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

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hey everybody, Robert here. First off, we are doing a
rewind week because I've written two new Andrew Tait episodes,
but also myrith day came recently. We took some time off,
so we're gonna take this week to replay the first
fourth Tait episodes with ad breaks and stuff removed. I
also wanted to tell you Ed Zitron is in the

(00:24):
running for a webby for his show Better Offline, as
is Molly Conger for Weird Little Guys. Please go to
the Webbies vote for them. You can find the links
in the show notes along with their other links. You
can also just google ed Zitron, Webbies, Molly Conger Webbys
and you will find them. Please do vote for them.
We'll be back next week with two brand new episodes
on what Tait has been up to over the last

(00:44):
couple of years and a bunch of really fucked up
information that's come up. So please enjoy these episodes the
reruns with less ads, and go vote in the Webbies.
Welcome to him, motherfuckers. I'm Robert Eva. This is Behind
the Bastards, a podcast that has just encountered one of
the worst disasters of its career, So we'll get into

(01:08):
this more later. This is supposed to be and he's
going to be the first of several episodes about Andrew
Tait and the mythopoetic Men's movement that led to his
rise to fame and influence among a generation of young men.
We started recording this episode just a few hours ago
with the wonderful April Clark and Grace Freud of the

(01:28):
Girl God podcast they have anyway, we recorded a little
bit with them, and then I had a minor emergency
which has taken me out of the house for a while.
Things are okay, you don't need to flip out on
Reddit or whatever, but it was a problem and we
were not able to record with them. To finish recording
with them, and because of the holiday, we have no backlog.

(01:51):
So in order to get this episode done and ready
for our editor asap, Sophie is going to be my
guest today along with Ea, our editor, and we will
get this out as soon as possible because otherwise we
will not have a show. And we are contractually obligated
to provide you with entertainment every single week until the

(02:11):
heat death of the Universe. But I do want to
shout out April and Grace, who are wonderful who came
on and booked time for us, and I'm sorry that
things got messed up. We will have them back on
the pod at some point in the near future, and
I wanted to let people know that there is They
have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February twenty fifth,

(02:31):
and people can get tickets for that show at Girlgodshow
dot com. You can also check out their podcast just
type girl God and any of the things that have podcasts,
and you can listen to their awesome show. Thank you
so much again, April and Grace. I'm sorry that there
was a minor calamity. Now, welcome to the pod, Sophie

(02:53):
and Ian. How are y'all.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Doing so well? So on Ian night in Johnson, by
the way, he edits a lot of our shows, and
it's also uh one half of Gladiator with fellow fellow
editor DJ Danel. All right, and we do have the
full Gladiator on staff, which I like to bring up

(03:15):
as much as possible.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
I appreciate the love. And yeah, you know it's Friday.
Ready for the weekend. Let's talk some Tate. You know,
let's let's do it.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Friday, get into it Friday, but also almost Saturday.

Speaker 4 (03:30):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
And Ian is currently in his closet.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
And we we may start drinking in the in the
near future.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
It might need to happen. Yeah, let's do it, all right, Robert.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
But yeah, Ian, I actually have you been on just
as one of our podcasts before you you have known
this first? Uh? Well, you know, Ian, people should know
about you again. You're you're one half of Gladiator. You
are a longtime friend of our other editor, DJ Danel.
You are a legendary podcast editor. And you had absolutely

(04:04):
no involvement in the July sixteenth plane crash that cost
John F. Kennedy Junior his life off the Massachusetts coast.
No involvement at all. No know why people, Yeah, don't
bring it up. We had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Why are you talking about that?

Speaker 2 (04:17):
I just to let people know Ian had nothing to
do with it. Ian, Sophie, What do y'all know about
Andrew Tait?

Speaker 3 (04:26):
So my limited knowledge of him is he's a I believe,
a former MMA fighter who I don't know how he
made a lot of money, but it seems like he
has a lot of money from what he've seen on
the internet.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
We'll be talking about how Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
And he's into a lot of misogynistic men rights kind
of stuff. And he got thoroughly destroyed online by Greta,
So I do remember that, and I think he's in
jail now.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
He is in jail now, unrelated to the Greta stuff.
There was a little bit of a confusion about that,
but yes, he is in jail for sex trafficking in Romania. Sophie,
Is that more or less your understanding of the guy?

Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, he fucking sucks.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, he does. Indeed, he does. Indeed fucking suck. Unfortunately,
he's also kind of worth studying in detail because he's
managed to do something with social media that I don't
think anyone else has ever managed the same degree of
success he has. He's he's smart in one very specific way.

(05:28):
Even though he also did a bunch of dumb things
and some really dumb crimes that hopefully have ruined his life.
He was he was smart, and one in a way
that has allowed him to become dangerously influential to an
entire generation of teenage boys, in a way that like
no one on earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump
is really the only other guy that I might put

(05:50):
next to Tate in that kind and I think Tit
has a wider appeal among gen Z teens and tweens
than certainly Trump.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah, it's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content show.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, we're going to be talking about all that. I
am one of the things when I started looking into
this guy, there's a ton of articles about because he
blew up kind of mid twenty twenty one up until
you know the arrest a couple of weeks ago, there's
not profile articles on him that like go into detail
about his background, in his past and his entire rise

(06:23):
to power. You'll generally the best articles you'll find in
places like BuzzFeed or I think we have a couple
from like The Guardian. They'll like summarize his backstory in
two or three paragraphs. I wanted to get into who
this guy is and where he came from, because he
kind of pops out of nowhere if you don't follow that.
I think this is the first time anyone's really done that,
So I think this will be valuable for that. But

(06:45):
I want to start by laying out why we have
to take Tit seriously and kind of explain the scale
of sort of his influence. I am not exaggerating when
I say that he is maybe the most influential single
person on teen pre teen mails in the US and
the UK and some other parts of the West than
anyone else on planet Earth. In fall of twenty twenty two,

(07:07):
financial services company Piper Sandler released a survey of fourteen
five hundred US teens taken between August and September of
that year. Tate was the number one influencer on the
list in terms of popularity. He beat Kanye West, he
beat mister Beast, he beat Dwayne the Rock Johnson, all.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Of them, not Beast.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
I yeah, I don't know who mister Beast is, but
he's he's a YouTuber. Yeah, he's a YouTuber. I know
Elon Musk joked about giving him control of Twitter or
he asked whatever. I don't know anything about him. I'm
sure you're fine, mister Beast, or he's horrible.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
It is horrible to say anybody who's that famous on YouTube.
I'm a little bit like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
No, good people get famous on YouTube, which is what
I text our friend Cody Johnston every single day when
he releases a new YouTube video. Anyway, the Andrew Tait
hashtag on TikTok has received more than ten billion views
over the course of twenty twenty two alone, which is
fucking nuts. That is in that is insane, that is

(08:07):
like incomprehensibly viral. He was Also, he will always claim
that he's like the most Googled person on Earth. I
looked into what he actually is. That's not quite it.
He is the he is the number one when you
type in who is into Google? Who is Andrew Tait
is the number one who is question asked of Google
in twenty twenty two, which is not the same as

(08:28):
being the most google person on Earth, although he is
one of the most google people on Earth. I found
a couple of lists of that, and he's often at
like number eight, someplace closer to like ten, but like
he's incredibly famous.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
I just tested that and it isn't fact true.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
Yes, the top ten most Google person on the planet
is that's your that's that's a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
That is a fuckload of people. And and in some
counts he's like beating Donald Trump, which again Trump was
the literal president. And it's interesting because his career you
can compare him to a guy like Joe Rogan right
Joe his career, there's nothing that people like. Wonder why
he's popular, but there's no mystery as to how he
became popular. He's got a very he's been consistently. The

(09:11):
trajector is, yeah, very very consistent guy, constantly in the limelight,
constantly doing stuff. Not hard to see where he came from.
Tate is a kickboxer for a while and then kind
of drops off, is just sort of a guy on
Instagram and then is suddenly the most famous influencer on
the planet, seemingly overnight. And this is not an accident.

(09:32):
This isn't also something He didn't just get surprised because
something of has happened to go viral. This was the
result of a tactic I haven't seen anyone else use,
or certainly not to the degree of success that Tate used.
And the tactic that he unleashed not only made him
as popular, but it made him popular enough that you
can find articles about schools in the US and the
UK holding seminars for young male students and for teachers

(09:54):
to try to talk about de radicalizing kids who have
got to have fallen under Tate's spell when I posted
a comment about him during his spat with Tunberg, just
because I was frustrated at the degree I had not
with Greta's response to him, which I thought was totally fair,
but with like people kind of cheering it on as

(10:15):
if he'd been beaten by it, where my concern was like, well,
the attention historically has just kind of made him more popular.
And there were a bunch of comments in that post
I made by teachers who were like, I don't think
people understand how popular he is with like thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen year old boys. I talk to kids every day

(10:36):
who worship the guy, and I've never seen anything like it.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
A lot of my really good friends Jack This is
actually a few weeks ago, we were hanging out and
he was like kind of joking but also serious. He
was like, I know, I'm like, it would be scary
to be a thirteen year old boy right now because
of the inundation of this kind of stuff that you're
seeing all day every day. And he was like, I'm
not gonna lie. If I was thirteen or fourteen and
didn't know better, I could probably fall for a lot

(11:00):
of this stuff. It's like I could imagine being that
age right now and just being flooded with that.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, I think about that sort of thing in a
lot of I'll talk about kind of there's elements of
Tate's pitch that I think might have worked on me
when I was seventeen eighteen years old. Particularly, A big
part of it is like working a shit job that
you hate for the entirety of your youth is bullshit,
which it is, like, it's a terrible way to spend

(11:25):
a life doing the thing you hate forever. And if
you kind of if that's the hook you're leading with,
rather than what a lot of male influencers lead in with,
which is like, here's how to pick up chicks. You know,
that's an interesting spin that he's put. We get it.
We'll get more into his pitch and like, what about
it is not new? And what about it is new?

(11:46):
But I wanted to I want to start by kind
of explaining who tilled the soil that Tate grew up in.
And to do that we have to travel back in
time to the nineteen nineties and the work of the
first real modern masculinity.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
Guru in U history.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Now we've talked about guys like Bernard McFadden in the
past who had elements of that where he's big into
physical culture and getting buff and he talks about like,
you know, how modernity is making men weak. But the
Robert Bli is the guy who Jordan Peterson is cutting
his image, and so do Degree is a guy like
Andrew Tait. He is the first guy to kind of

(12:24):
bring both academic rigor and also this kind of focus
on the damage capitalism has done to masculinity into this
kind of it's become the men's rights movements, it's become
the pickup artist community. That's not what it was called
at the time. But yeah, Robert Elwood Bli is the
name of the guy who kind of kicked all of

(12:45):
this off. And he's not the dude you'd think he was.
He's an American poet. By some accounts, he's one of
the most influential poets in American history. And he was
born on December twenty third, nineteen twenty six, in Minnesota. Initially,
Bli seemed to be on certainly not the path that
he wound up on. He goes to Harvard University, he

(13:05):
studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He receives a full
Fulbright scholarship to go to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry
into English. And during this time he also gets connected
to these great poets who are not Westerners, like Pablo
Naruta and Rumi, and they influence his understanding of art
and the myths that underlie it. And it also leads
him to feel that like modern contemporary American poetry is

(13:28):
kind of hollow and lacks a connection to this kind
of deeper mythology that he sees in some of these
Eastern poets and some of these poets from other parts
of the world that aren't the United States that he
feels are making a deeper connection to things.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
This pinion just a personal preference, But I find the
Iowa's Writer's Workshop to be a red flag.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Oh yeah, wait wait, I don't know much about it.
Tell me why is this?

