Behind the Bastards - Part Four: The Andrew Tate Story
Aired: 2023-01-26
Duration: 01:18:28


=== Raw Conversations on Recovery (01:57) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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[00:00:04]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:00:11]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:00:18]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with the guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:00:24]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:00:26]  Without this probe, I'm a die.
[00:00:28]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:00:35]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:00:43]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:00:52]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:00:55]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they failed.
[00:01:00]  Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:07]  This is Amy Roebuck, alongside TJ Holmes from the Amy and TJ podcast.
[00:01:11]  And there is so much news, information, commentary coming at you all day and from all over the place.
[00:01:18]  What's fact, what's fake, and sometimes what the F.
[00:01:22]  So let's cut the crap, okay?
[00:01:24]  Follow the Amy and TJ podcast, a one-stop news and pop culture shop to get you caught up and on with your day.
[00:01:31]  And listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
[00:01:38]  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I just tried to introduce badly, and I then completely forgot to start recording.
[00:01:49]  So I'm great.
[00:01:52]  I'm so good.
[00:01:55]  Do we have a guest?
[00:01:56]  What's the name of the show?

=== Andrew Tate's InfoWars Supplements (15:49) ===

[00:01:57]  What's happening?
[00:01:57]  I don't know, Sophie.
[00:01:58]  Do we have a guest?
[00:02:01]  Who are we?
[00:02:02]  What do we do?
[00:02:03]  Where are we?
[00:02:04]  This is Behind the Bastards.
[00:02:05]  You're Robert Evans.
[00:02:08]  I'm your overlord, Sophie Lichterman, and our guest is Ian Johnson, our wonderful editor.
[00:02:13]  Hi, Ian.
[00:02:15]  Hey, Sophie.
[00:02:16]  Ian Johnson, incredible editor.
[00:02:18]  Sophie, podcast and Fuhrer.
[00:02:22]  This is not the first time he's done that, and it's cringy every time.
[00:02:27]  It won't be the last one.
[00:02:27]  It will not be the last.
[00:02:28]  No, it will not.
[00:02:30]  Well, you know, we're talking about Andrew Emery Tate.
[00:02:37]  And boy, howdy, are we talking about Andrew Marie Tate?
[00:02:41]  We just finished talking about Hustlers University, and we're about to get into Hustlers University 2.0 because Andrew understands branding, if nothing else.
[00:02:52]  But before we get into that, I wanted to talk a little bit.
[00:02:54]  So obviously, while this is going on, while he's launching this series of online classes and deliberately courting controversy online by saying like fucked up shit about women to go viral, he's also constantly guesting on every right-wing podcast that will have him.
[00:03:11]  And because of the world is the way it is, InfoWars is the first place he's able to like really get some traction.
[00:03:17]  And he's going to abandon them as soon as he can, like everybody who gets their start on InfoWars, because it's a dead end.
[00:03:24]  You want to escape InfoWars and get on, he's going to eventually be interviewed by like fucking Piers Morgan and shit.
[00:03:30]  But at first, he's reliant upon them.
[00:03:34]  And Alex Jones sees the potential in this guy and decides, I want to try and make Andrew a part of my business, which is a thing that Alex does regularly.
[00:03:43]  And it leads us to this beautiful ad for the supplement line that Alex made branded based on Andrew Tate.
[00:03:50]  So here is an ad for Andrew Tate-branded InfoWars supplements.
[00:03:54]  Oh boy.
[00:03:56]  Oh, this is a real treat for everyone.
[00:03:59]  Oh boy.
[00:04:01]  To get a job, the man to get a job.
[00:04:03]  They inflate the currency so nobody can exist any other way because it's too expensive.
[00:04:06]  The parents are out working all day.
[00:04:08]  The school and the internet and the matrix raise your children.
[00:04:11]  Your children go to school all day and be told things that you may not want them to learn.
[00:04:14]  Then they sit on the internet and read things and watch things you may not want them to watch.
[00:04:17]  You talk to them for 10 minutes at the end of the day.
[00:04:19]  They go to bed.
[00:04:20]  You're fighting with your 10 minutes against endless hours of the most entertaining programming or the most forceful programming.
[00:04:27]  In school, it's forceful.
[00:04:28]  On the internet, it's entertaining.
[00:04:30]  Convincing them of ideas that you perhaps don't agree with.
[00:04:32]  I've seen it myself on YouTube.
[00:04:34]  I've seen a guy in America driving his car and his kids were in the backseat and he was arguing with them about an issue.
[00:04:38]  And they were like, where did you hear that?
[00:04:40]  School?
[00:04:40]  He's like, why did the school tell you that?
[00:04:42]  That's not true.
[00:04:43]  And his own children are arguing with him because they learned it in school.
[00:04:46]  Have you ever tried to take your children out of school?
[00:04:47]  You'll get fined.
[00:04:48]  You'll get in trouble.
[00:04:48]  No, your kids have to go to school.
[00:04:50]  You have to give your kids away to the school.
[00:04:52]  If you don't give your kids away to the brainwashing, you'll get in trouble.
[00:04:55]  As an all-star fighter, businessman, motivational speaker, the Switch is incredible.
[00:05:01]  It is.
[00:05:02]  It is.
[00:05:03]  That was like a pop face.
[00:05:05]  Here we go.
[00:05:06]  This is so funny.
[00:05:08]  So did I.
[00:05:08]  I thought I drew something up.
[00:05:10]  No.
[00:05:11]  Just leading us in with like this mix of Christian conservative fear-mongering and like divorce dad fear-mongering.
[00:05:18]  Oh, by the way.
[00:05:19]  It's perfect.
[00:05:20]  It's perfect.
[00:05:21]  And then we get Alex.
[00:05:22]  Let's go.
[00:05:23]  Speaker and philanthropist.
[00:05:25]  Andrew Tate has truly earned the title of Top G.
[00:05:28]  But there's another title Andrew Tate holds that has enraged the globalist.
[00:05:32]  He is consecutively the most googled man in the world in the last two years.
[00:05:38]  And that's because his message is about human and specifically male empowerment.
[00:05:43]  Now, Andrew Tate is taking his fight to empower and supercharge men to the next level.
[00:05:49]  Introducing Top G supplements.
[00:05:52]  We are proud to Andrew DeLis and sponsor the Top G line of supplements by Andrew Tate and his crew.
[00:05:57]  Now you have the chance to benefit in body, mind, and soul with the same supplements that Andrew Tate takes himself.
[00:06:03]  Learn more about these amazing products at andrewtatepower.com.
[00:06:08]  AndrewTatePower.com and discover the power of Andrew Tate's new supplements.
[00:06:13]  They're the highest quality on the market.
[00:06:15]  I think there's a whole bunch of men in the world who understand my value.
[00:06:17]  And if men grow up to be like me, you're going to have a whole bunch of people with no criminal record, dedicated athletes.
[00:06:25]  All right, that's probably enough.
[00:06:27]  Yes, no criminal record, huh, buddy?
[00:06:29]  I'm John Spirit in that video.
[00:06:31]  So, first of all, the music is amazing.
[00:06:34]  It's flawless.
[00:06:35]  Absolutely flawless.
[00:06:37]  Third of all, Jake Paul's face.
[00:06:40]  Oh, yeah.
[00:06:41]  Like, did you see the names of the supplements on the Catian?
[00:06:49]  That's probably useless.
[00:06:52]  It was, they were like those names from that other video we watched in the last episode.
[00:06:57]  It was like sheer per, I don't even know those words, like sheer perdacity or whatever.
[00:07:01]  Perspicacity.
[00:07:02]  Yeah.
[00:07:03]  Perspicacity.
[00:07:04]  Those are like the names of the supplements.
[00:07:06]  Yeah.
[00:07:06]  Because he's trying to do like a Muhammad Ali thing, right?
[00:07:09]  Like Muhammad Ali would always describe himself in these very flurried, often like rhyming terms.
[00:07:13]  But Muhammad Ali also could back up every single thing he said about himself, which Mr. Tate cannot.
[00:07:22]  But it also doesn't matter because it's all about making the image work.
[00:07:28]  So by 2021, Andrew Tate's image is working very well.
[00:07:32]  He has become one of the most popular accounts on Twitter, on Instagram.
[00:07:38]  He's got a pretty prominent YouTube.
[00:07:40]  He is huge on TikTok.
[00:07:42]  You know, we're talking like millions and millions of followers and combine several billion impressions just in like the top G term on TikTok and shit.
[00:07:52]  And so he launches Hustlers University 2.0.
[00:07:54]  So he had been selling a bunch of different classes.
[00:07:57]  He pairs that down and he focuses just on money-making schemes.
[00:08:01]  And the gist is this, for about $50 a month, you get the classes for free and you also get let into this Discord.
[00:08:09]  I'm sorry, for $50 a month, you get the classes for free.
[00:08:14]  So, but what about the $50 a month?
[00:08:18]  Well, sorry, you don't get the classes for free.
[00:08:20]  For $50 a month, you get access to the classes and to a series of Discord rooms.
[00:08:25]  Discord is like a chat service.
[00:08:26]  You can do voice and text chat.
[00:08:29]  And basically, what he is selling is, I built this community of people who have gotten rich using my tactics.
[00:08:37]  And if you pay this monthly fee, then you'll get to hang out with us and they will coach you on how to make money.
[00:08:42]  And you can watch all of our videos on how to make money too.
[00:08:46]  Damn it.
[00:08:47]  That's like kind of brilliant on two levels.
[00:08:49]  And I hate him for it because a subscription model is just passive income coming in every month as long as you can maintain that subscriber base.
[00:08:56]  And now he has other people doing the work for him.
[00:08:58]  He has his other, he's like community behind something doing the teachings.
[00:09:01]  He doesn't even have to do anything.
[00:09:02]  He's actually good at it.
[00:09:04]  And the schemes that he's, because he has like, you get to pick like one of three or four different money making paths to go down when you join Hustlers University.
