Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.

I'm producer Mia Cirenti. In recent years, the little-known kickboxer turned reality TV star Andrew Tate has become a figurehead for a burgeoning sphere of toxic masculinity online.

Drawn in by his shock tactics and displays of wealth, his viral video content has helped radicalise a whole generation of young men. But who is Andrew Tate? And how did he become such a troubling online phenomenon? And how did he come to face alleged criminal accusations, ranging from human trafficking to money laundering? Documentary makers Jamie Tarzin and Matt Shea have spent over four years reporting on Andrew Tate from inside his world.

Their work for outlets such as Vice has covered the rise of Andrew Tate, as well as topics ranging from drug use to teenagers drawn to crime. Their new book is Clown World, four years inside Andrew Tate's manosphere. Carl Miller, the technology researcher, author and host of the hit podcast Kill List, spoke to Jamie and Matt to find out more. All right, well, welcome to Intelligence Squared, everyone. I'm Carl Miller, and our guests today are Jamie Tarson and Matt Shea.

Jamie Tarson is an award-winning documentary director, producer and journalist. He's best known for Emmy-nominated Vice documentaries like The Teenage Mafia Academy and The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate. And Matt Shea is also an award-winning documentary director, producer and presenter who's worked on films including the Emmy-nominated Gaycation and Grierson-nominated Chemsex. He produces and presents High Society on Vice about drug use in the UK.

And together they've been investigating for many years now Andrew Tate's Manosphere from the inside. Their new book, Clown World, documents the four years of this fascinating and disturbing investigation. Tracking takes rise from fairly small Manosphere influencer all the way up to the kind of prominence that he reached at its peak and the threat that he poses. So welcome to Intelligence Squared, Jamie and Matt.

Thanks for having us. Thank you. How did you first come across Andrew Tate? What made you begin to want to kind of dig into him? Yeah, it was late 2019 and Matt and I were both working at Vice Media and I was making a lot of films about sort of cults and conspiracy theories, looking at sort of the 5G movement, basically just sort of disinformation groups that had a cult-like attitude. A friend and colleague of ours called Lexi Rose

Her best friend's younger brother had become obsessed with this guy called Andrew Tate. He wasn't that famous. He had about 50,000 Instagram followers, but what he did have was something called the War Room. He sold a number of online packages, courses that you could buy from him, but the most premium product was this thing called the War Room, an elite network of men.

his own words and for a cost of about three thousand pounds at the time three thousand pounds a year you could join the war room get access to Andrew Tate and his elite Network and learn from them how to be just like him this young man this 21 year old friend of a friend's younger brother had joined that group and it sort of immediately peaked my interest from there

And we're going to I mean, we have to tackle, I suppose, the so-called philosophy of Andrew Tate, because it's it's kind of weird tangle, isn't it? Like hypercapitalist in one sense, kind of self-actualizing in another. It speaks to masculinity. It speaks to the kind of enemy maybe that lots of young men are going through. Matt, how would you kind of piece it together? Tate's worldview. First of all, I have to say that this.

the extent to which he actually has a genuine worldview is questionable because I think what we uncovered in this book is that his main intention is really to sell online courses to make money and to do so through amplifying and prying open young men's insecurity and filling it with his own marketing and presenting himself as the solution to that insecurity about the masculinity. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he does have a worldview.

the most prominent kind of underpinning of that worldview is that the world is dominated by violence. It's something he says quite frequently. All the world is violence, and therefore the stronger man, and it is a man's goal in life to be stronger than other men, is the one who has the most power and might makes right, basically. I remember he once said,

if someone invaded England, if an army invaded England, would you want this? And he said to me, Would you want your kind of liberal, woke friends fighting them? Or would you want people like me and my brother? I began to realize, actually, wait, no, I wouldn't want, you know, Andrew Tate's fighting to defend England because I would want my army to follow the Geneva Convention and have some kind of morality. So, yeah, it really is violence over morality.

