Iman Gadzhi is a rising YouTube superstar. A high school dropout and supposed self-made multimillionaire, the 23 year-old marketing guru started his YouTube channel at age 15 with weightlifting videos. He has since built a following of 3.7 million. His life and career path is symbiotic with the platform, mirroring, monetizing, and accelerating every self-help and get-rich trend that blows through through the algorithms.
At some point during COVID, he caught the conspiracy theory bug, and turned his channel into a red pill factory, pumping out such volumes of aggressively paranoid content that YouTube money bros started comparing him to Andrew Tate.
Now, Gadzhi is reaching more aggressively into the brains of pre-teen boys around the world with a morbid fantasy about the origins of public education, and how it dooms them all into woke slavery. But it’s not just a conspiracy theory. It’s a highly-structured marketing campaign pitching his online sales coaching scheme as a substitute for high school.
Show Notes
Join THE RESCUE today. #fyp #viral | iman gadzhi | TikTok —Gadzhi content
Rebels stage new invasion of Dagestan | The Independent
Dagestan: Mob storms Russian airport in search of Jews - BBC News
Iman Gadzhi Talks About His Stepdad
Independent School Fees — Southbank International
Entrepreneur Pushes for More Inclusive Education in Developing Countries — Forbes
3 Books Changed My Life—Gadzhi content
What Are the 48 Laws of Power? The Complete List | Shortform Books
The Half-Century in Bullshit: On Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” and Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power”
Atomic Habits — If Books Could Kill
Corona Virus: SMMA in Crisis—Gadzhi content
Vaccine Regret Counselling | Life Coaching in London, UK
The Covid Crisis of 2021 - Richard Harris & Iman Gadzhi Unveil the Shocking Truth
Iman Gadzhi Opens Up About Why He Agrees With Andrew Tate & His Unique View On Women!!
5 Habits Keeping MEN Weak—Gadzhi content
A wife like that—Gadzhi content
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribed by https://otter.ai Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today we want to add to that tagline, Manosphere YouTubers who target preteen boys with a mixture of plausible cultural criticism and galaxy-brained bullshit.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
And we are on Instagram at conspiritualitypod and you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
One thing that some people may not know is that as a Patreon subscriber you get our main feed episodes completely ad-free as well right in the Patreon feed.
So that's an important perk to remember.
Yeah, and we've also got a book out.
It's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
It's in print, ebook, and audiobook format, narrated by me.
Please get it.
Please enjoy it.
it, please review it.
Welcome to Conspiratuality.
Is this the next Andrew Tate?
Alright Julian, so my son, who just turned 11, comes up to me and says he was served up a YouTube ad that was odd and a little bit cringe.
He tells me this guy is saying that he's exposing the education system.
That he's gonna show us how we're all being brainwashed, and that he's got five special answers from ancient Greece.
There's a website, my son is grinning, he knows something's up.
We look around, we find the ad on TikTok, and it's on the account of one Iman Gadzi.
I might get deleted because of this.
You see, I've chosen to take on the most powerful enemy of all, the elites.
And here's the story, over the course of the last few months, I have committed myself to finding the truth.
The truth about the education system.
You see, we all go through it, yet none of us actually know the truth behind it.
Now, you might think that the education system came about to ensure your success, to educate you and make you prosper.
In reality, it's quite the opposite.
The education system may actually be the very initiative that will end our freedom.
You see, once their plan is in place, you will be completely controlled and indoctrinated.
And the elites have been plotting this in the shadows for over 200 years.
But I am about to put everything on the line to expose it from the 30th of October to the 6th of November.
I'll be giving you three Netflix-style episodes where I arm you with the truth.
The only tool you need to fight back and escape their tyranny.
Because make no mistake about it, once stage four of their plan is implemented, it's gonna be too late.
Your liberty is gonna be gone.
Eroded completely.
And that means that you have a fine period of a few years to take the necessary steps to protect yourself and your family.
And I'm going to show you exactly how.
And that's why I'm calling this event The Rescue.
And all you need to do to sign up to this free event is click the link around this video and put in your email.
And I'll see you at The Rescue.
So, very dramatic, Julian.
Some familiar stuff here, you know.
Yeah, I mean, that thumping bass line is straight out of ancient Greece, and he's obviously very, very influenced by Plato's allegory of the cave.
Yeah, right.
And he's very, very tuned in to the perils of censorship.
Yeah, Agent Smith is coming for him.
launching this extremely dangerous online program. I like how I might get deleted as
a nice escalation from I might get cancelled.
Yeah, Agent Smith is coming for him and he's done several months of research, Matthew,
which I guess translates to a lifetime in YouTube years.
Yeah, and he's discovered that the most powerful enemy of all is the elites in the shadows
for 200 years.
They have a staged plan.
So, you know, some potential anti-Semitic dog whistling coming in here.
But as we'll see in part two of this two-part series we're doing, he actually flips this around into kind of a mirror world thing.
Yeah, the mirror world stuff is thick.
And I don't know.
I mean, I'm hearing kind of, you know, proletariat uprising vibes.
He's a man of the people.
I know, absolutely.
He's going to teach us all about the perils of capitalism, actually.
But soon it will be too late because capitalism is actually in his back pocket.
Right.
Also, you know, Iman Gadzi, we have to say off the top, is a video artist.
I would say first and foremost, like we'll talk about how he grew up on YouTube doing this stuff.
And so there's this rich visual environment that's behind all of this.
Lots of b-roll images.
The first one that sort of slid across the screen, I found it.
It was a 1922 image of Sigmund Freud and the secret committee members devoted to protecting psychoanalysis from the split with Jung.
For some reason, the editor has blacked their eyes out with sensor bars.
I don't know what that's about.
Yeah, well anything you can find just by doing a quick Google search has obviously been hidden in the shadows for hundreds of years.
Right, right.
So there's a drawing of a school teacher as a hatchet in front of children modeled as wooden toys that of course the teacher has hacked into shape.
And then he's got this ghoul in black cutting the feathers of a great white swan.
Yeah, a child with a barcode tattoo on his back.
I think I've seen that image in a bunch of different places.
There are skeletons having their brains removed by a robot and then covered up with those mortarboard graduation caps.
Yeah, and then the whole sort of delivery is framed by these will be three Netflix-style episodes.
So I think there's extra marketing points for that.
That's definitely an updated kind of aesthetic, an updated choice.
You know, so much of this goes back, when you say familiar, it goes back, I think, to things like Zeitgeist and Loose Change, like the really early sort of agitprop conspiracy videos that The makers of whom realized very quickly, oh, the internet is this incredible delivery system and we can just do something, you know, on our computers and reach lots and lots of people.
Right.
But I'm also hearing even earlier than that, we don't need no education.
And it turns out, you know, Roger Waters, as much as we may have appreciated the artistry and the social criticism of his post-World War II kind of class system in England, he's also susceptible to a lot of this conspiracy stuff.
My son remembered the website URL.
It's rescue.educate.io.
We go to it, we find the landing page for a mastermind-type seminar of three live streams that start, as he said, week of October 30th.
In which Iman Gadzi was going to explain the nefarious origins of modern education and resurrect five cancelled liberatory principles from Plato, Aristotle, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Alexander the Great.
So great, you know, big The Secret energy going on here.
Never heard of any of those people.
It's been a secret all this time.