[00:09:13]  It's a little like a video game.
[00:09:14]  Choose your adventure.
[00:09:15]  And they're all kind of boring.
[00:09:17]  Basically, you can choose to either learn how to day trade, like do stock trading, or learn how to sell cryptocurrency, or learn how to run like a copywriting mill where you're basically paying people pennies to write like terrible, shitty fake books to take advantage of Amazon's algorithm and trick people into paying like $2 for.
[00:09:36]  There's also a lot of Amazon affiliate shit.
[00:09:39]  A bunch of it involves taking advantage of like the ways that Amazon works.
[00:09:45]  And it's one of those things, if you watch YouTube and you don't have YouTube Red or whatever the fuck YouTube calls their subscription service, which I don't because I'm lazy, you get all these like shady ads from people telling you like, I'm going to teach you how to make a bunch of money off of YouTube or off of Amazon.
[00:10:00]  Like, did you know that you could get rich, you know, creating Amazon affiliate links or with Audible or whatever?
[00:10:07]  That's all he's doing.
[00:10:08]  But instead of selling it as like this shady video just on how to make money using Amazon, he's giving you access to this community of distinguished men who all smoke cigars and post pictures of how much money they're making.
[00:10:23]  And because all these other guys, again, it's taking a lot of these MLM tactics where you're surrounding yourselves in this community of other men who are going to be bragging constantly that they're making money.
[00:10:33]  So you feel like if I'm not making money, it's not because this video is bullshit.
[00:10:37]  It's because I'm not hustling hard enough.
[00:10:39]  I'm not taking advantage of all of the great advice that I've gotten.
[00:10:44]  It's a pretty clever thing to do.
[00:10:47]  And he does encourage his people like, post your sales, post what you're making this month.
[00:10:51]  And all of that's kind of gamed and a lot of it's very scammy in the same way that like a lot of MLM stuff is where it's like, yeah, just post your raw sales.
[00:10:59]  Don't tell people what your net is.
[00:11:00]  Don't tell people how much money you had to put into the business to make it work, all that good stuff.
[00:11:04]  And Tate, again, is barely present on the actual Hustlers University Discord.
[00:11:10]  But what he does do is when he launches this new version of the service, he spins up his media appearances in like all these different right-wing podcasts and hustler culture podcasts to push the store.
[00:11:23]  And he also alters his branding at this point.
[00:11:26]  Earlier, he'd kind of been indistinguishable from, he'd been kind of at the nexus of pickup artist and alt-right political weirdo.
[00:11:33]  But he increasingly pivots to positioning himself as kind of like a jacked and rich Jordan Peterson.
[00:11:40]  And I want to play you a video that gives you an example of that.
[00:11:43]  Let's quickly talk about like the red pill, the day game guys.
[00:11:46]  And this is why they're wrong.
[00:11:47]  And this is what they don't understand.
[00:11:49]  Listen to me and I'll teach you how to get girls on Tinder and I'll teach you how to go out and get girls at the mall all day.
[00:11:55]  If you are walking around the mall all day or you're tendering all day, you are giving out attention.
[00:12:01]  You're giving out more than you'll ever get back because you're a man.
[00:12:04]  You're giving attention out and you don't get enough back.
[00:12:07]  So that's an energy deficit and it zaps you of your powers.
[00:12:11]  Before you know it, you're going to end up one of them little red pill dorks sitting there.
[00:12:15]  Well, I'm in the manosphere.
[00:12:16]  I'm an alpha.
[00:12:17]  Bro, you're five foot seven.
[00:12:19]  Oh, fucking alpha.
[00:12:20]  How are you an alpha?
[00:12:21]  You're like five foot eight.
[00:12:23]  Alpha of what?
[00:12:24]  Walk into a fucking room of basketball players, multi-millionaire, six foot five, big shit, and talk about how alpha you are because of your YouTube channel.
[00:12:33]  Fucking these guys live in a dream.
[00:12:34]  Alpha has always, for the longest period of human time, meant capability for violence.
[00:12:39]  That's what alpha has always meant, apex fredder.
[00:12:41]  A little short dude.
[00:12:43]  All right, bro.
[00:12:44]  Of course you are.
[00:12:45]  Let's just, let's not even, let's meet and let's not even talk.
[00:12:48]  Let's meet and let's just measure our heights.
[00:12:50]  Let's just take a picture side by side of me and you.
[00:12:54]  And let's talk about how alpha you are afterwards.
[00:12:56]  Fucking dorks.
[00:12:58]  So they're giving out energy.
[00:13:00]  They don't get energy back.
[00:13:02]  The correct way to get pussy like I have is to absorb the energy from everyone in the room and then expel it in a fireball.
[00:13:11]  A lightning strike of power and prowess so that all the bitches want to fuck you and they pray you come and say hello.
[00:13:20]  That's how you get bitches.
[00:13:21]  You don't go and beg them and give energy away.
[00:13:23]  No.
[00:13:24]  You steal the energy from every other male and then you expel it in a ball of fucking lightning.
[00:13:30]  What's happening behind him?
[00:13:33]  Sounds like he's been watching a lot of Dragon.
[00:13:35]  Yeah.
[00:13:35]  Yeah.
[00:13:36]  Like, what the hell is he talking about?
[00:13:37]  What is happening behind him?
[00:13:39]  Someone's cleaning his house.
[00:13:41]  But why is she so close to him?
[00:13:43]  Because he likes to show you that.
[00:13:46]  Like, that's a big part of his, he does this in all of his, like a lot of his videos.
[00:13:49]  He'll make sure that like his cleaning lady or one of his cam girls is like doing a task behind him to like make the point that he's got all these women working for him, right?
[00:13:59]  Like that's, that's a huge part of the Tate myth.
[00:14:02]  But what he's doing here in this video is interesting to me.
[00:14:05]  He's, he's deliberately, he's positioning himself as the opposite of both these whiny men's rights activist guys and of the standard pickup artist crew.
[00:14:15]  And he's all this talk about height, this talk about alphas, he is playing to incels because, like he knows that very young men, mostly in their late teens, who are like angry about the fact that girls don't like them and angry about the fact that, like they're, they're, they don't have all of the money and success they think that they're owed that like that's his, that's his business right, that's his fucking bread and butter.
[00:14:38]  Um, why does he?
[00:14:40]  Why is he choosing to like alienate all the short people?
[00:14:43]  He's?
[00:14:44]  He's not, he's not.
[00:14:45]  This is actually a two-part con and it what he's, what he's doing here is he's getting them.
[00:14:49]  So I was gonna say it's like kind of sounds like he's like dunking on exactly who he like is targeting, but I think it's probably like a little reverse psychology.
[00:14:56]  He is doing yeah, some some negging and stuff right to get the, to get these guys uh, riled up.
[00:15:01]  But he's also so, if you remember back, if I don't know if any of you read Elliot Rogers manifesto, Elliot Roger being the first incel mass shooter.
[00:15:12]  He talks a lot and he, like the entire incel community was formed initially as a reaction to pickup artistry, right?
[00:15:18]  All of these guys who feel like there's something inherently wrong with their bodies that makes it impossible for them to pick up women in an unfair way or that feminism has ruined it.
[00:15:30]  Roger was obsessed that because he wasn't like tall enough or white enough, right?
[00:15:33]  That he was never going to get a girl.
[00:15:36]  They initially, when they were like younger, fell into pickup artistry.
[00:15:41]  And when that didn't work, because none of it works very well, they became violent psychopaths.
[00:15:47]  Like they became violent, right?
[00:15:48]  Like they decided like not only was the like pickup artistry a con, but all of society deserved to pay for the fact that they got conned by pickup artists.
[00:15:58]  Andrew recognizes this.
[00:16:00]  And so the first thing he's doing is he is going after the pickup artists, right?
[00:16:04]  And he's going after it in a way that's going to get all these incel dudes like agitated, but is also going to play to the fact that they realize they're being conned by these people.
[00:16:14]  And I think that's an interesting choice.
[00:16:16]  And the other thing that he's doing, he starts by talking about how like you're not alpha if you're not tall enough, right?
[00:16:23]  But he's also framing it as like these pickup artists aren't real alphas because they're not big.
[00:16:29]  And it sounds at first like he's kind of going into this.
[00:16:32]  It's hopeless.
[00:16:32]  If you're not tall, you'll never get a woman.
[00:16:34]  That's actually not the claim that he's making.
[00:16:37]  I'm going to play you another clip that's kind of an extension of his message that shows how he's talking to these incel folks after he gets through with the kind of slamming the uh uh slamming the pickup artist crew.
[00:16:50]  And the message that he has for the actual people being taken advantage of by the pickup artist community is kind of liberatory in a weird way.
[00:16:59]  Now, I have genetic gifts I understand you do not have, but I've also worked on my genetic gifts.
[00:17:04]  I didn't just have them.
[00:17:06]  You know, I worked.
[00:17:07]  Even if you, if you did the work I did, you'd still be taught 1%, even without the genetics, because you have no idea how hard I've worked.
[00:17:12]  But the point is, if I teach you how to absorb energy from everyone else around you, then you instantly become the most powerful person in the room.
[00:17:20]  So it's not only so much about being big and being strong and having a land ball, it's about absorbing energy and attention.
[00:17:26]  So you people do not understand.
[00:17:27]  And 99% of the things people teach you, they teach you how to expel energy.
[00:17:32]  You can expel and lose huge amounts of energy chasing bitches and trying to make money.
[00:17:37]  You don't get enough back.
[00:17:39]  Whereas if you can flip the script, then the whole world changes.
[00:17:43]  This is what you need to understand.

