Part Two: What's New With Andrew Tate?
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Oh boy, welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where tired people talk about a guy they hate, in this case, Andrew Tate. How are we all doing today? Everybody full of energy, juiced up as the kids say? I don't think the kids say that.

Ready to go. Playoffs are about to start. Lakers in five. Lakers in five. So we're good to go. Yeah. Well, that's good. Lakers in five sounds like a positive development. Yeah. Very. I had a really enjoyable experience of texting Robert late on Sunday when he was very intoxicated. A picture of the

LaBarbie that I purchased which is the LeBron James Ken doll and Robert would be like call me and go Sophie what is this? laughter

It's just beautiful is what it is. And I was like, it makes me happy. That's what it is. The amount of grown men standing in line trying to get this doll is just... You can't make it up. It's just hilarious. They made a G.I. Joe of him? Or is it a Barbie brand? No, it's Barbie. It's a Ken doll. They made a LeBron Ken doll. Well, he's really finally arrived, I guess. Yeah. It sold out so fast, but...

I was there. I did it. I'm going to guess that's the lowest percentage of Barbie dolls that have ever been bought by little girls. Probably. Probably true. Probably true. But it's, you know what? It made me happy for like 45 minutes. And when I look at it, I'll feel joy. And like, the world sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Joy sounds nice. Take the wins where we can get them. I remember joy. That's been replaced with occasional sleep. Yeah.

Speaking of things that bring me joy, this is not one of them because today we're going to be talking yet again about our friend Andrew Tate, who is not our friend. But who is our friend is supervising producer Ian Johnson, who's here once again. Yeah. Thanks for having me back. Can't wait to hear more about the horrors. Ian Johnson. Don't do that. Don't do that. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Robert, I've had 35 years of that. Please don't contribute. None of that. And then it's it's I've been I had a good I always love it when there's like really, really like stereotypically cheesy names in an action movie. And I just watched that very good movie, Novocaine, starring the guy from The Boys about a dude who can't feel pain. And it does a good job with it, portraying it both as like a disability and realistically showing how he could use it.

like to his advantage in a fight. And it's like very cringy because you're constantly watching this guy like permanently damage his body. But it's a hoot, but they made the real, the real character's name, Nathan Cain, which is like, okay guys, oh, that's a little, did we need that? Was that necessary? Did you have to, I know it's going to, that's going to come out in a pitch meeting. Like, oh, what if we called him this, but you didn't need to.

You didn't need to. Most of the movie's pretty grounded, which is kind of what works about it. And then that happens and you're like, I don't know, guys, come on. You were so close. There's also a scene where a bunch of bank robbers come out with a hostage and the cops put their guns down. And I'm like, this is the San Diego Police Department. You're telling me they don't just empty their fucking rifles into those people?

I'm sorry. We'll deal with the lawsuit later. We'll watch the LAPD shoot up a Trader Joe's over a hostage situation. Oh my God. I remember that. We don't need that shit here. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of shit nobody needs, we're talking about Andrew Tate and his digital empire, how it worked,

Today's episodes are going to be based on a bunch of subsequent reporting that was not available when we did our first episodes about how the War Room, which is his very expensive premium service that costs about eight grand a year to join, although that's actually the low end for what this fucking thing costs to be a member of, and the real world, which is like, costs 50 bucks a month. And the real world is, you know, if it's Toyota, the War Room is Lexus, that's the premium brand, and the real world is, you know,

the normal brand that actually makes them the bulk of their money. So we're going to talk about how these work, how Tate has weaponized them over the years, and what some of these released chat logs have made clear about the operating culture. But first, that's the cold open. We're done.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Valley with WGU. With courses available online 24/7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer. She had been shot twice in the head and in the back. It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

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We're back, and Sophie and I are commenting on our same-colored drinks. What's yours? Mine's electrolyte water. Mine's some mix of BCAAs and water, because this is ostensibly a workout day that has been a little bit of a shit show, but...

Might as well get whatever those chemicals are. People say they do something. Sensational. Yeah, yeah. So the doctors say. Speaking of things that do something, the war room. And so the real world is kind of the core of Tate's business because it's got between 150 and 200,000 subscribers at any given time. I think 170K is the estimate you'll hear the most often. And you've got that many people paying 50 bucks a month. You're talking some serious money.

Now, there's wide turnover on that because $50 a month isn't a massive upfront investment, right? People can afford to pay that and then back out later. There's a lot of people who are kind of interested in for a little while who will buy. And so there's a lot of churn over the overall use of this, right?

And the goal of the real world broadly is both to make money and to funnel users upward into the war room, which is much more expensive, you know, and as a result, harder to get into, but also lower turnover once people make that kind of financial commitment.

So both of these places we've known about for a while, the real world was originally Hustlers University, which is kind of Tate's first big web platform that kind of taught people how to pick up women and run cam hoarding businesses, so to speak.

And yeah, so we've known these places existed, but they were kind of black boxes until in August of 2023, a disgruntled, I think this is a person who would describe themselves as a rival of Tate's, like someone who dislikes what he's doing and wanted to get into them. It's not clear to me how they got access to the chat logs, but they get access to internal chat logs from the War Room, which is his digital inner circle, and they give them to the BBC. And the BBC uses these to put together a documentary and several articles.

Their primary interest as reporters was in laying out how the Tate brothers and their cohorts traffic women. And these logs identified 45 potential victims from just the period of March 2019 to April of 2020. Wow. That was just from one year? Yeah. That's crazy. And this is, again, there's maybe 500 people in the war room.

Right.

Whereas the war room is full of people who are actually doing the kind of Andrew Tate stuff. So that's why they were able to like – there's photos posted of texts. People post pictures of the women that they're trying to bring in and traffic. So you kind of see – it's possible to actually collect data on specific potential victims right through that.

Now, the next year, November of 2024, a group of anonymous hacktivists managed to breach the real world, which is the larger platform. And the cyber attack exposed the data of some 800,000 people who have used it at some point or another. It was during a time when about 170,000 people were active.

So you get an idea of like the scale of this. And it's also every time every time these pieces of shit, it's the same thing with those like Nazi leaks for a while ago. Every time those pieces of shit create something like this, it gets just just absolutely blown up. And then everybody's data gets leaked and you find out how many of them work for the federal government or whatever. Right. Right. Familiar. Yep.

