If I Speak - 38: Why is Andrew Tate’s manosphere so seductive? w/ Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Moya and Ash are joined by the authors of Clown World, a new book exposing Andrew Tate’s grip on his followers around the world, to talk about why patriarchy is so seductive. Plus, advice for a special one who is drowning under their workload. Email your missed connections and dilemmas to [e-mail] Music by Matt […]

Hello, welcome to If I Speak with me, Moya Lothie-McLean. I have with me my co-host, she likes to say, co-pilot. Who are you? I am Andrew Tate for the purposes of today's show. That's because we're not alone. That was Ash Sarker talking as well, by the way. Yeah, we are not alone. We have guests, not just any guests, two people who've spent four years hanging out

with one of the most notorious men on the internet. I wanted to say planet but I'm not sure that's accurate so we've gone with internet. Their names are Matt Shea and Jamie Tarsen and they are journalists who've written a book all about their time with Andrew Tate. It's called Clown World, four years inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere. Hi both of you. Can you just as a starter tell us what Andrew Tate's Manosphere. Hi, both of you. Can you just, as a starter, tell us what Andrew Tate's bootcamp smells like and is it links Africa? It smells like a pretty cheap aftershave

mixed with sweat, I would say, but like that incredibly overpowering aftershave that you cannot escape when you're in the room with it. That's incredible. How did this come about? How did, you know, give us the brief backstory. Yeah, the brief backstory, both Matt and I were working at Vice,

making documentaries there. We both made a lot of films about sort of, you know, organized criminals, social media influencers, conspiracy theories, cults, these kinds of things. And a friend and colleague of ours contacted us, basically saying that her best friend's younger brother had become obsessed with this guy, Andrew Tate, so obsessed that he had just spent £3,000 to join his secret society called The War Room.

I watched a couple of Andrew Tate's videos. This was back in 2019 when they had about 3,000 views on YouTube. I was one, really shocked by the level of misogyny, but then two shocked that a 21 year old British boy had paid thousands of pounds to join what was starting to kind of look like a cult. So me and Matt dived straight into the story there, started getting access to Andrew Tate. And in the sort of three years that we first started hanging out with him, he became incredibly famous. How did you get access to him? I slid into his DMs, how all great things start. I slid into Andrew Tate's DMs on Instagram and I

said, hey, my name is... The same way you two got access to him. The way all good things start. I slid into his DMs said, hey, I'm Jamie, I'm a journalist from Vice, would be interested in making a documentary about you. He immediately replied back saying like, how do I know you're from Vice? We got on the phone. We had about probably about an hour phone call that kind of peaked and troughed between him being like very complimentary and excited to calling me like a liberal cuck who was responsible for the downfall of the world. And it ended with him basically saying like, I don't necessarily want you to film my war room, which was this secret organization

we wanted to get access to. But he was like, you can come and film me and my brother, millionaire webcam playboy lifestyle in Romania, I'll show you like the mafia lifestyle. He was very, very braggadocious and like seemingly happy for us to come at that point. But you did end up filming the war room, which we will get onto, but first I think you have to go through the hazing ritual of if I speak, which is Ash, tell them.

The hazing ritual is Vogue's 73 questions, but we don't actually have the IP rights to that nor do we have time for 73 questions, so it's actually just three. So question one for Matt and for Jamie, favourite potato dish? have the IP rights to that, nor do we have time for 73 questions, so it's actually just three. So question one for Matt and for Jamie, favorite potato dish? Fries. Is that a dish? Yeah.

It is a dish. French fries? It's a dish. French fries is a dish. French fries. That's objectively the best potato dish. Otherwise you're lying. I would say chips, but to be specific, chips made with Cyprus potatoes. My family of Turkish Cyprus and like that style of chip just outbeats everyone.

So I know that's like very extra, but can't beat my Nene's chips. What's the difference between the taste of it? Has more Cyprus potato is banging. It's unbelievable. So like when you bake them, they go really fluffy. But I think they also have like a bit more starch in them. So they go much crispier on the outside. But it's why like if you ever get chips in Cyprus,

I don't know if you've been there. But they taste, they're another level. They're another level. Okay, question two. Hold tight, Palmer's green. Like I'm so glad I was introduced to a separate potato in my youth. Question two, tell us a knock knock joke.

Oh God, that's actually really tough. Everyone knows a knock knock joke. No, I'm listening to that question. I was like, this is one of the hardest questions you've ever asked on this point. A knock knock joke, no one knows a knock knock joke. I don't think I've told one in like 15 years, if that. What?

Matt, you've got to start us off. The only one I know is... Is it offensive? No, no, no, no, no. Okay. We're gonna get canceled. The only one I know is mainly geared towards children. It goes...

Knock, knock. Who's there? Who's there? Oh, wait, wait. No, that's not a knock, knock knock. Who's there? Who's there? Oh wait, wait, no, that's not a knock knock joke. Oh my God, I was right. It's a completely different format. It's a completely different format. I think this question is void.

I think this question is null and void because I think this form is actually kind of extinct. Let's say that, that would really help me out. No, no, no, no. I thought you were doing like a really meta like Harold Pinter knock knock joke. So I was there for the pause. Like you actually had me. Let's go to the next question. I think that question is so void. I'm sorry to say. Third and final question is, has your experience of doing this massive Andrew Tate project given you more or less hope in the

practice of journalism to expose the truth and change people's minds? My like depressingly honest answer is probably less hope at the moment. I don't know if that feels the same way. No, I mean, journalism is is is kind of all you have that and the slow moving cogs of the justice system to fight against, you know, massive pricks like Andrew Tate and all the other ones that seem to be propping up in our society right now. And it moves slowly and it moves even slower and is less effective in a world where, for example, Elon Musk owns Twitter.

And so, if you were to go on Twitter, for example, where a lot of Andrew Tate fans exist, you would get the sense that our journalism had been entirely debunked, that the women in our film were paid actresses, that we were agents of the matrix. And that's like the prevailing view on Twitter. So yeah, that it's slower and it's worse than it has been in the past. It's less powerful, but it is the only thing we have. And eventually it does

work. I mean, every day it gets a little bit harder to be an Andrew Tate fan, I think, with each new revelation that comes out. Well, let's get on to that. Let's get into it. But via the section that we like to call intrusive thoughts. And I'm the one bringing the intrusive thought to the table today. And I don't know if this is an intrusive thought as much as an intrusive question. But like many people, I have worries I return to fret about again and again and again. Some of these worries are deeply personal, but some are more broad. And one of these worries that is in the back of my mind, you know when there's a quiet moment and you just find yourself going down a thought path to this end conclusion that comes up again and again and again. So this simmering worry that I find my

way back to is the intoxicating siren call of patriarchy. I just want to know why can't we shake it? Why is this way of organising the world so seductive to people of all genders, I would say? We're seeing like a real push for traditional gender roles, which means gender roles organized according to patriarchy, and young men who feel that they're falling behind instead of running to catch up, I think, are often being seduced by this really extreme version of patriarchal masculinity.

