CZM Rewind: The Andrew Tate Story (Part 1 & 2)
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Hey everybody, Robert here. First off, we are doing a rewind week because I've written two new Andrew Tate episodes. But also, my birthday came recently. We took some time off. So we're going to take this week to replay the first four Tate episodes with ad breaks and stuff removed.

I also wanted to tell you Ed Zitron is in the running for a Webby for his show Better Offline, as is Molly Conger for Weird Little Guys. Please go to the Webby's, vote for them. You can find the links in the show notes along with our other links. You can also just Google Ed Zitron Webby's, Molly Conger Webby's, and you will find them. Please do vote for them. We'll be back next week with two brand new episodes on what Tate has been up to over the last couple of years and a bunch of really fucked up information that's come up. So please subscribe.

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and the mythopoetic men's movement that led to his rise to fame and influence among a generation of young men. We started recording this episode just a few hours ago with the wonderful April Clark and Grace Freud of the Girl God podcast. They have... And anyway, we recorded a little bit with them, and then I had a...

minor emergency, which has taken me out of the house for a while. Things are okay. You don't need to flip out on Reddit or whatever, but it was a problem, and we were not able to record with them, to finish recording with them, and because of the holiday, we have no backlog. So in order to get this episode done and ready for our editor ASAP, Sophie is going to be my guest today, along with Ian, our editor, and

And we will get this out as soon as possible because otherwise we will not have a show and we are contractually obligated to provide you with entertainment every single week until the heat death of the universe.

But I do want to shout out April and Grace, who are wonderful, who came on and booked time for us. And I'm sorry that things got messed up. We will have them back on the pod at some point in the near future. And I wanted to let people know that there is they have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February 25th. And people can get tickets for that show at GirlGodShow.com. You can also check out their podcast. Just type in GirlGodShow.

Just type Girl God into any of the things that have podcasts, and you can listen to their awesome show. Thank you so much again, April and Grace. I'm sorry that there was a minor calamity. Now, welcome to the pod, Sophie and Ian. How are y'all doing?

So well, so well. Great night. Ian is Ian Johnson, by the way. He edits a lot of our shows and is also one half of Gladiator with fellow editor DJ Danil. And we do have the full Gladiator on staff, which I like to bring up as much as possible. Thank you, Sophie. I appreciate the love.

Yeah, you know, it's Friday. Ready for the weekend. Let's talk some tape. You know, let's do it. Let's get into it. Friday, but also almost Saturday. And Ian is currently in his closet. Yeah, and we may start drinking in the near future. It might need to happen.

You know? Yeah. Let's do it. All right, Robert. But yeah, Ian, I actually, have you been on just as one of our podcasts before? You have not. No, this is my first time. Well, you know, Ian, people should know about you again. You're one half of Gladiator. You are a longtime friend of our other editor, DJ Danil.

You are a legendary podcast editor, and you had absolutely no involvement in the July 16th plane crash that cost John F. Kennedy Jr. his life off the Massachusetts coast. No involvement at all. I don't know why people, yeah, don't bring it up. That's weird. He had nothing to do with it. Why are you talking about that? Just to let people know, Ian had nothing to do with it. Ian, Sophie, what do y'all know about Andrew Tate?

Um, so my limited knowledge of him is he's a, I believe a former MMA fighter, uh,

I don't know how he made a lot of money, but it seems like he has a lot of money from what I've seen on the internet. We will be talking about how, yeah. And he's into a lot of misogynistic men rights kind of stuff. And he got thoroughly destroyed online by Greta. So I do remember that. And I think he's in jail now. He is in jail now. Unrelated to the Greta stuff, there was a little bit of confusion about that. But yes, he is in jail for sex trafficking in Romania. Yeah.

Sophie, is that more or less your understanding of the guy? Yeah, he fucking sucks. Yeah. That's all that matters. He does indeed...

He does indeed fucking suck. Unfortunately, he's also kind of worth studying in detail because he's managed to do something with social media that I don't think anyone else has ever managed to the same degree of success. He's smart in one very specific way, even though he also did a bunch of dumb things and some really dumb crimes that hopefully have ruined his life.

He was smart in a way that has allowed him to become dangerously influential to an entire generation of teenage boys in a way that no one on earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump is really the only other guy that I might put next to Tate in that kind. And I think Tate has a wider appeal among Gen Z teens and tweens than certainly Trump ever has. Yeah, it's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content shows up. Yeah.

We're going to be talking about all that. I am one of the things when I started looking into this guy, there's a ton of articles about because he blew up kind of mid 2021 up until, you know, the arrest a couple of weeks ago. There's not much.

profile articles on him that like go into detail about his background and his past and his entire rise to power. You'll generally the best articles you'll find in places like Buzzfeed or, or, um, I think we have a couple from like the guardian. They'll like summarize his backstory in two or three paragraphs. I wanted to,

get into who this guy is and where he came from. Cause he, he kind of pops out of nowhere. If you, if you don't follow that, I think this is the first time anyone's really done that. So I think this will be valuable for, for that, but I want to start by laying out why we have to take Tate seriously and kind of explain the scale of, of sort of his influence. Um,

I am not exaggerating when I say that he is maybe the most influential single person on teen and preteen males in the U.S. and the U.K. and some other parts of the West than anyone else on planet Earth. In fall of 2022, financial services company Piper Sandler released a survey of 14,500 U.S. teens taken between August and September of that year. Tate was the number one influencer on the list in terms of popularity. He beat Kanye West. He beat Mr. Beast. He beat Dwayne The Rock Johnson, all of them.

Not Mr. Beast.

I, yeah, I don't know who Mr. Beast is, but he's a YouTuber. Yeah. He's a YouTuber. I know Elon Musk joked about giving him control of Twitter or he asked whatever. I don't know anything about him. I'm sure you're fine, Mr. Beast, or he's horrible. Yeah. I was going to say, uh, anybody who's that famous on YouTube, I'm a little bit like, Hmm. Yeah. No good people get famous on YouTube, which is what I text our friend Cody Johnston every single day when he releases a new YouTube video. Fair. Uh,

Anyway, the Andrew Tate hashtag on TikTok has received more than 10 billion views over the course of 2022 alone, which is fucking nuts. That is insane. That is like incomprehensibly viral.

He was also he will always claim that he's like the most Google person on Earth. I looked into what he actually is. That's not quite it. He is that he is the number one. When you type in who is into Google, who is Andrew Tate is the number one who is question asked of Google in 2022, which is not the same as being the most Google person on Earth. Right.

Although he is one of the most Googled people on earth. I found a couple of lists of that and he's often at like number eight, someplace in the closer to like 10, but like he's incredibly famous. I just tested that and it is in fact true. Yes. Top 10 most Googled person on the planet is that's your, that's, that's a lot of people. That is a fuck load of people. And in, in some counts, he's like beating Donald Trump, which again, Trump was the literal president, uh,

And it's interesting because his career, you can compare him to a guy like Joe Rogan, right? Joe, there's nothing that people wonder why he's popular, but there's no mystery as to how he became popular. He's got a very – he's been consistently – The trajectory is clear. Yeah, very, very consistent guy, constantly in the limelight, constantly doing stuff. Not hard to see where he came from.

Tate is a kickboxer for a while and then kind of drops off, is just sort of a guy on Instagram, and then is suddenly the most famous influencer on the planet, seemingly overnight. And this is not an accident. This isn't also something – he didn't just get surprised because something of his happened to go viral. This was the result of a tactic I haven't seen anyone else use, or certainly not to the degree of success of

And the tactic that he unleashed not only made him this popular, but it made him popular enough that you can find articles about schools in the US and the UK holding seminars for young male students and for teachers to try to talk about de-radicalizing kids who have fallen under Tate's spell.

Um, when I posted a comment about him during his spat with Tunberg, just because I, I was frustrated at the degree I had not with Greta's response to him, which I thought was totally fair, but with like people kind of cheering it on as if he'd been beaten by it, where my concern was like, well, the attention historically has just kind of made him more popular. And there were a bunch of comments in that.

Post I made by teachers who were like, I don't think people understand how popular he is with like 13, 14, 15 year old boys. I talk to kids every day who worship the guy and I've never seen anything like it.

one of my um really good friends jack this was actually a few weeks ago we were hanging out and he was like kind of joking but also serious he was like yo i'm like it would be scary to be a 13 year old boy right now because of the inundation of this kind of stuff that you're seeing all day every day and he was like i'm not gonna lie if i was 13 or 14 and didn't know better i could probably fall for a lot of this stuff it's like i couldn't imagine being that age right now and just being flooded with that yeah i think

about that sort of thing in a lot of I'll talk about kind of there's elements of Tate's pitch that I think might have worked on me when I was 17, 18 years old. Particularly a big part of it is like working a shit job that you hate for the entirety of your youth is bullshit, which it is like it's a terrible way to spend a life doing the thing you hate forever.

and if you kind of, if that's the hook you're leading with rather than what a lot of male influencers lead in with, which is like, here's how to pick up chicks, um,

you know, that's an interesting spin that he's put up, but we'll get it. We'll get more into his pitch and like, what about it is not new. And what about it is new. But I wanted to, I want to start by kind of explaining who tilled the soil that Tate grew up in. And to do that, we have to travel back in time, uh, to the 1990s and the work of the, the first real modernist,

modern masculinity guru in U.S. history. Now, we've talked about guys like Bernard McFadden in the past who had elements of that where he's big into physical culture and getting buff and he talks about how modernity is making men weak. But the

Robert Bly is the guy who Jordan Peterson is cut in his image. And so to a degree is a guy like Andrew Tate. He is the first guy to kind of bring both academic rigor and also this kind of focus on, uh,

the damage capitalism has done to masculinity into this kind of, it's become the men's rights movements. It's become the pickup artist community. That's not what it was called at the time. But yeah, Robert Elwood Bly is the name of the guy who kind of kicked all of this off. And he's not the dude you'd think he was. He's an American poet. By some accounts, he's one of the most influential poets in American history. And he was born on December 23rd, 1926 in Minnesota.

Initially, Bly seemed to be on certainly not the path that he wound up on. He goes to Harvard University. He studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He receives a Fulbright scholarship to go to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English.

And during this time, he also gets connected to these great poets who are not Westerners, like Pablo Neruda and Rumi, and they influence his understanding of art and the myths that underlie it. And it also leads him to feel that modern contemporary American poetry is kind of hollow and lacks a connection to this kind of deeper mythology that he sees in some of these Eastern poets and some of these poets from other parts of the world that aren't the United States that he feels are making a deeper connection to things.