Speaker 1 (13:51):
No, it's just it's just one of those things that
gets uh overused in TV as like, oh, I need
to go to this thing. It's like it has like
a a weird, weird elitism to it that uh yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
I mean that. I feel that way about Harvard too.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
Yeah, there's a lot of weird lead elitism. Red flags,
where I'm like, uh, but yeah, hearing wearing Harvard University
followed by Iowa Writers Workshop is usually not the best.
Oh and then and then there's the full yeah, full
bright grant, so it's you know, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Fact Iowa Writers Workshop. Sophie says, go to hell fuck off.
Apparently that's right, motherfuckers. I don't know much about the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, but that's his background. And again this
is also he's coming. He's doing this at an earlier time.
I mean, Harvard was very very much that kind of thing,
but I don't know. Maybe the Iowa Writers Workshop was

(14:47):
was not. I don't know. His first poem of collection
of poems, which was called Silence in the Snowby Fields,
was published in nineteen sixty two, and it focused on
moments of solitude and beauty, as we see in this piece.
Driving to town late to mail a letter, it is
a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow. As I

(15:08):
lift the mailbox door, I feel it's cold iron. There
is a privacy I love in this snowy night. Driving around,
I will waste more time, which is just like this nice,
quiet little Certainly you don't see any red flags there.
It's just kind of a poem about one of those
quiet moments that you have in your life. You know.
It's I don't know, I don't find it deeply affecting,
but there's certainly like it's not like he's writing anything

(15:31):
you would see a problem with, Yeah, for sure. The
next year he published an influential essay in which he
attacked mainstream American poetry as impersonal, lacking in soul, and
a willingness to look inward. His criticism of American society
expanded after that, and in nineteen sixty six he co
founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. He is

(15:53):
one of the very first prominent American artists to try
and organize artists against the war, which is I mean good,
because it was a bad war. In nineteen sixty eight,
he made a public promise to refuse to pay taxes
until the end of the war, and he also made
he made some very trenchiant critiques of US imperialism. In

(16:14):
nineteen sixty seven, he wrote an article for the New
York Review of Books in which he noted the fact
that so few Americans have resigned from the government or
from responsible posts to protest. The Vietnam War is remarkable
to me. And he's bringing up also cases of like
the Russian Revolution and stuff, where you would have these
horrible wars being prosecuted by regimes that are on paper

(16:35):
a lot less free than the United States, but also
would have a lot more defections or people just like
refusing to do their jobs because they believed that of
course that the sovereign had set was unethical. And he's like,
why isn't this happening in American government? Why is no
one refusing to be a part of the Vietnam War?
And he went on to ask, can we imagine General

(16:56):
Westmoreland resigning and refusing to prosecute a brutal war? Never
pilots drop anti personnel bombs on small North Vietnamese villages
and many of them hate it, but they don't resign
with a public statement of protest. They quietly retire when
their tour is over. Bli wondered what this showed about Americans?
Are we timid? Are we greedy? He thought not, And
this is what he wrote. What it shows is a

(17:18):
disastrous split between the Americans inner and outer worlds. He
does not aim to use his life to make himself whole,
to join the two worlds in himself. On the contrary,
he is prepared to give up one of the two worlds.
The business man gives up the inner world and clings
to the outer as his way. A large body of
literature denounces the business man for taking the one world
without the other. But when a writer is opposed to

(17:39):
the Vietnam War and still accepts a grant from the
government prosecuting of the war, he is doing something similar.
He is letting the world split. He lets the outer
world go by him with just a wave of his hand,
and then he reaches out and pulls the inner world
to him. He accepts the money for the sake of
my work. It will enable him to live in his
inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken place

(17:59):
before where he begins to use the money for his
work instead of trying to apply what he has learned
in the actions of his inner life to the actions
of the world. He pulls back inside the house, closes
the door, and declares he doesn't know what is going
on out there, or knows, but has rejected it all
is outside his sphere of influence or his interest. He
is not political, But what could be more within the
sphere of interest of a writer than the world. And

(18:21):
I actually find that a really affecting critique. I think
about that a lot, just in terms of, like number one,
this desire, I have a lot where I'll just be
kind of like churning through the muck of a bunch
of horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress, or
like see some horrible Twitter thing culture warshit roll up,

(18:41):
and want to feel this urge to like, well, fuck this,
I don't want to pay attention to this anymore. I
just want to discard this from my life and focus
on this piece of art or creativity that And I
think most people feel that, most reasonable people feel that
way a lot. And what he's saying is like, how
can you call yourself a writer? How can you call

(19:02):
yourself an artist and attempt to discard the outer world
in favor of the one that you focus on for
your creativity, Like how can you actually be connected to
your inner world in any way and feel as if
you can pretend the outer world does not exist? You're
doing the same thing as a businessman who focuses entirely

(19:23):
on his desire to make money and ignores his spiritual development. Like,
there's not a fundamental moral difference between what the two
of you are doing, because you're both you're both rejecting
half of your being in order to stick with the
one that's more comfortable because of whatever you've chosen as

(19:43):
your profession. And in the case of yeah, I don't know,
I found an attrenchient critique that makes me think a
lot about myself. M Maybe check out what Bligh has
to say about the Vietnam War. And he put his
money where his mouth was. He used that article to
republish a letter he sent to the chairman of the
National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities because they had

(20:04):
offered him a five thousand dollars grant, and he turns
it down because he's like, look, this is a this
is an instrument of the United States government, and I
am opposed to a war they are waging. And even
though I could argue that, like, well, if I take
this money and won't get spent on bombs, what I'm
really doing is providing legitimacy to the state that is

(20:25):
carrying out this terrible war. And I'm simply not going
to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to
support it in any way even by letting it support me, which,
whether or not you agree with it, is a deeply
principled stance that requires sacrificing something.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
Yeah, so when does he when the sport right?

Speaker 2 (20:43):
He's not a bad guy so far.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, I'm waiting. Yeah, this is this is not cool
people who did cool stuff?

Speaker 2 (20:50):
No, no, no, So spoiler alert, the Vietnam War ends.
We don't do great goes. Okay for Vietnam though, well,
I mean, millions of people die, but they do win.
Bli remains an influential poet and thinker. In the nineteen seventies,
he organizes the first Great Mother Conference, which is still

(21:10):
going on today. It's a nine day festival that explores
human consciousness and it celebrates this kind of archetypal idea
of the Great Mother as this kind of like feminine
creative force that you know, underlies everything in society. And
Bli the reason why he felt it was important to

(21:31):
kind of bring consciousness and get people focused on this
idea and on this celebration of femininity is that he
saw the Vietnam war as kind of the expression of masculinity,
like running wild and leading to terrible death, and he
believed that Americans needed to reconnect with femininity in the
wake of the Vietnam War, which is again not an
unreasonable stance. You know, you can argue with it, but

(21:54):
you can see where he's coming from.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
And they're like both waiting for it.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Wait for the shooting job. Motherfucker's common. Motherfucker is common. Yeah,
So as the aftershocks of Vietnam faded, America enters the
swing in eighties, Blige becomes concerned with something else entirely.
He sees in the Reagan years, this vapid consumer culture,
you know, malls and shit, the the increasing spread of

(22:21):
popular music is like a concept in a way that
it really happened, the spread, Like, I mean, look again TV,
there's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today. TV
in the nineteen eighties was not what it is now.
So he sees all this happening, and he he also
just sees, like, again, what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained

(22:42):
capitalism is doing to people. And he begins to believe
that the kind of soullessness and brokenness at the at
the core of the American experiment is the result now
of crisis in masculinity. Right, So previously he had Yeah,

(23:06):
there's an extent to which he thinks, like, I don't know,
we'll get into what he thinks. So in nineteen ninety
he writes a book that is kind of illustrating the
things that he's he started to feel here, and he
calls it Iron John, a book about men. Now, have
you heard of the fairy Tale of Iron John? Ian?

Speaker 5 (23:23):
No so familiar?

Speaker 2 (23:25):
No, No, you're not big Grim's fairy Tales people. That's fine,
neither am I. I had not heard about this either.
I think maybe it's bigger in Germany.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
Is Grim's fairy Tales? Red Flog continuing, Yeah, oh.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Wow, Wow, that's a red flag one of the greatest
works of art. And I'm gonna guess German history, Sophie Robert. Wow,
I feel like you just hate German history reflexively for
reasons that have nothing to do with anything that has
ever happened in history.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
Hmm, I'm in on that.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Wow wow, well, Red Flag.

Speaker 5 (24:05):
Sund that what he does?

Speaker 2 (24:11):
I think Iron John again, it's a fairy tale, and
I think I'll give a brief summary of how that
fairy tale goes. It's because it's again none of us
are I.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Mean, you brought it up. You should tell us what
the I'll tell you.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
I'm gonna do it, so goddamn it. From a rite
up in the New York magazine. Here, that story goes
like this. Something in the forest is killing a kingdom's hunters.
A stranger arrives, goes into the forest with his dog,
and returns with a large hairy man he's extracted from
a pond. This is the wild man whom the king
locks in a cage. The king's son, playing with his ball,

(24:44):
lets it slip into the cage, and the wild man
tells him he'll give it back if the boy steals
the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow
and sets him free. The boy unlocks the cage, but
fearful that he'll be in trouble with his parents, flees
on the wild man's back to the forest. After the
boy fails a series of trials and wires a head
of golden hair, the wild man kicks him out of
the forest, but after he sinks to the low status

(25:04):
of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom. The wild
Man helps him become a mighty warrior, and he wins
the hand of the Princess, is reunited with his parents,
and becomes the rich, heroic king in his own right.
So you know, I think we're probably missing some context there,
just from culture. But it's like I get why that's
not in like the the tight five of Grim's fairy tales,

(25:27):
Like that's that's maybe the one you leave on the
cutting room floor.

Speaker 5 (25:30):
That's like the B sides.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, that's like a B side. Yeah, that's like, that's like,
I don't know, the one of the one of the
Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
Well, to be fair, like it's up against like snow
white cinderelative exactly.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
It's not a fairy tale. It would be funny to
see like modern Disney try to do this.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
Yes, I mean, the actually rooms fairy tales are pretty horrific,
to be honest.

Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, this one it also might be one of the
tamer ones. I don't know, I'm not an expert on
fairy tales.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
Well that's why Disney was like mm to tame not
into it.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
And again I feel like I feel like This is
an example. I think sometimes we look at these stories
that have been around a long time and are like, wow,
you know, there's some deep wisdom in there, which is
why we should keep telling them. But I'm looking at this,
which is it's it's a parable about manhood, right and
about becoming an adult. And I'm like, you know, it's
a better parable about manhood and becoming an adult for

(26:35):
Star Wars movie.

Speaker 5 (26:38):
That's a good point.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Much better one, much better one. Look, George Lucas knocked
it out of the park. Fuck you Grim. You know
who else is George Lucas?

Speaker 1 (26:49):
No, Robert, who else is George Lucas?

Speaker 2 (26:52):
The sponsor of this podcast?

Speaker 1 (26:54):
I mean that would be sold.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Actually, George, you have the cash sponsor this podcast. Uh,
and we'll we'll we'll make it work. Buddy, we got
you anyway, Uh we are back and no but maybe okay.

(27:25):
So here we are, we're talking, we're having a good time.
So Blig's book looks at this myth of iron John
and he re examines the myth using young in psychology,
which is again another red flag. There's perfectly valid reasons
to study young, but whenever you have somebody who is

(27:47):
reevaluating myths using young in psychology, they always turned into
Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry, that's just the way that
it works. So he's trying to find lessons that are
going to be meaningful for men struggling with modernity, and
his basic conclusion, as far as I can tell, is
that men need rewilding in order to fix the things
that are driving them crazy. Right, they need to reconnect

(28:08):
with the wild man inside them. Now, this is going
to be This is the root of a million kinds
of influenzer garbage, right, everything in that funck. Like you
guys know the liver King, that guy who was telling
people that he got super jacked by eating nothing but
raw animal livers that he hunted. He's spending twelve thousand
dollars a month on steroids, which he lied about. Now

(28:31):
he's getting sued for one hundred million dollars because he
defrauded people by convincing them to take his liver enzyme pills.
So funny. But what the liver King is doing is
this is he's basically setting it, pretending to be the
wild man that BLI talks about and being like, this
is what you have to do in order to be
healthy and deal with all of these toxic things about

(28:52):
our modern lives is go out and throw spears at
bores and then eat their raw, uncooked organs, which I
would actually say is a lot less masculine than doing
the thing that our actual caveman ancestors did, which was
learn how to cook meat.

Speaker 5 (29:10):
But you make a really good point.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, it's also the root of wed. We just started
this year with a couple of more episodes of Jordan B.
Peterson's show. He talks a lot about the need for
men to be controllable beasts, and also references another Grim's
fairy tale. The one that he chooses is, well, I
think it's a Grim's fairy tale, fucking Beauty and the Beast.

(29:32):
I don't know, maybe not. Maybe that started as a
Disney thing. I don't know where it started. But he
talks a lot about like this. Again, all of these
guys today who are talking about you have to be primal,
you have to reconnect with your caveman roots.

