Speaker 1: Welcome to him Motherfucker's I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards, a podcast that has just encountered one of
Speaker 1: the worst disasters of its career. So, uh, we'll get
Speaker 1: into this more later. This is supposed to be and
Speaker 1: it's going to be the first of several episodes about
Speaker 1: Andrew Tate and the mythopoetic men's movement that led to
Speaker 1: his rise to fame and influence among a generation of
Speaker 1: young men. We started recording this episode just a few
Speaker 1: hours ago with the wonderful April Clark and Grace Freud
Speaker 1: of the Girl God podcast. Uh they have in anyway.
Speaker 1: We recorded a little bit with them, and then I
Speaker 1: had a minor emergency which has taken me out of
Speaker 1: the house for a while. Things are okay, you don't
Speaker 1: need to flip out on Reddit or whatever, but it
Speaker 1: was it was a problem, um, and we were not
Speaker 1: able to record with them. To finish recording with them,
Speaker 1: and because of the holiday, we have no backlog. So
Speaker 1: in order to get this episode done and ready for
Speaker 1: our editor asap, Sophie is going to be my guest
Speaker 1: today along with Ian our editor. UM and we will
Speaker 1: get this out as soon as possible, because otherwise we
Speaker 1: will not have a show and we are contractually obligated
Speaker 1: to provide you with entertainment every single week until the
Speaker 1: heat death of the universe. Um, but I do want
Speaker 1: to shout out April and Grace, who are wonderful who
Speaker 1: came on and booked time for us, and I'm sorry
Speaker 1: that things got messed up. We will have them back
Speaker 1: on the pod um at some point in the near future,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to let people know that there is
Speaker 1: They have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February
Speaker 1: and people can get tickets for that show at Girl
Speaker 1: God Show dot com. You can also check out their
Speaker 1: podcast just type girl God and any of the things
Speaker 1: that have podcasts, and you can listen to their awesome show.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much again, April and Grace. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: that there was a minor calamity. UM. Now welcome to
Speaker 1: the pod. Uh, Sophie and Ian, How are y'all doing
Speaker 1: so well? So on I night. Ian is Ian Johnson,
Speaker 1: by the way, he edits a lot of our shows,
Speaker 1: and it's also uh one half of Gladiator with fellow
Speaker 1: fellow editor DJ Daniel. All Right, and um, we do
Speaker 1: have the full Gladiator on staff, which I like to
Speaker 1: bring up as much as possible. M. I appreciate the love.
Speaker 1: And yeah, you know it's Friday. Uh, ready for the weekend.
Speaker 1: Let's talk some tape, you know, Let's let's do it Friday,
Speaker 1: get into Friday, but also almost Saturday. Uh. And Ian
Speaker 1: is currently in his closet. We may start drinking in
Speaker 1: the in the near future. Might need to happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do it, all right, Robert? Yeah, Ian, I actually
Speaker 1: have you been on just as one of our podcasts
Speaker 1: before you you have known this my first Well, you know, Ian,
Speaker 1: people should know about you again. You're you're one half
Speaker 1: of Gladiator. You're a longtime friend of our other editor
Speaker 1: DJ Daniel. Um, you are a legendary podcast editor. And
Speaker 1: you had absolutely no involvement in the July six plane
Speaker 1: crash that cost John F. Kennedy Jr. His life off
Speaker 1: the Massachusetts coast. No involvement at all. I don't know
Speaker 1: why people, Yeah, don't bring it up. We had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with it. Why are you talking about that?
Speaker 1: I just to let people know Ian had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with it. Ian Sophie, what do y'all know about
Speaker 1: Andrew Tate. Um. So my limited knowledge of him is
Speaker 1: he's I believe a former m M A fighter who
Speaker 1: I don't know how he made a lot of money,
Speaker 1: but it seems like he has a lot of money
Speaker 1: from what he's seen on the internet. Will be talking
Speaker 1: about how and he's into a lot of misogynistic men
Speaker 1: rights kind of stuff. And uh, he got thoroughly destroyed
Speaker 1: online by um Grenna, So I do remember that, um.
Speaker 1: And I think he's in jail now. He is in
Speaker 1: jail now, um. Unrelated to the Greta stuff. Um, there
Speaker 1: was a little bit of a confusion about that, but yes,
Speaker 1: he is in jail for sex trafficking in Romania. Um, Sophie,
Speaker 1: is that more or less your understanding of the guy? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he fucking sucks, Yeah he does. Indeed he does, indeed
Speaker 1: fucking suck. Um. Unfortunately, he's also kind of worth studying
Speaker 1: in detail because he's managed to do something with social
Speaker 1: media that I don't think anyone else has ever managed
Speaker 1: to the same degree of success. Um. He's he's he's
Speaker 1: smart in one very specific way, even though he also
Speaker 1: did a bunch of dumb things and some really dumb
Speaker 1: crimes that hopefully have ruined his life. Um, he was
Speaker 1: he was smart in one in a way that has
Speaker 1: allowed him to become dangerously influential to an entire generation
Speaker 1: of teenage boys. UM, in a way that like no
Speaker 1: one on earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump is
Speaker 1: really the only other guy that I might put next
Speaker 1: to Tate in that kind, And I think Tate has
Speaker 1: a wider appeal among jin z teens and tweens than
Speaker 1: certainly Trump. It's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about all that. I am one
Speaker 1: of the things when I started looking into this guy,
Speaker 1: there's a ton of articles about because he blew up
Speaker 1: kind of mid one up until you know the arrest
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago. There's not profile articles on
Speaker 1: him that like go into detail about his background and
Speaker 1: his past and his entire rise to power. You'll generally
Speaker 1: the best articles you'll find in places like BuzzFeed or
Speaker 1: or UM. I think we have a couple from like
Speaker 1: The Guardian, but like summarize his backstory and two or
Speaker 1: three paragraphs. I wanted to get into who this guy
Speaker 1: is and where he came from because he kind of
Speaker 1: pops out of nowhere if you if you don't follow that.
Speaker 1: I think this is the first time anyone's really done that,
Speaker 1: So I think this will be valuable for for that.
Speaker 1: But I want to start by laying out why we
Speaker 1: have to take Tate seriously and kind of explain the
Speaker 1: scale of of sort of his influence. UM. I am
Speaker 1: not exaggerating when I say that he is maybe the
Speaker 1: most influential single person on teen and preteen males in
Speaker 1: the US and the UK and some other parts of
Speaker 1: the West than anyone else on planet Earth. UM. In
Speaker 1: fall of two, financial services company Piper Sandler released a
Speaker 1: survey of fourteen thousand, five hundred US teens taken between
Speaker 1: August and September of that year. Tait was the number
Speaker 1: one influencer on the list in terms of popularity. He
Speaker 1: beat Kanye West, he beat Mr Beast, he beat Dwyane
Speaker 1: the Rock Johnson, all of them. Mrs. I, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know who Mr Beast is, but he's somebotuber. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a YouTuber. I know. Elon Musk joked about giving
Speaker 1: him control of Twitter or he asked whatever, I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about him. I'm sure you're fine, Mr Beast
Speaker 1: or he's horrible. Anybody used that famous on YouTube? I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit like, yeah, no, good people get famous
Speaker 1: on YouTube, which is what I text our friend Cody
Speaker 1: Johnston every single day when he releases a new YouTube video. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Andrew Tate hashtag on TikTok has received more than ten
Speaker 1: billion views over the course of twenty two alone, which
Speaker 1: is fucking nuts. That is that is insane. Um. That
Speaker 1: is like incomprehensibly viral. Um. He was Also he will
Speaker 1: always claim that he's like the most Googled person on Earth.
Speaker 1: I looked into what he actually is. That's not quite it.
Speaker 1: He is the He is the number one when you
Speaker 1: type in who is into Google? Who is Andrew Tate
Speaker 1: is the number one who is question asked to Google?
Speaker 1: In two which is not the same as being the
Speaker 1: most google person on Earth. Um, although he is one
Speaker 1: of the most google people on Earth. I found a
Speaker 1: couple of lists of that, and he's often at like
Speaker 1: number eight, someplace closer to like ten. But like he's
Speaker 1: incredibly famous. I just tested that, and um it is factor. Yes,
Speaker 1: most Google person on the planet is that's your That's
Speaker 1: that's a lot of people that that is a funload
Speaker 1: of people and and in some counts he's like beating
Speaker 1: Donald Trump WI again drump the literal president um. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because his career you can compare him to
Speaker 1: a guy like Joe Rogan, right Joe his career, there's
Speaker 1: nothing that people like. Wonder why he's popular, but there's
Speaker 1: no mystery as to how he became popular. He's got
Speaker 1: a very he's been consistently trajector is very very consistent guy,
Speaker 1: constantly in in in the limelight, constantly doing stuff. Not
Speaker 1: hard to see where he came from. Tate is a
Speaker 1: kickboxer for a while and then kind of drops off.