So I guess my overarching question is, why is patriarchy so seductive? So you talk about in both the documentary made and the book that you write, why Andrew Tate is actually selling a sort of loser ethos to young men being like, you're fucking losers. I want to start by asking, why do you think that is so appealing? Who was signing up to be called a loser? Seemingly hundreds of thousands of men,

but I think it's like a dual combination of like calling other men losers and creating a feeling of inadequacy while also projecting himself as the complete antithesis to that. So he could say like, you're a loser because you feel depressed and you feel depressed because you're a loser.

It goes both ways for him, right? Like the reason you're sad is because you're pathetic. You don depressed because you're a loser. It goes both ways for him, right? Like the reason you're sad is because you're pathetic. You don't have enough money. You don't have enough women. You're not fit enough. And then he'd go, I'm really happy and do that sort of maniacal grin. He does with his giant veneers and say, look how happy I am. And I'm so happy because I'm rich.

I have loads of women. I'm powerful. And it's like, and Matt spoke about it a lot when we were out there, like this pressure cooker of insecurity is basically what he creates. This idea that you're less than, and the way to, and that is what's making you unhappy. And the way to become happy is to become me. So they all start to sort of build themselves

in Andrew Tate's image. In terms of how patriarchy is seductive to men, yeah, it's exactly that. I mean, the truth is all men who aren't lying are insecure about their masculinity to some degree or have been insecure about their masculinity to some degree. And that insecurity is expressed itself

as jealousy of other men and perhaps their success with women or jealousy in other men, sexual jealousy generally, jealousy of men with more money, but ultimately it comes down to jealousy of men with more power and the feeling of a lack of power. And when men are made to feel that inadequacy and insecurity to a heightened degree, which is what Andrew Tate does by telling them

that they are pathetic, that they are losers, repeatedly all day on Instagram and TikTok, then they double down on the things that make them feel more powerful. They double down on those traits that might be called toxic. That is the most dangerous kind of man, the man who is lashing out to try and regain

a sense of power that he feels he doesn't have and he's being mocked for not having. That's not the secure, perhaps the man that actually is this like paragon of masculinity, whatever that is in Andrew Tate's mind, that secure man is potentially less dangerous because he's not going to try to regain his power through some kind of dangerous means. And why is patriarchy seductive to women? Perhaps we can answer that next. We've disagreed at this in different points, but there's like, I think like part of the reason why patriarchy is attractive to like

millions of men, billions of men around the world, and now we're seeing many women with the like tradwife movement, etc., is like inherently tied to capitalism. Many women though. Yeah, it's still a relatively small proportion, but if you look in like the US in particular, it's definitely a growing movement. And I think it is tied to capitalism in this sense that with men, there's this expectation that their lives should be a certain way. They should be like FTSE 100 CEOs making loads of money. They're like sort of provider

myth that we've created throughout human existence. The nature of late state capitalism is that's just not happening for men, they're not playing that role that they feel that they should be. Patriarchy and misogyny works by saying a dual thing of the reason it's not working isn't actually because you personally are doing anything wrong, it's because the system has been broken to make it easier for these women. And I think likewise, the women on the other side, you know, being drawn to tradwife lifestyles, I think it's perhaps because the sense of alienation that comes from living through late stage capitalism,

like what is my purpose? What role do I have to play? What am I actually on earth to do? It can't be just to go and sit in an office and fill out spreadsheets. And it can't be just to do these sort of menial activities that I do at work. There has to be something more to it. So these women are looking for something more and there's something more they find as the answer is, well, I can have a farm and milk cows and my husband will cut

down trees and make fires for me because it's, it's a nice picture and ideal that you can create in your head. But like, I think anyone who's ever spent time on a farm knows it's not really like that. But it kind of works both ways, right? A lot of the young men we spoke to when we were out in Romania said like, life should feel like a movie, like every day shouldn't be the same, it should be exciting. And the realistic thing of like living in the world is most time it doesn't feel like a movie. Most time it's like a struggle going through menu activities you have to do to get from one day to the next and you have exciting moments but these young people are struggling to come to terms with

that I think. You said that as though you had spent time on a farm. My girlfriend's dad's a farmer. Oh okay, fair. Where. Yeah. Fair. Fair. Where do you think the Cypress potatoes come from? Matt? I was going to grow them. Of course. Of course. I mean, listening to you talk, it reminded me a lot of Simeon Brown's book, Get Rich or Lie Trying,

which looked at influences, culture, kind of online scams, how they're driven by social media. And the thing which for me has always tied together the people who are attracted to Andrew Tate and the smaller number, but I think culturally significant number of women who are drawn to like, you know, trad wifery

is that no one really knows how economic security is meant to happen anymore. Because unless you've got intergenerational wealth, it's unlikely that you're going to be making real money and making the kind of money that can give you a high standard of living and a secure basis on which to live. So then it's like, well, what if I retreat into gender roles or what if I just sort of try and fake it till I make it and I try and project a lifestyle through the means of like, what are effectively photo shoots, which hoodwink people into thinking that I'm living this way. And then if they want to emulate

me, they've got to pay me money or follow me or whatever else it is. And so I suppose like drilling further into that, that comment about late stage capitalism, I always find it's quite optimistic when people say late stage capitalism, like what if we're in the beginning of capitalism? Like what if there's so much more capitalism to come? But what role did class and class background play in the people who were willing to follow Andrew Tate? Were you surprised by what you found? Like were there any people who did come from intergenerational wealth? Or was it particular class backgrounds that you came across? I think with the younger men we met, a lot of them were from working class backgrounds. And I think that is what appealed to Andrew Tate about them is they

were like, you know, he portrays himself as this working class kid grew up in an estate in Luton, and is now a multimillionaire. I mean, if we put aside the ways in which he says he made that money for a moment, like that's an aspirational message for lots of these like young working class men. And they want to learn from him how they too can make wealth and escape the matrix. I was quite surprised with some of the older men that we met in the war room, who did clearly come from more like middle-class backgrounds and they owned houses. Some of them already had like fairly impressive careers. We interviewed one guy who was a doctor, another guy who worked for like a huge multinational company with a fairly senior

job. They were still drawn to it, but I think they were drawn less by the sort of aspiration to make tons of money and more by the aspiration to have other things that were lacking in their life, so women or some sense of like excitement or network or community. A lot of these were like really lonely guys who, you know, if you have to pay 3000 pounds to Andrew Tate to be able to form a network of friends, that's quite a sad place to be in, right? Most people can form their own networks

without having to pay an influencer to create a cult for you. I think groups with fewer avenues to wealth and success will tend to be more easily attracted to unrealistic kind of imaginative projections of wealth. I think that's a common thing. But that is not the only aspect of Andrew Tate's image. And the level of wealth that he is projecting is so unreal that even,

people from all socioeconomic statuses will envy that. So you could be a middle-class, upper middle-class man working your nine to five job, but you could still feel, and this is something he says all the time, if you're taking orders from your boss, you're essentially a pathetic beta male, right? A real man doesn't have a boss. So really all men are vulnerable to that within, you know, any socioeconomic status.