Speaker 3 (29:43):
You have to Okay, I saw I think I saw
Jordan B. Peterson like video on Instagram the other day,
and I didn't know it was him. I was just
scrolling and he was. But now that you say that,
I'm pretty sure it was him because he was talking
about how men should be dangerous, Like yeah, dangerous, but
it's like knowing when to use the threat of violence

(30:04):
or not. It's like, just because you're dangerous doesn't mean
you're like a violent person, but you should have that
capacity or some shit, that's what makes you a true man.

Speaker 5 (30:11):
It's like, what, yeah, crazy.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
It's I mean, And that's you can see like Peterson
is not an and he never has been an original thinker.
He's cribbing from Bly, right, they all are. Bli is
the origin of this. And it's also worth noting that
while Bli's book has been the descendants of Bli's book
are pure reactionary gibberish, Bli himself was not. Again, we

(30:34):
went through this guy's background. He's he's a deeper thinker
than that, and there's passages in his book that are
kind of worth connecting with. So I'm going to read
a quote from that now to judge by men's lives
in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, Zulu Lands, and in
the Arab and Persian culture favored flavored by Sufi communities,
men have lived together in heart unions and sole connections

(30:55):
for hundreds of thousands of years. Contemporary business life allows
competitive relationships only, which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry,
and fear after work. What do men do collect in
a bar to hold light conversations over light beer? Unities
that are broken off whenever a young woman comes by
or touches the brim of someone's cowboy hat. Having no
soul union with other men can be the most damaging

(31:16):
wound of all, and the cowboy hat things kind of weird,
But that's a totally valid point. The lack of intimate
male to male friendship is a deep problem in ourself.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
Light beer, I.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
I mean, because I think he's just sort of I mean, okay, whatever,
he's getting into a little bit of masculinity there. The
point is, like, fucker, yeah, sorry, Sophie, famous lover of
light beer. It's okay. I love I love my champagne
beer too. I just I had some lovely I actually

(31:49):
wish I had some Peroni right Nowightful Peroni is a lovely, nice, wonderful,
especially on a hot day.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Yeah, I've done I've.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
Gone on long runs with nothing but a backpack of
Peroni to keep me going.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
That sounds very believable.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
Paroni. It is essentially water.

Speaker 5 (32:09):
I can smell the dolls coming in.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, sponsorous cowards.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
But you see it, like what he's making there, and
this is not a point that like, this is not
a point Andrew Tate would make, right, because these guys
are all hyper competitive and that's a huge part of
like what they're talking about, whereas one of the like
Bly is at his core, a large part of what
he's complaining about is totally rational, which is like, again,
allowed to it.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
Where is it? Yeh? Where is this way?

Speaker 2 (32:37):
Well, that's not the only thing in the book. He's
also talking a lot of.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
Yeah, yeah, we're getting to it, okay.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Iron John spends sixty two weeks on the New York
seller list. Yeah, I only anything gets spends that long
in the best seller listed.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
It's a long ass time.

Speaker 5 (32:56):
Yes, that is that is innies still.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, this is nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety to ninety one,
because it's on there for more than a year, and
it turned Bly from a respected poet and activist into
the first masculinity guru in modern US history. Now again,
we had guys like Bonnara McFadden before, who had talked
about aspects of this. But BLI is wrapping his arguments
and respected academia, and the way he's connecting with his

(33:23):
people is exactly the same as the kind of shit
that Jordan Peterson and other folks do today, Guys like
Ivan Throne and whatnot who were in the masculinity influencer thing.
He's doing conferences, He's having rooms full of people, men
gather and he's speaking to them, and he's like running
them through. He's basically bringing them to these moments of

(33:43):
emotional height, and you can see some there's a little
bit of Werner Earhard in this. You know, there's a
reason this is all coming out at the same time
as we start to get the self help craze hit.
But he's basically holding these big pep rallies for adult men.
In nineteen ninety one, more than a thousand men went
to see him at the Eastfold Auditorium in Parkland, Washington,
paying seventy five nineteen ninety one dollars lois for the privilege. Yeah.

(34:07):
A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes the scene thusly,
as the customers file in a dozen white guys flail
away incompetently on African drums. When the crowd is seated,
the drummers quit the stage, and Bly and Michael Mead,
a storyteller who helps run the workshops, begin to recite,
rambling myths and bits of verse. Meat occasionally bangs a bongo,

(34:28):
Bly plinks a bazouki, the Greek version of the Mandolins,
sending mournful notes wafting out over the audience. So that
sounds good, right, It sounds like a fun time.

Speaker 5 (34:37):
Yeah, it sounds like a great way to spend seventy fight.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah, I always love white guys playing African drums in
my gigantic stadium speech series by a fucking poet. Anyway, Bly,
who in nineteen eighty four had been called the most
influential living American poet by current biography, became a kind
of celebrity that hadn't previously existed. So he's filling stadiums

(35:02):
with people who want to hear him talk. But he's
also he's engaging them in a way that's going to
spawn the modern men's self help industry. Quote Bli urges
men to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their
wild nature. Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear
of brutality, have labored to breed fierceness out of men,
creating the sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt

(35:23):
might have said, I could carve a better man out
of a banana. Bli believes that inside of every such male,
there's a wild man yearning to get out, a radiant
inner king, just waiting to confirm masculine pride and suareness
of purpose. Bli insists he doesn't blame women for men's
sorry state. He blames older men who have failed to
provide young ones with the role models they crave. In

(35:43):
traditional societies, boys worked alongside men, plowing fields and fashioning arrowheads,
but the Industrial Revolution severed that connection. The title character
and his bestseller is a wild hairy fellow who, in
a grim fairy tale, is fished up from a pond
and becomes a boy's mentor. That image is also the
inspiration for his most extravagant exercise and manly self discovery,
five day wild Man Excursions, in which groups of one

(36:05):
hundred men take to the woods under the tutelage of
Bly and others to dance around fires, banging on drums.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
I mean, honey to say you have daddy issues and
move the fuck on.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah yeah, I mean again this is there's this there's
this element where he's like, society is fucked because feminists
have tried to breed the violence out of my ninety one.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, okay, so you know you have it's like like
astonishing to me that people are paying seventy five dollars
and like selling out. I mean that's more like that's
more than the people were paying for Coachella in the
early early two thousands.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
The crazy thing is like at the core of what
he's saying, it's like most of that sounds like he's
making some good points vallid points about, you know, how
men have evolved in our society. So I'm just like,
where where's the twist, because.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Yeah, yeah, there's the You've seen it start to him
and here. So it's because like the valid thing in
that passage just he's like, hey, look, young boys used
to grow up learning alongside both their father and the
other men, you know, in whatever community they were in,
and that taught them what it meant to be a man.
And now because capitalism has kind of taken the man

(37:17):
out of the house. You're supposed to be working forty
sixty eighty hours a week, right, They're not there to ray.
It's just the usually in like the way our society works,
just the woman who's raising the kid. That's what he's saying, then,
that we've cut men off from this process of learning
how to be adult men and like that is actually
a pretty valid critique, And the problem is that now

(37:39):
he's saying, the problem is that feminists have bred fierceness
out of men instead of being like capitalism separates parents
from children for huge amounts of time, and that's bad
for kids. And actually, if you look at it, like
you could see in that very scenario of like men
are out of the house working so they're raised are

(38:00):
raised largely by their mothers. Well, that also means an
unfair burdens being placed on the mother. You could see this,
there's a way to have solidarity between the genders here
and be like, oh, yeah, this is all of a
problem of this system we've built that like separates families
in ways that are really fucked up. Like I identify
with that when I was a kid because we didn't
have much money at all. The only job my dad

(38:20):
could get was in New York City, and there was
a period of more than a year where he was gone.
He was living on a friend's couch, working there, sending
money back to us, and it was it was it's
not just him that made a sacrifice. I made a
sacrifice as his son, and my mom made a sacrifice
dealing with the entire job of like raising me. Like
there's a thing to identify with their But you can

(38:42):
see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well,
what's the problem is that feminists have tried to make
men less fierce? That's not really the problem, Robert BLI like.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
One interesting thing just before you keep going, is I
think in that quote, did he say like justifiably they
tried to breathe that, yeah, brutality out.

Speaker 5 (39:01):
Of men or whatever.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, even there, like on some level, you know, you
can kind of like, okay, like I kind of see
what the point he's making. You know, men do perpetuate
a lot of the bullshit that happens to women in
our society.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
So like he's not nearly he's not anywhere, He's not
on the same planet of toxicity. Is a lot of
like as guys like you know, Andrew Tate, who were
about to talk about, or even like Drian Peterson. But
you can see the root of it right where he is.

Speaker 5 (39:28):
It's like the start.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah, yeah, he's he's still saying fundamentally, part of the
problem is famous want men to be less aggressive, and like, no,
that's not really part of the problem that you have
adequately identified. Yeah, he wants his listeners. The young boys
are drowning and female energy in the schools. Every young
man has a fantastic need for initiation. That's why we
all became so crazy about our football coach. Such initiations,

(39:52):
he says, channel wildness into socially approved acts. And again
you see kind of this, like, well, why is the
prob isn't female energy, Like it's not that like it's
that young men. It's that families are being split up
by this like need to compete and work in ways
that are really unhealthy for kids. But anyway, you can
look at the sea of other self help grifters at

(40:14):
the time, Wrener Earhard, Aron Hubbard who had come around
at this point, and you could say that BLI is
just kind of another dude and that he's doing a
lot of the same things a lot of these other
self help grifters are doing. But one of the things
that differs him is those guys are mostly pil like
plying nonsense based on bad interpretations of Eastern religion and
psychological abuse. And BLI is kind of he's not insulting

(40:37):
or attacking people, he's not calling them them weak. He's
he's making some reasonable points about stuff that's toxic about
our society. And then he's trying to create like mutual
cathartic experiences with the men in his audience who are
being invited to kind of see the men around them
as brothers in a way that's more intimate than maybe

(40:59):
they had been trained to do previously. So again he's
there's there's something interesting going on here that he isn't
even wholly toxic that I think is kind of worth
acknowledging as we lead to the parts of it that
are a lot more toxic. And it's one of those
things where, like I've spent a lot of time on
in cell message boards, and they do talk a lot

(41:20):
about this feeling of disconnection with society. So when he
says that like young men are not connected to their communities.
He's making a decent point. He also one of the
points he makes that I thought was interesting is he
talks about the differences between female sex at and male
sex at. He points out that because of like just
basic biological realities of how periods happen, young girls are

(41:43):
instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys are not,
and it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about their bodies,
talking about health problems. And that's probably a valid thing
to point out.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Sarah definitely goes both ways.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
Sure, and again he's it's very he's completely ignorant to well,
I'm sure there's a lot of things actually, especially today,
that women are not taught about their bodies because of anyway. Again,
these are a lot of two way problems, and he's
focusing just on the male aspect of them. But he's
not inherently wrong about the male aspect of them. He's
just leaving a large part of the equation out and

(42:22):
that's where the toxicity comes in here.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
Well, yeah, I'm ready, I'm ready.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Bly has reached his fundamental message. Men and women are
essentially alien and neither should apologize they're different tribes. He
is saying, my father was an alcoholic, and yet if
you look underneath his weakness, there was something there that
my mother didn't have. She was fine, but she didn't
have it. Three million sperms start out and they find
themselves immediately in a hostile environment facing an egg approximately
forty thousand times bigger, where the product of the one

(42:49):
survivor that didn't give up, which is it's really weird
to be like setting up the gender struggle as like
sperm versus egg, where it's like, sure, well, actually all
of us are their product of spermnas that's the only
way people happen.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
He's got to emphasize on the last product quote there
you said, we are in the product of the one
survivor that didn't give up.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, what's the other half of that equation? Is it
just is it just one little bit of bit of
cum that makes a baby? Why, like, Chris, is there
another part to the baby equation? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (43:26):
I just want to be like, honey, did you not
show up for sex said class that day? Did you
miss that? Lesson?