Speaker 1: Is just sort of a guy on Instagram, and then
Speaker 1: it's suddenly the most famous influencer on the planet, seemingly overnight.
Speaker 1: And this is not an accident. This isn't also something
Speaker 1: he didn't just get surprised because something of has happened
Speaker 1: to go viral. This was the result of a tactic
Speaker 1: I haven't seen anyone else used, or certainly not to
Speaker 1: the degree of success um that Tate used, and and
Speaker 1: the tactic that he unleashed not only made him as popular,
Speaker 1: but it made him popular enough that you can find
Speaker 1: articles about schools in the U S and the UK
Speaker 1: holding seminars for young male students and for teachers to
Speaker 1: try to talk about de radicalizing kids who have got
Speaker 1: who have fallen undertake spell. Um when I posted a
Speaker 1: comment about him during his bat with Tunberg, just because
Speaker 1: I was frustrated at the degree I had not with
Speaker 1: Greta's response to him, which I thought was totally fair,
Speaker 1: but with like people kind of cheering it on as
Speaker 1: if he'd been beaten by it, where my concern was like, well,
Speaker 1: the attention historically has just kind of made him more popular.
Speaker 1: And there were a bunch of comments in that post
Speaker 1: I made by teachers who were like, I don't think
Speaker 1: people understand how popular he is with like thirteen, fourteen,
Speaker 1: fifteen year old boys. Um, I talked to kids every
Speaker 1: day who worshiped the guy, and I've never seen anything
Speaker 1: like it. One of my really good friends Jack, this
Speaker 1: is actually a few weeks ago. We were hanging out
Speaker 1: and he was like, kind of joking but also serious.
Speaker 1: He was like, Yo, I'm like, it would be scary
Speaker 1: to be a thirteen year old boy right now because
Speaker 1: of the inundation of this kind of stuff that you're
Speaker 1: seeing all day, every day, and he was like, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna lie. If I was thirteen or fourteen and
Speaker 1: didn't know better, I could probably fall for a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff. It's like, I couldn't imagine being that
Speaker 1: age right now and just being flooded with that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think about that sort of thing, and a lot
Speaker 1: of I'll talk about kind of there's elements of Tate's
Speaker 1: pitch that I think might have worked on me when
Speaker 1: I was seventeen eighteen years old. Um. Particularly, A big
Speaker 1: part of it is like working a ship job that
Speaker 1: you hate for the entirety of your youth is bullshit,
Speaker 1: which it is, like it's a terrible way to spend
Speaker 1: a life doing the thing you hate forever. Um. And
Speaker 1: if you kind of if that's the hook you're leading with,
Speaker 1: rather than what a lot of male influencers lead in with,
Speaker 1: which is like here's how to pick up chicks. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, that's an interesting spin that he's put up.
Speaker 1: But well, we'll we'll get it. We'll get more into
Speaker 1: his pitch and like, what about it is not new?
Speaker 1: And what about it is new? But I wanted to
Speaker 1: I want to start by kind of explaining who tilled
Speaker 1: the soil that Tate grew up in. And to do
Speaker 1: that we have to travel back and time to the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties and the work of the the first real
Speaker 1: modern masculinity guru. And now we've talked about guys like
Speaker 1: Bernard McFadden in the past who had elements of that
Speaker 1: where he's big into physical culture and getting buff and
Speaker 1: he talks about like, you know, how how modernity is
Speaker 1: making men weak. But the Robert Bligh is the guy
Speaker 1: who Jordan Peterson is cutting his image, and so do
Speaker 1: degree is a guy like Andrew Tate. He is the
Speaker 1: first guy to kind of bring both academic rigor and
Speaker 1: also this kind of focus on the damage capitalism has
Speaker 1: done to masculinity into this kind of it's become the
Speaker 1: men's rights movements. It's become the pickup artist community. That's
Speaker 1: not what it was called at the time. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: Robert L. Wood Bli is the name of the guy
Speaker 1: who kind of kicked all of this off. And he's
Speaker 1: not the dude you'd think he was. He's an American poet.
Speaker 1: By some accounts, he's one of the most influential poets
Speaker 1: in American history. And he was born on December twenty
Speaker 1: third nine in Minnesota. Um Initially Bligh seemed to be
Speaker 1: on certainly not the path that he wound up on.
Speaker 1: He goes to Harvard University, he studies at the Iowa
Speaker 1: Writer's Workshop. He receives a full Fulbright scholarship to go
Speaker 1: to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. And during
Speaker 1: this time he also gets connected to these great poets
Speaker 1: who are not Westerners, like Pablo Neruda and Roumi, and
Speaker 1: they influence his understanding of art and the myths that
Speaker 1: underlie it. And it also leads him to feel that
Speaker 1: like modern contemporary American poetry is kind of hollow and
Speaker 1: lacks a connection to this kind of deeper mythology that
Speaker 1: he sees in some of these Eastern poets and some
Speaker 1: of these, you know, poets from other parts of the
Speaker 1: world that aren't the United States that he feels are
Speaker 1: making a deeper connection to things for just a personal preference.
Speaker 1: But I find the Iowa's Writer's Workshop to be a
Speaker 1: red flag. Oh yeah, wait, wait what I don't know
Speaker 1: much about it? Tell me, tell me why is this? No,
Speaker 1: it's just it's just one of those things that gets
Speaker 1: uh were used in TV as like oh, I need
Speaker 1: to go to this thing. It's like it has like
Speaker 1: a a weird weird to leadism to it that Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that. I feel that way about Harvard too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of weird to lead the elitism red
Speaker 1: flags where I'm like, uh, but hearing hearing Harvard University
Speaker 1: followed by Iowa Writer's Workshop is usually not the best.
Speaker 1: Oh and then and and then there's the full yeah,
Speaker 1: full bright grant. So it's you know, yeah, i Iowa
Speaker 1: Writer's Workshop. Sophie says, go to hell. Apparently it's right, motherfucker's.
Speaker 1: I don't know much about the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Um,
Speaker 1: but that's his background. And again this is also he's coming.
Speaker 1: He's doing this at an earlier time. I mean, Harvard
Speaker 1: was very very much that kind of thing. But I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe the Iowa Writer's Workshop was was not.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Um. His first poem of collection of poems,
Speaker 1: which was called Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published
Speaker 1: in nineteens sixty two, and it focused on moments of
Speaker 1: solitude and beauty. As we see in this piece driving
Speaker 1: to town late to mail a letter. It is a
Speaker 1: cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted. The
Speaker 1: only things moving are swirls of snow. As I lift
Speaker 1: the mailbox store, I feel it's cold iron. There is
Speaker 1: a privacy I love in this snowy night. Driving around,
Speaker 1: I will waste more time, which is just like this nice,
Speaker 1: quiet little Certainly you don't see any red flags. There's
Speaker 1: just kind of a poem about one of those quiet
Speaker 1: moments that you have in your life. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: it's I don't know, I don't find it deeply affecting,
Speaker 1: but there's certainly like it's not like he's writing anything
Speaker 1: you would see a problem with, Yeah, for sure. The
Speaker 1: next year he published an influential essay and which he
Speaker 1: attacked mainstream American poetry as impersonal, lacking in soul, and
Speaker 1: a willingness to look inward. His criticism of American society
Speaker 1: expanded after that. In the nineteen sixty six he co
Speaker 1: founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. UM. He
Speaker 1: is one of the very first prominent amer Rican artists
Speaker 1: to like try and organize artists against the war. Which
Speaker 1: is I mean good because it was a bad war. UM.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty eight, he made a public promise to
Speaker 1: refuse to pay taxes until the end of the war,
Speaker 1: and he also made he made some very trenchent critiques
Speaker 1: of of US imperialism. In nineteen sixty seven, he wrote
Speaker 1: an article for the New York Review of Books in
Speaker 1: which he noted the fact that so few Americans have
Speaker 1: resigned from the government or from responsible posts to protest
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War is remarkable to me. And he's bringing
Speaker 1: up also cases of like the Russian Revolution and stuff,
Speaker 1: where you would have these horrible wars being prosecuted by
Speaker 1: regimes that are on paper a lot less free than
Speaker 1: the United States, but also would have a lot more
Speaker 1: defections or people just like refusing to do their jobs
Speaker 1: because they believed that of course that the sovereign had
Speaker 1: set was unethical. And he's like, why isn't this happening
Speaker 1: in American government? Why is no one refusing to be
Speaker 1: a part of the Vietnam War? And he went on
Speaker 1: to ask, can we imagine General Westmoreland resigning and refusing
Speaker 1: to prosecute a brutal war? Never pilots drop anti personnel
Speaker 1: bombs on small North Vietnamese villages and many of them
Speaker 1: hate it, but they don't resign with a public statement
Speaker 1: of protest. They quietly retire when their tour is over.
