Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert here. First off, we are doing a
Speaker 2: rewind week because I've written two new Andrew Tait episodes,
Speaker 2: but also myrith day came recently. We took some time off,
Speaker 2: so we're gonna take this week to replay the first
Speaker 2: fourth Tait episodes with ad breaks and stuff removed. I
Speaker 2: also wanted to tell you Ed Zitron is in the
Speaker 2: running for a webby for his show Better Offline, as
Speaker 2: is Molly Conger for Weird Little Guys. Please go to
Speaker 2: the Webbies vote for them. You can find the links
Speaker 2: in the show notes along with their other links. You
Speaker 2: can also just google ed Zitron, Webbies, Molly Conger Webbys
Speaker 2: and you will find them. Please do vote for them.
Speaker 2: We'll be back next week with two brand new episodes
Speaker 2: on what Tait has been up to over the last
Speaker 2: couple of years and a bunch of really fucked up
Speaker 2: information that's come up. So please enjoy these episodes the
Speaker 2: reruns with less ads, and go vote in the Webbies.
Speaker 2: Welcome to him, motherfuckers. I'm Robert Eva. This is Behind
Speaker 2: the Bastards, a podcast that has just encountered one of
Speaker 2: the worst disasters of its career, So we'll get into
Speaker 2: this more later. This is supposed to be and he's
Speaker 2: going to be the first of several episodes about Andrew
Speaker 2: Tait and the mythopoetic Men's movement that led to his
Speaker 2: rise to fame and influence among a generation of young men.
Speaker 2: We started recording this episode just a few hours ago
Speaker 2: with the wonderful April Clark and Grace Freud of the
Speaker 2: Girl God podcast they have anyway, we recorded a little
Speaker 2: bit with them, and then I had a minor emergency
Speaker 2: which has taken me out of the house for a while.
Speaker 2: Things are okay, you don't need to flip out on
Speaker 2: Reddit or whatever, but it was a problem and we
Speaker 2: were not able to record with them. To finish recording
Speaker 2: with them, and because of the holiday, we have no backlog.
Speaker 2: So in order to get this episode done and ready
Speaker 2: for our editor asap, Sophie is going to be my
Speaker 2: guest today along with Ea, our editor, and we will
Speaker 2: get this out as soon as possible because otherwise we
Speaker 2: will not have a show. And we are contractually obligated
Speaker 2: to provide you with entertainment every single week until the
Speaker 2: heat death of the Universe. But I do want to
Speaker 2: shout out April and Grace, who are wonderful who came
Speaker 2: on and booked time for us, and I'm sorry that
Speaker 2: things got messed up. We will have them back on
Speaker 2: the pod at some point in the near future, and
Speaker 2: I wanted to let people know that there is They
Speaker 2: have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February twenty fifth,
Speaker 2: and people can get tickets for that show at Girlgodshow
Speaker 2: dot com. You can also check out their podcast just
Speaker 2: type girl God and any of the things that have podcasts,
Speaker 2: and you can listen to their awesome show. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much again, April and Grace. I'm sorry that there
Speaker 2: was a minor calamity. Now, welcome to the pod, Sophie
Speaker 2: and Ian. How are y'all.
Speaker 1: Doing so well? So on Ian night in Johnson, by
Speaker 1: the way, he edits a lot of our shows, and
Speaker 1: it's also uh one half of Gladiator with fellow fellow
Speaker 1: editor DJ Danel. All right, and we do have the
Speaker 1: full Gladiator on staff, which I like to bring up
Speaker 1: as much as possible.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3: I appreciate the love. And yeah, you know it's Friday.
Speaker 3: Ready for the weekend. Let's talk some Tate. You know,
Speaker 3: let's let's do it.
Speaker 1: Friday, get into it Friday, but also almost Saturday.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: And Ian is currently in his closet.
Speaker 2: And we we may start drinking in the in the
Speaker 2: near future.
Speaker 1: It might need to happen. Yeah, let's do it, all right, Robert.
Speaker 2: But yeah, Ian, I actually have you been on just
Speaker 2: as one of our podcasts before you you have known
Speaker 2: this first? Uh? Well, you know, Ian, people should know
Speaker 2: about you again. You're you're one half of Gladiator. You
Speaker 2: are a longtime friend of our other editor, DJ Danel.
Speaker 2: You are a legendary podcast editor. And you had absolutely
Speaker 2: no involvement in the July sixteenth plane crash that cost
Speaker 2: John F. Kennedy Junior his life off the Massachusetts coast.
Speaker 2: No involvement at all. No know why people, Yeah, don't
Speaker 2: bring it up. We had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1: Why are you talking about that?
Speaker 2: I just to let people know Ian had nothing to
Speaker 2: do with it. Ian, Sophie, What do y'all know about
Speaker 2: Andrew Tait?
Speaker 3: So my limited knowledge of him is he's a I believe,
Speaker 3: a former MMA fighter who I don't know how he
Speaker 3: made a lot of money, but it seems like he
Speaker 3: has a lot of money from what he've seen on
Speaker 3: the internet.
Speaker 2: We'll be talking about how Yeah.
Speaker 3: And he's into a lot of misogynistic men rights kind
Speaker 3: of stuff. And he got thoroughly destroyed online by Greta,
Speaker 3: So I do remember that, and I think he's in
Speaker 3: jail now.
Speaker 2: He is in jail now, unrelated to the Greta stuff.
Speaker 2: There was a little bit of a confusion about that,
Speaker 2: but yes, he is in jail for sex trafficking in Romania. Sophie,
Speaker 2: Is that more or less your understanding of the guy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he fucking sucks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he does. Indeed, he does. Indeed fucking suck. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: he's also kind of worth studying in detail because he's
Speaker 2: managed to do something with social media that I don't
Speaker 2: think anyone else has ever managed the same degree of
Speaker 2: success he has. He's he's smart in one very specific way.
Speaker 2: Even though he also did a bunch of dumb things
Speaker 2: and some really dumb crimes that hopefully have ruined his life.
Speaker 2: He was he was smart, and one in a way
Speaker 2: that has allowed him to become dangerously influential to an
Speaker 2: entire generation of teenage boys, in a way that like
Speaker 2: no one on earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump
Speaker 2: is really the only other guy that I might put
Speaker 2: next to Tate in that kind and I think Tit
Speaker 2: has a wider appeal among gen Z teens and tweens
Speaker 2: than certainly Trump.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're going to be talking about all that. I
Speaker 2: am one of the things when I started looking into
Speaker 2: this guy, there's a ton of articles about because he
Speaker 2: blew up kind of mid twenty twenty one up until
Speaker 2: you know the arrest a couple of weeks ago, there's
Speaker 2: not profile articles on him that like go into detail
Speaker 2: about his background, in his past and his entire rise
Speaker 2: to power. You'll generally the best articles you'll find in
Speaker 2: places like BuzzFeed or I think we have a couple
Speaker 2: from like The Guardian. They'll like summarize his backstory in
Speaker 2: two or three paragraphs. I wanted to get into who
Speaker 2: this guy is and where he came from, because he
Speaker 2: kind of pops out of nowhere if you don't follow that.
Speaker 2: I think this is the first time anyone's really done that,
Speaker 2: So I think this will be valuable for that. But
Speaker 2: I want to start by laying out why we have
Speaker 2: to take Tit seriously and kind of explain the scale
Speaker 2: of sort of his influence. I am not exaggerating when
Speaker 2: I say that he is maybe the most influential single
Speaker 2: person on teen pre teen mails in the US and
Speaker 2: the UK and some other parts of the West than
Speaker 2: anyone else on planet Earth. In fall of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: financial services company Piper Sandler released a survey of fourteen
Speaker 2: five hundred US teens taken between August and September of
Speaker 2: that year. Tate was the number one influencer on the
Speaker 2: list in terms of popularity. He beat Kanye West, he
Speaker 2: beat mister Beast, he beat Dwayne the Rock Johnson, all.
Speaker 1: Of them, not Beast.
Speaker 2: I yeah, I don't know who mister Beast is, but
Speaker 2: he's he's a YouTuber. Yeah, he's a YouTuber. I know
Speaker 2: Elon Musk joked about giving him control of Twitter or
Speaker 2: he asked whatever. I don't know anything about him. I'm
Speaker 2: sure you're fine, mister Beast, or he's horrible.
Speaker 1: It is horrible to say anybody who's that famous on YouTube.
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit like, yeah.
Speaker 2: No, good people get famous on YouTube, which is what
Speaker 2: I text our friend Cody Johnston every single day when
Speaker 2: he releases a new YouTube video. Anyway, the Andrew Tait
Speaker 2: hashtag on TikTok has received more than ten billion views
Speaker 2: over the course of twenty twenty two alone, which is
Speaker 2: fucking nuts. That is in that is insane, that is
Speaker 2: like incomprehensibly viral. He was Also, he will always claim
Speaker 2: that he's like the most Googled person on Earth. I
Speaker 2: looked into what he actually is. That's not quite it.
Speaker 2: He is the he is the number one when you
Speaker 2: type in who is into Google? Who is Andrew Tait
Speaker 2: is the number one who is question asked of Google
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty two, which is not the same as
Speaker 2: being the most google person on Earth, although he is
Speaker 2: one of the most google people on Earth. I found
Speaker 2: a couple of lists of that, and he's often at
Speaker 2: like number eight, someplace closer to like ten, but like
Speaker 2: he's incredibly famous.
Speaker 1: I just tested that and it isn't fact true.
Speaker 3: Yes, the top ten most Google person on the planet
Speaker 3: is that's your that's that's a lot of people.
Speaker 2: That is a fuckload of people. And and in some
Speaker 2: counts he's like beating Donald Trump, which again Trump was
Speaker 2: the literal president. And it's interesting because his career you
Speaker 2: can compare him to a guy like Joe Rogan right
Speaker 2: Joe his career, there's nothing that people like. Wonder why
Speaker 2: he's popular, but there's no mystery as to how he
Speaker 2: became popular. He's got a very he's been consistently. The
Speaker 2: trajector is, yeah, very very consistent guy, constantly in the limelight,
Speaker 2: constantly doing stuff. Not hard to see where he came from.
Speaker 2: Tate is a kickboxer for a while and then kind
Speaker 2: of drops off, is just sort of a guy on
Speaker 2: Instagram and then is suddenly the most famous influencer on
Speaker 2: the planet, seemingly overnight. And this is not an accident.
Speaker 2: This isn't also something He didn't just get surprised because
Speaker 2: something of has happened to go viral. This was the
Speaker 2: result of a tactic I haven't seen anyone else use,
Speaker 2: or certainly not to the degree of success that Tate used.
Speaker 2: And the tactic that he unleashed not only made him
Speaker 2: as popular, but it made him popular enough that you
Speaker 2: can find articles about schools in the US and the
Speaker 2: UK holding seminars for young male students and for teachers
Speaker 2: to try to talk about de radicalizing kids who have
Speaker 2: got to have fallen under Tate's spell when I posted
Speaker 2: a comment about him during his spat with Tunberg, just
Speaker 2: because I was frustrated at the degree I had not
Speaker 2: with Greta's response to him, which I thought was totally fair,
Speaker 2: but with like people kind of cheering it on as
Speaker 2: if he'd been beaten by it, where my concern was like, well,
Speaker 2: the attention historically has just kind of made him more popular.
Speaker 2: And there were a bunch of comments in that post
Speaker 2: I made by teachers who were like, I don't think
Speaker 2: people understand how popular he is with like thirteen, fourteen,
Speaker 2: fifteen year old boys. I talk to kids every day
Speaker 2: who worship the guy, and I've never seen anything like it.
Speaker 3: A lot of my really good friends Jack This is
Speaker 3: actually a few weeks ago, we were hanging out and
Speaker 3: he was like kind of joking but also serious. He
Speaker 3: was like, I know, I'm like, it would be scary
Speaker 3: to be a thirteen year old boy right now because
Speaker 3: of the inundation of this kind of stuff that you're
Speaker 3: seeing all day every day. And he was like, I'm
Speaker 3: not gonna lie. If I was thirteen or fourteen and
Speaker 3: didn't know better, I could probably fall for a lot
Speaker 3: of this stuff. It's like I could imagine being that
Speaker 3: age right now and just being flooded with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think about that sort of thing in a
Speaker 2: lot of I'll talk about kind of there's elements of
Speaker 2: Tate's pitch that I think might have worked on me
Speaker 2: when I was seventeen eighteen years old. Particularly, A big
Speaker 2: part of it is like working a shit job that
Speaker 2: you hate for the entirety of your youth is bullshit,
Speaker 2: which it is, like, it's a terrible way to spend
Speaker 2: a life doing the thing you hate forever. And if
Speaker 2: you kind of if that's the hook you're leading with,
Speaker 2: rather than what a lot of male influencers lead in with,
Speaker 2: which is like, here's how to pick up chicks. You know,
Speaker 2: that's an interesting spin that he's put. We get it.
Speaker 2: We'll get more into his pitch and like, what about
Speaker 2: it is not new? And what about it is new?
Speaker 2: But I wanted to I want to start by kind
Speaker 2: of explaining who tilled the soil that Tate grew up in.
Speaker 2: And to do that we have to travel back in
Speaker 2: time to the nineteen nineties and the work of the
Speaker 2: first real modern masculinity.
Speaker 1: Guru in U history.
Speaker 2: Now we've talked about guys like Bernard McFadden in the
Speaker 2: past who had elements of that where he's big into
Speaker 2: physical culture and getting buff and he talks about like,
Speaker 2: you know, how modernity is making men weak. But the
Speaker 2: Robert Bli is the guy who Jordan Peterson is cutting
Speaker 2: his image, and so do Degree is a guy like
Speaker 2: Andrew Tait. He is the first guy to kind of
Speaker 2: bring both academic rigor and also this kind of focus
Speaker 2: on the damage capitalism has done to masculinity into this
Speaker 2: kind of it's become the men's rights movements, it's become
Speaker 2: the pickup artist community. That's not what it was called
Speaker 2: at the time. But yeah, Robert Elwood Bli is the
Speaker 2: name of the guy who kind of kicked all of
Speaker 2: this off. And he's not the dude you'd think he was.
Speaker 2: He's an American poet. By some accounts, he's one of
Speaker 2: the most influential poets in American history. And he was
Speaker 2: born on December twenty third, nineteen twenty six, in Minnesota. Initially,
Speaker 2: Bli seemed to be on certainly not the path that
Speaker 2: he wound up on. He goes to Harvard University, he
Speaker 2: studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He receives a full
Speaker 2: Fulbright scholarship to go to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry
Speaker 2: into English. And during this time he also gets connected
Speaker 2: to these great poets who are not Westerners, like Pablo
Speaker 2: Naruta and Rumi, and they influence his understanding of art
Speaker 2: and the myths that underlie it. And it also leads
Speaker 2: him to feel that like modern contemporary American poetry is
Speaker 2: kind of hollow and lacks a connection to this kind
Speaker 2: of deeper mythology that he sees in some of these
Speaker 2: Eastern poets and some of these poets from other parts
Speaker 2: of the world that aren't the United States that he
Speaker 2: feels are making a deeper connection to things.
Speaker 1: This pinion just a personal preference, But I find the
Speaker 1: Iowa's Writer's Workshop to be a red flag.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, wait wait, I don't know much about it.
Speaker 2: Tell me why is this?