Speaker 2 (43:32):
The sperm have to murder the eggs so that one
can survive. That is not the way it works. Bli
actually insists that he is not preaching old style machismo,
and he takes pains to tell his audience that, in fact,
male rage's weakness. We're not talking about aggression, he calls out.
A few of his listeners seemed confused. At the height

(43:53):
of an hour long discussion of the Gulf War, one
audience member announces that he seceded from society. I'm not
paying my tab, I've bought an AK forty seven, and
I'm farting around with ammunition just in case I have
to back up my decision, he says, softly but firmly. Bly,
and many others have spoken out against the Gulf War,
yet nobody criticizes the AK forty seven fellow. And when
Bli asks the Vietnam Vets to stand to be honored,

(44:15):
the rum erupts with the applause for about three minutes.
And you can see there too, the seeds of a
lot that's going on right now, right where yeah, he's like,
we're not talking about men need to be more aggressive.
And then a guy's like, I have dropped out of
society and started buying guns, and everyone's like that's great, cool, Look,

(44:39):
we're not anyway whatever. BLI died last year. He lived a.

Speaker 1 (44:44):
Long time, yeah, I would say.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
And you can find people, you know, reappraising his work
and stuff. There's some folks who will say that, like,
his greater talent was for self promotion rather than poetry,
and he wasn't as good a poet as people had said.

Speaker 5 (44:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
I'm not a not a poetry guy. I'm not gonna
analyze his poetry in that way. I do think sometimes
because somebody turns out to age into a problematic person,
people are like, well, I guess their work that everybody
loved in the past sucked, And I think that's kind
of cowardly. Like, nah, people liked his poems, they were influential,
and then he turned into a crank. That's fine, that happens. Like, yeah, anyway,

(45:26):
you know who isn't a crank and who will never
do anything problematic? My favorite filmmaker Roman Oh, oh you
know what. I googled his name right as I was
saying that, Oh boy, oh dear, well, I'm gonna go
burn all my DVDs of Rosemary's Baby and y'all check
out these ads. Ah, we're back, really glad. I caught

(45:52):
myself with a little while I thought it was good
with like the talk about reappraising his works and the
thank you, thank you, I thrive on praise.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah, that was something different, good for you.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
So Bli died, but his work launched what scholars have
called the mythopoetic men's movement, and it's.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Oh my god, yeah, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
It is. It is a somewhat uh fucking prickish name
to call it, I guess, but it's what they mean
by mythopoetic. I should explain, Like what they're saying is
like the argument Bli and the other because there's a
bunch of other authors in this. The argment they're making
is that our society has stripped mythology out and has

(46:38):
become this like kind of coldly competitive engine for creating
cash value, and that we need in order to make
men healthier, we need to reintroduce like this kind of
mythic understanding of masculinity and of the world that like
that's kind and a lot of it is they're like
looking at like Native American cultures and so of the

(47:00):
different rituals around masculinity they had and being like, well,
maybe well and there's actually again, there's a scientific basis
to a lot of this is cultural appropriation. But like,
one of the things that's happening in this period is
you've got a lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD
in an era before they understand it. And a thing
that occurs during this period is that some of them
have buddies who are also struggling with PTSD and are

(47:23):
Indigenous Americans and who invite their white and black and
Hispanic battle buddies back to do stuff like sweat lodges
in order to cope, and other kind of different rituals
that have existed in some of these indigenous societies to
deal with what happens to men when they go to
war and they invite their friends back, and that stuff

(47:45):
works better than just getting a job working for an
accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam. And so people are
starting to study this and write about it. And one
of the things that the mythopoetic guys take is this
belief that you should basically just kind of like steel
wholesale from these cultures and dress white people up in
headdresses and give them drums and stuff, as opposed to

(48:08):
being like, oh, well, maybe you know, there's a way
that isn't that to look at the value that some
of these rituals have in healing people. You know, I'm
not the person to analyze that completely, but that's part
of what they're saying here, is that like they're kind
of recognizing there's something hollow at the center of American

(48:29):
culture that is not hollow in some of these other cultures.
And instead of being like, maybe there's things that we
should fundamentally change about American culture there, they're saying, what
if we dress up like these other people? Right, That's
essentially what's going on with a lot of the Mythopoetic movement.
So a big chunk of this and these are some
of this is bl some of these guys outside of

(48:49):
bly Is they're they're making they're like putting a bunch
of like white accountants in sweat lodges that they make
the wrong way and lecturing them about you know, young
and Joseph Campbell, or they're like making them dressed like
cavemen while playing you know, African drums. There's a lot
of like weird, uncomfortable racism in the Mythopoetic men's movement

(49:11):
that said, it is less toxic than the men's rights
movement that would follow it. Things kind of get increasingly
aggressive and toxic from this point out. But Bli and
the initial mythopoetic influencers were not They saw themselves as therapists,
and again I don't think they were good at this,
But they were not political. So this was not a

(49:32):
conservative movement. They were not billing themselves as right wing.
They were not really like weighing in on culture war issues,
in part because the culture war didn't exist in the
same way then that it does now. And it's interesting
because Bli expressly says this is an a political movement.
You might criticize him because he had just written a

(49:53):
really kind of beautiful essay during the Vietnam War about
the cowardness of being a political but whatever. I found
an article from the Washington Post in nineteen ninety one
that talked to a number of men who had been
most active in the movement, and there's some interesting pieces
in there. Quote. An affirmation and strength comes from a
bonding between men that's impossible to put into words, says

(50:15):
ed Honold, the mild mannered federal lawyer and founder of
the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such
local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals
of dancing, roaring, hugging, and weeping. The experience was known
to men in the past, but has been forgotten. American
men face a desperate situation and don't even know it.
There are large numbers of men wandering lost and some

(50:36):
personal wasteland of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with
little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why. He
pauses thoughtfully and adds, there's a lot of hurting cowboys
out there. Now, these guys are not cowboys. These guys
were like middle managers at auto parts stores and shit like.

(50:56):
They are absolutely not hurting cowboys. And also, actual cowboys
aren't what this guy thought they were. But he's not
wrong again and saying that like, the situation of American
men was pretty unpleasant in the early nineteen nineties. They
were struggling against a capitalist culture that thrived on the
obliteration of meaning. However, men, of course, are not the
only ones suffering from this, nor are they suffering worse

(51:19):
than any other group of Americans. Right, this is just
alienation under capitalism, Part of what he's doing here that
is noteworthy and becomes a huge problem later on, is
he is identifying real problems with the society we live
in and then cutting men off from the rest of
that society and thus cutting off possibility of solidarity. So

(51:39):
you can't look at this kind of alienation and loss
of meaning and be like, wow, men and women and
everybody is being harmed by the meaninglessness this hole at
the center of our culture. You have to say men
are being harmed, and then that invites like, well, there
must be women that are doing it, and it must
we should be looking at how feminine I rather than
because he's a door for.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Toks right in It's interesting to see just how far
John Wayne's like reach impacts the way men think.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah, there's a lot of hurting cowboys. Motherfucker, you are
not a cowboy.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
And by the way, cowboys were mostly like poor black
and Hispanic and indigenous men who were being exploited for
their labor. Like, yeah, this is none of what you're
saying means anything. You are entirely You're you're talking about
the emptiness of culture, and your understanding of history has
been entirely formed by the movies you watched, right, like anyway,

(52:35):
do better do better? Well, some of them will eventually
in the future. I think it would be interesting to
try and find out look into all these men's groups
in the Washington in the state of Washington in this
period of time and see how many of those guys
wound up being elders and the proud boys thirty years later.
But that's that's that's a more in depth work for

(52:56):
someone in the future if they want to do it.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
So.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
One of the most dangerous aspects of the mythopoetic men's
movement is that it was not as toxic as its descendants. Again,
it identifies real problems, but then it recasts them as
things that just men, mostly white men, are suffering from.
And the answer is like Kischi kind of racist LARPing
as member like that, that's basically what they're doing, right,

(53:23):
and this, yeah, it's it's it's it causes problems. Later on,
one of the most ridiculous aspects of the myth of
poetic men's movement was the creation of wing Span, the
Journal of the Male Spirit. Don't you just want to
sit down? I in with a copy of Wingspan read
out quotes to your buds.

Speaker 5 (53:41):
I start every morning with it.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
With it. Yeah yeah, just spread spread in your wings
So in the in the pre internet era, this acted
as a clearing house for the movement and a central
place where influencers could advertise their events. Quote. The last
issue of Wingspan lists dozens of publications and events for
men around the country, including a new Warrior training adventure
Weakened in Wisconsin, drumming and dancing for men in Massachusetts,

(54:04):
Brother to Brother in New York, Healing the Father Wound
in California, and Afro American Males at Risk in New Jersey.
A recent grandfather ceremony at the Fairfax Unitarian Men's Council
featured drumming on a five and a half foot thunderheart
drum in this area. There are three large councils in Virginia,
one in Gaithersburg and another in Baltimore. The Men's Council

(54:24):
of Greater Washington, which HONLD started in June of nineteen
eighty eight with fifty men, is the largest, with two
thousand members and fifty newcomers arriving for each monthly meeting.
Late one night in January at the Council's meeting in
the Washington Ethical Society Auditorium on Upper sixteenth Street. Honald
shed his Clarkkin image as he leads five hundred men
who are pounding drums and chanting. The sweating windows shape

(54:45):
with rhythmic thunder that reverberates up and down the street
as they raise Honald, gyrating and clapping high overhead and
parade him about the room. Then group leaders circulate with
large feathers and clay pots, wafting the smoke of burning
sage into the waiting faces in what is termed a
Native American ritual designed to put you in touch with
generations of male ancestors. So that's a little problematic, a

(55:07):
little bit just to scoche. A number of other masculinity
grifters followed. Bli, Robert Moore, and Douglas Gillette wrote the
bestseller King, Warrior, Magician Lover, which purported to that's that's
a title right there. I want to be a king, Warrior,
magician lover. And these are these are like the archetypes

(55:28):
of male masculinity. I don't think they're in order, because
you probably don't start as a king and end up
as a lover, although maybe you do that would be
progressive actually saying that you need to you need to
shed your your mastery and your sense of ownership in
order to become a lover. But I don't think that's
the point they're making. Moore is a Youngian analyst and
a professor of psychology. Gillette, like doctor Jordan Balthasar Peterson,

(55:51):
was a mythologist. I found a good write up that
described the main arguments in their book by Aaron Innes.
The book's second shared premise is that there are universal
male archetypes inherent to every male body person that are
represented in myth and story around the world, but are
suppressed in the dominant culture. The developmental history of every man,
says Mora Jellette, is in large part the story of
his failure or success at discovering within himself the archetypes

(56:13):
of mature masculinity. Following Jungian psychological theory, they claim that
if men are not given room to express these archetypes
in a healthy manner, they will act them out unconsciously
in ways that are damaging and violent, either directed outward
at other people as overtly hostile male behavior, or directed
inward which SAPs the vitality of the men involved. It's
worth noting that the authors of both books, as well
as their contemporary followers, seem a hell of a lot

(56:35):
more concerned about remedying male acting out that's turned inward
and creating male malaise than they are about male violence
directed towards others. Take the essay why Men Find It
So Hard to Feel by Mythopoetic Workshop leader Darren Austin Hall,
who says that women are at an advantage to men
spiritually and that minstrel cycles mean women are energetically connected
to cycles of the moon, which in turn is energetically

(56:56):
linked to our unconscious. This leads him to the conclusion
that the solution to warm angering tyrants in the world
is for women to use touch and the beautiful arts
of seductive love to disarm men, and that this will
solve male violence. Oh you girls just gotta touch us right,
and we'll stop doing genocides. Oh my god, that's incredible.

(57:22):
Hitler wouldn't have done all that bad stuff if I
get well, I mean he was dating his cousin, so
I don't really want to continue this joke. But what dating?
Dating is the wrong word? You know that story? Sophie
we've talked about Hitler and his cousin.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
Oh, yeah, the one who killed herself.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
Yeah, it's a really bad story. Again, bringing up Hitler
and the cousin that he may be murdered is definitely
perhaps a good way of pointing out how fucked up
it is to say the problem of men's violence is
that women don't touch them the right way. It's pretty bad.
It also brings to mind I'm thinking about our Liberia
episodes and that sex strike that a bunch of women

(58:03):
went on to get the warlords to come to the
table to negotiate, and how it's like, literally the opposite.
It's it's number one, one of the most amazing stories
of activism I've ever heard of, And it's literally the
opposite of what these guys are saying. But I don't know,
I don't know, this is all so gross, yeah, ikey. So,

(58:23):
most regular listeners of the show are broadly familiar with
the way men's empowerment gurus and men's rights influencers evolved
over the last twenty years or so, a mix of
right wing culture war politics intersecting with very divorced men.
And I think we haven't talked about this yet. But
these guys are all extremely divorced, right, there's a there's
a lot of weakened dad energy in the sense.

