CZM Rewind: The Andrew Tate Story (Part 1 & 2)

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Speaker 12 hey everybody robert here first off uh we are doing a rewind week because i've written two new andrew tate episodes uh but also my birthday came recently. We took some time off.

Speaker 12 So we're going to take this week to replay the first four Tate episodes with ad breaks and stuff removed.

Speaker 12 I also wanted to tell you, Ed Zittron is in the running for a Webbby for his show Better Offline, as is Molly Conger for Weird Little Guys. Please go to the Webbies, vote for them.

Speaker 12 You can find the links in the show notes along with our other links. You can also just Google Ed Zittron Webbies,

Speaker 12 Molly Conger Webbies, and you will find them. Please do vote for them.

Speaker 12 We'll be back next week with two brand new episodes on what Tate has been up to over the last couple of years and a bunch of really fucked up information that's come up.

Speaker 12 So please enjoy these episodes, the reruns with less ads, and go vote in the Webbies.

Speaker 1 Welcome to hell, motherfuckers!

Speaker 12 I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that has just encountered one of the worst disasters of its career.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 12 we'll get into this more later.

Speaker 12 This is supposed to be and is going to be the first of several episodes about Andrew Tate and the mytho-poetic men's movement that led to his rise to fame and influence among a generation of young men.

Speaker 12 We started recording this episode just a few hours ago with the wonderful April Clark and Grace Freud of the Girl God podcast.

Speaker 12 They have, and anyway, we recorded a little bit with them and then I had a minor emergency, which has taken me out of the house for a while. Things are okay.

Speaker 12 You don't need to flip out on Reddit or whatever, but it was a problem. And we were not able to record with them, to finish recording with them.
And because of the holiday, we have no backlog.

Speaker 12 So, in order to get this episode done and ready for our editor, ASAP, Sophie is going to be my guest today, along with Ian, our editor.

Speaker 12 And we will get this out as soon as possible because otherwise we will not have a show and we are contractually obligated to provide you with entertainment every single week until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 12 But I do want to shout out April and Grace, who are wonderful, who came on and booked time for us. And I'm sorry that things got messed up.

Speaker 12 We will have them back on the pod at some point in the near future. And I wanted to let people know that

Speaker 12 they have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February 25th. And people can get tickets for that show at girlgodshow.com.
You can also check out their podcast.

Speaker 12 Just type Girl God and any of the things that have podcasts. And you can listen to their awesome show.
Thank you so much again, April and Grace. I'm sorry that there was a minor calamity.

Speaker 12 Now, welcome to the pod, Sophie and Ian.

Speaker 1 How are y'all doing?

Speaker 1 So well. So

Speaker 1 Ian. Great night.
Ian is Ian Johnson, by the way. He edits a lot of our shows and is also

Speaker 1 one half of Gladiator with

Speaker 1 fellow editor DJ Dannell.

Speaker 1 And we do have the full gladiator on staff, which I like to bring up as much as possible.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Sophie. I appreciate the love.

Speaker 17 And yeah, you know, it's Friday.

Speaker 17 Ready for the weekend. Let's talk some tape.
You know, let's do it.

Speaker 1 Friday. Let's get into it.
Friday, but also almost Saturday.

Speaker 1 And Ian is currently in his closet.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and we may start drinking in the near future.

Speaker 1 It might need to happen.

Speaker 17 You know, let's do it.

Speaker 1 All right, Robert. But yeah, Ian,

Speaker 12 actually, have you been on just as one of our podcasts before? You have not

Speaker 12 well, you know, Ian, people should know about you. Again, you're one half of Gladiator.
You're a longtime friend of our other editor, DJ Dannell.

Speaker 12 You are

Speaker 12 a legendary podcast editor, and you had absolutely no involvement in the July 16th plane crash that cost John F. Kennedy Jr.
his life off the Massachusetts coast. No involvement at all.

Speaker 12 I don't know why people, yeah, don't bring it up.

Speaker 1 That's weird. He had nothing to do with it.
Why are you talking about that?

Speaker 12 Just to let people know, Ian had nothing to do with it. Ian, Sophie, what do y'all know about Andrew Tate?

Speaker 17 So my limited knowledge of him is he's a, I believe, a former MMA fighter who I don't know how he made a lot of money, but it seems like he has a lot of money from what he's seen on the internet.

Speaker 1 We'll be talking about how, yeah.

Speaker 17 And he's into a lot of misogynistic men rights rights kind of stuff. And he got thoroughly destroyed online by Greta.
So I do remember that.

Speaker 17 And I think he's in jail now.

Speaker 12 He is in jail now.

Speaker 12 Unrelated to the Greta stuff. There was a little bit of confusion about that.
But yes, he is in jail for sex trafficking in Romania.

Speaker 12 Sophie, is that more or less your understanding of the guy?

Speaker 1 Yeah, he fucking sucks. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He does indeed.

Speaker 12 He does indeed fucking suck.

Speaker 12 Unfortunately, he's also kind of worth studying in detail because he's managed to do something with social media that I don't think anyone else has ever managed to the same degree of success.

Speaker 12 He's smart in one very specific way, even though he also did a bunch of dumb things and some really dumb crimes that hopefully have ruined his life.

Speaker 12 He was smart in a way that... has allowed him to become dangerously influential to an entire generation of teenage boys

Speaker 12 in a way that, like, no one on earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump is really the only other guy that I might put next to Tate in that kind of thing.

Speaker 12 And I think Tate has a wider appeal among Gin Z, teens, and tweens than certainly Trump ever had.

Speaker 1 It's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content shows up. Yeah.

Speaker 12 We're going to be talking about all that.

Speaker 12 I am one of the things when I started looking into this guy, there's a ton of articles about, because he blew up kind of mid-2021, up until, you know, the arrest a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 12 There's not profile articles on him that like go into detail about his background and his past and his entire rise to power. You'll generally the best articles you'll find in places like BuzzFeed or

Speaker 12 I think we have a couple from like The Guardian. They'll like summarize his backstory in two or three paragraphs.

Speaker 12 I wanted to get into who this guy is and where he came from because he kind of pops out of nowhere if you don't follow that. I think this is the first time anyone's really done that.

Speaker 12 So I think this will be valuable for that. But I want to start by laying out why we have to take Tate seriously and kind of explain the scale of

Speaker 12 sort of his influence.

Speaker 12 I am not exaggerating when I say that he is maybe the most influential single person on teen and preteen males in the U.S. and the UK and some other parts of the West than anyone else on planet Earth.

Speaker 12 In fall of 2022, financial services company Piper Sandler released a survey of 14,500 U.S. teens taken between August and September of that year.

Speaker 12 Tate was the number one influencer on the list in terms of popularity. He beat Kanye West, he beat Mr.
Beast, he beat Dwayne The Rock Johnson, all of them.

Speaker 1 Not Mr.

Speaker 12 Beast.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I don't know who Mr. Beast is, but he's somebody.

Speaker 1 He's a YouTuber.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he's a YouTuber. I know Elon Musk joked about giving him control of Twitter, or he asked, whatever.
I don't know anything about him. I'm sure you're fine, Mr.
Beast. Or he's horrible.

Speaker 12 He's horrible.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, whatever. Anybody who's that famous on YouTube, I'm a little bit like,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 12 No good people get famous on YouTube, which is what I text our friend Cody Johnston every single day when he releases a new YouTube video. Fair.

Speaker 12 Anyway, the Andrew Tate hashtag on TikTok has received more than 10 billion views over the course of 2022 alone, which is fucking nuts.

Speaker 12 That is insane.

Speaker 12 That is like incomprehensibly viral.

Speaker 12 He was also, he will always claim that he's like the most Googled person on Earth. I looked into what he actually is.
That's not quite it.

Speaker 12 He is the, he is the number one, when you type in who is into Google, who is Andrew Tate is the number one who is question asked of Google in 2022, which is not the same as being the most Googled person on earth.

Speaker 12 Although he is one of the most Googled people on Earth, I found a couple of lists of that, and he's often at like number eight. Some place him closer to like 10, but like, he's incredibly famous.

Speaker 1 I just tested that, and it is in fact true. Yes.

Speaker 17 Top 10 most Google person on the planet is that's your, that's, that's a lot of people.

Speaker 1 That is a fuckload of people.

Speaker 12 And in some counts, he's like beating Donald Trump, which again, Trump was the literal president.

Speaker 12 And it's interesting because his career, you can compare him to a guy like Joe Rogan, right? Joe.

Speaker 12 His career, there's nothing that people like wonder why he's popular, but there's no mystery as to how he became popular. He's got a very, he's been consistently.
The trajectory is

Speaker 12 a very, very consistent guy, constantly in the limelight, constantly doing stuff. Not hard to see where he came from.

Speaker 12 Tate is a kickboxer for a while and then kind of drops off is just sort of a guy on Instagram and then is suddenly the most famous influencer on the planet seemingly overnight.

Speaker 12 And this is not an accident. This isn't also something he didn't just get surprised because something of his happened to go viral.

Speaker 12 This was the result of a tactic I haven't seen anyone else use, or certainly not to the degree of success that Tate used.

Speaker 12 And the tactic that he unleashed not only made him this popular, but it made him popular enough that you can find articles about schools in the US and the UK holding seminars for young male students and for teachers to try to talk about de-radicalizing kids

Speaker 12 who have fallen under Tate's spell.

Speaker 12 When I posted a comment about him during his spat with Tunberg, just because I was frustrated at the degree I had not

Speaker 12 with Greta's response to him, which I thought was totally fair, but with like people kind of cheering it on as if he'd been beaten by it.

Speaker 12 Where my concern was like, well, the attention historically has just kind of made him more popular.

Speaker 12 And there were a bunch of comments in that post I made by teachers who were like, I don't think people understand how popular he is with like 13, 14, 15-year-old boys.

Speaker 12 I talk to kids every day who worship the guy, and I've never seen anything like it.

Speaker 17 One of my really good friends, Jack, this was actually a few weeks ago. We were hanging out and he was like, kind of joking, but also serious.

Speaker 17 He was like, yo, I'm like, it would be scary to be a 13-year-old boy right now because of the inundation of this kind of stuff that you're seeing all day, every day.

Speaker 17 And he was like, I'm not going to lie, if I was 13 or 14 and didn't know better, I could probably fall for a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 17 It's like, I couldn't imagine being that age right now and just being flooded with that.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think about that sort of thing in a lot of, I'll talk about kind of, there's elements of Tate's pitch that I think might have worked on me when I was 17, 18 18 years old.

Speaker 12 Particularly, a big part of it is like

Speaker 12 working a shit job that you hate for the entirety of your youth is bullshit, which it is. Like, it's a terrible way to spend a life doing the thing you hate forever.

Speaker 12 And if you kind of, if that's the hook you're leading with, rather than what a lot of male influencers lead in with, which is like, here's how to pick up chicks.

Speaker 12 you know, that's an interesting spin that he's put up.

Speaker 12 But we'll get it, we'll get more into his pitch and like, what about it is not new and what about it is new but i wanted to i want to start by kind of explaining who tilled the soil that tate grew up in and to do that we have to travel back in time uh to the 1990s and the work of the the first real

Speaker 12 modern masculinity guru in U.S.

Speaker 1 history.

Speaker 12 Now, we've talked about guys like Bernard McFadden in the past who had elements of that, where he's big into physical culture and getting buff, and he talks about like, you know, how modernity is is making men weak but the

Speaker 12 robert bly is the guy who jordan peterson is cut in his image and so to a degree is a guy like andrew tate he is the first guy to kind of bring both academic rigor and also this kind of focus on

Speaker 12 the the damage capitalism has done to masculinity into this kind of it's become the men's rights movements it's become the pickup artist community that's not what it was called at the time um but yeah robert elwood Bly is the name of the guy who kind of kicked all of this off.

Speaker 12 And he's not the dude you'd think he was. He's an American poet.
By some accounts, he's one of the most influential poets in American history. And he was born on December 23rd, 1926 in Minnesota.

Speaker 12 Initially, Bly seemed to be on certainly not the path that he wound up on. He goes to Harvard University.
He studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Speaker 12 He receives a Fulbright scholarship to go to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into into English.

Speaker 12 And during this time, he also gets connected to these great poets who are not Westerners, like Pablo Neruda and Rumi, and they influence his understanding of art and the myths that underlie it.

Speaker 12 And it also leads him to feel that, like, modern contemporary American poetry is kind of hollow and lacks a connection to this kind of deeper mythology that he sees in some of these Eastern poets and some of these poets from other parts of the world that aren't the United States that he feels are making a deeper connection to things.

Speaker 1 This might be just a personal preference, but I find the Iowa's Writers Workshop to be a red flag.

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah, wait, wait, what? I don't know much about it. Tell me, tell me, why is this?

Speaker 1 No, it's just, it's just one of those things that gets

Speaker 1 overused in TV as like a, oh, I need to go to this thing. It's like, it has like a

Speaker 1 weird elitism to it that

Speaker 12 I mean, that I feel that way about Harvard, too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a lot of weird elitism red flags where I'm like, uh,

Speaker 1 but yeah, hearing Harvard University followed by Iowa Writers Workshop is usually not the best. Oh, and then, and, and then there's the Fulbright, yeah, Fulbright Grant.
So it's, you know,

Speaker 12 Iowa Writers Workshop, Sophie says, go to hell.

Speaker 1 Fuck off. Apparently.
That's right.