Speaker 1: Bligh wondered what this showed about Americans. Are we timid?
Speaker 1: Are we greedy? He thought not, And this is what
Speaker 1: he wrote. What it shows is a disastrous split between
Speaker 1: the Americans inner and outer worlds. He does not aim
Speaker 1: to use his life to make himself whole, to join
Speaker 1: the two worlds in himself. On the contrary, he is
Speaker 1: prepared to give up one of the two worlds. The
Speaker 1: businessman gives up the inner world and clings to the
Speaker 1: outer as his way. A large body of literature denounces
Speaker 1: the business man for taking the one world without the other.
Speaker 1: But when a writer is opposed to the Vietnam War
Speaker 1: and still accepts a grant from the government prosecuting of
Speaker 1: the war, he is doing something similar. He is letting
Speaker 1: the world split. He lets the outer world go by
Speaker 1: him with just a wave of his hand, and then
Speaker 1: he reaches out and pulls the inner world to him.
Speaker 1: He accepts the money for the sake of my work.
Speaker 1: It will enable him to live his inner live in
Speaker 1: his inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken
Speaker 1: place before he begins to use the money for his
Speaker 1: work instead of trying to apply what he has learned
Speaker 1: in the actions of his inner life to the actions
Speaker 1: of the world. He pulls back inside the house, closes
Speaker 1: the door, and declares he doesn't know what is going
Speaker 1: on out there, or knows, but has rejected at all
Speaker 1: as outside his sphere of influence or his interest. He
Speaker 1: is not political, but what could be more within the
Speaker 1: sphere of interest of a writer than the world. And
Speaker 1: I actually find that a really affecting critique. Um, I
Speaker 1: think about that a lot, just in terms of, like
Speaker 1: number one, this desire, I have a lot where I'll
Speaker 1: just be kind of like churning through the muck of
Speaker 1: a bunch of horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress,
Speaker 1: or like see some horrible Twitter thing culture warship roll
Speaker 1: up and one to um feel this urge to like, well,
Speaker 1: fuck this. I don't want to pay attention to this anymore.
Speaker 1: I just want to discard this from my life and
Speaker 1: focus on this like piece of art or creativity that
Speaker 1: I think most people feel that most reasonably will feel
Speaker 1: that way a lot. And what he's saying is like,
Speaker 1: how can you call yourself a writer? How can you
Speaker 1: call yourself an artist an attempt to discard the outer
Speaker 1: world in favor of the one that you focus on
Speaker 1: for your creativity, Like, how can you actually be connected
Speaker 1: to your inner world in any way and and feel
Speaker 1: as if you can pretend the outer world does not exist.
Speaker 1: You're doing the same thing as a businessman who focuses
Speaker 1: entirely on his his desire to make money and ignores
Speaker 1: his spiritual development. Like there's not a fundamental moral difference
Speaker 1: between what the two of you are doing, because you're both, Uh,
Speaker 1: you're both rejecting half of of of you're being in
Speaker 1: order to stick with the one that's more comfortable because
Speaker 1: of whatever you've you've chosen as your profession. And in
Speaker 1: the case of yeah, I don't know, I found an
Speaker 1: Attrention critique that makes me think a lot about myself. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe check out what Bligh has to say about
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War. And he put his money where his
Speaker 1: mouth was. He used that article to republish a letter
Speaker 1: he'd sent to the chairman of the National Foundation of
Speaker 1: the on the Arts and Humanities, UM, because they had
Speaker 1: offered him a five thousand dollar grant. And he turns
Speaker 1: it down because he's like, look, this is uh, this
Speaker 1: is an instrument of the United States government, and I
Speaker 1: am opposed to a war they are waging. And even
Speaker 1: though I could argue that, like, well, if I take
Speaker 1: this money and won't get spent on bombs, what I'm
Speaker 1: really doing is providing legitimacy to the state that is
Speaker 1: carrying out this terrible war. And I'm simply not going
Speaker 1: to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to
Speaker 1: support it in any way, even by letting it support me. Um, which,
Speaker 1: whether or not you agree with it, is a deeply
Speaker 1: principled stance that requires sacrificing something. Yeah, so when when
Speaker 1: does he right he's not a bad guy so far? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm waiting. Yeah, this is not this is not cool
Speaker 1: people who did cool stuff. No, no, no, So spoiler alert,
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War ends. Um, we don't do great um
Speaker 1: goes goes okay for Vietnam though, well, I mean, millions
Speaker 1: of people die, but they do win. Um Bli remains
Speaker 1: an influential poet and thinker. In the nineteen seventies, he
Speaker 1: organizes the first Great Mother Conference, which is still going
Speaker 1: on today. It's a nine day festival that explores human consciousness,
Speaker 1: and it celebrates this kind of archetypal idea of the
Speaker 1: Great Mother as this kind of like feminine creative force
Speaker 1: that that you know, underlies everything in society. Um and
Speaker 1: BLI the reason why he felt it was important to
Speaker 1: kind of bring consciousness and get people focused on this
Speaker 1: idea and on this celebration of femininity is that he
Speaker 1: saw the Vietnam War as kind of the expression of masculinity,
Speaker 1: like running wild and leading to terrible death. And he
Speaker 1: believed that Americans needed to reconnect with femininity in the
Speaker 1: wake of the Vietnam War, which is again not an
Speaker 1: unreasonable stance. Um. You know, you can argue with it,
Speaker 1: but you and see where he's coming from. And they're
Speaker 1: like both waiting for it. I'm just waiting for job
Speaker 1: is coming. Motherfucker is coming. So as the aftershocks of
Speaker 1: Vietnam faded, America enters the swinging eighties, Blind becomes concerned
Speaker 1: with something else. Entirely. He sees in the Reagan years
Speaker 1: this vapid consumer culture, you know, malls and ship the
Speaker 1: the increasing spread of popular music is like a concept
Speaker 1: in a way that it really happened. I mean again,
Speaker 1: TV there's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today.
Speaker 1: TV in the nineteen eighties was not what it is now. Um.
Speaker 1: So he sees all this happening, and he he also
Speaker 1: just sees, like, again, what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained
Speaker 1: capitalism is doing to people? Um And he begins to
Speaker 1: believe that the kind of soullessness and and uh brokenness
Speaker 1: at the the core of the American experiment is the
Speaker 1: result now of a crisis and masculinity. Right, So previously
Speaker 1: he had Yeah, there's an extent to which he thinks, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, we'll get into what he thinks.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen ninety he writes a book that is
Speaker 1: kind of illustrating the things that he's he started to
Speaker 1: feel here, and he calls it Iron John, a book
Speaker 1: about men. Now, do you have you heard of the
Speaker 1: fairy Tale of Iron John? Ian so familiar? No, No,
Speaker 1: you're not Big Grimm's fairy Tales people. That's fine, neither
Speaker 1: am I I had not heard about this either. I
Speaker 1: think maybe it's bigger in Germany. Umms. Fairy tales continue. Yeah, wow, wow,
Speaker 1: that's a red flat one of the greatest works of
Speaker 1: art and I'm gonna guess German history. Um, Sophie, I
Speaker 1: feel like you just hate German history reflectively for reasons
Speaker 1: that have nothing to do with anything that has ever
Speaker 1: happened in history. Mm hmmm. I have no comment on that. Wow, Wow,
Speaker 1: well Red Flag. I think Iron John again, it's a
Speaker 1: fairy tale, and I think I'll give a brief summary
Speaker 1: of how that fairy tale goes. It's because it's again
Speaker 1: none of us. I mean, he brought it up. You
Speaker 1: should tell us what I'll tell you. I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: it so God damn. I'm gonna quote from a rite
Speaker 1: up in the New York magazine here. That story goes
Speaker 1: like this. Something in the forest is killing a kingdom's hunters.