Speaker 1: No, it's just it's just one of those things that
Speaker 1: gets uh overused 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 elitism to it that uh yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean that. I feel that way about Harvard too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of weird lead elitism. Red flags,
Speaker 1: where I'm like, uh, but yeah, hearing wearing Harvard University
Speaker 1: followed by Iowa Writers Workshop is usually not the best.
Speaker 1: Oh and then and then there's the full yeah, full
Speaker 1: bright grant, so it's you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Fact Iowa Writers Workshop. Sophie says, go to hell fuck off.
Speaker 2: Apparently that's right, motherfuckers. I don't know much about the
Speaker 2: Iowa Writers' Workshop, but that's his background. And again this
Speaker 2: is also he's coming. He's doing this at an earlier time.
Speaker 2: I mean, Harvard was very very much that kind of thing,
Speaker 2: but I don't know. Maybe the Iowa Writers Workshop was
Speaker 2: was not. I don't know. His first poem of collection
Speaker 2: of poems, which was called Silence in the Snowby Fields,
Speaker 2: was published in nineteen sixty two, and it focused on
Speaker 2: moments of solitude and beauty, as we see in this piece.
Speaker 2: Driving to town late to mail a letter, it is
Speaker 2: a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
Speaker 2: The only things moving are swirls of snow. As I
Speaker 2: lift the mailbox door, I feel it's cold iron. There
Speaker 2: is a privacy I love in this snowy night. Driving around,
Speaker 2: I will waste more time, which is just like this nice,
Speaker 2: quiet little Certainly you don't see any red flags there.
Speaker 2: It's just kind of a poem about one of those
Speaker 2: quiet moments that you have in your life. You know.
Speaker 2: It's I don't know, I don't find it deeply affecting,
Speaker 2: but there's certainly like it's not like he's writing anything
Speaker 2: you would see a problem with, Yeah, for sure. The
Speaker 2: next year he published an influential essay in which he
Speaker 2: attacked mainstream American poetry as impersonal, lacking in soul, and
Speaker 2: a willingness to look inward. His criticism of American society
Speaker 2: expanded after that, and in nineteen sixty six he co
Speaker 2: founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. He is
Speaker 2: one of the very first prominent American artists to try
Speaker 2: and organize artists against the war, which is I mean good,
Speaker 2: because it was a bad war. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 2: he made a public promise to refuse to pay taxes
Speaker 2: until the end of the war, and he also made
Speaker 2: he made some very trenchiant critiques of US imperialism. In
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty seven, he wrote an article for the New
Speaker 2: York Review of Books in which he noted the fact
Speaker 2: that so few Americans have resigned from the government or
Speaker 2: from responsible posts to protest. The Vietnam War is remarkable
Speaker 2: to me. And he's bringing up also cases of like
Speaker 2: the Russian Revolution and stuff, where you would have these
Speaker 2: horrible wars being prosecuted by regimes that are on paper
Speaker 2: a lot less free than the United States, but also
Speaker 2: would have a lot more defections or people just like
Speaker 2: refusing to do their jobs because they believed that of
Speaker 2: course that the sovereign had set was unethical. And he's like,
Speaker 2: why isn't this happening in American government? Why is no
Speaker 2: one refusing to be a part of the Vietnam War?
Speaker 2: And he went on to ask, can we imagine General
Speaker 2: Westmoreland resigning and refusing to prosecute a brutal war? Never
Speaker 2: pilots drop anti personnel bombs on small North Vietnamese villages
Speaker 2: and many of them hate it, but they don't resign
Speaker 2: with a public statement of protest. They quietly retire when
Speaker 2: their tour is over. Bli wondered what this showed about Americans?
Speaker 2: Are we timid? Are we greedy? He thought not, And
Speaker 2: this is what he wrote. What it shows is a
Speaker 2: disastrous split between the Americans inner and outer worlds. He
Speaker 2: does not aim to use his life to make himself whole,
Speaker 2: to join the two worlds in himself. On the contrary,
Speaker 2: he is prepared to give up one of the two worlds.
Speaker 2: The business man gives up the inner world and clings
Speaker 2: to the outer as his way. A large body of
Speaker 2: literature denounces the business man for taking the one world
Speaker 2: without the other. But when a writer is opposed to
Speaker 2: the Vietnam War and still accepts a grant from the
Speaker 2: government prosecuting of the war, he is doing something similar.
Speaker 2: He is letting the world split. He lets the outer
Speaker 2: world go by him with just a wave of his hand,
Speaker 2: and then he reaches out and pulls the inner world
Speaker 2: to him. He accepts the money for the sake of
Speaker 2: my work. It will enable him to live in his
Speaker 2: inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken place
Speaker 2: before where he begins to use the money for his
Speaker 2: work instead of trying to apply what he has learned
Speaker 2: in the actions of his inner life to the actions
Speaker 2: of the world. He pulls back inside the house, closes
Speaker 2: the door, and declares he doesn't know what is going
Speaker 2: on out there, or knows, but has rejected it all
Speaker 2: is outside his sphere of influence or his interest. He
Speaker 2: is not political, But what could be more within the
Speaker 2: sphere of interest of a writer than the world. And
Speaker 2: I actually find that a really affecting critique. I think
Speaker 2: about that a lot, just in terms of, like number one,
Speaker 2: this desire, I have a lot where I'll just be
Speaker 2: kind of like churning through the muck of a bunch
Speaker 2: of horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress, or
Speaker 2: like see some horrible Twitter thing culture warshit roll up,
Speaker 2: and want to feel this urge to like, well, fuck this,
Speaker 2: I don't want to pay attention to this anymore. I
Speaker 2: just want to discard this from my life and focus
Speaker 2: on this piece of art or creativity that And I
Speaker 2: think most people feel that, most reasonable people feel that
Speaker 2: way a lot. And what he's saying is like, how
Speaker 2: can you call yourself a writer? How can you call
Speaker 2: yourself an artist and attempt to discard the outer world
Speaker 2: in favor of the one that you focus on for
Speaker 2: your creativity, Like how can you actually be connected to
Speaker 2: your inner world in any way and feel as if
Speaker 2: you can pretend the outer world does not exist? You're
Speaker 2: doing the same thing as a businessman who focuses entirely
Speaker 2: on his desire to make money and ignores his spiritual development. Like,
Speaker 2: there's not a fundamental moral difference between what the two
Speaker 2: of you are doing, because you're both you're both rejecting
Speaker 2: half of your being in order to stick with the
Speaker 2: one that's more comfortable because of whatever you've chosen as
Speaker 2: your profession. And in the case of yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 2: I found an attrenchient critique that makes me think a
Speaker 2: lot about myself. M Maybe check out what Bligh has
Speaker 2: to say about the Vietnam War. And he put his
Speaker 2: money where his mouth was. He used that article to
Speaker 2: republish a letter he sent to the chairman of the
Speaker 2: National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities because they had
Speaker 2: offered him a five thousand dollars grant, and he turns
Speaker 2: it down because he's like, look, this is a this
Speaker 2: is an instrument of the United States government, and I
Speaker 2: am opposed to a war they are waging. And even
Speaker 2: though I could argue that, like, well, if I take
Speaker 2: this money and won't get spent on bombs, what I'm
Speaker 2: really doing is providing legitimacy to the state that is
Speaker 2: carrying out this terrible war. And I'm simply not going
Speaker 2: to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to
Speaker 2: support it in any way even by letting it support me, which,
Speaker 2: whether or not you agree with it, is a deeply
Speaker 2: principled stance that requires sacrificing something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so when does he when the sport right?
Speaker 2: He's not a bad guy so far.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm waiting. Yeah, this is this is not cool
Speaker 1: people who did cool stuff?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, So spoiler alert, the Vietnam War ends.
Speaker 2: We don't do great goes. Okay for Vietnam though, well,
Speaker 2: I mean, millions of people die, but they do win.
Speaker 2: Bli remains an influential poet and thinker. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 2: he organizes the first Great Mother Conference, which is still
Speaker 2: going on today. It's a nine day festival that explores
Speaker 2: human consciousness and it celebrates this kind of archetypal idea
Speaker 2: of the Great Mother as this kind of like feminine
Speaker 2: creative force that you know, underlies everything in society. And
Speaker 2: Bli the reason why he felt it was important to
Speaker 2: kind of bring consciousness and get people focused on this
Speaker 2: idea and on this celebration of femininity is that he
Speaker 2: saw the Vietnam war as kind of the expression of masculinity,
Speaker 2: like running wild and leading to terrible death, and he
Speaker 2: believed that Americans needed to reconnect with femininity in the
Speaker 2: wake of the Vietnam War, which is again not an
Speaker 2: unreasonable stance. You know, you can argue with it, but
Speaker 2: you can see where he's coming from.
Speaker 1: And they're like both waiting for it.
Speaker 2: Wait for the shooting job. Motherfucker's common. Motherfucker is common. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So as the aftershocks of Vietnam faded, America enters the
Speaker 2: swing in eighties, Blige becomes concerned with something else entirely.
Speaker 2: He sees in the Reagan years, this vapid consumer culture,
Speaker 2: you know, malls and shit, the the increasing spread of
Speaker 2: popular music is like a concept in a way that
Speaker 2: it really happened, the spread, Like, I mean, look again TV,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today. TV
Speaker 2: in the nineteen eighties was not what it is now.
Speaker 2: So he sees all this happening, and he he also
Speaker 2: just sees, like, again, what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained
Speaker 2: capitalism is doing to people. And he begins to believe
Speaker 2: that the kind of soullessness and brokenness at the at
Speaker 2: the core of the American experiment is the result now
Speaker 2: of crisis in masculinity. Right, So previously he had Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's an extent to which he thinks, like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: we'll get into what he thinks. So in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: he writes a book that is kind of illustrating the
Speaker 2: things that he's he started to feel here, and he
Speaker 2: calls it Iron John, a book about men. Now, have
Speaker 2: you heard of the fairy Tale of Iron John? Ian?
Speaker 5: No so familiar?
Speaker 2: No, No, you're not big Grim's fairy Tales people. That's fine,
Speaker 2: neither am I. I had not heard about this either.
Speaker 2: I think maybe it's bigger in Germany.
Speaker 1: Is Grim's fairy Tales? Red Flog continuing, Yeah, oh.
Speaker 2: Wow, Wow, that's a red flag one of the greatest
Speaker 2: works of art. And I'm gonna guess German history, Sophie Robert. Wow,
Speaker 2: I feel like you just hate German history reflexively for
Speaker 2: reasons that have nothing to do with anything that has
Speaker 2: ever happened in history.
Speaker 1: Hmm, I'm in on that.
Speaker 2: Wow wow, well, Red Flag.
Speaker 5: Sund that what he does?
Speaker 2: I think Iron John again, it's a fairy tale, and
Speaker 2: I think I'll give a brief summary of how that
Speaker 2: fairy tale goes. It's because it's again none of us
Speaker 2: are I.
Speaker 1: Mean, you brought it up. You should tell us what
Speaker 1: the I'll tell you.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna do it, so goddamn it. From a rite
Speaker 2: up in the New York magazine. Here, that story goes
Speaker 2: like this. Something in the forest is killing a kingdom's hunters.
Speaker 2: A stranger arrives, goes into the forest with his dog,
Speaker 2: and returns with a large hairy man he's extracted from
Speaker 2: a pond. This is the wild man whom the king
Speaker 2: locks in a cage. The king's son, playing with his ball,
Speaker 2: lets it slip into the cage, and the wild man
Speaker 2: tells him he'll give it back if the boy steals
Speaker 2: the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow
Speaker 2: and sets him free. The boy unlocks the cage, but
Speaker 2: fearful that he'll be in trouble with his parents, flees
Speaker 2: on the wild man's back to the forest. After the
Speaker 2: boy fails a series of trials and wires a head
Speaker 2: of golden hair, the wild man kicks him out of
Speaker 2: the forest, but after he sinks to the low status
Speaker 2: of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom. The wild
Speaker 2: Man helps him become a mighty warrior, and he wins
Speaker 2: the hand of the Princess, is reunited with his parents,
Speaker 2: and becomes the rich, heroic king in his own right.
Speaker 2: So you know, I think we're probably missing some context there,
Speaker 2: just from culture. But it's like I get why that's
Speaker 2: not in like the the tight five of Grim's fairy tales,
Speaker 2: Like that's that's maybe the one you leave on the
Speaker 2: cutting room floor.
Speaker 5: That's like the B sides.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like a B side. Yeah, that's like, that's like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, the one of the one of the
Speaker 2: Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore.
Speaker 1: Well, to be fair, like it's up against like snow
Speaker 1: white cinderelative exactly.
Speaker 2: It's not a fairy tale. It would be funny to
Speaker 2: see like modern Disney try to do this.
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean, the actually rooms fairy tales are pretty horrific,
Speaker 1: to be honest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one it also might be one of the
Speaker 2: tamer ones. I don't know, I'm not an expert on
Speaker 2: fairy tales.
Speaker 1: Well that's why Disney was like mm to tame not
Speaker 1: into it.
Speaker 2: And again I feel like I feel like This is
Speaker 2: an example. I think sometimes we look at these stories
Speaker 2: that have been around a long time and are like, wow,
Speaker 2: you know, there's some deep wisdom in there, which is
Speaker 2: why we should keep telling them. But I'm looking at this,
Speaker 2: which is it's it's a parable about manhood, right and
Speaker 2: about becoming an adult. And I'm like, you know, it's
Speaker 2: a better parable about manhood and becoming an adult for
Speaker 2: Star Wars movie.
Speaker 5: That's a good point.
Speaker 2: Much better one, much better one. Look, George Lucas knocked
Speaker 2: it out of the park. Fuck you Grim. You know
Speaker 2: who else is George Lucas?
Speaker 1: No, Robert, who else is George Lucas?
Speaker 2: The sponsor of this podcast?
Speaker 1: I mean that would be sold.
Speaker 2: Actually, George, you have the cash sponsor this podcast. Uh,
Speaker 2: and we'll we'll we'll make it work. Buddy, we got
Speaker 2: you anyway, Uh we are back and no but maybe okay.
Speaker 2: So here we are, we're talking, we're having a good time.
Speaker 2: So Blig's book looks at this myth of iron John
Speaker 2: and he re examines the myth using young in psychology,
Speaker 2: which is again another red flag. There's perfectly valid reasons
Speaker 2: to study young, but whenever you have somebody who is
Speaker 2: reevaluating myths using young in psychology, they always turned into
Speaker 2: Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry, that's just the way that
Speaker 2: it works. So he's trying to find lessons that are
Speaker 2: going to be meaningful for men struggling with modernity, and
Speaker 2: his basic conclusion, as far as I can tell, is
Speaker 2: that men need rewilding in order to fix the things
Speaker 2: that are driving them crazy. Right, they need to reconnect
Speaker 2: with the wild man inside them. Now, this is going
Speaker 2: to be This is the root of a million kinds
Speaker 2: of influenzer garbage, right, everything in that funck. Like you
Speaker 2: guys know the liver King, that guy who was telling
Speaker 2: people that he got super jacked by eating nothing but
Speaker 2: raw animal livers that he hunted. He's spending twelve thousand
Speaker 2: dollars a month on steroids, which he lied about. Now
Speaker 2: he's getting sued for one hundred million dollars because he
Speaker 2: defrauded people by convincing them to take his liver enzyme pills.
