Transcript
0:00 why is it that every time I'm writing an article that means something to me I end up feeling like William H Macy at the end of Fargo where the police had tracked him down to his motel room and he's like yeah just a sec climbing out the window and that's how I relate to editors welcome to you're wrong about the show where without even meaning to we find ourselves repeatedly asking straight men
0:31 what happened to you and why do you continue to be like this is that the universal tagline is that the theme for every episode now well I guess listen to The Godfather episode and that's definitely about that and I think our episodes tend to be about the foibles of humanity more broadly but since we're talking about American Life politics and history we do get back to the uh the reactive woundedness of the straight male population quite often I can hear
0:58 the clap emojis between all of the words that you're saying I'm Michael Hobbs I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post I'm Sarah Marshall I'm a writer for the new Republic and the believer in BuzzFeed and today we're talking about alpha males oh God what is the first thing that you think of like what do you see on your little Homeland red string board when that phrase pops into your head so until you told me this a couple months
1:22 ago I had no idea that this was like even up for dispute I thought the situation was simply that like wolf packs I guess bear packs I don't know if bears are in packs sleuths uh yeah like gorillas and chimpanzees and stuff there's like an alpha male there's like one dude who's at the top of the pecking order and everyone kind of bows before this figure I mean I also to be totally honest the first thing when you told me
1:45 this the first thing that I thought it was the How to Train Your Dragon movies which I'm like totally obsessed with I want to say the first one but it made a big impression on me so the second one is about his Dragon trying to become the alpha of all the dragons all the other dragons just unquestioningly follow the alpha so once you're the alpha everyone else just does exactly what you say without questioning it it's an animated
2:09 movie about dragons it's like obviously exaggerated but most of us kind of accept that concept that there is some sort of inherent hierarchy in these animals Society and then there's obviously like right-wing weirdos who believe that we should have that kind of hierarchy in the United States of America in 2018 and there's Alpha and betas and Cooks yeah I guess cuck is the new omega it's much cashier not to get too deep too fast but I feel like that
2:36 is a way that people seem to sort of relate to the world there's these kind of ubermenschmen and then there's like the follower men yeah and then there's like this lower level of men that are just being humiliated by these like studly brawny dudes yeah I think that it is like a handy little Rosetta Stone for understanding the world for a large and potentially growing portion of the male population this is just the way that they organize things I think alphanus is
3:04 something that does exist but just not in the way we tend to want it to exist like so many other things what I found most surprising going in and researching this was how relatively recent this term is because it's one of those things that's just become absorbed into our cultural Consciousness and we feel like we've had it for forever but I did the little graph thing where you enter a phrase into Google and it shows how
3:29 often it appears in books and it really is an almost no books at all no printed material at all until the late 60s interesting and then we start seeing it a lot and then it starts having an upswing I think in the late 80s and then it's continued to really grow since then but it's been continually getting more and more visibility since the 60s like and we are more inundated with this term now than we were 10 years ago more 10
3:57 years ago than we were 28 20 years ago which I find surprising because you think that the myths of patriarchal masculinity are evergreen but it turns out that they're a fluctuating mass and so the first historical text that I looked at and researching this that I wanted I found a passage that I want to read to you first because I feel like it might be the most annoying excerpt that we encounter today this is from an issue of Life magazine published
4:28 February 20th 1970. the cover of this issue of Life the headlines in order are teenagers on heroin Robert Audrey the case for population control and then oh my God an architect runs away to join the circus as a clown and the cover is a picture of a guy half in clown makeup and half nut which is like what a great after school special that would have been yeah so it's just it's a time when the teenagers are on
4:57 heroin and The Architects are joining the circus and everyone's like what's the [ __ ] point and so this is from the cover article by Robert Audrey and he makes an argument about well in animal populations the lower ranking animals have higher stress they more frequently die from stress so he's saying transitioning to humans in Australian experiments K Myers has shown that among rabbits subjected to density pressures it is a low-ranking female who suffers the greatest fetus
5:27 mortality we may speculate then that the quote temperament of a population May well be determined by the random incidence or absence of a powerful alpha male or female whose very presence acts to forestall the disintegration of social organization so we're already going in some scary directions continuing the relative immunity of the alpha and vulnerability of the Omega or lowest ranking member of a social order is suggested in a 1968 study of men and that year our kernel
5:58 science published a medical study of 270 000 male employees of a major American corporation okay sounds legit keep going the mammoth investigation linked educational background job achievement and incidence of coronary heart disease now there are a bunch of ads for air travel the corporation offered like a perfectly arranged laboratory condition a single controlled environment operating units whether in Georgia and New York state had similar structures fulfilled similar functions provided similar jobs all was