Speaker 12 Motherfuckers. I don't know much about the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Speaker 12 But that's his background. And again, this is also, he's coming, he's doing this at an earlier time.

Speaker 12 I mean, Harvard was very, very much that kind of thing, but I don't know, maybe the Iowa Writers Workshop was, was not. I don't know.

Speaker 12 His first poem of collection of poems, which was called Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962, and it focused on moments of solitude and beauty, as we see in this piece, Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter.

Speaker 12 It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow. As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.

Speaker 12 Driving around, I will waste more time.

Speaker 12 Which is just like this nice, quiet little. Certainly, you don't see any red flags there.
It's just kind of a poem about one of those quiet moments that you have in your life, you know?

Speaker 12 It's, I don't know, I don't find it deeply affecting, but there's certainly like

Speaker 12 it's not like he's writing anything you would see a problem with.

Speaker 1 It's offensive. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 12 The next year, he published an influential essay in which he attacked mainstream American poetry as impersonal, lacking in soul, and a willingness to look inward.

Speaker 12 His criticism of American society expanded after that. And in 1966, he co-founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War.

Speaker 12 He is one of the very first prominent American artists to like try and organize artists against the war,

Speaker 12 which is, I mean, good because it was a bad war.

Speaker 12 In 1968, he made a public promise to refuse to pay taxes until the end of the war. And he also made some very trenchant critiques of U.S.
imperialism.

Speaker 12 In 1967, he wrote an article for the New York Review of Books in which he noted, the fact that so few Americans have resigned from the government or from responsible posts to protest the Vietnam War is remarkable to me.

Speaker 12 And he's bringing up also cases of like the Russian Revolution and stuff, where you would have these horrible wars being prosecuted by regimes that are on paper a lot less free than the United States, but also would have a lot more defections or people just like refusing to do their jobs because they believed that a course that the sovereign had set was unethical.

Speaker 12 And he's like, why isn't this happening in American government? Why is no one refusing to be a part of the Vietnam War?

Speaker 12 And he went on to ask, can we imagine General Westmoreland resigning and refusing to prosecute a brutal war? Never.

Speaker 12 Pilots drop anti-personnel bombs on small North Vietnamese villages, and many of them hate it, but they don't resign with a public statement of protest. They quietly retire when their tour is over.

Speaker 12 Bly wondered what this showed about Americans. Are we timid? Are we greedy? He thought not, and this is what he wrote.

Speaker 12 What it shows is a disastrous split between the American's inner and outer worlds. He does not aim to use his life to make himself whole, to join the two worlds in himself.

Speaker 12 On the contrary, he is prepared to give up one of the two worlds. The businessman gives up the inner world and clings to the outer as his way.

Speaker 12 A large body of literature denounces the businessman for taking the one world without the other.

Speaker 12 But when a writer is opposed to the Vietnam War and still accepts a grant from the government prosecuting the war, he is doing something similar. He is letting the world split.

Speaker 12 He lets the outer world go by him with just a wave of his hand, and then he reaches out and pulls the inner world to him. He accepts the money for the sake of my work.
It will enable him to

Speaker 12 live in his inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken place before he begins to use the money for his work.

Speaker 12 Instead of trying to apply what he has learned in the actions of his inner life to the actions of the world, he pulls back inside the house, closes the door, and declares he doesn't know what is going on out there, or knows but has rejected it all as outside his sphere of influence or his interest.

Speaker 12 He is not political, but what could be more within the sphere of interest of a writer than the world? And I actually find that a really affecting critique.

Speaker 12 I think about that a lot just in terms of like,

Speaker 12 number one, this desire I have a lot where I'll just be kind of like churning through the muck of a bunch of horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress or like see some horrible Twitter thing, culture war shit roll up and want to

Speaker 12 feel this urge to like, well, fuck this. I don't want to pay attention to this anymore.

Speaker 12 I just want to discard this from my life and focus on this like piece of art or creativity that I, and I think most people feel that most reasonable people feel that way a lot.

Speaker 12 And what he's saying is, like,

Speaker 12 how can you call yourself a writer? How can you call yourself an artist and attempt to discard the outer world in favor of the one that you focus on for your creativity? Like, how can you actually

Speaker 12 be connected to your inner world in any way and

Speaker 12 feel as if you can pretend the outer world does not exist? You're doing the same thing as a businessman who focuses entirely on his desire to make money and ignores his spiritual development.

Speaker 12 Like, there's not a fundamental moral difference between what the two of you are doing because

Speaker 12 you're both rejecting half of

Speaker 12 your being in order to stick with the one that's more comfortable because of whatever you've chosen as your profession.

Speaker 12 And in the case of, yeah, I don't know, I found it a trenchant critique that makes me think a lot about myself.

Speaker 12 Maybe, maybe check out what Bly has to say about the Vietnam War. And he put his money where his mouth was.

Speaker 12 He used that article to republish a letter he'd sent to the chairman of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities

Speaker 12 because they had offered him a $5,000 grant. And he turns it down because he's like, look,

Speaker 12 this is an instrument of the United States government.

Speaker 12 and i am opposed to a war they are waging and even though i could argue that like well if i take this money it won't get spent on bombs what i'm really doing is providing legitimacy to the state that is carrying out this terrible war and i'm simply not going to do that i'm going to choose to refuse to support it in any way even by letting it support me um which whether or not you agree with it is a deeply principled stance that requires sacrificing something yeah so where when when does he uh when does right?

Speaker 1 He's not a bad guy so far. Yeah.
I'm waiting. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is not cool people who did cool stuff. No, no, no.

Speaker 12 So spoiler alert, the Vietnam War ends.

Speaker 12 We don't do great.

Speaker 12 Goes okay for Vietnam, though. Well, I mean, millions of people die, but they do win.

Speaker 12 Bly remains an influential poet and thinker. In the 1970s, he organizes the first Great Mother Conference, which is still going on today.

Speaker 12 It's a nine-day festival that explores human consciousness and it celebrates this kind of archetypal idea of the Great Mother as this kind of like feminine creative force that,

Speaker 12 you know, underlies

Speaker 12 everything in society.

Speaker 12 And Bly, the reason why he felt it was important to kind of bring consciousness and get people focused on this idea and on this celebration of femininity is that he saw the Vietnam War as kind of the expression of masculinity, like running wild and leading to terrible death.

Speaker 12 And he believed that Americans needed to reconnect with femininity in the wake of the Vietnam War, which is, again, not an unreasonable stance.

Speaker 12 You know, you can argue with it, but you can see where he's coming from.

Speaker 1 And they're like both waiting for it. I'm just waiting for it.

Speaker 1 You're waiting for the shooter drop.

Speaker 12 Motherfucker's coming. Motherfucker is coming.

Speaker 12 So as the aftershocks of Vietnam faded, America enters the swinging 80s. Bly becomes concerned with something else entirely.

Speaker 12 He sees in the Reagan years this vapid consumer culture, you know, malls and shit,

Speaker 12 the increasing spread of popular music as like a concept in a way that it really hadn't

Speaker 12 been.

Speaker 1 The spread of like,

Speaker 12 I mean, look, again, TV, there's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today. TV in the 1980s was not what it is now.

Speaker 12 So he sees all this happening and he also just sees like, again, what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained capitalism is doing to people.

Speaker 12 And he begins to believe that the kind of soullessness and

Speaker 12 brokenness

Speaker 12 at the core of the American

Speaker 12 experiment is the result now of a crisis in masculinity. Right.
So previously he had,

Speaker 12 yeah,

Speaker 12 there's an extent to which he thinks like, I don't know, we'll get into what he thinks.

Speaker 12 So in 1990, he writes a book that is kind of illustrating the things that he started to feel here, and he calls it Iron John: a book about men. Now, have you heard of the fairy tale of Iron John, Ian?

Speaker 17 No, Sophie, familiar.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 12 no, you're not big Grimm's fairy tales, people. That's fine.
Neither am I. I had not heard about this either.
I think maybe it's bigger in Germany.

Speaker 1 Grimm's fairy tales? Red flag. Continuing.
Yeah. Oh, wow.
Wow.

Speaker 12 That's a red flag. One of the greatest works of art in, I'm going to guess, German history.

Speaker 12 Sophie.

Speaker 1 Robert. Wow.

Speaker 12 I feel like you just hate German history reflexively for reasons that have nothing to do with anything that has ever happened in history.

Speaker 1 I have no comment on that. Wow.
Wow.

Speaker 12 Well, red flag.

Speaker 1 Oh, sorry. Turn it right back around.

Speaker 1 That's what he does.

Speaker 12 I think Iron John, John, again, it's a fairy tale. And I think I'll give a brief summary of how that fairy tale goes.
It's because it's, again, none of us are. Yeah, I mean, you brought it up.

Speaker 1 You should tell us what the fuck you want. I'll tell you.

Speaker 12 I'm going to do it.

Speaker 1 So, goddamn.

Speaker 12 So I'm going to quote from a write-up in the New York magazine here.

Speaker 12 That story goes like this. Something in the forest is killing a kingdom's hunters.

Speaker 12 A stranger arrives, goes into the forest with his dog, and returns with a large, hairy man he's extracted from a pond. This is the wild man, whom the king locks in a cage.

Speaker 12 The king's son, playing with his ball, lets it slip into the cage, and the wild man tells him he'll give it back if the boy steals the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow and sets him free.

Speaker 12 The boy unlocks the cage, but fearful that he'll be in trouble with his parents, flees on the wild man's back to the forest.

Speaker 12 After the boy fails a series of trials and acquires a head of golden hair, the wild man kicks him out of the forest, but after he sinks to the low status of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom, the wild man helps him become a mighty warrior and he wins the hand of the princess, is reunited with his parents and becomes the rich heroic king in his own right.

Speaker 12 So,

Speaker 12 you know, I think we're probably missing some context there just from culture, but it's like

Speaker 12 I get why that's not in like the tight five of Grimm's fairy tales. Like, that's that's maybe the one you leave on the cutting room floor.

Speaker 17 That's like the B side, yeah, that's like a B side,

Speaker 12 yeah, that's like, um, that's like, I don't know, the one of the one of the Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 To be fair,

Speaker 1 it's up against Snow White Cinderella. Exactly.

Speaker 1 It's not a Snow White grade.

Speaker 1 It's not a Snow White grade fairy tale.

Speaker 12 It would be funny to see Modern Disney try to do this.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, the actual Grims fairy tales are pretty horrific, to be honest.

Speaker 12 Yeah, this one, it also might be one of the tamer ones. I don't know.
I'm not an expert on fairy tales.

Speaker 1 Well, that's why Disney was like, too tame, not into it.

Speaker 12 And again,

Speaker 12 I feel like this is an example.

Speaker 12 I think sometimes we look at these stories that have been around a long time and are like, wow, you know, there's some deep wisdom in there, which is why we should keep telling them.

Speaker 12 But I'm looking at this, which is, it's a parable about manhood, right? And about becoming an adult.

Speaker 12 And I'm like, you know, it's a better parable about manhood and becoming an adult for a Star Wars movie.

Speaker 1 That's a good point.

Speaker 12 Much better one. Much better one.

Speaker 12 Look, George Lucas knocked it out of the park. Fuck you, Grimm.
You know who else is George Lucas?

Speaker 1 No, Robert. Who else is George Lucas?

Speaker 12 The sponsor of this podcast.

Speaker 1 I mean, that would be so incredibly baby. That would be pretty good.

Speaker 12 It would be actually, George, you have the cash. Sponsor this podcast

Speaker 12 and

Speaker 12 we'll make it work, buddy.

Speaker 12 We got you.

Speaker 12 Anyway,

Speaker 4 a decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 3 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 5 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 6 So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 7 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 2 Available now.

Speaker 6 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9 In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

Speaker 9 Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

Speaker 19 We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

Speaker 9 From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 From the studio who brought you the Piketon Massacre and Murder 101,

Speaker 10 this is Incels.

Speaker 1 I am a loser. If I was a woman, I wouldn't dame me either.

Speaker 10 From the dark corners of the web,

Speaker 10 an emerging mindset.

Speaker 1 If I can't have you, girls, I will destroy you.

Speaker 11 A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.

Speaker 10 A seed of loneliness explodes.

Speaker 12 I just hate myself.

Speaker 1 I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.

Speaker 10 At a deadly tipping point.

Speaker 1 Incels will be added to the terrorism guide.

Speaker 20 Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd, killing 10 people.

Speaker 1 Tomorrow is the day of retribution. I will have my revenge.

Speaker 10 This is Incels. Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 21 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 15 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 1 I'm telling you, we know Quincy Hilda. We know.

Speaker 15 A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Speaker 22 Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

Speaker 15 My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

Speaker 12 I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.

Speaker 23 They literally made me say that I took a a match and struck and threw it on her they made me say that i poured gas on her

Speaker 15 from lava for good this is graves county a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame america y'all better wake the hell up bad things happens to good people in small towns

Speaker 15 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 15 And to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 12 Ah, we are back.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 12 no,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 12 maybe.

Speaker 1 Okay. So

Speaker 12 here we are.

Speaker 12 We're talking.

Speaker 12 We're having a good time.

Speaker 12 Are we? So Bly's book looks at this myth of Iron John, and he re-examines the myth using Jungian psychology, which is, again, another red flag.

