Behind the Bastards - Part Four: The Andrew Tate Story

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Robert is joined again by Sophie and Ian to conclude our series on Andrew TateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?
Starting point is 00:00:40 And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I just tried to introduce badly.
Starting point is 00:01:48 And I then completely forgot to start recording. So I'm great. I'm so good. Do we have a guest? What's the name of the show? What's happening? I don't know. Sophie, do we have a guest? Who are we? What do we do? Where are we? This is Behind the Bastards. You're Robert Evans. I'm your overlord, Sophie Lichterman. And our guest is Ian Johnson, our wonderful editor. Hi, Ian. Hey, Sophie. Hi, Robert. Ian Johnson, incredible editor. Sophie, podcast and furor.
Starting point is 00:02:26 That's the first time he's done that, Ann. It's cringey every time. It will be the last. It will not be the last. No, it will not. Well, you know, we're talking about Andrew Emery Tate and Boy Howdy. Are we talking about Andrew Emery Tate? We just finished talking about Hustlers University and we're about to get into Hustlers University 2.0 because Andrew understands branding, if nothing else. But before we get into that, I wanted to talk a little bit.
Starting point is 00:02:59 Obviously, while this is going on, while he's launching this series of online classes and deliberately courting controversy online by saying like fucked up shit about women to go viral, he's also constantly guesting on every right wing podcast that will have him. And because of the world is the way it is, Info Wars is the first place he's able to like really get some traction. And he's going to abandon them as soon as he can, like everybody who gets their start on Info Wars, it's a dead end. You want to escape Info Wars and get on. He's going to eventually be interviewed by like fucking Pierce Morgan and shit. But at first he's reliant upon them and Alex Jones sees the potential in this guy
Starting point is 00:03:42 and decides I want to try and make Andrew a part of my business, which is the thing that Alex does regularly. And it leads us to this beautiful ad for the supplement line that Alex made branded based on Andrew Tate. So here is an ad for Andrew Tate branded Info Wars supplements. Oh boy. Oh, this is this is a real treat for everyone. Oh boy. To get a job. The man to get a job.
Starting point is 00:04:07 They inflate the currency so nobody can exist any other way because it's too expensive. The parents are out working all day to school and the Internet and the Matrix raise your children. Your children go to school all day and be told things that you may not want them to learn. Then they sit on the Internet and read things and watch things you may not want them to watch. You talk to them for 10 minutes at the end of the day. They go to bed. You're fighting with your 10 minutes against endless hours of the most entertaining programming or the most forceful programming in school.
Starting point is 00:04:32 It's forceful on the Internet. It's entertaining. Convincing them of ideas that you perhaps don't agree with. I've seen it myself on YouTube. I've seen a guy in America driving his car and his kids were in the back seat and he was arguing with them about an issue. And they was like, where did you hear that school? He's like, why did the school tell you that? That's not true. And his own children are arguing with him because they learned to in school.
Starting point is 00:04:50 Have you ever tried to take your children out of school? You'll get fined. You'll get in trouble. No, your kids have to go to school. You have to give your kids away to the school. If you don't give your kids away to the brainwashing, you'll get in trouble. As an all-star fighter, businessman, motivational speaker. There we go. The switch is incredible.
Starting point is 00:05:05 It is. It is. That was like a palm of the face. Here we go. This is so flawless. I thought you changed the video. So did I. I thought I fucked something up.
Starting point is 00:05:14 No. Just like leading us in with like this mix of Christian conservative fear mongering and like divorce dad fear mongering. Oh my god. It's perfect. It's perfect. And then we get Alex. Let's go.
Starting point is 00:05:28 Speaker and philanthropist, Andrew Tate has truly earned the title of Top G. But there's another title Andrew Tate holds that has enraged the globalist. He is consecutively the most googled man in the world in the last two years. And that's because his message is about human and specifically male empowerment. Now, Andrew Tate is taking his fight to empower and supercharge men to the next level. Introducing Top G supplements. We are proud to introduce and sponsor the Top G line of supplements by Andrew Tate and his crew.
Starting point is 00:06:02 Now you have the chance to benefit in body, mind and soul with the same supplements that Andrew Tate takes himself. Learn more about these amazing products at AndrewTatePower.com. AndrewTatePower.com and discover the power of Andrew Tate's new supplements that are the highest quality on the market. I think there's a whole bunch of men in the world who understands my value. And if men grow up to be like me, you're going to have a whole bunch of people with no criminal record dedicated athletes.
Starting point is 00:06:27 All right. That's probably enough. Yeah. No criminal record, huh, buddy? Jump scares in that video. So first of all, the music is amazing. It's flawless. Absolutely flawless.
Starting point is 00:06:41 Alex Jones voice. Third of all, Jake Paul's face. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like. Did you see the names of the supplements? No, I didn't know that. Let's go through that.
Starting point is 00:06:51 What do we got? That's probably. That's probably useful. It was, they were like those names from that like other video we watched in the last episode. It was like sheer per, per. I don't even know those words like sheer peracity or whatever. Perspicacity. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:07 Perspicacity. Those were like the names of the supplements. Yeah. Cause he's trying to do like a Muhammad Ali thing, right? Like Muhammad Ali would always describe himself in these very fluid, often like rhyming terms. Muhammad Ali also could back up every single thing he said about himself, which, which Mr. Tate cannot. But it also doesn't matter because it's all about, it's all about making, making
Starting point is 00:07:30 the image work. So by 2021, Andrew Tate's image is working very well. He has become one of the, the most popular accounts on Twitter, on Instagram. He's got a pretty prominent YouTube. He is a huge on TikTok. You know, we're talking like millions and millions of followers and combine several billion impressions just in like the top G term on TikTok and shit. And so he launches hustlers university 2.0.
Starting point is 00:07:58 So he had been selling a bunch of different classes. He pairs that down and he focuses just on money making schemes. And the gist is this for about $50 a month, you get the classes for free and you also get let into this discord. I'm sorry for $50 a month, you get the classes for free. So, um, um, but what about the $50 a month? Well, sorry, you don't get the classes for free for $50 a month. You get access to the classes and to a series of discord rooms.
Starting point is 00:08:29 Discord is like a chat service. You can do voice and text chat. Um, and basically what he's, what he is selling is I built this community of people who have gotten rich using my tactics. And if you pay this monthly fee, then you'll get to hang out with us and they will coach you on how to make money. And you can watch all of our videos on how to make money too. God damn it, that's like kind of brilliant on two levels and I hate him for it because
Starting point is 00:08:55 a subscription model is just passive income coming in every month as long as you can maintain that subscriber base. And now he has other people doing the work for him. He has this other community of underlings doing the teaching. He doesn't even have to do anything. He's actually good at it. And the schemes that he's, because he has like, you get to pick like one of three or four different money making paths to go down when you join Hustlers University.
Starting point is 00:09:17 It's a little like a video game. Yeah. But, and they're all kind of boring. Basically you can choose to either learn how to day trade, like do stock trading, or learn how to sell cryptocurrency, or learn how to run like a copywriting mill where you're basically paying people pennies to write like terrible shitty fake books to take advantage of Amazon's algorithm and trick people into paying like $2 for. There's also a lot of Amazon affiliate shit.