Speaker 1: A stranger arrives, goes into the forest with his dog,
Speaker 1: and returns with a large, hairy man he's extracted from
Speaker 1: a pond. This is the wild man whom the king
Speaker 1: locks in a cage. The king's son, playing with his ball,
Speaker 1: lets it slip into the cage, and the wild man
Speaker 1: tells him he'll give it back if the boy steals
Speaker 1: the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow
Speaker 1: and sets him free. The boy unlocks the cage, but
Speaker 1: fearful that he'll be in trouble with his par flees
Speaker 1: on the wild Man's back to the forest. After the
Speaker 1: boy fails a series of trials and acquires a head
Speaker 1: of golden hair, the wild Man kicks him out of
Speaker 1: the forest, but after he sinks to the low status
Speaker 1: of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom, the wild
Speaker 1: Man helps him become a mighty warrior, and he wins
Speaker 1: the hand of the Princess, is reunited with his parents,
Speaker 1: and becomes the rich, heroic king in his own right. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I think we're probably missing some context. They're
Speaker 1: just from culture. But it's like, I get why that's
Speaker 1: not in like the tight five of Grimm's fairy Tales,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's maybe the one you leave on the
Speaker 1: cutting room floor. That's like the B sides. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: like a B side. Yeah, that's like, um, that's like
Speaker 1: I don't know, the one of the one of the
Speaker 1: Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: to be to be fair, like it's up against like
Speaker 1: Snow White Great fairy Tale. It would be funny to
Speaker 1: see like modern Disney try to do this I mean,
Speaker 1: the actual fairy tales are pretty horrific, to be honest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this one I also might be one of the tamer ones.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm not an expert on fairy tales.
Speaker 1: That's why Disney was like to tame, not into it.
Speaker 1: And again, I feel like I feel like this is
Speaker 1: an example. I think sometimes we look at these stories
Speaker 1: that have been around a long time and are like, wow,
Speaker 1: you know, there's some deep wisdom in there, which is
Speaker 1: why we should keep telling them. But I'm looking at this,
Speaker 1: which is it's it's a parable about manhood, right and
Speaker 1: about becoming an adult. And I'm like, you know, it's
Speaker 1: a better parable about manhood and becoming an adult. First
Speaker 1: Star Wars movie. That's a good point. Much better one,
Speaker 1: much better one. Look, George Lucas knocked it out of
Speaker 1: the park. Fuck you Grim. You know who else is
Speaker 1: George Lucas? No, Robert, who else is George Lucas? The
Speaker 1: sponsor of this podcast? I mean would be actually George,
Speaker 1: you have the cash sponsor this podcast. Uh, and we'll
Speaker 1: we'll we'll make it work, buddy, We we got you.
Speaker 1: Um anyway, Uh we are back and no, but maybe
Speaker 1: so here we are, Um, we're talking. We were having
Speaker 1: a good time. Um So, Bligh's book looks at this
Speaker 1: myth of iron John and he re examines the myth
Speaker 1: using Young in psychology, which is again another red flag.
Speaker 1: There's perfectly valid reasons to study young, but whenever you
Speaker 1: have somebody who is reevaluating myths using Young in psychology,
Speaker 1: they always turned into Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry, that's
Speaker 1: just the way that it works. Um So, he's trying
Speaker 1: to find lessons that are going to be meaningful for
Speaker 1: men struggling with modernity, and his basic conclusion, as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, is that men need rewilding in
Speaker 1: order to fix the things that are driving them crazy. Right,
Speaker 1: they need to reconnect with the wild man inside them. Now,
Speaker 1: this is going to be this is the root of
Speaker 1: a million kinds of man influencer garbage, right, everything in
Speaker 1: that funk. Like you guys know the liver King, that
Speaker 1: guy who was telling people that he got super jacked
Speaker 1: by eating nothing but raw animal livers that he hunted. Um,
Speaker 1: he's spending twelve tho dollars a month on steroids, which
Speaker 1: he lied about. Now he's getting sued for a hundred
Speaker 1: billion dollars because he defrauded people by convincing them to
Speaker 1: take his liver enzyme pills. So funny. But what the
Speaker 1: livered King is doing is this is he's basically setting it,
Speaker 1: pretending to be the wild man that Blag talks about
Speaker 1: and being like, this is what you have to do
Speaker 1: in order to, you know, be healthy and deal with
Speaker 1: all of these toxic things about our modern lives is
Speaker 1: go out and throw spears at bores and then eat
Speaker 1: their raw, uncooked organs. Um, which I would actually say
Speaker 1: is a lot less masculine than doing the thing that
Speaker 1: our actual cave man ancestors did, which was learned how
Speaker 1: to cook meat. Um. But you make a really good point. Um,
Speaker 1: it's also the root of we had. We just started
Speaker 1: this year with a couple of more episodes of Jordan B.
Speaker 1: Peterson Show. He talks a lot about the need for
Speaker 1: men to be controllable beasts and also references another Grimm's
Speaker 1: fairy tale. The one that he chooses is, um, well,
Speaker 1: I think it's a Grimm's fairy tale, fucking Beauty and
Speaker 1: the Beast. I don't know, maybe not, maybe that started
Speaker 1: as a Disney thing. I don't know where it started,
Speaker 1: but he talks a lot about like this. Again, there
Speaker 1: the all of these guys today who were talking about
Speaker 1: you have to be primal, you have to reconnect with
Speaker 1: your cave man roots. You have to like the thing
Speaker 1: I saw. I think I saw Jordan B. Peterson like
Speaker 1: video on Instagram the other day and I didn't know
Speaker 1: it was him. I was just scrolling and he was.
Speaker 1: But now that you say that, I'm pre sure it
Speaker 1: was him, because he was talking about how men should
Speaker 1: be dangerous, Like you should be dangerous when it's like
Speaker 1: knowing when to use the threat of violence or not.
Speaker 1: It's like, just because you're dangerous doesn't mean you're like
Speaker 1: a violent person, but you should have that capacity or
Speaker 1: some ship. That's what makes you a true man. It's like, what, yeah, crazy,
Speaker 1: it's um that I mean. And that's you can see
Speaker 1: like Peterson is not in and he never has been
Speaker 1: an original thinker. He's cribbing from Bligh, right, they all are.
Speaker 1: Bligh is the origin of this. And it's also worth
Speaker 1: noting that while Bligh's book has been hit, the descendants
Speaker 1: Suppli's book are pure reactionary gibberish. Bligh himself was not. Again,
Speaker 1: we went through this guy's background. He's he's a deeper
Speaker 1: thinker than that, And there's passages in his book that
Speaker 1: are kind of worth connecting with. Um. So I'm going
Speaker 1: to read a quote from that now to judge by
Speaker 1: men's lives in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, Zulu Lands,
Speaker 1: and in the Arab and Persian culture favored flavored by
Speaker 1: Sufi communities, men have lived together in heart union and
Speaker 1: soul connections for hundreds of thousands of years. Contemporary business
Speaker 1: life allows competitive relationships only in which the major emotions
Speaker 1: are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear after work. What
Speaker 1: do men do collect in a bar to hold light
Speaker 1: conversations over light beer? Unities that are broken off whenever
Speaker 1: a young woman comes by or touches the brim of
Speaker 1: someone's cowboy hat. Having no soul union with other men
Speaker 1: can be the most damaged and wound of all. And
Speaker 1: Cowboy had things kind of weird, But that's a totally
Speaker 1: valid point. The lack of intimate male to male friendship
Speaker 1: is a deep problem in our light beer I had,
Speaker 1: I mean because I think he's just sort of I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: whatever he's getting into a little bit of masculinely the
Speaker 1: point making like, yeah, sorry, Sophie, famous lover of light beer. Um,
Speaker 1: it's okay, I love I love my champagne beer too.
Speaker 1: I just I had some lovely Actually, wish I had
Speaker 1: some Peroni right now. Peroni is a lovely ice, wonderful,
Speaker 1: especially on a hot day. Yeah, I've I've done. I've
Speaker 1: gone on long runs with nothing but a backpack full
Speaker 1: of Pironi to keep me going. Um, that sounds very believable.
Speaker 1: Lot Peroni. It is essentially water. I can smell the
Speaker 1: ad dollars coming in. Yeah, p sponsor us, you coward.