Speaker 12 There's perfectly valid reasons to study Jung, but whenever you have somebody who is re-evaluating myths using Jungian psychology, they always turn into Jordan B. Peterson.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 12 That's just the way that it works.

Speaker 12 So he's trying to find lessons that are going to be meaningful for men struggling with modernity.

Speaker 12 And his basic conclusion, as far as I can tell, is that men need rewilding in order to fix the things that are driving them crazy, right? They need to reconnect with the wild man inside them. Now,

Speaker 12 this is going to be, this is the root of a million kinds of manfluencer garbage, right? Everything in that funk.

Speaker 12 Like, you guys know the liver king, that guy who was telling people that he got super jacked by eating nothing but raw animal livers that he hunted.

Speaker 12 He was spending

Speaker 12 $12,000 a month on steroids, which he lied about. Now he's getting sued for $100 million because he defrauded people by convincing them to take his liver enzyme pills.

Speaker 12 So funny.

Speaker 12 But what the liver king is doing is this, he's basically setting it pretending to be the wild man that Bly talks about and being like, this is what you have to do in order to be healthy and deal with all of these toxic things about our modern lives is go out and throw spears at boars and and then eat their raw uncooked organs um

Speaker 12 which i would actually say is a lot less masculine than doing the thing that our actual caveman ancestors did which was learn how to cook meat um

Speaker 17 but you make a really good point

Speaker 12 um

Speaker 12 it's also the root of you know we had a we just started this year with a couple of more episodes of jordan b peterson's show he talks a lot about the need for men to be controllable beasts and also references another Grimms fairy tale.

Speaker 12 The one that he chooses is, well, I think it's a Grimms fairy tale. Fucking Beauty and the Beast.
I don't know, maybe not. Maybe that started as a Disney thing.
I don't know where it started.

Speaker 12 But he talks a lot about like this. Again,

Speaker 12 all of these guys today who are talking about you have to be primal. You have to reconnect with your caveman roots.

Speaker 1 You have to

Speaker 17 think.

Speaker 17 I think I saw a Jordan B. Peterson video on Instagram the other day and I didn't know it was him.
I was just scrolling. And he was, but now that you say that, I'm pretty sure it was him.

Speaker 17 Because he was talking about how

Speaker 17 men should be dangerous. Like, you should be dangerous, but it's like knowing when to use the threat of violence or not.

Speaker 17 It's like, just because you're dangerous doesn't mean you're like a violent person, but you should have that capacity or some shit. That's what makes you a true man.

Speaker 12 It's like, what? Yeah. Crazy.
It's that, I mean, and that's, you can see, like. Peterson is not an original and he never has been an original thinker.
He's, he's cribbing from Bly, right?

Speaker 12 They all are. Bly is the origin of this.
And it's also worth noting that while Bly's book has been,

Speaker 12 the descendants of Bly's book are pure reactionary gibberish, Bly himself was not. Again, we went through this guy's background.
He's a deeper thinker than that.

Speaker 12 And there's passages in his book that are kind of worth connecting with.

Speaker 12 So I'm going to read a quote from that now.

Speaker 12 To judge by men's lives in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, Zulu lands, and in the Arab and Persian culture flavored by Sufi communities, men have lived together in heart unions and soul connections for hundreds of thousands of years.

Speaker 12 Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only, in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear. After work, what do men do?

Speaker 12 Collect in a bar to hold light conversations over light beer? Unities that are broken off whenever a young woman comes by or touches the brim of someone's cowboy hat?

Speaker 12 Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all. And the cowboy hat thinks kind of weird, but that's a totally valid point.

Speaker 12 The lack of intimate male-to-male friendship is a deep problem in our society.

Speaker 1 What does does he have against light beer?

Speaker 12 I mean, because I think he's just sort of, I mean, okay, whatever. He's getting into a little bit of masculinity there, but I think the point he's making is like...

Speaker 1 Fucker.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 12 Sorry, Sophie, famous lover of light beer.

Speaker 12 It's okay.

Speaker 12 I love my champagne beer, too.

Speaker 12 I just, I had some lovely period. I actually wish I had some Peroni right now.

Speaker 1 Peroni is delightful.

Speaker 12 Peroni is a lovely, nice, wonderful, especially on a hot day. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I've gone on long runs with nothing but a backpack full of Pironi to keep me going.

Speaker 1 That's

Speaker 1 sounds very believable, actually.

Speaker 12 Peroni, it is essentially water.

Speaker 17 I can smell the ad dollars coming in. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Pironi, sponsor us, you cowards.

Speaker 12 But you see, like what he's making there, and this is not a point that, like, this is not a point Andrew Tate would make, right? Because these guys are all hyper-competitive.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 12 And that's a huge part of like what they're talking about whereas one of the like bligh is at his core a large part of what he's complaining about is totally rational which is like yeah again rod men aren't allowed to love each other where is it yeah where is the well that that's not the only thing in the book um he's also talking a lot of yeah i'm waiting for it

Speaker 12 yeah we're we're getting to it okay

Speaker 12 Iron John spends 62 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Yeah, I don't think anything gets spends that long on the bestseller list anyway.

Speaker 1 It's a long ass time.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Yes, that is.

Speaker 1 This is in the 90s still.

Speaker 12 Yeah, this is 1990,

Speaker 12 1990 to 91 because it's on there for more than a year.

Speaker 12 And it turned Bly from a respected poet and activist into the first masculinity guru in modern U.S. history.
Now, again, we had guys like Barnard McFadden before

Speaker 12 who had talked about aspects of this, but Bly is wrapping his arguments in respected academia.

Speaker 12 And the way he's connecting with his people is exactly the same as the kind of shit that Jordan Peterson Peterson and other folks do today, guys like Ivan Throne and whatnot, who are in the masculinity influencer thing.

Speaker 12 He's doing conferences. He's having rooms full of people, men gather, and he's speaking to them and he's like running them through.

Speaker 12 He's basically bringing them to these moments of emotional height. And you can see some, there's a little bit of Werner Erhard in this.

Speaker 12 You know, there's a reason this is all coming out at the same time as we start to get the self-help craze hit.

Speaker 12 But he's basically holding these big pep rallies for adult men. In 1991, more than a thousand men went to see him at the East Bold Auditorium in Parkland, Washington, paying $75,199

Speaker 12 a piece for the privilege. Yeah.
A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes the scene thusly. As the customers file in, a dozen white guys flail away incompetently on African drums.

Speaker 12 When the crowd is seated, the drummers quit the stage and Bly and Michael Mead, a storyteller who helps run the workshops, begin to recite rambling myths and bits of verse.

Speaker 12 Mead occasionally bangs a bongo. Bly plinks a bazooki, the Greek version of the mandolin, sending mournful notes wafting out over the audience.

Speaker 1 So that sounds good, right?

Speaker 12 Sounds like a fun time.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it sounds like a great way to spend semifax.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I always love white guys playing African drums

Speaker 12 in my gigantic stadium.

Speaker 12 speech series by a fucking poet. Anyway, Bly, who in 1984 had been called the most influential living American poet by current biography, became a kind of celebrity that hadn't previously existed.

Speaker 12 So he's filling stadiums with people who want to hear him talk, but he's also engaging them in a way that's going to spawn the modern men's self-help industry.

Speaker 12 Quote, Bly urges men to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their wild nature.

Speaker 12 Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear of brutality, have labored to breed fierceness out of men, creating the sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt might have said, I could carve a better man out of a banana.

Speaker 12 Bly believes that inside of every such male, there's a wild man yearning to get out, a radiant inner king just waiting to confer masculine pride and sureness of purpose.

Speaker 12 Bly insists he doesn't blame women for men's sorry state. He blames older men who have failed to provide young ones with the role models they crave.

Speaker 12 In traditional societies, boys worked alongside men, plowing fields and fashioning arrowheads, but the Industrial Revolution severed that connection.

Speaker 12 The title character in his bestseller is a wild, hairy fellow who, in a grim fairy tale, is fished up from a pond and becomes a boy's mentor.

Speaker 12 That image is also the inspiration for his most extravagant exercise in manly self-discovery: five-day wild man excursions, in which groups of 100 men take to the woods under the tutelage of Bly and others to dance around fires banging on drums.

Speaker 1 I mean, honey, just say you have daddy issues and move the fuck on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 12 I mean, again, this is there's this, there's this element where he's like, society is fucked because feminists have tried to breed the violence out of me, which is not the case.

Speaker 12 91.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay. So, you know, you have, it's like, like, astonishing to me that people are paying $75

Speaker 1 and like selling out big. I mean, that's more, like, that's more than they, people were paying for, for Coachella in the early, early 2000s.

Speaker 17 The crazy thing is, like,

Speaker 17 at the core of what he's saying, it's like, most of that sounds like he's making some good points, valid points about, you know, how men have evolved in our society.

Speaker 17 So I'm just like, where's the twist? Because like,

Speaker 1 there's the,

Speaker 12 you've seen it start to happen here. So,

Speaker 12 like, the valid thing in that passage is he's like, hey, look, young boys used to grow up learning alongside both their father and the other men, you know, in whatever community they were in.

Speaker 12 And that taught them what it meant to be a man. And now, because capitalism has kind of taken the man out of the house, you're supposed to be working 40, 60, 80 hours a week, right?

Speaker 12 They're not there to raise. It's just the usually in like the way our society works, just the woman who's raising the kid.
That's what he's saying.

Speaker 12 Then we've cut men off from this process of learning how to be adult men. And like, that is actually a pretty valid critique.

Speaker 12 And the problem is that now he's saying the problem is that feminists have bred fierceness out of men.

Speaker 12 Instead of being like, capitalism separates parents from children for huge amounts of time, and that's bad for kids.

Speaker 12 And actually, if you look at it, like you could see in that very scenario of like men are out of the house working, so their raised kids are raised largely by their mothers.

Speaker 12 Well, that also means an unfair burden is being placed on the mother. You could see this.

Speaker 12 There's a way to have solidarity between the genders here and be like, oh yeah, this is all of a problem of this system we've built that like separates families in ways that are really fucked up.

Speaker 12 Like I identify with that. When I was a kid, because we didn't have much money at all, the only job my dad could get was in New York City.
And there was a period of more than a year where he was gone.

Speaker 12 He was living on a friend's couch working there, sending money back to us. And it was, it was, it's not just him that made a sacrifice.

Speaker 12 I made a sacrifice as his son, and my mom made a sacrifice, dealing with the entire job of like raising me.

Speaker 12 Like, I, there's a thing to identify with there, but you can see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well, what's the problem is that feminists have tried to make men less fierce.

Speaker 1 That's not really the problem, Robert Blythe. Like,

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 17 one interesting thing, just before you keep going, is I think in that quote, did he say that justifiably they tried to breathe

Speaker 17 brutality out of men or whatever? So even there, like on some level, you know, you can kind of like, okay, like I kind of see what the point he's making.

Speaker 17 You know, men do perpetuate a lot of the bullshit that happens to women in our society.

Speaker 12 So like he's not nearly, he's not anywhere, he's not on the same planet of toxicity as a lot of like, as guys like, you know, Andrew Tate, who we're about to talk about, or even like Jordan Peterson.

Speaker 12 But you can see the root of it, right? Where he is.

Speaker 1 That's like the start. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah. He's still saying fundamentally part of the problem is feminists want men to be less aggressive.
And like, no, that's not really part of the problem that you have adequately identified.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he warns his listeners, the young boys are drowning in female energy in the schools. Every young man has a fantastic need for initiation.

Speaker 12 That's why we all became so crazy about our football coach. Such initiations, he says, channel wildness into socially approved acts.

Speaker 12 And again, you see kind of this like, well, why is the problem isn't female energy?

Speaker 12 Like, it's not that, like, it's that young men, it's that families are being split up by this like need to compete and work in ways that are really unhealthy for kids.

Speaker 12 But anyway, you can look at the sea of other self-help grifters at the time, Werner Erhard, Laron Hubbard, who had come around at this point, and you could say that Bly is just kind of...

Speaker 12 another dude and that he's doing a lot of the same things a lot of these other self-help grifters are doing. But one of the things that differs him is those guys are mostly

Speaker 12 plying nonsense based on bad interpretations of Eastern religion and psychological abuse. And Bly is kind of, he's not insulting or attacking people.
He's not calling them weak.

Speaker 12 He's making some reasonable points about stuff that's toxic about our society.

Speaker 12 And then he's trying to create like mutual cathartic experiences with the men in his audience who are being invited to kind of see the men around around them as brothers in a way that's more intimate than maybe they had been trained to do previously.

Speaker 12 So again,

Speaker 12 there's something interesting going on here that isn't even wholly toxic that I think is kind of worth acknowledging as we lead to the parts of it that are a lot more toxic.

Speaker 12 And it's one of those things where like I've spent a lot of time on incel message boards and they do talk a lot about this feeling of disconnection with society.

Speaker 12 So when he says that like young men are not connected to their communities, he's, he's making a decent point.

Speaker 12 Um, he also, one of the points he makes that I thought was interesting is he talks about the differences between female sex ed and male sex ed.

Speaker 12 And he points out that because of like just basic biological realities of how periods happen,

Speaker 12 young girls are instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys are not. And it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about their bodies, talking about health problems.

Speaker 12 And that's probably a valid thing to point out.