Speaker 2: So funny. But what the liver King is doing is
Speaker 2: this is he's basically setting it, pretending to be the
Speaker 2: wild man that BLI talks about and being like, this
Speaker 2: is what you have to do in order to be
Speaker 2: healthy and deal with all of these toxic things about
Speaker 2: our modern lives is go out and throw spears at
Speaker 2: bores and then eat their raw, uncooked organs, which I
Speaker 2: would actually say is a lot less masculine than doing
Speaker 2: the thing that our actual caveman ancestors did, which was
Speaker 2: learn how to cook meat.
Speaker 5: But you make a really good point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's also the root of wed. We just started
Speaker 2: this year with a couple of more episodes of Jordan B.
Speaker 2: Peterson's show. He talks a lot about the need for
Speaker 2: men to be controllable beasts, and also references another Grim's
Speaker 2: fairy tale. The one that he chooses is, well, I
Speaker 2: think it's a Grim's fairy tale, fucking Beauty and the Beast.
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe not. Maybe that started as a
Speaker 2: Disney thing. I don't know where it started. But he
Speaker 2: talks a lot about like this. Again, all of these
Speaker 2: guys today who are talking about you have to be primal,
Speaker 2: you have to reconnect with your caveman roots.
Speaker 3: You have to Okay, I saw I think I saw
Speaker 3: Jordan B. Peterson like video on Instagram the other day,
Speaker 3: and I didn't know it was him. I was just
Speaker 3: scrolling and he was. But now that you say that,
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure it was him because he was talking
Speaker 3: about how men should be dangerous, Like yeah, dangerous, but
Speaker 3: it's like knowing when to use the threat of violence
Speaker 3: or not. It's like, just because you're dangerous doesn't mean
Speaker 3: you're like a violent person, but you should have that
Speaker 3: capacity or some shit, that's what makes you a true man.
Speaker 5: It's like, what, yeah, crazy.
Speaker 2: It's I mean, And that's you can see like Peterson
Speaker 2: is not an and he never has been an original thinker.
Speaker 2: He's cribbing from Bly, right, they all are. Bli is
Speaker 2: the origin of this. And it's also worth noting that
Speaker 2: while Bli's book has been the descendants of Bli's book
Speaker 2: are pure reactionary gibberish, Bli himself was not. Again, we
Speaker 2: went through this guy's background. He's he's a deeper thinker
Speaker 2: than that, and there's passages in his book that are
Speaker 2: kind of worth connecting with. So I'm going to read
Speaker 2: a quote from that now to judge by men's lives
Speaker 2: in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, Zulu Lands, and in
Speaker 2: the Arab and Persian culture favored flavored by Sufi communities,
Speaker 2: men have lived together in heart unions and sole connections
Speaker 2: for hundreds of thousands of years. Contemporary business life allows
Speaker 2: competitive relationships only, which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry,
Speaker 2: and fear after work. What do men do collect in
Speaker 2: a bar to hold light conversations over light beer? Unities
Speaker 2: that are broken off whenever a young woman comes by
Speaker 2: or touches the brim of someone's cowboy hat. Having no
Speaker 2: soul union with other men can be the most damaging
Speaker 2: wound of all, and the cowboy hat things kind of weird,
Speaker 2: But that's a totally valid point. The lack of intimate
Speaker 2: male to male friendship is a deep problem in ourself.
Speaker 1: Light beer, I.
Speaker 2: I mean, because I think he's just sort of I mean, okay, whatever,
Speaker 2: he's getting into a little bit of masculinity there. The
Speaker 2: point is, like, fucker, yeah, sorry, Sophie, famous lover of
Speaker 2: light beer. It's okay. I love I love my champagne
Speaker 2: beer too. I just I had some lovely I actually
Speaker 2: wish I had some Peroni right Nowightful Peroni is a lovely, nice, wonderful,
Speaker 2: especially on a hot day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've done I've.
Speaker 2: Gone on long runs with nothing but a backpack of
Speaker 2: Peroni to keep me going.
Speaker 1: That sounds very believable.
Speaker 2: Paroni. It is essentially water.
Speaker 5: I can smell the dolls coming in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sponsorous cowards.
Speaker 2: But you see it, like what he's making there, and
Speaker 2: this is not a point that like, this is not
Speaker 2: a point Andrew Tate would make, right, because these guys
Speaker 2: are all hyper competitive and that's a huge part of
Speaker 2: like what they're talking about, whereas one of the like
Speaker 2: Bly is at his core, a large part of what
Speaker 2: he's complaining about is totally rational, which is like, again,
Speaker 2: allowed to it.
Speaker 1: Where is it? Yeh? Where is this way?
Speaker 2: Well, that's not the only thing in the book. He's
Speaker 2: also talking a lot of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we're getting to it, okay.
Speaker 2: Iron John spends sixty two weeks on the New York
Speaker 2: seller list. Yeah, I only anything gets spends that long
Speaker 2: in the best seller listed.
Speaker 1: It's a long ass time.
Speaker 5: Yes, that is that is innies still.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety to ninety one,
Speaker 2: because it's on there for more than a year, and
Speaker 2: it turned Bly from a respected poet and activist into
Speaker 2: the first masculinity guru in modern US history. Now again,
Speaker 2: we had guys like Bonnara McFadden before, who had talked
Speaker 2: about aspects of this. But BLI is wrapping his arguments
Speaker 2: and respected academia, and the way he's connecting with his
Speaker 2: people is exactly the same as the kind of shit
Speaker 2: that Jordan Peterson and other folks do today, Guys like
Speaker 2: Ivan Throne and whatnot who were in the masculinity influencer thing.
Speaker 2: He's doing conferences, He's having rooms full of people, men
Speaker 2: gather and he's speaking to them, and he's like running
Speaker 2: them through. He's basically bringing them to these moments of
Speaker 2: emotional height, and you can see some there's a little
Speaker 2: bit of Werner Earhard in this. You know, there's a
Speaker 2: reason this is all coming out at the same time
Speaker 2: as we start to get the self help craze hit.
Speaker 2: But he's basically holding these big pep rallies for adult men.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety one, more than a thousand men went
Speaker 2: to see him at the Eastfold Auditorium in Parkland, Washington,
Speaker 2: paying seventy five nineteen ninety one dollars lois for the privilege. Yeah.
Speaker 2: A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes the scene thusly,
Speaker 2: as the customers file in a dozen white guys flail
Speaker 2: away incompetently on African drums. When the crowd is seated,
Speaker 2: the drummers quit the stage, and Bly and Michael Mead,
Speaker 2: a storyteller who helps run the workshops, begin to recite,
Speaker 2: rambling myths and bits of verse. Meat occasionally bangs a bongo,
Speaker 2: Bly plinks a bazouki, the Greek version of the Mandolins,
Speaker 2: sending mournful notes wafting out over the audience. So that
Speaker 2: sounds good, right, It sounds like a fun time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it sounds like a great way to spend seventy fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I always love white guys playing African drums in
Speaker 2: my gigantic stadium speech series by a fucking poet. Anyway, Bly,
Speaker 2: who in nineteen eighty four had been called the most
Speaker 2: influential living American poet by current biography, became a kind
Speaker 2: of celebrity that hadn't previously existed. So he's filling stadiums
Speaker 2: with people who want to hear him talk. But he's
Speaker 2: also he's engaging them in a way that's going to
Speaker 2: spawn the modern men's self help industry. Quote Bli urges
Speaker 2: men to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their
Speaker 2: wild nature. Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear
Speaker 2: of brutality, have labored to breed fierceness out of men,
Speaker 2: creating the sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt
Speaker 2: might have said, I could carve a better man out
Speaker 2: of a banana. Bli believes that inside of every such male,
Speaker 2: there's a wild man yearning to get out, a radiant
Speaker 2: inner king, just waiting to confirm masculine pride and suareness
Speaker 2: of purpose. Bli insists he doesn't blame women for men's
Speaker 2: sorry state. He blames older men who have failed to
Speaker 2: provide young ones with the role models they crave. In
Speaker 2: traditional societies, boys worked alongside men, plowing fields and fashioning arrowheads,
Speaker 2: but the Industrial Revolution severed that connection. The title character
Speaker 2: and his bestseller is a wild hairy fellow who, in
Speaker 2: a grim fairy tale, is fished up from a pond
Speaker 2: and becomes a boy's mentor. That image is also the
Speaker 2: inspiration for his most extravagant exercise and manly self discovery,
Speaker 2: five day wild Man Excursions, in which groups of one
Speaker 2: hundred men take to the woods under the tutelage of
Speaker 2: Bly and others to dance around fires, banging on drums.
Speaker 1: I mean, honey to say you have daddy issues and
Speaker 1: move the fuck on.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I mean again this is there's this there's
Speaker 2: this element where he's like, society is fucked because feminists
Speaker 2: have tried to breed the violence out of my ninety one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so you know you have it's like like
Speaker 1: astonishing to me that people are paying seventy five dollars
Speaker 1: and like selling out. I mean that's more like that's
Speaker 1: more than the people were paying for Coachella in the
Speaker 1: early early two thousands.
Speaker 3: The crazy thing is like at the core of what
Speaker 3: he's saying, it's like most of that sounds like he's
Speaker 3: making some good points vallid points about, you know, how
Speaker 3: men have evolved in our society. So I'm just like,
Speaker 3: where where's the twist, because.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's the You've seen it start to him
Speaker 2: and here. So it's because like the valid thing in
Speaker 2: that passage just he's like, hey, look, young boys used
Speaker 2: to grow up learning alongside both their father and the
Speaker 2: other men, you know, in whatever community they were in,
Speaker 2: and that taught them what it meant to be a man.
Speaker 2: And now because capitalism has kind of taken the man
Speaker 2: out of the house. You're supposed to be working forty
Speaker 2: sixty eighty hours a week, right, They're not there to ray.
Speaker 2: It's just the usually in like the way our society works,
Speaker 2: just the woman who's raising the kid. That's what he's saying, then,
Speaker 2: that we've cut men off from this process of learning
Speaker 2: how to be adult men and like that is actually
Speaker 2: a pretty valid critique, And the problem is that now
Speaker 2: he's saying, the problem is that feminists have bred fierceness
Speaker 2: out of men instead of being like capitalism separates parents
Speaker 2: from children for huge amounts of time, and that's bad
Speaker 2: for kids. And actually, if you look at it, like
Speaker 2: you could see in that very scenario of like men
Speaker 2: are out of the house working so they're raised are
Speaker 2: raised largely by their mothers. Well, that also means an
Speaker 2: unfair burdens being placed on the mother. You could see this,
Speaker 2: there's a way to have solidarity between the genders here
Speaker 2: and be like, oh, yeah, this is all of a
Speaker 2: problem of this system we've built that like separates families
Speaker 2: in ways that are really fucked up. Like I identify
Speaker 2: with that when I was a kid because we didn't
Speaker 2: have much money at all. The only job my dad
Speaker 2: could get was in New York City, and there was
Speaker 2: a period of more than a year where he was gone.
Speaker 2: He was living on a friend's couch, working there, sending
Speaker 2: money back to us, and it was it was it's
Speaker 2: not just him that made a sacrifice. I made a
Speaker 2: sacrifice as his son, and my mom made a sacrifice
Speaker 2: dealing with the entire job of like raising me. Like
Speaker 2: there's a thing to identify with their But you can
Speaker 2: see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well,
Speaker 2: what's the problem is that feminists have tried to make
Speaker 2: men less fierce? That's not really the problem, Robert BLI like.
Speaker 3: One interesting thing just before you keep going, is I
Speaker 3: think in that quote, did he say like justifiably they
Speaker 3: tried to breathe that, yeah, brutality out.
Speaker 5: Of men or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, even there, like on some level, you know, you
Speaker 3: can kind of like, okay, like I kind of see
Speaker 3: what the point he's making. You know, men do perpetuate
Speaker 3: a lot of the bullshit that happens to women in
Speaker 3: our society.
Speaker 2: So like he's not nearly he's not anywhere, He's not
Speaker 2: on the same planet of toxicity. Is a lot of
Speaker 2: like as guys like you know, Andrew Tate, who were
Speaker 2: about to talk about, or even like Drian Peterson. But
Speaker 2: you can see the root of it right where he is.
Speaker 5: It's like the start.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's he's still saying fundamentally, part of the
Speaker 2: problem is famous want men to be less aggressive, and like, no,
Speaker 2: that's not really part of the problem that you have
Speaker 2: adequately identified. Yeah, he wants his listeners. The young boys
Speaker 2: are drowning and female energy in the schools. Every young
Speaker 2: man has a fantastic need for initiation. That's why we
Speaker 2: all became so crazy about our football coach. Such initiations,
Speaker 2: he says, channel wildness into socially approved acts. And again
Speaker 2: you see kind of this, like, well, why is the
Speaker 2: prob isn't female energy, Like it's not that like it's
Speaker 2: that young men. It's that families are being split up
Speaker 2: by this like need to compete and work in ways
Speaker 2: that are really unhealthy for kids. But anyway, you can
Speaker 2: look at the sea of other self help grifters at
Speaker 2: the time, Wrener Earhard, Aron Hubbard who had come around
Speaker 2: at this point, and you could say that BLI is
Speaker 2: just kind of another dude and that he's doing a
Speaker 2: lot of the same things a lot of these other
Speaker 2: self help grifters are doing. But one of the things
Speaker 2: that differs him is those guys are mostly pil like
Speaker 2: plying nonsense based on bad interpretations of Eastern religion and
Speaker 2: psychological abuse. And BLI is kind of he's not insulting
Speaker 2: or attacking people, he's not calling them them weak. He's
Speaker 2: he's making some reasonable points about stuff that's toxic about
Speaker 2: our society. And then he's trying to create like mutual
Speaker 2: cathartic experiences with the men in his audience who are
Speaker 2: being invited to kind of see the men around them
Speaker 2: as brothers in a way that's more intimate than maybe
Speaker 2: they had been trained to do previously. So again he's
Speaker 2: there's there's something interesting going on here that he isn't
Speaker 2: even wholly toxic that I think is kind of worth
Speaker 2: acknowledging as we lead to the parts of it that
Speaker 2: are a lot more toxic. And it's one of those
Speaker 2: things where, like I've spent a lot of time on
Speaker 2: in cell message boards, and they do talk a lot
Speaker 2: about this feeling of disconnection with society. So when he
Speaker 2: says that like young men are not connected to their communities.
Speaker 2: He's making a decent point. He also one of the
Speaker 2: points he makes that I thought was interesting is he
Speaker 2: talks about the differences between female sex at and male
Speaker 2: sex at. He points out that because of like just
Speaker 2: basic biological realities of how periods happen, young girls are
Speaker 2: instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys are not,
Speaker 2: and it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about their bodies,
Speaker 2: talking about health problems. And that's probably a valid thing
Speaker 2: to point out.
Speaker 1: Sarah definitely goes both ways.
Speaker 2: Sure, and again he's it's very he's completely ignorant to well,
Speaker 2: I'm sure there's a lot of things actually, especially today,
Speaker 2: that women are not taught about their bodies because of anyway. Again,
Speaker 2: these are a lot of two way problems, and he's
Speaker 2: focusing just on the male aspect of them. But he's
Speaker 2: not inherently wrong about the male aspect of them. He's
Speaker 2: just leaving a large part of the equation out and
Speaker 2: that's where the toxicity comes in here.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I'm ready, I'm ready.
