Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Andrew Tate Story

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Robert is joined again by Ian Johnson to continue to discuss Andrew Tate.  FOOTNOTES: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/108090691/chess-family-strives-to-keep-pressures/  https://youtu.be/bsu-IoE8J4A https://youtu.be/VIsKh-dtnQA  https://books.google.com/books?id=-4j9wgEACAAJ&newbks=0 https://www.insidesport.in/andrew-tate-what-is-top-g-andrew-tates-religion/  https://youtu.be/EpR9ucpGpWs https://youtu.be/UVUcv7yyJIA  https://youtu.be/IgdWYaz-6ZY https://youtube.com/shorts/RirKfcVP2OM?feature=share https://youtu.be/cI-Ps1NIU4w https://youtu.be/M-doheMG424 https://youtu.be/fFky34MAeGg https://youtu.be/JyNizUlYTC https://thecourseplace.net/product/andrew-tate-phd-program-full/  https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/who-is-andrew-tate-from-kickboxing-champ-to-accused-human-trafficker/ar-AA166CnO  https://web.archive.org/web/20220811143550/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynistic-world-of-tiktok-new-star https://youtu.be/LqGmS_9zCkU https://www.insider.com/andrew-tate-says-women-at-house-not-allowed-out-video-2023-1 https://archive.is/MEhRiOn  https://www.jointherealworld.com/ https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/andrew-tates-hospital-visit-sparks-conflicting-reports-about-his-health/ar-AA1684ty https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/andrew-tate-tiktok-fame-men-2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/30/andrew-tate-explainer-arrested-greta-misogyny/ https://rumble.com/v1gluzu-the-worst-things-about-being-rich-.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/andrew-tate-how-make-money-arrested-romania-b2256514.html https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/brothers-make-millions-using-webcam-26508739 https://archiIve.is/hAhhQ https://archive.is/lwViQ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ikrd/andrew-tate-hustlers-university https://www.vox.com/culture/2023/1/10/23547393/andrew-tate-toxic-masculinity-qa https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/02/03/mens-movement-stalks-the-wild-side/83d3e85f-1384-484c-8e43-c4e30e1229f4/   https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2021/12/a-snowy-poem-by-robert-bly/ https://ew.com/article/1991/04/19/robert-blys-mens-movement/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1967/12/21/protest/ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ikrd/andrew-tate-daria-gusa-instagram-dm?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharetwitter See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story 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. Oh, yeah! No, no, no! Sophie, Sophie! We ended the last episode where I was like, wow, you're such a great writer, that was so good. Thank you, Sophie. And then you come in and then you do that fucking shit.

Well, Sophie, you may not understand this because of your womanliness, but I was embodying the archetype of the magician-wild man. I don't... You're fired. That's fair, that's fair. Well, I have started drinking. Got a nice glass of Port Rue Talisker here. And I want to start this episode by giving a shout out to a friend of the pod,

former mayor of the city of Portland, Sam Adams. Now, y'all may not know Sam. I think he was briefly on the show Portlandia, but he was fired from being the mayor because he had a sexual relationship with a teenage staffer. And then got rehired by current mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, who's a giant piece of shit to be the mayor's body man, basically. And then this week Sam announced that he was retiring because he had an iron deficiency. And then Ted Wheeler told everyone,

no, he's retiring it because he wouldn't stop threatening and bullying women in the office. Both of you guys suck and it's very funny this happened. Also, I got to say, shout out to Sam Adams. Honestly, going from sexually harassing a teenager to being a bully to adult women. That's a step forward. Um, okay. Disagree, Sophie. You're fired, I don't know what else to say.

Look, one of the two things isn't to sex crime. So that's a real, real personal growth for former mayor of Portland, Sam Adams. Ted Wheeler, what the fuck is wrong with you? Look, honestly, fuck Sam Adams, he's a piece of shit. But incredible hiring decision from Ted Wheeler. Yeah, let's get the guy in here who had sex with a 17-year-old staffer. Let's get him back in city hall. We really need his insights.

Great work, Ted. It really shocked about, you know, how well-liked he is in the city of Portland. Yeah, I mean, he's not. But you can let him know how you feel about his decision to hire and then fire Sam Adams at Ted Wheeler on Twitter. Oh, remember when he got the tear gas thrown on him? I do remember that. That was nice. So, I started talking about Ted Wheeler and Sam Adams because they're both toxic men.

Today, we are finally getting into the direct personal story of one of the most toxic men of all time, Emery Andrew Tate III. Oh. That's quite a name. That's quite a name. Now, Emery Andrew Tate III was born in Washington, D.C. on December 1st, 1986. Now, that fancy name might lead you to think that he came from some like British-ass, British ass, noble family or some shit.

That sounds like a Duke's name to me. It's very formal. It sounds like old money for sure. Yeah. He is not. Now, most of the texture that we get on his childhood comes from Andrew himself, which is not ideal because he is a liar. But there's just not a lot of other.