Starting point is 00:09:43 A bunch of it involves taking advantage of like the ways that Amazon works. And it's one of those things. If you watch YouTube and you don't have YouTube red or whatever the fuck YouTube calls their subscription service, which I don't because I'm lazy, you get all these like shady ads for people telling you like, I'm going to teach you how to make a bunch of money off of YouTube or off of Amazon. Like, did you know that you could get rich, you know, creating Amazon affiliate links or with Audible or whatever?
Starting point is 00:10:11 That's all he's doing. But instead of selling it as like the shady video just on how to make money using Amazon, he's giving you access to this community of distinguished men who all smoke cigars and post pictures of how much money they're making. And because all these other guys, again, it's taking a lot of these MLM tactics where you're surrounding yourselves in this community of other men who are going to be bragging constantly that they're making money. So you feel like if I'm not making money, it's not because this video is bullshit.
Starting point is 00:10:41 It's because I'm not hustling hard enough. I'm not taking advantage of all of the great advice that I've gotten. It's a pretty clever thing to do. And he doesn't encourage people like post your sales, post what you're making this month, and all of that's kind of gamed and a lot of it's very scammy in the same way that like a lot of MLM stuff is where it's like, yeah, just post your raw sales. Don't tell people what your net is. Don't tell people how much money you had to put into the business to make it work,
Starting point is 00:11:07 all that good stuff. And Tate, again, is barely present on the actual Hustlers University discord. But what he does do is when he launches this new version of the service, he spins up his media appearances and like all these different right wing podcasts and hustler culture podcasts to push the push the store. And he also alters his branding at this point. Earlier, he'd kind of been indistinguishable from he'd been kind of at the nexus of pickup artist and alt-right political weirdo, but he increasingly pivots to positioning himself
Starting point is 00:11:41 as kind of like a jacked and rich Jordan Peterson. And I want to play you a video that gives you an example of that. Let's quickly talk about like the red pill today game guys. This is why they're wrong. And this is what they don't understand. Listen to me and I'll teach you how to get girls on Tinder and I'll teach you how to go out and get girls in the mall all day. If you are walking around the mall all day or you're tendering all day, you are giving out attention.
Starting point is 00:12:05 You're giving out more than you'll ever get back because you're a man. You're giving attention out and you don't get enough back. So that's an energy deficit and it zaps you of your powers. Before you know it, you're going to end up one of them little red pill doors sitting there. I'm in the monastery, I'm an alpha. Bro, you're five foot seven. You're not fucking alpha. How are you an alpha if you're like five foot eight? Alpha of what? Walk into a fucking room of basketball players,
Starting point is 00:12:31 multi-millionaires, six foot five, big shit. And talk about how alpha you are because of your YouTube channel. Fucking these guys live in a dream. Alpha has always for the longest period of human time met capability for violence. That's what alpha has always meant apex predator. A little short dude. Who an alpha? All right, of course you are.
Starting point is 00:12:50 Let's meet and let's not even talk. Let's meet and let's just measure our heights. Let's just take a picture side by side of me and you. And let's talk about how alpha you are afterwards. So they're giving out energy. They don't get energy back. The correct way to get pussy like I have is to absorb the energy from everyone in the room and then expel it in a fireball.
Starting point is 00:13:15 A lightning strike of power and prowess. So all the bitches want to fuck you and they pray you come and say hello. That's how you get bitches. Don't go and beg them and give energy away. No, you steal the energy from every other male. And then you expel it in a ball of fucking lightning. What's happening behind him? Sounds like he's been watching a lot of drag.
Starting point is 00:13:39 Yeah, yeah. Like what the hell is he talking about? What is happening behind him? Someone's cleaning his house. But why is she so close to him? Because he likes to show you that. Like that's a big part of his he does this in all of his like a lot of his videos. He'll make sure that like his cleaning lady or one of his cam girls is like doing a task behind him
Starting point is 00:13:59 to like make the point that he's got all these women working for him, right? Like that's that's a huge part of the Tate myth. But what he's doing here in this video is interesting to me. He's deliberately he's positioning himself as the opposite of both these whiny men's rights activists guys and of the standard pickup artist crew. And he's all this talk about height, this talk about alphas, he is playing two in cells because like he knows that very young men mostly in their late teens who are like angry about the fact that girls don't like them and angry about the fact that like they're there.
Starting point is 00:14:34 They don't have all of the money and success. They think that they're owed that like that's his that's his business, right? That's his fucking bread and butter. Why is he? Why is he choosing to like alienate all the short people? He's not. He's not. This is actually a two part con.
Starting point is 00:14:51 And what he's doing here is he's getting them. So I was going to say it's like kind of sounds like he's like dunking on exactly who he like is targeting. But I think it's probably like a little. He is doing some some negging and stuff, right? To get the to get these guys riled up. But he's also so if you remember back if I don't know if any of you read Elliott Rogers manifesto. Elliott Roger being the first in cell mass shooter. He talks a lot and he like the entire in cell community was formed initially as a reaction to pick up artistry, right?
Starting point is 00:15:23 All of these guys who feel like there's something inherently wrong with their bodies that makes it impossible for them to pick up women and in an unfair way or that feminism has ruined it. Roger was obsessed that because he wasn't like tall enough or wide enough, right, that he was never going to to get a girl. They initially when they were like younger fell into pickup artistry and when that didn't work because none of it works very well. They became violent psychopath like they became violent, right? Like they decided like not only was the like pickup artistry a con, but all of society deserve to pay for the fact that they got conned by pickup artists. Andrew recognizes this. And so the first thing he's doing is he is going after the pickup artists, right? He's going after it in a way that's going to get all these in cell dudes like agitated, but is also going to play to the fact that they realize they're being conned by these people.
Starting point is 00:16:19 And I think that's an interesting choice. And the other thing that he's doing, he starts by talking about how like you're not alpha if you're not tall enough, right? But he's also framing it as like these pickup artists aren't real alphas because they're not they're not big. It sounds at first like he's kind of going into this, it's hopeless if you're not tall, you'll never get a woman. That's actually not the claim that he's making. I'm going to play you another clip that's kind of an extension of his message that shows how he's talking to these in cell folks after he gets through with the kind of slamming the pickup artist crew. And the message that he has for the actual people being taken advantage of by the pickup artist community is kind of liberatory in a weird way. Now, I have genetic gifts, I understand you do not have, but I've also worked on my genetic gifts.
Starting point is 00:17:09 I didn't just have them, you know, I worked. But even if you did the work I did, you'd still be taught 1% even without the genetics, because you have no idea how hard I've worked. But the point is, if I teach you how to absorb energy from everyone else around you, then you instantly become the most powerful person in the room. So it's not only so much about being big and being strong and having a Lambo, it's about absorbing energy and attention. So you people do not understand and 99% of the things people teach you, they teach you how to expel energy. You can expel and lose huge amounts of energy chasing bitches and trying to make money. You don't get enough back. Whereas if you can flip the script, then the whole world changes.
Starting point is 00:17:47 This is what you need to understand. So that right there. He's insufferable. This is worth really drilling into and paying attention to, because this is an extremely appealing message to the kind of young men who are on the edge of where Elliot Roger was. These children and these guys, they're starting out in the world. Mostly we're talking young white teenagers, though not exclusively, but like men. And it's hard out there. Obviously it is still easier to be a man or a white man than it is to be basically anything else.
