CZM Rewind: The Andrew Tate Story (Part 1 & 2)

Summary

Behind the Bastards: CZM Rewind – The Andrew Tate Story (Part 1 & 2) Hosted by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
Release Date: April 15, 2025

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1. Introduction and Rewind Announcement (00:00 – 02:51)

The episode begins with a brief, off-topic introduction by Nancy Grace promoting her show, which is quickly bypassed by the main hosts. Robert Evans announces a special rewind week dedicated to revisiting previous Andrew Tate episodes, excluding advertisements to provide a seamless listening experience. During this segment, they also encourage listeners to vote for their friends running for Webby's awards.

2. Setting the Stage for Andrew Tate’s Story (02:51 – 07:15)

Robert Evans introduces the focus of the episode: the rise and influence of Andrew Tate within the context of the mythopoetic men's movement. Due to an unexpected emergency, Robert and Amelia Clark have to leave early, bringing in editor Ian Johnson and guest Sophie to continue the discussion. They express excitement about delving deeper into Tate's impact on modern masculinity and his subsequent legal troubles.

3. Andrew Tate’s Influence and Popularity (07:15 – 13:02)

The hosts discuss Tate's unprecedented influence among young men, citing a 2022 Piper Sandler survey where Tate ranked as the top influencer among 14,500 U.S. teens, surpassing high-profile figures like Kanye West and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. They highlight Tate's strategic use of social media, particularly TikTok, where his hashtag garnered over 10 billion views in 2022 alone. Robert Evans emphasizes that Tate's rise wasn't accidental but a result of calculated tactics that resonated deeply with his audience.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans (07:14): “I am not exaggerating when I say that he is maybe the most influential single person on teen and preteen males in the US and the UK...”

4. The Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and Robert Bly (12:20 – 21:10)

To understand Tate’s influence, the hosts delve into the origins of the mythopoetic men's movement, tracing its roots back to Robert Bly’s 1990 book, Iron John: A Book About Men. They discuss Bly’s critique of modern masculinity and his advocacy for reconnecting with primal, "wild" aspects of manhood. This movement laid the groundwork for later male empowerment gurus by addressing issues like emotional disconnection and the erosion of traditional male roles.

Notable Quote:

Amelia (12:23): “We need to reintroduce this kind of mythic understanding of masculinity and the world.”

5. Andrew Tate’s Background and Kickboxing Career (21:10 – 35:30)

The conversation shifts to Tate’s personal history. Born in Washington D.C. on December 1, 1986, Tate’s early life is painted as tumultuous with a focus on his father, Emory Tate Jr., a renowned chess prodigy. However, the hosts question the veracity of Tate’s self-presentation, noting discrepancies between his claims and available records.

They examine Tate’s kickboxing career, acknowledging his achievements but also pointing out the exaggerations in his narrative, such as claiming to be the second-best heavyweight kickboxer globally. The hosts critique Tate’s self-mythologizing and the inflated importance he places on his martial arts prowess.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans (30:10): “At a young age, he was competing in adult tournaments, but this was likely a tactic to build his tough image.”

6. Transition to Webcam Pimping Business and Allegations (35:30 – 108:31)

As Tate transitions from kickboxing to running a webcam studio with his brother Tristan, the hosts expose the darker aspects of his endeavors. They reveal allegations of sexual assault and abuse against Tate, primarily based on testimonies from former associates and victims. The discussion highlights how Tate’s business practices involved coercion and manipulation, resembling sex trafficking operations.

The hosts reference a 2015 Vice article detailing how Tate’s operations in the UK led to multiple accusations. Despite evidence and admissions from victims, the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute, allowing Tate to migrate his illicit activities to Romania. This legal loophole underscored the systemic failures in addressing his misconduct.

Notable Quote:

Amelia (107:42): “Andrew forces himself on her, debating whether he should rape her or not...”

7. The Impact of Legal Inaction and Tate’s Continued Influence (108:31 – 116:17)

Robert and Amelia discuss the implications of the authorities’ decision not to prosecute Tate despite substantial evidence. This inaction facilitated Tate’s rise to global prominence, exacerbating his toxic influence online. They explore how Tate leveraged his notoriety to expand his business and influence, further entrenching harmful masculinity standards among his followers.

