Charles Bethea

And I have to say the whole thing that we just heard, it does really veer into parody at times, but it's just not perceived that way by the audience or most of the audience as far as I could gather from the comments.

I also should say that I feel slightly uncomfortable hearing him talk about cold plunging in that way because I also like to cold plunge.

Yeah.

Anyway, that is how he speaks.

And if it was ever parody or ever put on, that's been forgotten and it's fully embraced and he's just run with the bit.

And lots of people have taken it and run with him.

And we know from Louis Thoreau's recent Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, there are lots of voices adjacent to Nick Adams on the internet.

You know, the Andrew Tates, the Justin.

And I don't want to conflate all these people.

They're different.

Some of them are more toxic and troubling than others.

The Andrew Tates, the Justin Wallers, the Myron Gaineses, Braden Peters.

I wouldn't expect all of these to be household names, but young men especially are probably familiar with them.

Yeah, RISE stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution.

And not to be confused with a separate man camp called Rise Up Kings, which is much more Christianity coded or biblically coded.

And I should say, you know, even it's not just the names that sound similar with some of these programs that often have the word warrior in them.

But in fact, a lot of the people who've worked at these camps have gone from one to another.

And there's a lot of cross-pollination there.

Yeah, so Rise was both predictable to me in some ways and surprising, quite surprising in others.

On the predictable side was a lot of its marketing, which of course I first encountered before the visit.