Starting point is 00:18:22 But it's not as much easier as it used to, right? And some of that's because things are less unfair than they used to be in some regards. And some of it's just because the economy's gotten worse, the world has gotten harder. A number of things, there's a lot of shit's gotten uglier. Capitalism has kind of gotten more undeniably brutal, even to the chunk of people who were initially being lifted up by it. And so these kids get out there and shit's not as easy. They're not getting handed the things that they're supposed to get handed. And a lot of them turn nihilistic. And the radical right has always targeted men in this age group and socioeconomic group.
Starting point is 00:19:01 And these are, again, young people who recognize, and some of what they're recognizing, like with Robert Bly's folks, is fair. There's a degree, a lot of atomization in our society. It is not encouraged for men to have intimate friendships with other men. It's deeply lonely. It's deeply competitive in a way that's really vicious. And these people are suffering, and the right always has made a lot of their early recruitments by kind of coming in and finding these men trying to make sense of their suffering and offering them an answer. But while the kind of incel youth culture that has been deeply influential online is super nihilistic, Tate is reaching out to these people and he's preaching to these awkward nerdy kids with social anxiety.
Starting point is 00:19:47 But he's offering them a sense of hope where he's like, yeah, you're not going to be like me because you're not 6'3 if you're like 5'7. But if you put in the work I've put in, you can still be in that top 1%, right? It's about taking and absorbing energy. And I have these tactics. Your genetics are not the only thing that matters, right? You can actually overcome that with enough work and find a way to make money and get women, right? That is actually the pitch that he's making. And for the people who are kind of adjacent to these incel communities, that's a more optimistic pitch than they've been getting from a lot of people. Again, if you spend a lot of time on some of these incel boards, it's dudes obsessing with like,
Starting point is 00:20:27 oh, because of the, my chin is only this wide and not this wide, so it's physically impossible for a woman to love me. Or like, I have this like, epicantic eye fold or whatever. Like, my nose is this size. And so I will never have sex. And like, this is a biological reality. And what Tate's actually saying is, the people telling you this are full of shit, but also like, I have a tactic for how you can and it just involves hard work. It doesn't matter that you don't have these genetic gifts, you actually can overcome that.
Starting point is 00:20:57 And this is when you start talking about Tate on any kind of open forum, right? You're going to get people coming in and saying some version of, he's the only reason I'm alive. He kept me from killing myself or like, I think he's, he's talking. And this is because as toxic as he is finding Andrew Tate, if you are one of these young men who might have gone, Elliot Roger might be better for you than like falling down the rabbit hole you would have fallen down before him. That's not necessarily an inaccurate statement. He tricks them into having hope. Yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 00:21:34 And again, the point I'm making here, I'm not saying that he is a net good. He's absolutely not. But when people, people who are specifically look like we're kind of in danger of falling into this in cell rabbit hole. If they find Tate, that might be better for them than the road they would have gone down. Now that's a small subset of the folks who are actually encountering his stuff. But when people make that point, it's not, there's not nothing there. And it's not because Tate cares about saving kids. It's because this is how to get money from them, right?
Starting point is 00:22:05 Exactly. And it just speaks to, again, how exploitative the whole thing is because you're already, you're going after these people who are already very clearly vulnerable and at a low point. And you're just praying on that and taking advantage of it. And it's just, it's just disgusting. It's all disgusting. But I also think it's really worth understanding the degree to which he understands the online ecosystem he's feeding in, right? And that's why it's so effective.
Starting point is 00:22:30 He's basically telling them that, you know, their greatest insecurities don't matter as long as they're, you know, they try to be like him and be big, tough man. Yeah, be a top G. Yeah. One of, one of his big lines is you don't have to be handsome if you're scary. Oh, exactly. Which means that like ugly dudes can get women if they're jacked. Which is, again, that's very bad. Although you could argue it's better than you should drive a car into a crowd because you'll never find love, right? So this is why people make that argument.
Starting point is 00:23:02 It's not, it doesn't mean that he's a net force for good because spoiler, he is not. He's a terrible person and his overall impact is a ton of harm. But on this specific community, there is an argument to be made and that's where that argument comes from, right? Yeah. And again, the idea that like he shouldn't be de-platformed because he's going to save all these incels is nonsense. It's just not coming out of nowhere, right? Because that is where his money comes from, right? That's the group of people he's decided to take advantage of.
Starting point is 00:23:33 And I do think in the long run, he might wind up having just as much of a negative effect on these kids as the pickup artist had on Elliott Roger. It just hasn't been going on that long because eventually they're going to see none of what he says works, right? Like in the long run, it's not going to work. It's just in the short term less nihilistic than drive your car into a crowd, although it might still end in the same place. But you know who won't tell kids to... Oh boy, Sophie, just roll the ads. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.
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Starting point is 00:25:25 But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:26:10 What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.
Starting point is 00:26:51 How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we are back. So Tate is kind of, while a lot of his pitch is laser targeted at young men going down that specific incel rabbit hole. Once he kind of captures that demographic, again, he's an innovator. He starts to broaden his appeal as fast as he can because he wants to reach as many vulnerable young men as he possibly can. And he is a cognizant person of the time that he's in, he recognizes there's a lot of movement and there's a lot of cultural momentum behind certain left-wing ideas, including criticisms of capitalism.
Starting point is 00:27:46 I actually think people don't recognize enough how superficially critical of capitalism Andrew Tate is and how much of his appeal comes from that. And to kind of exhibit that, I want to play a clip from him on the Fresh and Fit podcast, which he is sitting in between like seven or eight women who look like they're all Instagram kind of done up influencer type people. Yeah. That's bullshit. That's slave mind garbage. Feminist, racist, garbage crap that's been put in your brain that you need to resist absolutely. Nothing to do with Eurocentricism. It's bullshit. It's garbage. Thanks.
Starting point is 00:28:24 You need to resist that kind of shit. I'm telling you, the problems with the world today are very, very specific. And I state this without patronizing you. I don't want to patronize you. I'm an old man. I've been around the block. The problems in the world today exist because the people who are in charge of the world have done a very, very clever thing. They've specifically designed the world in which way that the people at the bottom, because we're all at the bottom, even me with all my millions, right? The people at the bottom are so busy fighting with each other that we never look up and realize we're getting fucked. And the reason they do that, the blacks hate the whites, Republicans hate the Democrats, the men hate the women. Eurocentric, he said this, you don't have pay gap, blah, blah, blah.
Starting point is 00:29:05 It's all slave mind shit to keep us all fighting amongst each other. Do you think when a billionaire who's black meets a billionaire who's white, they talk about race? No, no, no, you think a white, you think a female billionaire and male billionaire meet, they start talking about Eurocentricism, feminist fucking garbage? No, stop buying into that shit. It's a fucking trick and it's a fucking lie. All of it. Throw it away. Throw it the fuck away. If you want to be attractive as a female, you know what you need to do. You need to go to the fucking gym. And just because my wrong said it, just because my wrong said it,
Starting point is 00:29:35 you need to be smart enough, you need to be smart enough to not let yourself get triggered by the fact that he just said something you're not used to hearing. That's all it is. That's all it is. I hated every second of that. It is. It is miserable. But he's, again, that is a superficial kind of class analysis, right? Where he's talking about billionaires all have solidarity with each other. We're all we're all poor. And he's again, he's lying about this. He is he is multi-millionaire, possibly multi hundreds of millions of dollars.