So both leaks are interesting for different reasons, but I want to start with the real world because that, again, is kind of what funnels people's up. The site's ad copy claims it as, quote, the world's most advanced financial education platform. But it's also geared towards helping young men escape the matrix and avoid wasting their lives as a brokey.

which thanks to Tate has become one of the more common adolescent slang terms for young boys in the UK. And it means you don't have much money, right? You get this fucking, you hear this a lot with like the way these kids talk to their teachers and their parents were like, well, you're just a brokey. Like, why would I listen to anything you have to say about life or the world? You don't have as much money as, for example, this guy that I'm paying 50 bucks a month for my mom's credit card to learn how to like,

mostly make like ai scam books and stuff to sell on amazon like that's honestly the biggest thing that the real world does right now that's the grift yeah that's originally the hustlers university thing yeah yes right yes and so there's there's all just like scams to get rich quick essentially right yeah scams to get rich quick and it's all this this very much like

It's the same cons that you encounter if you're on like YouTube and you get a bunch of like con ads for oh here's a video of a guy in his fucking Garage with that with a sports car and a bunch of shitty business books and him walking you through how he makes $20,000 a month or whatever on Amazon drop shipping or you know making Kindle AI books again. That's now kind of the big one and While initially hustlers University was more focused just on getting women to work in your can business. I

The real world is a mix of very standard pickup artist stuff. Here are the different tips and tricks for getting women interested in you and how to mentally abuse them so they don't leave you. And then the next set of them is, or the next set of things on it is, here's a bunch of different scams for how you can get rich. And they're all, again, they're all these...

drop shipping scams and AI scams and stuff. So it's none of it is for as much as he talks about like being this jet setter who's who's got all of these innovative ideas like his primary money. It's an MLM, right? Like this is a thing that most people who do this will never make a dime really doing it. His money is in selling them and selling subscriptions, right?

Yeah. Well, the platform provides courses on common like passive income schemes. That's another term you'll hear a lot. It's primary service for Tate is both to milk money out of these kids in the hope that they'll believe for a time that they're going to get rich, but also to utilize them for free labor to keep his name trending. Again, the way this guy went from a nobody to being at least the most well-known name on social media is

is by gathering this group of young men together and handing them, once they're paying for access to the site, they get access to this archive of all of Tate's videos and interviews, and they can cut up clips from that to edit into YouTube and TikTok content, right?

And this content doesn't get them viewers. Like that's kind of what it's build is doing is like you can use Andrew's fame in order to build your own platform. That doesn't really work. But what does work is if you've got thousands of people constantly posting this shit to different social media, the algorithm continues. You turn them into a content mill. Right. Yeah.

And the algorithm will continue to prioritize your name and stuff related to you, you know? And that's really how all this stuff works. It's just free propaganda for him. It's free propaganda. And that's the actual, the real insight that he had. Like all of these cons are just stuff he rips off from elsewhere on the internet. Yeah.

The taking the MLM structure and adapting it to instead of having them try to sell his products, having them try to keep his name going viral so that the algorithm rewards his content. That's a that's a unique and creative move that he's made. And it's gotten him quite quite a bit of what he has right now.

Now, one of these BBC articles I came across interviews a former member of the real world, Mahmoud, who was pulled into Tate's orbit when he started coming across some of these videos that were just like being spread across his different social media timelines. He fell for the con. He believed that like, okay, this guy can probably teach me how to get rich. I want to get rich. You know, life's hard in the UK as a young man. Like I need to figure out some way that I can make a bunch of money. So he pays 50 bucks and he joins. Quote,

Before long, he was completely immersed in Tate's universe, isolating himself from friends and family. Mahmoud would regularly spend 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes as many as 16, at his computer, editing and publishing social media videos, promoting Tate daily as part of the required coursework. He'd become a cog in the same sophisticated PR machine that had initially drawn him to the influencer's web.

So he's giving these kids homework to just like make as many TikTok videos of him as possible. Yeah. If you want to stay in, if you want to keep getting access to these different instructors that I've had, if you don't want to be kicked out or you want a chance of getting into this, he has an affiliate marketing program. You have to post a certain number of videos a day. And they're really they're just trying to keep these kids on as often as they can, pumping out like 16 hours a day for free. I mean, not even for free. They're paying for the privilege. Right.

And again, there's not any one specific thing that's unique about the real world outside of this. All of the money-making scams they teach people are the same stuff you'll come across in these YouTube ads.

There's this basically like this forum type experience. I think it's mostly conducted through Telegram. So there's different private channels where users can talk to each other about their business ideas or about how to pick up women. And this allows Andrew to put in a lot less actual work in the system, right? He doesn't have to teach people directly and he doesn't actually have to manage this. He just has to put out his own content and it'll all get kind of fed into the churn.

Andrew has promoted coaches in order to handle the day-to-day task of managing this place. These are members of the war room who are also paying him. They'll call them his generals sometimes too.

And in addition to subscriptions to the real world, he sells classes and tickets to live events around the world where he will travel and travel alongside other men who are kind of in the Tate universe. And they'll give events for these just unbelievably sad young men who desperately want to know how to pick up women and get rich enough to not just rent their Maserati at a day rate.

the centerpiece of his whole platform, the main thing that he is geared towards selling through the real world, is his PhD, which stands, of course, for Pimpin' Ho's degree, right? Oh, my God. We talked about this last time. No, it's always just the worst thing when I have to tell people that. Yeah. Yeah. Every time it hurts. It's just...

Again, there's nothing at all that is unique or creative about this. What's actually happening here is this all these warmed over techniques from like the game and the first couple of years of the pickup artist community are being repackaged into a degree. And then that is being made into number one. It's a prerequisite to join the war room.

And the goal here is not to just seduce women to have sex with them, which is kind of what the pickup artists were doing. It was all about adding notches to your belt or whatever. In this case, the goal is to coerce women, make them fall for you, isolate them from their loved ones, and then get them working for you on camera as a sex worker, right? And convincing them to hand over all of the money they make doing so.

