Part One: Andrew Tate, and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement

Robert is joined by Cool Zone Media editor, Ian Johnson to discuss Andrew Tate.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to him Motherfucker's I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind
the Bastards, a podcast that has just encountered one of
the worst disasters of its career. So, uh, we'll get
into this more later. This is supposed to be and
it's going to be the first of several episodes about
Andrew Tate and the mythopoetic men's movement that led to

(00:21):
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 Girl God podcast. Uh they have in anyway.
We recorded a little bit with them, and then I
had a minor emergency which has taken me out of

(00:42):
the house for a while. Things are okay, you don't
need to flip out on Reddit or whatever, but it
was it was a problem, um, and we were not
able to record with them. To finish recording with them,
and because of the holiday, we have no backlog. So
in order to get this episode done and ready for
our editor asap, Sophie is going to be my guest

(01:03):
today along with Ian our editor. UM and we will
get this out as soon as possible, because otherwise we
will not have a show and we are contractually obligated
to provide you with entertainment every single week until the
heat death of the universe. Um, 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

(01:24):
that things got messed up. We will have them back
on the pod um 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
and people can get tickets for that show at Girl
God Show dot com. You can also check out their
podcast just type girl God and any of the things

(01:44):
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. UM. Now welcome to
the pod. Uh, Sophie and Ian, How are y'all doing
so well? So on I night. Ian is Ian Johnson,

(02:05):
by the way, he edits a lot of our shows,
and it's also uh one half of Gladiator with fellow
fellow editor DJ Daniel. All Right, and um, we do
have the full Gladiator on staff, which I like to
bring up as much as possible. M. I appreciate the love.
And yeah, you know it's Friday. Uh, ready for the weekend.

(02:28):
Let's talk some tape, you know, Let's let's do it Friday,
get into Friday, but also almost Saturday. Uh. And Ian
is currently in his closet. We may start drinking in
the in the near future. Might need to happen. Yeah,
let's do it, all right, Robert? Yeah, Ian, I actually
have you been on just as one of our podcasts

(02:51):
before you you have known this my first Well, you know, Ian,
people should know about you again. You're you're one half
of Gladiator. You're a longtime friend of our other editor
DJ Daniel. Um, you are a legendary podcast editor. And
you had absolutely no involvement in the July six plane

(03:11):
crash that cost John F. Kennedy Jr. His life off
the Massachusetts coast. No involvement at all. I don't know
why people, Yeah, don't bring it up. We had nothing
to do with it. Why are you talking about that?
I just to let people know Ian had nothing to
do with it. Ian Sophie, what do y'all know about
Andrew Tate. Um. So my limited knowledge of him is

(03:34):
he's I believe a former m M A fighter who
I don't know how he made a lot of money,
but it seems like he has a lot of money
from what he's seen on the internet. Will be talking
about how and he's into a lot of misogynistic men
rights kind of stuff. And uh, he got thoroughly destroyed
online by um Grenna, So I do remember that, um.

(03:55):
And I think he's in jail now. He is in
jail now, um. Unrelated to the Greta stuff. Um, there
was a little bit of a confusion about that, but yes,
he is in jail for sex trafficking in Romania. Um, Sophie,
is that more or less your understanding of the guy? Yeah,
he fucking sucks, Yeah he does. Indeed he does, indeed
fucking suck. Um. Unfortunately, he's also kind of worth studying

(04:20):
in detail because he's managed to do something with social
media that I don't think anyone else has ever managed
to the same degree of success. Um. He's he's he's
smart in one very specific way, even though he also
did a bunch of dumb things and some really dumb
crimes that hopefully have ruined his life. Um, he was
he was smart in one in a way that has

(04:41):
allowed him to become dangerously influential to an entire generation
of teenage boys. UM, in a way that like no
one on earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump is
really the only other guy that I might put next
to Tate in that kind, And I think Tate has
a wider appeal among jin z teens and tweens than

(05:02):
certainly Trump. It's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content. Yeah,
we're gonna 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 one up until you know the arrest
a couple of weeks ago. There's not profile articles on

(05:24):
him that like go into detail about his background and
his past and his entire rise to power. You'll generally
the best articles you'll find in places like BuzzFeed or
or UM. I think we have a couple from like
The Guardian, but like summarize his backstory and 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 if you don't follow that.