And then of course, there's the, the other cultural and kind of sexual aspects of jealousy that he's projecting as well that aren't even money related. Yeah, I think it's also like, it's a core like, hustle culture tenant, right? That he plays particularly with like people who have to have ordinary jobs and work nine to five, like Matt was talking about, he's obsessed with this idea of like passive income, which they are all obsessed with, right? How can you make money without having to trade the very valuable hours of the day that you have? And it sounds great, but it's kind of for most people, unless you have a huge

amount of wealth to start off with, it's a pretty difficult goal to achieve passive income. Whereas what Tate did, particularly with his like online schools and methods of making money online, it's like those scam adverts you see all the time where it's like, I spend an hour a week doing this and I make $35,000 a month. It's a very seductive message if you don't dig into it too much. How much, you keep mentioning jealousy, which I think is interesting. How much of a role does envy and like the politics of jealousy play in this construction of this new, very extreme form of like patriarchal masculinity? And also, does that envy play into the anger that is directed at women? Is there sort of like an envy of women in somewhere?

I get this politics of resentment a lot and I'm interested to see what you found. So there's always been a group of men, there's always been men who feel that they haven't had, they aren't having as much sex as other men and they've sought out these kind of gurus to help them with that. That's what the game was, et cetera. But it's only recently that that group of men has kind of like metastasized into a political group that feels that they're owed sex from women and that it's been denied to them by some kind of new feminist liberal agenda

that's taking it away from them. So you've always had the sexual envy, but now that sexual envy is has become kind of politicized into a movement. We're not getting laid because of the like liberal order that's like made women think that they have too much choice, et cetera, et cetera. We need to fight and take that back. You know, we're being emasculated by by those in power. Is it just sex though? Is the envy limited to sex? Because I feel like this goes much deeper than just sex. Like is it just heterosexual men looking for sex that are attracted to Andrew Tate?

Because I don't feel like that's the only group. I was using sex as an example, but it's money as well. Yeah, I mean you can use Andrew Tatism, Tatisms they call them, to sort of explain how he uses envy here. And it's one he said to us a lot. It's like the parable of the yacht, I like to call it. But he basically says, like, billionaires don't actually want yachts. Like, nobody is bothered about having super yachts. They're a pain in the arse. They cost loads to maintain. But billionaires buy them to let other men know that they're billionaires and they can afford yachts. So it's one about, like, creating envy from other men. That's how you become powerful. You signal so much status that other men must envy you.

But then you can see the weaponization of envy towards women as well, which they definitely do use. So like to go back to the yacht, Tateway says, what does a man have to do to get on a super yacht? He's got to work for 20 years. He's got to make all this money. He's got to make all these connections. He's got to make all this money. He's got to make all these connections. He's got to know the guy with the yacht,

know the guy that can sell him the yacht. There's so many stages to getting on the yacht. But a woman, what does she have to do to get on the yacht? It's one DM to a rich guy with a yacht and she's on there partying. Obviously not true, it's completely fake, but it kind of sets up how he wants men who listen to him to think about the world, right?

Which is that things come very easily to women and they don't to men. We have to work for everything, whereas they just get given it because of what they are, women. And what's interesting about Tate's audience, I think, on Twitter is you often see this huge amount of vitriol directed towards only fans girls on Twitter. And you'd think that vitriol would come from a place of like slut shaming, which sometimes it does. But more often than not, it comes from kind of like a jealousy of their economic success.

So they'll be like, oh, you think you're so good just because you can make 30,000 pounds in a month just doing this, this and this you don't ever understand. And like, it's a very small percentage of the population, but it kind of symbolizes how Tate is able to get men to both blame women for their own problems, but also be envious of how easy he's made them think their lives are, right? Like that is the biggest misconception

that Tate has managed to sell his audience is that life is easier for women than it is for straight white men, which like everyone knows isn't true, but he has people around the world genuinely believing it. Well, I mean, you say that, I think that it's sometimes a bit of a blind alley to go, you know, who is life more difficult for, right? Because if you are a working class man, there are some ways in which social mobility is closed off to you. I mean, that's what the statistics are showing in terms of educational attainment, university places, you know, even earnings, for instance,

compared to their female counterparts. There has been what has been termed the feminization of the labor market. So you've seen the demise of heavy industry, those jobs, which while they were backbreaking and, you know, often just really, really hard and like, you know, dirty, right, like dirty work. They're often unionized, often, you know, promised you a job for life. Like those things are gone. And you've had the blossoming of like, you know, white collar industries, which have favoured women, and also that coincides with with women entering the labour market in like huge numbers. So I guess, I guess my question is, if people who consider themselves to be on the left, however, that's defined, I recognise not

everyone's a Marxist, because I'm getting there, I's defined. I recognize not everyone's a Marxist because I'm getting there, I'm working hard, but not everyone's there yet. However you define the left is that I'll be a bit too tempted to say, no, you don't have these problems or like life is easy for you because you're, you know, a straight white man. Whereas actually, there are these material things going on. And if we can't accept that and go like, well, actually like there are some ways in which your class and your gender have disadvantaged you, even though you still benefit from patriarchy, that we're helping the pipeline from disaffected young man

to Andrew Tate's war room, because we can't even engage with what they're experiencing. My personal reaction to it would be that like, it's much more fundamentally a class issue than it is a gender one, right? And like the changing industries, that's something that like women brought that about in some sense through like campaigning, being able to get themselves in work. But like the removal of like heavy labour jobs in the UK, that's not to do with feminism, right? That's to do with like global economic change. These are class issues.

And I think what's quite clever about Tate is that he's able to take club. It's the same thing that like Tommy Robinson does with like race or religion. You take something that's caused by class or like a massive social issue. That's really complicated. And you provide the simple explanation of, well, actually it's hard because you're a man. It's not hard because you're a man. It's not hard because you're a working class kid who's grown up with not the right sort of opportunities and we haven't got enough social mobility programs available in the

country. It's actually just because you're a man and they hate men. Like, that's the message he tells them. It's happening to you just because you're a man. And also, and I know these statistics are very hotly debated, and I'm not saying I have the answers either, but I do think that we are hearing a lot more statistics about how men are disadvantaged that are slightly questionable. So we're often pointed to the education gap, that women are performing better in education,

but that's not yet translating to more pay for women in any socioeconomic level. And the question we should be asking is why is that not happening? And the answer is probably because we do live in a sexist society. We often hear about men without college degrees as one of the most disadvantaged groups. But you know who earns less than men without college degrees is women without college degrees, which is a group that is almost never spoken about in the media. So there has been this kind of reframing and like Jamie says, yes there are disadvantaged men and yes we should be trying to to help those

men but I'm not sure looking at the question of the socioeconomically disadvantaged people through the lens of gender actually leads to any kind of helpful discourse or legislation or anything. discourse or legislation or anything. I'm going to keep playing devil's avocado because I love it. So I, one of my weird old jobs before I was in journalism full time was I used to ghost write books for rappers. And one of the rappers who I worked with grew up not far from where I live now in Tottenham. And we were talking about how in his own family, there was this bright line of gender where the women grew up to be nurses, teachers, you know, public sector professionals of one kind or another. And for the men, it was like, no, you got pulled into street violence and gang violence at a really young age, whether you were part of that lifestyle or not. So when he was nine, actually, like he was going to the shops for his mom and like a car came around window rolled down, because they were looking for the boy that lived behind him.