Speaker 1: But you see like what he's making there, And this
Speaker 1: is not a point that like, this is not a
Speaker 1: point Andrew Tate would make, right, because these guys are
Speaker 1: all hyper competitive, and that's a huge part of like
Speaker 1: what they're talking about. Whereas one of the like BLI
Speaker 1: is at his core a large part of what he's
Speaker 1: complaining about is totally rational, which is like, again, aren't
Speaker 1: allowed to where is it? Where is this thing? Well,
Speaker 1: that's not the only thing in the book. Um. He's
Speaker 1: also talking a lot of yeah for it. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: we're getting to it. Ironed John spends sixty two weeks
Speaker 1: on the New York seller list. Yeah. I don't think
Speaker 1: anything gets spends that long in the best seller listing. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is UM. Yeah, this is n UM because it's
Speaker 1: on there for more than a year. UM. And it
Speaker 1: turned Bly from a respected poet and activist into the
Speaker 1: first masculinity guru in modern US history. Now again, we
Speaker 1: had guys like Bernar McFadden before UM, who had talked
Speaker 1: about aspects of this, but Bly is wrapping his arguments
Speaker 1: in respected academia, and the way he's connecting with his
Speaker 1: people is exactly the same as the kind of ship
Speaker 1: that Jordan Peterson and and other folks do today, guys
Speaker 1: like Ivan Throne and whatnot who were in the masculinity
Speaker 1: influencer thing. He's doing conferences, he's having rooms full of people,
Speaker 1: men gather and he's speaking to them and he's like
Speaker 1: running them through. He's basically bringing them to these moments
Speaker 1: of emotional height. And you can see some there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of Werner Erhard in this. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a reason this is all coming out at the same
Speaker 1: time as we start to get the self help craze
Speaker 1: hit UM. But he's basically holding these big pep rallies
Speaker 1: for adult men. In nineteen nine one more than a
Speaker 1: thousand men went to see him at the East Bold
Speaker 1: Auditorium in Parkland, Washington, paying seventy five nineteen dollars for
Speaker 1: the privilege. Yeah. A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes
Speaker 1: the scene thus, lee as the customers file in, a
Speaker 1: dozen white guys flail away incompetently on African drums. When
Speaker 1: the crowd has seated, the drummers quit the stage, and
Speaker 1: Bly and Michael Mead, a storyteller who helps run the workshops,
Speaker 1: begin to recite, rambling myths and bits of verse. Meat
Speaker 1: occasionally bangs a bongo bli, plinks a bazooki, the Greek
Speaker 1: version of the mandolin, seening, sending mournful notes wafting out
Speaker 1: over the audience. So that that sounds good, right, It
Speaker 1: sounds like a fun time. Yeah, it sounds like a
Speaker 1: great way to spend seventy ft. Yeah. I always love
Speaker 1: white guys playing African drums. Uh in in my in
Speaker 1: my gigantic stadium uh speech series by a fucking poet anyway, Bly,
Speaker 1: who in or had been called the most influential living
Speaker 1: American poet by current biography, became a kind of celebrity
Speaker 1: that hadn't previously existed. So he's filling stadiums with people
Speaker 1: who want to hear him talk, But he's also he's
Speaker 1: engaging them in a way that's going to spawn the
Speaker 1: modern men's self help industry. Quote, Bly are just men
Speaker 1: to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their wild nature.
Speaker 1: Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear of brutality,
Speaker 1: have labored to breed fierceness out of men, creating the
Speaker 1: sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt might have said,
Speaker 1: I could carve a better man out of a banana.
Speaker 1: BLYI believes that inside of every such male, there's a
Speaker 1: wild man yearning to get out, a radiant inner king,
Speaker 1: just waiting to confirm masculine pride and shareness of purpose.
Speaker 1: Bli insists he doesn't blame women for men's sorry state.
Speaker 1: He blames older men who have failed to provide young
Speaker 1: ones with the role models they crave. In traditional societies,
Speaker 1: boys worked alongside men, plowing fields and fashioning arrowheads, but
Speaker 1: the industrial Revolution severed that connection. The title character and
Speaker 1: his bestseller is a wild hairy Fellow. Who in the
Speaker 1: in a grim fairy tale is fished up from a
Speaker 1: pond and becomes a boy's mentor. That image is also
Speaker 1: the inspiration for his most extravagant exercise and manly self discovery,
Speaker 1: five day wild Man Excursions, in which groups of a
Speaker 1: hundred men take to the woods under the tutelage of
Speaker 1: Bly and others to dance around fires, banging on drums.
Speaker 1: I mean, honey, just say you have daddy issues and
Speaker 1: move the funk on. Yeah, yeah, I mean again, this
Speaker 1: is there's this there's this element where he's like, society
Speaker 1: is fucked because feminists have tried to breed the violence
Speaker 1: out of her. Yeah, okay, so you know you have
Speaker 1: It's like like astonishing to me that people are picking
Speaker 1: seventy five dollars and like selling out, because I mean
Speaker 1: that's more like that's more than the people were paying
Speaker 1: for for Coachella in the early early two thousand's. The
Speaker 1: crazy thing is like at the core of what he's saying,
Speaker 1: it's like most of that sounds that he's making some
Speaker 1: good points points about, you know, how men have evolved
Speaker 1: in our So I'm just saying, where where's the twist,
Speaker 1: because yeah, there's the there's you've seen it start to
Speaker 1: happen here. So it's because like the valid thing in
Speaker 1: that past is just he's like, hey, look, young boys
Speaker 1: used to grow up learning alongside both their father and
Speaker 1: the other men, you know, in whatever community they were in,
Speaker 1: and that taught them what it meant to be a man.
Speaker 1: And now because capitalism has kind of taken the man
Speaker 1: out of the house, you're supposed to be working forty
Speaker 1: six eight hours a week, right, they're not there to right,
Speaker 1: it's just the usually in like the way our our
Speaker 1: society where it's just the woman who's raising the kid.
Speaker 1: That's what he's saying then, that we've cut men off
Speaker 1: from this process of learning how to be adult men
Speaker 1: and and like that is actually a pretty valid critique.
Speaker 1: And the problem is that not that he's saying. The
Speaker 1: problem is that feminists have bred fierceness out of men
Speaker 1: instead of being like, capitalism separates parents from children for
Speaker 1: huge amounts of time, and that's bad for kids. And actually,
Speaker 1: if you look at it, like you can see in
Speaker 1: the in that very scenario of like men are out
Speaker 1: of the house working, so they're kids are raised largely
Speaker 1: by their mothers, well, that also means an unfair burdens
Speaker 1: being placed on the mother. You could see this, there's
Speaker 1: a way to have solidarity between the genders here and
Speaker 1: be like, oh, yeah, this is all of a problem
Speaker 1: of this system we've built that like separates families in
Speaker 1: ways that are really fucked up. Like I identify with
Speaker 1: that when I was a kid um because we didn't
Speaker 1: have much money at all. The only job my dad
Speaker 1: could get was in New York City, and there was
Speaker 1: a period of more than a year where he was gone.
Speaker 1: He was living on a friend's couch working. They're sending
Speaker 1: money back to us, and it was it was it's
Speaker 1: not just him that made a sacrifice. I made a
Speaker 1: sacrifice as his son, and my mom made a sacrifice
Speaker 1: dealing with the entire job of like raising me. Like,
Speaker 1: there's a thing to identify with their But you can
Speaker 1: see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well,
Speaker 1: what's the problem is that feminists have tried to make
Speaker 1: men less fierce? That's not really the problem. Robert Bligh Like, Um,
Speaker 1: one interesting thing just before you keep going, is I
Speaker 1: think in that quote, did he say that justifiably they
Speaker 1: tried to breathe Yeah, brutality out of men or whatever,
Speaker 1: even they're like on some level, you know, you can
Speaker 1: kind of like okay, like I kind of see what
Speaker 1: the point he's making. You know, men do p pretruate
Speaker 1: a lot of the bullshit that happens to women in
Speaker 1: our society. So like, he's nearly he's not anywhere. He's
Speaker 1: not on the same planet of toxicity as a lot
Speaker 1: of as as guys like you know, Andrew Tate who
Speaker 1: are about to talk about, or even like Jan Peterson.
Speaker 1: But you can see the root of it right where
Speaker 1: he is. Yeah, yeah, he's he's still saying fundamentally, part
Speaker 1: of the problem is famous want men to be less aggressive,
Speaker 1: and like, no, that's not really part of the problem
Speaker 1: that you have adequately identified. Um, yeah, he wants his listeners.