Speaker 12 Sure, but it definitely goes both ways. Sure.
And again, he's very

Speaker 12 completely ignorant to, well, I'm sure there's a lot of things actually,

Speaker 12 especially today, that women are not taught about their bodies because of. Anyway, again, these are a lot of two-way problems, and he's focusing just on the male aspect of them.

Speaker 12 But he's not inherently wrong about the male aspect of them. He's just leaving a large part of the equation out.

Speaker 12 And that's where the toxicity comes in here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready.

Speaker 12 Bly has reached his fundamental message. Men and women are essentially alien, and neither should apologize.
They're different tribes, he is saying.

Speaker 12 My father was an alcoholic, and yet if you look underneath his weakness, there was something there that my mother didn't have. She was fine, but she didn't have it.

Speaker 12 Three million sperms start out, and they find themselves immediately in a hostile environment, facing an egg approximately 40,000 times bigger.

Speaker 12 We're the product of the one survivor that didn't give up. Which is, it's really weird to be like setting up the gender

Speaker 12 struggle as like sperm versus egg, where it's like, well, actually, all of us are the product of sperm and eggs.

Speaker 12 It's the only way people happen.

Speaker 1 I just want to emphasize on the last part of that quote there. You said, we are the product of the one survivor that didn't give up.

Speaker 12 Yeah. What's the other half of that equation?

Speaker 12 Is it just one little bit of cum that makes a baby, Robert White?

Speaker 12 Or is there another part to the baby equation?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just want to be like, honey, did you not show up for sex ed class that day? Did you miss that lesson? He's framing it as like, the sperm have to murder the eggs so that one can survive.

Speaker 12 That is not the way it works.

Speaker 12 Bly actually insists that he is not preaching old-style machismo, and he takes pains to tell his audience that, in fact, male rage is weakness. We're not talking about aggression, he calls out.

Speaker 12 A few of his listeners seemed confused. At the height of an hour-long discussion of the Gulf War, one audience member announces that he's seceded from society.
I'm not paying my taxes.

Speaker 12 I've bought an AK-47 and I'm farting around with ammunition just in case I have to back up my decision, he says softly but firmly.

Speaker 12 Bly and many others have spoken out against the Gulf War, yet nobody criticizes the AK-47 fellow.

Speaker 12 And when Bly asks the Vietnam vets to stand to be honored, the room erupts with applause for about three minutes. And you can see there, too, the seeds of a lot that's going on right now, right?

Speaker 1 Where,

Speaker 12 yeah, he's like, we're not talking about men need to be more aggressive. And then a guy's like, I have dropped out of society and started buying guns.
And everyone's like, that's great.

Speaker 12 Cool.

Speaker 12 Look, we're not, anyway, whatever.

Speaker 12 Bly died last year.

Speaker 12 He lived a long time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I would say. And

Speaker 12 you can find people, you know, reappraising his work and stuff.

Speaker 12 There's some folks who will say that like his greater talent was for self-promotion rather than poetry, and he wasn't as good a poet as people had said. I don't know.
I'm not a poetry guy.

Speaker 12 I'm not going to analyze his poetry in that way.

Speaker 12 I do think sometimes because somebody turns out to age into a problematic person, people are like, Well, I guess their work that everybody loved in the past sucked.

Speaker 12 And I think that's kind of cowardly. Like, nah, people liked his poems, they were influential, and then he turned into a crank.
That's fine, that happens. Like,

Speaker 12 yeah.

Speaker 12 Anyway,

Speaker 12 you know, who isn't a crank and who will never do anything problematic? My favorite filmmaker, Roman Po. Oh, oh, you know what?

Speaker 1 I googled his name right as I was saying that. Oh, boy.

Speaker 12 Oh, dear.

Speaker 12 Well, I'm going to go burn all my DVDs of Rosemary's Baby. And y'all check out these ads.

Speaker 12 Ah, we're back.

Speaker 1 Really glad I caught myself with that. I'm saving that bit, Robert.
A little while.

Speaker 12 I thought it was good with like the talk about reappraising artists' works.

Speaker 12 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 12 I thrive on praise.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was something different. Good for you.

Speaker 12 So,

Speaker 12 Bly died, but his work launched what scholars have called the mythopoetic men's movement.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 That's what they're calling it. That's amazing.

Speaker 12 It is a somewhat

Speaker 12 fucking prickish name to call it, I guess.

Speaker 1 Don't know.

Speaker 12 But the what they mean by mythopoetic, I should explain like what they're saying, is like the argument Bly and the other, because there's a bunch of other authors in this.

Speaker 12 The argument they're making is that our society has stripped mythology out and has become this like kind of coldly competitive engine for creating cash value.

Speaker 12 And that we need in order to make men healthier, we need to reintroduce like this kind of mythic understanding of masculinity and of the world.

Speaker 12 That like that's kind of, and a lot of it is they're like looking at like Native American cultures and some of the different rituals around masculinity they had, and being like, well, maybe we'll, and there's actually, again, there's a scientific basis to a lot of this is cultural appropriation, but like one of the things that's happening this period is you've got a lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD in an era before they understand it.

Speaker 12 And a thing that occurs during this period is that some of them have buddies who are also struggling with PTSD and are Indigenous Americans and who invite their

Speaker 12 white and black and Hispanic battle buddies back to do stuff like sweat lodges in order to like cope and other kind of different rituals that have existed in some of these Indigenous societies to deal with what happens to men when they go to war.

Speaker 12 And they invite their friends back, and that stuff works better than just getting a job working for an accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam.

Speaker 12 And so people are starting to study this and write about it.

Speaker 12 And one of the things that the mythopoetic mythopoetic guys take is this belief that you should basically just kind of like steal wholesale from these cultures and dress white people up in headdresses and give them drums and stuff, as opposed to being like, oh, well, maybe, you know, there's

Speaker 12 a way that isn't that to look at the value that some of these rituals have in healing people.

Speaker 12 You know, I'm not the person to analyze that completely, but that's part of what they're saying here is that like they're they're kind of recognizing there's something hollow at the center of American culture that is not hollow in some of these other cultures.

Speaker 12 And instead of being like,

Speaker 12 maybe there's things that we should fundamentally change about American culture, they're saying, what if we dress up like these other people? Right.

Speaker 12 That's essentially what's going on with a lot of the mythopoetic movement.

Speaker 12 So a big chunk of this, and these are, some of this is Bly, some of this is guys outside of Bly, is they're making, they're like putting a bunch of like white accountants in sweat lodges that they make the wrong way and lecturing them about, you know, Young and Joseph Campbell, or they're like making them dress like cavemen while playing, you know, African drums.

Speaker 12 There's a lot of like weird, uncomfortable racism in the mythopoetic men's movement.

Speaker 12 That said, it is less toxic than the men's rights movement that would follow it.

Speaker 12 Things kind of get increasingly aggressive and toxic from this point out.

Speaker 12 But Bly and the initial mythopoetic influencers were not, they saw themselves as therapists. And again, I don't think they were good at this, but they were not political.

Speaker 12 So they were not, this was not a conservative movement. They were not billing themselves as right-wing.

Speaker 12 They were not really like weighing in on culture war issues, in part because the culture war didn't exist in the same way then that it does now.

Speaker 12 And it's interesting because Bly

Speaker 12 expressly says this is an apolitical movement.

Speaker 12 You might criticize him because he had just written a really kind of beautiful essay during the Vietnam War about the cowardice of being apolitical, but whatever.

Speaker 12 I found an article from the Washington Post in 1991 that talked to a number of men who had been most active in the movement, and there's some interesting pieces in there.

Speaker 12 Quote, An affirmation and strength comes from a bonding between men that's impossible to put into words, says Ed Honold, the mild-mannered federal lawyer and founder of the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals of dancing, roaring, hugging, and weeping.

Speaker 12 The experience was known to men in the past, but has been forgotten. American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it.

Speaker 12 There are large numbers of men wandering lost in some personal wasteland of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why.

Speaker 12 He pauses thoughtfully and adds, There's a lot of hurting cowboys out there.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 12 these guys are not cowboys. These guys were like middle managers at auto parts stores and shit.
Like, they are absolutely not hurting cowboys.

Speaker 12 And also, actual cowboys aren't what this guy thought they were. But he's not wrong, again, in saying that, like, the situation of American men was pretty unpleasant in the early 1990s.

Speaker 12 They were struggling against a capitalist culture that thrived on the obliteration of meaning.

Speaker 12 However, men, of course, are not the only ones suffering from this, nor are they suffering worse than any other group of Americans, right? This is just alienation under capitalism.

Speaker 12 Part of what he's doing here that is noteworthy noteworthy and becomes a huge problem later on is he is identifying real problems with the society we live in and then cutting men off from the rest of that society and thus cutting off the possibility of solidarity.

Speaker 12 So you can't look at this kind of alienation and loss of meaning and be like, wow, men and women and everybody is being harmed by the meaninglessness, this hole at the center of our culture.

Speaker 12 You have to say men are being harmed.

Speaker 12 And then that invites like, well, there must be women that are doing it and it must be we should be looking at how feminine rather than being opens the door for the toxicity to flow right in.

Speaker 1 It's interesting to see like just how far John Wayne's like reach impacts the way men think. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of hurt in cowboys.

Speaker 12 Motherfucker, you are not a cowboy.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 12 And by the way, cowboys were mostly like poor black and Hispanic and indigenous men who were being exploited for their labor.

Speaker 1 Like, this is,

Speaker 12 none of what you're saying means anything.

Speaker 12 You are entirely you're you're talking about the emptiness of culture and your understanding of history has been entirely formed by the movies you watched right like

Speaker 12 anyway do better

Speaker 12 do better well

Speaker 12 some of them will eventually in the future i think it would be interesting to try and find out look into all these men's groups in the washington in the state of Washington in this period of time and see how many of those guys wound up being elders and the proud boys 30 years later.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 12 that's that's that's a more in-depth work for someone in the future if they want to do it.

Speaker 12 So one of the most dangerous aspects of the mythopoetic men's movement is that it was not as toxic as its descendants.

Speaker 12 Again, it identifies real problems, but then it recasts them as things that just men, mostly white men, are suffering from.

Speaker 12 And the answer is like kiche kind of racist LARPing as member, like that that's basically what they're doing, right? And this, yeah, it's it's it's it causes problems later on.

Speaker 12 One of the most ridiculous aspects of the mythopoetic men's movement was the creation of Wingspan, the journal of the male spirit.

Speaker 12 Don't you just want to sit down, Ian, with a copy of Wingspan, read out quotes to your buds?

Speaker 17 I start every morning with it.

Speaker 12 With it, yeah, yeah. Just spreading your wings.
So in the pre-internet era, this acted as a clearinghouse for the movement and a central place where influencers could advertise their events.

Speaker 12 Quote, the last issue of Wingspan lists dozens dozens of publications and events for men around the country, including a new warrior training adventure weekend in Wisconsin, drumming and dancing for men in Massachusetts, Brother to Brother in New York, Healing the Father Wound in California, and Afro-American Males at Risk in New Jersey.

Speaker 12 A recent grandfather ceremony at the Fairfax Unitarian Men's Council featured drumming on a five-and-a-half-foot Thunderhart drum.

Speaker 12 In this area, there are three large councils in Virginia, one in Gaithersburg and another in Baltimore.

Speaker 12 The Men's Council of Greater Washington, which Honold started in June of 1988 with 50 men, is the largest, with 2,000 members and 50 newcomers arriving for each monthly meeting.

Speaker 12 Late one night in January, at the Council's meeting in the Washington Ethical Society Auditorium on Upper 16th Street, Honold shed his Clark-Kent image as he leads 500 men who are pounding drums and chanting.

Speaker 12 The sweating windows shake with rhythmic thunder that reverberates up and down the street as they raise Honold, gyrating and clapping, high overhead and parade him about the room.

Speaker 12 Then group leaders circulate with large feathers and clay pots, wafting the smoke smoke of burning sage into the waiting faces in what is termed a Native American ritual, designed to put you in touch with generations of male ancestors.

Speaker 1 So that's a little problematic.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just a little bit.

Speaker 12 Just a skosh.

Speaker 12 A number of other masculinity grifters followed Bly. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette wrote the bestseller King, Warrior,

Speaker 12 Magician, Lover, which purported to refuse.

Speaker 12 That's a title right there. I want to be a King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 12 these are like the archetypes of male masculinity.

Speaker 12 I don't think they're in order because you probably don't start as a king and end up as a lover, although maybe you do.

Speaker 12 That would be progressive, actually, saying that you need to shed your mastery and your sense of ownership in order to become a lover. But I don't think that's the point they're making.

Speaker 12 Moore is a Jungian analyst and a professor of psychology. Gillette, like Dr.
Jordan Balthazar Peterson, was a mythologist.

Speaker 12 I found a good write-up that described the main arguments in their book by Aaron Innes.

Speaker 12 The book's second shared premise is that there are universal male archetypes inherent to every male-bodied person that are represented in myth and story around the world, but are suppressed in the dominant culture.

Speaker 12 The developmental history of every man, says Moran Jillette, is in large part the story of his failure or success at discovering within himself the archetypes of mature masculinity.

Speaker 12 Following Jungian psychological theory, they claim that if men are not given room to express these archetypes in a healthy manner, they will act them out unconsciously in ways that are damaging and violent, either directed outward at other people as overtly hostile male behavior or directed inward, which saps the vitality of the men involved.

Speaker 12 It's worth noting that the authors of both books, as well as their contemporary followers, seem a hell of a lot more concerned about remedying male acting out that's turned inward and creating male malaise than they are about male violence directed towards others.