And then the money aspect, because kind of enrichment, personal enrichment is extremely important, isn't it? Both for Tate, the credo that he professes and the world that he's gathered around him. But it struck me reading your book that their kind of understanding or interaction with

the economy seems to be like extremely like kind of surface level. They kind of portray themselves as striking these deals, you know, and kind of but it doesn't it's quite unclear, in fact, what they're actually doing, apart from making money from the very audiences that they're claiming that they're enriching. It's really, really strange.

when you think about the fact that there are millions and millions of young men out there just doing deals and kind of doing all these weird methods of making money that Andrew teaches in his courses. But it's really, as you said, it's really unclear what they are and their parents don't know what it is that they're doing. A lot of it is like drop shipping, which is, you know, buying stuff cheaply in bulk and then reselling it for a higher price. A lot of it is crypto trading, which is often in the form of, you know,

a pump and dump scheme promoted by someone within the network on social media. But yeah, really, I mean, it's this kind of vacuum, like strange nebulous world of deals and money making that he seems to operate in. I think it speaks to the power of his marketing as well, because

Lots of young men are attracted to him, not just because of the misogyny, but also because they see him as some sort of like entrepreneurial genius, this guy who came from a working class background in Luton and is now, if you believe his own words, a billionaire.

Almost certainly not, but that's what he claims. When you actually analyze the various ways in which Andrew Tate appears to have made money throughout his life, he had a short stint on reality TV. He claims himself he ran a webcam company, which is now being investigated. So another way he made money was by allegedly exploiting women in sex work.

He ran casinos. When we first started speaking to him in 2019, he was opening casinos. Those casinos were apparently involved with an organized criminal group from Eastern Europe. So he's hardly...

actually a business mastermind, right? He's someone who's acquired some money through a series of alleged crimes, but he's managed to convince a number of a large number of young men that he is the person who can teach them about how to succeed in this fraught economy. The top G, as they call him. Tell us a bit about the PhD course and specifically the kind of webcam experience.

kind of like business that he both seemed to have developed, but then also taught other people to try and build themselves. Yeah. So when we first started speaking to Andrew Tate, he was at that time running a webcam company. At least he said he was, but he'd been doing that since about 2015 back in the UK.

And he claims he made millions of pounds from doing this, getting women to essentially strip on webcam and give him a large proportion of their earnings, if not all of them. And the reason he claimed he was able to extract so much money from these women and be so successful in his business was because these women started off as his girlfriends. That was what he would say. So he thought...

how can I sell a package teaching other men to do what I've done? I've now accrued these millions of pounds. I know other young men want women and they want money. I can sell them that package. So he created a course called the PhD, which stands for the pimping hose degree. And in that course, Andrew Tate basically lays out step by step his methods for

Finding online and then recruiting in real life women who you think are susceptible to being gradually manipulated into working in the webcam industry and giving you the money. And beyond that, then in his ideal world,

those same women will help you recruit more women to work for you. And in that PhD course, he says the methodology that he's teaching is very similar to what pimps do, street pimps. But what Andrew Tate did was apply it through a sort of modern social media lens.

So he says the main tool you'll use to get women and find them, for example, is Instagram. That was what he would do to seek out young women. And then rather than having them walk the streets, as a pimp might do, he claims he would have them sit and work on webcam. This course wasn't...

hugely popular at the start, it sort of bubbled around in the manosphere. But what we later found out through our investigations was that if you joined Andrew Tate's War Room, the PhD course became an integral part of what you were taught. So Andrew Tate ended up by 2022 having a network of hundreds of men who paid him thousands of pounds a year. And one of the key tenants of what they were learning was how to apply his methods of grooming women

to get women to make the money in the webcam industry. And so to investigate all of this, you both kind of took the decision that you needed to actually get physically on the inside of the war room and especially the test. Tell us what that was like. I mean, even just reading it, that sound, I was so scared for you both. I mean, it was extremely gutsy what you did. Yeah, I think...