That's. Yeah. That's the business. Yeah. Evil. Hard to even process. It's so gross. It's such an interesting evolution of this is about how to add up. If you were kind of paying attention to the early days of the pickup artist community, it was always very toxic, but it was less like outwardly evil. Like a lot more of it was framed as like, well,

This is just teaching young, awkward men how to be charming and how to like – Yeah. Yeah. And that turned into – there's a reason why this fed so much into the far right and to the alt-right, why there were guys like Roosh V and whatnot who were initially big in that, who tried to become right-wing influencers. But nearly all of them failed in part because –

this was a creature of the older internet, right? This pickup artistry stuff. And it didn't really age well into the kind of late social media period. And the other thing that was going on with this is that it's not the kind of thing that self-selects for people who are culture warriors. It self-selects for people who are like,

almost throwbacks at this point to like the old Hugh Hefner playboy era. And Andrew Tate is, I don't know if I'd say he's the first, but he's the most successful at merging the whole right-wing culture warrior narrative where you're fighting against the matrix and you're fighting for traditional values.

with a lot of this pickup artistry stuff. Okay. Which, you know, that's the position that he occupies. Now, the PhD used to be something he advertised on his major website, but because of all of the lawsuits against him, you can't find the degree being advertised normally. So it's pushed entirely in private through the real world. And the BBC got access to a number of these internal ads. These are like slideshows where Andrew's trying to convince people

these young men who are already locked into like the most basic stage of his platform, that they should join the war room and pay it eight grand a month. And I'm going to, I'm going to share here. It's eight grand a month or eight grand a year. Sorry. Eight grand a year. Yeah. Either way. That's still so much money. Yeah.

So this first slide just says, will the PhD system change your life? And it's above four pictures of a mix of it's like Andrew usually sitting and sipping a drink or wearing a fucking short sleeved shirt next to different various young women. Right.

Will the PhD system change your life? Do you have a girl who completely trusts your decisions, will do anything you say, and loves you deeply? Yes or no? If your answer is yes, I guarantee 90% of you are lying to yourselves. Read the question again. Understand what I mean when I say anything, and ask yourself if you've ever tested that your belief. If your answer is no, you're missing out on one of life's greatest pleasures. Doesn't matter your age, you should have a loving girlfriend. If you're too busy to get one, good. The PhD system was made for you. If you're happy touching your own dick, this power is not for you.

Oh, my gosh. So you see who he's advertising for here, right? Yeah. These guys are like, well, I could spend 16 hours at a computer, but I don't want to go out and actually make a connection with somebody, right? Right. And there's little bits of nofap in there. There's so many different little corners of the creep internet that come together in making Andrew Tate.

Final thoughts. I will be teaching you every step to building a girl who is submissive, loyal, and in love with you. From your first message to testing if you want to keep her to as long as you want the relationship to go on, I am the most capable man in the world to teach you this power, and I am 100% confident in my program. I have a warning. There's responsibility when you have someone completely loyal to you. I've had some girls for over a decade. When someone gives themselves to you completely, their life path is in your hands. Be wise. And then there's a little box at the bottom that says join the PhD program.

Wow. Yeah. Well, at least he's teaching them to be responsible with that kind of power. Sure, sure. You gotta be responsible when you come to own a woman via using Andrew Tate's mind domination program. Oh my God. And then the last slide here is what exactly do you get with the PhD programs? This is a big ad slide.

Hours of video content where I will teach you how to text women, how to build your social medias to pick up women, best first dates to bring women on, best follow-up dates, how to approach women, the framework that all male-female interactions are based on, how to see if a woman is high quality, my opening lines, how to get women in bed, the critical mistakes most men make, how to stay on her mind without interaction.

How to see if a woman is high quality. Yes. Now, if you've watched Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the degree to which all of this mirrors the Dennis system, which is one of the characters is a creepy sex criminal and has like a flirtation. Like it's one for one. Like there's absolutely, it's literally one for one. Jesus Christ. You know what else is one for one, Robert? Speaking of one for one, I'll give you one...

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And we're back. Ah, so we're talking about Andrew Tate, mind control wizard. Ew. He's just like, you know, this is, again, like I bring up the Dennis system, but this is all, what's kind of interesting to me is he clearly, to put this together, he and the people who made this spent a great deal of time combing the internet for the last 20 years of different people.

get rich quick and like flirt with like, like flirting with women, like pick up artists, scams and all that stuff. Like there's a whole generation of like,

creepy dude kind of right wing adjacent content and he's just an aggregator it's like somebody put the last 20 years of like dudes being assholes on the internet that led us directly to Trump and like use chat GPT to remix it into a guy with bad tattoos so I find that very interesting yeah now

Now, the stuff I read, these clips advertising the PhD system, like the way in which he describes it in this advertisement is disgusting. But in other interviews, he's dropped additional hints about some of the curriculum, which does include physical violence. So I played that clip earlier about Tate talking about using a machete on a woman who caught him cheating, right? About like, you know, what happens if she catches you cheating and she –

tries to attack you. And he says, you know, hit her in the face with a machete, right? This is something he talks about a lot. And it's this mix of like stuff like that, these like extreme, this extreme violence. And then these tactics that are almost like quaint, right? Like one thing he'll tell people to do is to start your relationship with ordering, by ordering the woman in question to bring you a box of chocolates, right?

And at first I was like, oh, is this just this is just like very basic, like almost 50s era stuff. But no, it turns out it's more related to like this neuro linguistic programming technique where you get someone doing you favors and you use that to ask them to do other favors. And Tate clearly he doesn't even really seem to grasp much of like the underlying logic here, because when there's this male BBC journalist who tries to interview him for this documentary on this leaked stuff.

Wants to interview Tate and Tate does the same thing tries to get him to bring a box of chocolates And hand them directly to Andrew and the journalist has to like talk to his editors to see it there and there's this whole weird It's a what he's trying to do is he's trying to establish a pattern of obedience Because he thinks that lets him manipulate people that it's like this hack to get into someone's brain if you get them doing one favor to you they'll do other favors to you and

This is very old power of positive thinking salesmanship kind of stuff. You'll get this in stuff going back to the 1950s, including a lot of like the Norman Vincent Peale shit that Donald Trump was being raised on as a kid.