This might be just a personal preference, but I find the Iowa's Writers Workshop to be a red flag. Oh, yeah? Wait, wait, wait. I don't know much about it. Tell me. Tell me. Why is this? No, it's just one of those things that gets overused in TV as like, oh, I need to go to this thing. It has like a weird elitism to it that...

Yeah. I mean, I feel that way about Harvard, too. Yeah. There's a lot of weird elitism red flags where I'm like, uh, but yeah, hearing Harvard University followed by Iowa Writers Workshop is usually

Oh, and then there's the Fulbright Grant. So it's, you know. Yeah, yeah. So Iowa Writers Workshop, Sophie says, go to hell. Fuck off. Apparently. That's right. Motherfuckers. I don't know much about the Iowa Writers Workshop. But that's his background. And again, this is also he's coming. He's doing this at an earlier time. I mean, Harvard was...

Very, very much that kind of thing. But I don't know, maybe the Iowa Writers Workshop was not. I don't know. His first collection of poems, which was called Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962. And it focused on moments of solitude and beauty, as we see in this piece, Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter.

Which is just like this nice, quiet little... Certainly you don't see any red flags there. It's just kind of a poem about one of those quiet moments that you have in your life, you know? It's... I don't know. I don't find it deeply affecting, but there's certainly like...

It's not like he's writing anything you would see a problem with. It's not offensive. Yeah, for sure. The next year, he published an influential essay in which he attacked mainstream American poetry as impersonal, lacking in soul and a willingness to look inward. His criticism of American society expanded after that. And in 1966, he co-founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War.

He is one of the very first prominent American artists to like try and organize artists against the war, which is, I mean, good because it was a bad war.

In 1968, he made a public promise to refuse to pay taxes until the end of the war. And he also made some very trenchant critiques of U.S. imperialism. In 1967, he wrote an article for the New York Review of Books in which he noted, "...the fact that so few Americans have resigned from the government or from responsible posts to protest the Vietnam War is remarkable to me."

And he's bringing up also cases of like the Russian Revolution and stuff where you would have these horrible wars being prosecuted by regimes that are on paper a lot less free than the United States, but also would have a lot more defections or people just like refusing to do their jobs because they believed that a course that the sovereign had set was unethical. And he's like, why isn't this happening in American government? Why is no one refusing to be a part of the Vietnam War? And he went on to ask –

Can we imagine General Westmoreland resigning and refusing to prosecute a brutal war? Never. Pilots drop anti-personnel bombs on small North Vietnamese villages, and many of them hate it, but they don't resign with a public statement of protest. They quietly retire when their tour is over. Bly wondered what this showed about Americans. Are we timid? Are we greedy? He thought not, and this is what he wrote.

what it shows is a disastrous split between the american's inner and outer worlds he does not aim to use his life to make himself whole to join the two worlds in himself on the contrary he is prepared to give up one of the two worlds the business man gives up the inner world and clings to the outer as his way

A large body of literature denounces the businessman for taking the one world without the other. But when a writer is opposed to the Vietnam War and still accepts a grant from the government prosecuting the war, he is doing something similar. He is letting the world split. He lets the outer world go by him with just a wave of his hand, and then he reaches out and pulls the inner world to him. He accepts the money for the sake of my work. It will enable him to live in his inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken place before he begins to use the money for his work.

Instead of trying to apply what he has learned in the actions of his inner life to the actions of the world, he pulls back inside the house, closes the door, and declares he doesn't know what is going on out there, or knows but has rejected it all as outside his sphere of influence or his interest. He is not political, but what could be more within the sphere of interest of a writer than the world? And I actually find that a really affecting critique. I think about that a lot just in terms of like,

Number one, this desire I have a lot where I'll just be kind of like churning through the muck of a bunch of horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress or like see some horrible Twitter thing, culture war shit roll up. And one of them...

Feel this urge to like, well, fuck this. I don't want to pay attention to this anymore. I just want to discard this from my life and focus on this like piece of art or creativity that I think most people feel that most reasonable people feel that way a lot. And what he's saying is like,

how can you call yourself a writer? How can you call yourself an artist and attempt to discard the outer world in favor of the one that you focus on for your creativity? Like, how can you actually be connected to your inner world in any way and feel as if you can pretend the outer world does not exist? You're doing the same thing as a businessman who

who focuses entirely on his desire to make money and ignores his spiritual development. Like there's not a fundamental moral difference between what the two of you are doing because you're both rejecting half of your being in order to stick with the one that's more comfortable because of whatever you've chosen as your profession. And in the case of, yeah, I don't know. I found an attrinship critique that makes me think a lot about myself.

Maybe maybe check out what Bly has to say about the Vietnam War. And he put his money where his mouth was. He used that article to republish a letter he'd sent to the chairman of the National Foundation of the on the arts and humanities because they had offered him a five thousand dollar grant. And he turns it down because he's like, look, this is a this is an instrument of the United States government.

And I am opposed to a war they are waging. And even though I could argue that like, well, if I take this money, it won't get spent on bombs. What I'm really doing is providing legitimacy to the state that is carrying out this terrible war. And I'm simply not going to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to support it in any way, even by letting it support me, which whether or not you agree with it is a deeply principled stance that requires sacrificing something.

Yeah. So when, when does he, uh, when does he, right. He's not a bad guy so far. Yeah. I'm waiting. Yeah. This is not, this is not cool people who did cool stuff. No, no, no. So spoiler alert, the Vietnam war ends. Um, we don't do great. Um, goes, goes okay for Vietnam though. Well, I mean, millions of people die, but they do win. Um,

Bly remains an influential poet and thinker. In the 1970s, he organizes the first Great Mother Conference, which is still going on today. It's a nine-day festival that explores human consciousness, and it celebrates this kind of archetypal idea of the Great Mother as this kind of feminine creative force that underlies humanity.

in society. And Bly, the reason why he felt it was important to kind of bring consciousness and get people focused on this idea and on this celebration of femininity is that he saw the Vietnam War as kind of the expression of masculinity, like running wild and leading to terrible death. And he believed that Americans needed to reconnect with femininity in the wake of the Vietnam War, which is, again, not an unreasonable stance.

You know, you can argue with it, but you can see where he's coming from. Ian and I are like both waiting for it. I'm just waiting for the shooter drop. You're waiting for the shooter drop. Motherfucker's coming. Motherfucker is coming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So as the aftershocks of Vietnam faded, America enters the swinging 80s.

Bly becomes concerned with something else entirely. He sees in the Reagan years, this vapid consumer culture, you know, malls and shit. The, the, the increasing spread of popular music is like a concept in a way that it really hadn't been. I mean, look again, TV, there's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today. TV in the 1980s was not what it is now. Um,

So he sees all this happening and he also just sees like, again, what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained capitalism is doing to people. And he begins to believe that the kind of soullessness and brokenness at the core of the American society

experiment is the result now of a crisis in masculinity. Right. So previously he had it. Yeah. He, he, there's an extent to which he thinks like, I don't know, we'll, we'll get into what he thinks. So in 1990, he writes a book that is kind of illustrating the things that he's, he started to feel here and he calls it iron John, a book about men. Now, do you, have you heard of the fairy tale of iron John in? No. So they're familiar.

No. No? You're not big Grimm's fairy tales people? That's fine. Neither am I. I had not heard about this either. I think maybe it's bigger in Germany. Grimm's fairy tales? Red flag. Continue. Yeah. Oh, wow. Wow. That's a red flag. One of the greatest works of art in, I'm going to guess, German history? Sophie? Robert. Wow.

I feel like you just hate German history reflexively for reasons that have nothing to do with anything that has ever happened in history. I have no comment on that. Wow. Wow. Well, red flag. Sorry. I'm turning right back around on you. That's what he does. I think...

Iron John, again, it's a fairy tale. And I think I'll give a brief summary of how that fairy tale goes. It's because it's again, none of us. I mean, you brought it up. You should tell us what the fuck. I'll tell you. I'm going to do it. So God damn. So I'm going to quote from a write up in the New York magazine here. That story goes like this. Something in the forest is killing a kingdom's hunters. A stranger arrives, goes into the forest with his dog and returns with a large hairy man he's extracted from a pond.

This is the wild man, whom the king locks in a cage. The king's son, playing with his ball, lets it slip into the cage, and the wild man tells him he'll give it back if the boy steals the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow and sets him free. The boy unlocks the cage, but fearful that he'll be in trouble with his parents, flees on the wild man's back to the forest.

After the boy fails a series of trials and acquires a head of golden hair, the wild man kicks him out of the forest. But after he sinks to the low status of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom, the wild man helps him become a mighty warrior, and he wins the hand of the princess, is reunited with his parents, and becomes the rich, heroic king in his own right. So, you know, I think we're probably missing some context there just from culture, but it's like...

I get why that's not in like the, the tight five of Grimm's fairy tales. Like that's, that's maybe the one you leave on the cutting room floor. That's like the B side. Yeah. That's like a B side. Yeah. That's like, that's like, I don't know the, one of the, one of the Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore. Well, to be, to be fair, like,

It's up against like Snow White, Cinderella. Exactly. Rapunzel. It's not a Snow White grade. Little Red Riding Hood. Not a Snow White grade fairy tale. It would be funny to see like modern Disney try to do this. Yeah. I mean, the actual Grimm's fairy tales are pretty horrific, to be honest. Yeah. This one also might be one of the tamer ones. I don't know. I'm not an expert on fairy tales. Well, that's why Disney was like, mm, too tame, not into it. And again, I feel like

I feel like this is an example. I think sometimes we look at these stories that have been around a long time and are like, wow, you know, there's some deep wisdom in there, which is why we should keep telling them. But I'm looking at this, which is it's it's a parable about manhood. Right. And about becoming an adult. And I'm like, you know, it's a better parable about manhood and becoming an adult.

for a Star Wars movie. That's a good point. Much better one. Much better one. That's true. Look, George Lucas knocked it out of the park. Fuck you, Grimm. You know who else is George Lucas? No, Robert. Who else is George Lucas? The sponsor of this podcast. I mean, that would be so incredibly based. That would be pretty based. It would be. Actually, George, you have the cash. Sponsor this podcast and we'll make it work, buddy.

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Here we are. We're talking. We're having a good time. Are we? So Bly's book looks at this myth of Iron John, and he reexamines the myth using Jungian psychology, which is, again, another red flag. There's perfectly valid reasons to study Jung, but whenever you have somebody who is reevaluating myths using Jungian psychology, they always turn into Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry. That's just the way that it works.