Starting point is 00:30:12 But you see what he's doing. He recognizes everyone hates these billionaires. Everyone you cannot ignore inequality and the role that it has on like why all these young men who are vulnerable to a message you're suffering. So I have to fucking play to that, right? And again, he is offering this kind of he starts with this thing that has elements of left wing analysis to it. The elements of like, you know, capitalism is a con game. The rich are a class and they have solidarity with each other and they're trying to keep you guys fighting so that you don't organize against them. There's pieces of left left wing analysis there. But then Tate's solution is not dismantle the system.
Starting point is 00:30:52 It's not go after these guys. It's treat it like a trap you escape by getting rich and jacked, right? That's the say again, look back to Robert Bly where he's he's very accurately stating here are some fucked up things. Capitalism is doing the men here are ways in which capitalism and the patriarchy is harming men. The solution is for men to like go out into the woods and play drums and and learn how to hunt and stuff. Not the solution is for men and women to organize to make a more just society that doesn't harm us in these ways. It takes doing a version of the same thing like Bly, he's he's diagnosing parts of the problem. And then the thing he's selling you is here's how you personally can get out of it by doing this thing that feeds money to me, right?
Starting point is 00:31:42 He's insufferable. He's insufferable, but it works. Yeah. And obviously other people are pushing pieces of this message on young folks. But his presentation is the most polished. He is not he is a good speaker. And I don't mean that in the you should like the way he speaks. I mean it and he's effective at speaking and getting his message across.
Starting point is 00:32:04 He's always the most obnoxious in the room. He's the loudest in the room. And you make sure of that. He does. And if you watch him with these these young men like these other male influencers on their podcasts, he's so good at sucking energy from them. Like he actually does know how to do that. He's very good at talking not just not even talking over them, but at making the focus of the conversation, whatever he wants it to be and making himself the person that people are focusing on. That's the thing he knows how to do.
Starting point is 00:32:38 And it's it's it's yeah. And I think probably the smartest thing he's done in this whole process is co-opt the Matrix movies in his messaging. And that sounds very silly. The thing that Tate does is he basically he positions the Matrix is the normal world where you like work for some company, 40 or whatever hours a week, just to scrape by. And if you're lucky, maybe buy a house someday. And the thing that Andrew tells people is that like, this is what you have to break out of, right? Not not that like you have to make a more equitable system, but you have to escape the Matrix like Neo does. And it's just about freeing yourself.
Starting point is 00:33:15 And yeah, screw everybody else. It's just about you getting yourself. And once he once he gets kids to accept that idea, the thing he tells them that they need to drop out of school and spend the money they would spend on college on Hustlers University. That is that is a massive part of his pitch. And again, it's not hard to see why this stuff is appealing to a lot of young kids. It's married to some of the worst misogyny imaginable to though. He tells young men that like they should not learn how to cook. That's a waste of time. They should find a woman to cook for them. They should focus on making money. Women shouldn't be allowed to leave the house. They shouldn't have friends of their own. This is all stuff that Tate preaches to alongside the stuff that's less fucked up.
Starting point is 00:33:57 In Tate's ideology, women being able to have their own careers and lives is also part of the Matrix, right? He starts from this reasonable position. Capitalism is kind of a con job. And then he pivots to telling kids that the real con is anything that limits the ability of young men to do whatever they want in any way. And I want to play you now a video that he made to advertise Hustlers University 2.0. Because it's something else. You cannot stop. You cannot give up. You're in the most fantastic place on the planet for making money, Hustlers University. And the only person who can ruin that is you.
Starting point is 00:34:31 Most of you are happy to be losers part time. You want to escape. That's why you joined. You don't want to be a loser anymore. But then that new video game comes out. I'll just play the video game. I'll just be a loser for two more weeks. Then I'll get back to trying to escape the Matrix. It doesn't work that way because you jump in and out of complacency. From I'm happy to be a loser and do loser things to I can't be a loser anymore. When you jump in and out, you never get momentum.
Starting point is 00:34:53 You cannot quit. You cannot give up. You need that momentum to break free when a rocket is flying out towards the moon to escape the atmosphere. It doesn't fucking pause halfway up the sky, does it? No, it keeps going. Every single second you're not in Hustlers University, there are things happening. Conversations happening that you're not watching. Information that could be the one little piece of information you need to break out. It could be that one little sentence that changes everything.
Starting point is 00:35:19 You're in Hustlers University and you're going to make money. But it ain't easy. It ain't going to be given to you on a plate. You're going to have to work. You're in competition with the entire world. Everyone wants to escape. You cannot be lazy. Okay, that's probably enough. The filming on this is so weird. He jumps back and forth between his cars. He's like clearly holding an empty mug to look powerful.
Starting point is 00:35:43 I think filmed in a way that is meant so that they can cut it up for TikTok more easily. You see this with the liver king too. A lot of these guys, their longer YouTube videos will have kind of a weird vibe because they're mainly filming it to cut it up for TikTok. But you see here, there's this fear of missing out. You're not doing enough. You've got to break free. You're in competition with everybody else. It's interesting because when he's talking this stuff, it's extremely modern
Starting point is 00:36:13 and it's almost apolitical. There was not a thing in that that you could super define as a particularly political rant. Tate is a very political guy. When he gets into his opinions about women shouldn't be allowed to leave the house, you realize he's actually kind of like a traditionalist, religious fundamentalist, which we will be building towards. But he's smart enough that he doesn't get stuck in the traps that a lot of religious fundamentalists fall into trying to reach out to young men.
Starting point is 00:36:40 He doesn't start with any of that. It's stuff that kind of comes out later in some of his other rants. And he gets this, there will be moments where you can, he will make these arguments about stuff like military service that actually wouldn't seem out of place if you're listening to some left-wing breadtuber going on a rant. I want to play you this clip here because again, it shows how much he's kind of separated himself from the traditional right-wing grift sphere, or at least the traditional conservative grift sphere.
Starting point is 00:37:11 I think you're a fool. You're going to go die for what, Biden? I'm trying to protect American freedom. Yeah, you're going to protect the freedom of those people in Nebraska by going over to Yemen and bombing some 13-year-old farmers. Great job. Stupid. You ain't protecting nothing. But profits for companies that don't care about you. You should only protect yourself and your boys. I fought for myself, became a world champion, got some money.
Starting point is 00:37:31 You never get any money, get your leg blown off. Walk around one leg, Mr. Limpy. Mr. Limpy, G, for what, for Biden? He doesn't care about you. Don't be stupid. Don't be dumb. Limp your ass down on my channel. See, that's, uh, again. That's, first of all, you should only protect your boys made me audibly vomit. Oh, that's how we work here at CoolZone.