I've seen versions of this that go back decades. And the thing you're supposed to do as time goes on, you're supposed to give the subject of your focus more tasks and you let your language get increasingly strict. You start by asking like, "Hey, would you do this for me?" And you end by giving them commands, right? We're like, "This is what we're doing today. This is your job for the day. This is what you have to do for the day."

And at the same time, and this is the thing that I think actually makes much more of an impact effectively, you're also supposed to be isolating your target from their family and social support network. So you're getting them in the habit of doing things that you say, and you're also cutting them off from their friends and family so they don't have anyone else in their life but you. Right.

The people who would ostensibly be like, hey, what are you doing? This is kind of fucking weird. Yeah, you're doing everything this guy tells you. Are you working 16 hours a day doing an OnlyFans that he gets the money from? That seems kind of fucked up. Now, I want to play you a clip leaked from one of these in-person seminars he gives on mentally dominating women. The question he's asked right before giving this answer is, can you say more about the restrictions and boundaries that you put on a woman in terms of who she can talk to?

Trigger warning, Andrew Tate's voice. Yeah.

You're a bad guy now. Why else would we do that? You develop a definition of I, and you just try and flex. You don't get hits in your head. That's enough to try and isolate them. And the things we've talked about thus far are like sudden agree, adding excitement, her never catching you slipping. All these things tie into isolating her and taking her away from the outside. Every outside influence, Chad.

Yeah, I fucking hate this guy so much. Oh, yeah. He's just, like, disgusting. He's the smallest little man in the world. Yeah. Because women won't shut the fuck up. It's like...

Well, I mean, it's taking this very basic misogyny because, again, his audience is not – it's framed as like we're an alliance of powerful men, you know, making each other more powerful. But his audience is all guys who have never – I mean, it's not even guys. It's children, right? It's kids who haven't been out in the world. Are you really powerful if you can't handle your partner having children?

Chuck's notes. A friend. A friend.

And these little kids' minds are just putty in their hands. They see the physical symbols of wealth that these people have, and they're like, well, then they must know what they're doing. This must all be the path to get what I want. And this is pretty classic cult leader behavior, both from Tate influencing these young people and the stuff he's telling them to do to women, right?

And he frames this as saying, like, there's no perfect girl for you. You have to make her. You have to make her using these techniques and.

Right? Yeah. And per a quote from the Daily Dot, which originally published a lot of these leaked War Room videos, in another clip from the same meeting, Tate explains why the woman his members want to date should not have normal jobs. If she has a normal job, she's got a social circle. She's got a support network, Tate bemoans. She's having a bunch of conversations you don't know about. She knows a bunch of dudes who are trying to get in her ear. She has concerns which aren't involving you. Right? Right.

And that's a problem. Tate says her brainpower is dedicated to things that have nothing to do with you. It's a massive influence. And there is this like deep insecurity, right? That if your woman has anything else in you, because you're going to be, you're going to make her miserable, right? You have no desire or intention to actually like be in a relationship with someone or provide them with anything they need. You're purely trying to take things from them. And it's obvious that's not going to make anyone happy.

I wanted to run through another section of this curriculum from Tate's PhD. So this is from that same clip that gets played around a lot of Andrew Tate talking about hitting women with a machete. What's not usually played in the context when people discuss this, because I've seen like all of the big interviews that he's done recently, he gets asked about this.

What's not played is that this is him talking about like one of the physical tests that you have to pass in order to get this PhD degree. And I really wish people would talk about this because this is kind of one of the more like fucked up things I've heard about in relation to what Tate is actually trying to teach the people who take his classes. Well, I got my PhD. We had to practice if a girl comes at you...

How do you cheat her? You're cheating. It's bang out the machete, boom in her face. This is the actual full context. It's like this is part of a test. You have to like, in order to pass this degree, you have to take a physical test on how you would defend yourself against one of these women you're trafficking, catching you cheating. Like that's the actual context of all of this. Insane. Yeah, it's pretty nuts. Yeah.

Yeah. Like just, just the fact that like you're building in, well, obviously your people are going to get attacked because the, the stuff that they're, they're doing is so like incredibly gross. We have to try and like train them to, to fight these women that we're also teaching them to try and like mentally dominate, which is simultaneously this admission that like the tactics don't work that well. Um,

So you're going to need to be able to fight. Yeah, his stance there, if I'm understanding correctly, is if a woman speaks in a way you don't like, you slice them? Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. You have to train people to slice them. With shitty machete?

Yeah. Yeah. With your terrible machete. And that's why you have it. It's not because you're being targeted by the deep state and the matrix. It's because your girlfriends are going to get angry at you and you have to be able to hit them. Yeah.

Yeah. It's insane. Yeah. Oh, my God. So giving speeches like this, and this is like part of the curriculum for this PhD program, you know, sold in the real world and operated as a prerequisite for getting into the war room. Making stuff like this is how Tate makes his money now, right? He is not primarily in the pimping business anymore because that doesn't make nearly as – it's an MLM thing, right? It's an MLM that sells being a pimp, right?

This is the same as doTERRA or whatever, but your business is...

like coercing women into working on camera for you. And Tate's at the top now, so he doesn't actually have to do that. There's much more money in making content like this. Now, the purpose of all of these programs is to get people to buy other classes, right? That's what's really sold. The real world's $50 a month, but if you want to get this degree, it's another $400. The war room's $8,000 a year, but there are access to additional secret chat rooms that cost thousands of additional dollars a year, right? Right.

And there's access to classes that cost thousands more. And there's all these in-person gatherings that cost money. And one of Tate's mottos is that no great man ever got there on his own, right? So he says, like, you need to be part of this network.

And it's all so familiar to like the ML, the standard MLM schema when you really look at it like that. And that's what's really changed my understanding of Tate from this is an influencer who is mobilizing his fan base to make himself more famous to this is a guy who whatever his initial goal was, he's now Amway. He's now the Amway of hitting women, right? Like that's what Andrew Tate's business is. He's got Keith Raniere energy.

Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about Keith Raniere because there's a lot of Keith Raniere to Andrew Tate. And I think to some extent it's maybe if Tate had come up in an earlier era before all the anti-woke stuff got as big as it was before the far right was ascendant, he would have tried more for the culturally kind of like...

left wing image that a guy like Ranieri cultivated where like no no no I'm part of like this progressive movement empowering women I think Andrew might have gone in that direction he probably wouldn't have been as successful because I think he's just kind of inherently also a dick but he's certainly shaped by like the tides of history around him yeah

Now, former members of the war room, not only are they being kind of taught to groom these women that they're trafficking in a culty way, they also describe the war room as a cult itself. And the basis of that BBC report is that the leader of the actual cult inside the war room isn't even Tate. He's just the figurehead.

The individual responsible for most of this content and curriculum and for the culture of the platform is a completely different guy who goes by the pseudonym Iggy Simmelweiss in the war room, right? And I'm not 100% in agreement with the BBC on how much this guy is actually running things behind the scenes. Is he a real person? But he's certainly a major figure. He is a real person. We'll give his real name.

I, his nickname is odd to me. When I first heard Iggy Semmelweis, I was like, that sounds familiar. And me being me, whenever I'm like, well, that guy's name sounds familiar. My assumption is like, so he's some sort of Nazi, right? Like this is some sort of guy like, but I look him up and I remembered where I read about him from because he's someone I've intended to tell his story on bastards for a while. He's actually not a bastard, but there's a lot of awful stuff in his story.

Ignat Simmelweis was a real guy and really the precise opposite of a bad guy. He was a Hungarian-German doctor. And he's the guy who was basically first in like an organized way making the scientific case for like, hey, we should use antiseptics. You know, people always die when we give surgery or we cut off their limbs. What if we like cleaned things first? What if we cleaned the saw? What a great –

What a great idea, my guy. Yeah. Great idea. Sounds like a good guy. He was a good guy. Yeah. As somebody who really, really, really, really, really likes hand sanitizer. Yeah. Well done. Iggy Simmelweis is the father of hand sanitizer. He's also the father. He was the first major figure who was like a respected Western scientist to be like,

Like surgeons and doctors should probably wash their fucking hands. Right. You should clean some shit. Thank you. Somebody who unfortunately had surgery this year. Thank you, my guy. Wow. Now,

You say that, Sophie. Oh, is he soft? But it turns out that, no, he was fine. But at a certain period of time, telling doctors that they needed to wash their hands was very dangerous. Because if you're telling doctors, hey, before you reach your hand into someone's chest cavity, you should like wash it with like soap and stuff. You're telling doctors your hands are covered in germs that get people sick.

And doctors are better than regular people, right? They are educated gentlemen. And if you're telling an educated gentleman, you're dirty and you might get a poor person sick by touching inside of their body, that is deeply offensive.

And it really pissed off a lot of people. So many that Semmelweis was hounded into a like hounded into like having a mental break and then forced into a mental asylum where he was beaten by guards and died of an infected injury because they weren't washing their hands. They weren't washing their fucking hands. I mean, my God, I do get a lot of joy when I know something that my doctor brother doesn't.

Yeah. I'm like, ha ha ha. Iggy Simmelweis, the father of being like, wash your fucking hands, people. God. Now...

Is everybody just so tiny? Just so tiny? Wash your hands. I mean, they do it now. They got around to it. We just had to lose a luminary first. Now, again, the real... Why would he pick this name? I don't understand. That I don't know because he has nothing to do with this guy, right? Other than maybe he feels like he... I guess I could make a case that like, oh, he probably sees...

The world he's in is filled with like germs, which is, you know, other people having rights. And maybe he's the he's he's the persecuted doctor who like sees the way things should be. Step away from the computer screen. Touch grass. Go to therapy. No, I don't want this guy to go do anything. That's the real dude is an American named Miles Sonkin. Right. That's the actual guy who uses the name. Yeah. All right. I don't know.

weird little guy. OK, the BBC got access to a bunch of leaked chats for its documentary, The Man Who Groomed the World. The journalist behind it, Matt Shea, came away with the opinion that Sonken is the brains and the ideological weight behind Tate's whole war room operation. And he makes a pretty good case. Again, I disagree with aspects of it. Shea has put more time into this than I have.

And he spent a lot of time around Tate. He's met Sonken in person. He's met a number of key figures here. So I'm going to yield to his expertise, even though I'm not sure I agree with him entirely. And we'll talk about who this guy is. But first, let's talk about who our advertisers are, other than great people, which they are.

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Sonken was born in Chicago, 1961, and he's been described in interviews by family members as a smart kid. And here's the most dangerous word we ever use on the show. He was also an autodidact, right? So he's this kid who learns a lot on his own and doesn't really go to high school, but educates himself and

Now, unfortunately, when you do that, there tend to be holes in your education. I feel like you can get pretty siloed into some weird shit. Yeah. This is one of our great problems is that if the things you're interested in wind up being worth a lot of money, you can get by never learning about anything else and also convincing yourself that you understand the world because you've made a lot of money.

And I think that's kind of what's going to happen to Sonken. And he pays an initial, he pays initially some like consequences for it because he immediately gets sucked into two different cults. I just sent Ian a picture of the guy. That's why his face is doing that. Oh yeah. He does look like a wizard, right? He looks like an evil wizard. Yes. This is so bad. This beard is terrible.

terrible oh yeah oh yeah no i'll believe he's using the fucking dentist system to get his get himself a harem yeah yeah uh malcolm please insert the uh a picture here please there's there's a there's a good one you'll know which one yeah wizard

So his self-education makes him kind of vulnerable to getting taken advantage of as a young man. And as a result, he joins two different cults, right? When he's a young person. I said today, two different organizations widely regarded as cults. And the second is the Rajneesh movement, who was the focus of the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. So he gets sucked into that for a while as a young man. And I think like the 80s, late 80s or 90s.

Now, the details of his specific involvement in either cult are not available at this time, but over the years, Songken evolved from a spiritual seeker into someone who believed that he in fact had the answers. During the early age of the social internet, he became a pickup artist and was one of the first prominent ones online. Starting like the late 90s, early 2000s, he's like on the ground floor of pickup artistry as like an online subculture.