6:29 directed by a single top management policy with the same system of Pensions and security insurance and medical practices and perhaps most important of record keeping and the 270 000 case histories provided a sample so large that even small variations from the expectable would have statistical significance the variations were not small from bottom to top and the company's pecking order the study found that workmen can track coronaries at the rate of 4.33 per thousand per year their
6:57 immediate superiors the foramen have it slightly worse 4.52 but supervisors and local area manicures dropped to 3.91 then comes a leap general area manicures have a mere 2.85 we then come to the high competitors the high Achievers the high Executives coronaries occur at a rate of 1.85 about 40 percent of the level of workmen while we may say that many a coronary customer could have been eliminated before reaching the alpha rank we must also reckon that the high executives are
7:28 much older what yeah yeah take it away I mean so basically okay so to try to summarize all that is basically saying first of all he's making almost like a Thomas Hobbes Leviathan argument your cousin that yes my dad that like to have a strong Society you need to have a strong alpha or a strong or a strong alpha female if such things even exist in your species which like right which maybe they do maybe they don't let's not let's
7:57 let's not get into these like specifics yeah but basically the metaphor is a you need a super strong Alpha and B in hierarchical systems like corporations the stress of being lower on the totem pole gives you higher cardiovascular risks and makes you more unhealthy and so there's these kind of Alphas that are at the top who are like very healthy and very robust and are doing fine even though they're older I don't want to impute bad faith to this journalist but
8:27 I would love to see the actual study of this corporation that it's based on because there's a million other reasons why people at the top of a company would have less cardiovascular risk I mean first of all cardiovascular risk is not a perfect measure of stress right so it's not clear that that's you know the one thing it's an interesting finding but you can think of a million other ways to explain that finding other than this like one little thing that you've
8:53 decided alphanus is is what explains this like maybe it could be better access to Medical care maybe it could be they're getting less discrimination in daily life because they're wearing suits and they just kind of look more affluent maybe it's because more of extra workers in this unnamed Corporation are people of color who have higher rates of coronary complications right you don't want to take away the finding it's an interesting finding there's lower rates of cardiovascular disease at the upper
9:25 levels to me that feels like that's the beginning of coming to the explanation whereas this journalist is casting it as like oh here's this one thing that explains it it feels like you need like another decade to figure out what's actually going on here like does this apply to other corporations does this apply to like manufacturing companies but not software companies does this apply in Georgia but not in Oregon does this I mean there's a million other
9:50 things you would have to look into before saying hey we think what's really going on here is this thing but he's like let's look at penguins and one study of a corporation boom alpha males well that's how you prop up a somewhat spacious argument is by cherry picking data I mean as a journalist I've definitely been in this situation right right like oh [ __ ] I need to like I wish this study said this more unequivocally and like I
10:18 know I'll just write about it as if I mean I pride myself on the fact that I haven't done this but there is huge pressure you read through an entire academic study and you're like oh this is actually pretty nuanced I'll just I'll just write up the abstract most academics when you show them like hey I saw your study and I have concluded this from it nine times out of ten they're like uh we don't think so we think we
10:42 need to do a lot more research on that and so I wonder what if that was the conclusion that the researchers themselves Drew from this study or if he's kind of taking this raw material and putting it into this mold yeah and you don't really you don't get a headline out of good science typically like I feel like occasionally it happens but yeah a good study tends to not be able to say very many things definitively and what it often leads to
11:06 is oh we should we should do follow-up on this we should investigate this further as opposed to and therefore it's also interesting to me that in this article where he's examining animal populations and that you know the classic alpha male rhetoric 2 is Millennia ago at the dawn of man animals needed to section section therefore this is how humans could behave in Suburbia and it's like why is it that we when we're taking tools from the dawn of man to use in our modern
11:37 lives it always involves being dominant or taking someone else's stuff right and the thing that initially got me interested in this and I'll just read this to you was you know how everyone has a very specific favorite piece of Taxidermy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York like we all do obviously yeah and my favorite is the wolves in the Hall of North American mammals because it's this really beautiful exhibit where it's the wolves are chasing a deer in
12:09 the Moonlight and they've used I think marble dust or something as the snow and the wolves are taxidermied and mid-leaf and it's this beautiful uncanny lifelike piece of of Taxidermy which is an art form that I appreciate very much and it's you know they're hunting but it's a quiet beautiful moment in Wolf life and the little plaque that accompanies it says an alpha pair dominates the family an alpha female will snap and snarl at lesser females to prevent them from
12:38 mating for only she gets this privilege the alpha male is the chorus leader and decision maker which I also really like it is a description because you're like oh wolves are Mormons I guess to ensure group hunting and pup rearing he will Block members from leaving the pack still some underlings do split off to form packs of their own whereupon they become the competition I mean why is this the most relevant thing about wolves this is the whole wolf part of