The hosts lament the lack of accountability and the role it played in amplifying Tate's reach, making him a central figure in promoting misogynistic and harmful ideologies.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans (115:24): “They're taking their money... Andrew Tate is an archon of male toxicity.”

8. Conclusion and Teaser for Part 2 (116:17 – End)

The episode concludes with the hosts expressing their dismay at Tate's actions and the broader societal issues that enabled his rise. They tease that the next part of the series will delve into the fallout from Tate’s legal troubles and his continuing influence on social media. Additionally, they encourage listeners to follow and support related content while maintaining a critical perspective on toxic masculinity narratives.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans (117:58): “We are finally getting into the direct personal story of one of the most toxic men of all time.”

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Key Takeaways:

• Andrew Tate’s Strategic Influence: Tate’s meticulous use of social media platforms, especially TikTok, has given him unparalleled influence over young males, surpassing even major celebrities.

• Mythopoetic Men’s Movement Roots: Understanding the foundational ideas of the mythopoetic men's movement, particularly Robert Bly’s contributions, is crucial to comprehending Tate’s ideology and appeal.

• Exaggerated Persona and Misconduct: Tate’s portrayal of himself as an elite kickboxer and his subsequent allegations of sexual abuse highlight a pattern of self-mythologizing combined with harmful actions.

• Systemic Failures: The reluctance of legal systems to prosecute Tate adequately allowed his toxic influence to spread, demonstrating significant gaps in accountability mechanisms.

• Continuation in Part 2: The unresolved legal issues and Tate’s ongoing online presence set the stage for further exploration of his impact and the societal responses to his actions.

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Note: This summary captures the essence and key discussions of the episode, including significant quotes with timestamps for reference. Non-content segments such as advertisements and unrelated conversations have been omitted to provide a focused overview of the main narrative.

Transcript

[Nancy Grace]

I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Breaking news tonight, the return of Tot Mom. It feels like a dirt sandwich in my mouth. TikTok stardom ahead as Casey Anthony haters beg. Please go away guys. Please don't miss this. Please join us, listen to Crime Stories with Nancy grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or. Or wherever you get your podcast.

[Ian Johnson]

Cool Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

Hey everybody, Robert here. First off, we are doing a rewind.

[Tristan Tate]

Week because I've written two new Andrew Tate episodes.

[Robert Evans]

But also my Earth Day came recently. We took some time off, so we're gonna take this week to replay the.

[Tristan Tate]

First four Tate episodes with ad breaks and stuff removed.

[Robert Evans]

I also wanted to tell you Ed.

[Tristan Tate]

Zitron is in the running for a webby for his show Better Offline, as.

[Robert Evans]

Is Molly Conger for weird little guys.

[Tristan Tate]

Please go to the Webbies.

[Robert Evans]

Vote for them.

[Tristan Tate]

You can find the links in the.

[Robert Evans]

Show notes along with our other links.

[Tristan Tate]

You can also just google at Zitron.

[Robert Evans]

Webbies, Molly Conger Webbies. And you will find them.

[Tristan Tate]

Please do vote for them. We'll be back next week with two brand new episodes on what Tate has.

[Robert Evans]

Been up to over the last couple of years and a bunch of really fucked up information that's come up. So please enjoy these episodes, the reruns.

[Tristan Tate]

With less ads and go vote in the Webbies.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome to hell, motherfuckers. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the Bastards, a podcast.

[Amelia]

That has just encountered one of the.

[Robert Evans]

Worst disasters of its career. So we'll get into this more later. This is supposed to be and is going to be the first of several episodes about Andrew Tate and the mythopoetic men's movement that led to his rise to fame and influence among a generation of young men women.

[Amelia]

We started recording this episode just a.

[Robert Evans]

Few hours ago with the wonderful April Clark and Grace Freud of the Girl God podcast they have. And anyway, we recorded a little bit with them and then I had a minor emergency which has taken me out.