He gets really interested in hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming alongside this. And he began to become an advocate of mind-controlling women by repeating certain words and phrases. You might recognize this as Pavlovian training applied to dating. And he seems to be the origin of Tate's, you know, get them to bring you chocolate, you know.

establish a pattern of obedience in order to break their ability to think separately from you. Now, Sanken is also a self-described wizard. He believes he literally, he's literally casting spells on people. He does that to this journalist when he tries to like interview Andrew Tate. Well, the look matches, so. He does have like a little bit of a Saruman. If Saruman got his hair done behind a 7-Eleven look. Yeah.

Sanken is a self-described wizard, and as he got into magic, he got more interested in the more esoteric segments of the far right through the early aughts, the weird Hitlerism shit. And this is all growing up kind of, for the most part, before people become super aware of it. And then Gamergate helps flood a lot of it, and then the alt-right. Sanken is kind of right in the middle of that.

He and Tate seem to have started working together in 2018, and at this point, Andrew Tate is basically a late undergrowth of the pickup artist community, focused on camera sex work type stuff. It's unclear how Miles is involved with him, but I think he probably helps to write and formulate a lot of the courses that Andrew was selling during this period. A former member of the War Room, which was established in 2019, describes Iggy as at the top and the real leader of the platform.

And it's, you know, I don't know if I like taking away credit from Tate for being, you know, a puppet master, but these guys are both definitely partners, you know? Sure. And the kind of things Tate's teaching, a lot of these are not things he came up with himself or wrote himself. They're things Semmelweis kind of had on deck that Tate decided to slap his name on. And even this has layers, right?

One former member described the War Room as a bunch of telegram chats, some for business or girls or money, but there are more prestigious rooms that users who have already put in thousands of dollars are expected to shell out thousands more to join. In messages on the War Room telegram, we can see Sanken posting a Semmelweis and giving the same advice Tate gives from that speech we listened to earlier.

And this is a message from him to war members. Isolating her from her family, friends, past is the kindest thing you can do for her if you are taking responsibility for having sole authority over her.

And then in another post, we deliberately reduce attention and note if she chases. Then we set up a coffee date and execute a move to find if she's willing to pay for our coffee and serve us. After that, it becomes a series of gradual steps to remove her entire support structure from her life. Then we punish her for her transgression, real or imagined, by having her get our name tattooed on her, leaving her family's home apartment town country. Webcamming and stripping, walking the track for us, getting us girls, escalate, escalate, escalate.

So this is really Keith Raniere stuff. They're doing the branding thing, right? Where you have to get tattoos or scarify yourself with the name of this guy. Yeah. It's pretty gross. It's pretty gross.

Now, I think it'd be wise if you wanted to do so, to view the war room and the real world as kind of a modern day answer to the Church of Scientology. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There's so many parallels. I was thinking of this the entire time. Ton of parallels. And obviously, Hubbard is a reflection of the big self-help movement.

culture of his time. Scientology starts off as an offshoot of the self-improvement movement with a book called Dianetics, which instructed readers on a series of exercises that would clear them of trauma and bad habits and make them superhuman.

One of the dominant subcultures of the early internet age, as I've said, was the pickup artist scene. And the inherent scamminess of a lot of this culture influenced the growth of the modern YouTube scam economy, as well as the ecosystem of far-right content creators who helped birth the Trump administration.

So it does make sense that Tate and Sonkin would form a cult around what is at its essence rebranded pickup artistry. The BBC documentary makes it sound like this was all Sonkin's plan from the beginning, and it quotes former members who described his ultimate goal as world domination through the spread of his ideology, right? He wants to get this to everybody. He wants to take over the world with this. But also, how is anyone going to make money with their cam businesses in that future? Sure. Ugh.

It's like if you wanted to take over the world by building a bunch of tire shops. Well, at a certain point, your tire shops aren't going to be worth any money. Do you not understand supply and demand? I don't know. Not the most logical movement. No, math not adding up at all here. Yeah, the math's not really adding up.

So Samuel Quinones was interviewed for a Vice article. He is a founding member of the War Room, but says that he quit about six months in because, quote, I recognize the upselling of useless courses and events, much like an MLM. Okay. Okay. So dumb enough to join, smart enough to leave. Yeah. There's another guy who's like, yeah, I was working on their socials for a while. I didn't realize they were trafficking women. And the interviewer asked, like, do you feel bad for that? And he's like,

Well, no, I didn't really know what was going on. Okay, man, I don't know.

There were still some unknowns, such as how much financial advantage is taken of in the war room, inner circle members, right? We don't know if Andrew's getting money from each of these guys in the war room, a cut of their profits from trafficking women. But we do know that about 1% of the people who join actually get a lot of money, which is not super different from Amway, right? Yeah, I was going to ask, were there any success stories or people who actually did get rich from this? And it sounds like-

No, it's hard to really tell. But I mean, I'm sure there are definitely people making money from having women do this for them. But anyone who winds up net in the black is fairly rare.

No, no.

I don't know. I don't know. Like, if you could be convinced not to go to university because you're hoping that, like, you could become the next Andrew Tate, maybe you shouldn't be getting whatever degree you were getting. Right. There's this, like, trend on TikTok right now that's, like,

I just needed a hug thing. It's like, did something crazy, but really just needed a hug. And it's just so many of these things. I'm like, you just need one person. One person being aware of what was going on in your life to be like, hey, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's an MLM. Or like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Manosphere, manosphere. Or no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't abuse women.

And the thing that you're being kind of continually pushed to do in the real world is put out more videos that will get more people to subscribe to Tate services. And if you get out enough, you have a certain number of people watching you, you get affiliate status, right? Which is where you get a cut of people who join and you pay into Tate programs through your videos.

So top war room generals act as social enforcers using humiliation to force young men to go into war mode where they would labor for days, often 16 to 20 hours at a time with very little sleep in order to make Tate content go viral. States were required to post four to six videos a day and harassed with their met if their metrics weren't good enough. And, you know, I would make more about how horrible this is, but a lot of this just sounds out how like working at Facebook is right now. So I don't know, could be a better boss, could be worse. Yeah.