Starting point is 00:37:57 No. No. Just like him going like firm, anti-military and anti-Biden, like you clearly know your audience. Yeah, it's these kids who grew up right after, because like, I mean, Ian and Sophie and I, we all grew up kind of right in the wake of 9-11 and all of that, like where the military was this like sacred, uncriticizable thing
Starting point is 00:38:24 in mainstream American culture. That era is past and it's, I mean, obviously in the UK, it was always a bit different, but like that era is well past. And you actually, you can get, I mean, Trump did versions of this, right? When he would talk about how you're like a loser if you get injured for your country. It would always, all these Democrats who are stuck in like 2006 would always get like, this has to be the end for him. Look, he told people that like injured veterans are chumps and it's like,
Starting point is 00:38:50 no, it doesn't matter. People are perfectly willing to say that they are chumps, because the modern conservatism, the modern right, is so purely focused on the grift and on personally sucking as much money out as you can from people around you that it doesn't matter. There's no need to be ashamed of this thing. And it can draw in folks who are like open to listening to these kind of left-wing arguments. He starts to make one there where he's like,
Starting point is 00:39:17 all you're doing joining the military is murdering kids in Yemen. You can find versions of that in like Marxist like Influencer YouTube brands and shit. I would be so curious to know like the specific things that he watched and read, where he like what specifically he learned. Yeah, I mean, it's... Yeah, exactly. I think he spends a lot of time and he says he spends all of his time online, like he's working all the time.
Starting point is 00:39:52 That's obvious. I think a lot of it is he's paying attention to what's going viral where and he's not just paying attention to what goes viral on the right. And one of the things that happened when he got arrested is you had all of these left-wing weirdos online, guys like Vosh is the one that I remember most specifically being like, well, you know, Andrew Tate's bad, but the left needs someone like him who can speak to young men in this way. And it's like, well, all he's doing is he's using these, he's using his bait, little pieces of left-wing social analysis and class analysis in order to get people on the hook.
Starting point is 00:40:29 And then he's trying to sell them on turning their 15-year-old cousins into Uber drivers. Like that is all that is here. There's no need to replicate this. He's not actually offering people anything. He's just the thing that he's promising them rather than like the grinding act of trying to reform the world in a more just way. He's promising them you can get a Lamborghini. Well, yes, that's always going to be a better pitch to a lot of people than if we all work hard and fight like hell, we can make the world more just.
Starting point is 00:40:58 But you can't, there's no like, there's no replicating what Tate's doing because the only thing he's promising is a chance at like winning the lottery basically, right? That's not actually a thing you should shoot for. That's my opinion here. So all of the videos that I've been playing for you, nearly all of them, come from fans who will compile clips of his various interviews and podcast appearances and put them up on social media. Since Tate has been banned for most platforms, this is the only way his content gets out. But more than that, it's part of a cohesive media strategy.
Starting point is 00:41:31 That's how he became famous in the first place. Tate built his empire knowing that this would happen. And I'm going to quote from The Guardian here. Since January, repackaged videos from interviews with Tate over the years have been attracting millions of views on TikTok. But in recent weeks, this growth has accelerated. In August so far alone, clips tagged with his name have been watched more than a billion times. The posts do not come from Tate himself, who does not appear to be active on the platform, but from hundreds of accounts often using his name and photo.
Starting point is 00:42:00 Run by his followers, members of Hustlers University. Members, including boys as young as 13, are told they can earn up to $10,000 a month through lessons on crypto investing, dropshipping, and by recruiting others to Hustlers University, earning a 48% commission for each person they refer. To have the best chance of getting people to sign up, they are advised to stoke controversy to improve their chances of going viral. In one guide, Hustlers University students are told that attracting comments and controversy is the key to success. What you ideally want is a mix of 60-70% fans and 40-30% haters. You want arguments. You want war. And this is the thing he did that's brilliant.
Starting point is 00:42:39 In mid-2022, there was this thing where all of these left-wing influencers and liberal influencers and media people found out about Andrew Tate, and for weeks, you could not miss him. He was everywhere. He was everywhere. All of these mainstream media people, like Pierce Morgan interviewed him. There were a couple other, someone at CNN talked to him, I think, like there were all these and all of them were condemning him. All of them were attacking him. A lot of them were making fun of him and trying to show him as a loser. All it did was make him millions of dollars. This is why when people were celebrating like Greta dunking on him, I was like, guys, this is how he got rich.
Starting point is 00:43:16 Thankfully, he happened to get arrested after that, but like this is how he got rich. The only reason that we're doing these episodes now is number one, I think the strategy, the whole sweep of it is important. I wasn't willing to do something like this until I thought there was a good chance he's not getting out of fucking prison. I mean, we'll see. He might still come back to it, but I figured it was worth doing at this point. I think it's interesting that like his reach where he was going on literally CNN, but also was doing like he did like an interview on a... The Fit and Trim podcast or whatever shit. Fit and Trim podcast, but also like he did an entire interview on this like TikTok teen show with Barstool Sports BFFs. Yes, we'll have a clip from that in a sec.
Starting point is 00:44:01 Yeah, where it's like... Yeah. And that's the thing, like when I talk about it, his range is unbelievable. He doesn't have a TikTok and he's like the number one guy on TikTok or was for quite a while. And that's... there's brilliance in that. This was conscious. He didn't look into this. This didn't happen by accident. He realized once he gets 100,000 or so people, he's like, if you've got 100,000 people in your discord thing following you and you can get them all posting 50,000, 60,000 people a day posting clip mashups of your interviews.
Starting point is 00:44:38 Some of that's going to go viral. It's going to be and it's going to go fucking and the algorithm will help carry you. And again, he part of this, he didn't come up like this is part in part based on the fact that he pays attention to what's been happening. So we notice is Alex Jones has guys like Kanye on because he knows that they're going to do provocative racist shit that the media will cover. And that'll get his name trending, even though he's not on social media. He observes this and then he goes more proactively after it, right? What Tate's done is he's taken the logic and the sense of personal investment that you get in a pyramid scheme or an MLM. And he's given his followers a vested financial interest in getting his content trending around the world. And this worked incredibly well.
Starting point is 00:45:20 The sudden rush of attention Tate's stuff got in 21 and 2022 drove tens of thousands of mostly very young men to Hustlers University and the war room, which is his even more exclusive discord that costs $5,000 a month or $5,000 total to join. Now, both platforms have strict requirements for their membership. If you pay five grand to join the war room, you're warned ahead of time that you could be banned for any reason. Costing you $5,000 if you just please Andrew Tate, so you're going to be invested in keeping him happy. Meanwhile, one of the things you told if you join Hustlers University, he tells you, if you don't pay every month for this, it means you're not committed enough to succeed and are definitely going to fail in life. I can remember him doing like a call in show where like one guy's like,
Starting point is 00:46:06 yeah, I think I need to take a month off from membership to buy my mom a birthday gift. And he's like, well, if you weren't a failure, you would have made that money already using the skills you'd learned here. And what they do if you if you miss a month of payments on Hustlers University. You're out, baby. No, you're not. You're not. You're not. You are siloed off to a separate discord where the only thing posted in there is screen grabs of the other members profits.
Starting point is 00:46:31 Oh my God. They want you to find a way to get the money. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm going to continue with a quote from that Guardian investigation. We conducted an anonymous experiment with a blank account set up for a teenage boy and were quickly shown content of Tate. After watching two of his videos, we were recommended more, including clips of him expressing misogynistic views. The next time the account was opened, the first four posts were of Tate from four different accounts.