Again, I haven't found, no one's done like a critical biography. There's not like a big, long New Yorker piece that really delves into his backstory. So I kind of had to do that myself to the best extent that I could do. Now, I did find one, and this is honestly the only texture you get on his childhood that I have come across, is from an article he wrote for a website that sells kickboxing gear. And the title of it is The Life of Andrew King Cobra Tate. So again, this is not a credible source, but the way in which he writes about his childhood and what he wants you to believe about it does tell you a lot about the man.

So we're still going to be covering it, but do not take this as literal truth. That should be obvious. Here's how he talks about his birth. I was born in Washington, D.C. at Walter Reed Army Hospital early one morning, December 1st, 1986. The doctor wanted to award me a perfect 10 on the birth scale, but settled on 9.5. So, already, already, that's the saddest thing anyone has ever bragged about. That's so pathetic. Absolutely heartbreaking.

Oh, my God. That's on somebody's fucking dating profile, for sure. Two weeks overdue, but I was nose-breathing already as the doctor held me upside down by my heels, and my right fist was inside of my mouth as I suckled. The doctor pinched my thigh to get a response, and I growled, knitting my brow, and trying to crane my head up to see who had attacked me. The doctor paled, shocked at my defensive powers. I did not cry.

Oh, my God, I hate this fucking guy. That's so funny, though. Bragging about how tough you were as a baby. As an infant. As a baby. Like, wow. Unbelievable. Incredible.

And I keep rereading what you just said, and it's... I'm going to tell you all right now, because, again, everything I found just kind of glosses over his childhood, because we don't have a lot of, like, detailed... Like, someone hasn't gone through an interview to shitload of people that he knew as a little kid or knew it, right? That hasn't happened yet, I'm sure it will. And I was thinking we were just going to have to brush over his childhood, and then I found this article he wrote about himself on a kickboxing website, and it made my week.

You're bragging. It made my week. You're bragging about your own birth, like you did fucking anything. So, if you're curious about Andrew's parentage, his mother, Eileen, is indeed English's shit, and she's a white lady. She worked as a catering assistant. His father is Emery Tate, Jr., and Emery, well, was Emery Tate, Jr. Emery Tate, Jr. was a black American man and a Chicago chess prodigy.

Actually, up until a year or two ago, Emery Tate was much more famous than Andrew Tate. We actually had, in our work chat, Mia was shocked to learn that Andrew Tate was Emery Tate's son. I had not heard of this guy, but I don't care for chess. Or for, yeah, chess, yeah. The Washington Post describes Emery Tate, Jr. as a trailblazer for black chess players. He's one of the first, I don't know, he may have been the first super famous, really well-known black professional chess players. Again, I don't understand chess. I don't understand why you would play a war game that doesn't include orcs,

but a lot of people who love chess say that he was one of the most fun players to watch. I did read a lot of writing fans and Reddit and stuff talking about Emery Tate, and one thing they also do agree on is he was just super entertaining to watch play chess. Quick, quick cue. Why does, when you type in Emery Tate into Google, why does the first suggested thing come up as CIA? What? I typed Emery Tate into Google, and the first thing that auto-fills is CIA. Hmm.

He was in the CIA. Yeah, well, Andrew says that he was in the CIA. Is that what's happening? Yeah, so he was in the Air Force as a sergeant, and he served as a linguist. There's not actually hard evidence that he was in the CIA that I have seen. Like, this is based on, again, Andrew is kind of, and we're about to get into this. He's really plumping his dad's reputation to make him into, like, not just a chess guy, but a badass. So may or may not be somebody who worked in the CIA.

I have not seen any independent confirmation that he worked in the CIA. Maybe he did. A lot of guys in that period who, like, did some sort of, like, weird work where they would have just been listed as a State Department employee. So it's not impossible, but I have not come across confirmation that he was in the CIA. So the Washington Post, in most sources who write about Andrew's dad, will call him a grandmaster at chess. This is not entirely true. I mean, this is not true. He was an international master, which is a lesser rank. He never quite made it to grandmaster.

I found, again, chess discussions online by nerds about chess who will say that he didn't make it to grandmaster, mainly because he wasn't able to, he wasn't willing to do, like, certain things that you have to do to do that. But he was, he had a really good record. He regularly beat grandmasters. Some people say he was as good at Bobby Fisher. Again, I have no way to evaluate any of this. Robert taking a big anti-chess approach here. Again, there's no battle tanks in chess.

There's no Titans with chainsaw hands. The ultimate game of strategy is still Warhammer 40,000. I think we can all agree on that. Yes, of course. It's been true for generations. But anyway, Emery Tate, great at chess. At chess history and wrote a book about him, which gives us some idea as to where Andrew Tate got his sense of style and personal branding.

The title was triple exclam with three exclamation points. The life and games of Emery Tate, chess warrior. Which is kind of fun. I think he literally died at the table in 2015 playing a game of chess. Like, this man, this motherfucker loved chess. He wears a white fedora with a gold band on the cover, which also gives you a little bit of insight into where Andrew Tate gets some of his taste in style. And Andrew idolizes his father and he doesn't particularly,

I'm not going to pretend to know the man's emotional state, but in his public writing, he particularly celebrates his dad. In that kickboxing website article, 2022 Andrew Tate noted this about the male side of his family background. My grandfather, Emery A. Tate Esquire, fought in World War II before becoming a lawyer in Chicago during racially charged times. As a black man, this shaped his worldview and he was very strict, very hard indeed. As a boy, he pushed a plow with mule through the hard clay dirt of Georgia,

forced to work on the farm. At age 12, he pushed a plow that only grown men normally handled. Then he ran away, never to return to the farm. He did some bare-knuckled fist fights as a young man and distinguished himself hand-to-hand during the war years. And again, I'm sure parts of that are true. Everything about his dad and his grandpa always veers into how good they were at hand-to-hand combat, and there is no evidence of this.