Speaker 2: Bly has reached his fundamental message. Men and women are
Speaker 2: essentially alien and neither should apologize they're different tribes. He
Speaker 2: is saying, my father was an alcoholic, and yet if
Speaker 2: you look underneath his weakness, there was something there that
Speaker 2: my mother didn't have. She was fine, but she didn't
Speaker 2: have it. Three million sperms start out and they find
Speaker 2: themselves immediately in a hostile environment facing an egg approximately
Speaker 2: forty thousand times bigger, where the product of the one
Speaker 2: survivor that didn't give up, which is it's really weird
Speaker 2: to be like setting up the gender struggle as like
Speaker 2: sperm versus egg, where it's like, sure, well, actually all
Speaker 2: of us are their product of spermnas that's the only
Speaker 2: way people happen.
Speaker 1: He's got to emphasize on the last product quote there
Speaker 1: you said, we are in the product of the one
Speaker 1: survivor that didn't give up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's the other half of that equation? Is it
Speaker 2: just is it just one little bit of bit of
Speaker 2: cum that makes a baby? Why, like, Chris, is there
Speaker 2: another part to the baby equation? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I just want to be like, honey, did you not
Speaker 1: show up for sex said class that day? Did you
Speaker 1: miss that? Lesson?
Speaker 2: The sperm have to murder the eggs so that one
Speaker 2: can survive. That is not the way it works. Bli
Speaker 2: actually insists that he is not preaching old style machismo,
Speaker 2: and he takes pains to tell his audience that, in fact,
Speaker 2: male rage's weakness. We're not talking about aggression, he calls out.
Speaker 2: A few of his listeners seemed confused. At the height
Speaker 2: of an hour long discussion of the Gulf War, one
Speaker 2: audience member announces that he seceded from society. I'm not
Speaker 2: paying my tab, I've bought an AK forty seven, and
Speaker 2: I'm farting around with ammunition just in case I have
Speaker 2: to back up my decision, he says, softly but firmly. Bly,
Speaker 2: and many others have spoken out against the Gulf War,
Speaker 2: yet nobody criticizes the AK forty seven fellow. And when
Speaker 2: Bli asks the Vietnam Vets to stand to be honored,
Speaker 2: the rum erupts with the applause for about three minutes.
Speaker 2: And you can see there too, the seeds of a
Speaker 2: lot that's going on right now, right where yeah, he's like,
Speaker 2: we're not talking about men need to be more aggressive.
Speaker 2: And then a guy's like, I have dropped out of
Speaker 2: society and started buying guns, and everyone's like that's great, cool, Look,
Speaker 2: we're not anyway whatever. BLI died last year. He lived a.
Speaker 1: Long time, yeah, I would say.
Speaker 2: And you can find people, you know, reappraising his work
Speaker 2: and stuff. There's some folks who will say that, like,
Speaker 2: his greater talent was for self promotion rather than poetry,
Speaker 2: and he wasn't as good a poet as people had said.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm not a not a poetry guy. I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: analyze his poetry in that way. I do think sometimes
Speaker 2: because somebody turns out to age into a problematic person,
Speaker 2: people are like, well, I guess their work that everybody
Speaker 2: loved in the past sucked, And I think that's kind
Speaker 2: of cowardly. Like, nah, people liked his poems, they were influential,
Speaker 2: and then he turned into a crank. That's fine, that happens. Like, yeah, anyway,
Speaker 2: you know who isn't a crank and who will never
Speaker 2: do anything problematic? My favorite filmmaker Roman Oh, oh you
Speaker 2: know what. I googled his name right as I was
Speaker 2: saying that, Oh boy, oh dear, well, I'm gonna go
Speaker 2: burn all my DVDs of Rosemary's Baby and y'all check
Speaker 2: out these ads. Ah, we're back, really glad. I caught
Speaker 2: myself with a little while I thought it was good
Speaker 2: with like the talk about reappraising his works and the
Speaker 2: thank you, thank you, I thrive on praise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was something different, good for you.
Speaker 2: So Bli died, but his work launched what scholars have
Speaker 2: called the mythopoetic men's movement, and it's.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2: It is. It is a somewhat uh fucking prickish name
Speaker 2: to call it, I guess, but it's what they mean
Speaker 2: by mythopoetic. I should explain, Like what they're saying is
Speaker 2: like the argument Bli and the other because there's a
Speaker 2: bunch of other authors in this. The argment they're making
Speaker 2: is that our society has stripped mythology out and has
Speaker 2: become this like kind of coldly competitive engine for creating
Speaker 2: cash value, and that we need in order to make
Speaker 2: men healthier, we need to reintroduce like this kind of
Speaker 2: mythic understanding of masculinity and of the world that like
Speaker 2: that's kind and a lot of it is they're like
Speaker 2: looking at like Native American cultures and so of the
Speaker 2: different rituals around masculinity they had and being like, well,
Speaker 2: maybe well and there's actually again, there's a scientific basis
Speaker 2: to a lot of this is cultural appropriation. But like,
Speaker 2: one of the things that's happening in this period is
Speaker 2: you've got a lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD
Speaker 2: in an era before they understand it. And a thing
Speaker 2: that occurs during this period is that some of them
Speaker 2: have buddies who are also struggling with PTSD and are
Speaker 2: Indigenous Americans and who invite their white and black and
Speaker 2: Hispanic battle buddies back to do stuff like sweat lodges
Speaker 2: in order to cope, and other kind of different rituals
Speaker 2: that have existed in some of these indigenous societies to
Speaker 2: deal with what happens to men when they go to
Speaker 2: war and they invite their friends back, and that stuff
Speaker 2: works better than just getting a job working for an
Speaker 2: accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam. And so people are
Speaker 2: starting to study this and write about it. And one
Speaker 2: of the things that the mythopoetic guys take is this
Speaker 2: belief that you should basically just kind of like steel
Speaker 2: wholesale from these cultures and dress white people up in
Speaker 2: headdresses and give them drums and stuff, as opposed to
Speaker 2: being like, oh, well, maybe you know, there's a way
Speaker 2: that isn't that to look at the value that some
Speaker 2: of these rituals have in healing people. You know, I'm
Speaker 2: not the person to analyze that completely, but that's part
Speaker 2: of what they're saying here, is that like they're kind
Speaker 2: of recognizing there's something hollow at the center of American
Speaker 2: culture that is not hollow in some of these other cultures.
Speaker 2: And instead of being like, maybe there's things that we
Speaker 2: should fundamentally change about American culture there, they're saying, what
Speaker 2: if we dress up like these other people? Right, That's
Speaker 2: essentially what's going on with a lot of the Mythopoetic movement.
Speaker 2: So a big chunk of this and these are some
Speaker 2: of this is bl some of these guys outside of
Speaker 2: bly Is they're they're making they're like putting a bunch
Speaker 2: of like white accountants in sweat lodges that they make
Speaker 2: the wrong way and lecturing them about you know, young
Speaker 2: and Joseph Campbell, or they're like making them dressed like
Speaker 2: cavemen while playing you know, African drums. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of like weird, uncomfortable racism in the Mythopoetic men's movement
Speaker 2: that said, it is less toxic than the men's rights
Speaker 2: movement that would follow it. Things kind of get increasingly
Speaker 2: aggressive and toxic from this point out. But Bli and
Speaker 2: the initial mythopoetic influencers were not They saw themselves as therapists,
Speaker 2: and again I don't think they were good at this,
Speaker 2: But they were not political. So this was not a
Speaker 2: conservative movement. They were not billing themselves as right wing.
Speaker 2: They were not really like weighing in on culture war issues,
Speaker 2: in part because the culture war didn't exist in the
Speaker 2: same way then that it does now. And it's interesting
Speaker 2: because Bli expressly says this is an a political movement.
Speaker 2: You might criticize him because he had just written a
Speaker 2: really kind of beautiful essay during the Vietnam War about
Speaker 2: the cowardness of being a political but whatever. I found
Speaker 2: an article from the Washington Post in nineteen ninety one
Speaker 2: that talked to a number of men who had been
Speaker 2: most active in the movement, and there's some interesting pieces
Speaker 2: in there. Quote. An affirmation and strength comes from a
Speaker 2: bonding between men that's impossible to put into words, says
Speaker 2: ed Honold, the mild mannered federal lawyer and founder of
Speaker 2: the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such
Speaker 2: local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals
Speaker 2: of dancing, roaring, hugging, and weeping. The experience was known
Speaker 2: to men in the past, but has been forgotten. American
Speaker 2: men face a desperate situation and don't even know it.
Speaker 2: There are large numbers of men wandering lost and some
Speaker 2: personal wasteland of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with
Speaker 2: little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why. He
Speaker 2: pauses thoughtfully and adds, there's a lot of hurting cowboys
Speaker 2: out there. Now, these guys are not cowboys. These guys
Speaker 2: were like middle managers at auto parts stores and shit like.
Speaker 2: They are absolutely not hurting cowboys. And also, actual cowboys
Speaker 2: aren't what this guy thought they were. But he's not
Speaker 2: wrong again and saying that like, the situation of American
Speaker 2: men was pretty unpleasant in the early nineteen nineties. They
Speaker 2: were struggling against a capitalist culture that thrived on the
Speaker 2: obliteration of meaning. However, men, of course, are not the
Speaker 2: only ones suffering from this, nor are they suffering worse
Speaker 2: than any other group of Americans. Right, this is just
Speaker 2: alienation under capitalism, Part of what he's doing here that
Speaker 2: is noteworthy and becomes a huge problem later on, is
Speaker 2: he is identifying real problems with the society we live
Speaker 2: in and then cutting men off from the rest of
Speaker 2: that society and thus cutting off possibility of solidarity. So
Speaker 2: you can't look at this kind of alienation and loss
Speaker 2: of meaning and be like, wow, men and women and
Speaker 2: everybody is being harmed by the meaninglessness this hole at
Speaker 2: the center of our culture. You have to say men
Speaker 2: are being harmed, and then that invites like, well, there
Speaker 2: must be women that are doing it, and it must
Speaker 2: we should be looking at how feminine I rather than
Speaker 2: because he's a door for.
Speaker 1: Toks right in It's interesting to see just how far
Speaker 1: John Wayne's like reach impacts the way men think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of hurting cowboys. Motherfucker, you are
Speaker 2: not a cowboy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And by the way, cowboys were mostly like poor black
Speaker 2: and Hispanic and indigenous men who were being exploited for
Speaker 2: their labor. Like, yeah, this is none of what you're
Speaker 2: saying means anything. You are entirely You're you're talking about
Speaker 2: the emptiness of culture, and your understanding of history has
Speaker 2: been entirely formed by the movies you watched, right, like anyway,
Speaker 2: do better do better? Well, some of them will eventually
Speaker 2: in the future. I think it would be interesting to
Speaker 2: try and find out look into all these men's groups
Speaker 2: in the Washington in the state of Washington in this
Speaker 2: period of time and see how many of those guys
Speaker 2: wound up being elders and the proud boys thirty years later.
Speaker 2: But that's that's that's a more in depth work for
Speaker 2: someone in the future if they want to do it.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: One of the most dangerous aspects of the mythopoetic men's
Speaker 2: movement is that it was not as toxic as its descendants. Again,
Speaker 2: it identifies real problems, but then it recasts them as
Speaker 2: things that just men, mostly white men, are suffering from.
Speaker 2: And the answer is like Kischi kind of racist LARPing
Speaker 2: as member like that, that's basically what they're doing, right,
Speaker 2: and this, yeah, it's it's it's it causes problems. Later on,
Speaker 2: one of the most ridiculous aspects of the myth of
Speaker 2: poetic men's movement was the creation of wing Span, the
Speaker 2: Journal of the Male Spirit. Don't you just want to
Speaker 2: sit down? I in with a copy of Wingspan read
Speaker 2: out quotes to your buds.
Speaker 5: I start every morning with it.
Speaker 2: With it. Yeah yeah, just spread spread in your wings
Speaker 2: So in the in the pre internet era, this acted
Speaker 2: as a clearing house for the movement and a central
Speaker 2: place where influencers could advertise their events. Quote. The last
Speaker 2: issue of Wingspan lists dozens of publications and events for
Speaker 2: men around the country, including a new Warrior training adventure
Speaker 2: Weakened in Wisconsin, drumming and dancing for men in Massachusetts,
Speaker 2: Brother to Brother in New York, Healing the Father Wound
Speaker 2: in California, and Afro American Males at Risk in New Jersey.
Speaker 2: A recent grandfather ceremony at the Fairfax Unitarian Men's Council
Speaker 2: featured drumming on a five and a half foot thunderheart
Speaker 2: drum in this area. There are three large councils in Virginia,
Speaker 2: one in Gaithersburg and another in Baltimore. The Men's Council
Speaker 2: of Greater Washington, which HONLD started in June of nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty eight with fifty men, is the largest, with two
Speaker 2: thousand members and fifty newcomers arriving for each monthly meeting.
Speaker 2: Late one night in January at the Council's meeting in
Speaker 2: the Washington Ethical Society Auditorium on Upper sixteenth Street. Honald
Speaker 2: shed his Clarkkin image as he leads five hundred men
Speaker 2: who are pounding drums and chanting. The sweating windows shape
Speaker 2: with rhythmic thunder that reverberates up and down the street
Speaker 2: as they raise Honald, gyrating and clapping high overhead and
Speaker 2: parade him about the room. Then group leaders circulate with
Speaker 2: large feathers and clay pots, wafting the smoke of burning
Speaker 2: sage into the waiting faces in what is termed a
Speaker 2: Native American ritual designed to put you in touch with
Speaker 2: generations of male ancestors. So that's a little problematic, a
Speaker 2: little bit just to scoche. A number of other masculinity
Speaker 2: grifters followed. Bli, Robert Moore, and Douglas Gillette wrote the
Speaker 2: bestseller King, Warrior, Magician Lover, which purported to that's that's
Speaker 2: a title right there. I want to be a king, Warrior,
Speaker 2: magician lover. And these are these are like the archetypes
Speaker 2: of male masculinity. I don't think they're in order, because
Speaker 2: you probably don't start as a king and end up
Speaker 2: as a lover, although maybe you do that would be
Speaker 2: progressive actually saying that you need to you need to
Speaker 2: shed your your mastery and your sense of ownership in
Speaker 2: order to become a lover. But I don't think that's
Speaker 2: the point they're making. Moore is a Youngian analyst and
Speaker 2: a professor of psychology. Gillette, like doctor Jordan Balthasar Peterson,
Speaker 2: was a mythologist. I found a good write up that
Speaker 2: described the main arguments in their book by Aaron Innes.
Speaker 2: The book's second shared premise is that there are universal
Speaker 2: male archetypes inherent to every male body person that are
Speaker 2: represented in myth and story around the world, but are
Speaker 2: suppressed in the dominant culture. The developmental history of every man,
Speaker 2: says Mora Jellette, is in large part the story of
Speaker 2: his failure or success at discovering within himself the archetypes
Speaker 2: of mature masculinity. Following Jungian psychological theory, they claim that
Speaker 2: if men are not given room to express these archetypes
Speaker 2: in a healthy manner, they will act them out unconsciously
Speaker 2: in ways that are damaging and violent, either directed outward
Speaker 2: at other people as overtly hostile male behavior, or directed
Speaker 2: inward which SAPs the vitality of the men involved. It's
Speaker 2: worth noting that the authors of both books, as well
Speaker 2: as their contemporary followers, seem a hell of a lot
Speaker 2: more concerned about remedying male acting out that's turned inward
Speaker 2: and creating male malaise than they are about male violence
Speaker 2: directed towards others. Take the essay why Men Find It
Speaker 2: So Hard to Feel by Mythopoetic Workshop leader Darren Austin Hall,
Speaker 2: who says that women are at an advantage to men
Speaker 2: spiritually and that minstrel cycles mean women are energetically connected
Speaker 2: to cycles of the moon, which in turn is energetically
Speaker 2: linked to our unconscious. This leads him to the conclusion
Speaker 2: that the solution to warm angering tyrants in the world
Speaker 2: is for women to use touch and the beautiful arts
Speaker 2: of seductive love to disarm men, and that this will
Speaker 2: solve male violence. Oh you girls just gotta touch us right,
Speaker 2: and we'll stop doing genocides. Oh my god, that's incredible.