So, I registered for the event under my usual pseudonym.
I joined the WhatsApp group.
I took a survey in which I answered questions about whether I knew where the modern education system came from.
They weren't very specific.
It's like, it didn't, you know, he wasn't asking about which country or like, you know, anything like that.
He asked also if I'd been happy with my experience in it.
And I never got any responses to those answers.
That was really just sort of an activity, an engagement activity, I think.
But my registration triggered this steady stream of teaser emails that were very dramatic, but, you know, also hadn't been spellchecked.
And they featured these unsighted Frankenstein quotes as signs of depth.
And we'll get into those a little bit later.
So, you know, long story short, I took his course.
I'll tell you all about it.
You don't have to do it.
But I want to start with a question of, like, how did this get served up to my son?
You know, he's logged into YouTube through his public school Google Workspace account.
Yeah.
He's able to access most of the creators he follows through that account, like anime artists, folks who illustrate personal essays about school or friendship or culture, some really beautiful things that he's exposed me to that, like, give me a lot of joy and actual hope.
And then he also really loves these artists who build these intricate Minecraft worlds
out of billions of blocks.
They use sort of secondary programs to build things outside of Minecraft
and then they can import them in.
And so, Godsey's ads came up during videos put out by two different Minecraft artists.
And the thing is, my son could just click right out of these ads and into the rabbit hole.
Like, not only the rescue course, but also Godzie's archive of 457 YouTube videos.
And then beyond that, there would be the suggestion feed that, of course, bends to, you know, right-wing content pulled by the manosphere magnet towards, like, some really shitty places.
So he's watching YouTube through a public school account, and YouTube is feeding him ads about how public school is indoctrinating him.
Awesome.
I reached out to the Media Relations Department at the Toronto District School Board to ask about, you know, their moderation issues.
Like, can they deal with ad content within the scope of their firewall?
And I spoke with Kevin Bradbeer.
He's the Senior Manager of Business Operations and IT Services at the TDSB, and he explained that The filtering services are provided by Palo Alto Networks.
It's a cybersecurity corporation in California.
And that the first thing, you know, I should know, he said, is that the service only works on the network level or when the device is on a school Wi-Fi network.
But these are devices that, you know, and I mean, kids are bringing home their Chromebooks, but they also can log into their school accounts from devices at home.
But, in any case, if he's accessing this Google workspace from home, the filters aren't going to work.
So, the internet, as far as the home space is concerned, is still the Wild West.
Of course.
Unless you get something like that installed.
Exactly.
So, secondly, the filtering, Bradbeer explained, is based on excluded categories of content.
You know, porn, racism, hate speech.
They have the whack-a-mole capacity to block specific sites based upon parents or teachers throwing up red flags, you know, sending them notes.
Can you please block this?
And they probably just do it.
And in fact, in the course of setting up my call with Bradbeer, the media relations department went ahead and blocked Godsey's landing.
So he was right to be scared about the cabal.
I'm the cabal.
I deleted him.
So there is filtering, but there are also plenty of holes and backdoors.
And I find the whole thing pretty complex.
When I asked Bradbeer whether Palo Alto was able to monitor ad content within a video or on a website that had already passed through the category or keyword filters, He didn't know the answer, and he had to ask the country, and I'm still waiting to hear back.
He had to ask the company.
Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty confident the answer is no.
I mean, if you think about the incentives that, you know, these big tech companies who generate all, where basically, you know, it's that saying, if the service is free, then you are the product.
Right.
So they generate all of their income through ad revenue.
What incentive do they have to make it easy For you to put a big wall around the ads that they're generating money from.
Well also we know that the ads are going to be fed into the stream according to some hidden mechanism and it's not like a filtering system would be able to search through the video to preemptively strike against an ad that was going to show up.
Exactly, exactly.
And this is not just algorithmic, Matthew.
This is micro-targeted advertising.
It is not an accident that your son was served that ad on that particular channel.
They know who watches those kinds of channels.
That's part of what they're selecting for.
So on this point, Of whether the TDSB is considering figuring out how to extend filtering services beyond school networks to cover home time.
Bradbeer said that there's a spectrum of parental response.
You know, some parents want everything blocked outside of school.
Other parents want no restrictions imposed by the school board that would interfere with their own choices.
So I got also the sense from him that this is a very fluid and changing landscape in terms of what parents want, in terms of what schools can offer, and there's no clear consensus as of yet.
But, I mean, Julian, this is going to be part of your life too.
Has your daughter been issued her Chromebook yet?
No, no, no, no, no.
She's five years old.
She gets homework sheets and a pencil and she does them while she's watching cartoons.
And she's, you know, it's very simple.
The issue of technology, though, is very much on our minds.
You know, we live on the west side of L.A.
and there was a lot of kids get phones quite young around here.
Apparently, what's what's sort of standard is eight or nine.
But, you know, I've seen You know, seven-year-olds with phones.
Yeah.
And part of that is it's good safety support, right?
And it's a good tracking device.
Like if your kid is in transit, you know exactly where they are.
But with this ongoing psychological experiment of social media turning out as it is, I feel like we're probably going to be quite controlling.
And especially as people who had kids a little later in life.
Yeah, I think we're going to lean more in that direction.
Yeah, and of course, that's another sort of long-term blowback interpersonal parenting risk, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so our 11-year-old was given a school iPad at eight, and we knew at that point that the filtering was pretty porous.
And I know that every generation of parents going back centuries has to face these new huge challenges to values and familiar ways of doing things.
And, you know, so many of them arise from the influence of techno-capitalism, and that's accelerating.
At this point, it feels that the influence is pervasive, predatory, it's highly personalized, it's targeted, as you say.
And it's an environment where singular charismatics can become like virtual residents in your home.
Informing values and behaviors much more effectively than you could as a parent.
And it happens so fast that even thinking about protecting a child from it becomes this kind of dream with maybe unrealistic, maybe even reactionary undertones.
Well, it's a fascinating flip, right?
Because I think in another era we would have thought of like Luddites or like the Amish as the sort of, you know, the easy reference.
People who reject technology out of a desire to maintain traditional spiritual purity.
But more and more it seems like The conservative, um, the contemporary conservative movement is much more invested in this anti-censorship kind of thing where it's just all a complete free-for-all.
And that's not just, it's not just about capitalism.
It's about saying, don't tell me what to do.
Don't tell me what I can watch.
I should be able to think for myself.
And so like, just bring on all of the propaganda and all of the manipulative marketing and all of the pseudoscience and we'll just, we'll just take, you know, whatever comes.
I don't want to be that grumpy old man complaining about how the kids today, you know, move their hips to that trashy rock and roll music.
But I think I do think digital technology has a lot to offer as well.
My instinct as a parent is to be as open as possible about what's out there.
You know, less of a security guard, more of a wilderness guide.
I, most of all, I don't want to offload my paranoia, which is, like, considerable, onto my kids.
I want to say, you know, I'm traveling this new territory with you.
I'm learning the same way as you are.
Maybe I'll stand in front.
I'm a little bit less vulnerable.
I'll tell you what you see, what I see.
So, when we run into somebody like Iman Gadzi, the idea is that we'll try to understand him together.
So, that's what we're gonna do.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense in terms of, you know, like, critical thinking, education, media literacy, you know, having a sort of being unafraid of something because, hey, we can look at it and talk about it together.