Speaker 1: The young boys are drowning in female energy in the schools.
Speaker 1: Every young man has a fantastic need for initiation. That's
Speaker 1: why we all became so crazy about our football coach.
Speaker 1: Such initiations, he says, channel wildness and the socially approved acts.
Speaker 1: And again you see kind of this, like, well, why
Speaker 1: is the problem? Isn't female energy? Like it's not that,
Speaker 1: Like it's that young men it's that families are being
Speaker 1: split up by this like need to compete and work
Speaker 1: in ways that are really unhealthy for kids. But anyway,
Speaker 1: you can look at the sea of other self help
Speaker 1: grifters at the time we're in her air hard around
Speaker 1: Hubbard who would come around at this point, and you
Speaker 1: could say that BLI is just kind of another dude,
Speaker 1: and that he's doing a lot of the same things
Speaker 1: a lot of these other self help grifters are doing.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that differs him is those
Speaker 1: guys are mostly pile like plying nonsense based on bad
Speaker 1: interpretations of Eastern religion and psychological abuse, and BLI is
Speaker 1: kind of he's not insulting or attacking people. He's not
Speaker 1: calling them them weak. Um he's he's making some reasonable
Speaker 1: points about stuff that's toxic about our society. And then
Speaker 1: he's trying to create like mutual cathartic experiences with the
Speaker 1: men in his audience who are being an vited to
Speaker 1: kind of see the men around them as brothers in
Speaker 1: a way that's more intimate than maybe they had been
Speaker 1: trained to do previously. Um. So again he's there's there's
Speaker 1: something interesting going on here that isn't even holy toxic
Speaker 1: that I think is kind of worth acknowledging as we
Speaker 1: lead to the parts of it that are a lot
Speaker 1: more toxic. Um. And it's one of those things where,
Speaker 1: like I've spent a lot of time on in cell
Speaker 1: message boards and they do talk a lot about this
Speaker 1: feeling of disconnection with society. So when he says that,
Speaker 1: like young men are not connected to their communities, he's
Speaker 1: he's making a decent point. Um. He Also one of
Speaker 1: the points he makes that I thought was interesting is
Speaker 1: he talks about the differences between female sex that and
Speaker 1: male sex, and he points out that because of like
Speaker 1: just basic biological realities of how periods happen, young girls
Speaker 1: are instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys
Speaker 1: are not, and it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about
Speaker 1: their bodies, talking about health problems. Um. And that's probably
Speaker 1: be a valid thing to point out, um, but definitely
Speaker 1: goes both ways. Sure, and again he's very he's completely
Speaker 1: ignorant too. Well. I'm sure there's a lot of things actually,
Speaker 1: especially today, that women are not taught about their bodies
Speaker 1: because of anyway, Again, these are a lot of two
Speaker 1: way problems, and he's focusing just on the male aspect
Speaker 1: of them. But he's not inherently wrong about the male
Speaker 1: aspect of them. He's just leaving a large part of
Speaker 1: the equation out um, and that's where the toxicity comes
Speaker 1: in here. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm ready, I'm ready. BLI
Speaker 1: has reached his fundamental message. Men and women are essentially alien,
Speaker 1: and neither should apologize they're different tribes. He is saying,
Speaker 1: my father was an alcoholic, and yet if you look
Speaker 1: underneath his weakness, there was something there that my mother
Speaker 1: didn't have. She was fine, but she didn't have it.
Speaker 1: Three million sperms start out and they find themselves immediately
Speaker 1: in a hostile environment facing an egg approximately forty times bigger,
Speaker 1: where the product of the one survivor that didn't give up,
Speaker 1: which is it's really weird to be like setting up
Speaker 1: the gender struggle as like sperm versus egg, where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: actually all of us are the product of sperm. That's
Speaker 1: the only way people happen. That's what I emphasize on
Speaker 1: the last part of that quote there, you said, we're
Speaker 1: in the product of the one survivor that didn't give up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the other half of that equation. Is it just
Speaker 1: is it just one little bit of a bit of
Speaker 1: cum that makes a baby? Why is there another part
Speaker 1: to the baby equation? Yeah, I just want to be like, honey,
Speaker 1: did you not show up for sex said class that day?
Speaker 1: Did you miss that lesson? He's framing it like the
Speaker 1: sperm have to murder the eggs so that one can survive.
Speaker 1: That is not the way it works. Um. Bli actually
Speaker 1: insists that he is not preaching old style machismo, and
Speaker 1: he takes pains to tell his audience that, in fact,
Speaker 1: male rage is weakness. We're not talking about aggression. He
Speaker 1: calls out a few of his listeners seemed confused. At
Speaker 1: the height of an hour long discussion of the Gulf War,
Speaker 1: one audience member announces that he's succeeded from society. I'm
Speaker 1: not paying my taxes. I bought an a K forty seven,
Speaker 1: and I'm farting around with ammunition just in case I
Speaker 1: have to back up my decision, he says, softly but firmly.
Speaker 1: Bli and many others have spoken out against the Gulf War,
Speaker 1: yet nobody criticizes the a K forty seven fellow, and
Speaker 1: when Bli asks the Vietnam bets to stand to be honored.
Speaker 1: The room erupts with the applause for about three minutes,
Speaker 1: and you can see there too, the seeds of a
Speaker 1: lot that's going on right now, right where Yeah, he's like,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about many to more be more aggressive.
Speaker 1: And then the guy's like, I have dropped out of
Speaker 1: society and started buying guns. And everyone's like that's great. Um,
Speaker 1: look we're not anyway whatever the BLI died last year.
Speaker 1: Um he lived a long time, yeah, I would say,
Speaker 1: And you can find people, you know, reappraising his work
Speaker 1: and stuff. There's some folks who will say that, like,
Speaker 1: his greater talent was for self promotion rather than poetry,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't as good a poet as people had said.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm not a not a poetry guy.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna analyze his poetry in in that way.
Speaker 1: I do think sometimes because somebody turns out to age
Speaker 1: into a problematic person, people are like, well, I guess
Speaker 1: their work that everybody loved in the past sucked, And
Speaker 1: I think that's kind of cowardly. Like, no people liked
Speaker 1: his poems, they were influential, and then he turned into
Speaker 1: a crank. That's fine, that happens, like yeah, um, anyway,
Speaker 1: you know who isn't a crank and who will never
Speaker 1: do anything problematic My favorite filmmaker Roman Oh. Oh you
Speaker 1: know what. I googled his name as I was saying,
Speaker 1: oh boy, oh dear, um, Well, I'm gonna go burn
Speaker 1: all my DVDs of Rosemary's Baby, and y'all check out
Speaker 1: these ads. Ah, we're bad, really glad if a little
Speaker 1: while I thought it was good, with like the talk
Speaker 1: about reabrasing artists works and the thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: I thrive on praisey. Yeah, that was something different, good
Speaker 1: for you. So um Blin died, but his work launched
Speaker 1: what scholars have called the mytho poetic men's movement, and
Speaker 1: it's it's, oh my god, that's amazing. It is. It
Speaker 1: is a somewhat uh fucking prickish name to call it,
Speaker 1: I guess, but it's what they mean by mythopoetic. I
Speaker 1: should explain, Like, what they're saying is like the argument
Speaker 1: Bli and the other because there's a bunch of other
Speaker 1: authors in this. The argument they're making is that our
Speaker 1: society has stripped mythology out and has become this like
Speaker 1: kind of coldly competitive engine for creating cash value, and
Speaker 1: that we need in order to make men healthier, we
Speaker 1: need to reintroduce like this kind of mythic under standing
Speaker 1: of of masculinity and of the world that like, that's
Speaker 1: kind and a lot of it is they're like looking
Speaker 1: at like Native American cultures and some of the different
Speaker 1: rituals around masculinity they had and being like, well, maybe well,
Speaker 1: and there's actually again, there's a scientific basis to a
Speaker 1: lot of this is cultural appropriation. But like, one of
Speaker 1: the things that's happening this period is you've got a
Speaker 1: lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD in an era
Speaker 1: before they understand it. And a thing that occurs during
Speaker 1: this period is that some of them have buddies who
Speaker 1: are also struggling with PTSD and our Indigenous Americans and
Speaker 1: who invite their their white and black and Hispanic battle
Speaker 1: buddies back to do stuff like sweat lodges um in
Speaker 1: order to like cope and other kind of different rituals
Speaker 1: that have existed in some of these indigenous societies to
Speaker 1: deal with what happens to men when they go to
Speaker 1: war and they invite their friends back, and that stuff
Speaker 1: works better than just getting a job working for an
Speaker 1: accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam. Um. And so people
Speaker 1: are starting to study this and write about it. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that the mythopoetic guys take is
Speaker 1: this belief that you should basically just kind of like
Speaker 1: steel wholesale from these cultures and and dress white people
Speaker 1: up in head dresses and give them drums and stuff,
Speaker 1: as opposed to being like, oh, well, maybe you know,
Speaker 1: there's a way that isn't that to look at the
Speaker 1: value that some of these rituals have in healing people. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not the person to to analyze that completely,
Speaker 1: but that's part of what what they're saying here is that,
Speaker 1: like they're they're kind of recognizing there's something hollow at
Speaker 1: the center of American culture that is not hollow in
Speaker 1: some of these other cultures. And instead of being like,
Speaker 1: maybe there's things that we should fundamentally change about American culture,
Speaker 1: they're they're saying, what if we dress up like these
Speaker 1: other people? Right? That's essentially what's going on with a
Speaker 1: lot of the mytho poetic movement. So a big chunk
Speaker 1: of this and these are some of this is blig.