Speaker 2: Hitler wouldn't have done all that bad stuff if I
Speaker 2: get well, I mean he was dating his cousin, so
Speaker 2: I don't really want to continue this joke. But what dating?
Speaker 2: Dating is the wrong word? You know that story? Sophie
Speaker 2: we've talked about Hitler and his cousin.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, the one who killed herself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really bad story. Again, bringing up Hitler
Speaker 2: and the cousin that he may be murdered is definitely
Speaker 2: perhaps a good way of pointing out how fucked up
Speaker 2: it is to say the problem of men's violence is
Speaker 2: that women don't touch them the right way. It's pretty bad.
Speaker 2: It also brings to mind I'm thinking about our Liberia
Speaker 2: episodes and that sex strike that a bunch of women
Speaker 2: went on to get the warlords to come to the
Speaker 2: table to negotiate, and how it's like, literally the opposite.
Speaker 2: It's it's number one, one of the most amazing stories
Speaker 2: of activism I've ever heard of, And it's literally the
Speaker 2: opposite of what these guys are saying. But I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't know, this is all so gross, yeah, ikey. So,
Speaker 2: most regular listeners of the show are broadly familiar with
Speaker 2: the way men's empowerment gurus and men's rights influencers evolved
Speaker 2: over the last twenty years or so, a mix of
Speaker 2: right wing culture war politics intersecting with very divorced men.
Speaker 2: And I think we haven't talked about this yet. But
Speaker 2: these guys are all extremely divorced, right, there's a there's
Speaker 2: a lot of weakened dad energy in the sense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, that's why they're all so bitter.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, that there's just no way anything else is
Speaker 2: going on here. Elon Musk would have been really, really
Speaker 2: would have fit in at these Maybe it would have
Speaker 2: kept him from buying Twitter. You know, I don't want
Speaker 2: to say it was all toxic. So yeah, again, you
Speaker 2: have most people listening are kind of familiar with where
Speaker 2: things descend after the mythopoetic men's movement, which still kind
Speaker 2: of is around, but more or less Peter's out over
Speaker 2: the course of the nineties, and after that point, you've
Speaker 2: got a mix of right wing culture war politics that
Speaker 2: intersects with these very divorced dudes angry over custody, you know,
Speaker 2: yelling about how men are discriminated against. And then we
Speaker 2: have pick of course, starting in the early two thousands,
Speaker 2: these pickup artists selling the secret to fucking chicks at bars,
Speaker 2: and this all gets brewed up into this slurry, and
Speaker 2: you know, you've got the pick up artists intersecting with
Speaker 2: the men's rights activists intersecting with the right wing culture
Speaker 2: war politicians intersecting with these literal Nazis, and from that
Speaker 2: slurry we get gamer Gate and the alt right and
Speaker 2: at least a portion of Donald Trump's political success. Right,
Speaker 2: So that is the story. Well, I mean, this is
Speaker 2: we haven't on into this on the show, and it
Speaker 2: was something I was broadly aware of, but I didn't
Speaker 2: know much about. But I think this is especially leading
Speaker 2: into a story about a guy like Andrew Tait, who
Speaker 2: is the most toxic, arguably calls himself the most like
Speaker 2: toxic man on the internet, and is certainly an ARCon
Speaker 2: of male toxicity. I think it kind of behooves us
Speaker 2: to talk about what led to him because it's interesting. Anyway,
Speaker 2: this is the end of episode one. Anybody anybody got
Speaker 2: some thoughts here at the end of things.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that was a really great explainer
Speaker 3: on kind of laying the groundwork for where the ideas
Speaker 3: that eventually became Andrew Tait, you know, started and took
Speaker 3: a foothold, and yeah, after you broke it down, it
Speaker 3: makes sense and I can see how we got there,
Speaker 3: you know, But it is interesting that you know, some
Speaker 3: of the initial original points, like you said, were valid
Speaker 3: and do kind of highlight some issues in our society
Speaker 3: that maybe we should be focusing more on our addressing.
Speaker 3: But also, as you said, it's not just a men's problem.
Speaker 3: It's a problem for everyone, and everyone's being affected by it,
Speaker 3: and we should be finding solidarity in that, and how
Speaker 3: can we help everybody improve our lives, not just Oh,
Speaker 3: it's a problem that's only affecting men.
Speaker 5: So yeah, the women, you know, those are the yeah problem.
Speaker 2: It's so interesting to me how many people see, oh,
Speaker 2: men are being made to like spind their entire young
Speaker 2: and mature adult lives, like laboring for somebody else's profit
Speaker 2: in a factory whatever, and as a result, their kids
Speaker 2: barely know them, which is a real problem. A lot
Speaker 2: of kids raised and like the fifties, sixties, seventies have
Speaker 2: and translating that as and like seeing you know, their
Speaker 2: moms struggling to like keep the house going and raise
Speaker 2: the kids through all that, and and the kids suffering,
Speaker 2: and be like, well, this is clearly a men's problem. No,
Speaker 2: this is this is a cultural problem. Everybody's problem. Is this.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Sophie, I'm really not looking forward to what's coming next.
Speaker 2: Oh, Sophie, it's going to be terrible and you're gonna
Speaker 2: have to play a lot of clips.
Speaker 1: So I'm so sorry listeners, but I'm sorry, but it
Speaker 1: is necessary now.
Speaker 2: You know what, I'm not sorry. I'll never apologize. That's
Speaker 2: what I learned from Andrew Tait.
Speaker 1: I think you wrote a really good script though.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Welcome Robert.
Speaker 2: I love me too. All right, everybody that's going to
Speaker 2: do it with us for us today at Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 2: the podcast that will be recorded again immediately after this,
Speaker 2: although I will probably start drinking because it is now
Speaker 2: quite late, so huzza, huzza.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, no late. We ended the last
Speaker 1: episode where I was like, wow, you're such a great writer.
Speaker 1: That was so good. Thank you, Sony, come in and
Speaker 1: then you do that fucking shit. What well Sylvie.
Speaker 2: You you may not understand this because of your your
Speaker 2: your womanliness, but I was embodying the archetype of the
Speaker 2: magician wild man.
Speaker 1: I don't you're fired.
Speaker 2: That's fair, that's fair. Well, I have started drinking, got
Speaker 2: a nice glass of port Rue Talisker here, and I
Speaker 2: want to start this episode by getting a shout out
Speaker 2: to a friend of the pod, former mayor of the
Speaker 2: City of Portland, Sam Adams. Now y'all may not know Sam.
Speaker 2: I think he was briefly on the show Portlandia. But
Speaker 2: he was fired from being the mayor because he had
Speaker 2: a sexual relationship with a teenage staffer, and then got
Speaker 2: re hired by current Mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, who's
Speaker 2: a giant piece of shit, Yeah, to be the mayor's
Speaker 2: body man basically, And then this week Sam announced that
Speaker 2: he was retiring because he had an iron deficiency, and
Speaker 2: then Ted Wheeler told everyone, no, he's retiring it because
Speaker 2: he wouldn't stop threatening and bullying women in the office.
Speaker 2: Both of you guys suck and it's very funny this happened. Also,
Speaker 2: I gotta say shout out to Sam Adams. Honestly, going
Speaker 2: from sexually harassing a teenager to being a bully to
Speaker 2: adult women, that's a step forward.
Speaker 1: Okay, disagree, Sophie, You're fine.
Speaker 2: Look one of the two things listened to sex crime,
Speaker 2: so that's a real personal growth for former Mayor of
Speaker 2: Portland Sam Adams.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Ted Wheeler, what the fuck is wrong with.
Speaker 2: Great great hiring? Look, honestly, fuck Sam Adams. He's a
Speaker 2: piece of shit, but incredible hiring decision from Ted Wheeler. Yeah,
Speaker 2: let's get the guy in here who had sex with
Speaker 2: a seventeen year old staffer's let's get him back in
Speaker 2: city hall. We really need his insights. Great great work too.
Speaker 1: It really shocked about You know how well liked he
Speaker 1: is in the city of Portland.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean he's not. But you can let him
Speaker 2: know how you feel about his decision to hire and
Speaker 2: then fire Sam Adams at at Ted Wheeler.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I remember when he got the tear gas
Speaker 1: thrown on him house.
Speaker 2: I do remember that. So I started talking about Ted
Speaker 2: Wheeler and Sam Adams because they're both toxic men. And
Speaker 2: today we are finally getting into the direct personal story
Speaker 2: of one of the most toxic men of all time.
Speaker 2: Emrie Andrew Tait the Third. Oh, that's quite a name.
Speaker 2: That's quite a name. Now, Emory Andrew Tait the third
Speaker 2: was born in Washington, d C. On December first, nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty six. Now that fancy name might lead you to
Speaker 2: that he came from some like British ash British British
Speaker 2: ass noble family or some shit that sounds like a
Speaker 2: duke's name.
Speaker 5: To me, but very formal it sounds like old money
Speaker 5: for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he is not. Now, most of the texture
Speaker 2: that we get on his childhood comes from Andrew himself,
Speaker 2: which is not ideal because he is a liar. But
Speaker 2: there's just not a lot of other Again, I haven't
Speaker 2: found no one's done like a critical biography. There's not
Speaker 2: like a big, long New Yorker piece that really delves
Speaker 2: into his backstory. So I kind of had to do
Speaker 2: that myself to the best extent that I could do.
Speaker 2: Now I did find one, and this is, honestly, the
Speaker 2: only texture you get on his childhood that I have
Speaker 2: come across is from an article he wrote for a
Speaker 2: website for kickboxing that sells kickboxing gear, and the title
Speaker 2: of it is the Life of Andrew King Kobra Tait.
Speaker 2: So again, this is not a credible source, but the
Speaker 2: way in which he writes about his childhood and what
Speaker 2: he wants you to believe about it does tell you
Speaker 2: a lot about the man. So we're still going to
Speaker 2: be covering it, but do not take this as literal truth.
Speaker 2: That should be obvious. Here's how he talks about his birth.
Speaker 2: I was born in Washington, d C. At Walter Reed
Speaker 2: Army Hospital, early one morning, December first, nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 2: The doctor wanted to award me a perfect ten on
Speaker 2: the birth scale, but settled on nine point five. Already, already.
Speaker 2: That's the saddest thing anyone has ever bragged. That's so pathetic,
Speaker 2: absolutely heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's on somebody's fucking like dating profile
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, two weeks overdue. But I was a nose. I
Speaker 2: was nose breathing already as the doctor held me upside
Speaker 2: down by my heels and my right fist was in
Speaker 2: sight of my mouth as I suckled. The doctor pinched
Speaker 2: my thigh to get a response, and I growled, knitting
Speaker 2: my brow and trying to crane my head up to
Speaker 2: see who had attacked me. The doctor paled, shocked at
Speaker 2: my defensive powers. I did not cry.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, I hate this.
Speaker 2: That's so funny, though, bragging about how tough you were
Speaker 2: as a baby as a baby, like wow, like believable,
Speaker 2: was incredible.
Speaker 1: And I was re reading what you what you just said,
Speaker 1: and it's I'm gonna.
Speaker 2: Tell y'all right now, because again, everything I found just
Speaker 2: kind of glosses over his childhood. Because we don't have
Speaker 2: a lot of like like detailed, like someone hasn't gone
Speaker 2: through and like interviewed a shipload of people that he
Speaker 2: knew was a little kid. And right, that hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 2: I'm sure it will. And I was thinking, we're just
Speaker 2: gonna have to brush over his childhood. And then I
Speaker 2: found this article he wrote about himself on a kickboxing
Speaker 2: website and it it made my week, made my week.
Speaker 2: It's so funny.
Speaker 1: It's about your own birth, like you did fucking anything.
Speaker 2: So, if you're curious about Andrew's parentage, his mother, Eileen
Speaker 2: is indeed English as shit, and she's a white lady.
Speaker 2: She worked as a catering assistant. His father is Imor
Speaker 2: Tate Junior and Emory what was Emory Tate junior? Emory
Speaker 2: Tate Junior was a black American man and a Chicago
Speaker 2: chess prodigy. Actually, up until a year or two ago,
Speaker 2: Emory Tait was much more famous than Andrew Tait. We
Speaker 2: actually had in the our work chat. Mia was shocked
Speaker 2: to learn that Andrew Tait was Imrie Tate's son. I
Speaker 2: had not heard of this guy. But I don't care
Speaker 2: for chess or for yeah chess. Yeah. The Washington Post
Speaker 2: describes Emory Tate Junior as a trailblazer for black chess players.
Speaker 2: He was like one of the first. I don't know,
Speaker 2: he may have been like the first, like super famous,
Speaker 2: really well known, like black professional chess players. Again, I
Speaker 2: don't understand chess. I don't understand why you would play
Speaker 2: a war game that doesn't include orcs. But a lot
Speaker 2: of people who love chess say that he was one
Speaker 2: of the most fun players watch. I did read a
Speaker 2: lot of like writing like fans and like reddit and
Speaker 2: stuff talking about Emory Tate, and one thing they all
Speaker 2: seem to agree on is he was just super entertaining
Speaker 2: to watch play.
Speaker 1: Yes, you, why does when you type in Emory Tate
Speaker 1: into Google, why does the first suggested thing come up
Speaker 1: as CIA? What I typed Emory Tate into Google and
Speaker 1: the first thing that autofields is CIA? Hmm, oh it
Speaker 1: was in the CIA?
Speaker 2: Well, Andrew says that he was in the CIA.
Speaker 1: Is that what's happening?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was. So he was in the Air Force
Speaker 2: as a sergeant and he served as a linguished linguist.
Speaker 2: There's not actually hard evidence that he was in the
Speaker 2: CIA that I have seen, Like this is based on again,
Speaker 2: Andrew is kind of when we're about to get into this,
Speaker 2: he's really plumping his dad's reputation to make him like
Speaker 2: not just a chess guy, but a bad ass.
Speaker 1: So may or may not beat somebody.
Speaker 2: I have not seen any independent confirmation that he worked
Speaker 2: in the CIA. Maybe he did a lot of guys
Speaker 2: in that period who like did some sort of like
Speaker 2: weird work where they would have just been listed as
Speaker 2: a state department employee. So it's not impossible. But I
Speaker 2: have not come across confirmation that he was in the CIA.
Speaker 2: So the Washington Post in most sources who write about
Speaker 2: Andrew's dad will call him a grand master at chess.
Speaker 2: This is not entirely true he was. I mean, this
Speaker 2: is not true. He was an international master, which is
Speaker 2: a lesser rank. He never quite made it to grand master.
Speaker 2: I found again chess discussions online by nerds about chess
Speaker 2: who will say that he didn't make it to grand
Speaker 2: master mainly because he wasn't able to. He wasn't willing
Speaker 2: to do like certain things that you have to do
Speaker 2: to do that. But he was. He had a really
Speaker 2: good record. He regularly beat grand masters. Some people say
Speaker 2: he was as good as Bobby Fisher. Again, I have
Speaker 2: no way to evaluate any of this.