Speaker 5 (58:45):
Yeah, okay, that's why they're all so bitter.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
Okay, Yeah, that there's just no way anything else is
going on here. Elon Musk would have been really, really
would have fit in at these Maybe it would have
kept him from buying Twitter. You know, I don't want
to say it was all toxic. So yeah, again, you
have most people listening are kind of familiar with where

(59:08):
things descend after the mythopoetic men's movement, which still kind
of is around, but more or less Peter's out over
the course of the nineties, and after that point, you've
got a mix of right wing culture war politics that
intersects with these very divorced dudes angry over custody, you know,
yelling about how men are discriminated against. And then we
have pick of course, starting in the early two thousands,

(59:29):
these pickup artists selling the secret to fucking chicks at bars,
and this all gets brewed up into this slurry, and
you know, you've got the pick up artists intersecting with
the men's rights activists intersecting with the right wing culture
war politicians intersecting with these literal Nazis, and from that
slurry we get gamer Gate and the alt right and
at least a portion of Donald Trump's political success. Right,

(59:52):
So that is the story. Well, I mean, this is
we haven't on into this on the show, and it
was something I was broadly aware of, but I didn't
know much about. But I think this is especially leading
into a story about a guy like Andrew Tait, who
is the most toxic, arguably calls himself the most like
toxic man on the internet, and is certainly an ARCon

(01:00:14):
of male toxicity. I think it kind of behooves us
to talk about what led to him because it's interesting. Anyway,
this is the end of episode one. Anybody anybody got
some thoughts here at the end of things.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
I mean, I think that was a really great explainer
on kind of laying the groundwork for where the ideas
that eventually became Andrew Tait, you know, started and took
a foothold, and yeah, after you broke it down, it
makes sense and I can see how we got there,
you know, But it is interesting that you know, some
of the initial original points, like you said, were valid

(01:00:51):
and do kind of highlight some issues in our society
that maybe we should be focusing more on our addressing.
But also, as you said, it's not just a men's problem.
It's a problem for everyone, and everyone's being affected by it,
and we should be finding solidarity in that, and how
can we help everybody improve our lives, not just Oh,
it's a problem that's only affecting men.

Speaker 5 (01:01:12):
So yeah, the women, you know, those are the yeah problem.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
It's so interesting to me how many people see, oh,
men are being made to like spind their entire young
and mature adult lives, like laboring for somebody else's profit
in a factory whatever, and as a result, their kids
barely know them, which is a real problem. A lot
of kids raised and like the fifties, sixties, seventies have

(01:01:36):
and translating that as and like seeing you know, their
moms struggling to like keep the house going and raise
the kids through all that, and and the kids suffering,
and be like, well, this is clearly a men's problem. No,
this is this is a cultural problem. Everybody's problem. Is this.

Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
Anyway, Sophie, I'm really not looking forward to what's coming next.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Oh, Sophie, it's going to be terrible and you're gonna
have to play a lot of clips.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
So I'm so sorry listeners, but I'm sorry, but it
is necessary now.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
You know what, I'm not sorry. I'll never apologize. That's
what I learned from Andrew Tait.

Speaker 1 (01:02:17):
I think you wrote a really good script though.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Thank you, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
Welcome Robert.

Speaker 2 (01:02:21):
I love me too. All right, everybody that's going to
do it with us for us today at Behind the Bastards,
the podcast that will be recorded again immediately after this,
although I will probably start drinking because it is now
quite late, so huzza, huzza.

Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
Oh no, no, no, no late. We ended the last
episode where I was like, wow, you're such a great writer.
That was so good. Thank you, Sony, come in and
then you do that fucking shit. What well Sylvie.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
You you may not understand this because of your your
your womanliness, but I was embodying the archetype of the
magician wild man.

Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
I don't you're fired.

Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
That's fair, that's fair. Well, I have started drinking, got
a nice glass of port Rue Talisker here, and I
want to start this episode by getting a shout out
to a friend of the pod, former mayor of the
City of Portland, Sam Adams. Now y'all may not know Sam.

(01:03:40):
I think he was briefly on the show Portlandia. But
he was fired from being the mayor because he had
a sexual relationship with a teenage staffer, and then got
re hired by current Mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, who's
a giant piece of shit, Yeah, to be the mayor's
body man basically, And then this week Sam announced that

(01:04:02):
he was retiring because he had an iron deficiency, and
then Ted Wheeler told everyone, no, he's retiring it because
he wouldn't stop threatening and bullying women in the office.
Both of you guys suck and it's very funny this happened. Also,
I gotta say shout out to Sam Adams. Honestly, going
from sexually harassing a teenager to being a bully to

(01:04:27):
adult women, that's a step forward.

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
Okay, disagree, Sophie, You're fine.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
Look one of the two things listened to sex crime,
so that's a real personal growth for former Mayor of
Portland Sam Adams.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
Anyway, Ted Wheeler, what the fuck is wrong with.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
Great great hiring? Look, honestly, fuck Sam Adams. He's a
piece of shit, but incredible hiring decision from Ted Wheeler. Yeah,
let's get the guy in here who had sex with
a seventeen year old staffer's let's get him back in
city hall. We really need his insights. Great great work too.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
It really shocked about You know how well liked he
is in the city of Portland.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Yeah, I mean he's not. But you can let him
know how you feel about his decision to hire and
then fire Sam Adams at at Ted Wheeler.

Speaker 1 (01:05:24):
Oh no, I remember when he got the tear gas
thrown on him house.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
I do remember that. So I started talking about Ted
Wheeler and Sam Adams because they're both toxic men. And
today we are finally getting into the direct personal story
of one of the most toxic men of all time.
Emrie Andrew Tait the Third. Oh, that's quite a name.

(01:05:49):
That's quite a name. Now, Emory Andrew Tait the third
was born in Washington, d C. On December first, nineteen
eighty six. Now that fancy name might lead you to
that he came from some like British ash British British
ass noble family or some shit that sounds like a
duke's name.

Speaker 5 (01:06:08):
To me, but very formal it sounds like old money
for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
Yeah, yeah, he is not. Now, most of the texture
that we get on his childhood comes from Andrew himself,
which is not ideal because he is a liar. But
there's just not a lot of other Again, I haven't
found no one's done like a critical biography. There's not
like a big, long New Yorker piece that really delves
into his backstory. So I kind of had to do

(01:06:33):
that myself to the best extent that I could do.
Now I did find one, and this is, honestly, the
only texture you get on his childhood that I have
come across is from an article he wrote for a
website for kickboxing that sells kickboxing gear, and the title
of it is the Life of Andrew King Kobra Tait.
So again, this is not a credible source, but the

(01:06:56):
way in which he writes about his childhood and what
he wants you to believe about it does tell you
a lot about the man. So we're still going to
be covering it, but do not take this as literal truth.
That should be obvious. Here's how he talks about his birth.
I was born in Washington, d C. At Walter Reed
Army Hospital, early one morning, December first, nineteen eighty six.

(01:07:16):
The doctor wanted to award me a perfect ten on
the birth scale, but settled on nine point five. Already, already.
That's the saddest thing anyone has ever bragged. That's so pathetic,
absolutely heartbreaking.

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
Oh my god, that's on somebody's fucking like dating profile
for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:07:38):
Yeah, two weeks overdue. But I was a nose. I
was nose breathing already as the doctor held me upside
down by my heels and my right fist was in
sight of my mouth as I suckled. The doctor pinched
my thigh to get a response, and I growled, knitting
my brow and trying to crane my head up to
see who had attacked me. The doctor paled, shocked at
my defensive powers. I did not cry.

Speaker 5 (01:08:01):
Oh my god, I hate this.

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
That's so funny, though, bragging about how tough you were
as a baby as a baby, like wow, like believable,
was incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
And I was re reading what you what you just said,
and it's I'm gonna.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Tell y'all right now, because again, everything I found just
kind of glosses over his childhood. Because we don't have
a lot of like like detailed, like someone hasn't gone
through and like interviewed a shipload of people that he
knew was a little kid. And right, that hasn't happened yet.
I'm sure it will. And I was thinking, we're just
gonna have to brush over his childhood. And then I
found this article he wrote about himself on a kickboxing

(01:08:46):
website and it it made my week, made my week.
It's so funny.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
It's about your own birth, like you did fucking anything.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
So, if you're curious about Andrew's parentage, his mother, Eileen
is indeed English as shit, and she's a white lady.
She worked as a catering assistant. His father is Imor
Tate Junior and Emory what was Emory Tate junior? Emory
Tate Junior was a black American man and a Chicago
chess prodigy. Actually, up until a year or two ago,

(01:09:18):
Emory Tait was much more famous than Andrew Tait. We
actually had in the our work chat. Mia was shocked
to learn that Andrew Tait was Imrie Tate's son. I
had not heard of this guy. But I don't care
for chess or for yeah chess. Yeah. The Washington Post
describes Emory Tate Junior as a trailblazer for black chess players.

(01:09:41):
He was like one of the first. I don't know,
he may have been like the first, like super famous,
really well known, like black professional chess players. Again, I
don't understand chess. I don't understand why you would play
a war game that doesn't include orcs. But a lot
of people who love chess say that he was one
of the most fun players watch. I did read a
lot of like writing like fans and like reddit and

(01:10:04):
stuff talking about Emory Tate, and one thing they all
seem to agree on is he was just super entertaining
to watch play.

Speaker 1 (01:10:10):
Yes, you, why does when you type in Emory Tate
into Google, why does the first suggested thing come up
as CIA? What I typed Emory Tate into Google and
the first thing that autofields is CIA? Hmm, oh it
was in the CIA?

Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
Well, Andrew says that he was in the CIA.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
Is that what's happening?

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
Yeah, he was. So he was in the Air Force
as a sergeant and he served as a linguished linguist.
There's not actually hard evidence that he was in the
CIA that I have seen, Like this is based on again,
Andrew is kind of when we're about to get into this,
he's really plumping his dad's reputation to make him like

(01:11:00):
not just a chess guy, but a bad ass.

Speaker 1 (01:11:02):
So may or may not beat somebody.

Speaker 2 (01:11:04):
I have not seen any independent confirmation that he worked
in the CIA. Maybe he did a lot of guys
in that period who like did some sort of like
weird work where they would have just been listed as
a state department employee. So it's not impossible. But I
have not come across confirmation that he was in the CIA.

(01:11:25):
So the Washington Post in most sources who write about
Andrew's dad will call him a grand master at chess.
This is not entirely true he was. I mean, this
is not true. He was an international master, which is
a lesser rank. He never quite made it to grand master.
I found again chess discussions online by nerds about chess
who will say that he didn't make it to grand
master mainly because he wasn't able to. He wasn't willing

(01:11:46):
to do like certain things that you have to do
to do that. But he was. He had a really
good record. He regularly beat grand masters. Some people say
he was as good as Bobby Fisher. Again, I have
no way to evaluate any of this.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
Robert taking a big anti chest chess approach here.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
Again, there's no battle tanks in chess. There's no titans
with chainsaw hands. The ultimate game of strategy is still
Warhammer forty thousand. I think we can all agree on that. Yes,
of course it's been true for generations. But anyway, Emory
Tate great at chess. A chess historian wrote a book

(01:12:23):
about him which gives us some idea as to where
Andrew Tate got his sense of style and personal branding.
The title was triple xclam with three explaanation points, The
Life and Games of Emory Tate, Chess Warrior, which is
kind of fun. I think he literally died at the
table in twenty fifteen playing a game of chess. Like

(01:12:43):
this man, This motherfucker loved chess. He wears a white
fedora with a gold band on the cover, which also
gives you a little bit of insight into where Andrew
Tate gets some of his taste in style. And Andrew
idolizes his father, and he does it particularly. I'm not
going to pretend to know the man's emotional state, but
in his public writing, he particularly celebrates his dad. In

(01:13:05):
that Kickboxing website article twenty twenty two, Andrew Tait noted
this about the male side of his family background. My grandfather,
Imrie A. Tait Esquire, fought in World War Two before
becoming a lawyer in Chicago during racially charged times as
a black man. This shaped his worldview, and he was
very strict, very hard. Indeed, as a boy he pushed
a plow with meal through the hard clay dirt of Georgia.

