Bootcamp for Men: from betas to alphas

In the past few years, videos from a new kind of camp have begun circulating the internet. They feature men participating in a variety of bizarre activities: from aggressively digging holes under floodlights, to collectively wailing in a pool of water. These are man camps, where men can pay up to $18,000 to undergo extreme boot-camp-like conditioning in the name of reclaiming their masculinity. This week on Endless Thread, host Ben Brock Johnson and senior producer Dean Russell, dive into the past, present and future of man camps. Show notes: Learning 'how to be a man' in the Californian desert: Man Camp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaKnfMUkzrI&t=120s (The Guardian)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Into the wild, the Caltier panther encounters a shimmering crocodile, a lonely lovebird, a breathless zebra, and a restless tiger.

• 0:49Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 0:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, y'all. Before the show starts, we just want to remind you that we set up secure lines for you to communicate with us if there's anything you need to share anonymously or very carefully in this time that we are living.

• 1:11Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, we have a Protonmail account that is [email protected]. Or you can text or call us on Signal. That number is 646-456-9095.

• 1:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  We should also mention that WBUR is an NPR member station and that the CEO of NPR, Catherine Marr, chairs the board of the Signal Foundation, the nonprofit that supports the messaging app. Anyway, if there's anything you need to be in touch with us about and you want to be careful with how you share that information and protected, that's how you get in touch, [email protected], or call us or text Signal 646-456-9095.

• 2:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Producer Dean Russell of the podcast Endless Thread from WBUR, Boston's NPR. How comfortable are you with your masculinity?

• 2:15Speaker 04

  I'm fine. I feel fine, I guess. But what about you, co-host Ben Brock Johnson of Endless Thread and all the other things that you said?

• 2:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  I feel fine with it. I think it's about trying to figure out how to not inflict pain and destruction. That's my general operating position.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Apologize often.

• 2:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  And try not to hurt other things. Yeah, I'm down with that.

• 2:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  We are here today to talk about one of the more bizarrely viral genres of videos that have become popular enough to kind of break out of the manosphere and poke themselves into the mainstream.

• 3:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Videos and the idea of man camp.

• 3:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  So some people have referred to this as alpha male boot camp or men's retreats.

• 3:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's of course a spectrum of this kind of thing, but the alpha male version is the more maybe controversial one that has popped up in recent years. For me, this really started to come into my own sort of online browsing awareness about a year ago. But I have definitely found posts and stories about this kind of like alpha male boot camp or retaking masculinity retreats and camp going back as far as 2020.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  I saw a lot of them a year ago, but then they've sort of also popped up in the last month or so. And maybe it's just like, everybody's thinking about camp because it's the summertime.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm going to share with you this video that for reasons that are still mysterious to me, went viral in the last month or so.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  All right.

• 4:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  You ready?

• 4:08Speaker 04

  I gotta see it.

• 4:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm strong.

• 4:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Move forward.

• 4:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Move forward. Move forward. I'm a man. I am.

• 4:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  So this version of this post is from the Sad Cringe subreddit. And it is a video of these two fully adult men. And one is clearly a camper and the other is clearly a counselor or whatever. So the counselor is sort of like telling the camper here to literally run into him and push him backwards and yell, I am a man. I am a man. I am a man.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Thank you, internet, for bringing me that.

• 4:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  You can kind of tell why it's on the Sad Cringe subreddit, right?

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's another video, which is maybe the first one I ever saw. That really looks a lot like a private form of boot camp.

• 5:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's like this muscle bound guy yelling at a bunch of other guys who are holding sledgehammers and lying on their backs and then on their stomachs. And then back on their feet over and over while he yells at them and waves on the beach like break over them.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  You don't deserve to be here. I want to be a better man. I want to be a better husband. I want to be a better father. I want to be a better, you whiny piece of.

• 5:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Any reactions, Dean? What have you got?

• 5:30Speaker 04

  It's something. I'm familiar with this camp. The thing that sticks out to me the most is that I grew up in a military family and we, you know, we lived in West Point. West Point's where the military academy is and my dad taught. He was in the Department of Physical Education, which is like saying he's like the most intense gym teacher that you could imagine. And my dad would take me to see Beast, which is the six week boot camp that every cadet takes before they enter the academy. And.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  It was the craziest spectacle to see as a child. You would just see men and women sweaty, running constantly. They would have to climb this ladder and then slide down on this rope and then drop 20, 30 feet into the lake. And then they would have to do pushups in the lake. Like their face would smack against the lake. And it was so intense. It was so cinematically boot camp. But when I watch these videos, something feels really off about it. And I think it's the difference of goal. Like, what is the goal of this camp?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  The goal of Beast was very specifically to get everyone ready for the academy. And the goal of this-

• 7:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  And men and women were both going through that process.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Both present.

