must become himself the wolf. Oh, yeah. But the biggest difference between trying to wrangle a bear and trying to wrangle a timber wolf would be what? You can't find timber wolves. So he spent the entire first summer there tracking these timber wolves, but it was kind of like tracking ghosts.

but ghosts who leave shit behind. So all he did that entire first summer was just run around, track Wolfscat, collected, and then study it to see kind of what their diet was to guess. But all he wanted to do was find a wolf. And so he got the idea in the wintertime to hire a pilot and get up in a Cessna and track him in the sky. His name was Don Murray, and he was an old bush pilot that actually had been hunting wolves as part of what he did.

So it was handy to have him around because he knew quite a bit about wolves and all. Wait, so the pilot was a wolf hunter in a literal sense. Yeah, dude. So this is, so scientist plus man who's trying to generally kill the thing that he is studying.

Right. They form this duo that travels around looking for their targets. Yeah, it was almost like a bad buddy cop movie. But the pilot was really good because if you are hunting wolves from the sky, which I learned, you need a pilot that can fly really, really steady so that when you aim your rifle or shotgun out the window and shoot them from the sky, there's a good chance that you can hit your target. But it's just a funny moment where it flipped from, you know, here's this pilot going out there flying, trying to track down wolves. Then all of a sudden here's the researcher, just sitting there and just kind of looking out, taking notes slowly. So, yeah, you can imagine what the pilot was thinking, too.

But I think they ended up forming a pretty good bond until Dave asked him to do something where the pilot was like, dude, no. What did Dave want him to do? Well, they were up in the plane one time, and they saw a moose kill. So a pack of wolves had just taken down a moose. And Dave was like, oh, I really want to get close to it. I really want to study this thing. The pilot was skeptical about letting me get down a mousse. on the ground with the wolves.

You know, at that time, wolves were considered pretty dangerous to people. In fact, I had, the Park Service made me carry a small revolver just a gun, just in case I got into some trouble with wolves. This is a good reminder that even the guy, the badass hunter of wolves, he's like, you need to remember what a wolf is. Yes, and at that time, these were thought of as just these pure killing men. Right. I mean, I grew up. I mean, we all grew up with these fairy tales, right, about the big, bad wolf and the wolf was always the villain and blowing down pitting houses and dressing up as a grandma eating kids. This is rooted in this fear. All of this fear. Generally, they were considered creatures that we shouldn't have around and that should be wiped out. In fact, Isle Royal was one of the very few places that they survived on at that time. Most places they had been wiped out of the country. but eventually the pilot relented and then landed the bush plane

and they had devised kind of a plan to if the wolves were to attack him the pilot would dive out of the sky and try to scare him I don't want a Monday morning quarterback someone's wolf survival attack strategy but that seems like a terrible idea yeah I don't know if it was the best or most thought out plan but it's the plan they went with and so Dave's out there on the ice walking toward this moose kill and he gets closer and closer, and it is just, it's gore everywhere. Think like Tarantino setting.

Like, it's that level. A lot of blood in a moose. Oh, yeah, and it's just, it snows everywhere. So he's got blood on snow, which even if you've had a bloody nose in the snow, it just looks like a massacre. Well, I might be a little bit hesitant around blood, like days of biologists kind of used to it. So he just went there and then just started examining the kill. Suddenly, the plane started coming in low and kind of diving the tree. trees a little bit. And I thought,

maybe the wolves are coming back. And I looked up, and here were two wolves charging towards me, maybe 100, 150 feet away or so. Then I realized that maybe I was in a little trouble. And I wondered, should I film these wolves coming towards me, or should I grab the pistol? This is when I'm yelling at the screen during the horror movie. Dave, there's an obvious choice here.

The science. Pull the gun. What are you doing? Yeah, the guy was scared. I mean, the wolves, like we said, they were thought of his killing machines. And he's sitting there with these two options, and it's just going through his head.

Are these killing machines? Are these something else? I decided to grab the pistol. I had the camera in one hand, and I grabbed my pistol, and as I pulled it out, the wolves saw me move, and that startled them.