(05:45):
I think this is the first time anyone's really done that,
So I think this will be valuable for for that.
But I want to start by laying out why we
have to take Tate seriously and kind of explain the
scale of of sort of his influence. UM. I am
not exaggerating when I say that he is maybe the
most influential single person on teen and preteen males in

(06:05):
the US and the UK and some other parts of
the West than anyone else on planet Earth. UM. In
fall of two, financial services company Piper Sandler released a
survey of fourteen thousand, five hundred US teens taken between
August and September of that year. Tait was the number
one influencer on the list in terms of popularity. He
beat Kanye West, he beat Mr Beast, he beat Dwyane

(06:26):
the Rock Johnson, all of them. Mrs. I, Yeah, I
don't know who Mr Beast is, but he's somebotuber. Yeah, yeah,
he's a YouTuber. I know. Elon Musk joked about giving
him control of Twitter or he asked whatever, I don't
know anything about him. I'm sure you're fine, Mr Beast
or he's horrible. Anybody used that famous on YouTube? I'm

(06:47):
a little bit like, yeah, 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. Um. Anyway,
Andrew Tate hashtag on TikTok has received more than ten
billion views over the course of twenty two alone, which
is fucking nuts. That is that is insane. Um. That

(07:11):
is like incomprehensibly viral. Um. 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 Tate
is the number one who is question asked to Google?
In two which is not the same as being the

(07:33):
most google person on Earth. Um, 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. I just tested that, and um it is factor. Yes,
most Google person on the planet is that's your That's

(07:54):
that's a lot of people that that is a funload
of people and and in some counts he's like beating
Donald Trump WI again drump the literal president um. 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

(08:14):
a very he's been consistently trajector is very very consistent guy,
constantly in in 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
it's suddenly the most famous influencer on the planet, seemingly overnight.

(08:36):
And this is not an accident. 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 used, or certainly not to
the degree of success um that Tate used, and 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 U S and the UK

(08:57):
holding seminars for young male students and for teachers to
try to talk about de radicalizing kids who have got
who have fallen undertake spell. Um when I posted a
comment about him during his bat 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,

(09:17):
but with like people kind of cheering it on as
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. Um, I talked to kids every

(09:41):
day who worshiped the guy, and I've never seen anything
like it. One 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, Yo, 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

(10:03):
didn't know better, I could probably fall for a lot
of this stuff. It's like, I couldn't imagine being that
age right now and just being flooded with that. Yeah,
I think about that sort of thing, and 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. Um. Particularly, A big
part of it is like working a ship job that

(10:24):
you hate for the entirety of your youth is bullshit,
which it is, like it's a terrible way to spend
a life doing the thing you hate forever. Um. 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. Um.
You know, that's an interesting spin that he's put up.

(10:45):
But well, we'll we'll get it. We'll get more into
his pitch and like, what about it is not new?
And what about it is new? But I wanted to
I want to start by kind of explaining who tilled
the soil that Tate grew up in. And to do
that we have to travel back and time to the
nineteen nineties and the work of the the first real

(11:05):
modern masculinity guru. And 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 how modernity is
making men weak. But the Robert Bligh is the guy
who Jordan Peterson is cutting his image, and so do

(11:26):
degree is a guy like Andrew Tate. He is the
first guy to kind of bring both academic rigor and
also this kind of focus on the damage capitalism has
done to masculinity into this kind of it's become the
men's rights movements. It's become the pickup artist community. That's
not what it was called at the time. Um, but yeah,

(11:47):
Robert L. Wood Bli is the name of the guy
who kind of kicked all of 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 nine in Minnesota. Um Initially Bligh seemed to be
on certainly not the path that he wound up on.

(12:08):
He goes to Harvard University, he studies at the Iowa
Writer's 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 Neruda and Roumi, and
they influence his understanding of art and the myths that

(12:28):
underlie it. And it also leads him to feel that
like modern contemporary American poetry is kind of hollow and
lacks a connection to this kind of deeper mythology that
he sees in some of these Eastern poets and some
of these, you know, poets from other parts of the
world that aren't the United States that he feels are
making a deeper connection to things for just a personal preference.

(12:49):
But I find the Iowa's Writer's Workshop to be a
red flag. Oh yeah, wait, wait what I don't know
much about it? Tell me, tell me why is this? No,
it's just it's just one of those things that gets
uh were used in TV as like oh, I need
to go to this thing. It's like it has like
a a weird weird to leadism to it that Uh yeah,

(13:10):
I mean that. I feel that way about Harvard too. Yeah,
there's a lot of weird to lead the elitism red
flags where I'm like, uh, but hearing hearing Harvard University
followed by Iowa Writer's Workshop is usually not the best.
Oh and then and and then there's the full yeah,
full bright grant. So it's you know, yeah, i Iowa

(13:30):
Writer's Workshop. Sophie says, go to hell. Apparently it's right, motherfucker's.
I don't know much about the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Um,
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 Writer's Workshop was was not.