• 7:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  And this is a different thing. And I guess that's my immediate reaction.

• 7:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, all right. I've got another video for you, Dean.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Let's do it.

• 7:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is another one that I saw months and months and months ago that feels kind of a different vibe. But honestly, I also can't really tell if it is. The title of this is "A Group of Men Crying Uncontrollably in a Pool."

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. And yes, it is a pool filled to the brim with men. And they are wailing. It's a much different vibe than the other videos. But it was unusual, for sure.

• 7:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  This, for me, has been my full interaction with this idea. Is just these kinds of videos have popped up in my feed over and over.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  But you went down a quick little rabbit hole to look at Man Camp.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is our shorthand for these various programs, or maybe the very specific one that keeps going viral. I don't know. I'm, I'm ready to learn. I'm your camper. You're my counselor.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Do you want me to shout all of this at you the whole time?

• 8:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, please, please shout it at, at me while I hold a sledgehammer in very shallow waves lapping at my stomach as I lie in the sand.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  I'll make sure to include a lot of degrading comments as well. So don't worry about that.

• 8:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cool.

• 8:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Coming up after the break, Dean takes us to man camp.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI? Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies. A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his past in lonely state. Dry your tears now, there's a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies. A most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  All right, so I did look into the history of man camps and, you know, a couple of specific camps, just to really try to dig down and understand their philosophy and what's behind that philosophy. And, you know, the first thing I'll say is that just the term man camps, it actually comes out of the fossil fuel industry, the American fossil fuel industry, which maybe you know about, but like, basically in the early 20th century, oil and gas companies-

• 11:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's all workers, right?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. Like, oil and gas companies, they used to have these permanent family housing for its workers. And then, you know, there was boom-bust cycles and, uh, basically it became uneconomical to have these permanent facilities. And so, yeah, they built these temporary barracks-like facilities. And the term man camp became popularized in like the 2010s with the, you know, the oil boom in North Dakota. And these were very hard places to live. The influx of men overwhelmed facilities, the camps,

• 12:05Speaker 04

  you know, coincided with spikes in violence and sex trafficking, often against indigenous women, because, you know, many of these trailing sites were, or, you know, are near or overlap with tribal lands. And so that's an interesting background to me, to then morph into something else. Man camps, meaning what we're talking about, which is a lot of-

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Dudes being dudes together. And, you know, as we kind of establish, man camps can mean a lot of things. We are talking about boot camp. And one of the videos, the second video that you showed me, where they're wielding a sledgehammer.

• 12:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  This comes from the Modern Day Knight Project. It came about in 2019 in Southern California.

• 13:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm assuming that Modern Day Knight is K-N-I-G-H-T.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  Modern Day Knight, and that will, that will relate to something in a second that we'll talk about.

• 13:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, I'm nervous now because I love a knight. I love knights of the round table, King Arthur, big fan. So hopefully this doesn't ruin it for me. Please go on.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  This project got a lot of attention over the last few years. USA Today did a profile of the group about a year and a half ago. And it's really because the project itself stands out in the cost and in the way that it's executed. This is billed as a 75-hour crucible. That's what they call it. And it costs $18,000 to attend. So $18,000 for three days. And what you get.

• 13:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Is three days of torturous, physical challenges led by military veterans. So former Marines, former Navy SEALs, you name it. These are the instructors that are yelling, screaming, bullying, all in the name of brotherhood and manhood. And it's pretty intense. You can go for more than 24 hours without sleep. You're doing, you know, all the time. You're like doing pushups, situps, endless runs. You play paintball. You get dragged through the mud. You shiver in the ocean, as we saw. You shiver in an ice bath while holding a cake.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  I guess that's one of the things that they do. Don't understand it, but that's what they do. And, um, and, you know, you'll, you'll carry your buddies. You, you'll carry another dude into Modern Day Knight's vision of manhood.

• 14:53Speaker 04

  And if I were to sum up the philosophy, it would be this.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  You know, your wife did not marry you just to have another son. She wants a man who is competent, who is capable, who is courageous, who knows how to protect, who can provide, and who is always prepared for the worst case scenario.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Did you know that then, when you got married? Did you, were you aware of this?

• 15:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  I mean, look, this is the complexity of these things for me is like, this is touching on something that I see people actively complaining about and asking for guidance on all the time on Reddit.