Um, so he's trying to find lessons that are going to be meaningful for men struggling with modernity. And his basic conclusion, as far as I can tell, is that men need rewilding in order to fix the things that are driving them crazy, right? They need to reconnect with the wild man inside them. Now,

This is going to be this is the root of a million kinds of man fluencer garbage, right? Everything in that like you guys know the liver king, that guy who was telling people that he got super jacked by eating nothing but raw animal livers that he hunted. He was spending so much. Twelve thousand dollars a month on steroids, which he lied about. Now he's getting sued for one hundred million dollars because he defrauded people by convincing them to take his liver enzyme pills.

So funny. But what the livered king is doing is this is he's basically setting it, pretending to be the wild man that Bly talks about and being like, this is what you have to do in order to be healthy and deal with all of these toxic things about our modern lives is go out and throw spears at boars and then eat their raw uncooked organs, which I would actually say is a lot less masculine than doing the thing that our actual caveman ancestors did, which was learn how to cook meat.

You make a really good point. It's also the root of, you know, we had, we just started this year with a couple of more episodes of Jordan B. Peterson's show. He talks a lot about the need for men to be controllable beasts and also references another Grimm's fairy tale. The one that he chooses is, well, I think it's a Grimm's fairy tale. Fucking Beauty and the Beast. I don't know.

I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe that started as a Disney thing. I don't know where it started. But he talks a lot about like this. Again, all of these guys today who are talking about you have to be primal. You have to reconnect with your caveman roots. You have to – OK. I think I saw Jordan B. Peterson like video on Instagram the other day and I didn't know it was him. I was just scrolling and he was – but now that you say that, I'm pretty sure it was him because he was talking about how –

Men should be dangerous. Like you should be dangerous, but it's like knowing when to use the threat of violence or not. It's like, just because you're dangerous doesn't mean you're like a violent person, but you should have that capacity or some shit. That's what makes you a true man. It's like, what?

Yeah. Crazy. It's, I mean, and that's, you can see like Peterson is not an, and he never has been an original thinker. He's cribbing from Bly, right? They all are. Bly is the origin of this. And it's also worth noting that while Bly's book has been, the descendants of Bly's book are pure reactionary gibberish, Bly himself was not. Again, we went through this guy's background. He's a deeper thinker than that. And there's passages in his book that are kind of worth connecting with.

So I'm going to read a quote from that now.

After work, what do men do? Collect in a bar to hold light conversations over light beer? Unities that are broken off whenever a young woman comes by or touches the brim of someone's cowboy hat? Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all. And the cowboy hat thing is kind of weird, but that's a totally valid point. The lack of intimate male-to-male friendship is a deep problem in our society. What does he have against light beer?

I mean, because I think he's just sort of I mean, OK, whatever. He's getting into a little bit of masculinity there. But I think the point he's making is like fucker. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Sophie. Famous lover of light beer. It's OK. I love I love my champagne beer, too. Yeah.

I just, I had some lovely, I actually wish I had some Peroni right now. Peroni's delightful. Peroni's a lovely, nice, wonderful, especially on a hot day. Yeah. I've gone on long runs with nothing but a backpack full of Peroni to keep me going. That sounds very believable, actually. Peroni, it is essentially water. Yeah.

I can smell the ad dollars coming in. Yeah. Sponsor us. But you see like what he's making there. And this is not a point that like, this is not a point Andrew Tate would make. Right. Because these guys are all hyper competitive. Right. And that's a huge part of like what they're talking about. Whereas one of the like Bly is at his core, a large part of what he's complaining about is totally rational, which is like, again,

men aren't allowed to love each other where is it where is the thing well that's not the only thing in the book he's also talking a lot of yeah I'm waiting for it yeah we're getting to it okay

Iron John spends 62 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Yeah. I don't think anything gets, spends that long in the bestseller list. That's a long ass time. Yeah. Yes. That is, um, that is in the nineties. So yeah, this is 1990, um, 1990 to 91. Cause it's on there for more than a year. Um,

And it turned Bly from a respected poet and activist into the first masculinity guru in modern U.S. history. Now, again, we had guys like Bernard McFadden before who had talked about aspects of this, but Bly is wrapping his arguments in respected academia. And the way he's connecting with his people is exactly the same as the kind of shit that Jordan Peterson and other folks do today, guys like Ivan Throne and whatnot, who were in the masculinity influencer thing. He's doing...

He's having rooms full of people, men gather, and he's speaking to them and he's like running them through. He's basically bringing them to these moments of emotional height. And you can see some there's a little bit of Werner Erhard in this. You know, there's a reason this is all coming out at the same time as we start to get the self-help craze hit. Right.

But he's basically holding these big pep rallies for adult men. In 1991, more than a thousand men went to see him at the Eastfold Auditorium in Parkland, Washington, paying $75, 1991 dollars a piece for the privilege. Yeah. A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes the scene thusly.

As the customers file in, a dozen white guys flail away incompetently on African drums. When the crowd is seated, the drummers quit the stage and Bly and Michael Mead, a storyteller who helps run the workshops, begin to recite rambling myths and bits of verse. Mead occasionally bangs a bongo. Bly plinks a bouzouki, the Greek version of the mandolin, sending mournful notes wafting out over the audience.

So that sounds good, right? Sounds like a fun time. Yeah, it sounds like a great way to spend $75. I always love white guys playing African drums in my gigantic stadium speech series by a fucking poet.

Anyway, Bly, who in 1984 had been called the most influential living American poet by current biography, became a kind of celebrity that hadn't previously existed. So he's filling stadiums with people who want to hear him talk, but he's also he's engaging them in a way that's going to spawn the modern men's self-help industry. Quote,

What?

Bligh insists he doesn't blame women for men's sorry state. He blames older men who have failed to provide young ones with the role models they crave. In traditional societies, boys worked alongside men, plowing fields and fashioning arrowheads. But the Industrial Revolution severed that connection. The title character in his bestseller is a wild, hairy fellow who, in a grim fairy tale, is fished up from a pond and becomes a boy's mentor.

I mean, honey, just say you have daddy issues and move the fuck on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, there's this element where he's like...

Society is fucked because feminists have tried to breed the violence out of me, which is not the case. Robert, what year is this? 91. Yeah, okay. So, you know, you have... It's like astonishing to me that people are paying $75 and like selling out. I mean, that's more than people were paying for Coachella in the early 2000s. The crazy thing is like...

At the core of what he's saying, it's like most of that sounds like he's making some good points, valid points about, you know, how men have evolved in our society. So I'm just like, where's the twist? Because like... Yeah, there's the... Where is it? You've seen it start to happen here. Right. Because like the valid thing in that passage is he's like, hey, look...

young boys used to grow up learning alongside both their father and the other men, you know, in whatever community they were in. And that taught them what it meant to be a man. And now because capitalism has kind of taken the man out of the house, you're supposed to be working 40, 60, 80 hours a week, right? They're not there to rate. It's just the, usually in like the way our, our society works, just the woman who's raising the kid. That's what he's saying. Then the,

we've cut men off from this process of learning how to be adult men. And like, that is actually a pretty valid critique. And the, the problem is that now he's saying the problem is that feminists have bred fierceness out of men instead of being like capitalism separates parents from children for huge amounts of time. And that's bad for kids. And,

And actually, if you look at it, like you could see in the, in that very scenario of like men are out of the house working. So they're raised, kids are raised largely by their mothers. Well, that also means an unfair burdens being placed on the mother. You could see this. There's a way to have solidarity between the genders here and be like, oh yeah, this is all of a problem of this system we've built that like separates families in ways that are really fucked up. Like I identify with that when I was a kid, um,

Because we didn't have much money at all, the only job my dad could get was in New York City. And there was a period of more than a year where he was gone. He was living on a friend's couch, working there, sending money back to us. And it was – it's not just him that made a sacrifice. I made a sacrifice as his son, and my mom made a sacrifice dealing with the entire job of, like, raising me. Like, I –

There's a thing to identify with there, but you can see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well, what's the problem is that feminists have tried to make men less fierce. That's not really the problem. Robert Bly. One interesting thing just before you keep going is I think in that quote, did he say that justifiably they tried to breathe the brutality out of men or whatever? Yeah. Even there, like on some level.

you know, you can kind of like, okay, like I kind of see what the point he's making, you know, men do perpetuate a lot of the bullshit that happens to women in our society. So like, he's not nearly, he's not anywhere. He's not on the same planet.

planet of toxicity as a lot of like, as, as guys like, you know, Andrew Tate, who we're about to talk about, or even like Jordan Peterson, but you can see the root of it, right? Where he is. Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's still saying fundamentally part of the problem is feminists want men to be less aggressive and like, no, that's not really part of the problem that you have adequately identified.

Yeah, he warns his listeners, And again, you see kind of this like, well, why is the problem isn't female energy? Like, it's not that like, it's that young people are not allowed to be in the school.

Young men, it's that families are being split up by this like need to compete and work in ways that are really unhealthy for kids. But anyway, you can look at the sea of other self-help grifters at the time, Werner Erhard, L. Ron Hubbard, who had come around at this point. And you could say that Bly is just kind of another dude in that he's doing a lot of the same things a lot of these other self-help grifters are doing.

But one of the things that differs him is those guys are mostly plying nonsense based on bad interpretations of Eastern religion and psychological abuse.

And Bly is kind of, he's not insulting or attacking people. He's not calling them, them weak. Um, he's, he's making some reasonable points about stuff that's toxic about our society. And then he's trying to create like mutual cathartic experiences with the men in his audience who are being invited to kind of see the men around them as brothers in a way that's more intimate than maybe they had been trained to do previously. Um,

So again, there's something interesting going on here that isn't even wholly toxic that I think is kind of worth acknowledging as we lead to the parts of it that are a lot more toxic. And it's one of those things where like I've spent a lot of time on incel message boards and they do talk a lot about this feeling of disconnection with society. So when he says that like young men are not connected to their communities, he's making a decent point.

Um, he also, one of the points he makes that I thought was interesting is he talks about the differences between female sex ed and male sex ed. And he points out that because of like just basic biological realities of how periods happen, young girls are instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys are not. And it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about their bodies, talking about health problems. Um, and that's probably a valid thing to point out. Um,

Sure, but definitely goes both ways. Sure. And again, he's very he's completely ignorant to. Well, I'm sure there's a lot of things actually, especially today that women are not taught about their bodies because of anyway. Again, these are a lot of two way problems and he's focusing just on the male aspect of them. But he's not inherently wrong about the male aspect of them. He's just leaving a large part of the equation out. And that's where the toxicity comes in here. Right.

Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready. Bly has reached his fundamental message. Men and women are essentially alien and neither should apologize. They're different tribes, he is saying. My father was an alcoholic. And yet if you look underneath his weakness, there was something there that my mother didn't have. She was fine, but she didn't have it. Three million sperms start out and they find themselves immediately in a hostile environment facing an egg approximately 40,000 times bigger. We're the product of the one survivor that didn't give up.

Which is, it's really weird to be like setting up the gender struggle as like sperm versus egg, where it's like, well, actually all of us are the product of sperm and eggs. It's the only way people happen. I just want to emphasize on the last part of that quote there. You said, we are the product of the one survivor that didn't give up. Yeah. What's the other half of that equation? Is it just, is it just one little bit of, bit of cum that makes a baby? Robert, why? Like,

Is there another part to the baby equation? Yeah. I just want to be like, honey, did you not show up for sex ed class that day? Did you miss that lesson? He's framing it as like the sperm have to murder the eggs so that one can survive. That is not the way it works.

He says softly but firmly.

And you can see there, too, the seeds of a lot that's going on right now, right? Yeah. Where, yeah, he's like, we're not talking about men need to be more aggressive. And then a guy's like, I have dropped out of society and started buying guns. And everyone's like, that's great. Yeah.

Cool. Look, we're not... Anyway, whatever. Bly died last year. He lived a long time. Yeah, I would say. And...

You can find people, you know, reappraising his work and stuff. There's some folks who will say that like his greater talent was for self-promotion rather than poetry. And he wasn't as good a poet as people had said. I don't know. I'm not a, not a poetry guy. I'm not going to analyze his poetry in, in that way. I do think sometimes because somebody turns out to age into a problematic person, people are like, well, I guess their work that everybody loved in the past sucked. And I think that's kind of cowardly. Like,

Nah, people liked his poems. They were influential. And then he turned into a crank. That's fine. That happens. Like, yeah. Anyway...

You know who isn't a crank and who will never do anything problematic? My favorite filmmaker, Roman. Oh, oh, you know what? I Googled his name. Oh, boy. Oh, dear. Well, I'm going to go burn all my DVDs of Rosemary's Baby and y'all check out these ads.

Ah, we're back. Really glad I caught myself with the Google there. How long have you been saving that bit, Robert? A little while. I thought it was good with like the talk about reappraising artist works. Thank you. Thank you. I thrive on praise. Yeah, that was something different. Good for you.

So Bly died, but his work launched what scholars have called the mythopoetic men's movement. Oh my God. That's what they call it? Yeah. That's amazing. It is a somewhat fucking prickish name to call it, I guess. I don't enjoy. What they mean by mythopoetic, I should explain like what they're saying, is like the argument Bly and the other, because there's a bunch of other authors in this. The argument they're making is that

Our society has stripped mythology out and has become this like kind of coldly competitive engine for creating cash value. And that we need in order to make men healthier, we need to reintroduce like this kind of mythic understanding of masculinity and of the world that like that's kind. And a lot of it is they're like looking at like Native American cultures and some of the different rituals around masculinity they had and being like, well, maybe I'm

Well, and there's actually, again, there's a scientific basis to a lot of this is cultural appropriation. But like one of the things that's happening in this period is you've got a lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD in an era before they understand it. And a thing that occurs during this period is that some of them have buddies who are also struggling with PTSD and are indigenous Americans and who invite their their white and black and Hispanic battle buddies to.

to do stuff like sweat lodges in order to cope and other kind of different rituals that have existed in some of these indigenous societies to deal with what happens to men when they go to war. And they invite their friends back. And that stuff works better than just getting a job working for an accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam.

and so people are starting to study this and write about it. And one of the things that the myth of poetic guys take is this belief that you should basically just kind of like steal wholesale from these cultures and, and dress white people up in headdresses and give them drums and stuff as opposed to being like, Oh, well maybe, you

you know, there's a way that isn't that to look at the value that some of these rituals have in healing people. You know, I'm not the person to analyze that completely, but that's part of what they're saying here is that like, they're kind of recognizing there's something hollow at the center of American culture that is not hollow in some of these other cultures. And instead of being like,

Maybe there's things that we should fundamentally change about American culture. They're saying, what if we dress up like these other people? Right. That's essentially what's going on with a lot of the mythopoetic movement.

So a big chunk of this, and these are, some of this is Bly. Some of this is guys outside of Bly is they're, they're making, they're like putting a bunch of like white accountants in sweat lodges that they make the wrong way and lecturing them about, you know, young and Joseph Campbell, or they're like making them dress like cavemen while playing, you know, African drums. There's a lot of like weird, uncomfortable racism in the myth of poetic men's movement. Um,

That said, it is less toxic than the men's rights movement that would follow it. Things kind of get increasingly aggressive and toxic from this point out. But

But Bly and the initial mythopoetic influencers were not, they saw themselves as therapists. And again, I don't think they were good at this, but they were not political. So they were not, this was not a conservative movement. They were not billing themselves as right wing. They were not really like weighing in on culture war issues, in part because the culture war didn't exist in the same way then that it does now. And it's interesting because Bly expressly says this is an apolitical movement.

You might criticize him because he had just written a really kind of beautiful essay during the Vietnam War about the cowardness of being apolitical, but whatever. I found an article from the Washington Post in 1991 that talked to a number of men who had been most active in the movement. And there's some interesting pieces in there. Quote,

An affirmation in strength comes from a bonding between men that's impossible to put into words, says Ed Honnold, the mild-mannered federal lawyer and founder of the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals of dancing, roaring, hugging, and weeping.

He pauses thoughtfully and adds, Now, the

These guys are not cowboys. These guys were like middle managers at auto parts stores and shit like they are absolutely not hurting cowboys. And also actual cowboys aren't what this guy thought they were. But he's not wrong again in saying that, like the the situation of American men was pretty unpleasant in the early 1990s.

They were struggling against a capitalist culture that thrived on the obliteration of meaning. However, men, of course, are not the only ones suffering from this, nor are they suffering worse than any other group of Americans, right? This is just alienation under capitalism. Part of what he's doing here that is noteworthy and becomes a huge problem later on is he is

is identifying real problems with the society we live in and then cutting men off from the rest of that society and thus cutting off the possibility of solidarity. So you can't look at this kind of alienation and loss of meaning and be like, wow, men and women and everybody is being harmed by the meaninglessness, this hole at the center of our culture. You have to say men are being harmed.

And then that invites like, well, that must be women that are doing it. And it must be, we should be looking at how feminine rather than being like, it's interesting to see like just how far John Wayne's like reach impacts the way men think. Yeah.

There's a lot of hurting cowboys. Motherfucker, you are not a cowboy. Yeah. And by the way, cowboys were mostly like poor black and Hispanic and indigenous men who were being exploited for their labor. Like, yeah, this is none of what you're saying means anything. You are entirely you're talking about the emptiness of culture and your understanding of history has been entirely formed by the movies you watched. Right. Like, anyway, do better. Do better. Well, yeah.

Some of them will eventually in the future. I think it would be interesting to try and find out, look into all these men's groups in the Washington, in the state of Washington in this period of time and see how many of those guys wound up being elders in the Proud Boys 30 years later. But that's a more in-depth work for someone in the future if they want to do it.

So one of the most dangerous aspects of the mythopoetic men's movement is that it was not as toxic as its descendants. Again, it identifies real problems, but then it recasts them as things that just men, mostly white men, are suffering from. And the answer is like kitschy, kind of racist LARPing as member. Like that's basically what they're doing. Right. And this. Yeah, it's it's it's it causes problems later on.

One of the most ridiculous aspects of the mythopoetic men's movement was the creation of Wingspan, the Journal of the Male Spirit. Don't you just want to sit down, Ian, with a copy of Wingspan, read out quotes to your buds? I start every morning with it. Yeah, just spreading your wings. So in the pre-internet era, this acted as a clearinghouse for the movement and a central place where influencers could advertise their events. Quote,

Right.

In this area, there are three large councils in Virginia, one in Gaithersburg and another in Baltimore. The Men's Council of Greater Washington, which Honnold started in June of 1988 with 50 men, is the largest, with 2,000 members and 50 newcomers arriving for each monthly meeting.

Late one night in January, at the council's meeting in the Washington Ethical Society Auditorium on Upper 16th Street, Honnold shed his Clark Kent image as he leads 500 men who are pounding drums and chanting. The sweating windows shake with rhythmic thunder that reverberates up and down the street as they raise Honnold, gyrating and clapping, high overhead and parade him about the room.

Then group leaders circulate with large feathers in clay pots, wafting the smoke of burning sage into the waiting faces in what is termed a Native American ritual designed to put you in touch with generations of male ancestors.

So that's a little problematic. Yeah, just a little bit. Just a skosh. A number of other masculinity grifters followed Bly. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette wrote the bestseller King Warrior Magician Lover, which purported to- That's a title right there. I want to be a King Warrior Magician Lover. And these are like the archetypes of male masculinity. Yeah.

I don't think they're in order because you probably don't start as a king and end up as a lover, although maybe you do. That would be progressive, actually, saying that you need to shed your mastery and your sense of ownership in order to become a lover. But I don't think that's the point they're making. Moore is a Jungian analyst and a professor of psychology. Gillette, like Dr. Jordan Balthazar Peterson, was a mythologist. I found a good write-up that described the main arguments in their book by Aaron Innes.

The book's second shared premise is that there are universal male archetypes inherent to every male-bodied person that are represented in myth and story around the world, but are suppressed in the dominant culture. The developmental history of every man, says Moore and Gillette, is in large part the story of his failure or success at discovering within himself the archetypes of mature masculinity. Following Jungian psychological theory, they claim that if men are not given room to express these archetypes in a healthy manner, they will act them out unconsciously in ways that are damaging and violent, either directed outward at other people or

as overtly hostile male behavior or directed inward, which saps the vitality of the men involved. It's worth noting that the authors of both books, as well as their contemporary followers, seem a hell of a lot more concerned about remedying male acting out that's turned inward and creating male malaise than they are about male violence directed towards others. Take the essay, Why Men Find It So Hard to Feel, by mythopoetic workshop leader Darren Austin Hall, who says that women are at an

advantage to men spiritually and that menstrual cycles mean women are energetically connected to cycles of the moon which in turn is energetically linked to our unconscious this leads him to the conclusion that the solution to warmongering tyrants in the world is for women to use touch and the beautiful arts of seductive love to disarm men and that this will solve male violence oh there it is that's toxicity you girls just gotta touch us right and we'll stop doing genocides oh my god laughing

That's incredible. Hitler wouldn't have done all that bad stuff if... I get why. I mean, he was dating his cousin, so I don't really want to continue this joke, but... What? Dating's the wrong word. Um...