(01:13:26):
Forced to work on the farm at age twelve, he
pushed a plow that only grown men normally handled. Then
he ran away, never to return to the farm. He
did some bare knuckled fist fights as young man, and
distinguish himself hand to hand during the war years. And
again I'm sure parts of that are true. Everything about
his dad and his grandpa always veers into how good
they were at hand to hand combat, and there is
no evidence of this. Like the stuff about working on

(01:13:49):
a farm, Yeah, that seems plausible. The stuff about how
we fought the Nazis hand to hand, I don't know, maybe,
but that actually doesn't happen often.

Speaker 3 (01:13:58):
That just gives me, like my dad can beat up
your dad vibes like yeah, it sounds like something like
a kid would say.

Speaker 1 (01:14:04):
Yeah about his own birth.

Speaker 2 (01:14:07):
And man, it's like, you don't have to lie about
him fist fighting Nazis. It's okay if he just shot them.
A lot of dudes did and that was rat Like,
he doesn't have to be great at punching just because
you grew up to punch people for a living. That's
kind of a weird thing to focus on, Andrew, but
he loves talking about how good his dad and grandpa
were at fighting. Quote his son. My dad, Emrie A.

(01:14:31):
Tait Junior, was a young athlete, learning wrestling in school
and developing the early forms of tate shin kai strikes
as a youth, which I guess is his own martial
arts thing. His job in the military for eleven years
took him on many adventures and little is known for
sure except that my dad never loses. He is my
role model in many ways, even as I write poetry

(01:14:52):
like he does. So I mean, also, I think his
dad would have been in the military, let me double
check here, Yeah, during Vietnam, which would mean that he did,
in fact lose. So sorry, Andrew, but I don't want

(01:15:14):
to be mean to Emory Tait because well, this is
a little bit his fault. So yeah. The closest thing
that Andrew has written or said that comes close to
being emotionally impactful at all is when he writes about
his father. I will give him that he writes with
like some amount of actual sincerity about his feelings towards

(01:15:36):
his dad, And I'm going to give you an example
of that now. I never learned to cry for attention.
I only used grunts to indicate hunger or discomfort, but
mostly I was silent. I had a large new crib,
but most every night I spent a sleep on my
dad's chest. He would place me there and sleep still,
never moving in the night, and our heart beats were
and are as one.

Speaker 1 (01:15:55):
I just think a baby like a yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:59):
Just too angry to sit cry now. Bits like this
do contrast with passages where Andrew will relate stories about
his dad that sound kind of abusive. Quote. I learned
to defend myself soon after I could walk, long before
my first punch into a pillow, I learned to balance,
had to step backward after being pushed gently in the chest.

(01:16:22):
Dad made a game of it, a game, which ended
with a savage shove across a living room, sending me
into a dramatic backpedal. I stopped myself with my head
one inch from cracking into the far wall. That was
the final test. Kind of sounds like your dad was
just shoving you because he was pissed and drew it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:37):
Kind of sounds not great, bro.

Speaker 2 (01:16:39):
Do you need to talk about this, man?

Speaker 1 (01:16:41):
Yeah, no talking, just a yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:16:46):
Just angry, just shoving.

Speaker 2 (01:16:49):
I mean, look, if I was going to raise a child,
I'd be lying if I said that the shoving method
didn't hold some appeal, because I do a lot of
other things by shoving. It's how I move my furniture,
it's how I record podcasts. I'm shoving a walking desk
around the room right now. We actually Danil spends like
thirteen hours a week editing that out before we can
even get the audio off off to Chris, that's most

(01:17:13):
of his job. It's it's really it's a good part
of our work.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
And remind me to tell you about the time when
Robert got a foot massager and he refused to not
use it while recording, and it would go directly into
the mic, and like there's no, there's no hazard. Pay
that's enough, truly, don't take it out. I'm sorry, And

(01:17:41):
that was my fault for bringing it up.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
That was your fault for bringing it up, but more
importantly not my fault, because nothing is speaking of toxic masculinity.
Let's get back to Andrew Tate.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (01:17:55):
So, Andrew was raised initially in the DC area and
then Indiana, and he seemed to want to follow in
his father's footsteps. He started playing chess at age three,
he started competing at five, and he eventually competed in
adult tournaments while still a child. And this is where
we get the very first news article on Andrew Tate,
who at that point was referred to as Emerie A Tait.

(01:18:17):
It is a local news piece, and this is the
first like objective ish piece of journalism that it's not
just like him writing about his background. And it's really
the only insight we get into his childhood that doesn't
come directly from a Tate. It's again a local news piece.
The news in his town, which is like South Bend,
was talking about the release there was a movie coming

(01:18:39):
out about Bobby Fisher, who I guess was good at chess,
and so they were writing about that, and they wanted
a human interest piece, so they talked about young Andrew Tate,
who was six when they wrote this article. He had
started a chess club in South Bend with some other kids,
and he had taught them chess because he wanted people
to play against. It includes the article a couple of
quotes that are interesting. Every kid wants to be like

(01:19:02):
his dad, the elder Tate said, but father had recently
limited son's playing time, encouraging other activities. I don't think
that a kid his age should spend so much time
playing chess. As a parent, I'd like to see him
become a top level player, but I realized there's so
much more to life than just chess. He learned how
to swim this summer, and he plays with his friends
and stuff like that. Andrew, however, says he plays because

(01:19:23):
he's bored all the time. Most of the time, I
am bored, and that's the only thing I want to
do most So Yeah, interesting, there's some insight into the
actual kid there. That is a response I understand from
a kid like I am bored all the time. This
is the only thing that I like. It Also, you know,

(01:19:45):
gives you a little bit of a look into like
there's for whatever reason, one of the things I take
with in this article is that Imory Tait didn't want
his son to follow him as a chess guy. It
might have been some insecurity about not wanting his kid
to be better than him, or it may have just
been understandably like, you know, I never made a lot
of money playing chess. I want you to do something

(01:20:06):
else with your life. I don't want you to like
be locked into this thing.

Speaker 1 (01:20:10):
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
There's some interesting questions that answers or asks. The author
of this article notes that Andrew had just competed in
his first adult chess tournament where he had and again
Andrews later on, when he starts putting out propaganda trying
to make himself do a badass, will point out that
like at age six, he was playing in adult chess tournaments.
He did lose three out of five games, and his

(01:20:31):
dad eventually had to pull him out of the tournament because, quote,
he got very upset because he thought he was failing.
So Emory withdrew his son from the game to quote
save him from crying in front of all those people.
And we're not keyed into what precisely happened there?

Speaker 1 (01:20:46):
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought he didn't cry. Why are
we worried about that?

Speaker 2 (01:20:51):
It sure seems like his dad said he did. Yeah, whoa,
whoa whoa fact check and again, Yeah, I'm gonna guess
one of two things happened there. Either Andrew was just
throwing a fit because he was losing, and his dad
was like, well, you can't be at a chess tournament
if you're gonna throw a fit when you lose. Or
Andrew was doing okay and wanted to keep playing, and
his dad was angry that he was losing and didn't

(01:21:12):
want him to keep, like risk losing again, even though
three to two is not a bad record for a six.

Speaker 5 (01:21:19):
Year old player six playing against a.

Speaker 2 (01:21:21):
Fither way, we don't know which of those is the case.
Either possibility is interesting to me. Andrew's parents had another boy, Tristan,
two years after Andrew was born, and the two brothers
have been inseparable their whole lives. They played chess together,
but Tristan never competed. They would later kickbox together, but
Tristan never competed. He's like always there, but he also

(01:21:43):
doesn't seem to get to live a full life because
he exists purely in his brother's shadow, as like an
agent of his greatness. It's kind of a weird relationship
for Tristan, but I don't think he's self aware enough
to understand that it's weird. One photo in the news
in that new article shows six year old Andrew focused
in the picture frame, face taking up a third of

(01:22:04):
the frame playing chess. Well, just Tristan's hand is visible
in the right third, and as the brothers grew up,
Andrew would consistently stay in focus. Well, Tristan would always
just sort of be off to the side.

Speaker 1 (01:22:16):
Is that and that's true to this day, right to
this day.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
I have I don't have it. In the script we
could play it. There's a very funny video of his
brother like telling him to go out to like film
their cars for this video they're doing about how nice
their life is. And then when his brother goes out,
Andrew cuts the feed just to be like, Aha, fuck you,
this is my show. I don't have to like let
you do anything if I don't want to. And it's
like weirdly abusive because they're both men who were in

(01:22:40):
their thirties, like Tristan, you don't have to take that
like things got harder for them after South Bend because
they their mom and dad. It's not a good marriage,
and they divorce. I have found very little detail about
why that divorce happened. We can infer the that it
was an extremely painful time for Andrew, and this is

(01:23:02):
all he's willing to write about it. Dad was working
minimum wage jobs overtime since his military career had been ended.
Both mom and dad worked so that we could survive.
Things became so hard that we decided to go to
England and try a life there only minus dad. And
he's not willing to write like, you know, the marriage
didn't work out or and again we don't know why.

(01:23:25):
I'm going to avoid like theorizing what might have happened there,
but this is clearly he idolizes his dad and he's
taken away from him forever basically, and obviously Mom might
have had a perfectly good reason for doing that. I'm
not trying to be critical. We just actually don't really know.
But this is definitely like the fact that he's not
willing to even acknowledge the basics of what happened kind

(01:23:48):
of suggests This leaves a pretty profound impact on young Andrew,
so by age eleven, he was, in his words, man
of the house, looking after his younger brother and now sister.
The town in England they live in was called Luton
and it is still. I think it's usually pronounced by
English people Luton. But you know, you know how they are.

Speaker 3 (01:24:09):
I didn't think we would get an accent this episode,
but I'm glad we did.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
I'm from Luton. That's how they sound.

Speaker 1 (01:24:17):
Robert, you know how much that upsets.

Speaker 2 (01:24:20):
When I do my When I do my accent, should
I do my Boston accent to get him back on board?

Speaker 1 (01:24:25):
Yeah? Your Boston accents really joy.

Speaker 2 (01:24:27):
Even from Boston and Oi looi caffy and shieldah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:31):
Yeah, sounds like Ben Affleck an Australian person underwater being strangled.

Speaker 2 (01:24:40):
Just Western Australia, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (01:24:44):
Anyways, Robert, it's time for an ad break.

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
It is time for an ad break. So good to
Denkin Donuts and have you a caffe Boston. It's so bad,
it's pretty good.

Speaker 3 (01:24:57):
It's honestly, it's so bad that it's impressive, Like thank you.
I feel like that takes a lot of skill and
control to be that bad again.

Speaker 2 (01:25:06):
I'll take any kind of praise. I don't care bad attention,
good attention, It's all the same to me. Welcome to
our podcast about toxic masculinity. H and we're back. Solwton Is.

(01:25:28):
It's not an easy place to grow up. It is
in fact close to, if not the very hardest place
to grow up in England. It is one of the
poorest places in the country. It has been repeatedly voted
the worst place to live in England. I actually found
a poll from like seven days before I write this
script from Bedfordshire Live that voted at the worst place
to live in England. It is a tough town. Andrew

(01:25:52):
and his family have basically no money. They live in
public housing and they are just barely getting by. We
know this for certain, like this is a confirmed fact
about his upbringing. Now Andrew again definitely acknowledges that they
were poor. This is actually an important part of his
own self mythology. But he also makes some claims that

(01:26:13):
we do not know for sure or true. He claims
he got a job as soon as I was old enough,
although he does not say when that was quote as
soon as I was old enough, I got a job
moving eighty pound boxes of frozen fish into the market
at five am, and a full day of school weekends
found me at the market stall, where it perfected my
knife skills, flawlessly fileting fish at blinding speeds. After some time,

(01:26:35):
I never cut my hands at all, not even a nick.
I learned to play drums. And yeah, that's interesting. I'm
sure some Again, I'm sure pieces of all of this
are true. I don't know about his knife skills or
the blinding speed, but I'm sure pieces of this are true. Now,
trist Or Andrew interestingly says that the only one of

(01:26:58):
them who got into a real world fight when they
were kids was his brother Tristan. Some kid was bullying
him and he beat him up. I don't know if
that story is true or not, but it is worth
noting that Andrew claims in this article, I have never
struck a person in anger. Now we know that's not true,
because he has beaten at least what like Yeah, we

(01:27:18):
know that's not true. We will talk about that later.
But this is the claim that he is making in
this thing that he writes in like twenty twenty two,
when he was a young adult, he was introduced to
a kickboxing trainer and he started training, as did his
brothers soon after. By two thousand and eight, he was
the seventh highest ranked heavyweight kickboxer in Britain. A year later,

(01:27:39):
he won his first championship and became the number one
ranked kickboxer in Europe for his division. Two years later,
in twenty twelve, he was the second best heavyweight kickboxer
on the planet. That sounds very impressive, right, Yeah, yeah,
I mean second best kickboxer on the planet. That means
you can kick to death anybody but one guy. Yeah,

(01:28:01):
that is not what that actually means. So I'm gonna
be honest. All of the articles about him will just
say he was the second best light heavyweight. Sometimes they'll
just say the second x kickboxer on the planet. They'll
talk about his championships and like lists the numbers. I
was the first draft of this, actually, I just wrote
that and then moved on and was like, hey, he's
really good at kickboxing. Lots of bad people are really

(01:28:21):
good at something. I assumed he was, as like, I
figured that that was true. I looked at his Wikipedia page,
which says he has like seventy nine wins and nine
losses and lists his championships, and he did win a
bunch of what are called world championships. However, that's not
how boxing works, because I also looked up a bunch
of discussions of boxing fans analyzing his actual performance, and

(01:28:43):
one thing they'll point up is that, well, there's not
just one guy who's the best at kickboxing. Kickboxing is
actually an incredibly fragmented sport, and there are a bunch
of different I think, I don't know if they call
him leagues or whatever. There's a bunch of different types
of kickboxing championships, and some are more impressive than others. Right,
Some are people who are really good at kickboxing, some

(01:29:03):
are people who are more amateur, and Andrew kind of
stayed doing the more amateur stuff, and he was really
good at beating amateur kickboxers. One of the critiques people
will note who are into kickboxing is that the league
that he became world or light heavyweight champion in only
covers Europe.