Speaker 12 Take the essay, Why Men Find It So Hard to Feel by mythopoetic workshop leader Darren Austin Hall, who says that women are at an advantage to men spiritually, and that minstrel cycles mean women are energetically connected to cycles of the moon, which in turn is energetically linked to our unconscious.

Speaker 12 This leads him to the conclusion that the solution to war-mongering tyrants in the world is for women to use touch and the beautiful arts of seductive love to disarm men, and that this will solve male violence.

Speaker 1 Oh, there it is.

Speaker 12 You girls just gotta touch us right, and we'll stop doing genocides.

Speaker 1 Oh my god.

Speaker 1 That's incredible.

Speaker 12 Hitler wouldn't have done all that bad stuff if I get well. I mean, he was dating his cousin, so I don't really want to continue this joke, but what?

Speaker 12 Dating's the wrong word.

Speaker 12 You know that story, Zophie. We've talked about Hitler and his cousin.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 12 The one who killed herself. Yeah,

Speaker 12 it's a really bad story.

Speaker 1 Again,

Speaker 12 bringing up Hitler and the cousin that he may be murdered is definitely perhaps a good way of pointing out how fucked up it is to say the problem of men's violence is that women don't touch them the right way.

Speaker 12 It's pretty bad. It also brings to mind, I'm thinking about our Liberia episodes and

Speaker 12 that sex strike that a bunch of women went on to get the warlords to come to the table to negotiate and how it's like literally the opposite.

Speaker 12 It's number one, one of the most amazing stories of activism I've ever heard of. And it's literally the opposite of what these guys are saying.

Speaker 12 But I don't know. I don't know.
This is all so gross.

Speaker 12 Yeah, icky.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 most regular listeners of the show are broadly broadly familiar with the way men's empowerment gurus and men's rights influencers evolved over the last 20 years or so.

Speaker 12 A mix of right-wing culture war politics intersecting with very divorced men. And I think we haven't talked about this yet, but these guys are all extremely divorced, right?

Speaker 12 There's a lot of weakened dad energy in these.

Speaker 17 That makes sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 That's why they're all so bitter. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 There's just no way anything else is going on here.

Speaker 12 Elon Musk would have been really, really would have fit in at these. Maybe it would have kept him from buying Twitter, you know? I don't want to say it was all toxic.

Speaker 12 So yeah,

Speaker 12 again, you have

Speaker 12 most people listening are kind of familiar with where things descend after the mythopoetic men's movement, which still kind of is around, but more or less peters out over the course of the 90s.

Speaker 12 And after that point, you've got a mix of right-wing culture war politics that intersects with these very divorced dudes angry over custody, you know, yelling about how men are discriminated against.

Speaker 12 And then we have pick,

Speaker 12 of course, starting in the early 2000s, these pickup artists selling the secret to fucking chicks at bars. And this all gets brewed up into this slurry.

Speaker 12 And, you know, you've got the pickup artists intersecting with the men's rights activists, intersecting with the right-wing culture war politicians, intersecting with these literal Nazis.

Speaker 12 And from that slurry, we get Gamergate and the alt-right, and at least a portion of Donald Trump's political success, right?

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 Boy Howdy, that was a paragraph.

Speaker 12 is, that is the story. Well, I mean, this is, I, I, I, we haven't gone into this on the show, and it was something I was broadly aware of but didn't know much about.

Speaker 12 But I think this is especially leading into a story about a guy like Andrew Tate, who is the most toxic, arguably, calls himself the most like toxic man on the internet, and is certainly an archon of male toxicity.

Speaker 12 I think it kind of behooves us to talk about what led to him because it's interesting.

Speaker 12 Um,

Speaker 12 anyway, this is the end of episode one. Anybody, anybody got some thoughts here at the end of things

Speaker 17 um i mean i think that was a really great explainer on kind of laying the groundwork for where the ideas that eventually became andrew tape you know started and took a foothold and uh yeah after you broke it down it it makes sense and i can see how we got there you know but it is interesting that

Speaker 17 you know some of the initial original points like you said were valid and do kind of highlight some issues in our society that maybe we should be focusing more on or addressing.

Speaker 17 But also, as you said, it's not just a men's problem, it's a problem for everyone, and everyone's being affected by it. And we should be finding solidarity in that.

Speaker 17 And how can we help everybody improve our lives? Not just, oh, it's a problem that's only affecting men, so it must be women, you know, those are the real problem.

Speaker 12 It's so interesting to me how many people see, oh, men are

Speaker 12 being made to like spend their entire young and mature adult lives like laboring for somebody else's profit in a factory or whatever.

Speaker 12 And as a result, their kids barely know them, which is a real problem. A lot of kids raised in like the 50s, 60s, 70s have.

Speaker 12 And translating that as, and like seeing, you know, their mom struggling to like keep the house going and raise the kids through all that and

Speaker 12 the kids suffering and be like, well, this is clearly a men's problem.

Speaker 12 No, this is

Speaker 1 a cultural problem.

Speaker 12 Everybody's problem is this.

Speaker 12 Anyway,

Speaker 12 Sophie?

Speaker 1 I'm really not looking forward to what's coming next.

Speaker 12 Oh, Sophie, it's going to be terrible and you're going to have to play a lot of clips. So.

Speaker 1 I'm so sorry, listeners.

Speaker 12 But it is necessary. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 But it is necessary.

Speaker 12 You know what? I'm not sorry. I'll never apologize.
That's what I learned from Andrew Tate.

Speaker 1 I think you wrote a really good script, though. Thank you, Sophie.
You're welcome, Robert.

Speaker 12 I love me too.

Speaker 1 All right, everybody.

Speaker 12 That's going to do it with us for us today at Behind the Bastards,

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Speaker 1 Oh, you!

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, no, Sophie, Sophie! No, I was late. We ended the last episode where I was like, wow, you're such a great writer.
That was so good. Thank you, Sophie.

Speaker 1 And then you come in and then you do that fucking shit. What?

Speaker 1 Well, Sophie,

Speaker 12 you may not understand this because of your womanliness, but I was embodying the archetype of the magician wild man.

Speaker 1 You're fired.

Speaker 1 That's fair. That's fair.

Speaker 12 Well, I have started drinking.

Speaker 12 Got a nice glass of Port Rue Talisker here.

Speaker 12 And I want to start this episode by giving a shout out to a friend of the pod, former mayor of the city of Portland, Sam Adams. Now, y'all may not know Sam.

Speaker 12 I think he was briefly on the show Portlandia, but he was fired from being the mayor because he had a sexual relationship with a teenage staffer

Speaker 12 and then got rehired by current mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, who's a giant piece of shit to be the mayor's body man, basically.

Speaker 12 And then this week, Sam announced that he was retiring because he had an iron deficiency.

Speaker 12 And then Ted Wheeler told everyone, no, he's retiring because he wouldn't wouldn't stop threatening and bullying women in the office. Both of you guys suck, and it's very funny this happened.

Speaker 12 Also, I gotta say, shout out to Sam Adams. Honestly, going from sexually harassing a teenager to

Speaker 12 being a bully to adult women, that's a step forward.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Disagree, Sophie?

Speaker 1 You're fired. I don't know what else to say.

Speaker 12 Look, one of the two things isn't a sex crime. So that's a real, real personal growth for former mayor of Portland Sam Adams.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Ted Wheeler, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Speaker 12 Great, great hiring. Look, honestly, fuck Sam Adams.
He's a piece of shit. But incredible hiring decision from Ted Wheeler.
Yeah, let's get the guy in here who had sex with a 17-year-old staffer.

Speaker 12 Let's get him back in City Hall. We really need his insights.

Speaker 12 Great, great work, Ted.

Speaker 1 I'm really shocked about

Speaker 1 how well-liked he is in the city of Portland.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 I mean, he's not. But you can let him know how you feel about his decision to hire and then fire Sam Adams at Ted Wheeler on

Speaker 1 Twitter. When he got the tear gas thrown on him, that was nice.
I do remember that. That was nice.

Speaker 12 I started talking about Ted Wheeler and Sam Adams because they're both toxic men.

Speaker 12 And today we are finally getting into the direct personal story of one of the most toxic men of all time, Emery Andrew Tate III.

Speaker 12 That's quite a name. That's quite a name.

Speaker 12 Now, Emery Andrew Tate III was born in Washington, D.C. on December 1st, 1986.
Now, that fancy name might lead you to think that he came from some like British-ash, British, British-ass

Speaker 12 noble family or some shit. That sounds like a Duke's name to me.

Speaker 1 It's very formal.

Speaker 17 It sounds like old money for sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 He is not.

Speaker 12 Now, most of the texture that we get on his childhood comes from Andrew himself, which is not ideal because he is a liar.

Speaker 12 But there's just not a lot of other. Again, I haven't found, no one's done like a critical biography.
There's not like a big long New Yorker piece that really delves into his backstory.

Speaker 12 So I kind of had to do that myself to the best extent that I could do.

Speaker 12 Now, I did find one, and this is honestly the only texture you get on his childhood that I have come across, is from an article he wrote for a website for kickboxing that sells kickboxing gear.

Speaker 12 And the title of it is The Life of Andrew King Cobra Tate.

Speaker 12 So, again, this is not a credible source, but the way in which he writes about his childhood and what he wants you to believe about it does tell you a lot about the man.

Speaker 12 So, we're still going to be covering it, but do not take this as literal truth. That should be obvious.
Here's how he talks about his birth.

Speaker 12 I was born in Washington, D.C., at Walter Reed Army Hospital early one morning, December 1st, 1986. The doctor wanted to award me a perfect 10 on the birth scale, but settled on 9.5.

Speaker 1 So, already, already, that's the saddest thing anyone has ever bragged about. That's so pathetic, absolutely heartbreaking.
Oh my god,

Speaker 1 that's on somebody's fucking like dating profile for sure.

Speaker 12 Yeah, Two weeks overdue, but I was a nose, I was nose-breathing already as the doctor held me upside down by my heels, and my right fist was inside of my mouth as I suckled.

Speaker 12 The doctor pinched my thigh to get a response, and I growled, knitting my brow and trying to crane my head up to see who had attacked me. The doctor paled, shocked at my defensive powers.

Speaker 12 I did not cry.

Speaker 1 Oh my god, I hate this fucking dog.

Speaker 1 That's so funny, though. Bragging about how tough you were as a baby.
As an infant. As a baby.
Like,

Speaker 1 wow.

Speaker 1 Unbelievable. I was incredible.

Speaker 1 I was rereading what you just said. And it's.

Speaker 12 I'm going to tell y'all right now, because, again, everything I found just kind of glosses over his childhood. Because we don't have a lot of

Speaker 12 detailed, like someone hasn't gone through and interviewed a shitload of people that he knew as a little kid.

Speaker 12 That hasn't happened yet. I'm sure it will.

Speaker 12 And I was thinking we were just going to have to brush over his childhood. And then I found this article he wrote about himself on a kickboxing website.

Speaker 1 And it made my week. It made my week.
It's so funny. Tell me about your own birth, like you did fucking anything.

Speaker 12 So if you're curious about Andrew's parentage, his mother,

Speaker 12 Eileen, is indeed English as shit. And she's a white lady.
She worked as a catering assistant.

Speaker 12 His father is emery tate jr um and emery well was emery tate jr emery tate jr was a black american man and a chicago chess prodigy actually up until a year or two ago emery tate was much more famous than andrew tate um i we actually had in in the our our work chat uh mia was shocked to learn that Andrew Tate was Emery Tate's son.

Speaker 12 I had not heard of this guy, but I don't care for chess.

Speaker 12 Or for, yeah, chess. Yeah.
The Washington Post describes Emery Tate Jr. as a trailblazer for black chess players.

Speaker 12 He was like one of the first, I don't know, he may have been like the first like super famous,

Speaker 12 really well-known like black professional chess players.

Speaker 12 Again, I don't understand chess. I don't understand why you would play a war game that doesn't include orcs, but a lot of people who love chess say that he was one of the most fun players to watch.

Speaker 12 I did read a lot of like writing, like fans and like Reddit and stuff talking about Emery Tate. And one thing they all seem to agree on is he was just super super entertaining to watch play chess.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Why does when you type in Emery Tate into Google? Why does the first suggested thing come up as CIA?

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 I typed Emery Tate into Google and the first thing that autofills is CIA.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 1 He was in the CIA.

Speaker 12 Well, Andrew says that he was in the CIA.

Speaker 1 Is that what's happening?

Speaker 12 Yeah, he was. So he was in the Air Force as a sergeant and he served as a linguist, a linguist.

Speaker 12 There's not actually hard evidence that he was in the CIA that I have seen. Like this is based on,

Speaker 12 again, Andrew is kind of,

Speaker 12 and we're about to get into this. He's really plumping his dad's reputation to make him into like not just a chess guy, but a badass.

Speaker 1 He may or may not be somebody.

Speaker 12 I have not seen any independent confirmation that he worked in the CIA.

Speaker 12 Maybe he did. A lot of guys in that period who like did some sort of like weird work where they would have just been listed as a State Department employee.

Speaker 12 So it's not impossible, but I have not come across confirmation that he was in the CIA.

Speaker 12 So the Washington Post and most sources who write about Andrew's dad will call him a grandmaster at chess. This is not entirely true.
He was, I mean, this is not true.