=== The Nihilistic Argument Flawed (06:03) ===

[00:17:46]  So that's there.
[00:17:48]  He's insufferable.
[00:17:50]  Is it?
[00:17:50]  But that's this is worth really drilling into and paying attention to because this is an extremely appealing message to the kind of young men who are like on the edge of where Elliot Roger was, right?
[00:18:02]  These children and it are these guys, they're starting out in the world.
[00:18:05]  Mostly we're talking young white teenagers, though not exclusively, but like men.
[00:18:10]  And it's hard out there.
[00:18:12]  Obviously, it is still easier to be a man or a white man than it is to be basically anything else, but it's not as much easier as it used to, right?
[00:18:20]  And some of that's because things are less unfair than they used to be in some regards.
[00:18:26]  And some of it's just because the economy's gotten worse, the world has gotten harder, a number of things.
[00:18:30]  There's a lot of shit's gotten uglier.
[00:18:32]  Capitalism has kind of gotten more undeniably brutal, even to the chunk of people who were initially being lifted up by it.
[00:18:42]  And so these kids get out there and shit's not as easy.
[00:18:45]  They're not getting handed the things that they're supposed to get handed.
[00:18:48]  And a lot of them turn nihilistic.
[00:18:50]  And the radical right has always targeted men in this age group and socioeconomic group.
[00:18:57]  And these are, again, young people who recognize, and some of what they're recognizing, like with Robert Bly's folks, is fair.
[00:19:03]  There's a degree, a lot of atomization in our society.
[00:19:07]  It is not encouraged for men to have like intimate friendships with other men.
[00:19:10]  It's deeply lonely.
[00:19:12]  It's deeply competitive in a way that's really vicious.
[00:19:16]  And these people are suffering.
[00:19:17]  And the right always has made a lot of their early recruitments by kind of coming in and finding these men, trying to make sense of their suffering and offering them an answer.
[00:19:28]  But while the kind of incel youth culture that has been deeply influential online is super nihilistic, Tate is reaching out to these people and he's preaching to these awkward, nerdy kids with social anxiety, but he's offering them a sense of hope where he's like, yeah, you're not going to be like me because you're not 6'3 if you're like 5'7.
[00:19:49]  But if you put in the work I've put in, you can still be in that top 1%, right?
[00:19:53]  It's about taking and absorbing energy.
[00:19:55]  And I have these tactics.
[00:19:56]  Your genetics are not the only thing that matters, right?
[00:19:59]  You can actually overcome that with enough work and find a way to make money and get, you know, women, right?
[00:20:07]  Like that is actually the pitch that he's making.
[00:20:09]  And for the people who are kind of adjacent to these incel communities, that's a more optimistic pitch than they've been getting from a lot of people.
[00:20:18]  Again, if you spend a lot of time on some of these incel boards, it's dudes obsessing with like, oh, because of the my chin is only this wide and not this wide, so it's physically impossible for a woman to love me.
[00:20:29]  Or like, I have this like epicanthic eye fold or whatever, or like my nose is this size, and so I will never have sex.
[00:20:37]  And like, this is a biological reality.
[00:20:39]  And what Tate's actually saying is the people telling you this are full of shit, but also like, I have a tactic for how you can, and it just involves hard work.
[00:20:48]  It doesn't matter that you don't have these genetic gifts.
[00:20:51]  You actually can overcome that.
[00:20:53]  And this is when you start talking about Tate on any kind of open forum, right?
[00:20:59]  You're going to get people coming in and saying some version of, he's the only reason I'm alive.
[00:21:04]  He kept me from killing myself.
[00:21:05]  Or like, I think he's, he's talking to you.
[00:21:07]  And this is because, as toxic as he is, finding Andrew Tate, if you are one of these young men who might have gone Elliot Roger, might be better for you than like falling down the rabbit hole you would have fallen down before him.
[00:21:21]  That's not an necessarily an inaccurate statement.
[00:21:26]  Right.
[00:21:26]  He tricks them into having hope.
[00:21:29]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:30]  And I, again, the point I'm making here is, I am not saying that he is a net good.
[00:21:34]  He's absolutely not.
[00:21:35]  But when people, people who are specifically look like were kind of in danger of falling into this incel rabbit hole, if they find Tate, that might be better for them than the road they would have gone down.
[00:21:46]  Now, that's a small subset of the folks who are actually encountering his stuff.
[00:21:50]  But when people make that point, it's not, there's not nothing there.
[00:21:55]  And it's not because Tate cares about saving kids.
[00:21:58]  It's because this is how to get money from them, right?
[00:22:01]  Exactly.
[00:22:02]  And it just speaks to, again, how exploitative the whole thing is because you're going after these people who are already very clearly vulnerable and at a low point, and you're just preying on that and taking advantage of it.
[00:22:13]  And it's just like, it's just disgusting.
[00:22:15]  It's all disgusting, but I also think it's really worth understanding the degree to which he understands the online ecosystem he's feeding it, right?
[00:22:25]  And that's why so.
[00:22:26]  He's basically telling them that, you know, their greatest insecurities don't matter as long as they're, you know, they try to be like him and be boot tough man.
[00:22:35]  Yeah, be a top G.
[00:22:37]  Yeah.
[00:22:38]  One of one of his big lines is you don't have to be handsome if you're scary.
[00:22:42]  Oh, yeah.
[00:22:42]  Which by which he means that like ugly dudes can get women if they're jacked.
[00:22:46]  Which is, again, that's very bad.
[00:22:49]  Although you could argue it's better than you should drive a car into a crowd because you'll never find love, right?
[00:22:54]  So this is why people make that argument.
[00:22:58]  It's not, it doesn't mean that he's a net force for good because spoiler, he is not.
[00:23:03]  He's a terrible person and his overall impact is a ton of harm.
[00:23:07]  But on this specific community, there is an argument to be made.
[00:23:10]  And that's where that argument comes from, right?
[00:23:14]  Yeah.
[00:23:14]  And again, the idea that he shouldn't be deplatformed because he's going to save all these incels is nonsense.
[00:23:20]  It's just not coming out of nowhere, right?
[00:23:24]  Because that is where his money comes from, right?
[00:23:26]  That's the group of people he's decided to take advantage of.
[00:23:29]  And I do think in the long run, he might wind up having just as much of a negative effect on these kids as the pickup artist had on Elliot Roger.
[00:23:36]  It just hasn't been going on that long because eventually they're going to see none of what he says works, right?
[00:23:40]  Like in the long run, it's not going to work.
[00:23:43]  It's just in the short term, less nihilistic than drive your car into a crowd, although it might still end in the same place.

=== Exploiting Incel Communities (03:12) ===

[00:23:50]  But you know who won't tell kids to oh boy, Sophie, just roll the ads on a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien.
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[00:25:13]  Just a little bit bigger, hips, wider.
[00:25:15]  This is the podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
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[00:26:59]  Ah, we are back.