We didn't know what the test was either going into it. No one did. Andrew Tate kept it a secret. But what it was, was this War Room Summit. So again, these are men who've paid thousands of dollars to be a part of Andrew Tate's War Room and attend this event. They're driven to the mountains in Transylvania. When they arrive, Andrew Tate's generals give a few speeches, including his spiritual grandmaster.

a kind of like masculinity shaman guy who we can get into later. And they're all building up this moment. And then Andrew Tate comes on stage, the kind of the master and commander of the war room. And everyone's, you know, in awe of him. You know, they've watched this guy's videos probably for hours and hours on end, staying up all night. And here he is in the flesh. And he says,

In three days time, you will be given the chance to participate in the test. Each of you has been paired up against a professional mixed martial artist and they're trained to kill you. You are not going to win this fight.

no matter how prepared you think you are. You don't have to do it. You can back out at any time. That's it. It's a real fight, you know? And then we were told to either write a piece of paper, whether we'd say yes or no. And you could change your decision over the course of three days. If you said no, you were made to sit facing a wall and journal about how shameful you are as a man, which is kind of hilarious, but also kind of terrifying because you

What he's done there is he's created this pressure cooker of male insecurity where your options are impress Andrew Tate by getting the shit kicked out of me or be shamed by Andrew Tate's generals for not doing this. It's really playground mentality there. I did say yes and did go through with the

quote fight um I say quote because it was basically just me getting beaten up um and Jamie as what was going through your head as you were seeing Matt right yes on that piece of paper

To be honest, I was really, really hopeful that Matt was going to be one of the people that said yes, found out a little bit more information and then right before the fight said, no, this is stupid. You were like, oh, great, great. It's a ploy. It's a ploy. Kind of. Yeah. And to be honest, I'd said to Matt multiple times, I don't think you should do this. Like, it's not a very controlled environment. Andrew Tate doesn't really like you very much. You're from the liberal media. He's invited us here. But like.

I was just terrified of what was going to happen in that ring. Was he going to get knocked unconscious? Was it all a set up? Andrew Tate was great at trolling the media and getting engagement bait. And I wondered, was this just a very clever ploy from him to get this journalist out to the woods in Transylvania and embarrass him and film it and get content?

um matt is probably one of the most like determined and brave people i've ever worked with so he obviously was happy to go through with the fight but when he wrote yes and the most susceptible to challenges to my master perhaps um but i was just praying he would say no but he he didn't he got in the ring and to be honest once he got in the ring and i saw that his uh

don't want to sound mean here Matt but his attempt at fighting was basically just running away from this guy and then when he got punched a few times like kind of hugging him until he submissed you submitted you I felt like basically as soon as the fight started I was like okay this is gonna this is gonna be all right but there were people getting knocked out there was blood all across the cage um it could have gone worse if I had actually tried to to

win which obviously i didn't because like i've never boxed or anything in my life and this person is a professional mma fighter but those other men that did get basically there was a direct correlation between like how hard you tried to win the actual fight and how hard you're going to get beaten and loads of these men we were speaking to them before they go through and they're like i'm trying to win i'm going to win this dog i've got it they're like these are untrained fights these are guys no formal fight training a lot of them aren't in very good shape they were it could be like

It could be like a 19-year-old guy you see in entertainment videos on Instagram, or it could be like a divorced dad who now hates women and he's overweight and unhealthy and he's going into the ring. These were literally professional fighters from Poland and Russia. Yeah. Yeah.