Speaker 12 He was an international master, which is a lesser rank. He never quite made it to grandmaster.

Speaker 12 I found, again, chess discussions online by nerds about chess who will say that he didn't make it to Grandmaster

Speaker 12 mainly because

Speaker 12 he wasn't willing to do like certain things that you have to do to do that. But he had a really good record.
He regularly beat Grandmasters. Some people say he was as good as Bobby Fisher.

Speaker 12 Again, I have no way to evaluate any of this.

Speaker 1 Robert taking a big anti-chess, a chess approach here.

Speaker 1 Again,

Speaker 12 there's no battle tanks and chess. There's no Titans with chainsaw hands.

Speaker 12 The ultimate game of strategy is still Warhammer 40,000.

Speaker 1 I think we can all agree on that.

Speaker 12 Yes, of course. It's been true for generations.

Speaker 12 But anyway, Emery Tate, great at chess.

Speaker 12 A chess historian wrote a book about him, which gives us some idea as to where Andrew Tate got his sense of style and personal branding. The title was Triple X Sclam with three exclamation points.

Speaker 12 The life and games of Emery Tate, chess warrior,

Speaker 1 which is kind of fun.

Speaker 12 i think he literally died at the table in 2015 playing a game of chess like this man this motherfucker loved chess um he wears a white fedora with a gold band on the cover which also gives you a little bit of insight into where andrew tate gets some of his uh taste in style um and andrew idolizes his father and he does it particularly i i'm not going to pretend to know the man's emotional state but in his public writing he particularly celebrates his dad.

Speaker 12 In that kickboxing website article, 2022, Andrew Tate noted this about the male side of his family background. My grandfather, Emery A.

Speaker 12 Tate, Esquire, fought in World War II before becoming a lawyer in Chicago during racially charged times. As a black man, this shaped his worldview and he was very strict, very hard indeed.

Speaker 12 As a boy, he pushed a plow with mule through the hard clay dirt of Georgia, forced to work on the farm. At age 12, he pushed a plow that only grown men normally handled.

Speaker 12 Then he ran away, never to return to the farm. He did some bare-knuckled fist fights as a young man and distinguished himself hand to hand during the war years.

Speaker 12 And again, I'm sure parts of that are true. Everything about his dad and his grandpa always veers into how good they were at hand-to-hand combat, and there is no evidence of this.

Speaker 12 Um, like the stuff about working on a farm, yeah, that seems plausible. The stuff about how we fought the Nazis hand-to-hand, I don't know, maybe, but that actually doesn't happen often.

Speaker 17 That just gives me like, my dad can beat up your dad vibes.

Speaker 1 Like, it sounds like something like a kid would say, yeah, he bragged about his own birth.

Speaker 12 I mean, it's like you don't don't have to lie about him fistfighting Nazis. It's okay if he just shot them.

Speaker 1 A lot of dudes did, and that was rat. Like,

Speaker 12 he doesn't have to be great at punching just because you grew up to punch people for a living. That's kind of a weird thing to focus on, Andrew.

Speaker 12 But he loves talking about how good his dad and grandpa were at fighting.

Speaker 12 Quote, his son, my dad, Emery A.

Speaker 12 Tate Jr., was a young athlete learning wrestling in school and developing the early forms of Tate Shinkai strikes as a youth, which I guess is his own martial arts thing.

Speaker 12 His job in the military for 11 years took him on many adventures, and little is known for sure, except that my dad never loses. He is my role model

Speaker 12 in many ways, even as I write poetry like he does.

Speaker 12 So,

Speaker 12 I mean, also, I think his dad would have been in the military. Let me double-check here.

Speaker 1 Uh,

Speaker 12 yeah,

Speaker 12 during Vietnam, which would mean that he did, in fact, lose. Um, so

Speaker 12 sorry, Andrew, but

Speaker 12 I don't want to be mean to Emery Tate, because, well, this is a little bit his fault.

Speaker 12 So, yeah, the closest thing that Andrew has written or said that comes close to being emotionally impactful at all is when he writes about his father. I will give him that.

Speaker 12 He writes with like some amount of actual sincerity about his feelings towards his dad. And I'm going to give you an example of that now.
I never learned to cry for attention.

Speaker 12 I only used grunts to indicate hunger or discomfort, but mostly I was silent. I had a large new crib, but most every night I spent to sleep on my dad's chest.

Speaker 12 He would place me there and sleep still, never moving in the night, and our heartbeats were and are as one.

Speaker 1 I just picture a baby like,

Speaker 1 yeah, just

Speaker 12 too angry to cry.

Speaker 12 Now, bits like this do contrast with passages where Andrew will relate stories about his dad that sound kind of abusive. Quote, I learned to defend myself soon after I could walk.

Speaker 12 Long before my first punch into a pillow, I learned to balance, how to step backward after being pushed gently in the chest.

Speaker 12 Dad made a game of it, a game which ended with a savage shove across a living room, sending me into a dramatic backpedal. I stopped myself with my head one inch from cracking into the far wall.

Speaker 12 That was the final test.

Speaker 12 Kind of sounds like your dad was just shoving you because he was pissed, Andrew.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that kind of sounds not great, bro. Do you need to talk about this, man? Yeah.

Speaker 1 No talking, just ah,

Speaker 1 yeah, just angry grunts.

Speaker 12 I mean, look, if I was going to raise a child, I'd be lying if I said that the shoving method didn't hold some appeal because I do a lot of other things by shoving.

Speaker 12 It's how I move my furniture, it's how I record podcasts. I'm shoving a walking desk around the room right now.

Speaker 12 We actually, Daniel spends like 13 hours a week editing that out before we can even get the audio off to Chris.

Speaker 12 That's most of his job.

Speaker 12 It's really

Speaker 12 a good part of our work.

Speaker 1 Ian, remind me to tell you about the time when Robert got a foot massager and he refused to not use it while he was in the middle of the

Speaker 1 Super Sports. And it would go directly

Speaker 1 and it would go directly into the mic. And like, there's no, there's no hazard pay.
That's enough.

Speaker 1 Like, it's truly, don't take it out.

Speaker 1 No, he's pouring in

Speaker 1 i'm sorry ian that was my fault for bringing it up that was your fault for bringing it up but more importantly

Speaker 12 not my fault because nothing is uh speaking of toxic masculinity let's get back to andrew tate cool

Speaker 12 so Andrew was raised initially in the DC area and then Indiana. And he seemed to want to follow in his father's footsteps.
He started playing chess at age three. He started competing at five.

Speaker 12 And he eventually competed in adult tournaments while still a child. And this is where we get the very first news article on Andrew Tate, who at that point was referred to as Emery A.
Tate.

Speaker 12 It is a local news piece, and this is the first like objective-ish piece of journalism that like, it's not just like him writing about his background.

Speaker 12 And it's really the only insight we get into his childhood that doesn't come directly from a Tate.

Speaker 12 It's again, a local news piece. The news in his town, which is like South Bend, was talking about the release.
There was a movie coming out about Bobby Fisher, who I guess was good at chess.

Speaker 12 And so they were writing about that, and they wanted a human interest piece. So they talked about young Andrew Tate, who was six when they wrote this article.

Speaker 12 He had started a chess club in South Bend with some other kids, and he had taught them chess because he wanted people to play against. It includes the article, a couple of quotes that are interesting.

Speaker 12 Every kid wants to be like his dad, the elder Tate said, but father had recently limited son's playing time, encouraging other activities.

Speaker 12 I don't think that a kid his age should spend so much time playing chess. As a parent, I'd like to see him become a top-level player, but I realize there's so much more to life than just chess.

Speaker 12 He learned how to swim this summer, and he plays with his friends and stuff like that. Andrew, however, says he plays because he's bored all the time.

Speaker 12 Most of the time, I am bored, and that's the only thing I want to do most.

Speaker 12 So.

Speaker 12 Yeah, interesting. There's some insight into the actual kid there.

Speaker 12 That is a response I understand from a kid. Like, Like, I am bored all the time.
This is the only thing that I like. It also,

Speaker 12 you know,

Speaker 12 gives you a little bit of a look into like, there's, for whatever reason, one of the things I take away from this article is that Imerie Tate didn't want his son to follow him as a chess guy.

Speaker 12 It might have been some insecurity about not wanting his kid to be better than him, or it may have just been understandably like, you know,

Speaker 12 I never made a lot of money playing chess. I want you to do something else with your life.
I don't want you to like be locked into this thing. I don't know.

Speaker 12 There's some interesting questions that answers or asks.

Speaker 12 The author of this article notes that Andrew had just competed in his first adult chess tournament, where he had, and again, Andrew's later on when he starts putting out propaganda trying to make himself into a badass will point out that like at age six, he was playing in adult chess tournaments.

Speaker 12 He did lose three out of five games.

Speaker 12 And his dad eventually had to pull him out of the tournament because, quote, he got very upset because he thought he was failing.

Speaker 12 So Emery withdrew his son from the game to, quote, save him from crying in front of all those people.

Speaker 12 And we're not keyed into what precisely happened there.

Speaker 1 Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought he didn't cry.
Why are we worried about that?

Speaker 12 It sure seems like his dad said he did.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Fact check.

Speaker 1 And again,

Speaker 12 I'm going to guess one of two things happened there.

Speaker 12 Either Andrew was just throwing a fit because he was losing, and his dad was like, well, you can't be at a chess tournament if you're going to throw a fit when you lose.

Speaker 12 Or Andrew was doing okay and wanted to keep playing and his dad was angry that he was losing and didn't want him to keep like risk losing again.

Speaker 12 Even though three to two is not a bad record for a six-year-old playing chess.

Speaker 1 Six. Playing against a dog.

Speaker 12 Either way, we don't know which of those is the case. Either possibility is interesting to me.

Speaker 12 Andrew's parents had another boy, Tristan, two years after Andrew was born, and the two brothers have been inseparable their whole lives. They played chess together, but Tristan never competed.

Speaker 12 They would later kickbox together, but Tristan never competed.

Speaker 12 He's like always there, but he also doesn't seem to get to live a full life because he exists purely in his brother's shadow as like an agent of his greatness.

Speaker 12 It's kind of a weird relationship for Tristan.

Speaker 12 But I don't think he's self-aware enough to understand that it's weird. One photo

Speaker 12 in that news article shows six-year-old Andrew focused in the picture frame, face taking up a third of the frame, playing chess, while just Tristan's hand is visible in the right third.

Speaker 12 And as the brothers grew up, Andrew would consistently stay in focus while Tristan would always just sort of be off to the side.

Speaker 1 Is that, and that's true to this day, right? To this day.

Speaker 12 I have, I don't have it in the script. We could play it.

Speaker 12 There's a very funny video of his brother like telling him to go out to like film their cars for this video they're doing about how nice their life is.

Speaker 12 And then when his brother goes out, Andrew cuts the feed just to be like, ha ha, fuck you. This is my show.
I don't have to like let you do anything if I don't want to.

Speaker 12 And it's like weirdly abusive because they're both men who were in their 30s like

Speaker 1 like tristan you don't have to take that like

Speaker 12 um

Speaker 12 things got harder for them after south bend um because they their mom and dad it's not a good marriage and they divorce um i have found very little detail about why that divorce happened we can infer though that it was an extremely painful time for andrew and this is all he's willing to write about it dad was working minimum wage jobs overtime since his military career had been ended Both mom and dad worked so that we could survive.

Speaker 12 Things became so hard that we decided to go to England and try a life there, only minus dad.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 he's not willing to write, like, you know, the marriage didn't work out.

Speaker 12 And again, we don't know why. I'm going to avoid like theorizing what might have happened there.
But this is clearly, he idolizes his dad and he's taken away from him forever, basically.

Speaker 12 And obviously, mom might have had a perfectly good reason for doing that. I'm not trying to be critical.
We just actually don't really know.

Speaker 12 But this is definitely like the fact that he's not willing to even acknowledge the basics of what happened kind of suggests this leaves a pretty profound impact on young Andrew. So

Speaker 12 by age 11, he was, in his words, man of the house, looking after his younger brother and now sister.

Speaker 12 The town in England they live in was called Luton, and it is still, I think it's usually pronounced by English people, Luton, but you know, you know how they are.

Speaker 17 I didn't think we would get an accent this episode, but

Speaker 17 I'm glad we did.

Speaker 1 Or I'm from Leuton.

Speaker 12 That's how they sound.

Speaker 1 Robert, you know how much that upsets.

Speaker 12 When I do my accent, should I do my Boston accent to get him back on board?

Speaker 1 Yeah, your Boston accent's really good. Oi! Ian from Boston, and Oi Lloyd, Kaffey, and Chuda.

Speaker 12 Yeah,

Speaker 12 that's my Boston accent.

Speaker 1 He sounds like an Australian

Speaker 1 Australian person underwater being strangled.

Speaker 12 Boston is just Western Australia, Sophie.

Speaker 1 Anyways, Robert, it's time for an ad break.

Speaker 12 It is time for an ad break.

Speaker 1 So go to Dinkin' Donuts and have you a kaffy.

Speaker 12 Robert. What's my Boston?

Speaker 1 It's so bad. I think it's pretty good.
I think it's pretty good. It's embarrassing.

Speaker 17 Honestly, it's so bad that it's impressive.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 17 I feel like that takes a lot of skill and control to be that bad.

Speaker 12 Again, I'll take any kind of praise. I don't care.