13:04 this whole exhibit and we could also talk about how wolves mate for life or something aside from the human reminiscent wolf politics right that we have attached to wolves and so before it trickled down to humans wolves were the first species that the alpha label was applied to in Popular Science so that's all comes back to a study done by a scientist named Rudolph schenkel that was published in 1947 and he studied captive wolves in Switzerland and then
13:38 extrapolated from that to talk about archetypal wolf Behavior I wonder if that turns out to be problematic later I don't know do you think that possibly that could skew the results I have no idea I also have come to mistrust studies done around times of societal upheaval which to be fair there aren't any that don't have that but like if you're doing a study on animal behavior during World War II and then publishing results immediately after World War II I
14:06 think that that affected the kind of mindset you know the kind of needs that people bring to the science and so here's a quote from shenkel by incessant control and repression of all types of competition within the same sex both of these Alpha animals defend their social position so he's saying there's an alpha male and an alpha female and they're in charge and anyone who tries to question that gets dominated and controlled and pushed back down according to schenkel how are these
14:35 alpha male and females getting to be the alpha and maintaining their status as the alpha well and let me see I have another quote the emotional reactivity of the dominant Cub the potential Alpha animal of the pack might be measurably different from the subordinate individuals and it might then be possible to pick out the temperament characteristics or emotional reactivity of potential alpha or leader wolves and of subordinates furthermore under normal field conditions it seems improbable that timid low-ranking wolves would
15:05 breed this is another author named L David Mech who published his own book on wolves in 1970 the wolf after studying wolves on Isle Royal and then decided that his previous research was flawed and has been one of the the leading voices of the sort of anti-shankle the second wave of wolf Behavioral Science of the 20th century oh my God I love tiny little debates like this like debates within a field yes [ __ ] you Shankle like yelling
15:35 at each other across a like Marriott Ballroom conference thing yeah of like no you're studying them in captivity my methodology is sound they're not shoving each other I just love that yes debates and scholarship are the most delicious things and especially when someone has written an article on the humanities oh yeah the antinomian controversy where they have all these sub Tweety footnotes where they're like this author you know wrote this in 1958 which my research suggests may have been based on a
16:05 misreading of a primary source and it's like oh my god when you're being catty about something that only four or five people would join you in Caviness about yeah but yes and in the post-shankle world the schenkel and the shankelian belief is that yeah wolf cubs are born and show these dominant or submissive traits and that it's an innate trait of the future dominant wolf cub to just be an alpha from birth and what the wolf studies
16:36 that come after this and that study wild populations find is that shankle's research was flawed partly because he was examining captive wolves that were living a little bit unusually compared to the standards of wild wolves which is that they had non-family members living together which apparently in the wild wolves don't tend to do what scientists who've come in the post-shankle universe have studied are wolves that live in the wildest family units the alphas the alpha male the alpha female are the mom
17:08 and the dad so Max has a great quote labeling a high-ranking wolf Alpha emphasizes its rank in a dominance hierarchy however in natural wolf packs the alpha male or female are merely the breeding animals the parents of the pack and dominance contests with the other wolves are rare if they exist at all during my 13 Summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack I saw none thus calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a
17:34 human parent or a doe deer as an alpha I know call the Burn Unit take that shingle any parent is dominant to its young Offspring so Alpha adds no information why not refer to an alpha female as the female parent the breeding female The Matriarch or simply the mother such a designation emphasizes not the animal's dominant status which is Trivial information but its role is pack progenitor which is critical information and then he adds the point here is not
18:07 so much the terminology but what the terminology falsely implies a rigid force-based dominance hierarchy wow that is some academic yeah yeah that's what I live for but I mean if you're gonna pull a metaphor out of this it's actually interesting that I mean one of the metaphors you could draw is that something about being in captivity changes natural patterns right yeah being in captivity is profoundly unnatural and that it's almost like a debunking of like learning very much at
18:37 all about the Animal Kingdom from animals in captivity simply because it is always going to change their behavior in ways that are very difficult to see at the time like it it looked very obvious to shrinkle that there were these dominance displays but then the minute you get into more natural conditions you're like no it's just a normal family structure right and so it's interesting like you think about all the other stuff that we learn about
18:57 animals from captivity that not all of that is going to be bunk but you have to consider the possibility that some of it is going to be bunk because we're just creating conditions that don't exist in nature right I mean it's a little bit like studying humans and having you know the circumstance that you're finding them and be a prison right humans really like trading cigarettes for stuff what a weird wow we've learned so much about humans