And they stopped, turned around and ran away. And then I felt kind of foolish because actually they were afraid of me. And that was the last time that he ever packed a gun. He actually thought that it would be more dangerous just to have a gun on him as he was hiking throughout the island

than to just walk around in the wild with timberwolves around him. So Dave, his eyes are opened for the first time as to actually, these nightmare creatures are more complicated than it. might actually seem. Yeah, definitely. And also in that moment, he realized that he made a mistake.

He's a scientist. Yeah. And so he regretted the instinct to be a hunter. I think in that moment, he realized that he made a mistake. And Dave's a guy that owns up to his mistakes and is like, it's okay. If you correct him, it'll be all right. But later on, he would understand that there are some mistakes that no matter how hard you try, you can't.

Correct. Right. Right. And so Dave Meach, this true believer, this man who has his eyes open now for the first time, really, to what wolves might really be, he's confronting this mistake that brings us directly to this book that's been sitting on this desk. So this book, titled again, The Wolf, originally published 1970. This, Bradley, is the text that Dave Meach brought down from this mountaintop. and it was where and how the alpha wolf concept took off. Like this is where we trace it to. Yeah, yeah. Research. Totally. I mean, even at the start of the recent national championship game

between Michigan and University of Washington, yeah, they were talking about how Jim Harbaugh likes to play videos of predators hunting to his team to get him fired up. And he says the most lethal set of predators are a pack of wolves hunting. The perfect fighting unit to me is a pack of wolves, you know, a wolf pack. And you see them, you see them gathered together, you know, before the fight. You see them together going to the fight. You see them together in the fight.

You see him celebrating after the fight. Right. And it's just like, nah. A descendant, though, of this book. Like, that is the through line, right? Yeah. Yeah, or people that never read the book. So what did the book actually say?

Well, the big thing in the book is that Dave wanted to write things that were right. What he had to do was he had to review all the other literature about wolves that was out there. The famous one was out by a German behaviorist named Rudolf Schnenkel. And this guy had studied wolves in captivity. And he was really interested in this thing called Pack Dynamics. But to make his pact a study in. captivity then, Schenkel just grabbed a bunch of wolves from different zoos and threw them all together into an enclosure and considered that a wolf pack. The idea was that all the wolves were

together and just thrown together in some random group. And then there would be a fight, a competition, a battle in order to get to that top spot. And once they reach that top spot through aggression, through dominance, through just pure... Ass kicking. Yeah, ass kicking. Hey, bucking. they would be called the alpha. And so Dave looked at this previous research and realized it actually matched up

to what he witnessed on Isle Royal. There was always one dog that was the lead dog and subordinates behind it. So it was like, oh, okay, it must just be the alpha. This is just kind of how things work. The alpha dominates the others. They saw it in captivity, in Germany, with the study.

And now Dave is seeing this on Isle Royal. Actually, the quote, in competitive situations, dominance takes the form of privilege the dominant animals showing the initiative and claiming whatever is desired. There it is. Yeah.

I can imagine, so this book comes out again in 1970, just the way that so many finance bros must have felt so justified in this description of my privilege comes from my dominance. Oh, yeah. And you can imagine finance bros love it too because the alpha wolf actually walks with this tail up

so other wolves can sniff its ass. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, anytime you can biologically justify butt sniffing. Oh, Wall Street loves that. Oh, they love that stuff. They love that stuff. But, by the way, so too broadly did, like, America, did people in the marketplace for books?

Like, this thing took off. It did, it did. I think this one's like the fifth printing? This one, I think, is from 1987. Yep. Printing number five, which means that it gets bought and sold over and over and over and over again across the world.

And all sorts of schools everywhere. Even in small town, Dallas, Oregon, that little rural town that I come from, fourth grade, we were learning all about wolves. And a lot of it came from that book. No, it's an actual sensation that informs and influences scientific thinking, trickles down all the way to little Bradley Campbell. Yeah. Can't wait to get those muscles pumping in honor of the alpha wolf image. Firewood isn't going to split itself. And it cements every instinct, I suppose, we have about, oh, this villain.

in all of these fairy tales, the big bad wolf. Yeah, it was essentially True Squad or the whole thing. But within this book, while most all of it is correct, there was one major problem, this massive error about alphas. And it's one that took Dave about 30 years to fix. Okay, so I'm just doing the math here, right? So 30 years for Dave brings us to about 1999-ish. Yeah, height of total request live.

