The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - PTFO - The 'Alpha' Myth, Debunked

Episode Date: January 17, 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.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Pablo Tore finds out I am Pablo Tore and today we're going to find out what this sound is. And I looked up and here are two wolves charging towards me, maybe 150 feet away or so. Then I realized that maybe I was in a little trouble. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe King's 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.

It's called the PTFO dictionary, right? That's right. Shout out to that listener, viewer in Israel apparently, who watches and learns, unlike you. Okay, learning art. What he does is he looks up these stupid words you say and he finds out what they mean. Like, symbolic and sensorious and great word.

Parenium and area, 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 a word that I, I argue Cortez is the most influential term in all of sports. These nuts? 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. That's just sports. Like, at the end of hell, 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 alpha 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. When I want a lot of time.

The reason I have been saying it is because it's actually, first off, f*** you. Second, oh. The idea of dominance, okay, of being the stronger person, being the alpha, it's something that is instinctive and intuitive. That's why you wanted to talk to me. Like, biggest alpha male at the company.

For the record, by the way, for the podcast, he's not watching on YouTube or the Rockies Network. Cortez, I'm just noticing this now, he's speaking about Cadbury Larry. What? Cortez is, he's wearing a f***ing black polo 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 it on the leave of the hat instead. Yeah. But this idea of what heat 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. That's how it's that. Read it. What does it say? What does it say on the cover of this book? It says the woof, the ecology and behavior of a... The woof. Dangered species.

Did you say woof? That's how you pronounce wolf? Whatever, man. What is this accent? The woof. That's what I'm saying. The woof, 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, 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 and I,

it's substantial. Why is the font so big, bro? Look at this. This is insane. It's like a textbook size. It is a large-fonded book with a large idea at the center of it. When was that a book written?

It was published at 1970. Okay. The author is L. David Meach. What does L stand for? I don't was published uh 1970. Okay. The author is L David Meach. What does L stand for? I don't know. Loser. Okay. Uh stop trying to out alpha the alpha book guy. Uh the point is this gentleman L David Meach is the foremost wolf researcher on the f*** planet. Okay. And so this book I I have been fascinated by it and reading it. Yes, 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-confconfidence in social intercourse. That's what it looks like when a wolf is feeling self-confident in social intercourse.

This is a book about a wolf sex? Well, yeah, actually, this. Figure 14, presentation and withdrawal of the anal parts. I mean, there's 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 it's exerting control over the anal parts of the subordinate who is withdrawing his anal region. So this is science, this book, okay? The most 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 gonna 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? Oh. So you're gonna 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 because you just just look at the view to the South Proof class. And he's waiting on the other side of the South Proof class. Very good. Thank you for taking on this assignment and drinking what you just confessed off microphone to be dandelion to you. Thanks, Pavel. No, I appreciate the embrace. Yes. Yes.

You're a valued part of the metal-lark 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 and the Dragon's 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.

Yeah. Before though, you were this. Ah! Ah! And I just need a stress that your hair is shorter. Your quads are Godzilla-sized. There's so much alpha in you, Bradley. Yeah.

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 quadsilas? And you look like you're a part of the f***ing super-silter program. Oh, yeah, that's like 180 pounds of Trump rally. Just coming at you, looking at that photo.

Put them 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. Hatfields, like one of his farms.

Because you're from rural Oregon. So super rural, and 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 and 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, gagged is absolutely what is next to this photo in the dictionary, right next to another term, which we conscripted you to investigate, because you, hey, hey, bucker, former high school, track athlete, quarterback,

all of these things, we sent you back out into nature, into rural America, to investigate how it is that we all became obsessed with the idea of the alpha. Yeah, you guys send 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, Alpha Dave. My name is Dave Meach. I'm a senior research scientist with the US Geological Survey. And I've been a world 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 bound it up to the second floor. And in 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?

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 Iow Royal. It's an island in Lake Superior and he was there to track Timberwolves as part of a research study for his PhD slash dissertation.

But he had the right, you know, kind of, kind of resume for it. Because he could guard Carl Addenetowns. No, no. I don't know if he, I wouldn't put a past him. I wouldn't put a past him. Uh, 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 that the only one I think? With the ag school? I mean, yeah, yeah. God bless Cornell. I mean, we're not, we're not, we're not having an ag school over at Harvard University, Bradley. Come on, 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. 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 dark pistols and dark 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 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 or drug it

and put your tags on it. His team would jump out, wrestle the bear, grab the bear's feet essentially to spread eagle-to-thing. Injectulous. And then get up close and then knock the bear out with drugs by hand, a bespoke bear drug. So I do want to point out that this Dave Meach character, the scientist who is the pre-eminent

wolf researcher and apparently an expert bear trapper himself, major alpha energy so far. Oh, huge, huge back in the day, which made them the perfect PhD candidate to set loose on an island to track down Timberwolves, which are for people who only know the Timber Wolves through like, I don't know, NBA, no, three point guards before, Stephanie. There are a lot scarier than that. Yeah, Johnny Flynn's like jump shot. There are a lot scarier than that. Yeah, Johnny Flynn's like jump shot. So anyway, our 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 7th Heaven. He wouldn't like mound around the island pretending to be a wolf.