Like, the stuff about working on a farm? Yeah, that seems plausible. The stuff about how he fought the Nazis hand-to-hand? I don't know, maybe, but that actually didn't happen often. That just gives me like, my dad can beat up your dad vibes. Yeah. It sounds like something like a kid would say. He bragged about his own birth.

I mean, it's like, you don't have to lie about him fist-fighting Nazis. It's okay if he just shot them. A lot of dudes did and that was rad. He doesn't have to be great at punching just because you grew up to punch people for a living. That's kind of a weird thing to focus on, Andrew. But he loves talking about how good his dad and grandpa were at fighting. Quote, his son, my dad, Emery A. Tate, Jr. was a young athlete, learning wrestling in school and developing the early forms of Tate Shinkai strikes as a youth,

which I guess is his own martial arts thing. His job in the military for 11 years took him on many adventures, and little is known for sure, except that my dad never loses. He is my role model in many ways, even as I write poetry like he does. So, I mean, also, I think his dad would have been in the military. Let me double-check here. Yeah. During Vietnam, which would mean that he did in fact lose.

So, sorry, Andrew, but I don't want to be mean to Emery Tate, because, well, this is a little bit his fault. So, yeah, the closest thing that Andrew has written or said that comes close to being emotionally impactful at all is when he writes about his father. I will give him that. He writes with some amount of actual sincerity about his feelings towards his dad. And I'm going to give you an example of that now. I never learned to cry for attention.

I only used grunts to indicate hunker or discomfort, but mostly I was silent. I had a large new crib, but most every night I spent to sleep on my dad's chest. He would place me there and sleep still, never moving in the night, and our heartbeats were and are as one. I just picture a baby like, Yeah, just too angry to cry. Now, bits like this do contrast with passages where Andrew will relate stories about his dad that sound kind of abusive. I learned to defend myself soon after I could walk.

Long before my first punch into a pillow, I learned to balance how to step backward after being pushed gently in the chest. Dad made a game of it, a game which ended with a savage shove across a living room, sending me into a dramatic backpedal. I stopped myself with my head one inch from cracking into the far wall. That was the final test. Kind of sounds like your dad was just shoving you because he was pissed, Andrew. Yeah, that kind of sounds not great, bro. Do you need to talk about this, man?

Yeah. No talking, just... Just angry grunts. I mean, look, if I was going to raise a child, I'd be lying if I said that the shoving method didn't hold some appeal, because I do a lot of other things by shoving. It's how I move my furniture. It's how I record podcasts. I'm shoving a walking desk around the room right now.

Actually, Daniel spends like 13 hours a week editing that out before we can even get the audio off to Chris. That's most of his job. It's really... It's a good part of our workflow. Ian, remind me to tell you about the time when Robert got a foot massager and he refused to not use it while recording. Still haven't, Sophie. You wouldn't use the bad boy in recording. And it would go directly into the mic.

There's no hazard pay. That's enough. Truly, don't take it out. Don't plug it in. I'm sorry, Ian. That was my fault for bringing it up. That was your fault for bringing it up. But more importantly, not my fault, because nothing is. Speaking of toxic masculinity, let's get back to Andrew Tate. Cool.

So Andrew was raised initially in the DC area and then Indiana, and he seemed to want to follow in his father's footsteps. He started playing chess at age three. He started competing at five, and he eventually competed in adult tournaments while still a child. And this is where we get the very first news article on Andrew Tate, who at that point was referred to as Emery A. Tate. It is a local news piece. This is the first objective-ish piece of journalism that it's not just him writing about his background. And it's really the only insight we get into his childhood that doesn't come directly from a Tate. It's, again, a local news piece.

The news in his town, which is South Bend, was talking about the release. There was a movie coming out about Bobby Fisher, who I guess was good at chess. And so they were writing about that, and they wanted a human interest piece. They talked about young Andrew Tate, who was six when they wrote this article. He had started a chess club in South Bend with some other kids, and he had taught them chess because he wanted people to play against. It includes the article, a couple of quotes that are interesting. Every kid wants to be like his dad, the elder Tate said, but father had recently limited sons playing time, encouraging other activities. I don't think that a kid his age should spend so much time playing chess.

As a parent, I'd like to see him become a top level player, but I realized there's so much more to life than just chess. He learned how to swim this summer, and he plays with his friends and stuff like that. Andrew, however, says he plays because he's bored all the time. Most of the time I am bored, and that's the only thing I want to do most. So, yeah, interesting. There's some insight into the actual kid there. That is a response I understand from a kid. I am bored all the time. This is the only thing that I like. It also gives you a little bit of a look into...