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for 24-7 support in Massachusetts or call 1-877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York. And Jamie, I mean, the point, a bit of journalism, I guess, that people see less of is your fraught, responsible role as a producer in all this. And, you know, I imagine you were like phoning your bosses back in London and the insurance companies and everything else. I mean, it must have been absolutely terrifying to see your presenter. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's not something you're normally prepared for. We did have multiple calls with the security team. And to be honest, they were happy for Matt to do it once he got a bit of basic training, which was basically like, how can you fall over without really injuring yourself? But I mean, that was the great thing about working at Vice is they were willing to...

let producers and let directors make on the ground risk assessments as you go, right? And if it ever got to a situation where I thought Matt was actually like, really, I mean, I was standing right by the ring. If he'd taken a big punch, I would have tried to jump him. But basically, what would you have done? Just thrown myself in front of you and become a human shield. Anything but get sued. No, I think like,

With all of these kind of stories, right? You have to push yourself in really far if you want to get the most access possible. And

through saying yes to these sorts of things and through Matt's bravery, we didn't just get to do an interview with Andrew Tate. We got to spend, we got to have conversations with him over like a four or five year period. We got to go to his house in Romania. We got to meet with him for drinks in London. We got to go for interviews in London. And then we got invited into his closed door secret society and got to meet all these other men. If we had just from the get-go said no to his crazy suggestions, we would have been kicked out. And then

I don't think we would have uncovered all of the really important stuff that we did. And so you returned back from Romania and your relationship with Tate begins to fray, doesn't it, as you pivot your investigation towards the unbelievably harrowing testimony of women that have been, well, I suppose victimised by him. Tell us a bit about what you began to hear.

We'd had suspicions about Tate since we first started reporting on him. As we mentioned, he has a course called the Pimping Hose Degree. He had this webcam business which had red flags all over it. And there was a few other things we picked up on. He was following a number of pretty young women from across Romania on his Instagram. They weren't celebrities or influencers, and there was no real logical explanation for why this man in his 30s would be following them.

But so when we first when we went to Romania with Tate in 2022, which was when he was at the height of his fame, Matt did ask him about the lover boy method, which is a specific type of

grooming human trafficking used by pimps and human traffickers, where you basically portray yourself as romantically interested in someone, sell them a sort of dream life, dream scenario. I want to marry you. I want to have kids. And once you have them sort of ensnared and have potentially moved them to another location to be with you, you then start to turn on them and manipulate them into sex work. And we asked them about that.

in 2022. And that was kind of the start of the fraying of the relationship. When we got back to London was when we basically uncovered allegations of not just grooming, but also sexual assault and serious physical assault from women who had either dated Tate back in 2014, 2015, or women who had worked for Tate in his webcam company.

And these are allegations that he denies. But these women, when he James's work for his webcam company, this was in Luton before he moved to Romania. And it appeared, if what they're saying was true, that the methods he developed for grooming women, which he then taught to millions of young men through social media, which then directed them to his courses,

were perhaps developed in Luton when he was running a webcam house there. The reaction to your story, because you then released a documentary, don't you? A very visible, award-winning documentary. And there's been a huge reaction, isn't there, to the allegations that you're making and the testimonies that you're platforming. What was that like? Well, it was pretty disheartening because, you know, we thought when people see

including Andrew Tate fans, when they see the accounts of these women who, through their own tears, detail their allegations about how they say they were sexually assaulted, physically abused by Andrew Tate, we thought surely this will be the end of any kind of

support for him. And yet that was completely not the case. We had people saying that these women were actresses, that they were paid, that they were lying. And many people didn't watch our documentaries. They only watched Andrew Tate's own clipped out bits with his own editing that he released on social media.

And according to Andrew Tate and his supporters, and he has a vast network of supporters on social media, according to them, our documentary had been debunked and discredited and we were totally discredited as journalists. So when people came up to us in the street and you recognize, for example, me from the films, they would be coming up to us as, oh, you're the guy who like was lying about Andrew Tate and got totally disproved and debunked. Have you seen the documentary? Like, no, no. But I just heard that, you know, it was completely disproven.