You know that story, Sophie. We've talked about Hitler and his cousin. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The one who killed herself. Yeah, it's a bad, it's a really bad story. Again, bringing up Hitler and the cousin that he may be murdered is definitely perhaps a good way of pointing out how fucked up it is to say the problem of men's violence is that women don't touch them the right way.

It's pretty bad. It also brings to mind, I'm thinking about our Liberia episodes and the, um, that sex strike that a bunch of women went on to get the warlords to come to the table to negotiate and how it's like literally the opposite. It's, it's number one, one of the most amazing stories of activism I've ever heard of. And it's literally the opposite of what these guys are saying. Um, but I don't know. I don't know. This is all so gross. Um,

Yeah. Icky. So most regular listeners of the show are broadly familiar with the way men's empowerment gurus and men's rights influencers evolved over the last 20 years or so. A mix of right wing culture war politics intersecting with very divorced men. And I think we haven't talked about this yet, but these guys are all extremely divorced, right? There's a there's a lot of weekend dad energy in these rooms. That makes sense. Yeah. OK. Yeah.

That's why they're all so bitter. Okay. Yeah. There's just no way anything else is going on here. Elon Musk would have been really, really would have fit in at these. Maybe it would have kept him from buying Twitter. You know, I don't want to say it was all toxic.

So, yeah, again, you have most people listening are kind of familiar with where things descend after the mythopoetic men's movement, which is still kind of is around, but more or less peters out over the course of the 90s. And after that point, you've got a mix of right wing culture war politics that intersects with these very divorced dudes angry over custody, you know, yelling about how men are discriminated against. And then we have pick up.

Of course, starting in the early 2000s, these pickup artists selling the secret to fucking chicks at bars. And this all gets brewed up into this slurry. And, you know, you've got the pickup artists intersecting with the men's rights activists, intersecting with the right wing culture war politicians, intersecting with these literal Nazis. And from that slurry, we get Gamergate and the alt-right and at least a portion of Donald Trump's political success. Right.

Boy, howdy. That was a paragraph, Robert. That is the story. Well, I mean, this is – we haven't gone into this on the show, and it was something I was broadly aware of but didn't know much about. But I think this is especially leading into a story about a guy like Andrew Tate who is the most toxic arguably – calls himself the most toxic man on the internet and is certainly an archon of –

male toxicity, I think it kind of behooves us to talk about what led to him because it's interesting. Anyway, this is the end of episode one. Anybody anybody got some thoughts here at the end of things? I mean, I think that was a really great explainer on kind of laying the groundwork for where the ideas that eventually became Andrew Tate, you know, started and took a foothold. And yeah, after you broke it down, it makes sense. And I can see how we got there.

But it is interesting that some of the initial original points, like you said, were valid and do kind of highlight some issues in our society that maybe we should be focusing more on or addressing. But also, as you said, it's not just a men's problem. It's a problem for everyone and everyone's being affected by it and

we should be finding solidarity in that and how can we help everybody improve our lives? Not just, oh, it's a problem that's only affecting men. So it must be women, you know, those are the real problem. It's so interesting to me how many people see women,

Oh, men are being made to like spend their entire young and mature adult lives, like laboring for somebody else's profit in a factory or whatever. And as a result, their kids barely know them, which is a real problem. A lot of kids raised in like the fifties, sixties, seventies have, and

And translating that as, and like seeing, you know, their mom struggling to like keep the house going and raise the kids through all that. And, and, and the kids suffering and be like, well, this is clearly a men's problem. No, this is, this is a cultural problem. Everybody's problem is this. Anyway.

Sophie? I'm really not looking forward to what's coming next. Oh, Sophie, it's going to be terrible and you're going to have to play a lot of clips. So... I'm so sorry, listeners. I'm sorry. But it is necessary. You know what? I'm not sorry. I'll never apologize. That's what I learned from Andrew Tate. I think you wrote a really good script, though. Thank you, Sophie. You're welcome, Robert. I love me too.

All right, everybody. That's going to do it with us for us today at Behind the Bastards. The podcast that will be recorded again immediately after this, although I will probably start drinking because it is now quite late. So, huzzah! Huzzah!

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Your TV is. Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's late. We ended the last episode where I was like, wow, you're such a great writer. That was so good. Thank you. And then you come in and then you do that fucking shit. What? Well, Sophie, you may not understand this because of your your your womanliness, but I was embodying the archetype of the magician wild man.

You're fired. That's fair. That's fair. Well, I have started drinking. Got a nice glass of Port Rue Talisker here.

And I want to start this episode by giving a shout out to a friend of the pod, former mayor of the city of Portland, Sam Adams. Now, y'all may not know Sam. I think he was briefly on the show Portlandia, but he was fired from being the mayor because he had a sexual relationship with a teenage staffer and then got rehired by current mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, who's a giant piece of shit, to be the mayor's body man, basically. Yes.

And then this week, Sam announced that he was retiring because he had an iron deficiency. And then Ted Wheeler told everyone, no, he's retiring because he wouldn't stop threatening and bullying women in the office. Both of you guys suck. And it's very funny this happened. Also, I got to say, shout out to Sam Adams. Honestly, going from sexually harassing a teenager to...

a bully to adult women, that's a step forward. Um, okay. Disagree, Sophie? You're fired. I don't know what else to say. Look, one of the two things isn't a sex crime. So that's a real, real personal growth for former mayor of Portland, Sam Adams. Anyway. Ted Wheeler. What the fuck?

fuck is wrong with you great great hiring look honestly fuck sam adams he's a piece of shit but incredible hiring decision from ted wheeler yeah let's get the guy in here who had sex with a 17 year old staffer let's let's get him back in city hall we really need his insights um great great work really shocked about uh you know how how well liked he is in the city of portland

Yeah, he I mean, he's not. But you can let him know how you feel about his decision to hire and then fire Sam Adams at Ted Wheeler on Twitter when he got the tear gas thrown on him. I do remember that.

So I started talking about Ted Wheeler and Sam Adams because they're both toxic men. And today we are finally getting into the direct personal story of one of the most toxic men of all time, Emery Andrew Tate III.

Oh, that's quite a name. That's quite a name. Now, Emery Andrew Tate III was born in Washington, D.C. on December 1st, 1986. Now, that fancy name might lead you to think that he came from some like British ash, British, British ass place.

noble family or some shit. That sounds like a Duke's name to me. It's very formal. It sounds like old money for sure. Yeah. He is not. Now, most of the texture that we get on his childhood comes from Andrew himself, which is not ideal because he is a liar. But there's just not a lot of other, again, I haven't found, no one's done like a critical biography. There's not like a big long New Yorker piece that really delves into his backstory. Um,

So I kind of had to do that myself to the best extent that I could do. Now, I did find one, and this is honestly the only texture you get on his childhood that I have come across, is from an article he wrote for a website that sells kickboxing gear.

And the title of it is The Life of Andrew King Cobra Tate. So again, this is not a credible source, but the way in which he writes about his childhood and what he wants you to believe about it does tell you a lot about the man. So we're still going to be covering it. But do not take this as literal truth. That should be obvious. Here's how he talks about his birth.

I was born in Washington, D.C. at Walter Reed Army Hospital early one morning, December 1st, 1986. The doctor wanted to award me a perfect 10 on the birth scale, but settled on 9.5. So already, already, that's the saddest thing anyone has ever bragged about. That's so pathetic. Absolutely heartbreaking. Oh, my God. That's on somebody's fucking like dating profile for sure. Yeah.

Two weeks overdue, but I was nose breathing already as the doctor held me upside down by my heels and my right fist was inside of my mouth as I suckled. The doctor pinched my thigh to get a response and I growled, knitting my brow and trying to crane my head up to see who had attacked me. The doctor paled, shocked at my defensive powers. I did not cry. Okay.

Oh my god I hate this fucking guy That's so funny though bragging about how tough you were as a baby As an infant As a baby Unbelievable Incredible I'm in shock and I keep rereading what you just said and it's

I'm going to tell you all right now, because again, everything I found just kind of glosses over his childhood because we don't have a lot of like detailed, like someone hasn't gone through and like interviewed a shitload of people that he knew as a little kid or knew, right? That hasn't happened yet. I'm sure it will. And I was thinking we're just going to have to brush over his childhood. And then I found this article he wrote about himself on a kickboxing website. And it made my week. It made my week. It's so funny. You're bragging about your...

own birth. Like you did fucking anything. So if you're curious about Andrew's parentage, his mother, uh, Eileen, uh,

is indeed English as shit. And she's a white lady. She worked as a catering assistant. His father is Emery Tate Jr. And Emery, well, was Emery Tate Jr. Emery Tate Jr. was a black American man and a Chicago chess prodigy. Actually, up until a year or two ago, Emery Tate was much more famous than Andrew Tate. We actually had in our work chat, Mia was shocked to learn that Andrew Tate was Emery Tate's son.

I had not heard of this guy, but I don't care for chess. Or for, yeah, chess, yeah. The Washington Post describes Emery Tate Jr. as a trailblazer for black chess players. He was like one of the first, I don't know, he may have been like the first like super famous, really well-known like black professional chess players.

Again, I don't understand chess. I don't understand why you would play a war game that doesn't include orcs. But a lot of people who love chess say that he was one of the most fun players to watch. I did read a lot of like writing like fans and like Reddit and stuff talking about Emery Tate. And one thing they all seem to agree on is he was just super entertaining to watch play chess. Quick cue. Why does when you type in Emery Tate into Google, why does the first suggested thing come up as CIA? What?

I typed Emery Tate into Google, and the first thing that autofills is CIA. He was in the CIA! Well, Andrew says that he was in the CIA. Is that what's happening? Yeah, so he was in the Air Force as a sergeant, and he served as a linguist there.