America at its peak. And we have Dave Meach, the number one wolf researcher in the entire world. Yep. The man who has at least five printings of his super influential tome, the wolf that establishes and teaches America that the alpha wolf is a real thing, that these are dominant animals claiming what's desired. That's the quote. And then he realizes that he has f***ed something up about this seminal research. Yeah, and it just starts eating away at him. I began to realize that rather than strange wolves coming together and fighting and one becomes the alpha and all that, it's not the way it works.

I'm imagining Dave Meach, like in the shower one day, this true believer scientist who still is stressed out about whether he should have pulled that gun on that wolf that was about to kill him. Like, that guy's like, I have made a huge tiny mistake. A nightmare, a nightmare for Dave Meage. So there's no fighting or great competition to become the top member of that group, the dominant one, but rather it just happens naturally. And therefore, the term alpha does not really apply because the term alpha implies

that there was a fight, a battle, a challenge, a competition to get to the top. And with wolves, that's not what happens. It's just a matter of just like humans, a male and female mating and having offspring. Oh, God, it just hits him again and again, and he continues to do research, and continues to bolster this fact.

And he just realized it's not just a bunch of random wolves coming together, but it's just a family. That's it. It's a family, and honestly he said it relates a lot to a human family, where it's like they raise their kids, then their kids grow up, then they go off, and they find a mate, and they make families of their own. They come together a male and female, and as they reproduce, they automatically become the dominant members of the pack, just like a human male and female, a mother and father, become dominant to their offspring.

There's no battling. There's no battling. No, it's just a mom and dad. That's an alpha parents. This is for so many people for whom the alpha male was a way. to either get back at or become their dad. This is a cruel bit of scientific poetry. Oh, my gosh. Yes. Yes, it is. So just to be very clear here for our listeners, because we're establishing something that is staggering and radical, the alpha wolf.

Yes. Is what? Horses. But the next question I have, then, given the way that horseshs it tends to smell. Which you know how horseshs is smells. One of the few animals in New York. I've smelled that.

That scat. That scat. Familiar with. How did Dave tolerate this for so long? This is a huge existential concern. This guy is a true believer. He cares deeply about correcting mistakes. And this was not, I mean, it was horses, but it was not a lie.

He just got it wrong. And so how does this sit with him for so long? How does he go about fixing this? He went to fix it in the most scientific. way possible by publishing a journal article in 1999. And he challenged the whole idea and brought to life the truth about what he learned. And then he's like, okay, settled it with scientific community. Let me now change my book.

Right. And he tries. And he's like, hey, we have to fix this. It's completely wrong. But the publisher was like, no, we can't do that. And he was like, no, then just stop selling it. Like, you need to stop selling this thing. But it kept on selling.

it kept on selling. So past 1999, past 2000, past 2010, past 2018, all the way up to 2022, it finally went out of publication. This part is incredible. Yeah. The idea that Dave is doing the rare thing that so few public intellectuals of any kind ever do, which has raised their hand and say, not only do I want to correct the record, I would like to stop profiting off of this.

And the publishing machine, why don't they? help him make the record correct? I reached out to the publisher and they said they only comment on books that are being published. Right. But anyway, then I talked to another book. Yeah, yeah, big paper. Big paper. Total big paper response. But anyway, then I talked to another friend who is in the publishing world, actually involved in Bill Simmons' book of basketball publishing. And he said it's a lot less nefarious. There are just a lot of pages here, or what? It's just a hell of old technology. Oh.

Books. Printing. Printing physical copies. Yeah, you can't just go in and quickly get into the CMS and edit something, scrub it and fix it and boom. Like the change never happened. And so this is sad also. Because Dave is losing control of this creature. This alpha.

Yeah, he can't put it back in the cage, man. We know this from just living. from living in the present. Being in the sports world in particular, where this is everywhere, dude. Oh, it's LeBron James, who can't stop referencing alphas. He's talking about how Anthony Davis needs to be an alpha. To be able to get, you know, a young, hungry, you know, alpha male to go out there

and just do the things that he do. It's Dion Sanders, Coach Prime, firing up his football players. Dominance. To be dominant all the time. Let's be dominant. Let's be dominant. Let's prepare to be dominant. In the weight room, in the classroom, at home, in your meetings, and on this field.