You could really see the like dual information spheres that we live with in action in that, like, if you spoke to, you know, normal friends, colleagues, etc. Or like looked at the reviews in the press, they were all relatively positive. And there was lots of support for the women who had made these allegations against Andrew Tate. But then if you spoke to any, you

Andrew Tate found or a lot of men who just spent too much time on Twitter in particular, you would see this polar opposite understanding. And you speak to people that think that our documentary and its debunking is the reason why Vice went bankrupt. Matt had people claiming that he was a stooge being fed lines by a giant media organization, sort of whispering things into his ear. There was an allegation that I was an FBI informant. They just so much disinformation came out of the film.

that it was really shocking to be in the middle of it, right? Because you always hear about online disinformation, these crazy conspiracy theories, but to open your phone and see that there's a video of 700,000 views saying that you secretly work for the FBI or that Matt is a top Matrix agent, it was a very unusual situation to be in, but I could only imagine a million times worse for those alleged victims, right? Because they've

They went through a four-year police investigation. Some of these women are now speaking to us seven years after the alleged incidents occurred. They've been fighting for that long to try and get justice. And from a significant portion of the population, the response was,

not even that I don't believe you, but that you're not even real. You're an actress. So it wasn't so much even that they didn't believe these women. They entirely discredited them by saying they don't even exist. Has that kind of online and offline pressure, has that kind of continued up to today? Or has that kind of evolved? Was there a kind of spike and then it's and then a kind of a calming down? I mean, to be honest, it does still continue. If anything,

like Twitter or X is slightly turned against Undertaker, but that's only because

Another group that's really active on X are kind of conspiracy theorists who think the world is run by sex trafficking pedophiles who now see Tate as part of that. But yeah, like that disinformation continues. It has been amplified because Tate was then reinstated on X by Elon Musk and became one of the most popular users on the platform. And some of his supporters on Twitter are some of the most popular users on the platform.

And Tate was then, well, he was investigated and arrested and imprisoned and then placed under house arrest. Is that right? Yeah. And then charged. And then charged. Yeah. After six months after his arrest. The trial is sort of getting underway. There have been a number of appeals about the holding of assets and about various pieces of evidence, whether they should be allowed to be submitted. But

It's underway, it's just still going through a number of sort of proceedings that slow it down. It's going to be like human trafficking investigations on average in Romania take about a year to two years, so it won't be an overnight thing. He does now have a second set of additional charges that have been filed against him in Romania, further accounts of human trafficking, including trafficking of a minor and sexual intercourse with a minor. Stepping back and like kind of thinking about

the ability of Andrew Tate to connect with so many men in the way that he has. There's obviously kind of one layer to this, which is just his like capacity to go viral and how he's better at that than lots of other, I suppose, people also competing for attention. But do you think it also says something about a gap that's left at all in the way that kind of masculinity is addressed?

Because it seems that in productive ways, not in the ways that Andrew Tate wants to address masculinity, but in other ways. Because it sounds like from reading your work and reporting that there are lots of men out there that are really struggling with coming to terms with being a man. And he's stepping into a gap that is not necessarily kind of...

being fulsomely kind of like occupied by other more pro-social, less misogynistic, kind of more healthier kind of voices and narratives. Is there anything in that or have I got that completely wrong? No, I think it's a very important question. I just think that this obsession with masculinity is a very new phenomenon. I can't think of

any real benefit that comes from really focusing on masculinity? Say we're talking about how to raise your son, for example. Is there really any benefit teaching him, well, this is how you be the most positive masculine version. This is how you be a correct man. Or is it better to teach them how to be a good person? I think the

obsession with gender and the obsession with masculinity comes from a place of like reactionary insecurity. And I think that it comes from the platform we've afforded to people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson through social media. But I mean, the idea that and this is what a lot of men like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate say that you could no longer be a man.

that you can no longer be a man's man is just a complete fallacy. You can't sexually harass women, but that's always been the case. And that like, there's nothing masculine about sexual harassment, right? You know, so this is basically like a kind of reactionary insecurity that has nothing...