Speaker 1: Robert taking a big anti chest chess approach here.
Speaker 2: Again, there's no battle tanks in chess. There's no titans
Speaker 2: with chainsaw hands. The ultimate game of strategy is still
Speaker 2: Warhammer forty thousand. I think we can all agree on that. Yes,
Speaker 2: of course it's been true for generations. But anyway, Emory
Speaker 2: Tate great at chess. A chess historian wrote a book
Speaker 2: about him which gives us some idea as to where
Speaker 2: Andrew Tate got his sense of style and personal branding.
Speaker 2: The title was triple xclam with three explaanation points, The
Speaker 2: Life and Games of Emory Tate, Chess Warrior, which is
Speaker 2: kind of fun. I think he literally died at the
Speaker 2: table in twenty fifteen playing a game of chess. Like
Speaker 2: this man, This motherfucker loved chess. He wears a white
Speaker 2: fedora with a gold band on the cover, which also
Speaker 2: gives you a little bit of insight into where Andrew
Speaker 2: Tate gets some of his taste in style. And Andrew
Speaker 2: idolizes his father, and he does it particularly. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to pretend to know the man's emotional state, but
Speaker 2: in his public writing, he particularly celebrates his dad. In
Speaker 2: that Kickboxing website article twenty twenty two, Andrew Tait noted
Speaker 2: this about the male side of his family background. My grandfather,
Speaker 2: Imrie A. Tait Esquire, fought in World War Two before
Speaker 2: becoming a lawyer in Chicago during racially charged times as
Speaker 2: a black man. This shaped his worldview, and he was
Speaker 2: very strict, very hard. Indeed, as a boy he pushed
Speaker 2: a plow with meal through the hard clay dirt of Georgia.
Speaker 2: Forced to work on the farm at age twelve, he
Speaker 2: pushed a plow that only grown men normally handled. Then
Speaker 2: he ran away, never to return to the farm. He
Speaker 2: did some bare knuckled fist fights as young man, and
Speaker 2: distinguish himself hand to hand during the war years. And
Speaker 2: again I'm sure parts of that are true. Everything about
Speaker 2: his dad and his grandpa always veers into how good
Speaker 2: they were at hand to hand combat, and there is
Speaker 2: no evidence of this. Like the stuff about working on
Speaker 2: a farm, Yeah, that seems plausible. The stuff about how
Speaker 2: we fought the Nazis hand to hand, I don't know, maybe,
Speaker 2: but that actually doesn't happen often.
Speaker 3: That just gives me, like my dad can beat up
Speaker 3: your dad vibes like yeah, it sounds like something like
Speaker 3: a kid would say.
Speaker 1: Yeah about his own birth.
Speaker 2: And man, it's like, you don't have to lie about
Speaker 2: him fist fighting Nazis. It's okay if he just shot them.
Speaker 2: A lot of dudes did and that was rat Like,
Speaker 2: he doesn't have to be great at punching just because
Speaker 2: you grew up to punch people for a living. That's
Speaker 2: kind of a weird thing to focus on, Andrew, but
Speaker 2: he loves talking about how good his dad and grandpa
Speaker 2: were at fighting. Quote his son. My dad, Emrie A.
Speaker 2: Tait Junior, was a young athlete, learning wrestling in school
Speaker 2: and developing the early forms of tate shin kai strikes
Speaker 2: as a youth, which I guess is his own martial
Speaker 2: arts thing. His job in the military for eleven years
Speaker 2: took him on many adventures and little is known for
Speaker 2: sure except that my dad never loses. He is my
Speaker 2: role model in many ways, even as I write poetry
Speaker 2: like he does. So I mean, also, I think his
Speaker 2: dad would have been in the military, let me double
Speaker 2: check here, Yeah, during Vietnam, which would mean that he did,
Speaker 2: in fact lose. So sorry, Andrew, but I don't want
Speaker 2: to be mean to Emory Tait because well, this is
Speaker 2: a little bit his fault. So yeah. The closest thing
Speaker 2: that Andrew has written or said that comes close to
Speaker 2: being emotionally impactful at all is when he writes about
Speaker 2: his father. I will give him that he writes with
Speaker 2: like some amount of actual sincerity about his feelings towards
Speaker 2: his dad, And I'm going to give you an example
Speaker 2: of that now. I never learned to cry for attention.
Speaker 2: I only used grunts to indicate hunger or discomfort, but
Speaker 2: mostly I was silent. I had a large new crib,
Speaker 2: but most every night I spent a sleep on my
Speaker 2: dad's chest. He would place me there and sleep still,
Speaker 2: never moving in the night, and our heart beats were
Speaker 2: and are as one.
Speaker 1: I just think a baby like a yeah.
Speaker 2: Just too angry to sit cry now. Bits like this
Speaker 2: do contrast with passages where Andrew will relate stories about
Speaker 2: his dad that sound kind of abusive. Quote. I learned
Speaker 2: to defend myself soon after I could walk, long before
Speaker 2: my first punch into a pillow, I learned to balance,
Speaker 2: had to step backward after being pushed gently in the chest.
Speaker 2: Dad made a game of it, a game, which ended
Speaker 2: with a savage shove across a living room, sending me
Speaker 2: into a dramatic backpedal. I stopped myself with my head
Speaker 2: one inch from cracking into the far wall. That was
Speaker 2: the final test. Kind of sounds like your dad was
Speaker 2: just shoving you because he was pissed and drew it.
Speaker 1: Kind of sounds not great, bro.
Speaker 2: Do you need to talk about this, man?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no talking, just a yeah.
Speaker 5: Just angry, just shoving.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, if I was going to raise a child,
Speaker 2: I'd be lying if I said that the shoving method
Speaker 2: didn't hold some appeal, because I do a lot of
Speaker 2: other things by shoving. It's how I move my furniture,
Speaker 2: it's how I record podcasts. I'm shoving a walking desk
Speaker 2: around the room right now. We actually Danil spends like
Speaker 2: thirteen hours a week editing that out before we can
Speaker 2: even get the audio off off to Chris, that's most
Speaker 2: of his job. It's it's really it's a good part
Speaker 2: of our work.
Speaker 1: And remind me to tell you about the time when
Speaker 1: Robert got a foot massager and he refused to not
Speaker 1: use it while recording, and it would go directly into
Speaker 1: the mic, and like there's no, there's no hazard. Pay
Speaker 1: that's enough, truly, don't take it out. I'm sorry, And
Speaker 1: that was my fault for bringing it up.
Speaker 2: That was your fault for bringing it up, but more
Speaker 2: importantly not my fault, because nothing is speaking of toxic masculinity.
Speaker 2: Let's get back to Andrew Tate.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 2: So, Andrew was raised initially in the DC area and
Speaker 2: then Indiana, and he seemed to want to follow in
Speaker 2: his father's footsteps. He started playing chess at age three,
Speaker 2: he started competing at five, and he eventually competed in
Speaker 2: adult tournaments while still a child. And this is where
Speaker 2: we get the very first news article on Andrew Tate,
Speaker 2: who at that point was referred to as Emerie A Tait.
Speaker 2: It is a local news piece, and this is the
Speaker 2: first like objective ish piece of journalism that it's not
Speaker 2: just like him writing about his background. And it's really
Speaker 2: the only insight we get into his childhood that doesn't
Speaker 2: come directly from a Tate. It's again a local news piece.
Speaker 2: The news in his town, which is like South Bend,
Speaker 2: was talking about the release there was a movie coming
Speaker 2: out about Bobby Fisher, who I guess was good at chess,
Speaker 2: and so they were writing about that, and they wanted
Speaker 2: a human interest piece, so they talked about young Andrew Tate,
Speaker 2: who was six when they wrote this article. He had
Speaker 2: started a chess club in South Bend with some other kids,
Speaker 2: and he had taught them chess because he wanted people
Speaker 2: to play against. It includes the article a couple of
Speaker 2: quotes that are interesting. Every kid wants to be like
Speaker 2: his dad, the elder Tate said, but father had recently
Speaker 2: limited son's playing time, encouraging other activities. I don't think
Speaker 2: that a kid his age should spend so much time
Speaker 2: playing chess. As a parent, I'd like to see him
Speaker 2: become a top level player, but I realized there's so
Speaker 2: much more to life than just chess. He learned how
Speaker 2: to swim this summer, and he plays with his friends
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. Andrew, however, says he plays because
Speaker 2: he's bored all the time. Most of the time, I
Speaker 2: am bored, and that's the only thing I want to
Speaker 2: do most So Yeah, interesting, there's some insight into the
Speaker 2: actual kid there. That is a response I understand from
Speaker 2: a kid like I am bored all the time. This
Speaker 2: is the only thing that I like. It Also, you know,
Speaker 2: gives you a little bit of a look into like
Speaker 2: there's for whatever reason, one of the things I take
Speaker 2: with in this article is that Imory Tait didn't want
Speaker 2: his son to follow him as a chess guy. It
Speaker 2: might have been some insecurity about not wanting his kid
Speaker 2: to be better than him, or it may have just
Speaker 2: been understandably like, you know, I never made a lot
Speaker 2: of money playing chess. I want you to do something
Speaker 2: else with your life. I don't want you to like
Speaker 2: be locked into this thing.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: There's some interesting questions that answers or asks. The author
Speaker 2: of this article notes that Andrew had just competed in
Speaker 2: his first adult chess tournament where he had and again
Speaker 2: Andrews later on, when he starts putting out propaganda trying
Speaker 2: to make himself do a badass, will point out that
Speaker 2: like at age six, he was playing in adult chess tournaments.
Speaker 2: He did lose three out of five games, and his
Speaker 2: dad eventually had to pull him out of the tournament because, quote,
Speaker 2: he got very upset because he thought he was failing.
Speaker 2: So Emory withdrew his son from the game to quote
Speaker 2: save him from crying in front of all those people.
Speaker 2: And we're not keyed into what precisely happened there?
Speaker 1: Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought he didn't cry. Why are
Speaker 1: we worried about that?
Speaker 2: It sure seems like his dad said he did. Yeah, whoa,
Speaker 2: whoa whoa fact check and again, Yeah, I'm gonna guess
Speaker 2: one of two things happened there. Either Andrew was just
Speaker 2: throwing a fit because he was losing, and his dad
Speaker 2: was like, well, you can't be at a chess tournament
Speaker 2: if you're gonna throw a fit when you lose. Or
Speaker 2: Andrew was doing okay and wanted to keep playing, and
Speaker 2: his dad was angry that he was losing and didn't
Speaker 2: want him to keep, like risk losing again, even though
Speaker 2: three to two is not a bad record for a six.
Speaker 5: Year old player six playing against a.
Speaker 2: Fither way, we don't know which of those is the case.
Speaker 2: Either possibility is interesting to me. Andrew's parents had another boy, Tristan,
Speaker 2: two years after Andrew was born, and the two brothers
Speaker 2: have been inseparable their whole lives. They played chess together,
Speaker 2: but Tristan never competed. They would later kickbox together, but
Speaker 2: Tristan never competed. He's like always there, but he also
Speaker 2: doesn't seem to get to live a full life because
Speaker 2: he exists purely in his brother's shadow, as like an
Speaker 2: agent of his greatness. It's kind of a weird relationship
Speaker 2: for Tristan, but I don't think he's self aware enough
Speaker 2: to understand that it's weird. One photo in the news
Speaker 2: in that new article shows six year old Andrew focused
Speaker 2: in the picture frame, face taking up a third of
Speaker 2: the frame playing chess. Well, just Tristan's hand is visible
Speaker 2: in the right third, and as the brothers grew up,
Speaker 2: Andrew would consistently stay in focus. Well, Tristan would always
Speaker 2: just sort of be off to the side.
Speaker 1: Is that and that's true to this day, right to
Speaker 1: this day.
Speaker 2: I have I don't have it. In the script we
Speaker 2: could play it. There's a very funny video of his
Speaker 2: brother like telling him to go out to like film
Speaker 2: their cars for this video they're doing about how nice
Speaker 2: their life is. And then when his brother goes out,
Speaker 2: Andrew cuts the feed just to be like, Aha, fuck you,
Speaker 2: this is my show. I don't have to like let
Speaker 2: you do anything if I don't want to. And it's
Speaker 2: like weirdly abusive because they're both men who were in
Speaker 2: their thirties, like Tristan, you don't have to take that
Speaker 2: like things got harder for them after South Bend because
Speaker 2: they their mom and dad. It's not a good marriage,
Speaker 2: and they divorce. I have found very little detail about
Speaker 2: why that divorce happened. We can infer the that it
Speaker 2: was an extremely painful time for Andrew, and this is
Speaker 2: all he's willing to write about it. Dad was working
Speaker 2: minimum wage jobs overtime since his military career had been ended.
Speaker 2: Both mom and dad worked so that we could survive.
Speaker 2: Things became so hard that we decided to go to
Speaker 2: England and try a life there only minus dad. And
Speaker 2: he's not willing to write like, you know, the marriage
Speaker 2: didn't work out or and again we don't know why.
Speaker 2: I'm going to avoid like theorizing what might have happened there,
Speaker 2: but this is clearly he idolizes his dad and he's
Speaker 2: taken away from him forever basically, and obviously Mom might
Speaker 2: have had a perfectly good reason for doing that. I'm
Speaker 2: not trying to be critical. We just actually don't really know.
Speaker 2: But this is definitely like the fact that he's not
Speaker 2: willing to even acknowledge the basics of what happened kind
Speaker 2: of suggests This leaves a pretty profound impact on young Andrew,
Speaker 2: so by age eleven, he was, in his words, man
Speaker 2: of the house, looking after his younger brother and now sister.
Speaker 2: The town in England they live in was called Luton
Speaker 2: and it is still. I think it's usually pronounced by
Speaker 2: English people Luton. But you know, you know how they are.
Speaker 3: I didn't think we would get an accent this episode,
Speaker 3: but I'm glad we did.
Speaker 2: I'm from Luton. That's how they sound.
Speaker 1: Robert, you know how much that upsets.
Speaker 2: When I do my When I do my accent, should
Speaker 2: I do my Boston accent to get him back on board?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Your Boston accents really joy.
Speaker 2: Even from Boston and Oi looi caffy and shieldah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sounds like Ben Affleck an Australian person underwater being strangled.
Speaker 2: Just Western Australia, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Anyways, Robert, it's time for an ad break.
Speaker 2: It is time for an ad break. So good to
Speaker 2: Denkin Donuts and have you a caffe Boston. It's so bad,
Speaker 2: it's pretty good.
Speaker 3: It's honestly, it's so bad that it's impressive, Like thank you.
Speaker 3: I feel like that takes a lot of skill and
Speaker 3: control to be that bad again.
Speaker 2: I'll take any kind of praise. I don't care bad attention,
Speaker 2: good attention, It's all the same to me. Welcome to
Speaker 2: our podcast about toxic masculinity. H and we're back. Solwton Is.