(13:52):
I don't know. Um. His first poem of collection of poems,
which was called Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published
in nineteens 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 lift

(14:13):
the mailbox store, 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's
just kind of a poem about one of those quiet
moments that you have in your life. You know. Um,
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

(14:36):
you would see a problem with, Yeah, for sure. The
next year he published an influential essay and 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. In the nineteen sixty six he co
founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. UM. He

(14:58):
is one of the very first prominent amer Rican artists
to like try and organize artists against the war. Which
is I mean good because it was a bad war. UM.
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 trenchent critiques
of of US imperialism. In nineteen sixty seven, he wrote

(15:21):
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 a lot less free than
the United States, but also would have a lot more

(15:44):
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 Westmoreland resigning and refusing
to prosecute a brutal war? Never pilots drop anti personnel

(16:06):
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.
Bligh 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 disastrous split between
the Americans inner and outer worlds. He does not aim

(16:27):
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
businessman 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 the Vietnam War
and still accepts a grant from the government prosecuting of

(16:47):
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 his inner live in
his inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken
place before he begins to use the money for his
work instead of trying to apply what he has learned

(17:08):
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 at all
as 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
I actually find that a really affecting critique. Um, I

(17:30):
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 warship roll
up and one to um feel this urge to like, well,
fuck this. I don't want to pay attention to this anymore.

(17:52):
I just want to discard this from my life and
focus on this like piece of art or creativity that
I think most people feel that most reasonably will feel
that way a lot. And what he's saying is like,
how can you call yourself a writer? How can you
call yourself an artist an attempt to discard the outer
world in favor of the one that you focus on

(18:13):
for your creativity, Like, how can you actually be connected
to your inner world in any way and 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 on his his desire to make money and ignores
his spiritual development. Like there's not a fundamental moral difference

(18:35):
between what the two of you are doing, because you're both, Uh,
you're both rejecting half of of of you're being in
order to stick with the one that's more comfortable because
of whatever you've you've chosen as your profession. And in
the case of yeah, I don't know, I found an
Attrention critique that makes me think a lot about myself. Um,

(18:56):
maybe 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'd sent to the chairman of the National Foundation of
the on the Arts and Humanities, UM, because they had
offered him a five thousand dollar grant. And he turns
it down because he's like, look, this is uh, this
is an instrument of the United States government, and I

(19:18):
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
carrying out this terrible war. And I'm simply not going
to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to
support it in any way, even by letting it support me. Um, which,

(19:40):
whether or not you agree with it, is a deeply
principled stance that requires sacrificing something. Yeah, so when when
does he right he's not a bad guy so far? Yeah,
I'm waiting. Yeah, this is not this is not cool
people who did cool stuff. No, no, no, So spoiler alert,
the Vietnam War ends. Um, we don't do great um

(20:02):
goes goes okay for Vietnam though, well, I mean, millions
of people die, but they do win. Um Bli remains
an influential poet and thinker. In the nineteen seventies, he
organizes the first Great Mother Conference, which is still going
on today. It's a nine day festival that explores human consciousness,
and it celebrates this kind of archetypal idea of the

(20:23):
Great Mother as this kind of like feminine creative force
that that you know, underlies everything in society. Um and
BLI the reason why he felt it was important to
kind of bring consciousness and get people focused on this
idea and on this celebration of femininity is that he
saw the Vietnam War as kind of the expression of masculinity,

(20:47):
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. Um. You know, you can argue with it,
but you and see where he's coming from. And they're
like both waiting for it. I'm just waiting for job

(21:07):
is coming. Motherfucker is coming. So as the aftershocks of
Vietnam faded, America enters the swinging eighties, Blind becomes concerned
with something else. Entirely. He sees in the Reagan years
this vapid consumer culture, you know, malls and ship the
the increasing spread of popular music is like a concept

(21:28):
in a way that it really happened. I mean again,
TV there's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today.
TV in the nineteen eighties was not what it is now. Um.
So he sees all this happening, and he he also
just sees, like, again, what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained
capitalism is doing to people? Um And he begins to

(21:52):
believe that the kind of soullessness and and uh brokenness
at the the core of the American experiment is the
result now of a crisis and masculinity. Right, So previously
he had Yeah, there's an extent to which he thinks, like,