I don't think that there's any real struggle that men face in this day and age in being a man. I mean, I personally have never had any experience with someone. I felt like I can't be a man. I don't know if you guys have.

I also think it speaks to like, this fallacy that Tate and others like him kind of build themselves, right, which is that the world is fundamentally harder for men. And there are some metrics they point to that are true, which we should examine and try and work out what's going on, like why so many young men committing suicide, but they'll also create a whole bunch of logical fallacies and things that just fundamentally aren't statistically true. They'll say it's

Easier for women to get jobs now than it is for men. It's easier for women to make more money. It's easier for women to always get custody of kids. So many of these things that when you actually look at the data isn't true. He wraps that all up with a

a sprinkling of a few true statistics and maybe like a good slogan that would be used by someone like The Rock. And it's really sellable to these young men as to like why they're not happy. Right. And I also think fundamentally most teenage boys, teenage girls, all teenagers, they go through a period of not necessarily being that happy with life. It's an ordinary part of growing up, right? Growing pains. It's why we have that expression applied to adults. And

The difference with perhaps us when we were young teenagers is the people we looked up to weren't there specifically targeting those growing pains, trying to make money out of it, right? We might have looked up to professional footballers or musicians or artists or actors, people that had a skill that we wanted. These young men are looking up to a person who

his sole purpose appears to be how can I manipulate that very insecurity to make money? And that insecurity is key, right? Because when you think about a young man who is falling for this kind of marketing, who believes that they need to, for example, cut out all vegetables and eat a raw meat diet, and that's how they'll be more of a man, and that's how women will like them again.

the kind of man who does that is a man who is insecure. How does men become insecure about their masculinity? Well, partially because they see videos from other men like Andrew Tate who tell them that they're broke, that they're never going to get laid because they're pathetic and weak, right? And so it is a little bit of a chicken and egg question, but I believe that the insecurity of masculinity is driven by people like Tate. Tell us a bit about Iggy.

Because I think via Iggy, it sounded like he was one of your windows into this much deeper vein of...

kind of what would you even call it like quasi mythological kind of substrate that was sitting quite deeply in this community. But at least seemed to me to have some like very distinct kind of cult like characteristics to it, the kind of specific vocabularies that were created and specific kind of hierarchies as well. Yeah, tell us about Iggy and why he was important.

Yeah, so I think Andrew Tate's movement isn't just like a social media phenomenon. But when you look particularly at the war room, there is a real sort of spiritual quasi-religious element to it in the sense that they call it Tateism. They have their own

tenets of Tate, they call them, the sort of philosophies you should live by, rules for life. And they also have an origin myth involving a character they call Master Poe, who is based on Andrew Tate's father. And Iggy Semmelweis, as he called himself, was a man who wore long wizard robes, a big trilby with a big beard. He would sometimes swap those robes for a black velour tracksuit with War Room branding on it. But those were basically his two outfits.

He was the spiritual high priest and grandmaster of the war room. That's his official title. And he also referred to himself as the greatest hypnotist that ever lived.

And immediately he, as you could imagine, stood out to us as a character that seemed very out of place in this group of men smoking cigars, wearing tight suits, talking about making money. And we became quite obsessed with who he really was and why he was in the war room and not only in it, seemingly holding a very high position, if not the most high position in the war room alongside Andrew Tate.

What we uncovered was that Iggy's real name was Myles Sonkin, and he had a long and sordid history, not just in cults, he was a member of two cults, but also he was a figure in the burgeoning manosphere in the 80s and 90s.