We got that? Yes, sir. All right. It even goes out to a brain supplement. Oh, yeah. In order to get an alpha brain called alpha brain. Yeah. That is promoted by Joe Rogan.

Of course. If I go to a UFC and I don't have alpha brain, I panic. I take it before every podcast. I even oftentimes take it on the air. just to let people know, like, I really take this. Look, I got to admit here, like, Joe Rogan doesn't bother me. Like, he does some good interviews. Like, his one with Rick Rubin.

Okay, fine. Solid, solid interviewing. I'm not here to put Joe Rogan on trial. My old alpha is like, oh, hey, Joe, how you doing? We can talk about squats? About chokeholds. I do, though, want to speak to the person who was actually on trial. Oh, yeah.

So, embodies this whole, this whole alpha scheme. He's the one that took it all the way off the rails. This dude, Andrew Tate. If you guys want to know what it's like to be an alpha male, I think Andrew exemplifies this more than just about anyone I know because he just does whatever the fuck he wants, he says whatever the fuck he wants, and he gets whatever the fuck he wants.

And that, you know, in my definition, is what an alpha male is. He turned this into like a quasi-religion. Yes, called Tateism. These are the 41 tenets I believe in. I believe that men have the divine imperative to become as capable, powerful, and competent as possible in this life. I believe that a man's life is difficult

and he has a sacred duty to become strong to handle such difficulty. I believe that men have the sacred duty to approach everything in life from a position of strength. So this is where I have to point out if you're not familiar, if you were in fact blessedly unfamiliar

with Andrew Tate and Azouvra. This is the dude who got arrested in Romania. Prosecutors in Romania have filed formal charges against the controversial influencer Andrew Tate, his brother Tristan and two Romania. associates. The charges include rape, human trafficking, and forming an organized crime group.

And those trials, that whole legal proceeding is still unfolding now. But that's the guy who took this lineage, the lineage of the Alpha Wolf, and built a whole business on it, and allegedly criminal business that, let's be honest about this, that is more popular than any of us would like to admit. Like the whole Alpha Brain, Alpha Male, Alpha Wolf Industrial Complex, it's clearly speaking to something that men at least are deeply sort of searching for. Yeah, I guess to get real for a moment.

Please. Well, yeah, it's just like guys like me die a suicide in the U.S. at the highest rate. White guys middle-aged. And I guess in order to cope with it, you want to reach for a philosophy that's easy to understand. Right. We keep on looking to animals. There's a purity toward animals.

And if you actually go any seal wolf or you're actually any wild animal up close, it's like, oh, that's pure. How they live is just perfect and it's easy and they seem at ease and they just are full of just innate confidence. That we don't have. It is strength, but also it is an uncomplicated vision of crime. Seemingly. But man, when you're close to an apex predator, it's just. It's powerful. And so, yeah, so I think a lot of people that are going toward this, I don't know, this way of living, I guess, they just want something simple to be that salve within their lives and allow them to not think about all the complexities just to go out and fucking dominate.

And so I just want to spell all of this out for the audience here. The thing that has been eating away in America, this cycle. desire to be strong, to be an alpha, to be the wolf, to be this alpha male, that's all been premised on a scientific misunderstanding. Like, none of it is

actually true. Well, kind of. And I'll get, I guess I'll get to that in a sec. What have we been doing here? This entire time, I'm trying to understand what it is that I found out today. Yeah. And I had thought that the alpha male, as established by our debunking,

which is, by the way, Dave Meach's own debunking of himself of the Alpha Wolf concept. We agree on that. That is not in dispute. It's not a dispute that this then went out to every high school and college in America, basically,

how every athlete, every coach, every locker room wants to worship at the altar of what it means to be the Alpha. Yes. And so what are you now trying to tell me? Well, Alpha Wolves they don't exist.

They're just parents, but alpha males. They do exist. They do exist, but domination is a sort of narrow view. So that's Franz de Wall. He's one of the top primate researchers in the world. Now we're... Okay, now we're doing primate researchers. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's important to get into another species in this because it's important about what he says because he studied chimps back in the day. I had this book called Chimpanzee politics, power in sex among the apes. Back the 90s, that book was a thing among people in power. Newt Gingrich of all people in Washington, who recommended it to Republicans in the House, I believe.