And the guy like shook his head, like, no, no, that's not him. But that's a moment where he could have died, right. So there was like an extremity of experience that he had as a man, that doesn't mean that,'t mean that women didn't have these other vulnerabilities or disadvantages, particularly to do with things like intimate partner violence, the levels of domestic labor and childcare they had to take on within the family. But even within that same family,

women had a path to not necessarily wealth, but a degree of respectability that just wasn't there for men in the same way. So I guess it's like, you can't say, well, that's all to do with class, because they are in the same family, right? So I would say that comes back to patriarchy, but in the sense that it's like the expectations created by patriarchy. And maybe not with this specific example, because like, you, because there's lots of other factors coming into play there with the grooming that you get that happens in those sort of organized crime worlds. But like, there's a,

patriarchy has created this expectation in a lot of men that they can and should be leaders, wealthy, et cetera. And I think maybe that is what, a lot of the young men we speak to who follow Andrew Tate, if you say to them you could become a teacher or a nurse, they would laugh in your face at the idea because they would see themselves as so much above, not just the job but the amount of money that they would earn, right? Because they have this really warped perception of what a man should be. A man should be incredibly wealthy and powerful.

And they don't see those jobs as meeting up to that expectation. Whereas perhaps because women haven't been so like, well, they haven't been molded by patriarchy in the same way, of course they have been, but not in the same way. They don't have those same degrees of expectation that lots of these deluded young men do, right?

I think like that is a fundamental thing that we need to unpick with these young men. It's like this reality that Andrew Tate is telling you that you can achieve, it is attainable, but it is not attainable for the vast majority of people. And that is just the sad reality of life. Like we don't all become millionaires and run companies. Like it would be great if we did, but we don't. So I think it comes down to like the expectations created by patriarchy. And also there's a slight paradox in the framing of it as a, as a class

issue in that, in that, like these men, the tapeholders wouldn't accept manufacturing jobs. If we were to revive like the manufacturing vocational industry, that would not be something they would accept either, not just nurse or teacher. They all want to be CEOs. You guys were both socialized as men. Was there a point in your lives where you think that if the Andrew Tate logic had come along,

it might have ensnared you, and if so, why? I think it had come along. And every young man that I know has had this ideology. If it hasn't come from Andrew Tate through TikTok, it's come through a group of boys in their school. And I grew up in a... I went to a state school outside Boston. And if you weren't good at sports, you were just considered gay

and you'd get the shit cook out of you. That was how it was. And there was definitely a pressure to act a certain way around women, to brag about exploits with women, whether they were true or not, to project this more toxic version of masculinity than you really were inside.

You know, you weren't that person, you were doing that to impress other men. I think we all had that. Now we grew up out of it because, maybe for the simple reason that you cannot keep that attitude as you move into the workplace or as you have a relationship. Why?

Because you have to interact with women. You eventually have to interact with women and therefore the relationship doesn't work unless you see them as objects. So that levels out naturally. And it should level out earlier, but it often doesn't. But it levels out naturally. What we're now seeing is that leveling out is not happening. And that's because it agitates ideology.

Yeah, I think there's, I'd like to optimistically say I wouldn't have been drawn into it because like, I went to a mixed school, grew up around like lots of women, lots of women in my family, like, you'd like to think you wouldn't have gotten away with it, but I do think there was a point in my life where I would have been potentially vulnerable to it, more just because of the online sort of ecosystems I was existing in. So when I was like 16, 17, no, sort of 15, 16, I got very into Joe Rogan,

which I know is like a really embarrassing thing to say right now, right? But back then, like, he was kind of considered in some ways like a darling of the left and like, you know, he would just explore controversial topics and I Enjoyed the podcast, but I think the main thing that that podcast did to me throughout the two years that I listened to it Was I became obsessed with the idea of like conspiracy and there being like unfair unfair forces at play like if you listen to Joe Rogan, he's constantly looking for a conspiracy in everything. And I think that's something that Tate adopted, which like, you know, maybe if he had come along

at that period when I was 15, I would have bought into that aspect of it. Because Tate is very clever, particularly now. He doesn't just talk about women right now. He talks about all sorts of global conspiracy theories. And he talks about, you know, the world economic forum and all of these like very played out conspiracy theories. But I think it opens him up to dissatisfied men in another route, right? Because he's now not just talking about women. He's talking about a whole host of factors that are these sort of conspiracies that are at play.

And I think I could have been drawn into it just by virtue of the fact that the other people I'm consuming kind of like prep you for it. So your work also unearthed the allegations of, I guess, grooming and sexual violence. Two women in particular who go by the names Amelia and Sally, I think. The frame of voice question was,

what's so seductive about patriarchy? And of course, what's being alleged is that Andrew Tate employed what's called the lover boy method to win the trust of these women to make them feel dependent on him for validation, which then sort of wore away at their defenses and resilience and had them saying yes to things in a way which isn't actually really consenting, right? Because your ability to say no has been taken away. So all you've got is the yes. I suppose there's a few questions for me. One is to what extent, at least initially, were they being drawn in by that same image of wealth and power and unshakable confidence, right?

Like to what extent did that image draw them into his orbit in the first place? The second thing is, are there any shared tactics in terms of how Andrew Tate was alleged to have groomed these women and his relationship to his male supporters? in terms of how Andrew Tate was alleged to have groomed these women and his relationship to his male supporters. And I suppose the third thing is

what was the experience like for these women going public with these allegations and for them to be accused of being paid actresses and being accused of being at the center of a grand conspiracy to bring him down? So sorry, I know there's a lot in there. Yeah. So I guess the first thing was about, was the same thing he used to sort of lure in these men,

is that what attracted these women to him at the start? And I think like, particularly once we got sort of later into like 2015, 2016, 2017, when Tate's webcam business was like large and growing, he definitely lent into that factor of it, right? The money, the cars, that all became part of it because it projected this idea of an incredibly successful man who wouldn't need to cheat you or con you because it's the same thing that people say about him being a scammer now, like his fans online will say, well, why would he scam me? He's already so rich. And it's this like comforting

perception you trust that, you know, this person's already rich and powerful. So they don't need to do anything bad to me. Um, but with the women we spoke to, particularly those women in the UK, they were the very first women that he either had relationships with or tried to groom for his, well did groom for his webcam company, allegedly they, um, they were much more groomed through like the traditional lover boy method by Tate whereby it was the real promises of like relationship and love and a family.