Speaker 5 (01:29:23):
So, okay, you.

Speaker 2 (01:29:24):
Guys might notice there's a couple of places that are
the world that aren't Europe. That iume. I assume there's
some kickboxers in those places, at least one or yeah,
at least a couple. The other thing they'll point out
is that of all of these fights that he had
and he claims like seventy nine wins, they can only
verify like forty something fights because and this is that

(01:29:47):
may not mean that he's lying it. It's all of
the ways that the shit gets reported are weird, right,
and there's so many different weird leagues and shit. He
might be lying about the total number of wins and
games he was in, but of the things that we
can terrify only this is something kickboxing fans will point out.
Only five of his fights are against guys with Wikipedia pages,
And that sounds, but it means like guys who are

(01:30:10):
notable enough that they they have caught like are good
enough at kickboxing.

Speaker 3 (01:30:13):
So he lost fights were against like nobodies or nobody
for guys who just you know, on the weekends or something.

Speaker 2 (01:30:19):
Of the notable five fights he was in, he lost
three of them. The allegation kickboxing fans will make is
that he mostly fought amateurs to pad his record. Now,
everyone agrees he's still that's still pretty good at kickboxing,
but he is not the second He was never the
second best on the Planet Earth at kickboxing. That's just
simply not the case. And I think it's it's fair

(01:30:43):
to say, yeah, he's pretty good at kickboxing, he was
never as good as he claimed, and this is a
part of the self mythologizing that he engages in kind
of vastly exaggerating his competency at kicking people a bunch
with his feet. So yeah, it's all It's worth noting that,
like the level Tait actually was at did not pay

(01:31:04):
terribly well. The per fight amount is impressive. He can
make between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars per fight
that he was in, but he was having like one
or two fights per year, which is not terrible income.
But you're paying for a coach, you're paying for Jim access,
you're paying for the medical care that comes from this,
and he's going to have several serious injuries. So he's

(01:31:26):
not living well off of this salary. And in fact,
he and his brother are living in a cheap apartment
I think in Bedfordshire and eating as cheaply as they
possibly can in order to afford to keep being in kickboxing.
Because it's like that's kind of what it is when
you're competing at this kind of awkward level that he's at,
and Tate relates aspects of this himself in a video

(01:31:47):
from twenty twenty two. And I'm going to play this
so everyone can get a look and listen to the
guy before we can go any further. This is from
his video on Rumble. This is his like you Like
Rumble is right wing you tube and his channel is
called Tate Speech as in hate speech. But you guys
get it right, I don't need here.

Speaker 1 (01:32:10):
It is the first first clip world.

Speaker 6 (01:32:13):
Level athletes with no money. We invented a dish that
was so bland. We called it Flavor because it was
the only way you could add flavor to the dish,
So it had the name Flavor, but it was extremely bland,
and it was white rice frozen peas because they're cheap.

Speaker 1 (01:32:33):
Kidney beans.

Speaker 6 (01:32:34):
Kidney beans have more protein per one hundred grams than
minced beef.

Speaker 2 (01:32:38):
Did you know that?

Speaker 6 (01:32:39):
I found out when I was broke, walk in the
aisles at a grocery store trying to find the cheapest
protein money can buy. Could it have bring myself to
be a vegetarian?

Speaker 1 (01:32:47):
So I'd add a.

Speaker 6 (01:32:47):
Little bit of mate minced beef and if I was
really rich, i'd have hot sauce.

Speaker 2 (01:32:54):
And I actually suspect he's probably not lying too much there.
That seems like a a reasonable story. And I know
some people who are professional athletes at that similar awkward
level where you're like a pro but you're not rich,
who are like, yeah, you do whatever it takes to
like stay fueled, or that means cooking giant pots of
like not delicious things just to stay Anyway, that seems

(01:33:19):
broadly speaking, like he's probably not lying entirely about that.
Now he is lying about he and his brother being
world class athletes. You might say he was. That's going
to be up to what you define that as. But
Tristan is not competing in kickboxing. He is working as
like a coach kind of, although people will criticize that
in ways that are too weirdly nuanced and involve knowledge

(01:33:40):
of kickboxing. So we're just going to move on now.
The height of his career as a guy who kicks
people for money comes in like twenty twelve, twenty thirteen,
twenty thirteen, I think is his last big championship, and
not long after that he decides to leave professional sports
as a full time thing. Injuries play a major role
in this. Tate does not like talking about vulnerability, but

(01:34:04):
he was worse at taking hits than he likes to pretend.
He suffered detached retinas in several fights and had to
have surgery for his eyes. So he was like, he's
I mean again and again. That's the I'm pointing this
out because he will never admit it. Like, if you're
a professional kickboxer, at some point, you're going to get
hurt enough that you can't keep doing kickboxing, like we

(01:34:27):
all saw, like Muhammad Ali go from you know Muhammad
Ali to you know, a guy who has severe injuries
as a result of being a boxer. All this stuff's
bad for you, like you either quit it a certain
point or it destroys your body and mind the same
way that like football or whatever it does. I mean,
we all just got a reminder of that a couple
of weeks ago with oh, the guy who had a

(01:34:48):
heart attack on the Yeah, this is all pretty like
normal sports stuff, right like it you are when you're
watching guys do these kind of combat sports. You are
watching people like mortgage their bodies in the hope of
getting rich, and Tate kind of had to accept at
a certain point, my body is going to give out
before I get rich doing this. So you know, that's

(01:35:10):
the thing that he recognizes, and he decides I need
to let my most professional athletes do. I need to
find something else I can do that's easier on my
body that I can support myself with. You know, some
people open car dealerships. Some people decide to you know,
sell ads for different things and be pitchman. Some people
go into professional baseball. Tristan decided to become a webcam

(01:35:34):
sex pimp. So that's that's an interesting call. I do
think history would have been different in fascinating ways that
that's the choice Michael Jordan had made. Sophie, don't give
you that look anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:35:54):
What I'm just saying that look, you deserved it.

Speaker 2 (01:35:58):
I usually do so for three years, they run a
rapidly expanding business finding women to act as cam operators. Now,
this is not an inherently dishonest business. I guess if
you are, you know, building a studio and building like
a platform by which you can you know, bring these
these cam workers attention, and they understand their contracts and

(01:36:22):
like it's a reasonably fair split. I don't have an
ethical issue with building a company that allows sex workers
to do cam work, right, that's that's fine. But the
business that Tait interest and operated was not fine. It
was fundamentally pretty toxic.

Speaker 1 (01:36:39):
No shit, the brothers didn't have a environment, all right, cool.

Speaker 2 (01:36:45):
Yeah, I'm going to quote now from an article in
The Mirror, which is not an ideal source, but it's
who entered them about this. And I don't know why
they would lie about something this shady and gross, because
it makes them seem like sex criminals.

Speaker 5 (01:36:58):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (01:36:59):
Some of their customers fall for the belief that they
can have a real relationship with the women they see
on screen, but Tristan brazenly told The Sunday Mirror it's
all a big scam and bragged that he doesn't feel
any guilt because no one cares and it's their problem,
not mine. The more punter's handover, the more models earn.
Some women will claim to have crippling university debt, a

(01:37:21):
family member in need of private healthcare, or a dream
of moving to the UK, sometimes even telling men they
want to meet them. Whatever the excuse is, it is
a lie, Tristan said. So he tells a story in
this article about this guy who wanted to give a
cam operator twenty thousand dollars his life savings, and Tristan's like,
and I try. I talked him out of it. I

(01:37:42):
told him, you know, he shouldn't do that. She was
actually making good money. And then he came back a
couple of months later and fell in love with another
and this time I was like, yeah, man, we'll take
your money, which definitely a lie. Tristan and Andrew Tate
have never turned down twenty grand that a desperate man
offered them for lies, trying to.

Speaker 1 (01:38:03):
Absolutely bread and butter.

Speaker 2 (01:38:06):
Yeah, I am going to continue that quote from the Mirror,
but first, you know what I am going to continue
first is capitalism. I am. I am keeping this nightmare
engine alive on my own by advertising for products on
this podcast. So on your own, that's it. That's I am.

(01:38:27):
I am the lynch pin holding the global economy.

Speaker 1 (01:38:30):
Together on your own.

Speaker 2 (01:38:32):
Look after Facebook fell apart, it's just me, baby, Oh
my god, name another company, Sophie, It's just this podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:38:42):
Just run, just run the ads. He's out of control.

Speaker 2 (01:38:54):
Uh, we are back. So I'm going to continue that
quote from the Sunday Mirror of Tristan Tate being interviewed.
He believes he is beyond the reach of the authorities
because of two lines in the terms and conditions. He said,

(01:39:14):
One is broadcasting is for entertainment purposes only. That means
if a model says she has a sick dog or
a sick grandma, it doesn't have to be true. The
next is that all cash given to models is a
voluntary sign of gratitude for their time broadcasting. Now, I'm
not a lawyer.

Speaker 1 (01:39:32):
That kind of sounds like the taking their money.

Speaker 2 (01:39:34):
It does sound like you're taking their money. That said,
he may be in the right there. The mirror did
a journalistic thing and they reached out to a lawyer
to be like, is this true, And the lawyer said maybe.
But also generally UK laws say that you can't defraud
people and take their money on fraudulent terms. But also
the laws haven't kept pace with technology. There's a good

(01:39:57):
chance he was in a legal gray area. They did
not get charged, so probably is fair to say they
were in enough of a legal gray area that they
were reasonably safe. And to be like, perfectly honest, I
suspect they could have done this indefinitely. If Andrew Tate
hadn't been a sex criminal, which is what we're getting
to here. So Andrew Tate later wrote this on his

(01:40:20):
personal website, slash Shady Business, teaching men to run there
on webcam porn studios. This is a thing he does later,
but this is how he talks about his webcam business
and how he makes it work. God, how did I
become rich webcam? I've been running a webcam studio for
nearly a decade. I've had over seventy five girls work
for me, and my business model is different than ninety

(01:40:41):
nine percent of webcam studio owners. Over fifty percent of
my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time, and
if all my girlfriends, none were in the adult industry
entertainment industry before they met me. My job was getting
women to fall in love with me. Literally, that was
my job. My job was to meet a girl, go
on a few dates, sleep her, test if she's quality,
get her to fall in love with me to where

(01:41:03):
she do anything I'd say, and then get her on
webcams so we could become rich together. Whether you agree
or disagree with what I did with their loyalties, submission
and love for me doesn't matter. You cannot reject the results.
And the results are simple. My girlfriends would do more
for me than ninety nine point nine percent of men's
wives would do for them.

Speaker 5 (01:41:20):
So what does that make That's one of the grossest things.

Speaker 2 (01:41:25):
Is really gross's and.

Speaker 1 (01:41:28):
Like voluntarily listed on his own site in it it's
just fucking.