And the particular movement of the online manosphere that Iggy became obsessed with was pickup artistry. He was a P-Way, a man who would use various different sort of pseudo-scientific techniques to apparently attract more women to have sex with him. And then he would teach those same techniques to other men who paid money. And Iggy

well, Miles Sonkin, as we now know he was called, he had a pickup artistry character. He called himself Douglas Hall. He had another character in LA that he created that he used to go to sex parties. And we basically found out he was this sort of very unusual person

pretty far right hyper misogynist who adopted different characters throughout his life that he used to sort of serve different purposes. And Iggy Semmelweis was a character he created around 2018, and he formed this union with Andrew Tate where he essentially used the image of Andrew Tate, used Andrew Tate as his figurehead to assemble this cult around him, this cult that we now know to be the War Room.

And Iggy really used cult-like practices to build and maintain that organization. He was obsessed with something called neuro-linguistic programming, which has been used by lots of cult leaders. It's also used by salesmen and it's used in hypnobirthing. It has a number of both nefarious and completely nice ordinary practices.

purposes, right? But Iggy was using it to not only groom the men in the war room to try and make them more reliant on him, but he was also teaching them how to use aspects of NLP to, in his own words,

brainwash women to turn them into again, his own words, sex slaves. Iggy used taught them a method alongside Andrew Tate's PhD course that he likened to Pavlovian conditioning, how you train dogs, and they basically believed they could use that method to gradually make women more dependent on them and more subservient to them up until the point that they would agree to do sex work for them and give them all of the earnings.

I'd like us just to come up to the kind of present day, if we may. So Matt, maybe starting with you, how important is Andrew Tate today to the manosphere as it exists? And what would what will happen to it if

Tate is indeed convicted. Tate's influence will be chipped away by every allegation that's proven true, by every bit of journalism. It's a slow process. It's not as fast and conclusive as we wish it was, but it does chip away. But his ideas have changed not just the manosphere, but the right in the Western world forever. The kind of paradigm shift that Tate caused

was a realignment of really right-wing ideology, especially far-right ideology, into a philosophy of gender, of the West being emasculated by our enemies, and the need for men to kind of become violent again, to also the kind of

the idea that feminism is an enemy and that it has actually given women so much choice that

that it's denied men the sex and the procreation that they feel they are owed by women. And these are ideas that we now see across the spectrum. They bleed into the great replacement theory, the idea that, you know, they bleed into the idea that, you know, white Western men aren't having enough children, that the marriage rate's declining, the birth rate's declining. And also,

The number of young people having sex is declining. All of that has been wrapped up together into this new kind of like male focused right wing ideology that we're seeing in every country in the West across the spectrum.

i think even after tate tate's case comes to an end if he's found guilty i think the the impact of his ideology and what he did in order to become famous will be felt for years to come not just because he has been so influential on some young men but also because he has literally created these sort of mini tapes on social media

There are tons of influencers now with huge followings, people like Aiden Ross, people like Sneeko, these people like Hassan MrOverpaid, he's known as. These people have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers across their platforms. And a number of them were actual members of Andrew Tate's War Room and learned from him how to become famous and how to use his techniques to achieve virality.

What Andrew Tate did in by what Andrew Tate did, perhaps unintentionally, by becoming so famous while being such a viral misogynist, was show loads of other young men that that was also a possible route to fame and money. Not just that they should be misogynist, but that they should actually become these hyper misogynistic characters and push those narratives out on social media. So whereas Tate was an anomaly when he popped up on my computer screen in 2019, I watched his videos and thought,

God, there's no one out there saying things this abhorrent so confidently and with such a like laugh and wink about it. If that was to happen now, he would just be run of the mill because genuinely every time I open up Twitter, Rumble, TikTok, you see TikToks

tens, 20, hundreds of these men with these same lines, these same narratives, just searching for that engagement. I think that is an effect of Andrew Tate that can't be overlooked. If you end Andrew Tate, the philosophy still lives on.

Well, Jamie, Matt, thank you very much. That was Jamie Tarson and Matt Shea, everyone. And they're the authors of Clown Worlds, four years inside Andrew Tate's manosphere, which is available now online or at a bookshop near you. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti. Thanks for joining us.

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