This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley. For about a decade now, we've been talking about toxic masculinity.

The term gained steam alongside the cultural reckoning of Me Too. And now it has collided with a new and

louder movement, an aspiration to be an alpha male. We see it everywhere. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg,

has reinvented himself as a cage fighter and declared that corporate America doesn't have enough

masculine energy. President Trump's inner circle includes men celebrated for their warrior tattoos,

their MMA records, and their bench press videos. And influencers with millions of

followers are telling men and boys that the problem with society isn't how they treat others,

it's that they've been made to feel ashamed of who they are. My guest today, New Yorker

staff writer Charles Bethay, embedded in the new phenomenon of camps in retreats

where men go to reclaim their masculinity. He's written a new piece called The Camps that

Promise to Turn You or Your Son into an Alpha Male. But they found that across the country,

men are paying big money to crawl through mud, carry logs, and sit in ice baths.

Some programs promise to forge modern-day warriors with special ops training and rites of passage for teenage boys.

But what Bethay found inside these camps is more complicated than the culture war framing suggests.

Underneath the warrior posturing, he writes, is genuine pain, men who are lonely, lost, and desperate.

Charles Bethay, welcome to fresh air.

Thanks, Tanya.

Okay, so before we get into what you found, I actually want to know first, how you even found out about these camps in the first place?

So sometime last year, I was on X, and I stumbled across this guy named Nick Adams, who presented himself as a kind of alpha male guru.

He was telling men to never apologize,

to find a woman who is, and I quote here,

as low maintenance as she is hot.

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