If you spend enough time online, you’ll eventually come across people who proudly call themselves alpha males. These guys are usually just insecure men who feel the need to prop themselves up and separate from everyone else. Aside from often being openly misogynistic, they tend to behave ridiculously, dividing men into “alpha” and “beta,” and even wasting their money on absurdly expensive “alpha male boot camps.” These camps are not new. You can easily find countless examples of them online. Yet they never fail to become a source of humor, as people can’t help but laugh at the idea of grown men paying thousands of dollars to be told how to “be a man.” Recently, one such boot camp went viral after a video from the event began circulating online. It featured a Washington DC influencer, David Cohodes, leading an “Alpha Male Boot Camp,” teaching participants how to become what he called unbreakable men.
Now, you might wonder how exactly someone becomes “unbreakable.” Maybe by learning philosophy to handle life’s crises with a calm mind? Or perhaps through meditation or emotional resilience training? Nope. According to this Washington DC influencer, the secret to becoming unbreakable is yelling at each other.
In the viral clip, the Washington DC influencer can be seen holding onto a participant and shouting, “I’m strong,” while urging the man to push back and repeat, “I’m a man.” The two then proceed to scream their lungs out at each other as they shove back and forth. The influencer never loses his balance, which makes it look rehearsed or carefully staged. When the shouting finally ends, the influencer embraces the participant in silence as if they have just shared some deep emotional breakthrough. What a touching man-to-man interaction. Very alpha male indeed.
Of course, while the boot camp attendees seemed to take the exercise seriously, the internet had a very different reaction. Viewers flooded social media with jokes and disbelief, wondering how anyone could waste so much money on something so absurd.
“Could’ve just joined the military and gotten paid instead,” one user wrote. Another suggested that instead of paying for an alpha male boot camp, these men should invest in therapy and address their internal issues properly instead of hiring a self-styled influencer to yell at them.
“I mean, I’m not one to kink-shame, but I’m kink-curious. Why?” one Reddit user joked. Others pointed out the strange irony of these self-proclaimed alpha males, noting how their activities often come across as oddly homoerotic despite their frequent hostility toward the LGBTQ community. “Ah yes, nothing screams alpha male like receiving a kiss on the forehead after shouting ‘I am a man,’” another commenter said.
