Charles Bethea

And he needs a word or a term to describe the male chimps that he sees who are not necessarily the largest, but they're especially good at keeping the peace.

at consoling other chimps in need, and he settles on the term alpha male, and that's the term he uses in this book he publishes in 1982 called Chimpanzee Politics.

Newt Gingrich, as the story goes, according to DeWall, this seems to be the sequence of events, Newt Gingrich, then a Republican congressman in Georgia,

gets his hands on the book, seems to like it, passes it around to freshman congressmen in the early 90s.

They don't appear to read it very carefully and alpha male soon comes to mean something much more reductive.

This thing we've been talking about in these camps that I went to as meaning essentially like the best at bullying, a kind of physically dominant male who –

really distrusts and dismisses deep human connection, consolation, vulnerability, anything that can be perceived as weak.

Yeah, so Marino is this guy who around 2008, he's—I think he's unemployed.

He's at a low point in his life.

He's in his 30s, I think, and his wife gives him a camcorder, and he decides to use it to give to other guys or try to give to other guys what he didn't get as a young man, which was—

kind of fatherly guidance, really, just guidance from a mentor, a male mentor in his life.

So he starts filming videos and putting them on YouTube.

This is the early-ish days of YouTube.

And he gets really, really popular.

And his videos, I'd say, I mean, as compared to what we now have with the Andrew Tates, they're almost sweet in their simplicity.

He's talking about, you know, in a more appropriate way, how do you improve your sex life?

How do you do, you know, shaving tips, dressing tips?

Just how do you optimize yourself as a man?

And he describes alpha male for him, I think, pretty generously as just sort of the optimal version of yourself.

But, you know, years pass.