Starting point is 00:46:58 In one video posted from an account with Tate's name and face, he describes matter of factly how he expects his girlfriends to behave. I inflict, I expect absolute loyalty from my woman, he says. I ain't having my chicks talking to other dudes, liking other dudes. My chicks don't go to the club without me. They are at home. This tactic has worked extremely well. And the way that social media functions has ensured that all the Tate, the hate Tate receives does nothing but make his brand stronger. In mid 2021, basically every liberal and lefty.
Starting point is 00:47:25 Yeah, I already talked about this. But yeah, after he gets kicked off of social media, subscriptions to Hustlers University only increase. Screenshots posted online showed that Hustlers University 2.0 had about 12,000 subscribers in March of 2022, when kind of everybody started attacking Andrew Tate. By July, it had 77,000 subscribers. And at the start of August, there were 129,000 followers. By the end of August, he starts to get even more media attention. And his affiliate program that incentivize subscribers gets discontinued, which costs him a bunch of people. So like near the end of that month, he goes down by like 25,000 or so.
Starting point is 00:48:05 But that's a temporary loss because by September, he's back up to 160,000 subscribers. In October, Buzzfeed observed more than 221,000 users in his Discord server, which is Hustlers University 2.0. Since all of those people were paying $49.99 a month, that means he was making $11 million in October alone just from his Discord. Holy shit. That's crazy. Yeah. And you know he's not paying taxes on anything. He's already told you you shouldn't pay taxes on your shit.
Starting point is 00:48:41 Break the law, right? Solid point, yeah. Now, I think it's important to see the way a lot of young men react to and imitate Tate because it could be easy to dismiss him as just another weirdo right-wing guy online if you don't see that. So I'm going to play you a clip. This is of some kid, I think they're 18. This is their TikTok. Watch this. Pay attention to his mannerisms. You've all seen enough Andrew Tate now to recognize Tate. People think that it's so hard to break the matrix.
Starting point is 00:49:12 And I'm here to tell you it's not. Like I made my first million dollars last year. And in the past 12 months, I was able to turn that $1 million into $5.6 million. At 18 years old, by the way. I'm going to tell you this right now. I didn't do this by listening to a broken teacher saying, steady, steady, steady, steady for your degree. Fuck your degree. It is not hard to create your dream life.
Starting point is 00:49:32 Like once you make that first 100k, you are out. And if you follow the steps that I give you and actually take action and make that first 100k and not blow it on a fucking penthouse or a Lambo, you will be out. So stop waiting and join us. People think that it's so hard. Wow. Wow. Yeah. It's like literally like verbatim, like clone of it.
Starting point is 00:49:55 Yeah. Yeah. Right down to like the facial expressions and stuff. And he's. And even like he's doing kind of a weird like semi British accent thing in there or something. I don't know. Maybe like kid is British, but like. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:50:07 And he's doing like the term Broke is one that evolved within the Tate community. Exactly. The hand gestures like all of it. It's like the thing, by the way, Broke is like, that's what they tell you. Tate people tell you like, call your teachers that. Tell your like the adults around you who tell you not to obsess with Andrew Tate style hustlers, Broke is because they're not multi-millionaires. So they're losers.
Starting point is 00:50:25 If you argue with these people online, the question they're told to ask you is what color is your Bugatti? By the way, the color of Andrew Tate's Bugatti now is he doesn't have one because it's been confiscated by the Romanian government. But this again, you see why this is like, I mean, just for a little bit of like personal context, when I was 19 to 18, 19, like I started working and it sucks like working for minimum wage and trying to afford an apartment was a lot easier 15, 16 years ago when I was doing it, but like it still sucked ass.
Starting point is 00:51:01 And the thing that I wanted more than anything was to like figure out some job that would let me work from home doing something that wasn't miserable, which is like how I started my career in like tech journalism and shit. And like that was my soul motivation was to not have to spend 40 to 60 hours a week being miserable in an office in like for someone else's profit. I didn't want to have to do that. And like I get how powerful a motivator that is. And there's again, this kid that we just saw, like part of what he's saying is like these
Starting point is 00:51:37 teachers who tell you to study for your degree, that's not going to help you. And for a lot of people, he's right. I know a shitload of people who got a fucking college degree and it did nothing but lock them into debt. There's a reason why kids are vulnerable to this shit. And it's because doing things the quote unquote right way is often deeply unpleasant. It's just that all Andrew Tate's going to get you to do is give him money. He's not going to teach you how to escape this system because you can't escape it.
Starting point is 00:52:04 Like even if you think that you've escaped it because you've gotten a decent job, you're still latched to it one way or the other. Like it is still dragging behind you, which is why we need to kill it with a spear. But anyway, that's that's the ads. Time for some ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S.
Starting point is 00:52:35 and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.
Starting point is 00:52:55 I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.
Starting point is 00:53:42 But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.
Starting point is 00:54:48 Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, good stuff. I'm like, good stuff. Not sure. Are you going to ask how we're feeling? Yeah, how are you feeling? How's everybody doing? Everybody happy?
Starting point is 00:55:42 Sad and concerned for... I'm hearing happy. I'm hearing happy. Tell us more. So in the weeks before his arrest, Andrew was trending in what is a legitimately fascinating direction. He announced at the start of December of 2022 that he had converted to Islam. Now, there is a whole video. There's a number of them. But I watched a whole video with him and some weirdo Muslim scholar. I don't know that this guy is on the one Islam network, which has 1.74 million subscribers.
Starting point is 00:56:14 This video has 1.6 million views. The guy is Mohammed Hijab. I don't think he's a good person. I'm certainly not saying that he actually knows or actually is an expert on Islam. I don't know. I'm not certainly either, but boy, this video is gross as shit. So, Tate starts by saying that he had converted to Islam because he decided it was the only real religion. All of the other religions have been cucked by the matrix and are fake. He claimed he used to be an atheist, but then he saw evil and that that convinced him of the existence of God. Then we get to my favorite part, which is the only thing that's entertaining in this video and not deeply depressing.
Starting point is 00:56:57 Longest time. You know, I've never been to like a music concert and people ask me why. I just look at it and I feel embarrassed. I look at someone up on a stage dancing round and I look at hundreds of thousands of peasants in the crowd. I feel cringe. It's like secondhand embarrassment when I see these festivals and everyone's losing their mind or these music concerts. I genuinely feel embarrassed for the people who go because to me that is a form of worship. You can listen to the music at home for free. You don't have to wait in that line and stand out in the cold. I don't know. Perhaps it was a bit extreme, but I've always known that they're trying to give us false idols to some degree. When I speak to atheists, they go, I don't believe in God, but they've signed up so hard to the liberal woke agenda. They're as religious as anybody, but they're just believing in the wrong things.
Starting point is 00:57:48 I think that's interesting because what clearly has happened here is that Andrew Tate is a deeply malignant narcissist. If you go to a concert, part of what people get out of a concert is losing themselves in a piece of another person's creation. That would mean that the focus is not on Andrew Tate. Not only can he not enjoy it, but it makes him sick to see other people be a focus of attention. Live music is one of the greatest things we have. It's the single best thing that our species has created. Not Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate is like, ooh, too much joy. But if people are looking at Dua Lipa, that means no one's listening to me.