Both in the war room itself, discussion tended to focus around sharing clips of text with messages from different women members who were, from different women that members were pursuing or trying to converse into what we would call trafficking. The most granular write-up of how people converse in the war room documentary, in the war room, come from the sub stack of a guy called Crabman, who was the source for the NBC's documentary, right? He brings them some of these leaked documents and he takes great pains to break down what's going in in the onage of these discussions.

In one chat in the Great Hall, which seems to be a general discussion area, Tristan described how well-trained Andrew's girls are and that girls who don't play ball are expelled. Crabman writes, Here's the thing. It's all a game to Andrew. He tells our War Room members, You have to risk it all by losing to get to the next bet.

Sometimes you lose. I've lost girls. Doesn't always work. But that's why you got to find new ones. And the ones that it does work for, those are the ones you keep. That's just how you build a good harem of girls, you know? Because some girls, it's just like it. Some girls, the system works. But if we have another guy, they kind of have like, or whatever outside influences. Sometimes you do lose them when you play hardball. But I play hardball anyway because it's all I'm interested in. I want the 100. I don't want the 5. So I'll gamble it. That's the basic premise. Romantic.

Yeah. Prick. Andrew blames that this PhD test alone, being able to defend himself from angry women, was fundamental to becoming a millionaire, right? A little further down, though, in text within the war room, he complains that nothing he tries works as well since he got famous, right? Quote, girls are too defensive. They instantly assume you message every hot girl. It destroys PhD success rate. Seriously, unless you want to be a sugar daddy, which I don't.

So even he's like, yeah, now that people know my face, nobody wants anything to do with me. Yeah, it's your face, asshole. That's what it is. It's your face. It's not your face. So he's just like basically admitting that like none of this shit really works. But you just got to keep trying and keep giving me money and maybe you'll get lucky. Yeah, exactly.

So he's bragging that his old techniques don't work since he's been verified on social media. Quote, girls are too defensive. They instantly assume you message every hot girl. It destroys PhD success rate. Seriously, unless you want to be a sugar daddy, which I don't.

Other members post pictures of cars that they purportedly bought with funds earned by their harems and give blow-by-blow accounts of their own flirtation journeys. A popular thing to post are messages from women that the poster has ignored as part of Andrew's strategy hinges on denying attention in order to build interest.

So there's just like clips of women being like, when are you coming? Hi, why are you ignoring me? And like, see, look at this wind. I'm not responding to this woman that I like. And it's just, it's both. So dumb. Yeah. It's such like pickup artist in cell stuff. And also such, again, it's the dentist system. Yeah. It's negging. None of it's new.

It's just been repackaged in a way that... Yeah. It's been repackaged to sell an MLM, right? It doesn't matter if this works or...

Some number of men will always, I don't know if it's because of the individual people they're going after or something about their personal characteristics, will be successful enough with this to convince themselves that it's worthwhile. And 99% will have nothing happen, but they'll pay for long enough that it makes it worthwhile, right? It's the same thing with like, yes, some people sell Amway products or at least...

sell a few Amway products and then get a lot of people to sign up for Amway. And so they do make money. That's just about 1% of Amway. Everyone else has kind of taken a bath. Now, there's also kind of in the Raniere vibe within these kind of like the elite war room chats, there's a lot of discussion on how to permanently mark women, which is considered the ultimate sign of success that like you have gotten this person so in your spell that you've gotten them to tattoo your name on their body.

This seems to be a core aspect of Semmelweis's teachings. I think he's the main person who introduced this. It's kind of unclear to me, but all these guys are constantly posting either them attempting to convince women to do this. And...

you know, there's this mix of like people saying no and getting dumped. So this message here is between like Tate. She's like showing him a tattoo that she's got. And he's saying like, I want you to get my name tattooed on you. I don't want this like other tattoo. And, uh,

She's asking him, like, when will we get married? And he says, you know, now, as soon as you you get the tattoo. And she's like, OK, but then if you leave me, I'll still have your name on my body. And that's kind of fucked up. And he's like, why would I leave? Are you saying you're not going to be good to me?

And then there's kind of the most telling thing at the end here is she eventually, he says, yes, it'll make me happy if you get this tattoo. And she says, okay, I'll do it. I cannot write great. My dad does not have to see. So I don't know how old this girl is. Ha ha.

Too young, it sounds like. Very young. Again, these are the people that are being reached out towards, right? These are not adults. These are not people who have mature brains. The whole thing is, but show me with your fingers how big. I'm very uncomfortable.

- Oh. - Yeah, it's gross. Now the messages posted here are from back in 2019. So this is an older era of the war room and it's hard to say where things are now with the culture there since the beginning of the litigation against Andrew.

Mm-hmm.

Now, there's been some good work done to kind of lay out who is involved in this community. The BBC documentary did a lot of it. Bellingcat did an article on it. One of these guys, these people who are like – these are both folks who are presumably paying Andrew thousands or tens of thousands a year but are also working and getting money of their own. You might call them the high-level Amway distributors of the war room in the real world. One of them is a guy who has a YouTube channel called Sartorial Shooter.

Uh, he's a former Australian soldier and a current Dubai resident. A lot of Dubai residencies here, uh, who claims to have gone into the intelligence world and worked all around the planet. He claims to have weapons and tactics trading facilities everywhere. Uh,

Now, as is always the case with these guys, that's a bit of an exaggeration. His real name is Joel Sullivan. He's one of the leading lights of the war room. Bellingcat revealed that he was a former director of international security for a global health care company.

Which is not a nothing job, but it's not exactly James Bond. He wants you to think he's like out here being some sort of like mercenary special operator spy. It's like, no, you worked for like a health care company directing security. And again, there's not nothing there, but it's not quite what you're claiming it is. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Another key general of Andrews goes by the Twitter title First Prince of Wudon, which you'll remember is he's got this sort of pretend mythic story about how he learned to be a martial arts master. The actual guy behind this account is a current Delta pilot and a former U.S. Air Force major who the BBC detailed posting about his use of Tate's techniques to try and coerce women into doing sex work for his financial benefit. Yeah, it's all just like the grossest...

Some of them do have money. So it's not like these are the people at the top. Number one, they're generally people who have had a degree of success before getting involved in Andrew Tate's thing. So number one, they have some money of their own. So they're able to bootstrap themselves until they can make money getting affiliates, basically, pulling people in and selling stuff.

them on subscriptions, which they seem to get a cut of. And they're also just people who have been more successful. They're older, so they can kind of replicate some degree of the scams that Andrew has carried out. And I really think like that's all that's going on here with these guys.