And it's not until they bought into that, that he then begins to isolate you. Right. And even when he gets these women who he's groomed to do webcam, um, it often starts, they would tell us with him saying like, this is a really fun like couple thing we can do together. It's like a really fun thing to do as a couple. And it's a story we see a lot at the moment now with like allegations around some, some only fans accounts essentially that you have like boyfriends pressuring their girlfriends

into creating sexual content by selling it as like, it's almost like this romantic thing we can do together to create a bit of extra money. So these women sort of enter into it with this like, okay, maybe it's this thing I'm doing with my boyfriend who loves me and it's gonna be fun, we'll get a bit of extra money. Not understanding that, you know, two weeks into it, he will have manipulated them into a process

where like it's a job, they're doing it 12 hours a day, six days a week and he's keeping all the money and they're not allowed to go anywhere. If he doesn't say they can go anywhere, they can't speak to anyone. If he says they can't speak to them. So he did sort of very traditionally use the lover boy method early on. What he's done now, which again creates a parallel with the boys we're talking about, the Andrew Tate fans, is he's used social media to make that method much more effective. Andrew Tate grooms young men in the way that many sort of fake gurus have done in the past, but he was arguably the first person to use TikTok and Twitter to do it really successfully on a huge global scale. If you watch Andrew Tate's courses

that he sells to men, one of them is called the PhD, the pimping hose degree is its full name. And that's his course where he sort of teaches you his version of the lover boy method and he says in that course, like social media has completely changed the game and Instagram is now our biggest weapon. So what he does is he'll sort of tell men to say that they're going to be in like Bucharest in Romania, I'm traveling to Bucharest. You go and you put Bucharest into Instagram in the search bar and you'll find girls that have tagged pictures of them out in nightclubs in Bucharest and you'll just send them a message

that says something like, Bucharest, an emoji of a strawberry question mark. Something that would just like be a weird message that would spark a conversation. And what's depressing is we then saw war room members who are doing this and they're showing like thousands of messages that they've sent to women all over the country. And you know, if you do that to lots of women, the chances are you can rifle it down to someone who is vulnerable for grooming. So they've become very good at using social media

to find targets to groom. And I think that is the same thing that he's done with young men, is he's like pumped this message out on social media, knowing that as much as 80% of the world might find it abhorrent, if he can find the 20% who love it and will join forces with him

and basically become what he needs them to be, it's worked. And he actually said that to us once. He said like, when I create a post, like I know that the majority of people are gonna hate it, but the ones who really like it, that's who you're making the post for. Like, it doesn't matter about the haters. He was very aware of that. So I think that's the sense in which he is using the loverboy method and he's using it in a way that tells us something about what he does to young men. Um, I'm just trying to remember what the final third question was. I guess, what was it, what was it like for Amelia and for Sally?

I mean, uh, you know, Matt, I know that for you, you know, especially after, after, you know, the work came out, like the investigative work came out, um, you had people like accosting you in, in public. I mean, did, did any of that happen for these women? And also like what insight did that give you in terms of the power of these networks and their ability to sort of, you know, terrify and harangue people into silence?

First of all, for these women to have gone through, you know, the trauma of trying to get the police and then the justice system to believe their allegations of sexual assault, to retell that story for many years, and then to finally, to have the courage to, having been failed by the justice system, go to us and have us release their stories. And then immediately, you know, they would appear on, say, our document appear on Sneakos podcast and all the guys in the chat will be like, she's lying or and worse, you know, the worst things you can imagine they were saying to them.

It's like it's just they're so they must have so much strength to have to deal with that, to be called like a paid actress and a fake, you know, making everything up. It's just crazy. Now, in terms of like the sense of the power of Andrew Tate's network and its ability to silence people, as soon as the films came out, I started getting approached in public, because you can see my face in the film,

because I'm in the film by Andrew Tate fans. It would be random things like a few Uber drivers, the security at Glastonbury, the an air steward. Even the guy at the award ceremony for our film, one of the catering staff, and they all come up to you in the same exact way. They all have, they're all kind of well-built, formally dressed, they have very strong posture, and they speak in short-term sentences, because that's what they've been trained to act as men,

by Andrew Tate, and they all feel entitled to some kind of debate with you. And that happens so frequently. And it would often be like I'd be at the pub and there'd be a group of men and one of them would start looking at me. And he was obviously, he would sidle away from his friends and then approach me and confront me.

But he wouldn't want his friends to know he was an Andrew Tate fan. You know, he was clearly ashamed because he would kind of slink away to do it. And it just made me realize they're everywhere. Andrew Tate fans they're everywhere. Andrew Tate fans are absolutely everywhere and you never know when someone you're speaking to

is an Andrew Tate fan. Now that's a little bit creepy and weird for me but it must be terrifying as a woman because anyone you're speaking to on any dating app or whatever could be part of this cult essentially. And they could be about to. It could be your boyfriend. Like, you know, these guys, they work over the course of years, they gradually brainwash the woman

that they're dating into being, you know, in their words, and this is the war room's words, a slave, who through like Pavlovian conditioning will do whatever they say. It starts with, you know, asking them to make you coffee in the morning and then it ends with OnlyFans and sex work. Fucking hell, my husband asked me for a cup of tea this morning and I'm looking at that in a whole different light. Shit. Obviously, we're talking about a very extreme form of like

patriarchal masculinity and domination here, but I wonder how this, making this documentary, writing this book, made you reflect on the presence of this patriarchal masculinity in your own lives. Cause I think these things are separate. Like I've read the Will to Change, okay? Like I like to separate them out. You know, you have patriarchal masculinity and then you have just masculinity.

But I'm not sure many of us know what a masculinity free from patriarchy actually looks like in practice. So yeah, you're talking about these guys could be anywhere. And I think sometimes we treat just like all men as sort of original sin. It's like you're born male, so you're gonna end up like hurting someone or abusing someone and like that's just inevitable,

which is such an unhelpful way of thinking about like masculinity. That is that masculinity is synonymous with patriarchal masculinity. Absolutely. So, yeah, how did the four years spent in the war room make you reflect on sort of the masculinity that's present in your own lives? I think it made me identify some people in my life who were maybe more toxic than I thought they were Because you could see that they were at the start of They're at the start of a road that leads you to very dark places Let's put it that way and like it wasn't so much people I was really close with but there was like one of my best

Friends boyfriends, for example, I found out that basically he'd become a huge Andrew Tate fan. And then that became quite an alarming thing because I'm like, well, I know the sort of content this guy's consuming and he's in a relationship with like my best friend who I've known since I was like 10 and where's that relationship gonna go? So it kind of made me assess personal relationships a lot more if that makes sense. And it's this revelation that Matt kind of spoke about

when you realize like they are everywhere and actually they're not all quite as extreme and easy to spot as you think they would be, right? There are people who seem really normal, have like everyday jobs. Maybe you've had like perfectly fine conversations with them beforehand, but particularly during that like lockdown period

where Tate became massively famous, where we were all spending loads of time on the internet, you could see that misogyny being unlocked in them, right? And maybe previous things which were problematic but relatively harmless became very harmful and alarming. I don't know what you thought Matt. I think it goes back to that sense of, I think, yeah, your own sense of masculinity. And I think, yeah, again, like I would say,

all men who aren't lying at some point have questioned or felt insecure about their masculinity. And I think it took being around men like that, men who bristle with that insecurity about their masculinity to such a high degree that every item of clothing they choose to wear, every word they say, every action they take is all kind of conscripted in this constant effort to project this hyper masculinity

that you realize, like, actually I'm all right, like, I don't need this, like, at all, I don't need any part of this. And there was this final moment where I just saw Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate, you know, with their, like, muscles bulging out of there, like, incredibly tight-fitting clothes, smoking literal cigars, like, wearing aviator sunglasses,

and, like, blowing cigar smoke in the faces of like reporters as they walked towards the courthouse to receive their charges for sex trafficking, that I realized if that's what masculinity is, then like I'm all right having no part of it. And what it is is essentially a caricatured performance for other men, often, often. Now we can talk about what like good masculinity is and that's a separate question, but that

kind of masculinity is ridiculous. Yeah, that's the flip side of what I wanted to ask. What was the positive, like what is the positive construction of masculinity to you and how have you seen that playing out in your own lives? You know, spending time around Andrew Tate, did that then make you be like in moments, I don't know, with both men, women, anyone of any gender be like, actually in this moment, I'm going to be vulnerable. I'm choosing actively to take this form of masculinity.