For whatever reason, one of the things I take away from this article is that Emery Tate didn't want his son to follow him as a chess guy. It might have been some insecurity about not wanting his kid to be better than him. Or it may have just been, understandably, like, you know, I never made a lot of money playing chess. I want you to do something else with your life. I don't want you to, like, be locked into this thing. I don't know. There's some interesting questions that answers or asks. The author of this article notes that Andrew had just competed in his first adult chess tournament, where he had... And again, Andrew's later on, when he starts putting out propaganda, trying to make himself into a badass, will point out that, like, at age six, he was playing in adult chess tournaments.

He did lose three out of five games. And his dad eventually had to pull him out of the tournament because, quote, he got very upset because he thought he was failing. So Emery withdrew his son from the game to, quote, save him from crying in front of all those people. And we're not keyed into what precisely happened there. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought he didn't cry. Why are we worried about that? It sure seems like his dad said he did. Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Fact check.

Again, you know, I'm going to guess one of two things happened there. Either Andrew was just throwing a fit because he was losing and his dad was like, well, you can't be at a chess tournament if you're going to throw a fit when you lose. Or Andrew was doing okay and wanted to keep playing and his dad was angry that he was losing and didn't want him to keep, like, risk losing again. Even though three to two is not a bad record for a six-year-old playing chess. Yeah, he's six playing against adults. Either way, we don't know which of those is the case.

Either possibility is interesting to me. Andrew's parents had another boy, Tristan, two years after Andrew was born, and the two brothers have been inseparable their whole lives. They played chess together, but Tristan never competed. They would later kickbox together, but Tristan never competed. He's like always there, but he also doesn't seem to get to live a full life because he exists purely in his brother's shadow as like an agent of his greatness. It's kind of a weird relationship for Tristan,

but I don't think he's self-aware enough to understand that it's weird. One photo in that news article shows six-year-old Andrew focused in the picture frame, face taking up a third of the frame, playing chess, while just Tristan's hand is visible in the right third. And as the brothers grew up, Andrew would consistently stay in focus while Tristan would always just sort of be off to the side. And that's true to this day, right? I don't have it in the script. We could play it.

There's a very funny video of his brother telling him to go out to film their cars for this video they're doing about how nice their life is. And then when his brother goes out, Andrew cuts the feed just to be like, Haha, fuck you, this is my show. I don't have to let you do anything if I don't want to. And it's weirdly abusive because they're both men who were in their thirties. Like Tristan, you don't have to take that. Things got harder for them after South Bend

because their mom and dad, it's not a good marriage and they divorce. I have found very little to tell about why that divorce happened. We can infer though that it was an extremely painful time for Andrew and this is all he's willing to write about it. Dad was working minimum wage jobs over time since his military career had been ended. Both mom and dad worked so that we could survive. Things became so hard that we decided to go to England and try a life there, only minus dad.

And he's not willing to write like, you know, the marriage didn't work out or, and again, we don't know why I'm going to avoid like theorizing what might have happened there. But this is clearly he idolizes his dad and he's taken away from him forever basically. And obviously mom might have had a perfectly good reason for doing that. I don't want to try to be critical. We just actually don't really know. But this is definitely like the fact that he's not willing to even acknowledge the basics of what happened kind of suggests this leaves a pretty profound impact on young Andrew. So by age 11, he was in his words,

man of the house looking after his younger brother and now sister. The town in England they live in was called Luton and it is still, I think it's usually pronounced by English people, Luton, but you know, you know how they are. I didn't think we would get an accent this episode, but I'm glad we did. Or from Luton. That's how they sound. Robert, you know how much that upsets? When I do my accent, should I do my Boston accent to get him back on board? Yeah, your Boston accent is really good.

Oy, Ian from Boston and Oyloi, Kathy and Shilda. Yeah, that's my Boston. That's my Ben Affleck. An Australian person underwater being strangled. Boston is just, just Western Australia, Sophie. Anyways, Robert, it's time for an ad break. It is time for an ad break. So go to Dink and Do-nuts and have you a coffee.

Robert, it's so bad. I think it's pretty good. It's so bad that it's impressive. I feel like that takes a lot of skill and control to be that bad. Again, I'll take any kind of praise. I don't care. Bad attention, good attention. It's all the same to me. Welcome to our podcast about toxic masculinity. 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. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. 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. 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? 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. 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 Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. So Luton is, it's not an easy place to grow up. It is in fact close to, if not the very hardest place to grow up in England. It is one of the poorest places in the country. It has been repeatedly voted the worst place to live in England. I actually found a poll from like seven days before I read the script from Bedfordshire Live that voted at the worst place to live in England. It is a tough town. Andrew and his family have basically no money.

They live in public housing and they are just barely getting by. We know this for certain. Like this is a confirmed fact about his upbringing. Now, Andrew again, definitely acknowledges that they were poor. This is actually an important part of his own self mythology. But he also makes some claims that we do not know for sure are true. He claims he got a job as soon as I was old enough, although he does not say when that was. Quote, as soon as I was old enough, I got a job moving 80 pound boxes of frozen fish into the market at 5am.