19:21 today they love cigarettes that's not not true but it's it's in a specific context and so primatology is a field continues to grow it's hard to understate how amazed Americans seem to be by all of our Revelations about primates in the 60s and 70s you knowing Jane Goodall figuring out that the great apes are using tools and oh my God and no one believed her and when you look at that now and you're like they have hands
19:51 like and so primatology studies in the 60s and 70s continued you know actually go into the wild to the extent that they can and look at the power structures and and primates and primates actually do seem to have Alphas much more than wolves do they do have groupings that are larger than just a family unit and have you know the male in charge and and you know higher primates do do scary [ __ ] yeah chimps wigs war on each other
20:21 and consumed the Flesh of their enemies and stuff I don't know who's idea was to to start putting them in tutus and roller skates but that seems like one of the the pieces of human Folly that I don't know suggests a particular kind of blindness about the the intelligence and the sheer strength of the animal you're [ __ ] with but so the alpha male thing does sort of exist but not in wolves well to an extent I feel like it's good
20:47 that it has it it applies to animal behavior but when we as humans try to appropriate it do this Prometheus thing with it we tend to interpret it in the ways that are most convenient for us and so this book comes out in 1982 which is Franz Duvall and other primatologists talking about chip behaviors and maybe we can compare this to humans and to the alpha behavior of the chimp versus the corporate bigwig and this seems to be
21:19 the moment that the spark kind of jumps in 1982 from animal Behavioral Studies and academics sub-tweeting each other to this popular understanding that we have now of alpha males and we appropriate this shankalian idea of that there are born alphas and some people just are more dominant and that we naturally tend toward power structures led by alpha males and where we are with that now seems to be you know a lot of the uglier
21:51 little corners of the internet of the red pill discussion boards and things of guys talking about you know how do you become an alpha so it can be a self-made man thing I guess like becoming an entrepreneur like how do you act like an elephant how do you boss everyone around this is part of pickup artist culture which always makes me think of there's a pickup artist character on Bob's Burgers who has all of these little tips and one
22:14 of them is never make her pancakes make her make you pancakes that's such a great summation of like the relationship between those dudes to women and this is my own personal reading of all this is you know all of these arguments are like well you know the alpha male is the leader of the pack the leader of the society Society needs leaders and we're the leaders and so the alpha is someone who [ __ ] whoever they
22:41 want and isn't nice to anyone and never makes anyone pancakes and is constantly engaging in Feats of dominance and clashes and things like that and you look at it and you're like hmm I don't know how great those behaviors are for running a society or a family or a community like I think we actually need I think the actual Alphas of nature if we're talking if we're going to call the breeding pair of a family wolf pack the
23:08 alphas which we can or if we're going to talk about Alpha chimps or whatever are the ones who think in terms of the community and in terms of the greater good and the safety of those around them and like has everybody eaten does everybody have an umbrella does everybody have a coat it's gonna be cold yeah the alpha is really you know the soccer mom some of them the natural Kingdom he's like okay we're gonna go to Dairy Queen does anyone have
23:36 a nut allergy the alpha is the one who figures out who has nut allergies they're not the person constantly pushing everyone around I'm curious how this concept went from animals to humans because animals exhibit an infinite number of behaviors right and there's only a few that were like well this one explains humans like dogs eat each other's feces I don't see anyone being like Oh there's like the cuck eats the feces of the other Cooks like right or
24:04 you know why is no one like well the male seahorse carries the fetus so therefore right I think that this came along at the moment when the first popular science discussion of the alpha male begins with the wolf study immediately you know carried out during World War II and published right after and this is also the time during which Corporate America is really rising in a way that it hadn't before and our need for corporations and workplaces that can
24:31 bright that comprise these vast hierarchical structures the scale of hierarchy that most Americans interacted with as part of their job suddenly became so present and so inescapable and we really started as a society to lose our grasp on communal living when we look at how we interacted with the idea of alpha males especially you know looking at at animal behavior and being like right animals also live in a rigid hierarchy and they have bosses and the bosses are required to
25:03 wage war on anyone who disagrees with them slightly and constantly make sure that everyone is under them and what animals and humans really want I think is not a boss but a parent how did this get laundered into human behavior like were there time and Newsweek articles about like hey look at this thing that animals do let's do it too yeah I mean the first real spark jump was with the chimpanzee Behavior book that comes out
25:30 in 1982 and that makes a link between chimpanzee and higher primate Alpha behavior and corporate humans and this idea of the alpha is the person who rises above the competition and takes control of the situations and Human Society needs Alphas because we're mammals and primates just like everybody else and we just have this idea of well look this is how humans organize themselves this is our society and how it always has to be and will be and so