I think the emphasis upon, like, keeping the communication relationship solid is really important when I see, as I'll mention a little bit later, that so much of the commentary response to Godsey's material is from 12, 13, 14-year-old boys who are saying, yeah, my parents would never let me watch this, or if my parents knew that I was watching this, then, you know, they wouldn't approve of, you know, you telling me what the education system was about.
I mean, as we'll see, he has to play into or accentuate whatever wedge he can drive into that, you know, parent-child discourse, right?
So who is he?
I think I said this just at the top, that This is somebody who pretty much grew up on YouTube.
457 uploads since December of 2015.
He was 15 years old then, by the way.
I don't think we've mentioned his age, but this guy, like, the audio that we just heard is from a guy who's 22, 23 years old.
So he's 15 in 2015.
There is a video about, you know, once every six days.
And as I mentioned, it's not just crap.
Everything is produced and edited.
And you can track how, over time, him representing his life becomes increasingly self-referential.
For the first 18 months or so, Godzie is really just doing workout selfies with decent editing, a lot of weightlifting.
Slowly, he starts breaking the fourth wall as he then talks with his followers about selfie production techniques and video hardware.
And then he slowly leans towards life coaching with content that is more self-consciously about brand building for himself and others.
And wouldn't you know it, the businesses he goes on to build are in the newish and somewhat dodgy category of the social media marketing agency, which as I'm trying to understand it, coming to understand it, is like the money bro fad that is starting to overshadow dropshipping.
Yeah, well, you cut out the in-between service, right?
This is a variation on something we've talked about before, but you know, Mallory, our correspondent, has been covering this affair a bit lately, too.
It's the phenomenon of being in the business, of teaching people how to be in the business.
So you don't teach them about dropshipping, you teach them how to teach others how to teach others to do the thing.
Like coaching coaches on how to build a client base of coaches who they are coaching on how to coach.
It's not actually an MLM, but there are overlaps.
And sadly, you know, I look at it and I'm like, shit, this correlates with yoga teacher trainings.
To some extent, right?
And we both did that for a long time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that, but also the online course business model, which I was briefly involved in, which, which a lot of yoga teachers end up getting into because you've got to keep figuring out, you know, how to, how to make, how to make a living.
Right.
And this is about selling evergreen information products or online courses, right?
But you don't have to actually be there.
People can just access the course and it starts to become, the dream is it becomes this stream of passive income, right?
Right.
And it just so happens that educating others on how to do the very thing you're doing, when you market your services to them, is an extremely lucrative internet gig.
And social media provides incredible reach and tools for exactly this kind of entrepreneurship.
Okay, so I just need to underline that.
Okay, so you're saying it just so happens that educating others on how to do the very thing you're doing when you market your services to them is one of the most, oh my god, one of the most lucrative internet gigs.
This is the kind of postmodernism that Jordan Peterson should really be complaining about.
It's really the sort of cul-de-sac that's also, it's custom made for both narcissism and also the dream of infinite wealth that we heard Marc Andreessen bang on about in the last episode, right?
Yeah, we're in Jorge Luis Borges territory here.
There once was a map that was so large it covered all of the world and eventually people couldn't tell the difference.
It's, it's, yeah, it's, I, I've called it the map to nowhere before.
Mallory had this great post a couple of weeks ago that just showed how this coach had an ad on social media in which she was selling an online course on how to sell online courses without doing ads on social media.
And I think, you know, with teacher trainings in the yoga world, it took about 20 years to hit that double tipping point.
And we're of the generation who like rode through that 20 years together.
And I call it a double tipping point because I think one tipping point is that 90% of the students, roughly, I'm just pulling that stat out of the air, who had bought into the idea that they could deepen their practice.
Through doing a training, even if they didn't want to teach, right?
That became the secondary way of getting more people to participate.
90% of those people had paid thousands for teacher trainings and deepened their practice.
And then maybe 90% of the students in the existing pool who wanted to be teachers had done the same.
So not only then do you have the market for teacher trainings, which is the biggest earning product in the industry, starting to collapse because there's just no more people to sell teacher trainings to, but you also have an industry that's flooded with bright eyed and actually quite anxious, recently certified teachers trying to transition to their meaningful second career and then eventually live the dream of offering teacher trainings.
I mean, I turned around and looked at it and went, oh jeez, I'm part of this!
Part of it, and you couldn't see it, right?
No.
You couldn't see it in front of you.
I think what we can see in front of Godsey is that, you know, it might be a map to nowhere, but it's not exactly going nowhere in terms of content.
You can kind of hear the whir of a conveyor belt.
It's going to lead towards the heterodox sphere, right?
Like, where else can it go?
And I guess I had this feeling as I'm going through this material is that he's this great example of somebody who's symbiotic with the YouTube platform.
And so it makes sense that he would actually be a bellwether for shifting themes on it and shifting ways of doing business.
And what's really ironic, as we'll see, for someone whose entire thing is the glorification of personal freedom and autonomy, you know, his pitch is that you can ditch the system and be an entirely self-made man.
And he's making this pitch from within the fully automated machine of YouTube.
Yeah, I think maybe someone needs to tell him that you cannot use the master's tools to dismantle the master's
house Let's talk a little bit about where he comes from
And all of this info, you know, that I've got here is his story.
You know, there hasn't been any independent fact checking of any of this, nor of his income claims, by the way.
You know, he says he's a multimillionaire.
I didn't have my self-aggrandizement radar go off because his story is quite sort of meandering.
It doesn't really serve a strong hero's journey narrative.
It's more like trading places than rags to riches.
There's a ton of luck involved in his backstory, and he doesn't really obscure that.
He's born in January of 2000 in Russia in Dagestanskiy Ogni in Dagestan, and his original surname is Gadzhim Magomedov.
And Iman is a Muslim name, it means faith.
His mom's name is Muminat, and I believe that name means woman believer.
And if you're not familiar with Dagestan, this is in the beautiful North Caucasus Mountains, sparsely populated by many very old ethnic groups, dozens of languages in the region, and quite poor.
The average per capita monthly income for 2022 was about $360 per month.
But back in 2000, when Ghazi was born, and the post-Soviet wounds were still very raw, that income was just over $20 a month.
And, you know, he's self-deprecating about his home country.
He says in a number of places that Dagestan is like Borat, but in Russia.
But, you know, I have to say there's also a very noble Independent, mountain-dwelling heritage of groups of people who are never really part of any empire or national project.
I just want to add here, too, that Americans who know about Dagestan, who've even heard of Dagestan for the most part, know of it because of the UFC and there being a whole contingent of incredibly, incredibly effective, skillful fighters who practice a kind of wrestling that is sometimes practiced early in life with baby bears.
No.
I mean, yes.
There's video of this.
Yes.
Shit.
Yes.
It's a very interesting subculture and it has sort of this glory surrounding that aspect of it.
So, you know, he might joke about it, but he's also, you know, he's born into considerable chaos.
The year before he's born, we have a Chechen-Islamic warlord group invade Dagestan with the goal of setting up an independent Islamic state.
And in response, the Russians launch the Second Chechen War.
And then more recently, Dagestan unfortunately made the news for a pogrom-like scene where a mob of hundreds rallied on telegram to swarm the Makhachkala airport looking for Jews to harass or maybe even lynch as they arrived from Tel Aviv.