None of them are. Andrew wants them to look like they're like the secret masters of the world. And they're not that. They're guys who are probably making like mid to low six figure salaries like they're doing well. They've got positions that afford them a decent degree of income and they want to be more. And so I think a lot of this for them and why it's worth it.

Cause you know, a pilot, that kind of income, you can afford to throw eight grand at some shit like this, especially if you're making some of it back through whatever the affiliate scheme pays you. And maybe the fantasy of being part of this like elite group of men is worth more to you than whatever amount of money that you kind of burn. It's like speaks to a larger issue. Like it's not about the money for them or like trying to get rich. It's like a deeper issue, like the control of women and manipulating people and everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, there's a lot that I could really get into, like more stuff about all this here. One of the more difficult parts of doing this was knowing what to cut out and what to include. I do want to note one thing, which is that some of the... One of my favorite...

One of my favorite side facts of this is there's some messages that Tristan Tate posts to the war room about how a guy named Ivan Throne is crashing on their couch in Romania. Have either of you heard of Ivan Throne? No. Not familiar. He's a really low-grade...

manfluencer hack. He's like a big bearded dude who always poses in like a suit or he's got like kind of like a fucking goatee. He always poses in a suit. He wrote this book about like the dark triad man, which is like using the power of sociopathy in order to like make yourself a better business person.

leader or whatnot. And he used to do, he did, he had a Tate style grift that just didn't do well called throne dynamics where like men would pay to go to these summits where they'd eat steak and smoke cigars and talk about, you know, make connections about their, their great businesses, which are again, mostly like pickup artistry, like right wing, like, like low grade right wing propaganda bullshit. And the reason I bring up Ivan is that he was part of my favorite moment in the history of Twitter. Hmm.

So I'm going to share that with you. So he posts a picture of there's this like very photorealistic statue of like a beautiful young white lady with long flowing hair. The fabric work on the statue is really nice. Like you can see she's got this sheer shirt. It's like it's it's like a sexy sculpture, right? Like it's definitely meant to be.

She has nipples. She's got nipples. It's provocative. It's provocative. And Ivan posts this to his Twitter account and says, this is called art. This is the legacy and heritage of the West. This is what the men of the West fight, sacrifice, and die for. This is victory. Hashtag Deus Volt.

And one of his followers asks him, is there an example of a female sculptor who committed himself to the same level of detail that a man does with a woman? And Ivan responds, none that come to mind. That sculpture is an act of worship before heaven, and it shows. And someone just responds with a picture of the artist next to its sculptor and says, the sculptor is a Chinese woman, you dork ass losers. Yeah.

I'm so dumb. And he just like, that was it for Ivan. Like, I understand why he's crashing on Andrew Tate's couch for a while, because that just fucking nukes him as a human being. You can't come back from that. And learning that like Tristan Tate's his buddy and he was like bumming, like couch surfing with the Tates in 2019. They're extremely fucking funny to me.

Now, one of the other things that's kind of missed the great mysteries that's answered from these leaks is why Andrew keeps coming back to Romania, which I had to have to admit, as I kept looking through like what he's doing, what's going on with him. This was like a constant thing for me. Like, why in the fuck is this guy not he's got he does have money. He's not poor. He's got millions, at least that they still didn't have access to. They didn't get everything.

He has friends in Dubai. He is able to, he could get a permanent residency in Dubai. And if you think you might go to prison for all of your sex crimes and you're this guy, Dubai is where you want to wind up. And the fact that he like visited and then came back, that he went back to Romania. I didn't know why until I found this post of his on the war room, um,

That I think kind of explains it, right? I've been everywhere, and let me tell you a few things. The world is basically the same. Temples and churches are bullshit, and you're better off finding the best spot you can and becoming a local force than float around all day like a digital nomad dork. There's no club on earth better than the club here in Romania. I have 20 girls at the table. Security knows me. No one fucks with me. Why leave? And I think that really gets right down to it, is he's like, he's found his place, and

He's pretty confident that Romania will botch the prosecution against him enough that he can continue to live there. And I think he doesn't really want to live in Dubai because as much of a stereotypical place as it is for guys like him, it doesn't have the same kind of opportunities for the sort of debauchery that he's into, right? It's a stricter culture in some ways than that, even for some guys with money.

And he could if he was posting the kind of videos that he tends to post, he could get in trouble at some point. And I think he's just he's just convinced of the fact that he can make this work for himself. That's that's really what I'm saying. Yeah. And it's like they treat him like a god in Romania. It's like, why would I go anywhere else? Like, I'm pretty good here. Yeah. And he might get away. Yeah. You know? Yeah. All right. That's what I got. That's the Andrew Tate update. That's where he is right now.

So it sounds like he's still a piece of shit. Okay. Still a piece of shit. Update. Ew. Yep. Update. Ew. Gross guy. We're done with him for a while again. Probably don't have to go back to Andrew Tate for a minute until some of these court cases get more adjudicated, right? Yeah. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. Gross. So that's it. That's our update on Andrew.

Ian, you have anything you want to plug?

I just want to plug the Los Angeles Lakers and my glorious King, LeBron James playoffs are about to start Lakers in five. That's all I got to say. And listen to hood politics. It's a good show. Listen to hood politics. It's a good show. Don't subscribe to the war room. So if we should have a place, people can give us $8,000 a year if they want to. Wouldn't that be nice? Cool. The coolest zone media. We're not, we're not that desperate. Give me $8,000 zone media.

If we're ever asking you for $8,000, it's not us. It's a scam. Something's gone terribly wrong. Unless I say it's definitely me. Yeah. In which case, it's definitely me. I would never lie to you. Unless someone cloned my voice with AI. In which case, I would definitely lie to you. Oh, God. You know, Andrew Tate isn't great. Andrew Tate isn't great. My mate.

All right. Sophie's going to go watch the Lakers. I'm going to like stand outside in the sun or some shit. Yeah. They don't even play today. I'm just excited. Yeah. Great.

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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