I like backing stuff. You would back 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 Wolfs, 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 Wolfs got collected,

and then study it to see kind of what they, 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 and assess and track them 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 and because he knew, you know, quite a bit about wolves at 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 buddycott 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 funny moment where it flipped from, you know, here's this pilot going out there flying, trying to track down the walls,

and then all of a sudden here's the researcher, just sitting there and just kind of looking out, taking notes. That's lovely. 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, nah.

What did Dave want him to do? Well, they're up in the plane one time and they saw a moose kill. So 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 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 in 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 machines. Right, I mean, I grew up, I mean, we all grew up, these fairy tales, right, about the big, bad wolf, and the wolf was always the villain and blowing down pigs, houses, and dressing up as a grandma, eating kids. Like, this is rooted in all of this fear. All of this fear.

Generally, we're considered creatures that we shouldn't have around, and that should be wiped out. In fact, Iowa Royal was one of the very few places that they survived on at that time. Most places they had been wiped out in the country. But eventually the pilot relented and then landed the bush plane and they devised kind of a plan to if the wolves were to attack him, the pilot would die

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 I'll plan, but it's the plan they went with. Dave's out there on the ice walking toward this moose kill, and he gets closer and closer, and it is just its gore everywhere.

I think like Tarantino setting. It's that a lot of blood in a moose. Oh, yeah, and it's just, it snows everywhere. So you've 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 these 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 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 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. F*** the science. Hold the gun. What are you doing? Yeah, the guy was scared.

I mean, the walls, like we said, they're a thought of as 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 and 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 Tim Roles around him. So Dave, his eyes are open 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. 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 mountain top. And it was where and how the Alpha Wolf concept took off. Like this is where we trace it to. Yes.

Research. Totally. I mean, even at the start of the National recent national championship game, between Michigan and University of Washington, yeah, they were talking about how Jim Harbott likes to play videos of predators hunting to his team to get him fired up and he says the most like lethal set of predators are a pack of wolves hunting. The perfect fighting unit to me is a pack of wolves, you know, 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 them celebrating after the fight. You see him celebrating after the fight. Right. Right. It's just like, nah. A descendant of this book, like that is the through line, right? 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, who was out there. 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 packed dynamics. But to make his packed of study in captivity,

then Schnenkel 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 battle in order to get to that top spot. And once they reached that top spot through aggression,

through dominance, through just pure... Ascicking. Yeah, ascicking. Hey, Bucky. They would be called the Alpha. And so Dave looked at this previous research and realized that it actually matched up to what he witnessed on the Isle Royal.

There was always one dog that was the lead dog and subordinates behind it. So he was like, 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 David's 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. Yeah. Just the way that so many finance broke.

Must have felt so justified. Oh, yeah. In this description of my privilege comes from by dominance. Oh, yeah. And you can imagine finance rose love it too, because like the alpha wolf actually walks with this tail up, so other wolves can sniff its ass. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anytime you can biologically justify butt sniffing, Wall Street loves that. Oh, they love that stuff. They love that stuff. But by the way, so too, broadly did 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 world town that had 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 a little Bradley Campbell. Yep. Can't wait to get those muscles pumping in honor of the alpha wolf. If I were to split it, so. can't wait to get those muscles pumping in honor of the alpha wolf. Why would it not split itself? And it's cement 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 of the whole thing. But within this book, well, most of it is correct. There was one major problem, this massive air 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, a kind of total request life. America at its peak.

And we have Dave Mage, the number one wolf researcher in the entire world. The man who has at least five printings of his super influential tone, 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 walls coming together and fighting and one becomes the alpha and all that, it's not the way it works. I'm imagining Dave Meade's like in the shower one day. This true believer scientist who still is stressed out about whether he should have pulled that gun and 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 Meige. 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. 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? Horse shit. But the next question I have then, given the way that horse shit tends to smell.

Which you know how horse shit smells. That's right, it's one of the fun animals. Yes, in New York. I smell, I smell that dogs. That's cat, familiar with. How did Dave tolerate this for so long? Like this is a huge existential concern. Now this guy is a true believer.

He cares deeply about correcting mistakes. And this was not, I mean, he was h- It was not a lie. He just got in a log. 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, settle 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, it didn't just stop selling it.