[Amelia]

Of the house for a while.

[Robert Evans]

Things are okay, you don't need to flip out on Reddit or whatever, but it was a problem and we were not able to record with them to finish recording with them. And because of the holiday, we have no backlog. So. So in order to get this episode done and ready for our editor asap, Sophie is going to be my guest today along with Ian, our editor. And we will get this out as soon as possible. Cause otherwise we will not have a show and we are contractually obligated to Provide you with entertainment every single week until the heat death of the universe. But I do want to shout out.

[Amelia]

April and Grace, who are wonderful, who came on and booked time for us.

[Robert Evans]

And I'm sorry that things got messed up.

[Amelia]

We will have them back on the.

[Robert Evans]

Pod some point in the near future. And I wanted to let people know that there is. They have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February 25, and people can.

[Amelia]

Get tickets for that show@girl godshow.com you.

[Robert Evans]

Can also check out their podcast, just.

[Amelia]

Type Girl God, and any of the.

[Robert Evans]

Things that have podcasts, and you can listen to their awesome show. Thank you so much again, April and Grace. I'm sorry that there was a minor calamity. Now, welcome to the pod. Sophie and Ian, how are y'all doing?

[Ian Johnson]

So well. So well.

[Robert Evans]

Great night.

[Ian Johnson]

Ian is Ian Johnson, by the way. He edits a lot of our shows and is also one half of Gladiator with Fellow Fellow editor D.J. daniel. That's right. And we do have the full Gladiator on staff, which I like to bring up as much as possible.

[Robert Evans]

Mm. Mm.

[Sophie]

Thank you, Sophie. I appreciate the love. And yeah, you know, it's Friday. Ready for the weekend? Let's talk some Tate. You know, let's. Let's do it Friday.

[Ian Johnson]

Let's get into it Friday, but also almost Saturday. And Ian is currently in his closet.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And we may start drinking in the near future.

[Ian Johnson]

It might need to happen, you know.

[Sophie]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Ian Johnson]

All right, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

But, yeah, Ian, I actually. Have you been on just as one of our podcasts before? You have not?

[Sophie]

No, this is my first time.

[Robert Evans]

Well, you know, Ian, people should know about you.

[Amelia]

Again, you're one half of Gladiator. You are a longtime friend of our.

[Robert Evans]

Other editor, DJ Daniel. You are a legendary podcast editor, and.

[Amelia]

You had absolutely no involvement in the July 16 plane crash that cost John F. Kennedy Jr. His life off the Massachusetts coast.

[Robert Evans]

No involvement at all.

[Amelia]

I don't know why people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, don't bring it up.

[Ian Johnson]

That's weird.

[Amelia]

Nothing to do with it.

[Ian Johnson]

Why are you talking about that?

[Robert Evans]

I just to let people know Ian had nothing to do with it. Ian, Sophie, what do y'all know about Andrew Tate?

[Sophie]

So my limited knowledge of him is he's a, I believe, a former MMA fighter who. I don't know how he made a lot of money, but it seems like he has a lot of money from what he's seen on the Internet.

[Robert Evans]

We will be talking about how. Yeah.

[Sophie]

And he's into a lot of misogynistic. Men rights kind of stuff. And he got thoroughly destroyed online by Greta. So I do remember that. And I think he's in jail now.

[Robert Evans]

He is in jail now, unrelated to the Greta stuff. There was a little bit of confusion about that.

[Amelia]

But yes, he is in jail for.

[Robert Evans]

Sex trafficking in Romania. Sophie, is that more or less your understanding of the guy?

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah. He fucking sucks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's awesome. He does indeed. He does indeed fucking suck. Unfortunately, he's also kind of worth studying in detail because he's managed to do something with social media that I don't.

[Amelia]

Think anyone else has ever managed to the same degree of success. He's smart in one very specific way.

[Robert Evans]

Even though he also did a bunch.

[Amelia]

Of dumb things and some really dumb.

[Robert Evans]

Crimes that hopefully have ruined his life. He was smart in a way that.

[Amelia]

Has allowed him to become dangerously influential.