• 15:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is touching on a real thing, which is that one might make the argument that a large number of adult males have not been culturally trained to be good partners in relationships.

• 15:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  And so I can see that this video is like ostensibly sort of like trying to solve for that, saying like, you have to take responsibility and accountability for your part in this relationship. So I can see that side of it. I'm not sure what digging a hole in the dirt under floodlights has to do with that. It's complicated, right? Because you're, you know, again, to me, this is touching on a real sort of like cultural challenge in the way that we like view ourselves and each other. And also, it also seems ridiculous when you like, look at it objectively. It seems very clownish, so.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  It's one of those things that starts in a philosophy that many of us can, can agree with, which is to say, you have to take responsibility for who you are. But then you dig down into what does that mean? Because that means different things to different people.

• 17:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  And what I'll say about... This project, because I think the way it runs is really interesting. Between 2019 and 2024, they held 20 classes. And each one sold out, according to the project. And not everyone makes it the full 75 hours. So if you reach a breaking point, you ring a bell of shame, essentially, and you're dismissed.

• 17:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  And a lot of the videos are instructors screaming like, "Go ahead, ring the bell. Do it. Do it." And then, obviously, you have to leave. You do not get your money back if you leave early, but...

• 17:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  But you are rewarded if you make it the full 75 hours. You get sort of inducted into this kind of brotherhood with coaching from folks like Bedros Koulian. He is the co-founder of the Modern Day Nights Project.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  There's something inside of a man that we will run towards enemy gunfire for the cry of a woman, let alone our woman or our daughter.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  He kind of looks like a hybrid of Jimmy Kimmel and Joe Rogan.

• 18:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  If that's helpful to you, just smoosh them together.

• 18:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think it is. Yeah. Yep, yep.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  He's a fitness entrepreneur, author of the book Man Up. He's got a podcast like everyone else in the world. And I have some good news and some bad news about Bedros and his projects. What I really wished for this episode was for us to attend the project together. You know, I felt like that would have been really special. I don't know where we would have come up with $36,000, but... It would have been great.

• 19:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't know which one of us would have rung the bell of shame first, but we could ring it for each other.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  I think I would have just collapsed. I wouldn't have the ability to ring the bell, I feel like, but you know, you never know until you're there. The bad news is that we will never know, actually, because the project closed in 2024 for reasons I do not know. The very good news, though, is that Bedros Koulian started a very similar man camp for fathers and sons.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  It is called The Squire Program.

• 19:36Speaker 05

  Every man knows instinctively, my son, to survive, his life's journey needs to be harder than my daughter. And I know the feminists are losing their [BLEEP] right about now. Exactly. What do you mean? That's just how it is, you know, like it or not.

• 19:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my God. I can't. I can't with this one. I can't. I cannot, Dean.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  The point of The Squire Program, which he's kind of underlying there, is that it's designed as a, quote, "rite of passage for boys" because, quote, "Men are literally the only ones who will stand up and defend our society from the tyranny seeping into our nation."

• 20:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  This guy.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  And because the tyranny seeping into our nation can be seen in many different ways, he clarifies to say that is also known as the mission to turn, quote, "masculine societies into soft, confused, unsure, passive-aggressive feminized betas."

• 20:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Can this guy just take five minutes and read the Wikipedia for Harriet Tubman? I don't know, man. I don't know what to do. It's very upsetting.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  So I sent you a link to what The Squire Program looks like.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  It's time to start passing the torch on to your sons. Stop doing everything for them. Let them [BLEEP] start taking the lead. Start demanding that they take the lead.

• 20:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  And they stop letting yourselves be baby. You're young men. If you're here, you're old enough that we could talk to you like this. Oh, God.

• 21:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  I feel sorry for these kids. Um, all right. This guy is, he's basically, it's sort of another version of this boot camp where he's like yelling at the children and the, he's yelling at the dads and the sons.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  This seems like the essence of toxic masculinity here. Like, you're basically like poisoning these people with ideas. That's my perspective.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Again, acknowledging that men are in need of direction in our modern society and support of each other. This is going to result in the opposite of that, I feel. Or just like, it's going to result in ideas that, again, like, are actually fake. Like, ideas that are not real about how you're different from women and girls and, and what that means and why it matters and whether it matters. It just all seems very stupid.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, I don't know.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean.

• 22:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't know what to say about it.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  It is this kind of, of training camp to be the traditional breadwinning, strong man idea. And it's, it's not unique either. Like, for instance, Andrew Tate, this sort of celebrity, former kickboxer charged of many things, including rape and sex trafficking, has set up several expensive online boys-to-men training grounds. There are plenty of ways of going about this. And when I say about this, I mean about the sort of...