Then a full day of school. Weekends found me at the market stall where I perfected my knife skills, flawlessly filleting fish at blinding speeds. After some time, I never cut my hands at all, not even a nick. I learned to play drums. And yeah, that's that's interesting. I'm sure some again, I'm sure pieces of all of this are true. I don't know about his knife skills or the blinding speed, but I'm sure pieces of this are true. Now, Trist or Andrew, interestingly, says that the only one of them who got into a real world fight when they were kids was his brother Tristan.

Some kid was bullying him and he beat him up. I don't know if that story is true or not, but it is worth noting that Andrew claims in this article, I have never struck a person in anger. Now, we know that's not true because he has beaten at least what like, yeah, we know that's not true. We will talk about that later, but this is the claim that he is making in this thing that he writes in like 2022. When he was a young adult, he was introduced to a kickboxing trainer and he started training, as did his brother soon after. By 2008, he was the seventh highest ranked heavyweight kickboxer in Britain. A year later, he won his first championship and became the number one ranked kickboxer in Europe for his division. Two years later, in 2012, he was the second best heavyweight kickboxer on the planet.

That sounds very impressive, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, second best kickboxer on the planet, that means you can kick to death anybody or one guy. That is not what that actually means. So, I'm going to be honest, all of the articles about him will just say he was the second best light heavyweight. Sometimes they'll just say the second best kickboxer on the planet. They'll talk about his championships and like list the numbers. I was the first drafted this actually, I just wrote that and then moved on was like, yeah, he's really good at kickboxing.

Lots of bad people are really good at something. I figured that that was true. I looked at his Wikipedia page, which says he has like 79 wins and nine losses and lists his championships. And he did win a bunch of what are called world championships. However, that's not how boxing works because I also looked up a bunch of discussions of boxing fans analyzing his actual performance. And one thing they'll point out is that, well, there's not just one guy who's the best at kickboxing. Kickboxing is actually an incredibly fragmented sport and there are a bunch of different, I don't know if they call them leagues or whatever. There's a bunch of different like types of kickboxing championships and some are more impressive than others, right?

Some are people who are really good at kickboxing. Some are people who are more amateur and Andrew kind of stayed doing the more amateur stuff. And he was really good at beating amateur kickboxers. One of the critiques people will note who are into kickboxing is that the league that he became world heavy or light heavyweight champion in only covers Europe. So you guys might notice there's a couple of places that are the world that aren't Europe that I assume. I assume there's some kickboxers in those places. At least one or two. Yeah, at least a couple.

The other thing they'll point out is that of all of these fights that he had and he claims like 79 wins, they can only verify like 40-something fights because, and this is, that may not mean that he's lying. It's all of the ways that this shit gets reported are weird, right? And there's so many different weird leagues and shit. He might be lying about the total number of wins and games he was in, but of the things that we can verify, only, this is something kickboxing fans will point out, only five of his fights are against guys with Wikipedia pages. And that may sound silly, but it means like guys who are notable enough that they have a good enough at kickboxing. So most of his fights were against like nobodies or amateur guys who just, you know, fight on the weekends or something.

Of the notable five fights he was in, he lost three of them. The allegation kickboxing fans will make is that he mostly fought amateurs to pad his record. Now, everyone agrees he's still, that's still pretty good at kickboxing, but he is not the second, he was never the second best on the planet Earth at kickboxing. That's just simply not the case. And I think it's fair to say, yeah, he's pretty good at kickboxing. He was never as good as he claimed, and this is a part of the self mythologizing that he engages in, kind of vastly exaggerating his competency at kicking people a bunch with his feet. So, yeah, it's also worth noting that like the level Tate actually was at did not pay terribly well. The per fight amount is impressive.

He could make between 50 and $100,000 per fight that he was in, but he was having like one or two fights per year, which is not terrible income, but you're paying for a coach, you're paying for gym access, you're paying for the medical care that comes from this. And he's going to have several serious injuries, so he's not living well off of this salary. And in fact, he and his brother are living in a cheap apartment, I think in Bedfordshire and eating as cheaply as they possibly can in order to afford to keep being in kickboxing, because it's like that's kind of what it is when you're competing at this kind of awkward level that he's at. And Tate relates aspects of this himself in a video from 2022. And I'm going to play this so everyone can get a look and listen to the guy before we can go any further. This is from his video on rumble. This is his like you like rumble is right wing YouTube and his channel is called Tate speech as in hate speech, but you guys get it right. Here it is.

First the first clip. World level athletes with no money. We invented a dish that was so bland, we called it flavor, because it was the only way you could add flavor to the dish. So it had the name flavor, but it was extremely bland. And it was white rice, frozen peas, because they're cheap, kidney beans, kidney beans have more protein per 100 grams, grams than minced beef. Did you know that? I found out when I was broke, walking the aisles at a grocery store trying to find the cheapest protein money can buy. Could it bring myself to be a vegetarian? So I'd add a little bit of meat, minced beef. And if I was really rich, I'd have hot sauce.