Speaker 2: It's not an easy place to grow up. It is
Speaker 2: in fact close to, if not the very hardest place
Speaker 2: to grow up in England. It is one of the
Speaker 2: poorest places in the country. It has been repeatedly voted
Speaker 2: the worst place to live in England. I actually found
Speaker 2: a poll from like seven days before I write this
Speaker 2: script from Bedfordshire Live that voted at the worst place
Speaker 2: to live in England. It is a tough town. Andrew
Speaker 2: and his family have basically no money. They live in
Speaker 2: public housing and they are just barely getting by. We
Speaker 2: know this for certain, like this is a confirmed fact
Speaker 2: about his upbringing. Now Andrew again definitely acknowledges that they
Speaker 2: were poor. This is actually an important part of his
Speaker 2: own self mythology. But he also makes some claims that
Speaker 2: we do not know for sure or true. He claims
Speaker 2: he got a job as soon as I was old enough,
Speaker 2: although he does not say when that was quote as
Speaker 2: soon as I was old enough, I got a job
Speaker 2: moving eighty pound boxes of frozen fish into the market
Speaker 2: at five am, and a full day of school weekends
Speaker 2: found me at the market stall, where it perfected my
Speaker 2: knife skills, flawlessly fileting fish at blinding speeds. After some time,
Speaker 2: I never cut my hands at all, not even a nick.
Speaker 2: I learned to play drums. And yeah, that's interesting. I'm
Speaker 2: sure some Again, I'm sure pieces of all of this
Speaker 2: are true. I don't know about his knife skills or
Speaker 2: the blinding speed, but I'm sure pieces of this are true. Now,
Speaker 2: trist Or Andrew interestingly says that the only one of
Speaker 2: them who got into a real world fight when they
Speaker 2: were kids was his brother Tristan. Some kid was bullying
Speaker 2: him and he beat him up. I don't know if
Speaker 2: that story is true or not, but it is worth
Speaker 2: noting that Andrew claims in this article, I have never
Speaker 2: struck a person in anger. Now we know that's not true,
Speaker 2: because he has beaten at least what like Yeah, we
Speaker 2: know that's not true. We will talk about that later.
Speaker 2: But this is the claim that he is making in
Speaker 2: this thing that he writes in like twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: when he was a young adult, he was introduced to
Speaker 2: a kickboxing trainer and he started training, as did his
Speaker 2: brothers soon after. By two thousand and eight, he was
Speaker 2: the seventh highest ranked heavyweight kickboxer in Britain. A year later,
Speaker 2: he won his first championship and became the number one
Speaker 2: ranked kickboxer in Europe for his division. Two years later,
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve, he was the second best heavyweight kickboxer
Speaker 2: on the planet. That sounds very impressive, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean second best kickboxer on the planet. That means
Speaker 2: you can kick to death anybody but one guy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that is not what that actually means. So I'm gonna
Speaker 2: be honest. All of the articles about him will just
Speaker 2: say he was the second best light heavyweight. Sometimes they'll
Speaker 2: just say the second x kickboxer on the planet. They'll
Speaker 2: talk about his championships and like lists the numbers. I
Speaker 2: was the first draft of this, actually, I just wrote
Speaker 2: that and then moved on and was like, hey, he's
Speaker 2: really good at kickboxing. Lots of bad people are really
Speaker 2: good at something. I assumed he was, as like, I
Speaker 2: figured that that was true. I looked at his Wikipedia page,
Speaker 2: which says he has like seventy nine wins and nine
Speaker 2: losses and lists his championships, and he did win a
Speaker 2: bunch of what are called world championships. However, that's not
Speaker 2: how boxing works, because I also looked up a bunch
Speaker 2: of discussions of boxing fans analyzing his actual performance, and
Speaker 2: one thing they'll point up is that, well, there's not
Speaker 2: just one guy who's the best at kickboxing. Kickboxing is
Speaker 2: actually an incredibly fragmented sport, and there are a bunch
Speaker 2: of different I think, I don't know if they call
Speaker 2: him leagues or whatever. There's a bunch of different types
Speaker 2: of kickboxing championships, and some are more impressive than others. Right,
Speaker 2: Some are people who are really good at kickboxing, some
Speaker 2: are people who are more amateur, and Andrew kind of
Speaker 2: stayed doing the more amateur stuff, and he was really
Speaker 2: good at beating amateur kickboxers. One of the critiques people
Speaker 2: will note who are into kickboxing is that the league
Speaker 2: that he became world or light heavyweight champion in only
Speaker 2: covers Europe.
Speaker 5: So, okay, you.
Speaker 2: Guys might notice there's a couple of places that are
Speaker 2: the world that aren't Europe. That iume. I assume there's
Speaker 2: some kickboxers in those places, at least one or yeah,
Speaker 2: at least a couple. The other thing they'll point out
Speaker 2: is that of all of these fights that he had
Speaker 2: and he claims like seventy nine wins, they can only
Speaker 2: verify like forty something fights because and this is that
Speaker 2: may not mean that he's lying it. It's all of
Speaker 2: the ways that the shit gets reported are weird, right,
Speaker 2: and there's so many different weird leagues and shit. He
Speaker 2: might be lying about the total number of wins and
Speaker 2: games he was in, but of the things that we
Speaker 2: can terrify only this is something kickboxing fans will point out.
Speaker 2: Only five of his fights are against guys with Wikipedia pages,
Speaker 2: And that sounds, but it means like guys who are
Speaker 2: notable enough that they they have caught like are good
Speaker 2: enough at kickboxing.
Speaker 3: So he lost fights were against like nobodies or nobody
Speaker 3: for guys who just you know, on the weekends or something.
Speaker 2: Of the notable five fights he was in, he lost
Speaker 2: three of them. The allegation kickboxing fans will make is
Speaker 2: that he mostly fought amateurs to pad his record. Now,
Speaker 2: everyone agrees he's still that's still pretty good at kickboxing,
Speaker 2: but he is not the second He was never the
Speaker 2: second best on the Planet Earth at kickboxing. That's just
Speaker 2: simply not the case. And I think it's it's fair
Speaker 2: to say, yeah, he's pretty good at kickboxing, he was
Speaker 2: never as good as he claimed, and this is a
Speaker 2: part of the self mythologizing that he engages in kind
Speaker 2: of vastly exaggerating his competency at kicking people a bunch
Speaker 2: with his feet. So yeah, it's all It's worth noting that,
Speaker 2: like the level Tait actually was at did not pay
Speaker 2: terribly well. The per fight amount is impressive. He can
Speaker 2: make between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars per fight
Speaker 2: that he was in, but he was having like one
Speaker 2: or two fights per year, which is not terrible income.
Speaker 2: But you're paying for a coach, you're paying for Jim access,
Speaker 2: you're paying for the medical care that comes from this,
Speaker 2: and he's going to have several serious injuries. So he's
Speaker 2: not living well off of this salary. And in fact,
Speaker 2: he and his brother are living in a cheap apartment
Speaker 2: I think in Bedfordshire and eating as cheaply as they
Speaker 2: possibly can in order to afford to keep being in kickboxing.
Speaker 2: Because it's like that's kind of what it is when
Speaker 2: you're competing at this kind of awkward level that he's at,
Speaker 2: and Tate relates aspects of this himself in a video
Speaker 2: from twenty twenty two. And I'm going to play this
Speaker 2: so everyone can get a look and listen to the
Speaker 2: guy before we can go any further. This is from
Speaker 2: his video on Rumble. This is his like you Like
Speaker 2: Rumble is right wing you tube and his channel is
Speaker 2: called Tate Speech as in hate speech. But you guys
Speaker 2: get it right, I don't need here.
Speaker 1: It is the first first clip world.
Speaker 6: Level athletes with no money. We invented a dish that
Speaker 6: was so bland. We called it Flavor because it was
Speaker 6: the only way you could add flavor to the dish,
Speaker 6: So it had the name Flavor, but it was extremely bland,
Speaker 6: and it was white rice frozen peas because they're cheap.
Speaker 1: Kidney beans.
Speaker 6: Kidney beans have more protein per one hundred grams than
Speaker 6: minced beef.
Speaker 2: Did you know that?
Speaker 6: I found out when I was broke, walk in the
Speaker 6: aisles at a grocery store trying to find the cheapest
Speaker 6: protein money can buy. Could it have bring myself to
Speaker 6: be a vegetarian?
Speaker 1: So I'd add a.
Speaker 6: Little bit of mate minced beef and if I was
Speaker 6: really rich, i'd have hot sauce.
Speaker 2: And I actually suspect he's probably not lying too much there.
Speaker 2: That seems like a a reasonable story. And I know
Speaker 2: some people who are professional athletes at that similar awkward
Speaker 2: level where you're like a pro but you're not rich,
Speaker 2: who are like, yeah, you do whatever it takes to
Speaker 2: like stay fueled, or that means cooking giant pots of
Speaker 2: like not delicious things just to stay Anyway, that seems
Speaker 2: broadly speaking, like he's probably not lying entirely about that.
Speaker 2: Now he is lying about he and his brother being
Speaker 2: world class athletes. You might say he was. That's going
Speaker 2: to be up to what you define that as. But
Speaker 2: Tristan is not competing in kickboxing. He is working as
Speaker 2: like a coach kind of, although people will criticize that
Speaker 2: in ways that are too weirdly nuanced and involve knowledge
Speaker 2: of kickboxing. So we're just going to move on now.
Speaker 2: The height of his career as a guy who kicks
Speaker 2: people for money comes in like twenty twelve, twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: twenty thirteen, I think is his last big championship, and
Speaker 2: not long after that he decides to leave professional sports
Speaker 2: as a full time thing. Injuries play a major role
Speaker 2: in this. Tate does not like talking about vulnerability, but
Speaker 2: he was worse at taking hits than he likes to pretend.
Speaker 2: He suffered detached retinas in several fights and had to
Speaker 2: have surgery for his eyes. So he was like, he's
Speaker 2: I mean again and again. That's the I'm pointing this
Speaker 2: out because he will never admit it. Like, if you're
Speaker 2: a professional kickboxer, at some point, you're going to get
Speaker 2: hurt enough that you can't keep doing kickboxing, like we
Speaker 2: all saw, like Muhammad Ali go from you know Muhammad
Speaker 2: Ali to you know, a guy who has severe injuries
Speaker 2: as a result of being a boxer. All this stuff's
Speaker 2: bad for you, like you either quit it a certain
Speaker 2: point or it destroys your body and mind the same
Speaker 2: way that like football or whatever it does. I mean,
Speaker 2: we all just got a reminder of that a couple
Speaker 2: of weeks ago with oh, the guy who had a
Speaker 2: heart attack on the Yeah, this is all pretty like
Speaker 2: normal sports stuff, right like it you are when you're
Speaker 2: watching guys do these kind of combat sports. You are
Speaker 2: watching people like mortgage their bodies in the hope of
Speaker 2: getting rich, and Tate kind of had to accept at
Speaker 2: a certain point, my body is going to give out
Speaker 2: before I get rich doing this. So you know, that's
Speaker 2: the thing that he recognizes, and he decides I need
Speaker 2: to let my most professional athletes do. I need to
Speaker 2: find something else I can do that's easier on my
Speaker 2: body that I can support myself with. You know, some
Speaker 2: people open car dealerships. Some people decide to you know,
Speaker 2: sell ads for different things and be pitchman. Some people
Speaker 2: go into professional baseball. Tristan decided to become a webcam
Speaker 2: sex pimp. So that's that's an interesting call. I do
Speaker 2: think history would have been different in fascinating ways that
Speaker 2: that's the choice Michael Jordan had made. Sophie, don't give
Speaker 2: you that look anyway.
Speaker 1: What I'm just saying that look, you deserved it.
Speaker 2: I usually do so for three years, they run a
Speaker 2: rapidly expanding business finding women to act as cam operators. Now,
Speaker 2: this is not an inherently dishonest business. I guess if
Speaker 2: you are, you know, building a studio and building like
Speaker 2: a platform by which you can you know, bring these
Speaker 2: these cam workers attention, and they understand their contracts and
Speaker 2: like it's a reasonably fair split. I don't have an
Speaker 2: ethical issue with building a company that allows sex workers
Speaker 2: to do cam work, right, that's that's fine. But the
Speaker 2: business that Tait interest and operated was not fine. It
Speaker 2: was fundamentally pretty toxic.
Speaker 1: No shit, the brothers didn't have a environment, all right, cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to quote now from an article in
Speaker 2: The Mirror, which is not an ideal source, but it's
Speaker 2: who entered them about this. And I don't know why
Speaker 2: they would lie about something this shady and gross, because
Speaker 2: it makes them seem like sex criminals.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 2: Some of their customers fall for the belief that they
Speaker 2: can have a real relationship with the women they see
Speaker 2: on screen, but Tristan brazenly told The Sunday Mirror it's
Speaker 2: all a big scam and bragged that he doesn't feel
Speaker 2: any guilt because no one cares and it's their problem,
Speaker 2: not mine. The more punter's handover, the more models earn.
Speaker 2: Some women will claim to have crippling university debt, a
Speaker 2: family member in need of private healthcare, or a dream
Speaker 2: of moving to the UK, sometimes even telling men they
Speaker 2: want to meet them. Whatever the excuse is, it is
Speaker 2: a lie, Tristan said. So he tells a story in
Speaker 2: this article about this guy who wanted to give a
Speaker 2: cam operator twenty thousand dollars his life savings, and Tristan's like,
Speaker 2: and I try. I talked him out of it. I
Speaker 2: told him, you know, he shouldn't do that. She was
Speaker 2: actually making good money. And then he came back a
Speaker 2: couple of months later and fell in love with another
Speaker 2: and this time I was like, yeah, man, we'll take
Speaker 2: your money, which definitely a lie. Tristan and Andrew Tate
Speaker 2: have never turned down twenty grand that a desperate man
Speaker 2: offered them for lies, trying to.
Speaker 1: Absolutely bread and butter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am going to continue that quote from the Mirror,
Speaker 2: but first, you know what I am going to continue
Speaker 2: first is capitalism. I am. I am keeping this nightmare
Speaker 2: engine alive on my own by advertising for products on
Speaker 2: this podcast. So on your own, that's it. That's I am.
Speaker 2: I am the lynch pin holding the global economy.
Speaker 1: Together on your own.
Speaker 2: Look after Facebook fell apart, it's just me, baby, Oh
Speaker 2: my god, name another company, Sophie, It's just this podcast.
Speaker 1: Just run, just run the ads. He's out of control.
Speaker 2: Uh, we are back. So I'm going to continue that
Speaker 2: quote from the Sunday Mirror of Tristan Tate being interviewed.
Speaker 2: He believes he is beyond the reach of the authorities
Speaker 2: because of two lines in the terms and conditions. He said,
Speaker 2: One is broadcasting is for entertainment purposes only. That means
Speaker 2: if a model says she has a sick dog or
Speaker 2: a sick grandma, it doesn't have to be true. The
Speaker 2: next is that all cash given to models is a
Speaker 2: voluntary sign of gratitude for their time broadcasting. Now, I'm
Speaker 2: not a lawyer.
Speaker 1: That kind of sounds like the taking their money.
Speaker 2: It does sound like you're taking their money. That said,
Speaker 2: he may be in the right there. The mirror did
Speaker 2: a journalistic thing and they reached out to a lawyer
Speaker 2: to be like, is this true, And the lawyer said maybe.