Yeah, that was a scary scene.
Yeah, terrible.
Now, it's so interesting because he leans heavily into what he calls his Eastern European heritage as an authentic source of conservative and traditional values, especially around women.
I haven't seen him declare a religious heritage or practice.
He does have a video called 17 Lessons for Teenagers in which he talks about the necessity of faith in God, but he uses very universalist terms in that video.
But his name and 80% of Dagestan is Muslim.
There is one point where he pokes fun at Andrew Tate's recent conversion to Islam, implying that, you know, the top G is actually LARPing, whereas, you know, Iman is the real deal.
It's in his blood.
Now, daddy issues are a huge theme.
He recounts never having known his alcoholic, abusive father, and that he lived mainly with his grandparents until the age of four in a very humble home without indoor plumbing.
His very young mother at the time goes off to work in Moscow and eventually meets Ghazi's wealthy future stepfather who's a guy from an Indian family in the UK who spent a lot of his time in Dubai.
So, mom marries the guy, they move to London, they move into Chelsea SW7, which is a super swanky neighborhood, and they live in one of stepdad's detached houses, bought years before, still unrenovated, like one of these places that, you know, would not be worth many millions of pounds.
And through his stepfather's means, he was able to attend private school, a private school called South Bank International Boarding.
Now today, tuition at that school starts at 20,000 pounds per year for a half day and goes to 36 pounds per year at the senior high school level.
That's 44,000 US dollars per year.
So, Juliet, did you know South Bank?
Did you know that neighborhood in Chelsea?
I know of it.
It's very posh and luxurious.
I did live in London, but not anywhere near that.
It's a big thing in his life.
It creates this kind of split experience, as we'll see.
Things go south in his mom's marriage.
There's estrangement, and on one hand, the stepfather is paying for private school, but on the other, Gadsi says that he cuts them off in the expensive house.
I've met a lot of people.
He's probably the only person on earth I'm still, like, scared of.
Like, he's a scary, scary, scary, scary dude.
So, basically, from, like, the age of, like, 8, 9, 10 years old, things kind of fell apart.
Basically, my stepdad cut off me and my mom.
Not that he was giving us much money anyways.
He also pretended to be, like, super, super broke.
So, yeah, basically, by the age of... I remember I was, like, 10 or 11, and my mom told me.
And my mom used to, like, hide her bank accounts from me, because I would...
Even from the age of 10, 11, I would look.
I was a young kid.
From the age of eight or nine, I knew that we were... Yeah, things were not gonna be pretty.
Julian, do you remember how Charlotte Ward, she's the author of the Conspiratuality paper, she also wrote that pre-QAnon book called Illuminati Party under the name of Jackie Farmer?
Yeah, of course.
And, you know, tracking all of that down, you did wonderful research.
It's one of the key stories in our book.
I mean, not only does she sort of prefigure our podcast, but the paranoid themes that she was cooking up may have influenced QAnon, or some of the people who created QAnon, or that whole alchemical sort of process of a whole group of people manifesting something, along with her fellow Brit, David Icke.
But for anyone who missed the full episode we did on this, this is the academic from whose paper we derived the name of the podcast.
And then we discovered later that she turned out to have an alter ego that was obsessed with propagating some particularly intense and slanderous conspiracism.
That's it. And this sounds like a little bit of a tangent, but I'm noting it because in her book,
she describes a similar double life to what Godzie has going on.
She says that her own family isn't wealthy by any means, but somehow she's able to attend private school in London,
and this gives her an outsider, insider perspective on power.
So she describes being very familiar with the children of the indolent wealthy, but she's able to keep her wits and values about her.
Now, what she does with that is to make up morbid fantasies about what they're all up to with their satanic, you know, practices.
And, and Gazi has some of that same angle, but he takes it in a different direction.
He is cynical about the wealthy, but later we'll hear him talk about how being rich is ultimately cool because it means you live by different rules, and his early life gave him insight into who is able to cheat, you know, who is able to be above the system.
But, you know, he also insists that he doesn't belong to that class by birth or by temperament.
He can, you know, retain some sort of veneer of morality, of working man I don't know, like stuff.
Yeah, there's some overlap here with spiritual messaging, right?
In the world but not of the world, being a special soul who's kind of set apart, just observing, all-seeing but not indoctrinated, wise to the brainwashing.
It's interesting too because I think in years gone by, If I saw some, let's say I saw a movie in which there was a depiction of someone from the outside entering a private school and then they discover to their shock and horror that the private school is a den of like satanic worship and pedophilia.
I would watch that and I would go well that that's really morbid and you know bizarre and gothic and what have you.
But I would also go oh There's a psychological kind of interpretation here that's actually about capitalism.
It's actually about how these people do have a special privileged access and they are actually exploiting and harming everyone else in ways that they do prefer to keep hidden so that the whole system can keep rolling along.
And so it's so wild that this has now become I mean, to me, it also goes to one of my hobby horses of how, you know, overly literal interpretation of these kinds of metaphors tends to lead people in pretty bad directions.
Yeah.
And in very ironic directions in this case, right?
Absolutely.
Next thing I want to underline is that Godzie's mom is always present in these stories.
She looms very large.
He loves the toughness that he says allowed her to survive tough
times.
He loves her brand of old-world sexual politics, especially when it gives him permission
in ways that we'll get into.
And that gives him a leg up on Andrew Tate, in my opinion, who mostly talks about his seemingly abusive chess
grandmaster father and, you know, who has a mom who seems to hate his guts.
But Moominat is always there in the background of the content.
So whenever he sets up shop, and wherever he is, he's got a place in Dubai, he's got a place in Cape Town, South Africa, he makes sure she has an apartment close by.
So the lead video on his homepage is about him buying a four million pound house for her in central London.
Other videos feature him taking her to Paris or Greece for vacations.
He's buying her a $30,000 handbag.
They seem very much in love with each other.
And on one hand, he really looks like a little boy when he's around her, but on the other hand, you know, he's taking care of her in a paternalistic way that becomes a huge part of his brand.
And I think it makes sense when you really clock the backstory of her becoming a single young mother who came from this very volatile place.
In one interview, Godsey describes his biological father breaking her arm by pushing her out of a moving car.
So there's this feeling that she heroically overcame perilous obstacles to protect and raise him, and he's now returning the favor.
And this is huge for his followers.
So many commenters on his videos praise the sweetness that he shows her.
Okay, Julian, let's talk about his businesses.
There's one puff piece interview with Godsey in Forbes, where he lays out his biz progress in overview format, if you'd like to read from that.
I started flipping Instagram accounts at age 14.
I would buy accounts that weren't worth much, help them grow, and then sell them.
Later, I dabbled in fitness coaching, and before you knew it, I was selling three-month personal training services to parents of my friends and people I networked within the gyms.
These two businesses made me about $20,000 in profit.
But I branched out and started shooting photos and videos for people.
That experience propelled me to open my own online marketing agency.
IAG Media grew significantly over the last 6 years and has given me multiple 7 and 8 figure years of profit.
I made some investment moves as well.
For instance, in 2020, I invested $1 million in crypto and another million in wristwatches, which is a surprisingly profitable asset class if you know what to look for.
There were a few other small ventures, but that's a quick summary of how I started.
I've made about $25 million to date, and investing in schools has become one of my strongest passions.