(22:12):
I don't know. Well, 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, do you have you heard of the
fairy Tale of Iron John? Ian so familiar? No, No,
you're not Big Grimm's fairy Tales people. That's fine, neither

(22:35):
am I I had not heard about this either. I
think maybe it's bigger in Germany. Umms. Fairy tales continue. Yeah, wow, wow,
that's a red flat one of the greatest works of
art and I'm gonna guess German history. Um, Sophie, I
feel like you just hate German history reflectively for reasons

(22:57):
that have nothing to do with anything that has ever
happened in history. Mm hmmm. I have no comment on that. Wow, Wow,
well Red Flag. I think Iron John again, it's a

(23:19):
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. I mean, he brought it up. You
should tell us what I'll tell you. I'm gonna do
it so God damn. I'm gonna quote 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,

(23:41):
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,
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 par flees
on the wild Man's back to the forest. After the

(24:03):
boy fails a series of trials and acquires a head
of golden hair, the wild Man kicks him out of
the forest, but after he sinks to the low status
of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom, the wild
Man helps him become a mighty warrior, and he wins
the hand of the Princess, is reunited with his parents,
and becomes the rich, heroic king in his own right. So,
you know, I think we're probably missing some context. They're

(24:24):
just from culture. But it's like, I get why that's
not in like the tight five of Grimm's fairy Tales,
Like that's that's maybe the one you leave on the
cutting room floor. That's like the B sides. Yeah, that's
like a B side. Yeah, that's like, um, that's like
I don't know, the one of the one of the
Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore. Um. Well,

(24:49):
to be to be fair, like it's up against like
Snow White Great fairy Tale. It would be funny to
see like modern Disney try to do this I mean,
the actual fairy tales are pretty horrific, to be honest. Yeah,

(25:10):
this one I also might be one of the tamer ones.
I don't know. I'm not an expert on fairy tales.
That's why Disney was like to tame, not into it.
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,

(25:31):
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. First
Star Wars movie. That's a good point. Much better one,
much better one. Look, George Lucas knocked it out of
the park. Fuck you Grim. You know who else is

(25:52):
George Lucas? No, Robert, who else is George Lucas? The
sponsor of this podcast? I mean would be actually George,
you have the cash sponsor this podcast. Uh, and we'll
we'll we'll make it work, buddy, We we got you.

(26:13):
Um anyway, Uh we are back and no, but maybe
so here we are, Um, we're talking. We were having

(26:37):
a good time. Um So, Bligh'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 reevaluating myths using Young in psychology,
they always turned into Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry, that's

(26:59):
just the way that it works. Um 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 with the wild man inside them. Now,
this is going to be this is the root of

(27:20):
a million kinds of man influencer garbage, right, everything in
that funk. 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. Um,
he's spending twelve tho dollars a month on steroids, which
he lied about. Now he's getting sued for a hundred
billion dollars because he defrauded people by convincing them to

(27:42):
take his liver enzyme pills. So funny. But what the
livered King is doing is this is he's basically setting it,
pretending to be the wild man that Blag talks about
and being like, this is what you have to do
in order to, you know, be healthy and deal with
all of these toxic things about our modern lives is
go out and throw spears at bores and then eat

(28:02):
their raw, uncooked organs. Um, which I would actually say
is a lot less masculine than doing the thing that
our actual cave man ancestors did, which was learned how
to cook meat. Um. But you make a really good point. Um,
it's also the root of we had. We just started

(28:24):
this year with a couple of more episodes of Jordan B.
Peterson Show. He talks a lot about the need for
men to be controllable beasts and also references another Grimm's
fairy tale. The one that he chooses is, um, well,
I think it's a Grimm's fairy tale, fucking Beauty and
the Beast. I don't know, maybe not, maybe that started
as a Disney thing. I don't know where it started,
but he talks a lot about like this. Again, there
the all of these guys today who were talking about

(28:46):
you have to be primal, you have to reconnect with
your cave man roots. You have to like the thing
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 pre sure it
was him, because he was talking about how men should
be dangerous, Like you should be dangerous when it's like

(29:07):
knowing when to use the threat of violence 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 ship. That's what makes you a true man. It's like, what, yeah, crazy,
it's um that I mean. And that's you can see
like Peterson is not in and he never has been
an original thinker. He's cribbing from Bligh, right, they all are.