Speaker 2: But also generally UK laws say that you can't defraud
Speaker 2: people and take their money on fraudulent terms. But also
Speaker 2: the laws haven't kept pace with technology. There's a good
Speaker 2: chance he was in a legal gray area. They did
Speaker 2: not get charged, so probably is fair to say they
Speaker 2: were in enough of a legal gray area that they
Speaker 2: were reasonably safe. And to be like, perfectly honest, I
Speaker 2: suspect they could have done this indefinitely. If Andrew Tate
Speaker 2: hadn't been a sex criminal, which is what we're getting
Speaker 2: to here. So Andrew Tate later wrote this on his
Speaker 2: personal website, slash Shady Business, teaching men to run there
Speaker 2: on webcam porn studios. This is a thing he does later,
Speaker 2: but this is how he talks about his webcam business
Speaker 2: and how he makes it work. God, how did I
Speaker 2: become rich webcam? I've been running a webcam studio for
Speaker 2: nearly a decade. I've had over seventy five girls work
Speaker 2: for me, and my business model is different than ninety
Speaker 2: nine percent of webcam studio owners. Over fifty percent of
Speaker 2: my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time, and
Speaker 2: if all my girlfriends, none were in the adult industry
Speaker 2: entertainment industry before they met me. My job was getting
Speaker 2: women to fall in love with me. Literally, that was
Speaker 2: my job. My job was to meet a girl, go
Speaker 2: on a few dates, sleep her, test if she's quality,
Speaker 2: get her to fall in love with me to where
Speaker 2: she do anything I'd say, and then get her on
Speaker 2: webcams so we could become rich together. Whether you agree
Speaker 2: or disagree with what I did with their loyalties, submission
Speaker 2: and love for me doesn't matter. You cannot reject the results.
Speaker 2: And the results are simple. My girlfriends would do more
Speaker 2: for me than ninety nine point nine percent of men's
Speaker 2: wives would do for them.
Speaker 5: So what does that make That's one of the grossest things.
Speaker 2: Is really gross's and.
Speaker 1: Like voluntarily listed on his own site in it it's
Speaker 1: just fucking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he bragged about this. Now, this is potentially him
Speaker 2: describing sex trafficking.
Speaker 1: Right, Especially, that's what it sounds like if.
Speaker 2: You're if the women are not getting Now again, there's
Speaker 2: not like a law that says you can't have someone
Speaker 2: fall in love with you and then contract with them
Speaker 2: to do sex work, right, that's not a thing that
Speaker 2: there's a law against. However, if they are not getting
Speaker 2: paid for it, and if they are not being allowed
Speaker 2: freedom of movement, well then what happens is that you
Speaker 2: have like entrapped them and you are sex trafficking them. Right.
Speaker 2: This is what's called law enforcement calls this the lover
Speaker 2: boy method, right, where you get someone to fall in
Speaker 2: love with you. And also this is this goes on.
Speaker 2: This is a very old tactic in like shall we
Speaker 2: say pimping, where like, yeah, you make a woman feel
Speaker 2: like or a person be in love and dependent on you,
Speaker 2: and then you kind of emotionally abuse them into doing
Speaker 2: sex work. This is a thing that happens that is
Speaker 2: like a recognized part of a criminal enterprise. Now, obviously
Speaker 2: getting charges based on those words on his website is
Speaker 2: going to be hard to do, but just kind of
Speaker 2: the stuff that he had published for a while was
Speaker 2: enough that people at the time should have known that
Speaker 2: he was up to a what was a likely illegal business. Now,
Speaker 2: if you came across articles about Tate in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one under twenty twenty two and they went to any
Speaker 2: detail about his webcam career, the most you were likely
Speaker 2: to learn and was what the Mirror wrote here. After
Speaker 2: three years they moved to Romania, saying the UK had
Speaker 2: gone downhill. They have women on a number of CD sites.
Speaker 2: Operators take a forty percent cut and the rest goes
Speaker 2: to the studio. So that's that's what they claimed for
Speaker 2: years had happened, like, you know, we did it in
Speaker 2: the UK and then the UK got woke and so
Speaker 2: we switched to Romania. That is not what actually happened.
Speaker 2: So they started running this can business in twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: Three years after twenty twelve, and they moved to Romania.
Speaker 2: It's twenty fifteen now, just a few days ago after
Speaker 2: his arrest, a story drop that made it clear why
Speaker 2: they actually left the UK, and it had nothing to
Speaker 2: do with wokeness or the country going downhill. Andrew Tate
Speaker 2: was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse
Speaker 2: in twenty and fifteen. Weiss broke the story quote. Two
Speaker 2: women told Vice World News they were violently abused, one raped,
Speaker 2: the other repeatedly strangled by Andrew Tate, and that UK
Speaker 2: police and the Crown Prosecution Service mishandled their case, leaving
Speaker 2: him free to rise to global fame on the back
Speaker 2: of his unchecked misogyny. Police took four years to pass
Speaker 2: their investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service, whose job involves
Speaker 2: assessing whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction, at
Speaker 2: which point the CPS declined to prosecute. So that's the
Speaker 2: reality of why they had to leave the UK.
Speaker 1: Fucking vile, disgusting human beings.
Speaker 2: And it makes the timeline makes a lot more sense
Speaker 2: when you know that, when he's like, yeah, oh, we
Speaker 2: had to bounce because you know, things just got to
Speaker 2: woke for us in Romania. And he would also. He
Speaker 2: later made the claim that, like, I had to leave
Speaker 2: Romania because in the UK a man can get accused
Speaker 2: of rape for anything, right, and you know, Romania, it's
Speaker 2: much harder to get accused of rape. And so I
Speaker 2: moved to Romania, not because I'm a rapist, but because
Speaker 2: I like freedom. No, man, you were accused of rape
Speaker 2: by multiple women and then investigated, and you decided to
Speaker 2: leave because you didn't know if the UK was going
Speaker 2: to come for your ass at some point. And the
Speaker 2: story is actually a bit more fucked up than that,
Speaker 2: because back in twenty fourteen, a woman who Vice refers
Speaker 2: to as Amelia filed a police report alleging sexual and
Speaker 2: physical abuse by Tate. She claims that she and Tate
Speaker 2: met in two thousand and nine. They were friendly for
Speaker 2: years until twenty thirteen, which is when Tate was transitioning
Speaker 2: away from kickboxing to webcam pimping. The two decided to
Speaker 2: go out on a series of dates at the end
Speaker 2: of that year, and after several weeks, they were in
Speaker 2: her room when Andrew forced himself on her. Now she
Speaker 2: describes him stopping. She tells him to stop when he
Speaker 2: starts like trying to go to have sex, and she
Speaker 2: tells him that she doesn't want to have sex, and
Speaker 2: he tells her she says that he like sits quietly
Speaker 2: for a moment, and then she asks him what's going on,
Speaker 2: and he says, I'm debating whether I should rape you
Speaker 2: or not.
Speaker 5: What what the thought?
Speaker 2: Oh boy, howdy, it's it's bad. Within an end, he
Speaker 2: changed who he was. He wasn't the same Andrew that
Speaker 2: I knew. That was funny, that would make me laugh.
Speaker 2: It was like his eyes went and I didn't have
Speaker 2: a clue who that person was.
Speaker 1: Terrifying, disgusting. Oh that's horrible. I'm so sorry that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's so. Here's one of the things about
Speaker 2: this is she goes to the cops. He rapes her,
Speaker 2: and it takes they they have. After that point, she
Speaker 2: consents to sec she says a couple of times over
Speaker 2: the next six months, which is not uncommon in situations
Speaker 2: like this. But eventually she goes to the police to
Speaker 2: make a complaint and the police are like, do you
Speaker 2: want to do you want to proceed with charges right,
Speaker 2: because that's an option that you have in this case,
Speaker 2: and she decides, obviously, I don't. I hopefully I don't
Speaker 2: think I have to explain this to this audience, but like,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of horrible persons consequences that can
Speaker 2: come to charging your rapist, right to pursuing with criminal charges,
Speaker 2: she decides, and there is, and this seems like a
Speaker 2: positive things. There's an option in the UK where you
Speaker 2: can just log a complaint and say this guy rape
Speaker 2: me without proceeding with criminal charges, which she decides she
Speaker 2: doesn't want to do at this point, and so that's
Speaker 2: what she does. And then this is again twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen, is when those two women who worked in
Speaker 2: his cam studio push press charges against him and the
Speaker 2: police and this is a positive step. It's about to
Speaker 2: get less positive, but the police find out, oh, there's
Speaker 2: a report logged against this guy two years earlier, and
Speaker 2: they reach out to Amelia and they're like, more women
Speaker 2: have come forward saying that this guy assaulted them. Do
Speaker 2: you want your charges? Do you want your allegations basically
Speaker 2: to be added to theirs in this case that we're building, right,
Speaker 2: And she says yes, and she hands over her phone
Speaker 2: to the cops, which contained numerous audio notes because she
Speaker 2: had told Andrew and like text and stuff like, Hey,
Speaker 2: you know like you rate me. That's why I don't
Speaker 2: want to know you anymore. And he had responded to her.
Speaker 2: And he had responded to her using voice notes where
Speaker 2: he admitted to what he had done and Yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna play a couple of notes of Andrew Tait here
Speaker 2: for you, because before we hear him in his like
Speaker 2: fifteen year old boy influencer voice, we should hear how
Speaker 2: he talks to somebody like Amelia when he doesn't think
Speaker 2: it's going to be on the news?
Speaker 4: Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn't
Speaker 4: like it, the more I enjoyed it. I fucking loved
Speaker 4: how much you hate it.
Speaker 5: Turn me on?
Speaker 4: Why am I like that? Why? I am one of
Speaker 4: the most dangerous men on this planet. Sometimes you forget
Speaker 4: exactly how lucky you were to get fucked by me.
Speaker 4: Would you rather me pin you down and make you
Speaker 4: do things she didn't like? Or would you rather fuck
Speaker 4: you didn't like that? I was thinking, I can do
Speaker 4: whatever I want to you. That's what it is. I'm
Speaker 4: the smartest person on this fucking planet. Are you seriously
Speaker 4: so offended? I strangled you a little bit. You didn't
Speaker 4: fucking pass out? Chill the fuck out, Jesus Christ. I
Speaker 4: thought you were cool. What's wrong with you?
Speaker 5: Oh my god?
Speaker 2: So that's not great. That's not great.
Speaker 5: That's so upsetting, that's so upsetting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's pretty bad. He's he's a pretty bad dude.
Speaker 1: And what's vile? Disgusting, despicable? Yeah, waste geta like again.
Speaker 2: Normally self diagnosis is a thing we avoid on this,
Speaker 2: but like, that's just very obvious textbook narcissism. I am
Speaker 2: the smartest man in the world, you know, like he is,
Speaker 2: It's not hard to see what's going on with this guy.
Speaker 2: And I don't know his dad or like how that
Speaker 2: all went down, but there's there's there's this if you
Speaker 2: look at the way he talks about his dad and
Speaker 2: his grandpa, there's this need to like associate himself with greatness.
Speaker 2: And I don't know, like every everything that's going on
Speaker 2: here makes sense, but it's also so bleak, and I
Speaker 2: I don't know that there's probably a better a better
Speaker 2: writer and thinker than me might be able to draw
Speaker 2: a more trenchant connection between the kind of stuff that
Speaker 2: I was talking about about, how lack of connection to
Speaker 2: other men and to older men and how not knowing
Speaker 2: what your place is in society leads young men to
Speaker 2: feel disconnected and that that can be the root of
Speaker 2: some bad behavior. And the fact that Tate idolizes his
Speaker 2: dad and is separated from him and becomes so needful
Speaker 2: to kind of convince others of his greatness while using
Speaker 2: violence and threats against them. I don't know that there's
Speaker 2: a connection there, but it's it's I think, kind of
Speaker 2: worth thinking about. I guess in the same continuum, I
Speaker 2: don't know, this is still stuff like that. I'm kind
Speaker 2: of muddling through too, but it's it's not it's not
Speaker 2: surprising to me that this guy has this this kind
Speaker 2: of obsession with his because that's what it's about, right,
Speaker 2: It's it's never about like that he wanted, you know,
Speaker 2: sex or whatever. It's about that.
Speaker 5: It's about this power.
Speaker 2: It's about power he had this and it's about the
Speaker 2: fact that she didn't want to have sex with him
Speaker 2: is like an attempt from her to exercise agency. And
Speaker 2: no one else in the world gets to exercise agency
Speaker 2: just Andrew Taate, Right, Like that's the way this guy
Speaker 2: thinks about things. I don't know. There's a lot going
Speaker 2: on there worth worth pondering, and I guess we will
Speaker 2: ponder it for a while while we wait for part
Speaker 2: three of this series, where we will talk about the
Speaker 2: fallout from these cases and the social media presence that
Speaker 2: Tate builds. When again, nobody knows this ath I mean this,
Speaker 2: this this young woman knows it, and a couple of
Speaker 2: police officers know it. But as a spoiler, the police
Speaker 2: don't proceed with the charges and in fact they uh,
Speaker 2: it's really fucked up. The police say that they believe her,
Speaker 2: or Amelia says what she said to to Vice when
Speaker 2: they talked to her is that the police told her
Speaker 2: that they believed her claims, but they couldn't go forward
Speaker 2: with the case because there was a shred of doubt
Speaker 2: about Tate's guilt.
Speaker 1: Now and there's a shred of doubt.
Speaker 2: And see it does seem like he admitted.
Speaker 5: It directly.
Speaker 1: Seeing a sexual predator.
Speaker 2: What we.
Speaker 1: Cop.
Speaker 2: There's some fucked up cop gas lighting here because they
Speaker 2: tell her like, look, going through the process of pressing
Speaker 2: charge is against a rapist is so traumatic to the
Speaker 2: woman that we don't do it unless there's no shred
Speaker 2: of doubt. We're trying to protect you from the which
Speaker 2: is like cop gas lighting is on another level.
Speaker 1: That's it's hard. I'm so sorry, Amelia.
Speaker 2: That's yeah, it's fucking Bleak's this whole story is bleak.
Speaker 2: And after this point, Andrew and Tristan moved to Romania.
Speaker 2: They move their sex trafficking webcam business to Romania, and
Speaker 2: we will pick up that story in part three where
Speaker 2: it gets a lot bleaker in some ways, but also
Speaker 2: we get to make fun of Andrew tait videos.
Speaker 1: So you know something to look forward to.
Speaker 2: Take your wins where you can get them. Kiddos, what
Speaker 2: do we? Who are we? Who are we here?
Speaker 1: Ah?
Speaker 5: We're the bad boys of podcasting obviously.
Speaker 1: Uh well, all right, Robert, I think I think both
Speaker 1: shows are actually sold out. But you will be at
Speaker 1: SEF Sketch Best this coming weekend and you'll be doing
Speaker 1: a behind the Bastard show and you will also be
Speaker 1: doing Francesca Fiorentini, Yes, Orentini's The Bituation Room Show.
Speaker 5: Yeah, great franchise is great Internet machine episode.
Speaker 2: Rite something?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 1: Robert? Is a week from when we are recording this?
Speaker 2: All right, Well, we will finish recording the Andrew Taite
Speaker 2: episodes and then I will figure out what the fuck
Speaker 2: I'm doing for this live show that apparently a bunch
Speaker 2: of you assholes have decided to show up at God
Speaker 2: damn you. Thank you all for buying tickets Before we
Speaker 2: close out, I want to thank again April Clark and
Speaker 2: Grace Freud of Girl God the Girl Got Podcast, both
Speaker 2: great comedians. They have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver
Speaker 2: on fifth You Worry twenty fifth. People can get tickets
Speaker 2: for that at Girlgodshow dot com. They were on the
Speaker 2: early version of part of this, but I had an
Speaker 2: emergency and we had to bounce, and now we are
Speaker 2: recording this late at night because it is the only
Speaker 2: way that we can make this show work in a
Speaker 2: way that is we are contractually obligated to. So thank
Speaker 2: you April and Grace, Thank you, Ian and Sophie for
Speaker 2: being guests on my show last minute, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're fucking welcome. Robert, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Everyone else can go to hell though.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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