And the craziest part is just like Dave's book, people immediately went right to the alpha and are like, yeah, love this thing. And they just ran with it. But Franz, when I talked to him, he was just like, could we just pump the brakes? The real alpha males that I know in chimpanzees, I think one out of five is dictatorial, and so it's tyrannical. And they often end badly because the group at some point is going to revolt. But four out of five, I would say, are keeping the peace and protecting the underdog and keeping the group together.

One out of five alpha males in chimps is dictatorial. in five. The other four out of five, he's saying, keep the bees, protect the underdog, keep the group together, which is not alpha as I have come to appreciate the alpha male as a concept. No, no, and sometimes they're just really friendly. Sometimes they do a lot of favors

for their fellow chimps. And he added another important point in that it's more often than not, the people who decide who is the alpha of the group within chimpanzees, it's the women. The alpha female of the zoo group where I worked, whose name is Mama, because it was very modely to everyone, but she had an enormous power. And you basically could not become alpha male without her support.

So I'm listening to this, and I'm thinking back, like near the end here, back to my time in high school debate. When I felt most alpha. I love that you were doing something productive and I was just like stacking plates on the squat rack. I was lifting intellectual weights. And what I learned back then is that the key to any good debate, any good discussion of anything, is you've got to define your terms. If we don't agree on what the fuck we're arguing about, we're just like ships passing in the night. And so here, here I finally settle upon, it seems, this definition of alpha, which is just more complicated. Yeah.

Right? Like the alpha wolf in the wild is just apparent. That's what Dave Meach, our 87-year-old friend in Minnesota taught us. God bless him. It's not the domineering Andrew Tate kind of alpha image, but there are, in fact, Andrew Tate alpha chimps in this case. Definitely. They're just losers.

I know, I know, and I think the important part is to ground this all, this whole desire to be the alpha is success, is to get whatever you want. Right. And so whenever I hear that people using the term alpha, I'm like, why do you want to choose a mode that has you finish 1 in the pack 12 Deon Ketchin strays

But what they're saying is diplomacy An underrated part of leadership parenting the idea to care and to be emotionally sensitive to those who are in your care

That's what leadership is in the animal world They're quite responsible characters, and they can become extremely popular as a result. So because the whole group looks at them for security. But now I'm putting on my hat as a political strategist. Because I am realizing that a complicated definition is a dangerous one. Yeah. And so what do we do about the word alpha, right?

Like, where does it go? Can we actually do what Dave tried to do with his own book? and undo some of this. How do we approach that? I think it's here to stay. I don't think we can do anything. And even Dave agrees with me on that. An alpha does, says whatever they want.

With humans, yes. Yeah. Yeah, well, we're not going to stop that. I mean, that's just the way it is. But I think to bring it back to wolves, you know, in order to be a good parents, they have to be lethal because pups got to eat and moose are huge.

so you do have to you'd have to kill at times but the more important thing to be a great alpha to be a great parent you gotta be affectionate your mate you gotta be really great

to your pups your kids and that leads to possibly the coolest thing that I learned on this whole wolf tail if you will

IL or L.E that is that wolves hug wait So you mean they physically, literally, hug each other? Yep. Actually putting their arms around each other's neck.

I published a whole paper on wolves hugging each other. Sometimes, why side by side, where one will put its front paws around the neck of the other, and I've seen them doing it this way as well, where they actually hug I don't see that a lot or haven't seen it a lot but seen it enough to know that it does exist

yeah I love this so much man it's great right I feel like the only thing when I found out today yeah okay is that there's only one more thing left for clearly two alphas

as properly defined to do yeah here wait I mean Bud Light on the table. Oh, that's some good.

Oh, yeah. And, and... Bring it in, man. And, yeah. Let's do this. Oh, keep the cans on. Oh. Oh, you're so...

How are you still so strong? Pilates. For more of those quads and more reporting. Overseen by Bradley Campbell, check out Sports Explains the World from Metal Arc Media, wherever you get your podcasts. This has been Pablo Torre finds out,

a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.