=== Left-Wing Bait and Hooks (15:21) ===

[00:27:02]  So, Tate is kind of while a lot of his pitch is laser targeted at young men going down that specific incel rabbit hole.
[00:27:10]  Once he kind of captures that demographic, again, he's an innovator.
[00:27:14]  He starts to broaden his appeal as fast as he can because he wants to reach as many vulnerable young men as he possibly can.
[00:27:21]  And he is a cognizant person of the time that he's in.
[00:27:25]  He recognizes there's a lot of movement and there's a lot of cultural momentum behind certain left-wing ideas, including criticisms of capitalism.
[00:27:34]  I actually think people don't recognize enough how superficially critical of capitalism Andrew Tate is and how much of his appeal comes from that.
[00:27:42]  And to kind of exhibit that, I want to play a clip from him on the Fresh and Fit podcast, which he is sitting in between like seven or eight women who look like they're all Instagram kind of done up influencer type people.
[00:27:59]  Yeah.
[00:28:01]  That's bullshit.
[00:28:02]  That's slave mind garbage.
[00:28:03]  Feminist, racist, garbage crap that's been put in your brain that you need to resist.
[00:28:08]  Absolutely.
[00:28:09]  Nothing to do with Eurocentricism.
[00:28:10]  It's bullshit.
[00:28:11]  It's garbage.
[00:28:12]  You need to resist that kind of shit.
[00:28:14]  I'm telling you, the problems with the world today are very, very specific.
[00:28:18]  And I state this without patronizing you.
[00:28:20]  I don't want to patronize you.
[00:28:21]  I'm an old man.
[00:28:22]  I've been around the block.
[00:28:23]  The problems in the world today exist because the people who are in charge of the world have done a very, very clever thing.
[00:28:29]  They've specifically designed the world in which a way that the people at the bottom, because we're all at the bottom, even me with all my millions, right?
[00:28:37]  The people at the bottom are so busy fighting with each other that we never look up and realize we're getting fucked.
[00:28:44]  And the reason they do that, the blacks hate the whites, Republicans hate the Democrats, the men hate the women.
[00:28:48]  Eurocentric.
[00:28:50]  He said this.
[00:28:51]  You don't have pay gap.
[00:28:52]  Blah, blah, blah.
[00:28:53]  It's all slave mind shit to keep us all fighting amongst each other.
[00:28:56]  Do you think when a billionaire who's black meets a billionaire who's white, they talk about race?
[00:29:01]  No.
[00:29:02]  Fuck no.
[00:29:04]  You think a female billionaire and male billionaire meet?
[00:29:06]  They start talking about Eurocentricism, feminist fucking garbage.
[00:29:09]  No.
[00:29:10]  Stop buying into that shit.
[00:29:11]  It's a fucking trick and it's a fucking lie.
[00:29:13]  All of it.
[00:29:14]  Throw it away.
[00:29:15]  Throw it the fuck away.
[00:29:16]  If you want to be attractive as a female, you know what you need to do.
[00:29:18]  You need to go to the fucking gym.
[00:29:20]  And just because Myron said it, just because Myron said it, you need to be smart enough.
[00:29:25]  You need to be smart enough to not let yourself get triggered by the fact that he just said something you're not used to hearing.
[00:29:30]  That's all it is.
[00:29:31]  That's all it is.
[00:29:36]  I hate every second of that.
[00:29:39]  It is, it is miserable.
[00:29:41]  But he's, again, that is a superficial kind of class analysis, right?
[00:29:48]  Where he's talking about billionaires all have solidarity with each other.
[00:29:52]  We're all poor.
[00:29:53]  And he's, again, he's lying about this.
[00:29:55]  He is a multi-millionaire, possibly multi-hundreds of millions of dollars.
[00:30:00]  But you see what he's doing.
[00:30:02]  He recognizes everyone hates these billionaires.
[00:30:05]  Everyone, you cannot ignore inequality and the role that it has on like why all these young men who are vulnerable to my message are suffering.
[00:30:12]  So I have to fucking play to that, right?
[00:30:15]  And again, he's offering this kind of, he starts with this thing that has elements of left-wing analysis to it, elements of like, you know, capitalism is a con game.
[00:30:26]  The rich are a class and they have solidarity with each other and they're trying to keep you guys fighting so that you don't organize against them.
[00:30:33]  There's pieces of left-wing analysis there.
[00:30:36]  But then Tate's solution is not dismantle the system.
[00:30:40]  It's not go after these guys.
[00:30:42]  It's treat it like a trap you escape by getting rich and jacked, right?
[00:30:46]  That's the way to, that's the way it is to say, again, look back to Robert Bly, where he's he's very accurately stating, here are some fucked up things capitalism is doing to men.
[00:30:55]  Here are ways in which capitalism and the patriarchy is harming men.
[00:31:00]  The solution is for men to like go out into the woods and play drums and learn how to hunt and stuff.
[00:31:07]  Not the solution is for men and women to organize to make a more just society that doesn't harm us in these ways.
[00:31:15]  Tate's doing a version of the same thing.
[00:31:18]  Like Bly, he's diagnosing parts of the problem.
[00:31:22]  And then the thing he's selling you is, here's how you personally can get out of it by doing this thing that feeds money to me, right?
[00:31:30]  He's insufferable.
[00:31:32]  He's insufferable, but it works.
[00:31:34]  Yeah.
[00:31:36]  And obviously, other people are pushing pieces of this message on young folks.
[00:31:40]  But his presentation is the most polished.
[00:31:43]  He is not a, he is a good speaker.
[00:31:45]  And I don't mean that in the you should like the way he speaks.
[00:31:48]  I mean it in he's effective at speaking and getting his message across.
[00:31:52]  He's always the most obnoxious in the room.
[00:31:55]  He's the loudest in the room.
[00:31:58]  And you make sure of that.
[00:32:00]  He does.
[00:32:00]  And if you watch him with these young men, like these other male influencers on their podcasts, he's so good at sucking energy from them.
[00:32:09]  Like he actually does know how to do that.
[00:32:11]  He's very good at talk, not just not even talking over them, but at making the focus of the conversation whatever he wants it to be and making himself the person that people are focusing on.
[00:32:24]  That's the thing he knows how to do.
[00:32:27]  And it's, it's, it's, it's, yeah.
[00:32:29]  And I think probably the smartest thing he's done in this whole process is co-opt the Matrix movies in his messaging.
[00:32:36]  And that sounds very silly.
[00:32:38]  The thing that Tate does is he basically he positions the Matrix is the normal world where you like work for some company 40 or whatever hours a week just to scrape by.
[00:32:48]  And if you're lucky, maybe buy a house someday.
[00:32:51]  And the thing that Andrew tells people is that like, this is what you have to break out of, right?
[00:32:55]  Not that like you have to make a more equitable system, but you have to escape the Matrix like Neo does.
[00:33:00]  And it's just about freeing yourself.
[00:33:04]  And yeah, screw everybody else.
[00:33:06]  It's just about getting yourself out.
[00:33:08]  Yeah.
[00:33:08]  And once he gets kids to accept that idea, the thing he tells them that they need to drop out of school and spend the money they would spend on college on Hustlers University.
[00:33:18]  That is a massive part of his pitch.
[00:33:20]  And again, it's not hard to see why this stuff is appealing to a lot of young kids.
[00:33:24]  It's married to some of the worst misogyny imaginable too, though.
[00:33:28]  He tells young men that they should not learn how to cook.
[00:33:32]  That's a waste of time.
[00:33:32]  They should find a woman to cook for them.
[00:33:34]  They should focus on making money.
[00:33:36]  Women shouldn't be allowed to leave the house.
[00:33:38]  They shouldn't have friends of their own.
[00:33:40]  This is all stuff that Tate preaches too, alongside the stuff that's less fucked up.
[00:33:45]  In Tate's ideology, women being able to have their own careers and lives is also part of the Matrix, right?
[00:33:51]  He starts from this reasonable position, capitalism is kind of a con job.
[00:33:55]  And then he pivots to telling kids that the real con is anything that limits the ability of young men to do whatever they want in any way.
[00:34:02]  And I want to play you now a video that he made to advertise Hustlers University 2.0 because it's something else.
[00:34:11]  You cannot stop.
[00:34:12]  You cannot give up.
[00:34:13]  You're in the most fantastic place on the planet for making money, Hustles University.
[00:34:17]  And the only person who could ruin that is you.
[00:34:19]  Most of you are happy to be losers part-time.
[00:34:22]  You want to escape.
[00:34:23]  That's why you joined.
[00:34:24]  You don't want to be a loser anymore.
[00:34:26]  But then that new video game comes out.
[00:34:28]  I'll just play the video game.
[00:34:29]  I'll just be a loser for two more weeks.
[00:34:30]  Then I'll get back to trying to escape the Matrix.
[00:34:33]  It doesn't work that way because you jump in and out of complacency from I'm happy to be a loser and do loser things to I can't be a loser anymore.