(29:29):
Bligh is the origin of this. And it's also worth
noting that while Bligh's book has been hit, the descendants
Suppli's book are pure reactionary gibberish. Bligh himself was not. Again,
we 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. Um. So I'm going
to read a quote from that now to judge by

(29:51):
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 union and
soul connections for hundreds of thousands of years. Contemporary business
life allows competitive relationships only in which the major emotions
are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear after work. What

(30:11):
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 damaged and wound of all. And
Cowboy had things kind of weird, But that's a totally
valid point. The lack of intimate male to male friendship
is a deep problem in our light beer I had,

(30:34):
I mean because I think he's just sort of I mean, okay,
whatever he's getting into a little bit of masculinely the
point making like, yeah, sorry, Sophie, famous lover of light beer. Um,
it's okay, I love I love my champagne beer too.
I just I had some lovely Actually, wish I had

(30:56):
some Peroni right now. Peroni is a lovely ice, wonderful,
especially on a hot day. Yeah, I've I've done. I've
gone on long runs with nothing but a backpack full
of Pironi to keep me going. Um, that sounds very believable.
Lot Peroni. It is essentially water. I can smell the
ad dollars coming in. Yeah, p sponsor us, you coward.

(31:21):
But you see like what he's making there, And this
is not a point that like, this is not a
point Andrew Tate would make, right, because these guys are
all hyper competitive, and that's a huge part of like
what they're talking about. Whereas one of the like BLI
is at his core a large part of what he's
complaining about is totally rational, which is like, again, aren't
allowed to where is it? Where is this thing? Well,

(31:44):
that's not the only thing in the book. Um. He's
also talking a lot of yeah for it. Yeah, we're
we're getting to it. Ironed John spends sixty two weeks
on the New York seller list. Yeah. I don't think
anything gets spends that long in the best seller listing. Yes,
that is UM. Yeah, this is n UM because it's

(32:09):
on there for more than a year. UM. 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 Bernar McFadden before UM, who had talked
about aspects of this, but Bly is wrapping his arguments
in respected academia, and the way he's connecting with his
people is exactly the same as the kind of ship

(32:31):
that Jordan Peterson and 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 emotional height. And you can see some there's a

(32:52):
little bit of Werner Erhard 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 UM. But he's basically holding these big pep rallies
for adult men. In nineteen nine one more than a
thousand men went to see him at the East Bold
Auditorium in Parkland, Washington, paying seventy five nineteen dollars for
the privilege. Yeah. A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes

(33:16):
the scene thus, lee as the customers file in, a
dozen white guys flail away incompetently on African drums. When
the crowd has 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 bli, plinks a bazooki, the Greek

(33:36):
version of the mandolin, seening, sending mournful notes wafting out
over the audience. So that that sounds good, right, It
sounds like a fun time. Yeah, it sounds like a
great way to spend seventy ft. Yeah. I always love
white guys playing African drums. Uh in in my in
my gigantic stadium uh speech series by a fucking poet anyway, Bly,

(33:58):
who in or 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 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, Bly are just men
to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their wild nature.

(34:20):
Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear of brutality,
have labored to breed fierceness out of men, creating the
sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt might have said,
I could carve a better man out of a banana.
BLYI 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 shareness of purpose.

(34:41):
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 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 the
in a grim fairy tale is fished up from a

(35:02):
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 a
hundred men take to the woods under the tutelage of
Bly and others to dance around fires, banging on drums.
I mean, honey, just say you have daddy issues and
move the funk on. Yeah, yeah, I mean again, this

(35:23):
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 her. Yeah, okay, so you know you have
It's like like astonishing to me that people are picking
seventy five dollars and like selling out, because I mean
that's more like that's more than the people were paying

(35:44):
for for Coachella in the early early two thousand's. The
crazy thing is like at the core of what he's saying,
it's like most of that sounds that he's making some
good points points about, you know, how men have evolved
in our So I'm just saying, where where's the twist,
because yeah, there's the there's you've seen it start to

(36:05):
happen here. So it's because like the valid thing in
that past is 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
out of the house, you're supposed to be working forty

(36:26):
six eight hours a week, right, they're not there to right,
it's just the usually in like the way our our
society where it's 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 and like that is actually a pretty valid critique.
And the problem is that not that he's saying. The
problem is that feminists have bred fierceness out of men

(36:49):
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 can see in
the in that very scenario of like men are out
of the house working, so they're kids are raised largely
by their mothers, well, that also means an unfair burdens

(37:09):
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 um because we didn't
have much money at all. The only job my dad
could get was in New York City, and there was
a period of more than a year where he was gone.