25:57 you're either going to be an alpha or you're going to be getting bossed around by the alpha so if you can emulate and become the alpha might as well oh another really interesting thing is that pre-shankle before any of this rhetoric really starts percolating Alphas are the ruling class and Brave New World remember that book yes I don't remember that aspect of it someone made a reference to will Huxley talked about this in Brave New World and it was this
26:22 very much out of the current Alpha idea because there it's like clearly being used as rhetoric to prop up a totalitarian dystopia we don't really think of it that way now I mean I do yes you do I do we do well one thing that's always struck me is this alpha male concept is bouncing around for decades and then it gets picked up by of all things the dating Community like it's weird to me that it wasn't picked
26:51 up by like a political party yeah or for an activist movement yeah how do you see that well I mean it's not like pickup artists have some great reverence for the [ __ ] Animal Kingdom obviously what they're doing is they're cherry picking Concepts that they like to justify this world view and also this this vision of reality in which there are natural hierarchies whenever anybody envisions a natural hierarchy they always put themselves at the top of it
27:18 right right nobody ever says like there's genetic superiority and I'm like fourth right you're always like there's genetic superiority and oh oh oh look I'm I I guess I am at the top how strange interesting right let's just go about organizing our entire society around this hierarchy where like I happen to be at the top but really it's like a natural thing it's really a burden to me like I'm having the hardest time with having to go around
27:43 sterilizing everybody and so I mean I've spent a decent amount of time reading these like pickup artist guys thing because I find it like morbidly fascinating and really terrifying it's terrifying uh it's dark yeah I even read that [ __ ] the game the like pickup artist Bible that like pretends not to be a pickup artist Bible what is a pretend to be like about having like self-love or well he is like an outsider to the pickup artist culture I mean that
28:09 book sort of started the whole pickup artist thing where he brought it was this journalist for I think he wrote a story in Rolling Stone that then got turned into a book about this culture of these dudes in La that had all these like tactics we're all familiar with now of like nagging and they would dress in these like flamboyant clothes it would like get people's attention do they think they invented flamboyant clothes like have they never seen a 70s movie
28:32 before well that's the thing I mean it's not like these people are like learned Scholars right they're like completely doing this from scratch and the trick of course is you never hit on the hot girl you hit on her friend to make her think that she's not hot and so the whole thing is basically never allowing a woman to think that she's valuable you have to always be this is the negging concept too so you say like I like your
28:57 nails are they real which is like kind of disguised as a compliment but you're actually kind of sending the message like oh you're fake and you're not putting one over on me it's like these little ways of not letting her control the interaction and to and I think they even use this phrase establish dominance that you establish dominance in the interaction at all times that you're choosing the location you're choosing the times there's this whole thing of
29:20 like you have to move them to different locations like every 45 minutes you're supposed to be like let's go to a different bar like you've kidnapped someone and are trying to decide and I mean there's all this like pseudoscience that goes along with it and the pseudo psychology that goes along with it is that like if someone has known you in a series of locations they think they've known you longer so that establishes intimacy like oh I've seen him in three
29:42 different places I must have known him for longer than like two hours I mean there's no like I don't know what the base is for any of this [ __ ] is right but it's based on hacking the female brain in some way 100 yes white men can't be motivated to do anything unless you call it a hack and then they'll do it yeah exactly but of course I mean what's interesting about any of these hobbies that whenever anybody gets a
30:03 hobby they need like a whole world view to go along with it right nobody just like does yoga everyone needs to like do yoga and it's all about mindfulness and being at peace and in the rest of my life I try to do like it kind of like colonizes the rest of your life and so in the same way this pickup artist stuff they've adopted this pickup artist language in this pickup artist Community but then they need this whole world of
30:25 you to kind of justify it and make it bigger than just trying to get laid right so they create this whole world in which there's a hierarchy and the females are like doing their thing to climb up the hierarchy and males are doing their thing to climb up the hierarchy and what you need to do is establish yourself as like one wrong on the ladder above the women and then of course it goes into like the way that
30:46 Society is structured right and so that's where all this Alpha stuff comes in of it some people are simply more capable five ten years later once you get into the incel stuff then it's much more about men who have this ratio of their upper lip to their nose is more attractive to women there's all this weird genetic stuff the spacing between your eyes and the idea is that if you are lower on the totem pole in these
31:10 ridiculous proportional face [ __ ] you're an Omega and you're never gonna win or you have to wildly overcompensate by your for your upper lip to nose ratio by taking women to a bunch of different locations on a date so they get disoriented and have sex something faster I guess like yeah it's like you you're like well I'm playing with all these handicaps so it's fine if I cheat in the sand trap yeah a friend of mine a
31:37 female friend of mine whose name I'm not gonna use because she's like totally embarrassed about this went on a date with a guy years ago from I think okcupidermatch.com or one of these things and so it's like let's meet at a bar 7 P.M the Dude shows up and he has a puppy with him and he's like oh do you want to meet my puppy do you want to pet my puppy I go to this bar all the time