[00:34:40]  And when you jump in and out, you never get momentum.
[00:34:42]  You cannot quit.
[00:34:43]  You cannot give up.
[00:34:44]  You need that momentum to break free.
[00:34:46]  When a rocket is flying out towards the moon to escape the atmosphere, it doesn't fucking pause halfway up the sky, does it?
[00:34:52]  No, it keeps going.
[00:34:55]  Every single second you're not in Hustle's University, there are things happening, conversations happening that you're not watching, information, that could be the one little piece of information you need to break out.
[00:35:04]  It could be that one little sentence that changes everything.
[00:35:08]  You're in Hustle's University and you're going to make money, but it ain't easy.
[00:35:11]  It ain't going to be given to you on a plate.
[00:35:12]  You're going to have to work.
[00:35:13]  You're in competition with the entire world.
[00:35:16]  Everyone wants to escape.
[00:35:17]  You cannot be lazy.
[00:35:20]  Okay, that's probably enough.
[00:35:22]  The filming on this is so weird.
[00:35:24]  He jumps back and forth between his cars.
[00:35:27]  He's like clearly holding an empty mug to look at it.
[00:35:32]  I think filmed in a way that is meant so that they can cut it up for TikTok more easily.
[00:35:37]  You see this with the Liver King too.
[00:35:39]  A lot of these guys will, their longer YouTube videos will have kind of a weird vibe because they're mainly filming it to cut it up for TikTok.
[00:35:46]  But you see here, he's like, there's this fear of missing out.
[00:35:49]  You're not doing enough.
[00:35:50]  You've got to break free.
[00:35:51]  You're in competition with everybody else.
[00:35:54]  And it's interesting because when he's talking this stuff, it's extremely modern and it's almost apolitical, right?
[00:36:03]  Like there was not a thing in that that is like you could super define as like a particularly political rant.
[00:36:10]  Tate is a very political guy.
[00:36:12]  And when he gets into his opinions about like women shouldn't be allowed to leave the house, you realize he's actually kind of like a traditionalist religious fundamentalist, which we will be building towards.
[00:36:21]  But he's smart enough that he doesn't get stuck in the traps that a lot of religious fundamentalists fall into trying to reach out to young men.
[00:36:28]  He doesn't start with any of that.
[00:36:30]  It's stuff that kind of comes out later in some of his other rants.
[00:36:34]  And he gets this, there will be moments where you can, he will make these arguments about stuff like military service that actually wouldn't seem out of place if you're listening to some like left-wing bread tuber going on a rant.
[00:36:47]  I want to play you this clip here because again, it shows how much he's kind of separated himself from the traditional right-wing grift sphere or at least the traditional conservative grift sphere.
[00:36:59]  I think you're a fool.
[00:37:00]  You're going to go die for what?
[00:37:01]  Biden?
[00:37:02]  I'm trying to protect American freedom.
[00:37:05]  Yeah, you're going to protect the freedom of those people in Nebraska by going over to Yemen and bombing some 13-year-old farmers.
[00:37:10]  Great job.
[00:37:11]  Stupid.
[00:37:12]  You ain't protecting nothing but profits for companies that don't care about you.
[00:37:15]  You should only protect yourself and your boys.
[00:37:16]  I fought for myself, became a world champion, got some money.
[00:37:19]  You're not going to get any money.
[00:37:20]  Get your leg blown off.
[00:37:21]  Walk around one leg, Mr. Limpy.
[00:37:23]  Mr. Limpy, geez, for what?
[00:37:24]  For Biden?
[00:37:25]  He doesn't care about you.
[00:37:26]  Don't be stupid.
[00:37:27]  Don't be dumb.
[00:37:28]  Limp your ass out of my- See, that's uh that's first of all.
[00:37:37]  You should only protect your boys made me audibly vomit.
[00:37:41]  But uh.
[00:37:42]  Well, that's how we work here at CoolZone.
[00:37:46]  No.
[00:37:48]  No.
[00:37:49]  But just like him going like firm, anti-military and anti-Biden, like you're, you're clearly, you clearly know your audience.
[00:37:58]  Yeah, it's these, it's these kids who grew up right after, because like, I mean, Ian and Sophie and I, we all grew up kind of right in the wake of 9-11 and all of that, like where the military was this like sacred, uncriticizable thing in mainstream American culture.
[00:38:14]  That era is past and it's, I mean, obviously in the UK, it was always a bit different, but like that era is well past.
[00:38:21]  And you actually, you can get, I mean, Trump did versions of this, right?
[00:38:25]  When he would talk about how you're like a loser if you get injured for your country, it would always, all these Democrats who are stuck in like 2006 would always get like, this has to be the end for him.
[00:38:34]  Look, he, he said, told people that like injured veterans are chumps.
[00:38:38]  And it's like, no, it doesn't matter.
[00:38:40]  They're perfect.
[00:38:40]  People are perfectly willing to say that they are chumps because Modern conservatism, the modern right, is so purely focused on the grift and on personally sucking as much money out as you can from people around you that it doesn't matter.
[00:38:55]  Tate realizes that there's no need to be ashamed of this thing.
[00:38:58]  And it can draw in folks who are like open to listening to these kind of left-wing arguments.
[00:39:03]  He starts to make one there where he's like, All you're doing joining the military is murdering kids in Yemen.
[00:39:09]  You can find versions of that in like Marxist influencer YouTube rants and shit.
[00:39:14]  I would be so curious to know like the specific things that he watched and read where he like, like what, what specifically he learned.
[00:39:27]  Like, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:30]  I mean, it's yeah, exactly.
[00:39:34]  I think he spends a lot of time, and he says he spends all of his time online.
[00:39:39]  Like he's working all the time.
[00:39:40]  I think a lot of, I think a lot of it is he's paying attention to what's going viral where, and he's not just paying attention to what goes viral on the right.
[00:39:49]  And one of the things that happened when he got arrested is you had all of these left-wing weirdos online, guys like Vosh is the one that I remember most specifically being like, well, you know, Andrew Tate's bad, but the left needs someone like him who can speak to young men in this way.
[00:40:05]  And it's like, well, all he's doing is he's he's using these, he's using as bait little pieces of left-wing social analysis and class analysis in order to get people on the hook.
[00:40:17]  And then he's trying to sell them on turning their 15-year-old cousins into Uber drivers.
[00:40:22]  Like that, that is all that is here.
[00:40:24]  There's no need to replicate this.
[00:40:27]  He's not actually offering people anything.
[00:40:29]  He's just the thing that he's promising them rather than like the grinding act of trying to reform the world in a more just way.
[00:40:36]  He's promising them you can get a Lamborghini.
[00:40:38]  Well, yes, that's always going to be a better pitch to a lot of people than if we all work hard and fight like hell, we can make the world more just.
[00:40:47]  But you can't, there's no like, there's no replicating what Tate's doing because the only thing he's promising is a chance at like winning the lottery, basically, right?
[00:40:56]  That's not actually a thing you should shoot for.
[00:40:58]  That's my opinion here.
[00:41:01]  So all of the videos that I've been playing for you, nearly all of them, come from fans who will compile clips of his various interviews and podcast appearances and put them up on social media.
[00:41:12]  Since Tate has been banned from most platforms, this is the only way his content gets out.
[00:41:17]  But more than that, it's part of a cohesive media strategy that's how he became famous in the first place.
[00:41:22]  Tate built his empire knowing that this would happen.
[00:41:25]  And I'm going to quote from The Guardian here.
[00:41:28]  Since January, repackaged videos from interviews with Tate over the years have been attracting millions of views on TikTok, but in recent weeks, this growth has accelerated.
[00:41:35]  In August, so far alone, clips tagged with his name have been watched more than a billion times.
[00:41:40]  The posts do not come from Tate himself, who does not appear to be active on the platform, but from hundreds of accounts, often using his name and photo run by his followers, members of Hustlers University.
[00:41:51]  Members, including boys as young as 13, are told they can earn up to $10,000 a month through lessons on crypto investing, dropshipping, and by recruiting others to Hustlers University, earning a 48% commission for each person they refer.
[00:42:03]  To have the best chance of getting people to sign up, they are advised to stoke controversy to improve their chances of going viral.
[00:42:09]  In one guide, Hustlers University students are told that attracting comments and controversy is the key to success.
[00:42:15]  What you ideally want is a mix of 60, 70% fans and 40 to 30% haters.
[00:42:20]  You want arguments.
[00:42:21]  You want war.