Yeah. I mean, I think- I think I've always been a bit of a like, sorry, Macca. That was positive masculinity. Letting your boys speak. It was very interrupting. Letting your boys speak. I'm trying to interrupt you. Well, as part of the documentary, I actually did the fight experience. So I like fought a professional MMA fighter, fought, like I did air quotes there for the people listening to the audio, fought a professional cage fighter.

I got the crap kicked out of me by this guy in front of Andrew Tate and the war room as part of this kind of test of masculinity and Really what what that was was that kind of masculinity which I think can be associated with combat sports is a very Individualistic one. It's about proving yourself in front of other men On the other hand recently I've started playing a lot more football and that the team sport of football, like if you do something wrong and someone tells you you should have been playing over there, you have to kind of take it on the cheek and be a bit more vulnerable. That kind of group masculinity where you have to actually keep each other in check, you

have to interact with other men, that teaches you to exist properly within a community of men. I think that prepares you much better for the real world and that teaches you to exist properly within a community of men. I think that prepares you much better for the real world and that requires you being sometimes vulnerable, sometimes accepting your own mistakes, communicating effectively with other men, like gaining respect from other men, but also giving them respect too.

That's not the opposite of the kind of masculinity that was on display in the war room. I kind of agree. I was going to say, I've kind of never been the most like traditionally masculine person growing up. Like I wasn't super sporty and, you know, didn't take the traditional tick boxes of like masculinity. So I never felt like super affected by it in that sense, because I kind of looked at what these men were trying to emulate. And I was just like, oh, that's just, that's just not me. Like I'm not interested in that. The thing that Matt touched on, which definitely did have an impact on me was like,

oh, I should, like spending time with like groups of other men, like can actually be a really positive and important thing. And I should make more of an effort to do it. And it kind of came from, from two senses. One unsurprisingly for the documentaries, we were required to have an all male crew. They didn't want any women coming to the war room event.

And there was a point where like one of, like we basically been like getting footage kind of surreptitiously, not undercover, but surreptitiously of things they maybe wouldn't want us to see. We went outside, the crew was sat there having like a little debrief, but being quite quiet. One of the generals came over and he was like, I hate

saying that word generals, but it's how they refer to themselves. And he was like, look at this great group, like you guys have got a brotherhood here as well. Like, isn't this great? And I kind of realized like, oh, yeah, these guys are like paying to create something they don't have in their life, which is like genuine friendships with other men. And I think men in particular can be very guilty of not putting in the effort to maintain friendships and not checking in like all of these cliched things that we talk about, but like they are genuinely true. And it had this dual thing of me for being like, okay, actually, yeah, like it can be quite beneficial sometimes to just meet up with the boys and have a boys day or whatever, do that stuff. But also like, if you don't check in on your boys and the people that you love,

like they could end up becoming one of these men. Like this comes from social isolation and loneliness and not feeling good enough. And like, I don't want anyone in my personal life to feel isolated and lonely and not good enough. So it kind of made me see like the one shred of positive masculinity that existed in the war room was like the men themselves, not Andrew Tate, like the guys who had paid to come, like supporting each other and asking questions

and saying, how are you doing? All these things that these men hadn't heard for years in their lives. That is an important thing that we do need to consciously cultivate. is an important thing that we do need to consciously cultivate. I think just like on that, like my, my brother in law, you know, lives up north, like got very traditionally working class job in a factory. And something started happening when he sort of hit his mid to late 20s was that there was a sort of, that there were multiple suicides within his group of friends. And that was a really profound moment

of change for him because he sort of realized that they were part of his friendship group, and then they saw each other all the time, but there wasn't necessarily loads of emotional connection or checking in in that way. And so I think it's not just about like, do this so that people don't become violent or harmful towards others. It's also like not turning that that violence and harm inwards. And I also don't know how useful it is, like being a woman with really like a strong opinion about what constitutes like positive masculinity, but like because I have to live with men, I've got really, really strong sense of like, what what positive masculinity is. And I think that actually it's got something

in common with with a rejection of what I would call toxic femininity, because there has been this rise of like, you know, a really transactional kind of of, I guess, like dating and relationship advice, which is like, you know, he's got to send the Uber, he's got to pay for this, like, he's got to be like this. And it is a sort of mirror image of this Andrew Tate world where it's like, you've got to find a way to dominate people around you and to extract something from them. Now, obviously it doesn't come with the same implications

of violence or sexual degradation, but there's something in it, which I think is so corrosive to the spirit. And I think what like Andrew Tate fans and followers of these kinds of influencers who shall remain nameless, but I know who I'm thinking of in my head, something they've got in common is that it seems to me

that they think that partnership is impossible. And partnership is difficult and it is complicated and there's nuances to it, but it's certainly not impossible. And I think the things that one should look for in a partner is that one, not seeing things as transactional, right? Seeing things as generative rather than transactional. So if someone gives, that doesn't mean they've lost and you've won. It's actually nourishing the relationship and it's generative and not extractive. The second thing is that particularly with men, it's not just about how do they interact with me as a woman, it's how do they interact with everyone in their lives?

Because again, it's like, what seems to me to be the case about this like Andrew Tate world is that there's so much emphasis on like, how do you interact with women? Like, are you, you know, are you maximizing what you can extract from them? And it's like, well, what does it mean to be a good son? What does it mean to be a good brother to your siblings? What does it mean to be a good friend? And all of those things tend to be or if you're, if you're lucky and psychologically healthy, you know, you can't necessarily just look at your parents as an extractive relationship. If it's a good relationship, it's a generative relationship. And for me, back in the Paleolithic era when I was still dating, it was like looking at how

men talked about those family relationships was really important. And it would give me a sense of what they might be like. And also men that didn't talk about family relationships, like that wasn't just like, oh, well, you know, it might be all good. I was like, oh, you see yourself as like this, like lone ranger, just like kind of, you know,

striving into the frontiers of life like you don't you don't really think about the context which created you and and that didn't often make for good relationships even if they weren't like bad or harmful guys it was just like it wasn't possible to form a partnership of equals in that because fundamentally they saw themselves as striving alone and what you wanted was something that you could rely on and where someone also relied on you. And I think the workplace is another place. How men treat other men at work, I think is a huge thing.