31:55 because they let me bring my puppy here isn't he nice so she Pets the puppy they stay there for like 15 minutes and then he's like oh you know I know we're about to go out for a movie but you know do you mind if we pop back to my apartment because like I need to feed Wolfgang or whatever the [ __ ] his name is like I need to go back and feed Wolfgang so they go back to his apartment and then
32:12 there's like this whole routine that he has set up oh my god oh do you mind if I just play guitar for you a little bit I've been practicing do you mind listening to a song that I made and then he's like oh I was just watching this movie do you mind if we just like watch a scene and so my friend was saying as they're kind of getting into bed and they're making out she has this moment
32:31 that she's like wait a minute we didn't need to go back to your apartment hang on a minute you haven't even fed your puppy it all kind of clicks into her brain wow and it became really clear that he had this like script that he was running through and that he had probably done this like dozens of times before and so between the making out and the sex today she was like uh this is [ __ ] weird I'm gonna go and he was
32:51 just like okay as if it was Groundhog Day and he had like tried 50 million other times that's so insane coming into an interaction with another human being as if you're playing Halo has all these little packs and all these little tricks in order to hack into the main frame and then like you're cheating the casino by getting the slot machine to do a big jackpot for you and it's yeah the competitive idea of dating and how if you're trying to
33:20 trick someone constantly you can avoid the whole question of human intimacy because it's just a contest right this is from a New York man magazine article says across three studies Lori Jensen Campbell and colleagues found that it wasn't dominance alone but rather the interaction of dominance and pro-social behaviors that women reported were particularly sexually attractive oh interesting in other words dominance only increased sexual attraction when the person was already high in agreeableness and altruism so this is I
33:51 think a conclusion I'm going to arrive at repeatedly but my conclusion after reading through all of my debunking material was the biggest power move of all just be [ __ ] nice right there's no bigger power move than being nice that's one of the things I've come to believe is a midwesterner by choice what else does the article say it talks about the cultural history of the ideas Angus this idea of an ironclad hierarchy of Alpha Beta Omega and also talks about
34:18 how the term got more traction during Al Gore's campaign for president weird when allegedly Naomi wolf was brought in as one of his Consultants which what a time they were like we need a consultant for this presidential candidate what about a famous feminist okay and she let slip to reporters that she was trying to counsel him to be naturally dominant that's an awful idea that's awful oh there's also a great Al Gore quote Source in this
34:48 article said he stays with the same woman he likes his kids he's photographed with the grandchild he doesn't hide his age he's perfectly decent and real men aren't perfectly decent oh that's dark that's dark man that's one of those moments in 1999 where you're like I can see how we ended up with this whole situation but I mean since I've been working with dogs let me tell a dog story the dog love of my life is this dog named Maggie she's a sled
35:14 dog and I love her because she's a problem child someone who refuses to run who has trouble with obedience who doesn't relate well to others so I was spending time with Maggie recently she was being like super mouthy the other day and I wasn't entirely sure why and I was like okay let's get you calm down I have her sit in front of me and clamp my legs around her and just like hold her and she calms down
35:40 and we did that for a few minutes and then I got off and she was still completely mellow and I was just thinking about how you know to me that's Alpha Behavior where it's like you need this I'm gonna do this thing for you it's not necessarily like the beatings will continue until morale improves yeah so it's the opposite of that it's like you're beside yourself and you can't figure out how to get unbeside yourself because you're a puppy-ish dog and I can
36:08 understand what you need and I will restrain you so it's it feels as if there is dominance involved in that but it's me being like remember I know what you need and I'm stronger than you and I can remind you that it feels good to not be hysterical and it's me leading her to something that's better for her and better for me but it's not a show of force for the sake of force it's not about punishment it's not about control
36:34 it's about connecting her with her calm herself I I think of that as something much closer to Animal Kingdom alphanus wolf pack alphanus then you know tricking a woman into having sex with you by taking her to multiple locations you should teach pickup artist classes do your best to figure out what someone's emotional needs are and then do that I just think that we shouldn't take any lessons whole cloth from the Animal Kingdom frankly we are in fact
37:03 our own species yes it just isn't immediately clear what is useful from the Animal Kingdom and what isn't Animal Kingdom has an extremely high murder rate like animals kill each other constantly animals eat their young quite a bit and there's this kind of thing of like oh you know that's just something that animals do there's no like it's really obvious right that we're not all supposed to start killing and eating our young however okay well that's something
37:26 that animals do obviously that's not something we should use and then this alpha male concept comes along and we're like no that sounds pretty good yeah or I remember even in the debate over gay marriage how people would you'd always see these like things that would go viral of like these two lions at the Cleveland zoo or like in love with each other and they've been married and I was always just like well can people be able