Investing in schools is very interesting given what he's pitching to the public now.
And it's not local schools.
He didn't go back to Dagestan to help out there.
Somehow he alighted on the need to build schools in rural Nepal.
And he's got a lot of content on this on his channel.
Long trips to Nepal that he's filmed.
And I checked into it and a spokesperson for the educational trust that he says he's supporting did confirm that he's supporting building projects there.
Although when I asked for, you know, concrete details or, you know, public documentation, I got no response.
So, it's a really interesting twist seeing what's coming.
Like, Gadzi does in fact see value in public education, especially for people whose prospects were as dim as his own were when he was a little boy in Dagestan.
And I just want to add here too, it's sometimes not clear if these things are completely true, but there is a, there's a long history that predates the internet of gurus who often are very shady and, and have like very authoritarian power structures and a lot of abuse going on in their, in their immediate circles, doing philanthropic work like this funding hospitals and schools.
And, you know, and then when you try and look into it, you're like, Well, I'm not.
It seems like it might be partially true, but I'm not really following the money trail that well here.
Yes.
Did I email Iman Gadzi's brother, who's actually in charge of the trust that put the pictures of the schools up on the internet?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I'd have to be on the ground to find out more.
It's all very interesting because perhaps the biggest part of Godzie's story is that he drops out of high school at the age of 17 and he says that he absorbed himself in video creation and also he devoured self-help books.
Now he's very generously let us know about the books that most influence him and two of the four we'll mention here Have actually been ripped to shreds by Michael Hobbs and Peter Shamshiri on If Books Could Kill, just so you know.
Oh, they've got their fingers on the pulse.
So, what have we got first?
We've got David Data.
David Data.
Yeah, the way of the superior man, the way of the superior man.
Many listeners will know that this guy, David Data, he's, or Data, or Data, I'm not sure how you say it correctly, he's a pivotal figure In the development of a set of popular New Age ideas about relationship dynamics and this gender essentialism that kind of tries to pretend that it's not gender essentialism because it's about masculine and feminine energy.
Yeah, barf.
Or essence, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, he was a student and a devotee of the just outrageously abusive and deranged godman Adidas Samraj, who I did a bonus episode on if anyone wants to go dig it up.
He has described one aspect of what he teaches as Non-dual sexuality.
All right.
Yeah, I mean, maybe it's maybe the time is finally ripe for that.
I'm not sure.
So in 1997, he publishes The Way of the Superior Man.
It's his third book.
It's a big breakthrough for him.
The problems with it might be given away by the title.
Right.
The book is for men who want to be superior, presumably like him.
And I think it's some kind of Taoist reference that, you know, doesn't maybe doesn't translate that well, but he didn't he didn't choose a different word.
You'll be delighted to learn, Matthew, that the way of the superior man is ranked number one.
In a special Amazon category called Men's Gender Studies.
Oh, for fuck's sake, come on.
There's probably not a lot of books in that, to be fair.
But get this, it's also number 11 in love and romance on Amazon.
Wow.
And number 39 in personal transformation self-help.
And this is for a book, it's a book that's been out 26, yeah, 26 years.
26 years and he's making bank still.
There's an idea from the book that I've encountered many times in yoga circles, and it goes something like this.
What women really want in a man is someone who can be like a rock.
Steadfast.
Steadfast.
Able to withstand her changing weather and, you know, naturally stormy emotionality.
If he can do that, his sacred masculine space holding will then earn and deserve the vulnerable trust and passionate sexuality of a woman.
You really know this stuff, man!
Oh, God!
Yes, yes!
It's a very common trope.
The profound mystery, Matthew, and irrational reactivity of the feminine shadow is, in fact, the same emotional and sexual energy that drew you to her in the first place.
Now, what a man, in turn, really wants is the freedom to devote his masculine essence to the struggle of pushing the edges to accomplish his mission in the world.
Okay, and Iman Godzie is recommending this book to my kid through his YouTube channel, which he got to because Google Ads fed him something into his school account.
On a Minecraft channel.
So, you know, there's a lot of bold and broad declarative wisdom.
I feel like this is so of the 90s, right?
Where within the circles that we moved in, people who could talk a good game would be like, I'm going to create a theory and I'm going to teach a method and there's going to be no citations and I'm going to have no qualifications except I studied with this guru and I have done this kind of practice, etc.
This is about how men and women are fundamentally different in their spiritual essences and here's how you can navigate that effectively for greater self-fulfillment.
Navigate, but then when it translates into sort of like the pickup artist discourse, it's also how you can take advantage of that for effectively greater fulfillment.
And I have to say, to be fair, David Dieter never really went in that direction and I would probably reject that.
Okay.
All right.
Fair is fair.
Anyway, I hate it.
I hate it anyway, because even when a little of it filters down into the daily awareness and behavior of the reader, I mean, all it will do is to turn women around him into absolute abstractions in his imagination.
Like, I already had that as a Catholic boy through my own, like, demented education, and it ruined my first relationships with women.
Like, I think guys probably come to BS-like data at a point in their lives
when there's probably a fork in the road and they can give up on, you know,
a culturally acceptable misogyny, or they can read this book and feel sanctified
by doubling down on it.
The next book is by a guy named Vadim Zeland, and it's called Reality Transurfing.
What did you find out about that?
Yeah, well, you know, the Amazon description reveals it to be a guide into how to achieve your goals through understanding how thoughts create reality and freedom of choice affects something along the lines of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics.
So I really don't feel like I need to read the book.
I've read it in a parallel universe.
Okay.
But you know, ho hum.
Well, one of the bios does say that Vadim Zeland is considered the number one author in Russian esotericism, which kind of gives me the prickles.
I haven't looked further, but the first connection that comes to my brain is like Alexander Dugin, especially in this day and age.
You have to work really hard to be the number one author in a hidden and secret tradition.
So, next up we have The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene.
Now, you read a review of this book by Paul Thompson in L.A.
Review of Books.
What does Thompson have to say?
So, Thompson describes the book as presaging an era in which bullshit would become indistinguishable from everything else around it.
He frames Green as a kind of dilettante, referencing military theorists and political philosophers as the basis for his vague and horoscope-like bromides.
Now this criticism really tracks because you see chapter titles like, Act Like a King to be Treated Like One.
Think as you like, but behave like others.
And here's another, pose as a friend, work as a spy.
Yeah, I think Hobbes and Shamshiri just pegged all of this as like 400 pages of sociopathy, right?
Totally, totally.
How to win friends and manipulate people.
Right.
So it's more pseudo profound self-help recommendations by a very young online guru, yeah?
Yeah.
And then we should add here that Green's second book is called The Art of Seduction and some analysts flag this up as being a precursor to the pickup artist scene and all of that mangled evolutionary psychology of what is sometimes called the red pill in terms of the manosphere world.
So the last book that Godsey talks about in this video is a little bit more secular, pragmatic.
It's Atomic Habits by James Clear.
It's basically cognitive behavioral therapy-oriented self-help with the tone of a dog training manual and huge promises of radical life changes that will blossom completely independent of your socioeconomic status.
So it's really a manual of neoliberal productivity therapy.
Here we come then to Godsey's COVID era.
Now, I think this is kind of a watermark, because up until now, things are fairly standard.
The content, especially the sales content, seems relatively benign.