(37:30):
He was living on a friend's couch working. They're 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
see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well,
what's the problem is that feminists have tried to make

(37:52):
men less fierce? That's not really the problem. Robert Bligh Like, Um,
one interesting thing just before you keep going, is I
think in that quote, did he say that justifiably they
tried to breathe Yeah, brutality out of men or whatever,
even they're like on some level, you know, you can
kind of like okay, like I kind of see what

(38:15):
the point he's making. You know, men do p pretruate
a lot of the bullshit that happens to women in
our society. So like, he's nearly he's not anywhere. He's
not on the same planet of toxicity as a lot
of as as guys like you know, Andrew Tate who
are about to talk about, or even like Jan Peterson.
But you can see the root of it right where
he is. Yeah, yeah, he's he's still saying fundamentally, part

(38:38):
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. Um, yeah, he wants his listeners.
The young boys are drowning in 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, he says, channel wildness and the socially approved acts.

(39:02):
And again you see kind of this, like, well, why
is the problem? 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 the time we're in her air hard around

(39:22):
Hubbard who would 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 pile like plying nonsense based on bad
interpretations of Eastern religion and psychological abuse, and BLI is
kind of he's not insulting or attacking people. He's not

(39:44):
calling them them weak. Um 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 an vited to
kind of see the men around them as brothers in
a way that's more intimate than maybe they had been

(40:05):
trained to do previously. Um. So again he's there's there's
something interesting going on here that isn't even holy toxic
that I think is kind of worth acknowledging as we
lead to the parts of it that are a lot
more toxic. Um. 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 about this

(40:27):
feeling of disconnection with society. So when he says that,
like young men are not connected to their communities, he's
he's making a decent point. Um. He Also one of
the points he makes that I thought was interesting is
he talks about the differences between female sex that and
male sex, and he points out that because of like
just basic biological realities of how periods happen, young girls

(40:48):
are instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys
are not, and it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about
their bodies, talking about health problems. Um. And that's probably
be a valid thing to point out, um, but definitely
goes both ways. Sure, and again he's very he's completely
ignorant too. Well. I'm sure there's a lot of things actually,

(41:11):
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 um, and that's where the toxicity comes
in here. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm ready, I'm ready. BLI

(41:34):
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 times bigger,

(41:54):
where the product of the one 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, well,
actually all of us are the product of sperm. That's
the only way people happen. That's what I emphasize on
the last part of that quote there, you said, we're

(42:15):
in the product of the one survivor that didn't give up. Yeah,
what's the other half of that equation. Is it just
is it just one little bit of a bit of
cum that makes a baby? Why is there another part
to the baby equation? Yeah, I just want to be like, honey,
did you not show up for sex said class that day?
Did you miss that lesson? He's framing it like the

(42:38):
sperm have to murder the eggs so that one can survive.
That is not the way it works. Um. Bli actually
insists that he is not preaching old style machismo, and
he takes pains to tell his audience that, in fact,
male rage is weakness. We're not talking about aggression. He
calls out a few of his listeners seemed confused. At

(42:59):
the height of an hour long discussion of the Gulf War,
one audience member announces that he's succeeded from society. I'm
not paying my taxes. I bought an a K forty seven,
and I'm farting around with ammunition just in case I
have to back up my decision, he says, softly but firmly.
Bli and many others have spoken out against the Gulf War,
yet nobody criticizes the a K forty seven fellow, and
when Bli asks the Vietnam bets to stand to be honored.

(43:21):
The room 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 many to more be more aggressive.
And then the guy's like, I have dropped out of
society and started buying guns. And everyone's like that's great. Um,

(43:44):
look we're not anyway whatever the BLI died last year.
Um he lived a long time, yeah, I would say,
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.

(44:05):
I don't know. I'm not a not a poetry guy.
I'm not gonna analyze his poetry in 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, no people liked
his poems, they were influential, and then he turned into

(44:25):
a crank. That's fine, that happens, like yeah, um, anyway,
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 as I was saying,
oh boy, oh dear, um, Well, I'm gonna go burn

(44:48):
all my DVDs of Rosemary's Baby, and y'all check out
these ads. Ah, we're bad, really glad if a little
while I thought it was good, with like the talk
about reabrasing artists works and the thank you, thank you,

(45:10):
I thrive on praisey. Yeah, that was something different, good
for you. So um Blin died, but his work launched
what scholars have called the mytho poetic men's movement, and
it's it's, oh my god, that's amazing. It is. It
is a somewhat uh fucking prickish name to call it,

(45:34):
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 argument they're making is that our
society has stripped mythology out and has become this like
kind of coldly competitive engine for creating cash value, and
that we need in order to make men healthier, we