37:47 to visit their Partners in the hospital regardless of what lions do like I think I think things like I shouldn't be impoverished if my husband dies because his family takes all the inheritance and I get nothing like to me I don't really care what happened to the Cleveland Zoo for like that to be bad I don't find it to be a great argument and then of course there were like the debunkings oh it turns out those two lions were just
38:08 friends those two lions were business partners I just think that all animal kingdom behavior is interesting but right none of it should be used like if you're taking precedent from the Animal Kingdom then it's like yeah that's true but so is everything else yeah I wonder if there's something here about like the tendency to see I don't know to see metaphors and everything to take lessons from animal behavior it's just always really contingent and usually the the
38:34 lessons are right in front of us it's pretty obvious that there is no genetic ubermensch class and the acting in a dominant way and classifying the world into alphas and cucks and whatever even if it was 100 true and the animal can them it's a shitty way to go through life and it's a shitty way to organize and describe Human Society right well or that it's it's relevant to wolves but if we're gonna take the argument
39:03 do this and they're therefore it's okay for us to do this it's like we're doing our own thing we can just leave wolves out yeah yeah to me what that connects to is just in order to take to accept a species for what it is you know whether it's rats or or Homo sapiens you just have to say well every species on Earth is capable of a huge variety of behaviors and the fact that we're capable of them doesn't mean that any of
39:27 them are what we're meant to be doing or what we should be doing it means that if there's something that we can do we can organize ourselves into large rigid hierarchical structures that relentlessly punish the people at the bottom of the pyramid this competitive paranoid way of existing in the world where you constantly have to be dominating everyone around you you can't trust women to have sex with you on purpose like that's a weird thing to
39:51 have just accepted as a culture is bad or undesirable or scary I mean I think this goes in the category like crack babies of things that we don't need evidence to believe yeah for a lot of people you don't need to be convinced of the idea idea that there's a hierarchy among men and that life is a struggle for dominance there's some people that just no matter how thin the evidence they're always going to go like oh yeah
40:13 definitely like that sounds convincing or that life has to be a struggle for dominance and there's no other way of living because I really like Thomas Hobbes I always think of this as like a fundamental misunderstanding of what he means by Leviathan that the point of that book and the point of his argument is this idea of the state as Leviathan that there is a hierarchy but the hierarchy is determined by the state and that there's accountable institutions
40:37 that deliver public goods whereas the alpha male concept is all about an individual at the center of it not an accountable institution so it's twisting this idea of like government is the will of the people we vote we hold institutions accountable in a million different ways and that then reflects back to us things like anti-poverty programs or they build roads or whatever the alpha male concept is kind of the exact opposite of let's put an individual at the center of this let's
41:06 find like a Mussolini or somebody who's so quote unquote special that they don't need any accountability and that they can just move faster and that they establish the whole hierarchy the hierarchy is a is a reflection of this individual or this personality rather than a transparent accountable institution right dogs that tend to be dominant don't go around picking fights like if someone challenges them if another dog challenges them and is like hey I have to have a fight with you they'll be like
41:36 all right I will pin you see I win there doesn't need to be any ambivalence here like you know who's in charge does that make you feel better okay but like needing to go around picking fights to show your power is a sign of you feeling that you don't really have any why do you think this concept was so useful for dating well doesn't it give you a rationale for being terrified of women the your only route to physical or
42:01 emotional intimacy is this game that you have to hack into and trick and that you can never have consensual emotional encounters with anyone that you're not forcing to have them with you in your dating life did you ever come across any dudes who gave off like a pickup artisty Vibe not really I mean I'm not a prolific dater I did have this one this is not the same thing as that but was kind of I don't know maybe a little
42:25 similar I went out with this guy once who like he went to get us new drinks at the bar and then when he brought them back he like ostentatiously was like you can have this one or that one you can have either drink and I was like oh your mansplaining to me that you're not gonna roofie me Jesus but he was like kind of a depressing moment because I was like so the norm is that if you get me a drink like you will
42:48 drug me and you're like by the way I'm I'm not gonna roofie you wow yeah I feel like with straight people every day is Yalta for us where it's like you know the battle of wills I had a Thing Once can I do yeah story so first of all I've noticed at the gym I go to a gym that's probably 25 gay people and like 75 straight people and I've noticed that the gay guys and the straight guys look me up and down
43:17 differently in the locker room you're changing your clothes and other people are in there and they do the thing my friend calls elevator eyes where they kind of like their eyes go up and down you and you can kind of tell that they're doing it but I've gotten to the point where I can notice the difference the gay guys do that and they're like do I want to have sex with this person and the straight guys do exactly the same