There's not actually hard evidence that he was in the CIA that I have seen. Like this is based on, again, Andrew is kind of,

And we're about to get into this. He's really plumping his dad's reputation to make him into, like, not just a chess guy, but a badass. So may or may not be somebody who worked in the CIA. I have not seen any independent confirmation that he worked in the CIA. Maybe he did. A lot of guys in that period who, like, did...

some sort of like weird work where they would have just been listed as a state department employee. So it's not impossible, but I, I have not come across confirmation that he was in the CIA. Um,

So the Washington Post and most sources who write about Andrew's dad will call him a grandmaster at chess. This is not entirely true. He was I mean, this is not true. He was an international master, which is a lesser rank. He never quite made it to grandmaster. I found, again, chess discussions online by nerds about chess who will say that he didn't make it to grandmaster.

mainly because he wasn't able to, he wasn't willing to do like certain things that you have to do to do that. But he was, he had a really good record. He regularly beat grandmasters. Some people say he was as good at Bobby Fisher. Again, I have no way to evaluate any of this. Robert taking a big anti-chess, chess approach here. Again, there's no, there's no battle tanks and chess. There's no Titans with chainsaw hands.

The ultimate game of strategy is still Warhammer 40,000. I think we can all agree on that. Yes, of course. It's been true for generations. But anyway, Emery Tate, great at chess. A chess historian wrote a book about him, which gives us some idea as to where Andrew Tate got his sense of style and personal branding. The title was Triple Exclam with three exclamation points. The Life and Games of Emery Tate, Chess Warrior. Which is...

Kind of fun. Hardcore. I think he literally died at the table in 2015 playing a game of chess. Like, this man, this motherfucker loved chess. He wears a white fedora with a gold band on the cover, which also gives you a little bit of insight into where Andrew Tate gets some of his taste in style.

And Andrew idolizes his father, and he doesn't particularly, I'm not going to pretend to know the man's emotional state, but in his public writing, he particularly celebrates his dad. In that kickboxing website article, 2022 Andrew Tate noted this about the male side of his family background.

My grandfather, Emory A. Tate, Esquire, fought in World War II before becoming a lawyer in Chicago during racially charged times. As a black man, this shaped his worldview, and he was very strict, very hard indeed. As a boy, he pushed a plow with mule through the hard clay dirt of Georgia, forced to work on the farm. At age 12, he pushed a plow that only grown men normally handled. Then he ran away, never to return to the farm. He did some bare-knuckled fistfights as a young man and distinguished himself hand-to-hand during the war years."

And again, I'm sure parts of that are true. Everything about his dad and his grandpa always veers into how good they were at hand to hand combat. And there is no evidence of this. Like the stuff about working on a farm. Yeah, that seems plausible. The stuff about how we fought the Nazis hand to hand. I don't know. Maybe. But that actually didn't happen often. That just gives me like my dad can beat up your dad vibes. Like it sounds like something like a kid would say. He bragged about his own birth.

And man, it's like you don't have to lie about him fist fighting Nazis. It's OK if he just shot them. A lot of dudes did. And that was rad. He doesn't have to be great at punching just because you grew up to punch people for a living. That's kind of a weird thing to focus on, Andrew. But he loves talking about how good his dad and grandpa were at fighting.

So...

I mean, also, I think his dad would have been in the military. Let me double check here. Yeah, during Vietnam, which would mean that he did, in fact, lose. So, sorry, Andrew, but...

I don't want to be mean to Emery Tate because, well, this is a little bit his fault. So, yeah, the closest thing that Andrew has written or said that comes close to being emotionally impactful at all is when he writes about his father. I will give him that. He writes with like some amount of actual sincerity about his feelings towards his dad. And I'm going to give you an example of that now.

I never learned to cry for attention. I only used grunts to indicate hunger or discomfort, but mostly I was silent. I had a large new crib, but most every night I spent asleep on my dad's chest. He would place me there and sleep still, never moving in the night, and our heartbeats were and are as one. I just picture a baby like...

Yeah, just too angry to cry. Now, bits like this do contrast with passages where Andrew will relate stories about his dad that sound kind of abusive. Quote,

I learned to defend myself soon after I could walk. Long before my first punch into a pillow, I learned to balance, how to step backward after being pushed gently in the chest. Dad made a game of it, a game which ended with a savage shove across a living room, sending me into a dramatic backpedal. I stopped myself with my head one inch from cracking into the far wall. That was the final test.

Kind of sounds like your dad was just shoving you because he was pissed, Andrew. Yeah, it kind of sounds not great, bro. Do you need to talk about this, man? Yeah.

No talking, just... Yeah. Just angry grunts. Just shoving. I mean, look, if I was going to raise a child, I'd be lying if I said that the shoving method didn't hold some appeal because I do a lot of other things by shoving. It's how I move my furniture. It's how I record podcasts. I'm shoving a walking desk around the room right now. We actually... Daniel spends like 13 hours a week editing that out before we can even get the audio off to Chris. Yeah.

That's most of his job. It's really, it's a good part of our workflow. Ian, remind me to tell you about the time when Robert got a foot massager and he refused to not use it while recording. Still have it, Sophie. Still have it. You want me to plug this bad boy in? And it would go directly into the mic. And like, there's no hazard pay. That's enough. Truly, don't take it out. Don't plug it in. No, he's plugging it in.

I'm sorry, Ian. That was my fault for bringing it up. That was your fault for bringing it up. But more importantly, not my fault, because nothing is. Speaking of toxic masculinity, let's get back to Andrew Tate's

Cool. So Andrew was raised initially in the D.C. area and then Indiana. And he seemed to want to follow in his father's footsteps. He started playing chess at age three. He started competing at five and he eventually competed in adult tournaments while still a child. And this is where we get the very first news article on Andrew Tate, who at that point was referred to as Emery A. Tate.

It is a local news piece. And this is the first like objective-ish piece of journalism that like, it's not just like him writing about his background. And it's really the only insight we get into his childhood that doesn't come directly from a Tate.

It's, again, a local news piece. The news in his town, which is like South Bend, was talking about the release. There was a movie coming out about Bobby Fisher, who I guess was good at chess. And so they were writing about that and they wanted a human interest piece. So they talked about young Andrew Tate, who was six when they wrote this article. He had started a chess club in South Bend with some other kids and he had taught them chess because he wanted people to play against. It includes the article, a couple of quotes that are interesting.

"'Every kid wants to be like his dad,' the elder Tate said, "'but father had recently limited son's playing time, encouraging other activities. "'I don't think that a kid his age should spend so much time playing chess. "'As a parent, I'd like to see him become a top-level player, "'but I realize there's so much more to life than just chess. "'He learned how to swim this summer, and he plays with his friends and stuff like that. "'Andrew, however, says he plays because he's bored all the time. "'Most of the time I'm bored, and that's the only thing I want to do most.'"

So, yeah, interesting. There's some insight into the actual kid there. That is a response I understand from a kid. Like, I am bored all the time. This is the only thing that I like. It also, you know, gives you a little bit of a look into, like, there's, for whatever reason, one of the things I take away from this article is that Emery Tate didn't want his son to follow him as a chess guy. Right.

It might have been some insecurity about not wanting his kid to be better than him, or it may have just been understandably like, you know, I never made a lot of money playing chess. I want you to do something else with your life. I don't want you to like be locked into this thing. I know there's some interesting questions that answers or asks.

The author of this article notes that Andrew had just competed in his first adult chess tournament where he had, and again, Andrew's later on when he starts putting out propaganda, trying to make himself look like a badass, will point out that like at age six, he was playing in adult chess tournaments. He did lose three out of five games. And his dad eventually had to pull him out of the tournament because, quote, he got very upset because he thought he was failing. So Emery withdrew his son from the game to, quote, save him from crying in front of all those people.

And we're not keyed into what precisely happened there. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought he didn't cry. Why are we worried about that? It sure seems like his dad said he did. Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Fact check. And again, you know,

I'm going to guess one of two things happened there. Either Andrew was just throwing a fit because he was losing and his dad was like, well, you can't be at a chess tournament if you're going to throw a fit when you lose. Or Andrew was doing okay and wanted to keep playing and his dad was angry that he was losing and didn't want him to keep like risk losing again. Even though three to two is not a bad record for a six-year-old playing chess. Yeah, he's six. Playing against adults. Either way, we don't know which of those is the case. Either possibility is interesting to me.

Andrew's parents had another boy, Tristan, two years after Andrew was born. And the two brothers have been inseparable their whole lives. They played chess together, but Tristan never competed. They would later kickbox together, but Tristan never competed. He's like always there, but he also doesn't seem to get to live a full life because he exists purely in his brother's shadow as like an agent of his greatness. It's kind of a weird relationship for Tristan. Um,

Um, but I don't think he's self-aware enough to understand that it's weird. One photo in the news are in that news article shows six year old Andrew focused in the picture frame face taking up a third of the frame playing chess while just Tristan's hand is visible in the right third. And as the brothers grew up, Andrew would consistently stay in focus while Tristan would always just sort of be off to the side.

And that's true to this day, right? To this day. I don't have it in the script. We could play it. There's a very funny video of his brother telling him to go out to film their cars for this video they're doing about how nice their life is. And then when his brother goes out, Andrew cuts the feed just to be like, ha ha, fuck you. This is my show. I don't have to let you do anything if I don't want to. And it's weirdly abusive because they're both men who were in their 30s. Yeah.

Like, Tristan, you don't have to take that. Things got harder for them after South Bend because their mom and dad, it's not a good marriage and they divorce. I have found very little detail about why that divorce happened. We can infer, though, that it was an extremely painful time for Andrew. And this is all he's willing to write about it.

Dad was working minimum wage jobs over time since his military career had been ended. Both mom and dad worked so that we could survive. Things became so hard that we decided to go to England and try a life there only minus dad. And, uh, he's not willing to write like, you know, the marriage didn't work out or, and I, again, we don't know why I'm going to avoid like theorizing what might've happened there, but this is clearly he idolizes his dad and he's taken away from him forever. Basically. Yeah.

And obviously, mom might have had a perfectly good reason for doing that. I'm not trying to be critical. We just actually don't really know. But this is definitely like the fact that he's not willing to even acknowledge the basics of what happened kind of suggests this leaves a pretty profound impact on young Andrew. So.

By age 11, he was, in his words, man of the house, looking after his younger brother and now sister. The town in England they live in was called Luton. And it is still, I think it's usually pronounced by English people, Luton. But, you know, you know how they are. I didn't think we would get an accent this episode, but I'm glad we did. Oh, I'm from Luton! That's how they sound. Robert, you know how much that upsets...

When I do my accent, should I do my Boston accent to get him back on board? Yeah, your Boston accent's really good. Oi, I'm from Boston, and oi, loy, caffy, and chuda. That's my Boston. That's my Ben Affleck. An Australian person underwater being strangled. Boston is just Western Australia, Sophie.

Anyways, Robert, it's time for an ad break. It is time for an ad break. So go to Dinkin' Donuts and have you a caffy.