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Adrift feeling that seems to be out there.

• 23:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  There are many man camps with different vibes. I mean, The Guardian did a profile of Sacred Sons, which is dedicated to quote unquote, healthy masculinity. And these are like retreats that involve a lot of crying and emotions and staring into each other's eyes. And there is something there. There is something that some men appear to be searching for.

• 23:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  I mean, a lot of experts have pointed to loneliness. And there's something to that. I mean, like several surveys suggest that men have a harder time connecting emotionally with their friends.

• 23:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  And each other specifically.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. The recent Pew survey found that 16% of men say they are lonely. All or most of the time. That same survey found that 15% of women said the exact same thing.

• 24:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think loneliness seems to be a larger epidemic. It's not gender based. And I think that the gender piece of it, or at least I'll say this anecdotally, the gender piece of it to me is maybe connected to how men are culturally trained to not allow themselves to be honest about their emotions, perhaps, or reach out for help, or say how they feel. And so men are, you know, once they reach a certain age, they're actually very bad at supporting each other again and like reaching out to each other and connecting with one another.

• 24:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Men are also often, I think, trained to not know how to be friends with women culturally. And I think that's like another aspect of this that is like really unfortunate and feels real. I'm not sure how we, as men, sort of like figure it out, but it definitely needs work. And $18,000 in three days ain't gonna do it. I will say that.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  I haven't been through this camp, but bootcamps can be effective at a lot of things. Like, they can be effective at friendship and bonding. They can be effective at physical fitness.

• 25:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, building confidence.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Exactly. And, and there are brutal bootcamps, too, that, you know, maybe you could condemn them. But I think of BEAST in the US Military Academy. Like, my, my dad went to BEAST. My dad was an instructor at BEAST. But my sister also went to BEAST. To me, that's like the difference. It is this banner philosophy of should. Like, men should be a certain way. Society should run on certain principles, principles that flow from a culture of the past.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  And there are reasons that philosophy is appealing to certain people. There are real issues, issues that we're talking about, right? Like loneliness, even though it's not maybe gender specific, loneliness and wealth gaps and education gaps. Boys graduate high school and go to college less than women now. The grounds of, of culture are, you know, ever shifting.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  And you throw all that together. To me, it makes sense that some people will hold on to something because it is clearly defined and for that subset of people, it seems like solid ground. A man is X, and X is strictly defined. But it made sense that the universe revolved around the Earth for a long time. And then, you know, turned out that wasn't true.

• 26:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  I also think there's like, uh, identity is important. I want to acknowledge that identity is important to a lot of people. And I don't, and this is not to take away from

• 27:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  male identity and all the different people who wish to have that male identity. And at the same time,

• 27:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think it's interesting to think about a world where we, we just really let these things go. And if you want to be strong and powerful.

• 27:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're just strong and powerful. You just work to be strong and powerful. And no matter who you are, and if you want to be somehow like pugilistic in the way that you think about your positioning towards the world, and you want to be a defender, and you want to be the one who runs towards flying bullets, like, it doesn't actually matter who you are. If that's what you want, then you do that. We live in a world right now where that that stuff can culturally be tied to gender, and I get that. And also, like, it doesn't have to be. And I think the more we think about that and just like allow that to be fluid, I think the better.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, Ben, it's been lovely. Thanks for joining me on our trip to man camp. Always pleasant.

• 28:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Absolutely. I mean, I'll be in the same cabin with you anytime, my friend. Shotgun top bunk, though.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Fair enough. But I think there's no sleeping allowed in man camp, but fair enough. Fair enough.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

• 28:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode was co-hosted by myself, Ben Brock Johnson.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  And me, Dean Russell.

• 28:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  It was produced by Franny Monahan.

• 28:59Speaker 04

  Our editor is Meg Kramer. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

• 29:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rest of our team is Emery Seibertson, Grace Tatter, managing producer Suma Tojoshi, and production manager Paul Vikes.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet or camp that you want us to tell, get in touch at [email protected].

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 30:05Speaker 06

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context. And just to claim why you're excited about it. Oh my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Get this. When you're with Xfinity, you're already a member. No sign up, no cost. Score epic experiences from our family at NBC Universal. Plus movie tickets, discounts on streaming, mobile and more. Check the Xfinity app every Thursday for exclusive perks and experiences only with Xfinity. Now that's the way to start a weekend. Let the magic begin. Restrictions apply. Visit Xfinity.com/membership to learn more.