But we know what happened to people starting in April of 2020.
And one revelation that I come away with from this part of the research that I did for these episodes is that I just didn't realize what a huge problem it is that, you know, the big social media companies deleted content for terms of service violations during COVID, for misinformation, for anti-vax propaganda.
But when they didn't remove the channels, what ends up happening is that the content creator's record becomes laundered.
So it took me actually hours to find out that Iman Gadzi became a rabid COVID contrarian.
The filtering and moderation bias is based on keywords and content and not the creator themselves.
So the platforms are not incentivized or equipped to figure out how not to wind up doing laundry for these people.
Wow.
This is a very important observation because it's an unintentional consequence, right?
But it ends up creating this false impression because you've basically taken anything away that might be offensive or misinformation or conspiratorial.
Wild.
And so this is what happens when I start to look for signs of Godzie's political identity during COVID.
The only thing I found at first, it's still up on his YouTube channel, was a fairly neutral and sober biz advice video at the beginning of the pandemic.
This is March 18th, 2020.
He got out in front of it and he gave some helpful advice.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I feel as though we should address the elephant in the room.
First things first, I want to go ahead and say that I have demonetized this video.
It is more important to me that you watch this thing all the way through rather than me make a bit of money from it.
Second, I've gone ahead and linked in the description the advice pages for all of my audience and basically everything I referenced in this video.
I know this might sound patronizing, but honestly, it would mean the world to me if you Clicked on these links and just took a minute to educate yourself.
You might learn something that ultimately will help you and your family stay healthy in a very difficult time like this.
Finally, I just want to say this incredibly simple message.
Please wash your hands.
The priority should be reducing the transmission of the disease, especially amongst the vulnerable and the elderly.
So, wash your hands.
Learn how to wash your hands correctly and do it as frequently as you can.
So I just want to say that when you hear where he goes with this, part of his sort of reactionary stance is based upon having had bad information at the beginning of the pandemic.
So I'm sure he is listening to the replay of Please Wash Your Hands.
hands and going, ah, that was incorrect. I was being lied to by all of these public health
officials that fucked up all of the information. But of course, as we'll see, he goes way overboard.
And again, this is still up on YouTube, which gives the false public impression that he's
a COVID realist. So then I came across something else.
October 19th, 2020, YouTube strikes down a COVID conspiracy theory podcast appearance that Iman Godzi does with Richard Harris, but they upload it to Odyssey.
Now, Godzi also lost his blue tick on Instagram around this time for misinfo violation.
Now, Richard Harris is a Bath, UK-based life coach devoted to Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson.
He's a huge and very passionate COVID conspiracist, and he actually got his YouTube channel nuked for disinformation, and now he's doing something called vaccine regret counseling alongside his fitness stuff.
So he writes, Being a life coach, vociferous COVID narrative critic, and researcher into the deep state, I'm one of the few individuals qualified to help people through the devastation caused by the COVID injection.
I understand much of the biology, the political milieu, the applied psychology used in the propaganda, the nuance of the censorship, as well as experienced life coaching for five years.
I offer my services as a counselor to help people come to terms with the damage of the injection and the evil behind its planning.
Yeah, so I actually reached out to interview him about vaccine regret counseling because I just wanted to see what he said about how exactly this was counseling.
Like, how he would avoid simply telling clients that they'd been abused based on his analysis of their symptoms.
You know, he wrote back politely.
He declined.
But, I mean, it just feels like this has some of the same characteristics of recovered memory therapy.
You know, a person has disturbing physical or mental health symptoms, they're reaching for an explanation, and then somebody is there to say, yes, you were abused.
Yes, there is child sexual abuse in your deep memory.
Yeah, this is awful, and it's the same kind of priming, in which whatever the silver bullet explanation is for your existential angst, whether it's the devil, or repressed sexual abuse memories, or alien abductions, or what was really done to you by the evil vaccine without your knowledge, this then becomes the root cause.
That must be healed in order for you to be free and whole again.
And guess what?
I've got the specially crafted, bespoke method for doing that.
So Richard Harris strikes me as obviously very smart, but also boiling over with what I would describe as like aspirational rage.
He's super activated in these podcasts.
He's sipping black espresso.
So they open this one discussion in a very animated fashion, talking about G. Edward Griffin's conspiracy theory about the Federal Reserve.
Now, Griffin is the conspiracy theorist who believes that the entire U.S.
monetary system is a privately controlled cartel I mean, not absolutely wrong, but also thoroughly debunked by political and economics historians.
And that's not just because Griffin believes in chemtrails, or that cancer is a nutritional deficiency, or that HIV-AIDS doesn't exist, or that he's a leading figure in the John Birch Society.
Or that he knows where Noah's Ark is.
And from there, they get into a litany of every COVID conspiracy theory that we've heard.
That the virus wasn't isolated, that, you know, the PCR tests are fraudulent, the cycles are all wrong, and that flu deaths were reassigned as COVID deaths.
But then they get into masks, and their take is both denialist, but also incredibly cynical and almost cruel.
Like, Godsey talks about how he never wore a mask in an Uber or on a plane because wealthy people know it's all a scam and they play by different rules, don't you know?
So, there's a lot of BS here.
But then they get to this, and I just have to pause and let them take it from here.
Now just a heads up here, they've spliced a video of a child about your daughter's age, Julian, on her way to school, and she's crying because the mask is very uncomfortable.
So it's a little bit disturbing to listen to.
By the way, if you're letting your children wear these face masks or be told to wear face masks, I'm calling that for what it is.
That's child abuse.
That's an abusive thing to do to a child.
I don't want this back!
Okay, go Mommy.
I don't want this back!
things.
When you're a child, you need to... You're in such an important phase of your life, you need to see other people's expressions.
You need to see... So much, man.
Like, especially just even your mother's, right?
Like, let alone if you're not putting a mask on your child.
If you're the mother and you're walking around and you're just holding your baby and you're interacting with your newborn and you're wearing a mask and you can't... Like, your newborn can't discern what your expression is, what emotion you're trying to put through.
Like, it's...
It's so warped, and I'm in full agreement.
Like, if I see someone and they're letting their child wear a mask, I'm just like... I'm gonna be honest, you're not fit to be a parent in my opinion.
Yeah, I wouldn't have anything to do with someone that did that.
Like, I'd address it and I'd say, listen, I think this is f***ed up.
Just like if they were, like, touching their kid up or something.
We all would say, oi, what are you doing there, right?
If I saw that behaviour, I'd say, listen, this is messed up what you're doing to this child here.
Like, I'm not gonna sit here and let this go on, you know?
Yeah, masking, encouraging your child to wear a mask during a pandemic is akin to committing incestuous pedophilia.
So let's just underline for a moment that Godsey does not have children.
I haven't heard Harris reference himself as a parent.
I kind of doubt that he is.
So here are two bros who are free of the actual burden of the terrible dilemmas of protection versus freedom.
And yet, and yet, there's an incredible depth of Jungian analysis and child developmental psychology that they have access to, so that's impressive.
I don't think any of this is coming from any actual experience.
It really reminds me of like my dad, who in church, Catholic Church, whenever the priest would say something about children, he would always like roll his eyes and say, that shithead needs to change some diapers.
I remember some of my parents' friends also talking about priests like saying, don't take relationship advice from someone who's never been married, right?