Robert. That was my Boston. It's so bad. I think it's pretty good. It's like a bear. It's a bear. Honestly, it's so bad that it's impressive. Thank you. I feel like that takes a lot of skill and control to be that bad. Again, I'll take any kind of praise. I don't care. Bad attention, good attention. It's all the same to me. Welcome to our podcast about toxic masculinity. And we're back. So...

Luton is it's not an easy place to grow up. It is, in fact, close to, if not the very hardest place to grow up in England. It is one of the poorest places in the country. It has been repeatedly voted the worst place to live in England. I actually found a poll from like seven days before I read the script from the from Bedfordshire Live that voted it the worst place to live in England. It is a tough town.

Andrew and his family have basically no money. They live in public housing and they are just barely getting by. We know this for certain. Like this is a confirmed fact about his upbringing. Now, Andrew, again, definitely acknowledges that they were poor. This is actually an important part of his own self mythology. But he also makes some claims that we do not know for sure are true. He claims he got a job as soon as I was old enough, although he does not say when that was.

Quote, And yeah, that's interesting. I'm sure some, again, I'm sure pieces of all of this are true.

I don't know about his knife skills or the blinding speed, but I'm sure pieces of this are true. Now, Trist or Andrew, interestingly, says that the only one of them who got into a real world fight when they were kids was his brother, Tristan. Some kid was bullying him and he beat him up. I don't know if that story is true or not, but it is worth noting that Andrew claims in this article, I have never struck a person in anger. Now, we know that's not true because he...

has beaten at least one, like, yeah, we know that's not true. We will talk about that later, but this is the claim that he is making in this thing that he writes in like 2022.

When he was a young adult, he was introduced to a kickboxing trainer and he started training, as did his brother soon after. By 2008, he was the seventh highest ranked heavyweight kickboxer in Britain. A year later, he won his first championship and became the number one ranked kickboxer in Europe for his division. Two years later, in 2012, he was the second best heavyweight kickboxer on the planet. That sounds very impressive, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, second best kickboxer on the planet. That means you can kick to death anybody but one guy. Yeah. That is not what that actually means. So I'm going to be honest. All of the articles about him will just say he was the second best light heavyweight. Sometimes they'll just say the second best kickboxer on the planet. They'll talk about his championships and like list the numbers.

I was... The first draft of this, actually, I just wrote that and then moved on. I was like, yeah, he's really good at kickboxing. Lots of bad people are really good at something. I assumed he was as... I figured that that was true. I looked at his Wikipedia page, which says he has like 79 wins and 9 losses and lists his championships. And he did win a bunch of what are called world championships. However...

That's not how boxing works, because I also looked up a bunch of discussions of boxing fans analyzing his actual performance. And one thing they'll point out is that, well, there's not just one guy who's the best at kickboxing. Kickboxing is actually an incredibly fragmented sport. And there are a bunch of different I don't know if they call them leagues or whatever. There's a bunch of different like types of kickboxing championships that.

And some are more impressive than others, right? Some are people who are really good at kickboxing. Some are people who are more amateur. And Andrew kind of stayed doing the more amateur stuff. And he was really good at beating amateur kickboxers. One of the critiques people will note who are into kickboxing is that the league that he became light heavyweight champion in only covers Europe.

So you guys might notice there's a couple of places that are the world that aren't Europe that I assume, I assume there's some kickboxers at those places. At least one or two. Yeah. At least a couple. Um, the other thing they'll point out is that of all of these fights that he had, and it

He claims like 79 wins. They can only verify like 40-something fights because – and this is – that may not mean that he's lying. It's – all of the ways that this shit gets reported are weird, right? And there's so many different weird leagues and shit. He might be lying about the total number of wins and games he was in. But of the things that we can verify, only – this is something kickboxing fans will point out. Only five of his fights are against guys with Wikipedia pages. And that –

But it means like guys who are notable enough that they have a quality, like are good enough at kickboxing. So most of his fights were against like nobodies or amateur guys who just, you know, fight on the weekends or something. Of the notable five fights he was in, he lost three of them.

of them. Um, the allegation kickboxing fans will make is that he mostly fought amateurs to pad his record. Now everyone agrees. He's still, that's still pretty good at kickboxing, but he is not the second. He was never the second best on the planet earth at kickboxing. Um, that's just simply not the case. Um,

And I think it's fair to say, yeah, he's pretty good at kickboxing. He was never as good as he claimed. And this is a part of the self-mythologizing that he engages in, kind of vastly exaggerating his competency at kicking people a bunch with his feet. So, yeah, it's also worth noting that like,

The level Tate actually was at did not pay terribly well. The per fight amount is impressive. He can make between $50,000 and $100,000 per fight that he was in. But he was having like one or two fights per year.

which is not terrible income, but you're paying for a coach, you're paying for gym access, you're paying for the medical care that comes from this. And he's going to have several serious injuries. So he's not living well off of this salary. And in fact, he and his brother are living in a cheap apartment, I think in Bedfordshire, and eating as cheaply as they possibly can in order to afford to keep being in kickboxing. Because it's like, that's kind of what it is when you're competing at this kind of awkward level that he's at.

Um, and Tate relates aspects of this himself in a video from 2022. And I'm going to play this so everyone can get a look and listen to the guy before we can, uh, go any further. This is from his video on Rumble. Uh, this is his like, you like Rumble is right wing YouTube and his, his channel is called Tate speech as in hate speech, but you guys get it, right? I don't need. Here it is. First, the first, first clip.

World-level athletes with no money. We invented a dish that was so bland, we called it "flavor" because it was the only way you could add flavor to the dish. So it had the name "flavor," but it was extremely bland. And it was white rice, frozen peas, because they're cheap,

Kidney beans. Kidney beans have more protein per 100 grams than minced beef. Did you know that? I found out when I was broke, walking the aisles at a grocery store, trying to find the cheapest protein money can buy. Could have bring myself to be a vegetarian, so I'd add a little bit of meat, minced beef. And if I was really rich, I'd have hot sauce.

And I actually suspect he's probably not lying too much there. That seems like a reasonable story. And I know some people who are professional athletes at that similar awkward level where you're like a pro, but you're not rich who are like, yeah, you do whatever it takes to like stay fueled. And that means nothing.

cooking giant pots of like not delicious things just to say anyway that that seems broadly speaking like he's probably not lying entirely about that now he is lying about he and his brother being world-class athletes you might say he was that's going to be up to what you define that as but tristan is not competing in kickboxing he is working as like a coach kind of

Although people will criticize that in ways that are too weirdly nuanced and involve knowledge of kickboxing. So we're just going to move on. Now, the height of his career as a guy who kicks people for money comes in like 2012, 2013. He 2013, I think it's his last big championship. And not long after that, he decides to leave professional sports as a full time thing.

Injuries play a major role in this. Tate does not like talking about vulnerability, but he was worse at taking hits than he likes to pretend. He suffered detached retinas in several fights and had to have surgery for his eyes. So he was like he's I mean, again and again, that's the I'm pointing this out because he will never admit it.

like if you're a professional kickboxer, at some point you're going to get hurt enough that you can't keep doing kickboxing. Like we all saw like Muhammad Ali go from, you know, Muhammad Ali to, you know, a guy who has severe injuries as a result of being a boxer, all this stuff's bad for you. Like you either quit at a certain point or it destroys your body and mind the same way that like football or whatever it does. I mean, we all just got a reminder of that a couple of weeks ago with, um,

Oh, the guy who had a heart attack on the table. Oh, DeMar Hamlin, yeah. Yeah, this is all pretty normal sports stuff, right? When you're watching guys do these kind of combat sports, you are watching people mortgage their bodies in the hope of getting rich. And Tate kind of had to accept at a certain point, my body is going to give out before I get rich doing this. Yeah.

So, you know, that's the thing that he recognizes and he decides I need to let my most professional athletes do. I need to find something else I can do that's easier on my body that I can support myself with. You know, some people open car dealerships. Some people decide to, you know, sell ads for different things and be pitchman. Some people go into professional baseball. Tristan decided to become a webcam sex pimp. Yeah.

So that's it. That's an interesting call. I do think history would have been different in fascinating ways if that's the choice Michael Jordan had made. Sophie, don't give me that look. Anyway, what? I'm just saying that look, you deserved it.

I usually do. So for three years, they run a rapidly expanding business, finding women to act as cam operators. Now, this is not an inherently dishonest business, I guess. If you are, you know, building a studio and building like a platform by which you can, you know, bring these these cam workers attention and they understand their contracts and like it's a reasonably fair split.

I don't have an ethical issue with building a company that allows sex workers to do cam work, right? That's fine.

But the business that Tate and Tristan operated was not fine. It was fundamentally pretty toxic. No shit. The Grunt Brothers didn't have a good workplace environment? All right, cool. Yeah. I'm going to quote now from an article in The Mirror, which is not an ideal source, but it's who entered them about this. And I don't know why they would lie about something this shady and gross because it makes them seem like sex criminals. Quote,

Some of their customers fall for the belief that they can have a real relationship with the women they see on screen. But Tristan brazenly told the Sunday Mirror, it's all a big scam, and bragged that he doesn't feel any guilt because no one cares and it's their problem, not mine.

Whatever the excuse is, it is a lie, Tristan said.

So he tells a story in this article about this guy who wanted to give a cam operator $20,000, his life savings. And Tristan's like, can I try? I talked him out of it. I told him, you know, he shouldn't do that. She was actually making good money. And then he came back a couple of months later and fell in love with another. And this time I was like, yeah, man, we'll take your money, which...

Definitely a lie. Tristan and Andrew Tate have never turned down 20 grand that a desperate man offered them for lies. Yeah, there's no way they're trying to talk somebody out of that. No, absolutely not. That's their bread and butter. Yeah. I am going to continue that quote from the mirror. But first, you know what? I am going to continue first.

is capitalism oh i am i am keeping this nightmare engine alive on my own by advertising for products on this podcast so on your own that's it that's i'm i am the linchpin holding the global economy together on your own look after facebook fell apart it's just me baby what name another company sophie

It's just this podcast. Just run the fucking... Raytheon. Just run the ads. He's out of control. We are back. So...

I'm going to continue that quote from the Sunday Mirror of Tristan Tate being interviewed. He believes he is beyond the reach of the authorities because of two lines in the terms and conditions. He said, one is broadcasting is for entertainment purposes only. That means if a model says she has a sick dog or a sick grandma, it doesn't have to be true. The next is that all cash given to models is a voluntary sign of gratitude for their time broadcasting. Now, I'm not a lawyer.

That kind of sounds like the tick in their money.