=== How Hustlers University Grew (10:35) ===

[00:42:23]  And this is the thing he did that's brilliant.
[00:42:29]  Mid-2022, there was this thing where all of these left-wing influencers and liberal influencers and media people found out about Andrew Tate.
[00:42:37]  And for weeks, you could not miss him.
[00:42:40]  He was everywhere.
[00:42:42]  He was everywhere.
[00:42:43]  All of these mainstream media people, like Piers Morgan, interviewed him.
[00:42:46]  There were a couple other, someone at CNN talked to him, I think.
[00:42:48]  Like there were all these, and all of them were condemning him.
[00:42:52]  All of them were attacking him.
[00:42:54]  A lot of them were making fun of him and trying to show him as a loser.
[00:42:56]  All it did was make him millions of dollars.
[00:42:59]  This is why when people were celebrating like Greta dunking on him, I was like, guys, this is how he got rich.
[00:43:04]  Thankfully, he happened to get arrested after that, but like, this is how he got rich.
[00:43:10]  The only reason that we're doing these episodes now is, number one, I think the strategy, the whole sweep of it is important.
[00:43:15]  I wasn't willing to do something like this until I thought there was a good chance he's not getting out of fucking prison.
[00:43:22]  I mean, we'll see.
[00:43:23]  He might still come back to it, but I figured it was worth doing at this point.
[00:43:26]  I think it's interesting that like his reach where he was going on literally CNN, but also was doing like, he did like an interview on a fit and trim podcast or something.
[00:43:36]  The fit and trim podcast, but also like he did an entire interview on this like TikTok teen show with Barstool Sports BFFs.
[00:43:47]  Yes, yeah, we'll have a clip from that in a sec.
[00:43:49]  Yeah, where it's like, where it's like.
[00:43:51]  Yeah.
[00:43:52]  And that's the thing.
[00:43:53]  Like, he's everywhere.
[00:43:54]  Like his range is unbelievable.
[00:43:57]  He doesn't have a TikTok and he's like the number one guy on TikTok or was for quite a while.
[00:44:04]  And that's, that's a, there's brilliance in that.
[00:44:08]  He, this was conscious.
[00:44:10]  He didn't luck into this.
[00:44:11]  This didn't happen by accident.
[00:44:13]  He, he realized once he gets 100,000 or so people, he's like, if you've got 100,000 people in your Discord thing following you and you can get them all posting, you can get 50, 60,000 people a day posting clip mashups of your interviews, some of that's going to go viral.
[00:44:29]  It's going to be and it's going to go fucking and the algorithm will help carry you.
[00:44:33]  And again, he part of this, he didn't come up like this is in part based on the fact that he pays attention to what's been happening.
[00:44:39]  So he notices Alex Jones has guys like Kanye on because he knows that they're going to do provocative racist shit that the media will cover and that'll get his name trending, even though he's not on social media.
[00:44:49]  He observes this and then he goes more proactively after it, right?
[00:44:55]  What Tate's done is he's taken the logic and the sense of personal investment that you get in a pyramid scheme or an MLM and he's given his followers a vested financial interest in getting his content trending around the world.
[00:45:07]  And this worked incredibly well.
[00:45:09]  The sudden rush of attention Tate's stuff got in 21 and 2022 drove tens of thousands of mostly very young men to Hustlers University and the War Room, which is his even more exclusive Discord that costs $5,000 a month or $5,000 total to join.
[00:45:24]  Now, both platforms have strict requirements for their membership.
[00:45:27]  If you pay five grand to join the War Room, you're warned ahead of time that you could be banned for any reason, costing you five grand if you displease Andrew Tate.
[00:45:36]  So you're going to be invested in keeping him happy.
[00:45:39]  That's destructively evil.
[00:45:42]  And I think that's what I'm saying.
[00:45:42]  One of the things you told, if you join Hustlers University, he tells you, if you don't pay every month for this, it means you're not committed enough to succeed and are definitely going to fail in life.
[00:45:52]  I can remember him doing like a call-in show where like one guy's like, yeah, I think I need to take a month off from membership to buy my mom a birthday gift.
[00:45:59]  And he's like, well, if you weren't a failure, you would have made that money already using the skills you'd learned here.
[00:46:04]  And what they do, if you miss a month of payments on Hustlers University, you're out, baby.
[00:46:10]  100%.
[00:46:10]  No, you're not.
[00:46:11]  You're not.
[00:46:12]  You're not.
[00:46:12]  You are siloed off to a separate Discord where the only thing posted in there is screen grabs of the other members' profits.
[00:46:21]  Oh my God.
[00:46:23]  They want you to come back.
[00:46:24]  They want you to find a way to get the money to come again.
[00:46:28]  Yeah.
[00:46:28]  And I'm going to continue with a quote from that Guardian investigation.
[00:46:31]  We conducted an anonymous experiment with a blank account set up for a teenage boy and were quickly shown content of Tate.
[00:46:37]  After watching two of his videos, we were recommended more, including clips of him expressing misogynistic views.
[00:46:42]  The next time the account was opened, the first four posts were of Tate from four different accounts.
[00:46:46]  In one video, posted from an account with Tate's name and face, he describes matter-of-factly how he expects his girlfriends to behave.
[00:46:52]  I inflict, I expect, absolute loyalty from my woman, he says.
[00:46:56]  I ain't having my chicks talking to other dudes, liking other dudes.
[00:46:59]  My chicks don't go to the club without me, they are at home.
[00:47:02]  This tactic has worked extremely well.
[00:47:04]  And the way that social media functions has ensured that all the hate Tate receives does nothing but make his brand stronger.
[00:47:09]  In mid-2021, basically, every liberal and lefty-yeah, I already talked about this, but yeah, um, after he gets kicked off of social media, subscriptions to Hustlers University only increase.
[00:47:21]  Um, screenshots posted online showed that Hustlers University 2.0 had about 12,000 subscribers in March of 2022, when kind of everybody started attacking Andrew Tate.
[00:47:31]  By July, it had 77,000 subscribers, and at the start of August, there were 129,000 followers.
[00:47:38]  By the end of August, he starts to get even more media attention, and his affiliate program that incentivized subscribers gets discontinued, which costs him a bunch of people.
[00:47:49]  So, like, near the end of that month, he goes down by like 25,000 or so.
[00:47:53]  But that's a temporary loss because by September, he's back up to 160,000 subscribers.
[00:47:59]  In October, BuzzFeed observed more than 221,000 users in his Discord server, which is Hustlers University 2.0.
[00:48:06]  Since all of those people were paying $49.99 a month, that means he was making $11 million in October alone just from his Discord.
[00:48:15]  Holy shit.
[00:48:17]  That's crazy.
[00:48:20]  Yeah.
[00:48:22]  And yeah.
[00:48:23]  And you know, he's not paying taxes on anything.
[00:48:25]  He's already told you you shouldn't pay taxes on your shit.
[00:48:29]  Break the law, right?
[00:48:31]  Solid point.
[00:48:34]  Now, I think it's important to see the way a lot of young men react to and imitate Tate because it could be easy to dismiss him as just another weirdo right-wing guy online if you don't see that.
[00:48:45]  So I'm going to play you a clip.
[00:48:46]  This is of some kid.
[00:48:47]  I think they're 18.
[00:48:49]  This is their TikTok.
[00:48:52]  Watch this.
[00:48:52]  Pay attention to his mannerisms.
[00:48:54]  You've all seen enough Andrew Tate now to recognize Tate.
[00:48:57]  People think that it's so hard to break the matrix.
[00:49:00]  And I'm here to tell you it's not.
[00:49:02]  Like, I made my first million dollars last year.
[00:49:04]  And in the past 12 months, I was able to turn that $1 million into 5.6 million at 18 years old, by the way.
[00:49:11]  And I'll tell you this right now.
[00:49:12]  I didn't do this by listening to no brokey teachers saying, steady, steady, steady, steady for your degree.
[00:49:17]  Fuck your degree.
[00:49:18]  It is not hard to create your dream life.
[00:49:21]  Like, once you make that first 100K, you are out.
[00:49:24]  And if you follow the steps that I give you and actually take action and make that first 100K and not blow it all in a fucking penthouse or a Lambo, you will be out.
[00:49:32]  So stop waiting and join us.
[00:49:34]  People think that it's so hard.
[00:49:37]  Wow.
[00:49:38]  Yeah.
[00:49:39]  That's like literally like verbatim, like clone.
[00:49:43]  It's insane.
[00:49:44]  Yeah.
[00:49:45]  It's right down to like the facial expressions and stuff.
[00:49:47]  And he's.
[00:49:48]  And even like he's doing kind of a weird like semi-British accent thing in there or something.
[00:49:52]  I don't know.
[00:49:52]  Maybe that kid is British, but like and he's doing like the term brokey is one that evolved within the Tate community.
[00:49:58]  Exactly.
[00:49:59]  The hand gestures, like all of it.
[00:50:00]  It's yeah, that's like the thing.
[00:50:01]  By the way, brokey is like, that's what they tell you.
[00:50:03]  Tate people tell you, like, call your teachers that.
[00:50:05]  Tell your, like, the adults around you who tell you not to obsess with Andrew Tate style hustlers, brokeies, because they're not multi-millionaires.
[00:50:12]  So they're losers.
[00:50:14]  If you argue with these people online, the question they're told to ask you is, what color is your Bugatti?
[00:50:20]  By the way, the color of Andrew Tate's Bugatti now is he doesn't have one because it's been confiscated by the Romanian government.
[00:50:28]  But this, again, you see why this is like, I mean, just for a little bit of like a personal context, when I was 19, 18, 19, like I started working and it sucks, like working for minimum wage and trying to afford an apartment was a lot easier 15, 16 years ago when I was doing it, but like it still sucked ass.
[00:50:49]  And the thing that I wanted more than anything was to like figure out some job that would let me work from home doing something that wasn't miserable, which is like how I started my career in like tech journalism and shit.
[00:51:02]  And like that was my sole motivation was to not have to spend 40 to 60 hours a week being miserable in an office in like for someone else's profit.
[00:51:14]  I didn't want to have to do that.
[00:51:17]  And like, I get how powerful a motivator that is.
[00:51:21]  And there's, again, this kid that we just saw, like part of what he's saying is like these teachers who tell you to study for your degree, that's not going to help you.
[00:51:28]  And for a lot of people, he's right.
[00:51:30]  I know a shitload of people who got a fucking college degree and it did nothing but lock them into debt.
[00:51:36]  There's a reason why kids are vulnerable to this shit.
[00:51:39]  And it's because doing things the quote unquote right way is often deeply unpleasant.
[00:51:45]  It's just that all Andrew Tate's going to get you to do is give him money.
[00:51:48]  He's not going to teach you how to escape this system because you can't escape it.
[00:51:52]  Like even if you think that you've escaped it because you've gotten a decent job, you're still latched to it one way or the other.
[00:51:58]  Like it is still dragging behind you, which is why we need to kill it with a spear.
[00:52:03]  But anyway, that's that's ads.
[00:52:06]  Time for some ads.
[00:52:11]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:52:22]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:52:28]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:52:38]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:52:42]  That's great.
[00:52:43]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:52:52]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.