Speaker 1: Some of these guys outside of Bligh is there. They're
Speaker 1: making their like putting a bunch of like white accountants
Speaker 1: and sweat lodges that they make the wrong way and
Speaker 1: lecturing them about you know, young and Joseph Campbell, or
Speaker 1: they're like making them dress like Caveman while playing you know,
Speaker 1: African drums. There's a lot of like weird and comfortable
Speaker 1: racism in the mythopoetic men's movement. UM. That said, it
Speaker 1: is less toxic than the men's rights movement that would
Speaker 1: follow it. Um. Things kind of get increasingly aggressive and
Speaker 1: toxic from this point out. UM. But Bly and the
Speaker 1: initial mytho poetic influencers were not They saw themselves as therapists,
Speaker 1: and again I don't think they were good at this.
Speaker 1: But they were not political. So they were not This
Speaker 1: was not a conservative movement. They were not billing themselves
Speaker 1: as right wing. They were not really like weighing in
Speaker 1: on culture war issues, in part because the culture war
Speaker 1: didn't exist in the same way then that it does now. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because Bli expressly says this is an
Speaker 1: a political movement. You might criticize him because he had
Speaker 1: just written a really kind of beautiful essay during the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War about the cowardness of being a political but whatever, um.
Speaker 1: I found an article from the Washington Post in nine
Speaker 1: that talked to a number of men who had been
Speaker 1: most active in the movement, and there's some interesting pieces
Speaker 1: in there. Quote an affirmation and strength comes from a
Speaker 1: bonding between men that's impossible to put into words, says
Speaker 1: ed Hanold, the mild mannered federal lawyer and founder of
Speaker 1: the Men's Council of Creator Washington, one of six such
Speaker 1: local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals
Speaker 1: of dancing, roaring, hugging, and weeping. The experience was known
Speaker 1: to men in the past, but has been forgotten. American
Speaker 1: men face a desperate situation and don't even know it.
Speaker 1: There are large numbers of men wandering lost and some
Speaker 1: personal waste, land of jobs with little meaning, personal lives
Speaker 1: with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why.
Speaker 1: He pauses thoughtfully and adds, there's a lot of hurting
Speaker 1: cowboys out there. Now, these guys are not cowboys. These
Speaker 1: guys were like middle managers at auto parts stores and
Speaker 1: ship like, they're absolutely not hurting cowboys. Um, and also
Speaker 1: actual cowboys aren't what this guy thought they were. But
Speaker 1: he's not wrong again and saying that, Like, the situation
Speaker 1: of American men was pretty unpleasant in the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: They were struggling against a capitalist culture that thrived on
Speaker 1: the obliteration of meaning. However, men, of course they are
Speaker 1: not the only ones suffering from this, nor are they
Speaker 1: suffering worse than any other group of Americans. Right, this
Speaker 1: is just alienation under capitalism. Part of what he's doing
Speaker 1: here that is noteworthy and becomes a huge problem later on,
Speaker 1: is he is identifying real problems with the society we
Speaker 1: live in and then cutting men off from the rest
Speaker 1: of that society and thus cutting off the pacity of
Speaker 1: possibility of solidarity. So you can't look at this kind
Speaker 1: of alienation and loss of meaning and be like, wow,
Speaker 1: men and women and everybody is being harmed by the
Speaker 1: meaninglessness this whole, at this or of our culture. You
Speaker 1: have to say men are being harmed, and then that
Speaker 1: invites like, well, there must be women that are doing it,
Speaker 1: and it must be we should be looking at how
Speaker 1: feminine flow right in It's interesting to see like just
Speaker 1: how far John Wayne's like reach impacts the way men think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hurting cowboys. Motherfucker, you are not
Speaker 1: a cowboy. And by the way, cowboys were mostly like
Speaker 1: poor black and Hispanic and Indigenous men who were being
Speaker 1: exploited for their labor. Like, this is not none of
Speaker 1: what you're saying means anything. You are entirely You're you're
Speaker 1: talking about the emptiness of culture and your understanding of
Speaker 1: history has been entirely formed by the movies you watched.
Speaker 1: Like anyway, do better, well, some of them will eventually
Speaker 1: in the future. I think it would be interesting to
Speaker 1: try and find out look into all these men's groups
Speaker 1: in the Washington in the state of Washington in this
Speaker 1: period of time and see how many of those guys
Speaker 1: wound up being elders and the proud boys thirty years later.
Speaker 1: But that's that's that's a more in depth work for
Speaker 1: for someone in the future if they want to do it.
Speaker 1: Um So, one of the most dangerous aspects of the
Speaker 1: mytho poetic men's movement is that it was not as
Speaker 1: toxic as its descendants. Again, it identifies real problems, but
Speaker 1: then it recasts them as things that just men, mostly
Speaker 1: white men, are suffering from. And the answer is like,
Speaker 1: KEECHI kind of racist LARPing as member like that. That's
Speaker 1: basically what they're doing, right, and this, yeah, it's it's,
Speaker 1: it's it causes problems. Later on, one of the most
Speaker 1: ridiculous aspects of the mytho poetic men's movement was the
Speaker 1: creation of wing Span, the Journal of the Male Spirit.
Speaker 1: Uh don't you just want to sit down in with
Speaker 1: a copy of Wingspan read out quotes to your buds.
Speaker 1: I start every morning with it, with it. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: spread spreading your wings. So in the in the pre
Speaker 1: internet era, this acted as a clearing house for the
Speaker 1: movement and a introl place where influencers could advertise their events.
Speaker 1: Quote the last issue of Wingspan list dozens of publications
Speaker 1: and events for men around the country, including a New
Speaker 1: Warrior Training Adventure weekend in Wisconsin, Drumming and Dancing for
Speaker 1: men in Massachusetts, Brother to Brother in New York, Healing
Speaker 1: the Father Wound in California, and Afro American Mails at
Speaker 1: Risk in New Jersey. A recent grandfather ceremony at the
Speaker 1: Fairfax Unitarian Men's Council featured drumming on a five and
Speaker 1: a half foot thunder heart drum. In this area. There
Speaker 1: are three large councils in Virginia, one in Gaithersburg and
Speaker 1: another in Baltimore. The Men's Council of Greater Washington, which
Speaker 1: Hanld started in June of nine with fifty men, is
Speaker 1: the largest, with two thousand members and fifty newcomers arriving
Speaker 1: for each monthly meeting. Late one night in January, at
Speaker 1: the Council's meeting in the Washington Ethical Society Auditorium on
Speaker 1: Upper sixteenth Street, Hanald shed his Clark Kent image as
Speaker 1: he leads five hundred men who are pounding drums and chanting.