It does sound like you're taking their money. That said, he may be in the right there. The Mirror did a journalist-y thing and they reached out to a lawyer to be like, is this true? And the lawyer said, maybe, but also generally UK laws say that you can't defraud people and take their money on fraudulent terms. But also the laws haven't kept pace with technology. There's a good chance he was in a legal gray area. They did not get charged. So...

is fair to say they were in enough of a legal gray area that they were reasonably safe. And to be like perfectly honest, I suspect they could have done this indefinitely if Andrew Tate hadn't been a sex criminal, which,

Which is what we're getting to here. So Andrew Tate later wrote this on his personal website slash shady business teaching men to run their own webcam porn studios. This is a thing he does later. But this is how he talks about his webcam business and how he makes it work. Oh, God. Okay. How did I become rich?

Webcam. I've been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade. I've had over 75 girls work for me, and my business model is different than 99% of webcam studio owners. Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time, and of all my girlfriends, none were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me.

So...

What does that make y'all think? That's disgusting. That's one of the grossest things I've ever heard. That is really gross. That's fucking horrible. And like voluntarily listed on his own site. And if

It's just fucking. Yeah, he bragged about this. Now, this is potentially him describing sex trafficking, right? Right. That's what it sounds like. If you're if the women are not getting. Now, again, there's not like a law that says you can't have someone fall in love with you and then contract with them to do sex work. Right. That's not.

thing that there's a law against. However, if they are not getting paid for it and if they are not being allowed freedom of movement, well, then what happens is that you have like entrapped them and you are sex trafficking them, right? This is what's called law enforcement calls this the lover boy method, right? Where you get someone to fall in love with you. And also this is, this goes on, this is a very old tactic in like, shall we say pimping?

where like, yeah, you make a woman feel like or a person be in love and dependent on you, and then you kind of emotionally abuse them into doing sex work. This is a thing that happens that is like a recognized part of a criminal enterprise. Now,

Obviously, getting charges based on those words on his website is going to be hard to do. But just kind of the stuff that he had published for a while was enough that people at the time should have known that he was up to what was a likely illegal business.

Now, if you came across articles about Tate in 2021 or 2022, and they went into any detail about his webcam career, the most you were likely to learn was what the Mirror wrote here. After three years, they moved to Romania, saying the UK had gone downhill. They have women on a number of seedy sites. Operators take a 40% cut, and the rest goes to the studio. So that's what they claimed for years had happened. Like, you know, we did it in the UK, and then the UK got woke, and so we switched to Romania.

That is not what actually happened. So they started running this can business in 2012. Three years after 2012, when they moved to Romania, it's 2015. Now, just a few days ago after his arrest, a story dropped that made it clear why they actually left the UK, and it had nothing to do with wokeness or the country going downhill. Andrew Tate was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse in 2015. Vice broke the story. Quote,

So...

That's the reality of why they had to leave the UK. Yeah, he's a fucking vile, disgusting human being. And it makes the timeline makes a lot more sense when you know that. He's like, yeah, oh, we had to bounce because, you know, things just got too woke for us in Romania. And he would also he later made the claim that like

I had to leave Romania because in the UK a man can get accused of rape for anything, right? And, you know, Romania, it's much harder to get accused of rape. And so I moved to Romania, not because I'm a rapist, but because I like freedom. No, man, you were accused of rape by multiple women and then investigated and you decided to leave because you didn't know if the UK was going to come for your ass at some point.

And the story is actually a bit more fucked up than that, because back in 2014, a woman who Vice refers to as Amelia filed a police report alleging sexual and physical abuse by Tate. She claims that she and Tate met in 2009. They were friendly for years until 2013, which is when Tate was transitioning away from kickboxing to webcam pimping.

The two decided to go out on a series of dates at the end of that year. And after several weeks, they were in her room when Andrew forced himself on her. Now, she describes him stopping. She tells him to stop when he starts like trying to go to have sex. And she tells him that she doesn't want to have sex. And he tells her she says that he like sits quietly for a moment. And then she asks him what's going on. And he says, I'm debating whether I should rape you or not.

What the fuck? What the fuck? Oh boy, howdy. It's, um... It's bad. Within an instant, he changed who he was. He wasn't the same Andrew that I knew, that was funny, that would make me laugh. It was like his eyes went, and I didn't have a clue who that person was. That's terrifying. Yeah. Terrifying, disgusting. That's horrible. I'm so sorry that happened to her. Yeah, and it's... So...

Here's one of the things about this is she goes to the cops. He rapes her. And it takes... They have, after that point, she consents to sex, she says a couple of times over the next six months, which is not uncommon in situations like this. But eventually she goes to the police to make a complaint. And the police are like, do you want to proceed with charges? Right? Because that's an option that you have in this case. And she decides...

because obviously i don't i hopefully i don't think i have to explain this to this audience but like there are a lot of horrible personal consequences that can come to charging your rapist right to to pursuing with criminal charges she decides and there is and this seems like a positive thing there's an option in the uk where you can just log a complaint and say this guy raped me without proceeding with criminal charges which she decides she doesn't want to do at this point and so that's what she does

And then that this is again, 2013, 2015 is when those two women who worked in his cam studio push press charges against him and the police. And this is a positive step. It's about to get less positive. The police find out, oh, there's a report logged against this guy two years earlier and they reach out to Amelia and they're like.

More women have come forward saying that this guy assaulted them. Do you want your charges? Do you want your allegations basically to be added to theirs in this case that we're building? Right. Um,

And she says yes, and she hands over her phone to the cops, which contained numerous audio notes, because she had told Andrew in, like, text and stuff, like, hey, you know, like, you raped me, that's why I don't want to know you anymore. And he had responded to her, and he had responded to her using voice notes where he admitted to what he had done.

Um, and yeah, I'm going to play a couple of notes of Andrew Tate, um, here for you, because before we hear him in his like 15 year old boy influencer voice, uh, we should hear how he talks to somebody like Amelia when he doesn't think it's going to be on the news.

Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn't like it, the more I enjoyed it. I fucking loved how much you hated it. Turn me on. Why am I like that? Why? I am one of the most dangerous men on this planet. Sometimes you forget exactly how lucky you were to get fucked by me. Would you rather me pin you down and make you do things you didn't like, or would you rather fuck you didn't like that I was thinking I can do whatever I want to you?

That's what it is. I'm the smartest person on this fucking planet. Are you seriously so offended I strangled you a little bit? You didn't fucking pass out. Chill the fuck out. Jesus Christ. I thought you were cool. What's wrong with you? Oh my God. So that's not great. That's not great. That's so upsetting. That's so upsetting. Yeah, it's pretty bad. He's a pretty bad dude.

Just a vile, disgusting, despicable waste of space. Like, again, normally self-diagnosis is the thing we avoid on this, but like, that's just very obvious textbook narcissism. I am the smartest man in the world, you know, like he is, it's not hard to see what's going on with this guy. And I don't know his dad or like how that all went down, but.

There's this, if you look at the way he talks about his dad and his grandpa, there's this need to associate himself with greatness. And I don't know, everything that's going on here makes sense, but it's also so bleak. And I don't know, there's probably a better writer and thinker than me might be able to draw a more...

Trenchant connection between the kind of stuff I was talking about, about how lack of connection to other men and to older men and how not knowing what your place is in society leads young men to feel disconnected and that that can be the root of some bad behavior and the fact that Tate.

idolizes his dad and is separated from him and becomes so needful to kind of convince others of his greatness while using violence and threats against them. I don't know that there's a connection there, but it's, I think, kind of worth thinking about, I guess, in the same continuum. I don't know. This is still stuff that I'm kind of muddling through, too. But it's not...

It's not surprising to me that this guy has this kind of obsession with his... Because that's what it's about, right? It's never about that he wanted sex or whatever. It's about power and control. It's about power. And it's about the fact that she didn't want to have sex with him is an attempt from her to exercise agency. And no one else in the world gets to exercise agency. Just Andrew Tate.

Right. Like that's the way this guy thinks about things. Um,

I don't know. There's a lot going on there worth pondering. And I guess we will ponder it for a while while we wait for part three of this series, where we will talk about the fallout from these cases and the social media presence that Tate builds when, again, nobody knows this. I mean, this young woman knows it, and a couple of police officers know it. But as a spoiler, the police don't proceed with the charges.

And in fact, they it's really fucked up. The police say that they believe her or Amelia says what she said to to vice when they talked to her is that the police told her that they believed her claims, but they couldn't go forward with the case because there was a shred of doubt about Tate's guilt.

there's a shred of doubt it does seem like he admitted it directly he literally admits to being a sexual predator what are we doing there's some fucked up cop gaslighting here because they tell her like look going through the process of pressing charges against a rapist is so traumatic to the woman that we don't do it unless there's no shred of doubt we're trying to protect you from like an ugly court which is like

Cop gaslighting is on another level. That's so disheartening. I'm so sorry, Amelia. Yeah, it's fucking bleak. That's terrible. This whole story is bleak. Yeah. And after this point, Andrew and Tristan move to Romania. They move their sex trafficking webcam business to Romania. And we will pick up that story in part three, where...

It gets a lot bleaker in some ways, but also we get to make fun of Andrew Tate videos. So, you know. Something to look forward to. Take your wins where you can get them, kiddos. What do we... Who are we? Who are we here? We're the bad boys of podcasting. Obviously.

That's right. Robert, I think both shows are actually sold out, but you will be at SF Sketch Fest this coming weekend, and you'll be doing a Behind the Bastards show, and you will also be doing Francesca Fiorentini. Christ. Yeah.

Fiorantini's The Habituation Room show. Yeah. Great. Francesca's great. Francesca's a hero. Internet Hating Machine, lovely episode. Should check that out if you haven't. Write something.

Why, why? Yes, Robert, it is a week from when we are recording. All right. Well, we will finish recording the Andrew Tate episodes and then I will figure out what the fuck I'm doing for this live show that apparently a bunch of you assholes have decided to show up at. God damn you.

Thank you all for buying tickets. Before we close out, I want to thank again April Clark and Grace Freud of Girl God, the Girl God podcast. Both great comedians. They have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February 25th. People can get tickets for that at girlgodshow.com. They were on the early version of part of this, but...

I had an emergency and we had to bounce. And now we are recording this late at night because it is the only way that we can make this show work in a way that is, we are contractually obligated to. So thank you, April and Grace. Thank you, Ian and Sophie for being guests on my show last minute. And yeah, you're fucking welcome, Robert. Thank you. Thank you, Sophie. Everyone else can go to hell though.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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