Starting point is 00:58:33 No one's paying attention to Andrew Tate, yes. Also, there's definitely videos of him at concerts, but at least it really happens. I love that. That's beautiful. It's very funny. It's also worth noting that Andrew Tate and Jeff Bezos are buddies in baldness and not understanding the gift of song. It's neat that they have that in common. They also both like to wear really tight pants, which is very funny. They also both like to wear really tight pants. That is correct. Although, I gotta say this, Jeff Bezos gave up half of his fortune in the divorce, and I don't think that Andrew Tate would have done that.
Starting point is 00:59:11 100% no. Definitely not. So anyway, Tate was arrested right before the end of 2022, alongside his brother Tristan and two Romanian women, one of whom was a former Romanian police officer. Some of the articles I found that are Romanian will say that the women were branded by him. This is not entirely accurate. They're saying this because of like nexium, right? Because the second season of the Keith Ranieri doc came out and those women had been branded. The reality is that they have Tate's girls tattoos, which we know exist. I've seen pictures of them on a number of different women, and that's weird, but that is not branding.
Starting point is 00:59:48 People get tattoos. People get tattoos with dudes' names on them. Tattoos and branding somebody are dramatically different. Yeah, again, the guy is deeply abusive, but I have not seen any evidence that he's literally branding women. They just got tattoos of his name, which is weird, but not what Keith Ranieri was having women do. It is too early for me to comment in much detail about the allegations against him. We do know that at least two women, I think it's up to four now, have accused one of the Tates, and we don't actually know which of the Tates with physical and sexual abuse. In addition, both Tates are accused, along with those women, of sexually trafficking a number of women for their webcam business.
Starting point is 01:00:31 Do we think he throws brother under the bus to save himself? Yeah, I think there's a good chance. I don't think Tristan would. Tristan, I think, is kind of... Not to Tristan's a giant piece of shit, by the way. I think that Andrew would throw Tristan under the bus before Tristan would throw Andrew under the bus, although I'm open to being surprised here. For a little bit of context on the crimes, I'm going to quote from Reuters here. A directorate for investigating organized crime and terrorism said the suspects appear to have created an organized crime group with the purpose of recruiting housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for the cost.
Starting point is 01:01:08 It claimed that the men recruited women with the pretense of romance in the Loverboy method before being forced to perform in pornographic content under the threat of violence. Investigators are reported to believe one of the performers brought in 45,000 pounds a month, but received no payment, while the women were kept under house arrest. Tate claims the women kept 80 to 85% of the fees earned and that most of the girls ended up being multi-millionaires. And look, Tate has his claim here. That's important to note. But we know that in his Hustlers University video, he recommends getting people to work with you in a gig basis and then lying to them about how much money they're making so you can take it all. So I think there's reason to believe the Romanian authorities on this one. Now, the prosecution doesn't just have that they have audio that likely some of it I think came from a wiretap.
Starting point is 01:01:59 Some of it seems to have been recorded by one of his victims. Some of this audio has been leaked to apparently been leaked to local Romanian news sources. Most of the translations of it I found have been from Romanians on Reddit. I'm not going to quote directly from it because I just am not certain about the providence of all of this yet. But some credible Romanian news sources are reporting that based on these leaked conversations that the prosecution has, Tate openly discusses using the women who worked for him to launder money and talks about the fact that he is committing crimes. He does this very openly. They have him recorded talking about the laws that he's broken because as smart as he is in terms of how to like get himself going viral on TikTok,
Starting point is 01:02:43 he's not comprehensive. Again, like everything about Andrew, he's not as good as he thinks he is. And in this case, it seems to have bitten him in the ass. Now, it is worth noting that Tate's house had been raided like six months before his arrest. So he was aware that the police were on him. It's kind of baffling to me that he did not in it. Maybe it shows his arrogance that he didn't try to flee the country with his assets or as much of them as possible. And instead, he kind of ceded his fan base with comments about the fact that he was likely to be arrested or killed. This is sort of a John McAfee.
Starting point is 01:03:17 And I'm sure that's who he's copying from here. Here's a clip from a fan video I found with nearly 700,000 views at the time of publication of this episode. This right here is one of my 18 audio books that I own. It made 82 sales last month. It's a fucking audible scam. It's called Learn Spanish for Kids, and I don't even speak Spanish. Okay, guys, I paid $150. He recorded the audio and then I just uploaded the file to Audible.
Starting point is 01:03:44 Wow. What's amazing about this. That's crazy. And I make about 50 to 100 sales. Pause this. And for each sale, I get paid. So again, part of why Andrew is because this is he will tell you how to do a version of this scam. And so will a million other people.
Starting point is 01:03:59 Part of why Tate gets away with what he's doing is we have built a culture in which every single mass media. Organ is largely supported by a variety of scams and cons designed to suck money from people and provide them with nothing, including that's how YouTube makes its money. This is a huge amount of YouTube's advertising. Yeah. Like is shit like this. That's why Andrew is able to maneuver and act is that our culture has created this space where it is all nothing but a series of cons from the top to the bottom. Anyway, let's let's watch this video now of him talking about how he's going to be murdered for cracking the matrix to think they're not.
Starting point is 01:04:38 All I'm trying to do is teach men to be strong. If they decide to kill me on a long enough time frame, they're going to be successful. But I can't. I don't want to fear because what did I say in the earlier tenant? If I become a coward, I will live in fear and it breeds an action. The music is amazing. I want the world to know that I'd absolutely never ever kill myself under any circumstances ever. No matter what they say, I did not kill myself.
Starting point is 01:05:06 I don't want to be seen as a threat to the elite. I'm going to tell you right now. I believe I have to die. I want to be seen as a positive for. I'm going to tell you right now. Andrew absolutely would commit suicide if he thought he was never going to get out of prison, just like John McAfee did. Just like, look, narcissists do this all the time. He's just hoping that he can rile people up, get folks angry.
Starting point is 01:05:28 Maybe inspire some violence on his behalf. Again, this is a pretty, this is part of the playbook where he's not being creative at all. He's just doing a John McAfee. He's literally doing a McAfee. Yeah. Now true to, and I hope he, I hope he does the full McAfee, by the way, true to form immediately after his request, someone with access to his account posted a link to Hustlers University 3.0, which is the newest face of his art. He had just launched this before he got arrested.
Starting point is 01:05:58 Now, Hustlers University 3.0 lives at the link jointherealworld.com. And on the website is a video made with clips from The Matrix and some other movies alongside clips of Tate and clips of other YouTube stars attacking him. Because he was like on Logan Paul show. And then when he got arrested, Logan Paul pretended that like he hated him, all this good stuff. Above the video is the text. It's time to wake up, Neo. Join us. The mass wealth escapes slavery.
Starting point is 01:06:27 Hustlers University. Hustlers University. Hustlers University. Want to learn about Hustlers University. There's a bunch of rooms to go into and those rooms have millionaire professors. You are taught by a millionaire. That answer your questions. They give you everything on a silver planet.
Starting point is 01:06:42 It may be impossible to not make money if you follow what they say. Not only having contact with actual multi-millionaires. Being part of a community of students. We all help each other. It's a community. People that are there for you. We're only there for one thing and that's to make money. I've already made my money back after the first day.