And I actually suspect he's probably not lying too much there. That seems like a reasonable story. And I know some people who are professional athletes at that similar awkward level where you're like a pro, but you're not rich who are like, yeah, you do whatever it takes to like stay fueled. And that means cooking giant pots of like, not delicious things just to stay anyway. That seems broadly speaking, like he's probably not lying entirely about that. Now he is lying about he and his brother being world class athletes. You might say he was that's going to be up to what you define that as, but Tristan is not competing in kickboxing. He is working as like a coach kind of, although people will criticize that in ways that are too weirdly nuanced and involve knowledge of kickboxing.

So we're just going to move on. Now, the height of his career as a guy who kicks people for money comes in like 2012, 2013. 2013 is his last big championship and not long after that he decides to leave professional sports as a full time thing. Injuries play a major role in this. Tate does not like talking about vulnerability, but he was worse at taking hits than he likes to pretend. He suffered detached retinas in several fights and had to have surgery for his eyes. So he was like, I mean, again, and again, that's the I'm pointing this out because he will never admit it. Like if you're a professional kickboxer at some point, you're going to get hurt enough that you can't keep doing kickboxing. Like we all saw like Muhammad Ali go from, you know, Muhammad Ali to, you know, a guy who has severe injuries as a result of being a boxer.

All this stuff's bad for you. If you quit at a certain point or it destroys your body and mind the same way that like football or whatever it does. I mean, we all just got a reminder of that a couple of weeks ago with the guy who had a heart attack on the. Yeah, this is all pretty like normal sports stuff, right? Like you are when you're watching guys do these kind of combat sports. You are watching people like mortgage their bodies in the hope of getting rich and Tate kind of had to accept at a certain point. My body is going to give out before I get rich doing this. So, you know, that's the thing that he recognizes and he decides I need to let my most professional athletes do.

I need to find something else I can do that's easier on my body that I can support myself with. You know, some people open car dealerships, some people decide to, you know, sell ads for different things and be pitchman. Some people go into professional baseball. But Tristan decided to become a webcam sex pimp. So that's it. That's an interesting call. I do think history would have been different and fascinating ways if that's the choice Michael Jordan had made. Sophie, don't give me that look.

Anyway, what that I'm just saying that look, you deserve it. I usually do. So for three years, they run a rapidly expanding business, finding women to act as cam operators. Now, this is not an inherently dishonest business, I guess. If you are, you know, building a studio and building like a platform by which you can, you know, bring these these cam workers attention and they understand their contracts and like it's a reasonably fair split. I don't have an ethical issue with building a company that allows sex workers to do cam work, right? That's that's fine. But the business that Tate and Tristan operated was not fine.

It was fundamentally pretty toxic. No shit. The grunt brothers didn't have a. All right, cool. Yeah, I'm going to quote now from an article in the mirror, which is not an ideal source, but it's who entered them about this and I don't know why they would lie about something this shady and gross because it makes them seem like sex criminals quote. Some of their customers fall for the belief that they can have a real relationship with the women they see on screen. But Tristan brazenly told the Sunday Mirror, it's all a big scam and bragged that he doesn't feel any guilt because no one cares and it's their problem, not mine. The more punters hand over the more models earn.

Some women will claim to have crippling university debt, a family member in need of private health care or a dream of moving to the UK, sometimes even telling men they want to meet them. Whatever the excuse is, it is a lie, Tristan said. So he tells he tells a story in this article about this guy who wanted to give a cam operator $20,000 his life savings. And Tristan's like, and I try I talked him out of it. I told him, you know, he shouldn't do that. She was actually making good money. And then he came back a couple of months later and fell in love with another. And this time I was like, yeah, man, we'll take your money, which definitely a lie.

Tristan and Andrew Tate have never turned down 20 grand that a desperate man offered them for lies. Yeah, there's no way they're trying to talk somebody out of that. There's no way. Absolutely not. That's their bread and butter. Yeah, I am going to continue that quote from the mirror. But first, you know what I am going to continue first is capitalism. Oh, I am.

I am keeping this nightmare engine alive on my own by advertising for products on this podcast. So on your own. That's it. That's I am I am the lynchpin holding the global economy together on your own. Look, after Facebook fell apart, it's just me, baby. Oh, my God. Name another company, Sophie. It's just this podcast.

Just run the just run the fucking Raytheon. Just run the ads. Just run the ads. He's out of control. 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. 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. 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 iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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.

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. 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. 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. We are back. So, I'm going to continue that quote from the Sunday Mirror of Tristan Tate being interviewed. He believes he is beyond the reach of the authorities because of two lines in the terms and conditions. He said, one is, broadcasting is for entertainment purposes only. That means if a model says she has a sick dog or a sick grandma, it doesn't have to be true. The next is that all cash given to models is a voluntary sign of gratitude for their time broadcasting. Now, I'm not a lawyer.

That kind of sounds like they're taking their money. It does sound like you're taking their money. That said, he may be in the right there. The Mirror did a journalistic thing and they reached out to a lawyer to be like, is this true? And the lawyer said, maybe, but also generally UK laws say that you can't defraud people and take their money on fraudulent terms. But also the laws haven't kept pace with technology. There's a good chance he was in a legal gray area. They did not get charged. So, probably is fair to say they were in enough of a legal gray area that they were reasonably safe. And to be perfectly honest, I suspect they could have done this indefinitely if Andrew Tate hadn't been a sex criminal, which is what we're getting to here.