Like you need to stop selling this thing, but it kept on selling and it kept on selling. So past 1999, 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 is raise 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, yeah, big paper, big paper, a total big paper response. But anyway, then I talked to another friend who is

in the publishing world, actually involved in Bill Simms' 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 in sport, in the sports world, in particular, where this is everywhere, dude.

Oh, it's LeBron James who can't stop referencing Alphas. He's he's talking about how Anthony Davis needs to be an alpha. To be able to get, you know, a young hungry, you know, you know, alpha male to go out there and just do the things that he do. It's Deon Sanders, coach prime firing up his football players, dominance. To be dominant all the time. 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.

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 at 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 I got it made like Joe Rogan doesn't bother me. Like he does some good interviews,

like his one with Rick Rubin. Okay, solid, solid interview. I'm not here, like I'm not. I'm not. Yeah, my old alpha is like, oh, hey, Joe, how you doing? I mean, we can talk about squatty, about, about, about chokeholds. I do though wanna speak to the person

who was actually on trial. Oh yeah. So embodies this wholeodies 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 f**k he wants.

He says whatever the f**k he wants and he gets whatever the f**k he wants. And that in my definition is what an alpha male is. He turned this into like a quasi-religion, yes, called catism. These are the 41 tenants, I believe in. I believe that men have to 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 the 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're in fact blessedly unfamiliar with Andrew Tate and Ezuva. 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 Romanian 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, an 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, that men at least are deeply sort of searching for. Yeah, I guess to get real for a moment. Please. Oh yeah, it's just like guys like me die of suicide in the US 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 at animals. For our, there's a purity toward animals. And if you actually go and you see a wolf or you're actually any wild animal up close It's like oh that that's pure how they live is just perfect and it's easy and they see me ease and they just are full of just Inate confidence that like it's so we don't have it we don't have it it is strength, but also it is an uncomplicated vision of 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 south within their lives and allow them to not think about all the complexities just to go out and f**king 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 psychological 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, kinda, 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. And I had thought that the alpha male as established by our debunking, but 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 in 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, right? They're parents, but alpha males. They do exist. They do exist. The domination is a sort of narrow view. So that's Franz DeWal. He's one of the top private researchers in the world. Now we're okay. Now we're doing private researchers. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to get into a, I can do another species in this because it's important about what he says because he studied James back the day. That's book called chimpanzee politics Politics, Power in Sex, Among the Apes,

Back the 90s, that book was a thing among people in power. Newed Ginerage of all people in Washington who recommended it to Republicans in the house, I believe. And the crazy 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. 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 mills 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. One 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 modally to everyone, but she had an enormous power. And you could, you basically could not become alpha male This out 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 the I'm doing something productive and I was just like stacking plates on the squat rack I was 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 I got to define your terms. If you don't agree on what the f*** 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, right? Like the alpha wolf in the which is just more complicated. Yeah. Right? Like the alpha wolf in the wild is just apparent.

That's what Dave meets our 87 year old friend in Minnesota taught us. God bless him. It's not the domineering, andrutate kind of alpha image, but there are in fact, andrutate alpha chimps. Definitely. Definitely. They're just losers. I know,. Yeah, chimps. Definitely. 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 one and eight in the back 12?

Hahaha. Deon Ketch the back 12. Okay. Deon, I'm catching strays. Geez. 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. Yeah. 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 like undo some of this? How do we approach that? Well, 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, we're all that. We're not trying to stop that. I mean, that's just where it is. But I think to bring it back to wolves, in order to be a good parent, they have to be lethal because pups got to eat and moose are huge. So you do have to kill at times. But the more important thing to be a great alpha,

to be a great parent, you gotta be affectionate. Yes. 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, I L or Ellie. Yes. 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 I haven't seen it a lot,

but seen it enough to know that it does exist. Yeah, I love this so much. It's great, right? I feel like the only thing when I found out today, yeah, okay, that there's only one more thing left for clearly two alphas as properly defined. I think so. Yeah, here, wait, I mean. are clearly two alphas as properly defined. I think so. To do.

Yeah. Here, wait, I mean. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Bud light on the table. Ah.

Ah. Ah, that's some good. Oh, yeah. And. And. And. And, yeah. Let's do this.

Oh, keep your hands on. Ah. Ah. Ah. You're so. How are you still so strong? Bringing in man and yeah, let's do this How are you still so strong Pilates For more of those quads and and more reporting overseen by Bradley Campbell check out sports explains the from Metal Arc Media, wherever you get your podcasts. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ This has been Pablo Torey, finds out a Metal Arc Media production.

And I'll talk to you next time. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ And I'll talk to you next time.