You know, the thing too about playing that clip, which is so awful and so exploitive, where's the clip of the child crying because their parent or grandparent died from COVID?
Accordingly, with all of this stuff, in the same general time frame as he's making this stuff with Richard Harris, Gandhi also takes a few cracks at wellness content.
I didn't watch his 100-odd weightlifting fitness coaching videos.
I don't know exactly what his pre-2020 health vibe was like, but in 2020, something difficult but also familiar happened.
So he describes going through a period of depression.
to the point of having suicidal ideation and then developing psoriasis and being very frustrated with doctors having little to offer but steroid creams.
And this may be where he gets hooked into Jordan Peterson because he describes curing himself with an all-beef diet for a time and also seeking out male mentorship and guidance.
So he produces content on Vim Hof, something he calls dopamine detoxing for his sort of wellness portfolio.
I mean, dopamine detoxing is really just logging off for a few days.
But eventually, all of it starts to bend towards what he will be telling young men today.
Now in this clip, which comes from a video called Five Habits Making Men WEAK, with WEAK all in caps, you can see that the values of natural health and self-reliance start to braid themselves into an argument about schooling.
Now the first one is extremely controversial, and that is prescription drugs.
You're a little kid, you have so much energy, you have so much potential inside of you.
You could become so much, be so much.
And you're not meant to sit in a classroom for six hours being static, not moving.
That's not natural, that's not right.
And we build all these unnatural structures, and when a kid does not want to follow that system, We label it as ADHD and then we numb them with Adderall.
You're feeling slightly depressed?
Don't worry.
Don't face the issue head-on.
Don't tackle it.
It's okay.
Just, you know, take some SSRIs and be enslaved for the rest of your life because Prozac will fix all of your issues.
Just take the pill.
Don't question it.
How dare you question the science?
And by the way, this is coming from someone who has had an extremely, extremely difficult life.
This is coming from someone Who went through an extremely difficult depressive episode in the summer of 2020, so much so to the point that I even considered deleting myself and not thinking maybe I should do it.
Once it gets scary is once you ask yourself, how am I going to do it?
And you know what I did?
I consulted my most trusted advisors.
I consulted my most trusted masculine role models and I worked through it naturally.
I work through it by completely cutting out alcohol, completely cutting out stimulants like caffeine,
going through a process of an elimination diet and also doing a lot of meditation, alone time,
trauma work, just sitting with myself, working through things.
But you know, the modern world will tell you that that's stupid because you could have just taken a pill.
The awful thing about this, Matthew, is I listened to that and I'm like, you know what?
When I was 23, 24, 25, I would have been spewing exactly this narrative.
And I'm sure I did in my yoga classes to some extent.
You don't need... Prozac was the thing, right?
In the 90s, you don't need Prozac.
You need to work through your trauma.
You need to get back into your body.
You need to face your demons.
The culture wants to keep you asleep.
You know, Big Pharma is not your friend.
On and on.
It's in their best interest for there not to be cures for all of these different... They don't want you to go and eat healthy and take care of yourself and make the lifestyle changes that will make you not be dependent upon them.
I get it.
It's a natural set of ideas to find your way into as a rebellious and sort of curious young person.
And they're super compelling because they're not entirely wrong as ideas, especially when he begins to tie in the pathologization of, you know, school-age boys as the father of two boys who, by their nature, make me question the sanity and motivations behind asking them to do desk work for six hours every day.
I'm very aware of the socializing pressures that set up productivity thresholds, which if they're not met, they lead down this road to pathologization.
I'm very aware of the archetype of the boy who becomes the problem child and therefore the scapegoat of the broader community.
The child who may actually be the canary in the coal mine of, you know, a kind of capitalist despair.
But there's a big shadow here, too, alongside that, which is that, in a way, he's sort of reaching out and touching people who may have a variety of neurodivergent or like, you know, developmental sort of challenges and saying, no, no, no, I have the answer.
And that, to me, is actually shocking.
We've entered the part of our show that's called Enter the Manosphere.
And it shows where his wellness content begins to dovetail with Manosphere themes.
And here's how that particular video opens.
Gentlemen, I believe that from the moment you're born, the odds are stacked against you.
I believe that in the modern world, you are set up to fail.
We've got testosterone declining.
We've got men being shamed for being men.
Really let that sink in for a second.
You are shamed for simply wanting to be a man and embrace masculine values.
And now you're villainized for being a man.
You're villainized for being what God set you on this earth to be.
We're told that we're evil.
We're told that we're toxically masculine.
But quite frankly, I don't think that we are.
I think we want to protect, we want to provide, and we want to fulfill our duty as a man.
I believe that as men, we take great pride in the things that we can do for our sisters, for our mother, for our wife.
The issue is the modern world makes it very, very difficult with all the traps that it lays out for us.
So in this video, I'm going to tell you the five worst habits that keep men weak.
Yeah, I mean, this is this is boilerplate right now.
Unfortunately, it's that intersection of aspirational, you know, I can teach you how to feel empowered.
I can teach you how to overcome your dissatisfaction.
And we're going to give you a scapegoat to blame it all on.
And it turns out that this is going to be feminism.
And so then you have this intersection with reactionary cultural ideas.
A lot of people ask me my opinion on Andrew Tate.
Yeah, I've brought him up a couple of times.
I haven't bitten yet.
Okay, so here's the issue.
I agree with, honestly, 98% of what he says.
Bear in mind, I come from an Eastern European background, so he has adopted that.
That's just my blood, right?
So for me, the stuff when I hear, I'm not like, that's outlandish.
I'm like, well, yeah, that makes sense, right?
The issue is he's speaking to 0.001% of guys, right?
Like remember what my mom said when I grew up, certain men have different, certain men can play by different rules because they've earned that right.
So what he, and by the way, that right does not mean just cause you're wealthy.
Cause that's the other thing guys think that like, Oh, just cause I'm wealthy, I can see, you know, I can have sleep with multiple women and still have my wife.
And it's like, no, because wealth is just a commodity in the same way.
Beauty is just commodity.
I mean, the shtick here is that the high value man can feel justified in this male fantasy of wealth and then self-indulgence because any woman that he's with should accept the fact that he wants to be a polygamist, essentially.
I think he's also just being strategic because this is staking out competitive territory as Tate adjacent.
But here's how I'm different than him.
And at the time, you know, the guy had massive reach.
So it's any anyone advising him would say, yeah, you need it.
This is this is a good move.
Yeah, so I agree with 98% of what Andrew Tate says, except when it comes to... Look, there's stuff I agree with.
First of all, I don't think it's noble for your girlfriend to be on OnlyFans anyway.
I think if you're a true baller, like if you're a true baller, thousands of guys should not be masturbating to photos of your girl's vagina.
If you're a true baller and you're with a girl who brings you peace, who's loyal, And she's proven herself in dark, difficult times.
Just take care of her.
If you're really that much of a baller, just give her her spending money.
She cooks for you, she cleans for you, she brings peace to your life.
You got, like, I don't know, I just don't see the appeal in getting your girlfriend on OnlyFans and having guys, like, jerk, like, that's just me.
All right, so did you get that, Julian?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, not noble to traffic women into sex work, as Tate has alleged to have done for years, because if they're high value women, you should just give them an allowance for the sex work and house labor that they do for you and keep them at home.
It's a kindler, gentler misogyny.