Like most men probably are friendly and they want to bring everyone up as a team. But I think Andrew Tate certainly encourages you to kind of maximize, like you just, just see work as a, as a way to get more out of people and you see everyone else as a competitor. I think that's definitely a thing. It's very like Machiavellian, the way he views the world. He talks a lot about like the war room for example, like you need a network of men around you. It's important, like no man can be alone. But when you dig into why he says you need a network, it's like, oh, so those men can do stuff for you. Like it's all basically comes down to personal

gain. It's not about like reciprocity and things going back and forth and a friendship. It's like, well, like if you're in a sticky situation, you need guys who can do X, Y and Z for you. So it is essentially a very like isolationist lifestyle that he's promoting, which I think comes back to what you're saying about like what is a toxic man? Like a toxic man is a guy who sees himself as an island and like I know this is like a much more like softened down version of it but like about a boy this character that like Hugh Grant plays his whole thing is like I am an islander I'm Ibiza that's what he

always responds and what you see is like if you live like that you essentially have a really depressing unfulfilling life. And I fear that that's what's gonna happen to men that go down this Andrew Tate rabbit hole is they are gonna wake up in 10 years and go, oh God, I wasted like the best years of my life. Guess final question, was Andrew Tate an island? Like why is Andrew Tate the way Andrew Tate is?

His dad, I would say he's like largely shaped by his dad trying to emulate him, but also trying to find ways to understand what was essentially like child abuse in a lens that makes it not child abuse. So his dad treated him very brutally in a lot of ways. And his answer was say, it isn't to say that like maybe my dad wasn't great.

It's to say that actually being brutal is like the greatest form of love. That's how you create someone who's strong and powerful is by being mean and brutal. Um, I think that really shaped him, but I would emphasize that like, he's not an island in the sense he has his younger brother, Tristan. And those two have always lived together, never lived with anyone else. They're largely inseparable. Only once in my entire four and a half years of meeting up with Andrew Tate did Tristan not come, which is quite unusual for brothers. That says so much. That was fascinating, but we do have to do listener problems.

listener problems. Yes, so this is the segment of the show that we call I'm in big trouble. And if you are in big trouble and you promise not to sue us if we give you bad advice, please email if I speak at navaramedia.com. That's if I speak at navaramedia.com strictly for the non litigious amongst you. Moya, do you want to do do you wanna read this one out? I love reading, I love reading. Okay, it's a bit long, I have cut it down just so people know this is an abridged version.

Ready, in keeping with the unspoken rule that opening these kind of emails, you must always ask, look, I'm gonna start off by emphasizing how much of a huge fan I am. Obviously it was important that I put this in. I know that didn't get cut. This didn't get cut. Okay. I find both of you massively inspirational. Thank you so much. For some background info, I'm a 25 and a 26 year old guy who has recently re-entered education in the form of an access to Higher Education course with prospects to go to

university next September. These courses are renowned for being intense, so naturally you need to be aware of the dedication and commitment it takes. Last year I did Access to Music, but halfway through the year I realised I wanted to study Psychology but given my long history of mental health issues. This year I'm doing Access to social work. Given how well I did last year, I truly thought the year would be a breeze and I'd have no issues with the workload, especially considering it's an area I'm curious to learn more about

and take great interest in. I know it's only October and I'm just over a month into the course, but I found it unbelievably overwhelming, absolutely nothing like last year. Extensions are only offered in extenuating circumstances. And if you hand in an assignment even one minute late, your grade is capped at the pass rate, unless you're granted an extension. This is a massive contrast

to last year. Also a contrast, I don't find my teachers particularly approachable or friendly and I don't resonate with their styles of teaching. I haven't had any chance to receive any form of feedback so I don't know what level I'm working at. Over the last week, at every possible opportunity I've had, I've got my head down and worked on assignments all day and night until 2-3am, completely isolating myself from friends and family, not giving myself any sort of leisure time, also taking into account the fact I work a part-time job, up to 30 hours a week. I had a massive cry earlier for the first time in months and the anxiety I'm feeling is completely unlike anything I've ever felt. I feel like I'm constantly on the verge of a panic attack or mental breakdown. I've

never been so stressed in my entire life about anything ever. I think the reason why it's causing me so much stress is this genuinely means so much to me. The issue I'm grappling with most is I feel academically incompetent. At the moment I'm very much getting imposter syndrome, feeling like I've bitten off more than I can chew and set the bar too high for myself, particularly in the universities I'm looking at, and they're not even Russell Group Unis. The most upsetting thing for me is the fact I've undergone so much therapy and worked so hard to improve my state of mind. I really have come leaps and bounds from where I was three years ago. I feel like the questions speak for themselves but to clarify, am I being pedantic? I'm not sure if that pedantic

is the right word yet but I don't want to make you feel worse. Is this something that everyone goes through? I don't think I'm asking if I should reconsider my choice of trajectory just yet, as I stand by that I still want to do this more than anything, but I'm curious to know your guys' perspectives anyway, taking into account the hard work I've put in to build myself to the position I'm currently at. That's the dilemma. So, do we have any initial thoughts?

They basically want to know. I think Jamie and Matt should go first in the spirit of creating an antidote to the war. This guy is worried about how stressful he's finding the course he's doing and he feels terrible about it. But how far along is he? He's one month in. I'd say be like kind to yourself

because it does sound like you have an insane amount on your plate trying to get that done with a part-time job and then all of the other aspects of just being alive in your mid-20s, which is stressful for a whole host of reasons. But then also like to relate it back to like my own life and I'm sure Matt's life as well, it's not abnormal. It's like really, really normal. We all have like moments in our lives where you feel like entirely overwhelmed by anxiety and stress and feel like you have more to do than you can ever possibly achieve and you're not good enough to do it. It's really, really normal to feel like that.

But what is important to try and avoid, I think, is like being in a situation where you feel like that all the time. And I think what particularly has helped me when I've got myself into those states and I can really relate like to that feeling of like, Oh my God, I'm just gonna burst into tears because I'm so overwhelmed, I just cannot do this, is by setting yourself easier targets. Don't think in terms of September to June or whatever it is, I need to do this whole year.

Just be like, okay, well if I can get to November and be at this state, try and break it down into little more manageable parcels. That's always helped me feel like less overwhelmed. And then easier said than done, but like try and take some time for yourself. And like self care is perhaps an overused and like cliched word, but it is a really important thing. And if all you're doing is working at your job and then working at something, because I think that's also something to remember, like you signed up for this course

because you like the subject material and I can really relate to like signing up to something because you like it and then there's so much of it, you begin to hate it and it becomes overwhelming. Try and remind yourself of like what you liked about it and don't so much worry about like the past fail of it all. Focus on like what is interesting to you about the work and then you'll get it done in a way that's more enjoyable.

I don't know, that feels like, I really worry that I'm sounding really patronizing, but I just wanna say I have 100% been in that situation before where you feel like there's just too much and you can't get through it and you can just try and find some ways to manage it personally. A peaceful sea does not make a good sailor and like you're gonna come out of this much stronger

and don't you know you don't don't try not to catastrophize about it and also you said you're saying until 2 or 3 a.m. I would say that's probably gonna make you more stressed out or more anxious. If there's any way you can get the normal amount of sleep, then that will help every aspect of your life. And if that's better time management, then you know, but yeah, just trying to go to bed a bit earlier. That was real like advice from your dad. Go to bed earlier. Yeah. Go to bed. Yeah. Right, yeah. My dad is a sleep scientist.