(45:56):
need to reintroduce like this kind of mythic under standing
of 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 some of the different
rituals around masculinity they had and being like, well, maybe well,
and there's actually again, there's a scientific basis to a

(46:16):
lot of this is cultural appropriation. But like, one of
the things that's happening this period is you've got a
lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD in an era
before they understand it. And a thing that occurs during
this period is that some of them have buddies who
are also struggling with PTSD and our Indigenous Americans and
who invite their their white and black and Hispanic battle

(46:38):
buddies back to do stuff like sweat lodges um in
order to like cope and other kind of different rituals
that have existed in some of these indigenous societies to
deal with what happens to men when they go to
war and they invite their friends back, and that stuff
works better than just getting a job working for an
accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam. Um. And so people

(47:01):
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 and dress white people
up in head dresses and give them drums and stuff,
as opposed to being like, oh, well, maybe you know,
there's a way that isn't that to look at the

(47:23):
value that some of these rituals have in healing people. Um.
You know, I'm not the person to to analyze that completely,
but that's part of what what they're saying here is that,
like they're they're kind of recognizing there's something hollow at
the center of American culture that is not hollow in
some of these other cultures. And instead of being like,

(47:44):
maybe there's things that we should fundamentally change about American culture,
they're 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 mytho poetic movement. So a big chunk
of this and these are some of this is blig.
Some of these guys outside of Bligh is there. They're
making their like putting a bunch of like white accountants
and sweat lodges that they make the wrong way and

(48:07):
lecturing them about you know, young and Joseph Campbell, or
they're like making them dress like Caveman while playing you know,
African drums. There's a lot of like weird and comfortable
racism in the mythopoetic men's movement. UM. That said, it
is less toxic than the men's rights movement that would
follow it. Um. Things kind of get increasingly aggressive and

(48:28):
toxic from this point out. UM. But Bly and the
initial mytho poetic 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 they were not This
was not a 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

(48:50):
didn't exist in the same way then that it does now. UM.
And it's interesting because Bli expressly says this is an
a political movement. You might criticize him because he had
just written a really kind of beautiful essay during the
Vietnam War about the cowardness of being a political but whatever, um.

(49:10):
I found an article from the Washington Post in nine
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
ed Hanold, the mild mannered federal lawyer and founder of
the Men's Council of Creator Washington, one of six such

(49:30):
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
personal waste, land of jobs with little meaning, personal lives
with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why.

(49:52):
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
ship like, they're absolutely not hurting cowboys. Um, and also
actual cowboys aren't what this guy thought they were. But

(50:12):
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 they are
not the only ones suffering from this, nor are they
suffering worse than any other group of Americans. Right, this
is just alienation under capitalism. Part of what he's doing

(50:34):
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 the pacity of
possibility of solidarity. So you can't look at this kind
of alienation and loss of meaning and be like, wow,
men and women and everybody is being harmed by the

(50:57):
meaninglessness this whole, at this or 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 be we should be looking at how
feminine flow right in It's interesting to see like just
how far John Wayne's like reach impacts the way men think. Yeah,

(51:19):
there's a lot of hurting cowboys. Motherfucker, you are not
a cowboy. And by the way, cowboys were mostly like
poor black and Hispanic and Indigenous men who were being
exploited for their labor. Like, this is not 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.

(51:42):
Like anyway, 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

(52:06):
for someone in the future if they want to do it.
Um So, one of the most dangerous aspects of the
mytho poetic 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,

(52:26):
KEECHI kind of racist LARPing as member like that. That's
basically what they're doing, right, and this, yeah, it's it's,
it's it causes problems. Later on, one of the most
ridiculous aspects of the mytho poetic men's movement was the
creation of wing Span, the Journal of the Male Spirit.
Uh don't you just want to sit down in with

(52:46):
a copy of Wingspan read out quotes to your buds.
I start every morning with it, with it. Yeah, just
spread spreading your wings. So in the in the pre
internet era, this acted as a clearing house for the
movement and a introl place where influencers could advertise their events.
Quote the last issue of Wingspan list dozens of publications
and events for men around the country, including a New

(53:08):
Warrior Training Adventure weekend in Wisconsin, Drumming and Dancing for
men in Massachusetts, Brother to Brother in New York, Healing
the Father Wound in California, and Afro American Mails 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 thunder heart drum. In this area. There

(53:29):
are three large councils in Virginia, one in Gaithersburg and
another in Baltimore. The Men's Council of Greater Washington, which
Hanld started in June of nine 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, Hanald shed his Clark Kent image as