So, Andrew Tate later wrote this on his personal website slash shady business teaching men to run their own webcam porn studios. This is a thing he does later, but this is how he talks about his webcam business and how he makes it work. How did I become rich? Webcam. I've been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade. I've had over 75 girls work for me and my business model is different than 99% of webcam studio owners. Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time and if all my girlfriends, none were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me. My job was getting women to fall in love with me. Literally, that was my job.

My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she'd do anything I'd say. And then get her on webcam so we could become rich together. Whether you agree or disagree with what I did with their loyalties, submission and love for me doesn't matter. You cannot reject the results and the results are simple. My girlfriends would do more for me than 99.9% of men's wives would do for them. So, what does that make y'all think? That's disgusting. That's one of the grossest things I've ever heard. That is really gross.

That's fucking horrible. And like voluntarily listed on his own site. It's just fucking. Yeah, he bragged about this. Now, this is potentially him describing sex trafficking, right? That's what it sounds like. If the women are not getting, again, there's not like a law that says you can't have someone fall in love with you and then contract with them to do sex work, right? That's not a thing that there's a law against.

However, if they are not getting paid for it and if they are not being allowed freedom of movement, well, then what happens is that you have like entrapped them and you are sex trafficking them, right? This is what's called law enforcement calls this the lover boy method, right? Where you get someone to fall in love with you. And also this is, this goes on. This is a very old tactic in like, shall we say pimping? Where like, yeah, you make a woman feel like or a person be in love independent on you. And then you kind of emotionally abuse them into doing sex work. This is a thing that happens that is like a recognized part of a criminal enterprise.

Now, obviously getting charges based on those words on his website is going to be hard to do. But just kind of the stuff that he had published for a while was enough that people at the time should have known that he was up to a what was a likely illegal business. Now, if you came across articles about Tate in 2021 or 2022 and they went into any detail about his webcam career, the most you were likely to learn was what the mirror wrote here. After three years, they moved to Romania saying the UK had gone downhill. They have women on a number of CD sites operators take a 40% cut and the rest goes to the studio. So that's that's what they claimed for years had happened. Like, you know, we did it in the UK and then the UK got woke and so we switched to Romania. That is not what actually happened.

So they started running this can business in 2012. Three years after 2012 when they moved to Romania, it's 2015. Now, just a few days ago after his arrest, a story dropped that made it clear why they actually left the UK and it had nothing to do with wokeness or the country going downhill. Andrew Tate was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse in 2015. Vice broke the story, quote. Two women told Vice World News they were violently abused. One raped the other repeatedly strangled by Andrew Tate and that UK police in the Crown prosecution service mishandled their case, leaving him free to rise to global fame on the back of his unchecked misogyny. Police took four years to pass their investigation to the Crown prosecution service whose job involves assessing whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction and which point the CPS declined to prosecute.

So that's the reality of why they had to leave the UK. Yeah, he's a fucking vile, disgusting human being. And it makes the timeline makes a lot more sense when you know that when he's like, yeah, we had to bounce because, you know, things just got to woke for us in Romania. And he would also, he later made the claim that like I had to leave Romania because in the UK, a man can get accused of rape for anything, right? And, you know, Romania, it's much harder to get accused of rape. And so I moved to Romania not because I'm a rapist, but because I like freedom. No, man, you were you were accused of rape by multiple women and then investigated and you decided to leave because you didn't know if the UK was going to come for your ass at some point. And the story is actually a bit more fucked up than that because back in 2014, a woman who vice refers to as Amelia filed a police report alleging sexual and physical abuse by Tate.

She claims that she and Tate met in 2009, they were friendly for years until 2013, which is when Tate was transitioning away from kickboxing to webcam pimping. The two decided to go out on a series of dates at the end of that year and after several weeks they were in her room when Andrew forced himself on her. Now, she describes him stopping like she tells him to stop when he starts like trying to go to have sex and she tells him that she doesn't want to have sex. And he tells her she says that he like sits quietly for a moment and then she asks him what's going on and he says I'm debating whether I should rape you or not. What the fuck? Oh boy, howdy. It's it's bad. Within an instant he changed who he was.

He wasn't the same Andrew that I knew that was funny that would make me laugh. It was like his eyes went and I didn't have a clue who that person was. That's terrifying, disgusting. That's horrible. I'm so sorry that happened to her. Yeah, and it's so here's one of the things about this is she goes to the cops. He rapes her and it takes they have after that point she consents to sex. She says a couple of times over the next six months, which is not uncommon in situations like this, but eventually she goes to the police to make a complaint.