So you're actually just lobbying for big sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, big sleep. Got sleep. We need to declare this to the ASA, I'm afraid. But I was just gonna say, I've realized today I'm doing a bit of guided tour of all the jobs I used to have, but one of the jobs I used to have was I used to teach

a masters in Amsterdam and I did it for four years. And speaking as someone who is coming at it from the perspective of a lecturer, you should always say, hey, I know that, you know, you haven't graded the work yet, or like, you know, because you've said in your letter that you haven't actually had the opportunity for feedback yet. It seems to me that what's happening is that you're spinning out and within that lack of feedback,

you're then catastrophizing and you're going, oh my God, I've fucked up. That's triggered all of these reactions in you, which makes you feel that you've got to like overwork and really punish yourself, but you don't even know how you're going oh my god I've fucked up that's triggered all of these reactions in you which makes you feel that you've got to like overwork and really punish yourself but you don't even know how you're doing so it seems to me that a really straightforward solution is approach your lecture and say hey look I know you haven't had the chance to like you know grade the essays yet but can I just have a bit of feedback on my performance in seminars or what you have managed to read of what I've done because in the absence of that, I'm really spinning out and it's making me feel really anxious. Because one, as a lecturer,

it's really nice when someone goes, I value your opinion. So I'm like, Oh my God, you, what I think about you matters. Like, that's the first thing. The second thing is that it's not always easy to read, which students are really suffering from anxiety, because we see you for not very much of the day, and our attention is split, sometimes 15 ways, sometimes 20 ways, sometimes 30 ways. And it might be that because you're so anxious and you're wanting to put on a good face, that the impression you're conveying

is not the same as the one that you're feeling. So give your lecturer a chance to give you some feedback separate from the work, because I think that that could make you feel a lot better. I think it'll help you orient yourself in reality, because I think in the absence of that, like, you know, the old low self-esteem kicks in, I know how that feels, and you go,

well, I'm not getting any feedback, so I must be a fucking idiot. Right? It's so easy to leap to that place, but like, you're probably not. So talk to your lecturer, talk to your lecturer and get sleep. Yeah, I mean, this is really funny, because it chimes a lot with a conversation I've been having this week with friends. A lot of us have started new jobs and these new jobs for the first time in maybe, I don't know, a good few years, are challenging us in ways that we haven't felt since maybe we first even entered the workforce. So they're like massive steps up in what we are having to do and how we're having to apply our skills.

And one of my friends was explicitly talking about how hard she finds this. I'm also, you know, I've become very boring or work and no play makes Jill a dull girl who only talks about how much work she's doing at any time. So when my friends are saying like just how much this is like her new job, which she really loves and really wanted to do is stressing her out her sleeping spin affected. She doesn't feel like she's anytime She's neglected all the chores that she has to do like the really important tasks that keep you running that scaffolding And she also mentioned that she has no feedback from her employer She feels like she's totally failing that she's not meeting expectations The same sort of spiral that I think it sounds like

you've got yourself in and the others have identified. So all of the factors that you guys have mentioned, get more sleep, you need sleep. Like even if your job is, if your job, you know, doesn't send you home till 5 p.m. and you start work at 10, please don't work past 9 p.m. Nothing good is gonna come out of that. Like if you have to go to bed at nine, get up at six,

do a couple hours study in the morning, a couple hours writing, you have to break it into these manageable chunks. And I get at the time, it doesn't feel like that. You know, I'm finishing pieces that have deadlines at, let's say like 12pm. And I'm up at six writing, but I go to bed at nine, because I know if I stay up to one, it's just not going to be good for it's like you're taking time then from your future self, you're robbing your future self, you're what's it robbing Peter to pay Paul, but you're dealing with sleep. So that's one part of it and the stress that Ash talked about like definitely talk to the lectures definitely get the feedback, but also just be aware this is what happens when you are, cheese and Andrew Tate is in my imagine, leveling up when you are, jeez, Andrew Tate is in my imagine, leveling up. When you are doing something else and

you're being stretched and you're learning a new skill set and you're learning just new things, taking new information, like the point when you are starting, it's starting to go in, that's when it feels the worst. That's when you feel like you don't know anything, you're the stupidest person in the world, you're never going to get this. And that does change the month, you're a month in, it will change. Like yes, you have to take action to try and make this more manageable. And so you don't completely break down and yes, reach out to these people around you and be aware that you can't do everything.

You're probably not going to have leisure time if you're working and you're studying for at least a month until you've got those routines baked into you've got the sort of like rhythm of being able to do an essay and what you need to do for studying baked in. But right now you are learning all these things for the first time, you're learning how that fits in your life. And it's going to demand a lot from you. And that does feel horrible. I cried so much on my first job. I haven't cried at this job yet. But I'm sure at some point it will come. Like there's times when I've wanted to cry, even though I'm really enjoying it and I don't want to change my trajectory. It's just asking so much from me at this point because I'm doing a brand new thing. So just really keep that

in mind. Like Jamie says, it's completely normal to feel like this. What's not normal, as he also said, is if that continues past a certain point, which I would say like sadly three, six months, but try not to be on this level of sleep deprivation for any more time than you listen to this answer. That's a great answer. That was really good. Yeah. I think we've, we've come to the end of this wonderful journey. We could have talked about this forever, but unfortunately, as I said, we're on

deadlines, aren't we? So we can't, we can't talk about the manuscript forever, but people should very much check out your documentary. What's the documentary called before we say the book again? So there's two documentaries. One's called The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate, which you can watch on Vice in the US. I don't know if you can still watch it in the UK. And then we have one called Andrew Tate, The Man Who Groomed the World, which is on BBC iPlayer. And the book?

And the book is Clown World, Four Years Inside Andrew Tate's man who groomed the world which is on BBC iPlayer. And the book? And the book is Clown World, Four Years Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere. If you're going to do one buy the book because we like that. Wait why do you like the book more? Tell us that quickly. One I think it'll give you the full story and two we get royalty as well as we don't at the BBC. It's very self-indulgent. Who picked the title Clown World? That Matt, I think, wasn't it? It came from what they called us. They would be like, you guys are clowns, you live in clown world.

They refer to the liberal matrix cuck world as like clown world. Like you two, you're clown world. We're clown world too though, so don't worry. Yeah, Navara, Vice, very much clown world. But then we were like, oh, it does literally feel like you're hanging out with a bunch of clowns, so we're gonna just steal it

and use it. But we inverted the title, see, that's what's so clever. I'm sorry, but like you're all liberal cucks, I'm actually a communist cuck, totally different thing. Okay, well from the clowns and the cucks, this has been If I Speak. Thank you very much, Jamie and Matt, for joining us today. Ash, who've you been?

I was gonna try and do an Andrew Tate impression, but I realized I can't actually do it because that way of talking in so like a staccato, like intense way, I can't do it. So I've just been Ash Sarker. I can't do an impression. I'm sorry, goodbye. Bye. I'm sorry. Goodbye. Bye!