Speaker 12 Bad Bad attention, good attention, it's all the same to me. Welcome to our podcast about toxic masculinity.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 12 we're back.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 12 Luton is, it's not an easy place to grow up. It is, in fact, close to, if not the very hardest place to grow up in England.
It is one of the poorest places in the country.

Speaker 12 It has been repeatedly voted the worst place to live in England.

Speaker 12 I actually found a poll from like seven days before I wrote the script from Bedfordshire Live that voted it the worst place to live in England.

Speaker 1 It is a tough town.

Speaker 12 Andrew and his family have basically no money. They live in public housing and they are just barely getting by.
We know this for certain. Like this is a confirmed fact about his upbringing.

Speaker 12 Now, Andrew, again, definitely acknowledges that they were poor. This is actually an important part of his own self-mythology.

Speaker 12 But he also makes some claims that we do not know for sure are true. He claims he got a job as soon as I was old enough, although he does not say when that was.

Speaker 12 Quote, as soon as I was old enough, I got a job moving 80-pound boxes of frozen fish into the market at 5 a.m. Then a full day of school.

Speaker 12 Weekends found me at the market stall where I perfected my knife skills, flawlessly filleting fish at blinding speeds. After some time, I never cut my hands at all, not even a nick.

Speaker 12 I learned to play drums. And yeah,

Speaker 12 that's interesting.

Speaker 12 I'm sure some, again, I'm sure pieces of all of this are true.

Speaker 12 I don't know about his knife skills or the blinding speed, but I'm sure pieces of this are true.

Speaker 12 Now, Trist, or Andrew, interestingly, says that the only one of them who got into a real-world fight when they were kids was his brother Tristan. Some kid was bullying him and he beat him up.

Speaker 12 I don't know if that story is true or not, but it is worth noting that Andrew claims in this article, I have never struck a person in anger. Now, we know that's not true because he

Speaker 12 has beaten at least what, like, yeah,

Speaker 12 we know that's not true. Um, we will talk about that later, but this is the claim that he is making in this thing that he writes in like 2022.

Speaker 12 Um, when he was a young adult, he was introduced to a kickboxing trainer and he started training, as did his brothers soon after.

Speaker 12 By 2008, he was the seventh highest-ranked heavyweight kickboxer in Britain. A year later, he won his first championship and became the number one ranked kickboxer in Europe for his division.

Speaker 12 Two years later, in 2012, he was the second best heavyweight kickboxer on the planet. That sounds very impressive, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I mean, second best kickboxer on the planet.
That means you can kick to death anybody but one guy.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that is not what that actually means. So

Speaker 12 I'm going to be honest, all of the articles about him will just say he was the second best light heavyweight. Sometimes they'll just say the second best kickboxer on the planet.

Speaker 12 They'll talk about his championships and like list the numbers. I was the first draft of this, actually, I just wrote that and then moved on.
I was like, yeah, he's really good at kickboxing.

Speaker 12 Lots of bad people are really good at something. I assumed he was as like, I figured that that was true.

Speaker 12 I looked at his Wikipedia page, which says he has like 79 wins and nine losses and lists his championships. And he did win a bunch of what are called world championships.
However,

Speaker 12 that's not how boxing works because I also looked up a bunch of discussions of boxing fans analyzing his actual performance.

Speaker 12 And one thing they'll point up is that, well, there's not just one guy who's the best at kickboxing. Kickboxing is actually an incredibly fragmented sport.

Speaker 12 And there are a bunch of different, I think, I don't know if they call them leagues or whatever, there's a bunch of different like types of kickboxing championships.

Speaker 12 And some are more impressive than others, right? Some are people who are really good at kickboxing, some are people who are more amateur. And Andrew kind of stayed doing the more amateur stuff.

Speaker 12 and he was really good at beating amateur kickboxers.

Speaker 12 One of the critiques people will note who are into kickboxing is that the league that he became world or light heavyweight champion in only covers Europe.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 12 you guys might notice there's a couple of places that are the world that aren't Europe that I assume. I assume there's some kickboxers in those places.

Speaker 1 At least one or two. Yeah, at least a couple.

Speaker 12 The other thing they'll point out is that of of all of these fights that he had, and he claims like 79 wins, they can only verify like 40-something fights because, and this is, that may not mean that he's lying.

Speaker 12 All of the ways that this shit gets reported are weird, right? And there's so many different weird leagues and shit.

Speaker 12 He might be lying about the total number of wins and games he was in, but of the things that we can verify, only, this is something kickboxing fans will point out, only five of his fights are against guys with Wikipedia pages.

Speaker 12 And that may sound silly, but it means like guys who are notable enough that they have a quality, like are good enough at kickboxing.

Speaker 17 So most of his fights were against like nobodies or nobodies. These are guys who just

Speaker 17 fight on the weekends or something.

Speaker 12 Of the notable five fights he was in, he lost three of them.

Speaker 12 The allegation kickboxing fans will make is that he mostly fought amateurs to pad his record.

Speaker 12 Now, everyone agrees he's still, that's still pretty good at kickboxing, but he is not the second, he was never the second best on the planet Earth at kickboxing.

Speaker 12 That's just simply not the case um and i i think it's it's fair to say yeah he's pretty good at kickboxing he was never as good as he claimed and this is a part of the self-mythologizing that he engages in kind of vastly exaggerating his competency at kicking people a bunch with his feet um

Speaker 1 so yeah

Speaker 12 it's also worth noting that like the level tate actually was at did not pay terribly well the per fight amount is impressive he could make between fifty and a $100,000 per fight that he was in, but he was having like one or two fights per year,

Speaker 12 which is not terrible income, but you're paying for a coach, you're paying for gym access, you're paying for the medical care that comes from this. And he's going to have several serious injuries.

Speaker 12 So he's not living well off of this salary. And in fact, he and his brother are living in a cheap apartment,

Speaker 12 I think in Bedfordshire and eating as cheaply as they possibly can in order to afford to keep being in kickboxing.

Speaker 12 because it's like that's kind of what it is when you're competing at this kind of awkward level that he's at. And Tate relates aspects of this himself in a video from 2022.

Speaker 12 And I'm going to play this so everyone can get a look and listen to the guy before we can go any further. This is from his video on Rumble.
This is his like

Speaker 12 Rumble is right-wing YouTube, and his channel is called Tate Speech, as in

Speaker 12 hate speech, but you guys get it, right?

Speaker 1 I don't need to.

Speaker 1 Here it is.

Speaker 1 The first clip.

Speaker 12 World-level athletes with no money. We invented a dish that was so bland, we called it flavor, because it was the only way you could add flavor to the dish.

Speaker 12 So it had the name flavor, but it was extremely bland. And it was white rice, frozen peas, because they're cheap.

Speaker 1 Kidney beans.

Speaker 12 Kidney beans have more protein per 100 grams than minced beef. Did you know that?

Speaker 12 I found it out when I was broke, walking the aisles of the grocery store, trying to find the cheapest protein money can buy.

Speaker 12 Couldn't bring myself to be a vegetarian, so I'd add a little bit of meat, minced beef. And if I was really rich, I'd have hot sauce.
And I actually suspect he's probably not lying too much there.

Speaker 12 That seems like a...

Speaker 12 a reasonable story.

Speaker 12 And I know some people who are professional athletes at that similar awkward level where you're like a pro, but you're not rich, who are like, Yeah, you do whatever it takes to like stay fueled, and that means cooking giant pots of like

Speaker 12 not delicious things just to stay. Anyway,

Speaker 12 that seems broadly speaking like he's probably not lying entirely about that. Now, he is lying about he and his brother being world-class athletes.

Speaker 12 You might say he was, that's going to be up to what you define that as, but Tristan is not competing in kickboxing, he is working as like a coach, kind of, um, although people will criticize that in ways that are too weirdly nuanced and involve knowledge of kickboxing.

Speaker 12 So we're just going to move on. Now, the height of his career as a guy who kicks people for money comes in like 2012, 2013.

Speaker 12 2013, I think, is his last big championship. And not long after that, he decides to leave professional sports as a full-time thing.

Speaker 12 Injuries play a major role in this. Tate does not like...
talking about vulnerability, but he was worse at taking hits than he likes to pretend.

Speaker 12 He suffered detached retinas in several fights and had to have surgery for his eyes. So he like, he's, I mean, again, and again, that's the, I'm pointing this out because he will never admit it.

Speaker 12 Like, if you're a professional kickboxer, at some point you're going to get hurt enough that you can't keep doing kickboxing.

Speaker 12 Like, we all saw like Muhammad Ali go from, you know, Muhammad Ali to, you know, a guy who has severe injuries as a result of being a boxer. All this stuff's bad for you.

Speaker 12 Like, you either quit at a certain point or it destroys your body and mind the same way that like football or whatever does. I mean, we all just got a reminder of that a couple of weeks ago with,

Speaker 12 oh, the guy who had a heart attack on the train.

Speaker 12 Yeah, this is all pretty like normal sports stuff, right?

Speaker 12 Like it, you, you are, when you're watching guys do these kind of combat sports, you are watching people like mortgage their bodies in the hope of getting rich. And Tate.

Speaker 12 kind of had to accept at a certain point, my body is going to give out before I get rich doing this.

Speaker 12 So, you know, that's the thing that he recognizes and he decides I need to, like most professional athletes do, I need to find something else I can do that's easier on my body that I can support myself with.

Speaker 12 You know, some people open car dealerships. Some people decide to, you know, sell ads for different things and be pitchmen.

Speaker 12 Some people go into professional baseball.

Speaker 12 Tristan. decided to become a webcam sex pimp.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 that's an interesting call. I do think history would have been different in fascinating ways if that's the choice Michael Jordan had made.

Speaker 12 Sophie, don't give me that look.

Speaker 12 Anyway, what?

Speaker 1 I'm just saying that look,

Speaker 12 you deserved it. I usually do.
So for three years, they run a rapidly expanding business, finding women to act as cam operators. Now, this is not an inherently dishonest business, I guess.

Speaker 12 If you are, you know, building a studio and building like a platform by which you can, you know, bring these cam workers' attention and they understand their contracts and like it's a reasonably fair split.

Speaker 12 I don't have an ethical issue with building a company that allows sex workers to do cam work, right? That's that's fine. Um, but the business that Tate and Tristan operated was not fine.

Speaker 12 It was fundamentally pretty toxic.

Speaker 1 No shit. The Grunt brothers didn't have a

Speaker 12 quote now from an article in The Mirror, which is not an ideal source, but it's who entered them about this.

Speaker 12 And I don't know why they would lie about something this shady and gross because it makes them seem like sex criminals.

Speaker 1 Quote.

Speaker 12 Some of their customers fall for the belief that they can have a real relationship with the women they see on screen.

Speaker 12 But Tristan brazenly told the Sunday Mirror, it's all a big scam, and bragged that he doesn't feel any guilt because no one cares and it's their problem, not mine.

Speaker 12 The more punters hand over, the more models earn.

Speaker 12 Some women will claim to have crippling university debt, a family member in need of private health care, or a dream of moving to the UK, sometimes even telling men they want to meet them.

Speaker 12 Whatever the excuse is, it is a lie, Tristan said.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 12 he tells a story in this article about this guy who wanted to give a cam operator $20,000, his life savings. And Tristan's like, and I tried, I talked him out of it.

Speaker 12 I told him, you know, he shouldn't do that. She was actually making good money.
And then he came back a couple of months later and fell in love with another.

Speaker 12 And this time I was like, yeah, man, we'll take your money. Which definitely a lie.
Tristan and Andrew Tate have never turned down 20 grand that a desperate man offered them for lies.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's no way they're being

Speaker 17 out of that.

Speaker 1 No, there's no way that's absolutely not. There's no bread and butter.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 12 I am going to continue that quote from the mirror. But first, you know what I am going to continue first?

Speaker 12 Is capitalism. Oh,

Speaker 12 I am keeping this nightmare engine alive on my own by advertising for products on this podcast.

Speaker 1 On your own.

Speaker 12 That's it.

Speaker 12 I am the linchpin holding the global economy together.

Speaker 1 On your own.

Speaker 12 Look, after Facebook fell apart, it's just me, baby. Oh, my God.

Speaker 12 Name another company, Sophie.

Speaker 1 It's just this podcast.

Speaker 1 Just run the ads. Just run the fucking podcast.

Speaker 12 Just run the ads.

Speaker 1 Just run the ads. He's out of control.

Speaker 1 We

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 1 back.

Speaker 1 So.

Speaker 12 I'm going to continue that quote from the Sunday Mirror of Tristan Tate being interviewed. He believes he he is beyond the reach of the authorities because of two lines in the terms and conditions.

Speaker 12 He said, one is broadcasting is for entertainment purposes only. That means if a model says she has a sick dog or a sick grandma, it doesn't have to be true.

Speaker 12 The next is that all cash given to models is a voluntary sign of gratitude for their time broadcasting.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 12 I'm not a lawyer.

Speaker 1 That kind of sounds like they're taking their money.

Speaker 12 It does sound like you're taking their money. That said, he may be in the right there.
The mirror did a journalisty thing, and they reached out to a lawyer to be like, is this true?

Speaker 12 And the lawyer said, maybe, but also generally UK laws say that you can't defraud people and take their money on fraudulent terms. But also, the laws haven't kept pace with technology.

Speaker 12 There's a good chance he was in a legal gray area. They did not get charged.