(53:50):
he leads five hundred men who are pounding drums and chanting.
The sweating windows shape 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. And
what is termed a Native American ritual designed to put
you in touch with generations of male ancestors. So that's

(54:15):
a little problematic, just to scoch um a number of
other masculinity grifters, followed by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette
wrote the bestseller King, Warrior, Magician, Magician, Lover, which reported
to that's a that's a title right there. I want
to be a cane, warrior, magician, lover. And these are

(54:36):
these are like the archetypes of male masculinity. Um 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. Um
More is a young an analyst and a professor of psychology. Jillette,

(54:58):
like Dr Jordan balt Is Peterson, 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 bodied 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 more, Gilette is
in large part the story of his failure or success

(55:20):
at discovering within himself the archetypes of mature masculinity. Following
young and 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
fatality of the men involved. It's worth noting that the

(55:41):
authors of both books, as well as their contemporary followers,
seem a hell of a lot more concerned about remedying
male acting out that's turned inward and creating male malaise
than they are about male violence directed towards others. 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 at
minstrel cycles made women are energetically connected to cycles of

(56:03):
the moon, which in turn is energetically linked to our
unconscious This leads him to the conclusion that the solution
to warmongering 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. There
is the girl's just gotta touch us, Ryan, We'll stop
doing genocides. That's incredible. Hitler wouldn't have done all that

(56:33):
bad stuff, if I get what I mean. He was
dating his cousin, So I don't really want to continue
this joke. But dating dating is the wrong word. Um.
You know that story, Sophie. We've talked about Hitler and
his cousin. Yeah, I killed herself. Yeah, it's bad. It's
a really bad story. Again, bringing up Hitler and the

(56:55):
cousin that he may be murdered, um, 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. Um, it's pretty bad.
It also brings to mind I'm thinking about our Liberia
episodes and the that sex strike that a bunch of
women went on to get the warlords to come to

(57:15):
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. Um. But I
don't know, I don't know. This is also gross. Um
yeah ikey. So most regular listeners of the show are

(57:36):
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 weekend Dad energy in
these sense. Yeah, okay, that's why they're also better Okay,

(57:59):
yea that there's just no way anything else is going
on here. Um. 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. Um. So yeah, again,
you have UM. Most people listening are kind of familiar
with where things descend after the mytho poetic men's movement,

(58:21):
which still kind of is around, but more or less
peters 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 divorce 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, these pickup artists selling the secret to

(58:42):
fucking chicks at bars, and this all gets brewed up
into this slurry, and you know, you've got to 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, Um, so that is that is the story? Well,

(59:09):
I mean this is I I we haven't gone into
this on the show, and it was something I was
broadly aware of it, didn't know much about. But I
think this is especially leading into a story about a
guy like Andrew Tate, who was the most toxic, arguably
calls himself the most like toxic man on the Internet,
and is certainly an articon of of male toxicity. I
think it kind of behooves us to talk about what

(59:30):
led to him because it's interesting. Um. Anyway, this is
the end of episode one. Anybody anybody got some thoughts
here at the end of things? Um, I mean, I
think that was a really great explainer on kind of
laying the groundwork for where the ideas that eventually became
Andrew Tap you know, started and took a foothold, and uh, yeah,

(59:52):
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, we're valid and do kind of highlight
some issues in our society that maybe we should be
focusing more on or addressing. But also, as you said,
it's not just a men's problem. It's a problem for everyone,

(01:00:13):
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, so women problem. It's so interesting to
me how many people see, oh, men are being made
to like spend their entire young and mature adult lives

(01:00:37):
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 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 and the kids suffering, and be like, well,

(01:00:58):
this is clearly a men's problem. No, this is this
is a cultural problem. Everybody's problem is this. Um anyway, Sophie,
I'm really not looking forward to what's coming next, Sophie.
It's gonna be terrible, and you're gonna have to play
a lot of clips. So I'm so sorry listeners, but

(01:01:20):
I'm sorry, but it is necessary. You know what. I'm
not sorry. I'll never apologize. That's what I learned from
Andrew Tate. I think you wrote a really good script though.
Thank you, Sophie. Welcome Robert, I love me too. All right,
everybody that's gonna do it with us for us today
at at Behind the Bastards the podcast that will be

(01:01:41):
recorded again immediately after this, although I will probably start
drinking because it is now quite late. Um So, Huzza Huzza.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone, Media This at our website,
cool zone media dot com, or check us out on

(01:02:03):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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