Speaker 2 (01:41:34):
Yeah, he bragged about this. Now, this is potentially him
describing sex trafficking.

Speaker 1 (01:41:40):
Right, Especially, that's what it sounds like if.

Speaker 2 (01:41:43):
You're if the women are not getting Now again, there's
not like a law that says you can't have someone
fall in love with you and then contract with them
to do sex work, right, that's not a thing that
there's a law against. However, if they are not getting
paid for it, and if they are not being allowed
freedom of movement, well then what happens is that you

(01:42:05):
have like entrapped them and you are sex trafficking them. Right.
This is what's called law enforcement calls this the lover
boy method, right, where you get someone to fall in
love with you. And also this is this goes on.
This is a very old tactic in like shall we
say pimping, where like, yeah, you make a woman feel
like or a person be in love and dependent on you,

(01:42:26):
and then you kind of emotionally abuse them into doing
sex work. This is a thing that happens that is
like a recognized part of a criminal enterprise. Now, obviously
getting charges based on those words on his website is
going to be hard to do, but just kind of
the stuff that he had published for a while was
enough that people at the time should have known that

(01:42:48):
he was up to a what was a likely illegal business. Now,
if you came across articles about Tate in twenty twenty
one under twenty twenty two and they went to any
detail about his webcam career, the most you were likely
to learn and was what the Mirror wrote here. After
three years they moved to Romania, saying the UK had
gone downhill. They have women on a number of CD sites.
Operators take a forty percent cut and the rest goes

(01:43:10):
to the studio. So that's that's what they claimed for
years had happened, like, you know, we did it in
the UK and then the UK got woke and so
we switched to Romania. That is not what actually happened.
So they started running this can business in twenty twelve.
Three years after twenty twelve, and they moved to Romania.

(01:43:30):
It's twenty fifteen now, just a few days ago after
his arrest, a story drop that made it clear why
they actually left the UK, and it had nothing to
do with wokeness or the country going downhill. Andrew Tate
was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse
in twenty and fifteen. Weiss broke the story quote. Two
women told Vice World News they were violently abused, one raped,

(01:43:54):
the other repeatedly strangled by Andrew Tate, and that UK
police and the Crown Prosecution Service mishandled their case, leaving
him free to rise to global fame on the back
of his unchecked misogyny. Police took four years to pass
their investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service, whose job involves
assessing whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction, at
which point the CPS declined to prosecute. So that's the

(01:44:17):
reality of why they had to leave the UK.

Speaker 1 (01:44:21):
Fucking vile, disgusting human beings.

Speaker 2 (01:44:24):
And it makes the timeline makes a lot more sense
when you know that, when he's like, yeah, oh, we
had to bounce because you know, things just got to
woke for us in Romania. And he would also. He
later made the claim that, like, I had to leave
Romania because in the UK a man can get accused
of rape for anything, right, and you know, Romania, it's

(01:44:45):
much harder to get accused of rape. And so I
moved to Romania, not because I'm a rapist, but because
I like freedom. No, man, you were accused of rape
by multiple women and then investigated, and you decided to
leave because you didn't know if the UK was going
to come for your ass at some point. And the
story is actually a bit more fucked up than that,

(01:45:06):
because back in twenty fourteen, a woman who Vice refers
to as Amelia filed a police report alleging sexual and
physical abuse by Tate. She claims that she and Tate
met in two thousand and nine. They were friendly for
years until twenty thirteen, which is when Tate was transitioning
away from kickboxing to webcam pimping. The two decided to
go out on a series of dates at the end

(01:45:28):
of that year, and after several weeks, they were in
her room when Andrew forced himself on her. Now she
describes him stopping. She tells him to stop when he
starts like trying to go to have sex, and she
tells him that she doesn't want to have sex, and
he tells her she says that he like sits quietly
for a moment, and then she asks him what's going on,

(01:45:49):
and he says, I'm debating whether I should rape you
or not.

Speaker 5 (01:45:53):
What what the thought?

Speaker 2 (01:45:55):
Oh boy, howdy, it's it's bad. Within an end, he
changed who he was. He wasn't the same Andrew that
I knew. That was funny, that would make me laugh.
It was like his eyes went and I didn't have
a clue who that person was.

Speaker 1 (01:46:12):
Terrifying, disgusting. Oh that's horrible. I'm so sorry that.

Speaker 2 (01:46:21):
Yeah, and it's so. Here's one of the things about
this is she goes to the cops. He rapes her,
and it takes they they have. After that point, she
consents to sec she says a couple of times over
the next six months, which is not uncommon in situations
like this. But eventually she goes to the police to

(01:46:43):
make a complaint and the police are like, do you
want to do you want to proceed with charges right,
because that's an option that you have in this case,
and she decides, obviously, I don't. I hopefully I don't
think I have to explain this to this audience, but like,
there are a lot of horrible persons consequences that can
come to charging your rapist, right to pursuing with criminal charges,

(01:47:06):
she decides, and there is, and this seems like a
positive things. There's an option in the UK where you
can just log a complaint and say this guy rape
me without proceeding with criminal charges, which she decides she
doesn't want to do at this point, and so that's
what she does. And then this is again twenty thirteen,
twenty fifteen, is when those two women who worked in

(01:47:26):
his cam studio push press charges against him and the
police and this is a positive step. It's about to
get less positive, but the police find out, oh, there's
a report logged against this guy two years earlier, and
they reach out to Amelia and they're like, more women
have come forward saying that this guy assaulted them. Do

(01:47:46):
you want your charges? Do you want your allegations basically
to be added to theirs in this case that we're building, right,
And she says yes, and she hands over her phone
to the cops, which contained numerous audio notes because she
had told Andrew and like text and stuff like, Hey,
you know like you rate me. That's why I don't
want to know you anymore. And he had responded to her.

(01:48:09):
And he had responded to her using voice notes where
he admitted to what he had done and Yeah, I'm
gonna play a couple of notes of Andrew Tait here
for you, because before we hear him in his like
fifteen year old boy influencer voice, we should hear how

(01:48:31):
he talks to somebody like Amelia when he doesn't think
it's going to be on the news?

Speaker 4 (01:48:38):
Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn't
like it, the more I enjoyed it. I fucking loved
how much you hate it.

Speaker 5 (01:48:45):
Turn me on?

Speaker 4 (01:48:47):
Why am I like that? Why? I am one of
the most dangerous men on this planet. Sometimes you forget
exactly how lucky you were to get fucked by me.
Would you rather me pin you down and make you
do things she didn't like? Or would you rather fuck
you didn't like that? I was thinking, I can do
whatever I want to you. That's what it is. I'm
the smartest person on this fucking planet. Are you seriously

(01:49:10):
so offended? I strangled you a little bit. You didn't
fucking pass out? Chill the fuck out, Jesus Christ. I
thought you were cool. What's wrong with you?

Speaker 5 (01:49:19):
Oh my god?

Speaker 2 (01:49:22):
So that's not great. That's not great.

Speaker 5 (01:49:26):
That's so upsetting, that's so upsetting.

Speaker 2 (01:49:30):
Yeah, that's pretty bad. He's he's a pretty bad dude.

Speaker 1 (01:49:34):
And what's vile? Disgusting, despicable? Yeah, waste geta like again.

Speaker 2 (01:49:40):
Normally self diagnosis is a thing we avoid on this,
but like, that's just very obvious textbook narcissism. I am
the smartest man in the world, you know, like he is,
It's not hard to see what's going on with this guy.
And I don't know his dad or like how that
all went down, but there's there's there's this if you

(01:50:01):
look at the way he talks about his dad and
his grandpa, there's this need to like associate himself with greatness.
And I don't know, like every everything that's going on
here makes sense, but it's also so bleak, and I
I don't know that there's probably a better a better

(01:50:23):
writer and thinker than me might be able to draw
a more trenchant connection between the kind of stuff that
I was talking about about, how lack of connection to
other men and to older men and how not knowing
what your place is in society leads young men to
feel disconnected and that that can be the root of

(01:50:44):
some bad behavior. And the fact that Tate idolizes his
dad and is separated from him and becomes so needful
to kind of convince others of his greatness while using
violence and threats against them. I don't know that there's
a connection there, but it's it's I think, kind of

(01:51:04):
worth thinking about. I guess in the same continuum, I
don't know, this is still stuff like that. I'm kind
of muddling through too, but it's it's not it's not
surprising to me that this guy has this this kind
of obsession with his because that's what it's about, right,

(01:51:27):
It's it's never about like that he wanted, you know,
sex or whatever. It's about that.

Speaker 5 (01:51:31):
It's about this power.

Speaker 2 (01:51:33):
It's about power he had this and it's about the
fact that she didn't want to have sex with him
is like an attempt from her to exercise agency. And
no one else in the world gets to exercise agency
just Andrew Taate, Right, Like that's the way this guy
thinks about things. I don't know. There's a lot going

(01:51:54):
on there worth worth pondering, and I guess we will
ponder it for a while while we wait for part
three of this series, where we will talk about the
fallout from these cases and the social media presence that
Tate builds. When again, nobody knows this ath I mean this,
this this young woman knows it, and a couple of

(01:52:15):
police officers know it. But as a spoiler, the police
don't proceed with the charges and in fact they uh,
it's really fucked up. The police say that they believe her,
or Amelia says what she said to to Vice when
they talked to her is that the police told her
that they believed her claims, but they couldn't go forward

(01:52:35):
with the case because there was a shred of doubt
about Tate's guilt.

Speaker 1 (01:52:41):
Now and there's a shred of doubt.

Speaker 2 (01:52:43):
And see it does seem like he admitted.

Speaker 5 (01:52:44):
It directly.

Speaker 1 (01:52:47):
Seeing a sexual predator.

Speaker 2 (01:52:48):
What we.

Speaker 1 (01:52:51):
Cop.

Speaker 2 (01:52:52):
There's some fucked up cop gas lighting here because they
tell her like, look, going through the process of pressing
charge is against a rapist is so traumatic to the
woman that we don't do it unless there's no shred
of doubt. We're trying to protect you from the which
is like cop gas lighting is on another level.

Speaker 1 (01:53:14):
That's it's hard. I'm so sorry, Amelia.

Speaker 2 (01:53:19):
That's yeah, it's fucking Bleak's this whole story is bleak.
And after this point, Andrew and Tristan moved to Romania.
They move their sex trafficking webcam business to Romania, and
we will pick up that story in part three where
it gets a lot bleaker in some ways, but also
we get to make fun of Andrew tait videos.

Speaker 1 (01:53:40):
So you know something to look forward to.

Speaker 2 (01:53:45):
Take your wins where you can get them. Kiddos, what
do we? Who are we? Who are we here?

Speaker 1 (01:53:52):
Ah?

Speaker 5 (01:53:53):
We're the bad boys of podcasting obviously.

Speaker 1 (01:53:59):
Uh well, all right, Robert, I think I think both
shows are actually sold out. But you will be at
SEF Sketch Best this coming weekend and you'll be doing
a behind the Bastard show and you will also be
doing Francesca Fiorentini, Yes, Orentini's The Bituation Room Show.

Speaker 5 (01:54:20):
Yeah, great franchise is great Internet machine episode.

Speaker 2 (01:54:28):
Rite something?

Speaker 1 (01:54:30):
Why?

Speaker 2 (01:54:30):
Why?

Speaker 5 (01:54:30):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:54:31):
Robert? Is a week from when we are recording this?

Speaker 2 (01:54:34):
All right, Well, we will finish recording the Andrew Taite
episodes and then I will figure out what the fuck
I'm doing for this live show that apparently a bunch
of you assholes have decided to show up at God
damn you. Thank you all for buying tickets Before we
close out, I want to thank again April Clark and
Grace Freud of Girl God the Girl Got Podcast, both

(01:54:56):
great comedians. They have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver
on fifth You Worry twenty fifth. People can get tickets
for that at Girlgodshow dot com. They were on the
early version of part of this, but I had an
emergency and we had to bounce, and now we are
recording this late at night because it is the only
way that we can make this show work in a
way that is we are contractually obligated to. So thank

(01:55:18):
you April and Grace, Thank you, Ian and Sophie for
being guests on my show last minute, and.

Speaker 1 (01:55:25):
Yeah, you're fucking welcome. Robert, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:55:29):
Thank you. Everyone else can go to hell though.

Speaker 1 (01:55:36):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(01:55:57):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}CZM Rewind: The Andrew Tate Story (Part 1 & 2)