And the police are like, do you want to do you want to proceed with charges right because that's an option that you have in this case. She decides obviously I don't I hopefully I don't think I have to explain this to this audience but like there are a lot of horrible personal consequences that can come to charging your rapist right to pursuing with criminal charges. She decides and there is and this seems like a positive things there's an option in the UK where you can just log a complaint and say this guy raped me without proceeding with criminal charges, which she decides she doesn't want to do at this point. So that's what she does. And then that this is again 2013 2015 is when those two women who worked in his camp studio push press charges against him and the police and this is a positive step it's about to get less positive. The police find out oh there's a report locked against this guy two years earlier and they reach out to Amelia and they're like more women have come forward saying that this guy assaulted them. Do you want your charges do you want your allegations basically to be added to theirs in this case that we're building right. And she says yes and she hands over her phone to the cops which contained numerous audio notes because she had told Andrew and like texts and stuff like hey you know like you rape me that's why I don't want to know you anymore. And he had responded to her and he had responded to her using voice notes where he admitted to what he had done.

And yeah, I'm gonna play a couple of notes of Andrew Tate here for you because before we hear him in his like 15 year old boy influencer voice. We should hear how he talks to somebody like Amelia when he doesn't think it's going to be on the news. Am I a bad person because the more you didn't like it the more I enjoyed it. I fucking loved how much you hated it turned me on. Why am I like that. Why I am one of the most dangerous men on this planet sometimes you forget exactly how lucky you were to get fucked by me. Would you rather me pin you down and make you do things you didn't like or would you rather fuck you didn't like that I was thinking I can do whatever I want to you. That's what it is I'm the smartest person on this fucking planet.

Are you seriously so offended I strangled you a little bit you didn't fucking pass out. Chill the fuck out Jesus Christ I thought you were cool what's wrong with you. Oh my god. So that's not great. That's not great. That's so upsetting. That's so upsetting. Yeah.

It's pretty bad. He's a pretty bad dude. Just a vile disgusting despicable waste of space. Like again normally self diagnosis is the thing we avoid on this but like that's just very obvious textbook narcissism. I am the smartest man in the world you know like he is it's not hard to see what's going on with this guy. And I don't know his dad or like how that all went down but there's there's there's this if you look at the way he talks about his dad and his grandpa there's this need to like associate himself with greatness. And I don't know like every everything that's going on here makes sense but it's also so bleak and I. I don't know that there's probably a better a better writer and thinker than me might be able to draw a more.

Trenching connection between the kind of stuff Bly was talking about about how lack of connection to other men and to older men and how not knowing what your place is in society leads young men. To feel disconnected and that that can be the root of some bad behavior and the fact that Tate. Idolizes his dad and a separated from him and becomes so needful to kind of convince others of his greatness while using violence and threats against them. I don't know that there's a connection there but it's it's I think kind of worth. Thinking about I guess and in the same continuum I don't know this is still stuff like that I'm kind of muddling through to. But it's it's not it's not surprising to me that this guy. Has this. This kind of obsession with his because that's what it's about right it's it's never about like that he wanted you know sex or whatever it's about the power.

It's about power he had this and it's about the fact that she didn't want to have sex with him is like. An attempt from her to exercise agency and no one else in the world gets to exercise agency just Andrew Tate. Right like that's the way this guy thinks about things. I don't know there's a lot going on there worth worth pondering and I guess we will ponder it for a while while we wait for part three of this series where we will talk about the fallout from these cases. And the the social media presence that Tate builds when again nobody knows this at that I mean this this this young woman knows it and a couple of police officers know it. But as a spoiler the police don't proceed with the charges. And in fact they it's really fucked up the police say that they believe her or Amelia says what she said to device when they talked to her is that the police told her that they believed her claims but they couldn't go forward with the case because there was a shred of doubt about Tate's guilt. Now there's a shred of doubt and see it does seem like he admitted it here.

There's some fucked up cop gaslighting here because they tell her like look going through the process of pressing charges against a rapist is so traumatic to the woman that we don't do it unless there's no shred of doubt. They're trying to protect you from the ugly court which is like cop gaslighting is on another level. That's that's so disheartening. I'm so I'm so sorry Amelia that's yeah it's fucking bleak. This whole story is bleak. After this point Andrew and Tristan move to Romania they move their sex trafficking webcam business to Romania and we will pick up that story in part three where it gets a lot bleaker in some ways but also we get to make fun of Andrew Tate videos so you know something to look forward to take your wins where you can get them kiddos. What do we who are we who are we here.

We're the bad boys of podcasting obviously. Robert you're I think I think both shows are actually sold out but you will be at SF sketch fest. This coming weekend and you'll be doing a behind the bastard show and you will also be doing really be Francesca Fiorentini yet. The situation show yeah great. Internet machine should check that out if you haven't write something. Why yes Robert it is a week from when we are recording. All right well we will finish recording the Andrew Tate episodes and then I will figure out what the fuck I'm doing for this live show that apparently a bunch of you assholes have decided to show up at God damn you. Thank you all for buying tickets.

Before we close out I want to thank again April Clark and Grace Freud of Girl God the Girl God podcast both great comedians they have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February 25th people can get tickets for that at girlgodshow.com. They were on the early version of part of this but I had an emergency and we had to bounce and now we are recording this late at night because it is the only way that we can make this show work in a way that is we are contractually obligated to. Thank you April and Grace thank you Ian and Sophie for being guests on my show last minute and yeah you're fucking welcome Robert thank you thank you. Everyone else can go to hell though. 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. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space. Well I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story 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 I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.