What about romance?
Well, here he is.
I want a wife that has no social media or private social media.
She's not in any videos.
She's not in public.
She has her full undivided focus on taking care of the thing that is most important to me, which is my kids and future family.
Just general advice when you're looking for someone in life.
Your life path needs to align with theirs.
And you guys need to want the same thing.
And you can never take someone's dream away from them.
Yeah, surprise, surprise.
He wants a submissive trad wife that he can control, but it's dressed up as being this kind of intentional choice he's making for the vision.
And the tremolo guitar really adds some kind of mystery and romance to that.
Our title is, Is This the Next Andrew Tate?
And I really feel that this is the hinge point in the story of a guy who grows up on YouTube.
It's been about a year since Tate dominated global news.
And back then, I had lengthy conversations with my son about him.
He was aware of Tate in the ether, but the Toronto District School Board Google firewall seemed to have kept him out of my son's Chromebook.
But from a parenting point of view, it wasn't a huge challenge to break down the Tate technique and politics for my kid, because Tate really is a cartoon of himself.
Like, he could easily show up on The Simpsons.
So, My son was aware that something was off, and certainly would have had alarm bells triggered if he'd heard Tate speaking about bitches working for him.
You know, my son knows what I do for a living.
I tell him age-appropriate stories and the rough outlines of how I see these online structures working.
So Tate was an obvious charlatan to him, and he was suspicious of Iman Gadzi.
But I have to say that on his own, Gadzi makes a much more compelling case as a positive influencer.
Short of the criminal misogyny, the values and the biz model are very similar.
But the main thing is that if Godsey had come into our home first, I think it would have taken me a lot longer to discuss the issues with an 11-year-old because they're more masked.
And in that discussion, I might run the risk of simply seeing biased that I was going to critical lengths This is much more palatable.
I just didn't like him, that I was discriminating against the guy.
And I think there is going to be a sector of kids who would say, come on, he's not like Andrew Tate.
Is he really that bad? Are his values really that different from those of the men around me who work hard and play hard?
This is much more palatable.
It's less overtly domineering and sadistic.
And in fact, I think part of the quality here is that it's a relatable presentation
where Tate is always relying on cucking his fans, Godsey is offering a helping hand and a vibe that says, yeah, you can be a young millionaire just like me if you're willing to do the work.
And as a parent, I think the problems, yeah, are a little harder to point out.
We've come to the end, at least for now, Julian.
We're going to look next time at how Iman Gadzi is going to take on the entire educational system, and we're going to let you listeners in on a sneak peek offer here.
We have some very exclusive content coming up.
Julian, how would you let our listeners know about how we're going to complete this arc towards their ultimate liberation?
Well, you know, Matthew, a lot of people say they want to know the truth.
They want to change their lives.
They want to be empowered.
They want to find their true calling.
They want to stop feeling lost and scared.
But they don't take action.
So listen, for a limited time, we have a special offer.
It's only for the brave ones.
I'm serious about that.
If you're an occasional listener, or if you're one of those spiritual dilettantes who never really commits to doing the work, or if you don't realize you have to spend money to make money, okay, then this is not for you.
But for the true seekers of the freedom that comes from the knowledge only we can provide, you can sign up now for four easy payments.
Wow.
And I'm hearing from, wait, wait, I'm hearing from our producers, there are just 12 spots remaining.
The window of opportunity closes in 59 minutes and 59 seconds.
The countdown clock has begun.
It's the opportunity of a lifetime.
So, Julian, do you have any final words on, like, what this sales technique is?
I mean, we got into this because Iman Gadzi is pitching a conspiracy theory to my son about the educational system, but that's not even his real interest.
Like, he's using that as a hook to sell preteen boys on a business coaching package.
He says it's rare knowledge, it's hard to find, and you have to buy now.
So how does this all work?
Yeah, I mean, this is something I have looked into myself.
It's a kind of online sales narrative technique.
The idea is that once you've identified your key demographic, as well as their needs, their aspirations, and what is called in the business, their pain points, you start weaving a story around your product that is engaging and compelling specifically to them.
So what struck me right away is that this is actually very similar storytelling to the opening few minutes of The Secret.
Remember, that's the mega-hit Oprah-endorsed online movie, DVD and book franchise, most of our audience are very familiar with it, about the so-called Law of Attraction.
This goes back to 2006.
There is this hidden knowledge that we've uncovered.
It's going to be game changing for you.
The powers that be don't want you to know about it.
And there are some other sales psychology techniques.
I'm also familiar with that play here.
One is to appeal to exclusivity.
You're going to be on the inside.
You're becoming part of the select group of people who've woken up.
Then there's the urgency created around time.
There's a countdown to the product being released.
You don't want to miss it.
It's a technique that plays on your customer's sense of scarcity.
You'll only be able to sign up for a certain amount of time.
And all of these things create a kind of leverage.
It's all the art of persuasion, right?
They put pressure on the buyer.
Once the person doing the marketing has identified what their aspirations are and what their complaints are, those pain points, You know, it's funny because I took the free classes.
I got funneled into the sales pitch.
There's a $1,000 price tag.
I'm just skipping ahead a bit for Godsey's coaching service.
But before you buy, there's a talk to one of our advisors button.
So I booked a 20 minute call and that turned into two calls with different guys because the first one didn't close the sale.
So, I'll talk about most of that in the next episode, but I'll just say that when I asked one of them, why is Godsey getting so... going so blackpilled with his ad campaign?
Like, why doesn't he just tout his achievements and parade the testimonials?
And one of the guys just said outright, like, most people buy in through the gateway of pain, not pleasure.
Yeah, that's the whole thing with pain points, right?
And the idea is that you present your product as having the solution to those pain points, and then also pair that with painting the picture of what their life will be like after you've opened the door for them to achieve their deeply held aspirations.
Yeah, and I guess the irony here is that if you're inventing the pain points, you can really tailor the remedy.
Bingo.
There's something sadistic about it, but, you know, not entirely, because the sticky problem is that if you're talking about boys in high school, you don't have...
Yeah, no shit, right?
But you may find, you may invent scapegoats to tie all of those pain points onto and then you bundle that all together into a story that they can start identifying with in terms of what your product means, what kind of person they will just discover themselves to be as they progressively get seduced by the pitches until they eventually smash that buy button.
Or maybe they just join the list or sign up for a free call or a webinar like there's a there is a very broad kind of funnel that is that is sending people in different directions but sort of keeping them based on their level of interaction with what you're doing within the system.
At some point there's also the self-selecting reverse psychology move where you start saying you know if you're the kind of person who wastes a lot of time taking courses but never really follows through.
This is really not for you.
You can hit that X right now and get out of here.
If you're the kind of person who loves to consume a lot of self-help materials, but you always stay stuck and blame other people because you have some kind of fetish for playing the victim, this is not for you.
Like, you can leave right now.
This, what we're about to do, requires transformational commitment, so don't even bother giving us your money.
Unless you're really up for it, right?
On that note, listeners, remember that we have premium content available only on Patreon, where we help you crack the code of online insanity so that you can protect your children.
Because, you know, among the thousands of comments under Godsey's The Rescue videos, many, many of them are coming from boys who say they are 13, 14, 15 years old.
They're in the U.S., they're in India, they're in Pakistan, they're in Russia, they're everywhere.