=== Brainwashed Followers and Victims (15:06) ===

[00:52:58]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:53:09]  I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
[00:53:18]  Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
[00:53:26]  I'm talking to people like Julie Kay Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
[00:53:32]  These victims have been let down time and time again for decades and decades and decades by local law enforcement, by federal law enforcement, by administration after administration.
[00:53:46]  The Justice Department, through, I think we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
[00:53:54]  Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network.
[00:53:58]  Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:54:07]  Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
[00:54:11]  So I'm Leanne.
[00:54:12]  This is my best friend Janet.
[00:54:14]  Hey.
[00:54:14]  And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
[00:54:16]  Absolutely.
[00:54:17]  Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.
[00:54:21]  Just a little bit bigger hips, wider.
[00:54:23]  This is a podcast.
[00:54:24]  We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
[00:54:31]  Sidebar, why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
[00:54:34]  Oh, they had a BOGO.
[00:54:35]  Well, then you gotta.
[00:54:35]  Do you want a white class up here?
[00:54:37]  Just what are y'all doing?
[00:54:38]  Microphones?
[00:54:39]  Are you making that rap album?
[00:54:43]  I would buy it.
[00:54:44]  Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
[00:54:49]  That sounds delicious.
[00:54:51]  Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict.
[00:54:53]  You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic.
[00:54:55]  You're lucky I'm not a killer.
[00:54:57]  I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
[00:55:02]  Oh, listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:55:14]  Ah, good stuff.
[00:55:18]  So, I'm like, good stuff.
[00:55:21]  Not sure.
[00:55:23]  Are you going to ask how we're feeling?
[00:55:25]  Yeah, how are you feeling?
[00:55:26]  How's everybody doing?
[00:55:27]  Everybody happy?
[00:55:28]  Sad and concerned for a little bit of time.
[00:55:31]  I'm hearing happy.
[00:55:32]  I'm hearing happy.
[00:55:34]  That's good.
[00:55:35]  Tell us more.
[00:55:37]  So, in the weeks before his arrest, Andrew was trending in what is a legitimately fascinating direction.
[00:55:43]  He announced at the start of December of 2022 that he had converted to Islam.
[00:55:47]  Now, there is a whole video, there's a number of them, but I watched a whole video with him and some like weirdo Muslim scholar.
[00:55:54]  I don't know that this guy is a good idea.
[00:55:56]  It's on like the One Islam network, which has 1.74 million subscribers.
[00:56:01]  This video has 1.6 million views.
[00:56:03]  The guy is Muhammad Hijab.
[00:56:06]  I don't think he's a good person.
[00:56:09]  And I'm certainly not saying that he actually knows or actually is an expert on Islam.
[00:56:15]  I don't know.
[00:56:15]  I'm not certainly either, but boy, this video is gross as shit.
[00:56:20]  So Tate starts by saying that he had converted to Islam because he decided it was the only real religion, right?
[00:56:28]  All of the other religions have been cucked by the Matrix and are fake.
[00:56:31]  And he claimed he used to be an atheist, but then he saw evil and that that convinced him of the existence of God.
[00:56:38]  And then we get to my favorite part, which is the only thing that's entertaining in this video and not deeply depressing.
[00:56:44]  Longest time.
[00:56:45]  You know, I've never been to like a music concert, and people ask me why.
[00:56:49]  Oh, my God.
[00:56:50]  I just look at it and I feel embarrassed.
[00:56:52]  I look at someone up on a stage dancing around and I look at hundreds of thousands of peasants in the crowd.
[00:56:59]  Just, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:57:00]  I'm like, it's embarrassing.
[00:57:03]  I feel cringe.
[00:57:03]  It's like secondhand embarrassment.
[00:57:05]  When I see these festivals and everyone's losing their mind or these music concerts, I genuinely feel embarrassed for the people who go because to me, that is a form of worship.
[00:57:12]  Like, you can listen to the music at home for free.
[00:57:15]  You don't have to wait in that line and stand out in the cold.
[00:57:18]  I don't know.
[00:57:18]  Perhaps it was a bit extreme, but I've always known that they're trying to give us false idols to some degree.
[00:57:24]  And when I speak to atheists, atheists, they go, oh, I don't believe in God.
[00:57:27]  But they've signed up so hard to the liberal woke agenda.
[00:57:30]  They're as religious as anybody, but they're just believing in the wrong things.
[00:57:35]  So I think that's interesting because what clearly has happened here is that Andrew Tate is a deeply malignant narcissist.
[00:57:42]  And if you go to a concert, part of what people get out of a concert is losing themselves in a piece of another person's creation.
[00:57:51]  And that would mean that the focus is not on Andrew Tate.
[00:57:54]  And he simply not only can he not enjoy it, but it makes him sick to see other people be a focus of attention.
[00:58:01]  Like live music is one of the greatest things we have.
[00:58:05]  It's the single best thing that our species has created.
[00:58:08]  Like, but Andrew Tate entertains.
[00:58:14]  Ooh, whoo-hoo, too much.
[00:58:15]  I do think it's funny.
[00:58:16]  It's like, but if people are looking at Dua Lipa, that means no one's attacking.
[00:58:20]  No one's paying attention to Andrew Tate.
[00:58:24]  Also, there's definitely videos of him at concerts, but at least it really is.
[00:58:27]  I love that.
[00:58:28]  That's beautiful.
[00:58:30]  It's very funny.
[00:58:31]  It's also worth noting that Andrew Tate and Jeff Bezos are buddies in baldness and not understanding the gift of song.
[00:58:37]  So that's that's fun.
[00:58:39]  It's neat that they have that in common.
[00:58:41]  They also both like to wear really tight pants, which is they also both like to wear really tight pants.
[00:58:47]  That is correct.
[00:58:48]  Although I gotta say this: Jeff Bezos gave up half of his fortune in the divorce, and I don't think that Andrew Tate would have done that.
[00:58:56]  So 100% no.
[00:58:58]  Yeah.
[00:59:00]  Definitely not.
[00:59:00]  Definitely not.
[00:59:01]  So anyway, Tate was arrested right before the end of 2022, alongside his brother Tristan and two Romanian women, one of whom was a former Romanian police officer.
[00:59:12]  Some of the articles I found that are Romanian will say that the women were branded by him.
[00:59:18]  This is not entirely accurate.
[00:59:20]  They're saying this because of like Nexium, right?
[00:59:22]  Because the second season of the Keith Ranieri dock came out and those women had been branded.
[00:59:27]  The reality is that they have Tate's girls' tattoos, which we know exist.
[00:59:30]  I've seen pictures of them on a number of different women.
[00:59:32]  And like, that's weird, but that is not branding.
[00:59:35]  People get tattoos.
[00:59:36]  People get tattoos with dudes' names on them.
[00:59:38]  That's not like it's not branding.
[00:59:40]  And branding somebody are dramatically different.
[00:59:43]  Very different.
[00:59:43]  Yeah.
[00:59:43]  Again, the guy is deeply abusive, but he is not like, I have not seen any evidence that he's literally branding women.
[00:59:49]  They just got tattoos of his name, which is like weird, but not what Keith Ranieri was having women do.
[00:59:55]  It is too early for me to comment in much detail about the allegations against him.
[01:00:00]  We do know that at least two women, I think it's up to four now, have accused one of the Tates, and we don't actually know which of the Tates with physical and sexual abuse.
[01:00:10]  In addition, both Tates are accused, along with those women, of sexually trafficking a number of women for their webcam business.
[01:00:17]  Do we think he'd throw his brother under the bus to save himself?
[01:00:21]  One million.
[01:00:22]  Yeah, I think there's a good chance.
[01:00:23]  I don't think Tristan would.
[01:00:25]  Tristan, I think, is kind of brainwashed.
[01:00:28]  Tristan's a giant piece of shit, by the way.
[01:00:30]  Like, I think that Andrew would throw Tristan under the bus before Tristan would throw Andrew under the bus.
[01:00:35]  Although I'm open to being surprised here.
[01:00:38]  For a little bit of context on the crimes, I'm going to quote from Reuters here.
[01:00:42]  The Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism said the suspects appear to have created an organized crime group with the purpose of recruiting housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for a cost.
[01:00:54]  It claimed that the men recruited women with the pretense of romance in the loverboy method before being forced to perform in pornographic content under the threat of violence.
[01:01:03]  Investigators are reported to believe one of the performers brought in $45,000 a month or £45,000 a month, but received no payment while the women were kept under house arrest.
[01:01:13]  Tate claims the women kept 80 to 85% of the fees earned and that most of the girls ended up being multi-millionaires.
[01:01:20]  And look, Tate has his claim here.
[01:01:22]  That's important to note.
[01:01:23]  But we know that in his Hustlers University video, he recommends getting people to work with you in a gig basis and then lying to them about how much money they're making so you can take it all.
[01:01:32]  So I think there's reason to believe the Romanian authorities on this one.
[01:01:40]  Now, the prosecution doesn't just have that.
[01:01:42]  They have audio that likely, some of it I think came from a wiretap.
[01:01:46]  Some of it seems to have been recorded by one of his victims.
[01:01:49]  Some of this audio has been leaked to, apparently, been leaked to local Romanian news sources.
[01:01:54]  Most of the translations of it I found have been from Romanians on edit on Reddit.
[01:01:58]  I'm not going to quote directly from it because I just am not certain about the provenance of all of this yet.
[01:02:04]  But some credible Romanian news sources are reporting that based on these leaked conversations that the prosecution has, Tate openly discusses using the women who worked for him to launder money and talks about the fact that he is committing crimes.
[01:02:18]  He does this very openly.
[01:02:20]  They have him recorded talking about the laws that he's broken because, as smart as he is in terms of how to like get himself going viral on TikTok, he's not comprehensive.
[01:02:31]  Again, like everything about Andrew, he's not as good as he thinks he is.
[01:02:35]  And in this case, it seems to have bitten him in the ass.
[01:02:39]  Now, it is worth noting that Tate's house had been raided like six months before his arrest.
[01:02:44]  So he was aware that the police were on him.
[01:02:47]  It's kind of baffling to me that he did not, and maybe it shows his arrogance that he didn't try to flee the country with his assets or as much of them as possible.
[01:02:56]  And instead, he kind of seeded his fan base with comments about the fact that he was likely to be arrested or killed.
[01:03:02]  This is sort of a John McAfee, and I'm sure that's who he's copying from here.
[01:03:06]  Here's a clip from a fan video I found with nearly 700,000 views at the time of publication of this episode.
[01:03:13]  This right here is one of my 18 audiobooks that I own.
[01:03:17]  It made 82 sales.
[01:03:19]  It's a fucking call scam.
[01:03:20]  Learn Spanish for kids, and I don't even speak Spanish.
[01:03:24]  Okay, guys.
[01:03:25]  I paid a guy $150.
[01:03:27]  He recorded the audio, and then I just uploaded the file to Audible.
[01:03:31]  Wow.
[01:03:31]  But what's amazing about this is I make about 50 to 100 sales.
[01:03:36]  And for each sale, I get paid.
[01:03:39]  So, again, part of why Andrew is because this is, he will tell you how to do a version of this scam, and so will a million other people.
[01:03:45]  Part of why Tate gets away with what he's doing is we have built a culture in which every single mass media organ is largely supported by a variety of scams and cons designed to suck money from people and provide them with nothing, including that's how YouTube makes its money.
[01:04:03]  This is a huge amount of YouTube's advertising.
[01:04:06]  Yeah.
[01:04:07]  Like is shit like this.
[01:04:09]  That's why Andrew is able to maneuver and act is that our culture has created this space where it is all nothing but a series of cons from the top to the bottom.
[01:04:17]  Anyway, let's watch this video now of him talking about how he's going to be murdered for cracking the Matrix.
[01:04:23]  To think they were, they're not.
[01:04:25]  All I'm trying to do is teach men to be strong.
[01:04:27]  If they decide to kill me on a long enough timeframe, they're going to be successful.
[01:04:33]  But I can't.
[01:04:34]  I don't want to live in fear.
[01:04:37]  Because what did I say in the earlier tenant?
[01:04:39]  If I become a coward, I will live in fear and it breeds an action.
[01:04:43]  The music is amazing.
[01:04:45]  It is so fucking funny.
[01:04:46]  I want the world to know that I'd absolutely never ever kill myself under any circumstances ever, no matter what they say.
[01:04:51]  I did not kill myself.
[01:04:52]  I don't want to be seen as a threat to the elite.
[01:04:55]  I believe I have to die.
[01:04:57]  I want to be seen as a positive force.
[01:04:59]  I'm going to tell you right now, Andrew absolutely would commit suicide if he thought he was never going to get out of prison, just like John McAfee did.
[01:05:06]  Just like, look, narcissists do this all the time.
[01:05:10]  He's just hoping that he can rile people up, get folks angry, maybe inspire some violence on his behalf.
[01:05:17]  Again, this is a pretty, this is part of the playbook where he's not being creative at all.
[01:05:21]  He's just doing a John McAfee.
[01:05:24]  He's literally doing a McAfee.
[01:05:25]  Yeah.
[01:05:26]  Now, true to, and I hope he, I hope he does the full McAfee, by the way.
[01:05:33]  True to form, immediately after his request, someone with access to his account posted a link to Hustlers University 3.0, which is the newest phase of his, he had just launched this before he got arrested.
[01:05:44]  Now, Hustlers University 3.0 lives at the link jointherealworld.com.
[01:05:50]  And on the website is a video made with clips from The Matrix and some other movies, alongside clips of Tate and clips of other YouTube stars attacking him.
[01:05:57]  Because he was like on Logan Paul's show.
[01:06:00]  And then when he got arrested, Logan Paul pretended that he hated him, all this good stuff.
[01:06:04]  Above the video is the text, it's time to wake up, Neo.
[01:06:07]  Join us.
[01:06:08]  Amass wealth.
[01:06:09]  Escape slavery.
[01:06:13]  Hustlers University, Hustlers University, Hustlers University.
[01:06:16]  Want to learn about Hustlers University?
[01:06:18]  There's a bunch of rooms to go into, and those rooms have millionaire professors.
[01:06:22]  You are taught by a millionaire that asks your questions.
[01:06:25]  They give you everything on a silver planning.
[01:06:28]  It made it impossible to not make money if you follow what they say.
[01:06:36]  Not only having contact with actual multi-millionaires, being part of a community of students, it's a community.
[01:06:44]  People that are there for you are only there for one thing enough to make money.
[01:06:48]  I've already made my money back after the first day.
[01:06:56]  I've made 5K this month from just joining.
[01:06:59]  That's fucking crazy.
[01:07:00]  I made 4K in my first month.
[01:07:02]  I made $2,000.
[01:07:03]  Okay, two weeks at $15.
[01:07:11]  I just made the fucking $20,000.
[01:07:14]  Grits are so fucking cheap.
[01:07:16]  All in all, I made about $3,000.
[01:07:19]  My goal was to match my 9 to 5 income.
[01:07:21]  I shadowed that by five times.
[01:07:23]  I will have days where I made $2,000 or $3,000, and that's like what I used to make in a month.
[01:07:29]  There are so many guys in this video.
[01:07:33]  We probably saw like fucking close to 100 of them in that first series of just like different clips of people talking about their experience with Hustlers University.
[01:07:42]  Again, hundreds of thousands of people who have paid him money directly and have joined.
[01:07:46]  And all of these dudes are still on Hustlers University.
[01:07:50]  It is still functioning as far as I have heard.
[01:07:54]  And presumably still deeply invested in Tate's success.
[01:07:58]  Like, this is not a problem that's over.
[01:08:02]  And it is, you know, we don't know the court case.