43:36 thing but they're like can I beat this person up like is this person a threat to me I've noticed these little interactions sometimes with straight people where like they really need to establish dominance first of all like they need to establish they know more about this thing than I do that they earn more money than I do that they're like more confident than me or something and there's like this weird tension in the interaction I've noticed that like
43:58 I'll go to like random I'm like whatever urbanist happy hours or whatever and there is this kind of weird tension in the relationship until they establish the dominance right where I'm like oh I don't know very much about the train systems in Tokyo and they're like well let me tell you and then you can see them kind of relax all of a sudden it's like it's safe for us to be friends always interesting to me like first of
44:19 all how palpable that is and secondly this is how some people go through the world that reminds me of you know we've talked about mansplaining and how it's a Scourge and people don't need to be doing it and that's a conversation that's gotten big in the last five years but I think it's still seen as like this is what men do and it's like hmm are we maybe just using patriarchal masculinity as a Dumping Ground for our most
44:40 competitive and maladaptive behaviors as human beings and actually what we think of as masculinity is just a lot of unnecessary competitiveness and profound discomfort with The Human Condition what if masculinity could actually be a bunch of good stuff and fun stuff and guess our the set of behaviors that we think of as archetypally masculine in America are often responses to insecure attachment and lack of intimacy and security one thing that I think about a lot is I remember reading years ago and
45:10 trying to write an article about but it never went anywhere this study about testosterone levels and bar fights that if you look at different countries have different levels of drinking obviously and some countries have like more binge drinking patterns like the Nordic countries and some have they like drink a couple glasses of wine throughout dinner kind of patterns like the Mediterranean countries and what's really interesting is that the number of bar fights does not track the amount of drinking and binge
45:38 drinking at all that you would think countries with more binge drinking have more bar fights because people are more wasted sure no the bar fights are completely independent of the amount of drinking and the idea is that we tell ourselves that because drinking spikes testosterone when you're drunk as a man your testosterone about doubles and as a woman your testosterone goes up around 400 percent wow so when women are drunk they have as much testosterone in their
46:06 system as men do all the time I mean when I think about how horny I get after three ciders oh yeah that's rough I'm sorry the hypothesis of this article was when women are drunk they are as horny and violent as men are at all times but we are just way better trained in how to deal with it right how to supplement that or take a cold shower or whatever everybody does but women it just like
46:30 bursts through and then the girls gone wild industry benefits from all that yeah but what's interesting is is this double so for men it doubles men testosterone doubles but you would think that would cause like a pretty consistent spike in bar fights and just random drunken violence but no there's certain societies where men getting drunk is seen as like a really nurturing like there's a lot of Polynesian societies that have alcohol and have had alcohol for like hundreds of generations
46:59 but it's seen as like you get drunk and you're in they're like I love you man stage basically that like that's what alcohol is seen as alcohol isn't seen as a driver of violence it's seen as a driver of kind of embarrassing displays of intimacy and so the hypothesis of this article and I haven't been able to follow up on it was that bar fights and violence while drunk is learned that in certain societies we're given the
47:23 message that fighting is what you do when you're drunk and we somehow internalize that like oh I'm drunk I'd better see these threats through my masculinity or it's exaggerating these smaller currents that are already there and that's what gets what becomes these bursts of violence when you're drunk yeah yeah that alcohol functions like Animal Kingdom Behavior we're like well we're drunk so now we have to get violent and aggressive and it's like we want to get
47:52 violent and aggressive and also that behavior is somewhat expected or rewarded right that there are certain cultures that kind of see it as inevitable bar fights when you can imagine a culture you know 200 years ago like duels were a natural thing that happened in the world like oh we're going to take 20 paces and shoot each other that was like oh it happens but then eventually they're like no that's actually socially constructed and we actually can get rid of that if we
48:16 want to yeah we did get rid of duels that's a silver lining we don't have you know designated dueling areas anymore I read an article about that years ago that it was the wives of prominent men got together and organized like a boycott of duels and basically got rid of the prayer the women were like this is this is ridiculous you guys let's not do this I'm sure everyone thought that they were members of The Nanny state or
48:37 whatever they were calling it that totally now how can men be men if they can't shoot or stab each other to to death in an ally right but I guess I mean the argument is that other forms of kind of masculine violence I guess from domestic violence on down are also constructed in the same kind of way that like we have decided that this is a normal output right of drinking levels or of masculinity or whatever but we
49:02 haven't seen them for like how constructive they actually are yeah we can kind of do you know do we want we do not have to continue to behave competitively and individualistically and say we we have to do it we have to do it because the the birds and the bees and the Wolves and the monkeys and Thomas Jefferson did it we can actually make our own choices I just think we all need cuddles from Wolf Mommy we all need cuddles monitor
49:25 Alpha situations yeah one loving alpha wolf mom at a time that's how we heal this great nation [Music] thank you [Music]