Starting point is 01:07:10 I've made 5k this month from just joining. That's fucking crazy. I made 4k in my first month. I made 2000 dollars in two weeks at 15. I just made that fucking 20,000 dollars. Great zone. So fucking cheese. All in all, I made about 3,000 dollars.
Starting point is 01:07:32 My goal was to match my 9 to 5 income. I shadowed that by 5 times. I'll have days where I made 2 or 3,000 dollars and that's like what I used to make in a month. There are so many guys in this video. We probably saw like fucking close to 100 of them in that first series of just like different clips of people talking about their experience with Hustlers University. Again, hundreds of thousands of people who have paid him money directly and have joined. All of these dudes are still on Hustlers University. It is still functioning as far as I've heard and presumably still deeply invested in Tate's success.
Starting point is 01:08:12 This is not a problem that's over and it is. We don't know the court case. Andrew and his brother basically have not actually been formally charged yet as a publication of this episode or at least as of the recording of it. They are on a 30 day hold while the Romanian court kind of gets shit in order to see what they're actually going to charge them on. I know this is just that like Andrew's obviously a flight risk. He has whole videos about all the private jets that he has access to. So we'll see. I think there's a chance Andrew has played his last cards although I think there's a chance he winds up getting out and this has another ugly chapter. But there's a very good chance he's going to do serious prison time like 10 plus years in Romania. And however rabid his fan base is now if he spends years in prison I think that will dull his appeal.
Starting point is 01:09:06 For one thing it'll make him look like a loser. But in the here and now all we are all left with the problem of all of these fucking people these young minds these weirdos these kids that he's influenced. Multiple schools particularly in the United Kingdom have had to hold classes and seminars on D radicalizing teenage boys who fell through Andrew Tate. Here's this episode by reading a quote from one of those articles in The Times of London. His initial track attraction to young people said one teacher was often his advice around being confident and financially successful. And from there he capitalizes on a post me to anxiety with comments such as females don't have independent thought they don't come up with anything. They're just empty vessels waiting for someone to install the programming. Jay Jordan a teacher in Dundee of five years said the recent interest in Tate had made boys more hostile.
Starting point is 01:09:52 You used to have to deal with sexist stuff but now it's explicitly connected to Andrew Tate. The boys do not stop talking about him. She said in one class she reprimanded a 14 year old. You're just a woman. He responded. Jordan 37 said we've definitely gone backwards and it is worrying. And that's the fun place to end the Andrew Tate cast the Tate Pissodes. How we how we doing gang.
Starting point is 01:10:19 That's just like I said before it's I'm scared because there's like hundreds of thousands of boys and young men who think like this and like they're they're not they're not in jail. They're not going anywhere you know. So like that this mindset and this ideology is going to continue to be proliferated. And it's it's pretty terrifying and it's it's worth noting again people talking about like what's the solution is throwing him in prison. The solution and like no throwing him in prison is a tourniquet maybe. I think it might stop his ability to grow the way that he would have grown if it hadn't. De-platforming was a total failure in this like kicking him off of shit did nothing but increase his reach in his profitability because of the quote unquote controversy they got. And the thing to blame here there's a couple of things.
Starting point is 01:11:11 Number one the structure of social media is to blame the structure of social media in order to stop an Andrew Tate. It's not getting better at arresting these guys. It's changing the structure of social media to not reward the kind of conflicts that he deliberately incited in order to the fact that like if you do something super fucked up and racist and people get angry about it. It increases your reach on every social media app that exists is a huge part of the problem. And the reason why that will not change is fundamentally that's how all of these people make money. Whether they're the good Twitter the bad Elon Twitter Twitter they all made their money by making people fight or by not making people fight but by. Sharing things that would make people angry so that they would engage in fights. That's a big part of what Andrew Tate recognized.
Starting point is 01:11:58 The other thing is the entire structure of the system that we live under rewards cons and grifts. It is all figure out what the latest as technology increases there are more opportunities to run versions of the same old MLM scam that will not be recognized yet by the government as illegal right. So you get in there as fast as you can and you make your money and then you fucking escape. And this is the way this is the fucking cryptocurrency thing right this is all that NFT shit it's this this the new scam that is really just the old scam dressed up in enough of a coat of paint that nobody recognizes. That like no none of like the law doesn't recognize it for a couple of years that's all Andrew has ever been doing that's all he is purporting to teach you. And he just was sloppy enough with aspects of his life and that that he wasn't able to keep doing it long enough right like the only reason he got caught. Is that he bragged about breaking the laws in Romania and that they weren't going to punish him and also he was too good at becoming famous. If he had stayed a few levels lower than this if he'd stayed at like that Alex Jones level or whatever of social media influence even he probably would have kept getting away with it but he was so big that it created such a fuss.
Starting point is 01:13:16 And the Romanian government had to be like well look now he's bragging about sex trafficking and the EU is angry at us because we already have this problem let's destroy this guy's life. In order to because he basically forced us to write if he'd been a little bit less of an idiot a little bit more careful he would have gotten away with it for longer and the next one probably will. Although maybe all of these guys because their narcissists are unable to kind of pull back from the ledge before they go over it. I guess that's the optimistic thing maybe fundamentally the kind of guy who can do an Andrew Tate is always going to be so much of an ego maniac that they can't stop themselves. I don't know. Yeah I think the way that he's reached his audience should be examined and that it's truly terrifying. It's truly terrifying the reach that he has and that the Internet basically has rewarded him for it. I hope he stays in jail for a long time and fizzles out but as we can see Andrew Tate clones will just keep popping up. Yeah yeah that's the scary thing like somebody else who can just like study this model find the holes in it and patch it up and then you know you got your next Andrew Tate you know 4.0 or whatever.
Starting point is 01:14:40 And that's what's scary about it is as long as our current social media ecosystem exists and the way news is covered you know as long as that model exists somebody is just going to keep finding ways to exploit this and do the same thing. And yeah that's scary. It is scary but you know what's not scary. You're pluggables. That's you Ian what do you got. Hmm. Yeah I would just say. I don't know yeah cool zone media great team great great people great podcasts and.
Starting point is 01:15:27 Oh tennis I'll plug tennis I'm really into I'm just starting to play and I'm excited to get out there and get better Australian Open is going on right now. So it's a good time yeah I would like to plug that live music is beautiful and. Andrew Tate can go fuck himself at cool zone media and all the things Robert do you have anything specifically you would like to plug. Yeah I have a book called after the revolution if you just Google a K press after the revolution you can find it and buy a physical copy. You can also just go to ATR book dot com and find the ebook for free or just listen to the podcast of the same name. So check that out. I have a sub stack it's Shatter Zone just Google Shatter Zone sub stack and you'll find that I'll get another thing up there soon anyway that's me. You know you could you could start calling me top G if you wanted to Sophie do we think that's a good marketing term.
Starting point is 01:16:33 Okay well what if I do my Boston accent and I try to teach kids how to how to make their 12 year old cousins illegally labor without payment. I don't know there might be something there Robert. Well thank you thank you and thank you for believing me would you like to join my discord for five thousand dollars. All right all right all right well everybody I've got a new con to get off to. So everybody have a great day and feel better than you feel listening to this episode. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.
Starting point is 01:17:33 It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. But our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 01:18:42 Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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