=== The Scary Social Media Model (06:46) ===

[01:08:05]  Andrew and his brother basically have not actually been formally charged yet.
[01:08:10]  As of publication of this episode, or at least as of the recording of it, they are on a 30-day hold while the Romanian court kind of gets shit in order to see what they're actually going to charge them on.
[01:08:22]  Some of this is just that, like, Andrew's obviously a flight risk.
[01:08:26]  He has whole videos about all the private jets that he has access to.
[01:08:30]  So we'll see.
[01:08:31]  I think there's a chance Andrew has played his last cards, although I think there's a chance he winds up getting out and this has another ugly chapter.
[01:08:39]  But there's a very good chance he's going to do serious prison time, like 10 plus years in Romania.
[01:08:46]  And however rabid his fanbase is now, if he spends years in prison, I think that will dull his appeal.
[01:08:52]  For one thing, it'll make him look like a loser.
[01:08:54]  But in the here and now, we are all left with the problem of all of these fucking people, these young minds, these weirdos, these kids that he's influenced.
[01:09:04]  Multiple schools, particularly in the United Kingdom, have had to hold classes and seminars on de-radicalizing teenage boys who fell through Andrew Tate.
[01:09:11]  And I'm going to close this episode by reading a quote from one of those articles in the Times of London.
[01:09:16]  His initial track, Attraction to Young People, said one teacher, was often his advice around being confident and financially successful.
[01:09:23]  And from there, he capitalizes on a post-Me Too anxiety with comments such as, females don't have independent thought.
[01:09:29]  They don't come up with anything.
[01:09:30]  They're just empty vessels waiting for someone to install the programming.
[01:09:33]  Jay Jordan, a teacher in Dundee of five years, said the recent interest in Tate had made boys more hostile.
[01:09:39]  You used to have to deal with sexist stuff, but now it's explicitly connected to Andrew Tate.
[01:09:43]  The boys do not stop talking about him, she said.
[01:09:46]  In one class, she reprimanded a 14-year-old.
[01:09:48]  You're just a woman, he responded.
[01:09:50]  Jordan, 37, said, We've definitely gone backwards and it is worrying.
[01:09:55]  And that's the fun place to end.
[01:09:58]  The Andrew Tate cast, the Tate episodes.
[01:10:03]  How are we doing, gang?
[01:10:07]  That's just, like I said before, it's, I'm scared because there's like hundreds of thousands of boys and young men who think like this and like they're, they're not, they're not in jail.
[01:10:17]  They're not going anywhere, you know?
[01:10:20]  So like that, this mindset and this ideology is going to continue to be proliferated.
[01:10:25]  And it's, it's pretty terrifying.
[01:10:27]  It is terrifying.
[01:10:28]  And it's, it's worth noting.
[01:10:29]  Again, people talking about like, what's the solution?
[01:10:33]  Is throwing him in prison the solution?
[01:10:35]  And like, no, throwing him in prison is a tourniquet, maybe.
[01:10:39]  I think it might stop his ability to grow the way that he would have grown if it hadn't.
[01:10:45]  Deplatforming was a total failure in this.
[01:10:48]  Like kicking him off of shit did nothing but increase his reach and his profitability because of the quote-unquote controversy that got and the thing to blame here, there's a couple of things.
[01:10:57]  Number one, the structure of social media is to blame.
[01:11:00]  The structure of social media in order to stop an Andrew Tate, it's not getting better at arresting these guys.
[01:11:06]  It's changing the structure of social media to not reward the kind of conflicts that he deliberately incited in order to, the fact that like if you do something super fucked up and racist and people get angry about it, it increases your reach on every social media app that exists is a huge part of the problem.
[01:11:24]  And the reason why that will not change is fundamentally, that's how all of these people make money.
[01:11:28]  Whether they're the good Twitter, the bad Elon Twitter, they all made their money by making people fight or by not making people fight, but by sharing things that would make people angry so that they would engage in fights.
[01:11:41]  That's a big part of what Andrew Tate recognized.
[01:11:44]  The other thing is the entire structure of the system that we live under rewards cons and grifts.
[01:11:53]  It is all figure out what the latest, as technology increases, there are more opportunities to run versions of the same old MLM scam that will not be recognized yet by the government as illegal, right?
[01:12:06]  So you get in there as fast as you can and you make your money and then you fucking escape.
[01:12:11]  And this is the way, this is the fucking cryptocurrency thing, right?
[01:12:14]  This is all that NFT shit.
[01:12:15]  It's this the new scam that is really just the old scam dressed up in enough of a coat of paint that nobody recognizes that like no none of like the law doesn't recognize it for a couple of years.
[01:12:25]  That's all Andrew has ever been doing.
[01:12:28]  That's all he is purporting to teach you.
[01:12:31]  And he just was sloppy enough with aspects of his life and that he wasn't able to keep doing it long enough, right?
[01:12:40]  Like the only reason he got caught is that he bragged about breaking the laws in Romania and that they weren't going to punish him.
[01:12:46]  And also he was too good at becoming famous.
[01:12:49]  If he had stayed a few levels lower than this, if he'd stayed at like that Alex Jones level or whatever of social media influence even, he probably would have kept getting away with it.
[01:12:58]  But he was so big that it created such a fuss.
[01:13:02]  And the Romanian government had to be like, well, look, now he's bragging about sex trafficking and the EU's angry at us because we already have this problem.
[01:13:11]  Let's destroy this guy's life in order to because he basically forced us to, right?
[01:13:18]  If he'd been a little bit less of an idiot, a little bit more careful, he would have gotten away with it for longer.
[01:13:23]  And the next one probably will.
[01:13:25]  Although maybe all of these guys, because they're narcissists, are unable to kind of pull back from the ledge before they go over it.
[01:13:31]  I guess that's the optimistic thing.
[01:13:33]  Maybe fundamentally the kind of guy who can do an Andrew Tate is always going to be so much of an egomaniac that they can't stop themselves.
[01:13:40]  I don't know.
[01:13:43]  Yeah, I think the way that he's reached his audience should be examined and that it's truly terrifying.
[01:13:55]  It's truly terrifying the reach that he has and that the internet basically has rewarded him for it.
[01:14:04]  I hope he stays in jail for a long time and fizzles out.
[01:14:07]  But as we can see, Andrew Tate clones will just keep popping up.
[01:14:13]  Yeah.
[01:14:14]  Yeah.
[01:14:14]  And that's that's the scary thing.
[01:14:16]  Like somebody else who can just like study this model, find the holes in it and patch it up.
[01:14:22]  And then, you know, you got your next Andrew Tate, you know, 4.0 or whatever.
[01:14:26]  And that's what's scary about it is as long as our current social media ecosystem exists and the way news is covered, you know, as long as that model exists, somebody is just going to keep finding ways to exploit this and do the same thing.
[01:14:42]  And yeah, that's scary.
[01:14:47]  It is scary.
[01:14:48]  But you know what's not scary?

=== Andrew Tate Clones Persist (02:47) ===

[01:14:52]  Your pluggables.
[01:14:55]  That's you, Ian.
[01:14:56]  What do you got?
[01:14:59]  Hmm.
[01:15:02]  Yeah, I would just say, I don't know.
[01:15:07]  Yeah.
[01:15:07]  Coolzone Media, great team, great, great people, great podcasts.
[01:15:11]  And oh, tennis.
[01:15:14]  I'll plug tennis.
[01:15:16]  I'm really into, I'm just starting to play and I'm excited to get out there and get better.
[01:15:22]  Australian Open is going on right now.
[01:15:24]  So it's a good time.
[01:15:25]  Yeah.
[01:15:26]  I would like to plug that live music is beautiful and Andrew Tate could go fuck himself at CoolZone Media and all the things.
[01:15:36]  Robert, do you have anything specifically you would like to plug?
[01:15:42]  Yeah, I have a book called After the Revolution.
[01:15:44]  If you just Google AK Press After the Revolution, you can find it and buy a physical copy.
[01:15:51]  You can also just go to ATRBook.com and find the e-book for free or just listen to the podcast of the same name.
[01:15:57]  So check that out.
[01:16:00]  I have a sub stack.
[01:16:02]  It's Shatterzone.
[01:16:04]  Just Google Shatterzone substack and you'll find that.
[01:16:07]  I'll get another thing up there soon.
[01:16:09]  Anyway, that's me.
[01:16:11]  You know, you could start calling me Top G if you wanted to.
[01:16:16]  Sophie, do we think that's a good marketing term?
[01:16:19]  Okay.
[01:16:20]  Well, what if I do my Boston accent and I try to teach kids how to make their 12-year-old cousins illegally labor for them without payment?
[01:16:30]  I don't know.
[01:16:30]  There might be something there, Robert.
[01:16:33]  Well, thank you, Ian.
[01:16:35]  Thank you for believing in me.
[01:16:36]  Would you like to join my Discord for $5,000?
[01:16:39]  You know what, Bobby?
[01:16:40]  Yes.
[01:16:40]  Let's do it.
[01:16:41]  All right.
[01:16:43]  Well, everybody, I've got a new con to get off to.
[01:16:47]  So everybody, have a great day and feel better than you feel listening to this episode.
[01:16:54]  Bye.
[01:16:56]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:16:59]  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.
[01:17:09]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:17:16]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:17:23]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:17:29]  I'm an alcoholic without this probe.
[01:17:32]  I'm a guy.
[01:17:33]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== CoolZone Media Outro (00:48) ===

[01:17:39]  Saturday, May 2nd, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas.
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[01:17:50]  Get yours before they sell out at TicketMaster.com.
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[01:17:55]  Hey there, folks.
[01:17:55]  Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
[01:17:58]  And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days: from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake Lively thing about, anyway?
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[01:18:12]  Follow us, Amy and TJ, for news updates throughout the day.
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