Speaker 1: The sweating windows shape with rhythmic thunder that reverberates up
Speaker 1: and down the street as they raise Honald, gyrating and
Speaker 1: clapping high overhead and parade him about the room. Then
Speaker 1: group leaders circulate with large feathers and clay pots, wafting
Speaker 1: the smoke of burning sage into the waiting faces. And
Speaker 1: what is termed a Native American ritual designed to put
Speaker 1: you in touch with generations of male ancestors. So that's
Speaker 1: a little problematic, just to scoch um a number of
Speaker 1: other masculinity grifters, followed by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette
Speaker 1: wrote the bestseller King, Warrior, Magician, Magician, Lover, which reported
Speaker 1: to that's a that's a title right there. I want
Speaker 1: to be a cane, warrior, magician, lover. And these are
Speaker 1: these are like the archetypes of male masculinity. Um I
Speaker 1: don't think they're in order, because you probably don't start
Speaker 1: as a king and end up as a lover, although
Speaker 1: maybe you do. That would be progressive actually saying that
Speaker 1: you need to you need to shed your your mastery
Speaker 1: and your sense of ownership in order to become a lover.
Speaker 1: But I don't think that's the point they're making. Um
Speaker 1: More is a young an analyst and a professor of psychology. Jillette,
Speaker 1: like Dr Jordan balt Is Peterson, was a mythologist. I
Speaker 1: found a good write up that described the main arguments
Speaker 1: in their book by Aaron Innes. The book's second shared
Speaker 1: premise is that there are universal male archetypes inherent to
Speaker 1: every male bodied person that are represented in myth and
Speaker 1: story around the world, but are suppressed in the dominant culture.
Speaker 1: The Developmental History of every Man says more, Gilette is
Speaker 1: in large part the story of his failure or success
Speaker 1: at discovering within himself the archetypes of mature masculinity. Following
Speaker 1: young and psychological theory. They claim that if men are
Speaker 1: not given room to express these archetypes in a healthy manner,
Speaker 1: they will act them out unconsciously in ways that are
Speaker 1: damaging and violent, either directed outward at other people as
Speaker 1: overtly hostile male behavior, or directed inward which SAPs the
Speaker 1: fatality of the men involved. It's worth noting that the
Speaker 1: authors of both books, as well as their contemporary followers,
Speaker 1: seem a hell of a lot more concerned about remedying
Speaker 1: male acting out that's turned inward and creating male malaise
Speaker 1: than they are about male violence directed towards others. Take
Speaker 1: the essay why Men Find It So Hard to Feel
Speaker 1: by Mythopoetic Workshop leader Darren Austin Hall, who says that
Speaker 1: women are at an advantage to men spiritually and at
Speaker 1: minstrel cycles made women are energetically connected to cycles of
Speaker 1: the moon, which in turn is energetically linked to our
Speaker 1: unconscious This leads him to the conclusion that the solution
Speaker 1: to warmongering tyrants in the world is for women to
Speaker 1: use touch and the beautiful arts of seductive love to
Speaker 1: disarm men, and that this will solve male violence. There
Speaker 1: is the girl's just gotta touch us, Ryan, We'll stop
Speaker 1: doing genocides. That's incredible. Hitler wouldn't have done all that
Speaker 1: bad stuff, if I get what I mean. He was
Speaker 1: dating his cousin, So I don't really want to continue
Speaker 1: this joke. But dating dating is the wrong word. Um.
Speaker 1: You know that story, Sophie. We've talked about Hitler and
Speaker 1: his cousin. Yeah, I killed herself. Yeah, it's bad. It's
Speaker 1: a really bad story. Again, bringing up Hitler and the
Speaker 1: cousin that he may be murdered, um, is definitely perhaps
Speaker 1: a good way of pointing out how fucked up it
Speaker 1: is to say the problem of men's violence is that
Speaker 1: women don't touch them the right way. Um, it's pretty bad.
Speaker 1: It also brings to mind I'm thinking about our Liberia
Speaker 1: episodes and the that sex strike that a bunch of
Speaker 1: women went on to get the warlords to come to
Speaker 1: the table to negotiate, and how it's like literally the opposite.
Speaker 1: It's it's number one one of the most amazing stories
Speaker 1: of activism I've ever heard of, and it's literally the
Speaker 1: opposite of what these guys are saying. Um. But I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know. This is also gross. Um
Speaker 1: yeah ikey. So most regular listeners of the show are
Speaker 1: broadly familiar with the way men's empowerment gurus and men's
Speaker 1: rights influencers evolved over the last twenty years or so,
Speaker 1: a mix of right wing culture war politics intersecting with
Speaker 1: very divorced men. And I think we haven't talked about
Speaker 1: this yet, but these guys are all extremely divorced, right,
Speaker 1: There's a there's a lot of weekend Dad energy in
Speaker 1: these sense. Yeah, okay, that's why they're also better Okay,
Speaker 1: yea that there's just no way anything else is going
Speaker 1: on here. Um. Elon Musk would have been really really
Speaker 1: would have fit in at these Maybe it would have
Speaker 1: kept him from buying Twitter. You know, I don't want
Speaker 1: to say it was all toxic. Um. So yeah, again,
Speaker 1: you have UM. Most people listening are kind of familiar
Speaker 1: with where things descend after the mytho poetic men's movement,
Speaker 1: which still kind of is around, but more or less
Speaker 1: peters out over the course of the nineties, and after
Speaker 1: that point, you've got a mix of right wing culture
Speaker 1: war politics that intersects with these very divorce dudes angry
Speaker 1: over custody, you know, yelling about how men are discriminated against.
Speaker 1: And then we have pick of course, starting in the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, these pickup artists selling the secret to
Speaker 1: fucking chicks at bars, and this all gets brewed up
Speaker 1: into this slurry, and you know, you've got to pick
Speaker 1: up artists intersecting with the men's rights activists, intersecting with
Speaker 1: the right wing culture war politicians, intersecting with these literal Nazis.
Speaker 1: And from that slurry we get gamer Gate and the
Speaker 1: alt right and at least a portion of Donald Trump's
Speaker 1: political success. Right, Um, so that is that is the story? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean this is I I we haven't gone into
Speaker 1: this on the show, and it was something I was
Speaker 1: broadly aware of it, didn't know much about. But I
Speaker 1: think this is especially leading into a story about a
Speaker 1: guy like Andrew Tate, who was the most toxic, arguably
Speaker 1: calls himself the most like toxic man on the Internet,
Speaker 1: and is certainly an articon of of male toxicity. I
Speaker 1: think it kind of behooves us to talk about what
Speaker 1: led to him because it's interesting. Um. Anyway, this is
Speaker 1: the end of episode one. Anybody anybody got some thoughts
Speaker 1: here at the end of things? Um, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that was a really great explainer on kind of
Speaker 1: laying the groundwork for where the ideas that eventually became
Speaker 1: Andrew Tap you know, started and took a foothold, and uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: after you broke it down, it makes sense and I
Speaker 1: can see how we got there, you know. But it
Speaker 1: is interesting that, you know, some of the initial original points,
Speaker 1: like you said, we're valid and do kind of highlight
Speaker 1: some issues in our society that maybe we should be
Speaker 1: focusing more on or addressing. But also, as you said,
Speaker 1: it's not just a men's problem. It's a problem for everyone,
Speaker 1: and everyone's being affected by it, and we should be
Speaker 1: finding solidarity in that, and how can we help everybody
Speaker 1: improve our lives, not just oh it's a problem that's
Speaker 1: only affecting men, so women problem. It's so interesting to
Speaker 1: me how many people see, oh, men are being made
Speaker 1: to like spend their entire young and mature adult lives
Speaker 1: like laboring for somebody else's profit in a factory whatever,
Speaker 1: and as a result, their kids barely know them, which
Speaker 1: is a real problem. A lot of kids raised and
Speaker 1: like the fifties, sixties, seventies have and translating that as
Speaker 1: and like seeing you know, their moms struggling to like
Speaker 1: keep the house going and raise the kids through all
Speaker 1: that and and and the kids suffering, and be like, well,
Speaker 1: this is clearly a men's problem. No, this is this
Speaker 1: is a cultural problem. Everybody's problem is this. Um anyway, Sophie,
Speaker 1: I'm really not looking forward to what's coming next, Sophie.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be terrible, and you're gonna have to play
Speaker 1: a lot of clips. So I'm so sorry listeners, but
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but it is necessary. You know what. I'm
Speaker 1: not sorry. I'll never apologize. That's what I learned from
Speaker 1: Andrew Tate. I think you wrote a really good script though.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Sophie. Welcome Robert, I love me too. All right,
Speaker 1: everybody that's gonna do it with us for us today
Speaker 1: at at Behind the Bastards the podcast that will be
Speaker 1: recorded again immediately after this, although I will probably start
Speaker 1: drinking because it is now quite late. Um So, Huzza Huzza.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone, Media This at our website,
Speaker 1: cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
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Speaker 1: get your podcasts.