Speaker 12 Probably is fair to say they were in enough of a legal gray area that they were reasonably safe.

Speaker 12 And to be like perfectly honest, I suspect they could have done this indefinitely if Andrew Tate hadn't been a sex criminal, which is, which is what we're getting to here.

Speaker 12 So Andrew Tate later wrote this on his personal website slash shady business teaching men to run their own webcam porn studios.

Speaker 12 This is a thing he does later, but this is how he talks about his webcam business and how he makes it work. Oh, God.
Okay. How did I become rich? Webcam.

Speaker 12 I've been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade. I've had over 75 girls work for me, and my business model is different than 99% of webcam studio owners.

Speaker 12 Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time, and of all my girlfriends, none were in the adult industry, entertainment industry before they met me.

Speaker 12 My job was getting women to fall in love with me. Literally, that was my job.

Speaker 12 My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she'd do anything I'd say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.

Speaker 12 Whether you agree or disagree with what I did with their loyalty, submission, and love for me doesn't matter. You cannot reject the results, and the results are simple.

Speaker 12 My girlfriends would do more for me than 99.9% of men's wives would do for them.

Speaker 1 So, what does that make y'all say? Disgusting. That's one of the grossest things I've ever heard.
That is really gross. That's fucking horrible.
And, like, voluntarily listed on his own site.

Speaker 12 It's just fucking yeah, he bragged about this. Now, this is potentially him him describing sex trafficking, right?

Speaker 1 Especially if that's what it sounds like.

Speaker 12 If the women are not getting, now, again, there's not like a law that says you can't have someone fall in love with you and then contract with them to do sex work, right?

Speaker 12 That's not a thing that there's a law against.

Speaker 12 However, if they are not getting paid for it, and if they are not being allowed freedom of movement, well, then what happens is that you have like entrapped them and you are sex trafficking them, right?

Speaker 12 This is what's called, law enforcement calls this the lover boy method, right? Where you get someone to fall in love with you.

Speaker 12 And also this is this goes on, this is a very old tactic in like, shall we say, pimping,

Speaker 12 where like, yeah, you make a woman feel like or a person be in love and dependent on you, and then you kind of emotionally abuse them into doing sex work.

Speaker 12 This is a thing that happens that is like a recognized part of a criminal enterprise.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 12 obviously, getting charges based on those words on his website is going to be hard to do.

Speaker 12 But just kind of the stuff that he had published for a while was enough that people at the time should have known that he was up to what was a likely illegal business.

Speaker 12 Now, if you came across articles about Tate in 2021 or 2022 and they went into any detail about his webcam career, the most you were likely to learn was what the mirror wrote here.

Speaker 12 After three years, they moved to Romania, saying the UK had gone downhill. They have women on a number of CD sites.
Operators take a 40% 40% cut and the rest goes to the studio.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 that's what they claimed for years had happened. Like, you know, we did it in the UK and then the UK got woke and so we switched to Romania.
That is not what actually happened.

Speaker 12 So they started running this cam business in 2012. Three years after 2012, and they moved to Romania.
It's 2015.

Speaker 12 Now, just a few days ago after his arrest, a story dropped that made it clear why they actually left the UK, and it had nothing to do with wokeness or the country going downhill.

Speaker 12 Andrew Tate was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse in 2015.

Speaker 12 Vice broke the story.

Speaker 12 Quote, Two women told Vice World News they were violently abused, one raped, the other repeatedly strangled, by Andrew Tate, and that UK police and the Crown Prosecution Service mishandled their case, leaving him free to rise to global fame on the back of his unchecked misogyny.

Speaker 12 Police took four years to pass their investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service, whose job involves assessing whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction, at which point the CPS declined to prosecute.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 that's the reality of why they had to leave the UK.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's a

Speaker 1 fucking vile, disgusting human being.

Speaker 12 And it makes the timeline makes a lot more sense when you know that. When he's like, yeah, oh, we had to bounce because, you know, things just got too woke for us in Romania.

Speaker 12 And he would also, he later made the claim that, like, I had to leave Romania because in the UK, a man can get accused of rape for anything, right?

Speaker 12 And, you know, Romania, it's much harder to get accused of rape. And so I moved to Romania, not because I'm a rapist, but because I like freedom.
No, man, you were accused of rape by multiple women

Speaker 12 and then investigated and you decided to leave because you didn't know if the UK was going to come for your ass at some point.

Speaker 12 And the story is actually a bit more fucked up than that because back in 2014, a woman who Weiss refers to as Amelia filed a police report alleging sexual and physical abuse by Tate.

Speaker 12 She claims that she and Tate met in 2009. They were friendly for years until 2013, which is when Tate was transitioning away from kickboxing to webcam pimping.

Speaker 12 The two decided to go out on a series of dates at the end of that year, and after several weeks, they were in her room when Andrew forced himself on her. Now, she describes him stopping.

Speaker 12 Like, she tells him to stop when he starts like trying to go to have sex. And

Speaker 12 she tells him that she doesn't want to have sex. And he tells her, she says that he like sits quietly for a moment.
And then she asks him, What's going on?

Speaker 12 And he says, I'm debating whether I should rape you or not.

Speaker 1 What the fuck? What the fuck?

Speaker 12 Oh boy, howdy. It's

Speaker 12 bad.

Speaker 12 Within an instant, he changed who he was. He wasn't the same Andrew that I knew.
That was funny, that would make me laugh.

Speaker 12 It was like his eyes went, and I didn't have a clue who that person person was.

Speaker 1 That was

Speaker 1 a terrifying, disgusting,

Speaker 1 oh,

Speaker 1 that's horrible. I'm so sorry that happened to her.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and it's

Speaker 12 so

Speaker 12 here's one of the things about this is she goes to the cops. He rapes her.

Speaker 12 And it takes,

Speaker 12 they have after that point, she consents to sex, she says a couple of times over the next six months, which is not uncommon in situations like this.

Speaker 12 But eventually she goes to the police to make a complaint.

Speaker 12 And the police are like, do you want to, do you want to proceed with charges, right? Because that's an option that you have in this case. And she decides, obviously,

Speaker 12 hopefully I don't think I have to explain this to this audience, but like there are a lot of horrible personal consequences that can come to charging your rapist, right?

Speaker 12 To pursue with criminal charges.

Speaker 12 She decides, and there is, and this seems like a positive thing, there's an option in the UK where you can just log a complaint and say, this guy raped me without proceeding with criminal charges, which she decides she doesn't want to do at this point.

Speaker 12 And so that's what she does.

Speaker 12 And then this is again, 2013. 2015 is when those two women who worked in his cam studio

Speaker 12 push press charges against him. And the police, and this is a positive step, it's about to get less positive, but the police find out, oh, there's a report logged against this guy two years earlier.

Speaker 12 and they reach out to amelia and they're like more women have come forward saying that this guy assaulted them do you want your charges do you want your allegations basically to be added to theirs in this case that we're building right um

Speaker 12 And she says yes. And she hands over her phone to the cops, which contained numerous audio notes because she had told Andrew and like texts and stuff like, hey, you know, like you raped me.

Speaker 12 That's why I don't want to know you anymore. And he had responded to her and he had responded to her using voice notes where he admitted to what he had done.

Speaker 12 And yeah, I'm going to play a couple of notes of Andrew Tate

Speaker 12 here for you because before we hear him in his like

Speaker 12 15 year old boy influencer voice,

Speaker 12 we should hear how he talks. to somebody like Amelia when he doesn't think it's going to be on the news.

Speaker 24 Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn't like it, the more I enjoyed it. I fucking loved how much you hated it.
Turn me on.

Speaker 12 Why am I like that?

Speaker 24 Why? I am one of the most dangerous men on this planet. Sometimes you forget exactly how lucky you were to get fucked by me.

Speaker 24 Would you rather me pin you down and make you do things you didn't like, or would you rather fuck

Speaker 24 you didn't like that? I was thinking I can do whatever I want to.

Speaker 24 That's what it is. I'm the smartest person on this fucking planet.
Are you seriously so offended? I strangled you a little bit. You didn't fucking pass out.

Speaker 24 Chill the fuck out. Jesus Christ.
I thought you were cool. What's wrong with you?

Speaker 1 Oh my god.

Speaker 1 So that's not great.

Speaker 1 That's not great. That's so upsetting.

Speaker 17 That's so upsetting.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 12 It's pretty bad. He's a pretty bad dude.
Just a

Speaker 1 vile, disgusting, despicable

Speaker 1 waste of sense. You get this.

Speaker 12 Like, again, normally self-diagnosis is a thing we avoid on this, but like, that's just very obvious textbook narcissism.

Speaker 12 I am the smartest man in the world, you know, like he is, it's not hard to see what's going on with this guy.

Speaker 12 And I don't know his dad or like how that all went down, but there's, there's, there's this, if you look at the way he talks about his dad and his grandpa, there's this need to like associate himself with greatness.

Speaker 12 And I don't know, like every, everything that's going on here makes sense, but it's also

Speaker 12 so bleak.

Speaker 12 And I

Speaker 12 don't know, there's probably a better, a better

Speaker 12 writer and thinker than me might be able to draw a more trenchant connection between the kind of stuff Bly was talking about, about how lack of connection to other men and to older men and how not knowing what your place is in society leads young men to feel disconnected and that that can be the root of some bad behavior and the fact that Tate

Speaker 12 idolizes his dad and is separated from him and becomes so needful to kind of convince others of his greatness while using violence and threats against them.

Speaker 12 I don't know that there's a connection there,

Speaker 12 but it's, I think, kind of worth

Speaker 12 thinking about, I guess,

Speaker 12 in the same continuum. I don't know.
This is still stuff like that I'm kind of muddling through too.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 12 it's not surprising to me that this guy

Speaker 12 has this

Speaker 12 kind of obsession with his, because that's what it's about, right? It's never about that he wanted sex or whatever. It's about that.

Speaker 12 It's about power. He had this, and it's about the fact that she didn't want to have sex with him is like

Speaker 12 an attempt from her to exercise agency, and no one else in the world gets to exercise agency, just Andrew Tate, right? Like, that's the way this guy thinks about things.

Speaker 12 Um,

Speaker 12 I don't know, there's a lot going on there worth worth pondering.

Speaker 12 Um, and I guess we will ponder it for a while while we wait for part three of this series, where we will talk about the fallout from these cases and the

Speaker 12 social media presence that Tate builds when, again, nobody knows this.

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 12 this young woman knows it, and a couple of police officers know it. But as a spoiler, the police don't proceed with the charges.

Speaker 12 And in fact, they

Speaker 12 it's really fucked up.

Speaker 12 The police say that they believe her, or Amelia says, what she said to Vice when they talked to her, is that the police told her that they believed her claims, but they couldn't go forward with the case because there was a shred of doubt about Tate's guilt.

Speaker 12 Um,

Speaker 1 there's a shred of doubt, see, it does seem like he admitted it directly on all the attempts. He admits to being a sexual predator.
What are we doing?

Speaker 12 There's a piece of shit cops. There's some fucked up cop gaslighting here because they tell her, like, look,

Speaker 12 going through the process of

Speaker 12 pressing charges against a rapist is so traumatic to the woman that we don't do it unless there's no shred of doubt. We're trying to protect you from like an ugly court, which is like

Speaker 12 cop gaslighting is on another level.

Speaker 12 That's

Speaker 1 that's so disheartening.

Speaker 1 I'm so sorry, Amelia.

Speaker 12 That's yeah, it's fucking bleak. That's um, this whole story is bleak.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and after this point, Andrew and Tristan move to Romania, they move their sex trafficking webcam business to Romania, and we will pick up that story in part three, where it gets a lot bleaker in some ways, but also we get to make fun of Andrew Tate videos.

Speaker 12 So, you know.

Speaker 1 Something to look forward to.

Speaker 12 Take your wins where you can get them, kiddos.

Speaker 12 What do we,

Speaker 12 who are we? Who are we here?

Speaker 17 We're the bad boys of podcasting, obviously.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 Robert,

Speaker 1 I think both shows are

Speaker 1 actually sold out, but you will be at SF Sketchfest this coming weekend, and you'll you'll be doing a behind the bastard show and you will also be doing

Speaker 1 Francesca Fiorentini yesko Fiorentini's the obituation room show yeah great francesca is great

Speaker 1 internet hate machine lovely episode should check that out if you haven't we love write something

Speaker 12 why why yes Robert it is a week from when we are recording this all right well we will finish recording the Andrew Tate episodes and then I will figure out what the fuck I'm doing for this live show that apparently a bunch of you assholes have decided to show up at.

Speaker 12 God damn you. Thank you all for buying tickets.
Before we close out, I want to thank again April Clark and Grace Freud of Girl God, the Girl God podcast,

Speaker 12 both great comedians. They have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February 25th.
People can get tickets for that at girlgodshow.com.

Speaker 12 They were on the early version of part of this, but I had an emergency and we had to bounce.

Speaker 12 And now we are recording this late at night because it is the only way that we can make this show work in a way that we are contractually obligated to. So thank you, April and Grace.

Speaker 12 Thank you, Ian and Sophie, for being guests on my show last minute.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, you're fucking welcome, Robert.

Speaker 12 Thank you. Thank you, Sophie.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 12 Everyone else can go to hell, though.

Speaker 25 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 1 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 25 Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

Speaker 16 New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

Speaker 15 Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at behind the bastards.

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