[Robert Evans]

To an entire generation of teenage boys in a way that no one on earth has managed quite yet.

[Amelia]

Donald Trump is really the only other.

[Robert Evans]

Guy that I might put next to Tate in that kind. And I think Tate has a wider.

[Amelia]

Appeal among Gen Z teens and tweens than certainly Trump ever has.

[Ian Johnson]

It's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content shows up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we're gonna be talking about all that. I am. One of the things when I started looking into this guy, there's a ton of articles about. Cause he blew up kind of mid-2021, up until the arrest a couple of weeks ago. There's profile articles on him that like.

[Amelia]

Go into detail about his background and.

[Robert Evans]

His past and his entire rise to power. You'll generally the best articles you'll find in places like Buzzfeed or. Or I think we have a couple from, like, the Guardian. They'll like, summarize his backstory in two or three paragraphs. I wanted to get into who this.

[Amelia]

Guy is and where he came from.

[Robert Evans]

Because he kind of pops out of nowhere if you.

[Amelia]

If you don't follow that.

[Robert Evans]

I think this is the first time anyone's really done that. So I think this will be valuable for.

[Amelia]

For that.

[Robert Evans]

But I want to start by laying.

[Amelia]

Out why we have to take Tate.

[Robert Evans]

Seriously and kind of explain the scale of sort of his influence. I am not exaggerating when I say.

[Amelia]

That he is maybe the most influential single person on teen and preteen males.

[Robert Evans]

In the US and the UK and some other parts of the west than anyone else on planet Earth.

[Amelia]

In fall of 2022, financial services company Piper Sandler released a survey of 14,500 U.S. teens taken between August and September.

[Robert Evans]

Of that year, Tate was the number.

[Amelia]

Influencer on the list in terms of popularity. He beat Kanye west, he beat Mr. Beast, he beat Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

[Robert Evans]

All of them.

[Ian Johnson]

Not Mr. Beast.

[Robert Evans]

I. Yeah, I don't know who Mr.

[Amelia]

Beast is, but he's some guy's a YouTuber.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he's a YouTuber. I know Elon Musk joked about giving.

[Amelia]

Him control of Twitter or he asked.

[Robert Evans]

Whatever. I don't know anything about him. I'm sure you're fine, Mr. Beast.

[Amelia]

Or he's horrible.

[Ian Johnson]

If he's horrible, whatever. Anybody who's that famous on YouTube, I'm a little bit like, yeah, no good.

[Robert Evans]

People get famous on YouTube, which is what I text our friend Cody Johnston every single day when he releases a new YouTube video there. Anyway, the Andrew Tate hashtag on TikTok.

[Amelia]

Has received more than 10 billion views.

[Robert Evans]

Over the course of 2022 alone, which is fucking nuts. That is an.

[Amelia]

That is insane.

[Robert Evans]

That is like, incomprehensibly viral. He was also. He will always claim that he's like, the most Googled person on Earth. I looked into.

[Amelia]

He actually is.

[Robert Evans]

That's not quite it. He is the number one. When you type in who is into Google, who is.

[Amelia]

Andrew Tate is the number one who is question asked of Google in 2022.

[Robert Evans]

Which is not the same as being the most Googled person on Earth, although.

[Amelia]

He is one of the most Googled people on Earth. I found a couple of lists of.

[Robert Evans]

That and he's often at like, number eight, some place closer to like, 10. But, like, he's incredibly famous.

[Ian Johnson]

I just tested that and it is, in fact true.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Sophie]

Top 10 most Googled person on the planet. That's your. That's. That's a lot of people.

[Robert Evans]

That is a fuckload of people. And in some counts, he's like beating.

[Amelia]

Donald Trump, which again, Trump was the literal president.

[Robert Evans]

And it's interesting because his career, you can compare him to a guy like Joe Rogan. Right. Joe.

[Amelia]

His.

[Robert Evans]

There's nothing that people like, wonder why he's popular, but there's no mystery as to how he became popular. He's got a very.

[Amelia]

He's been consistently.

[Robert Evans]

The trajectory is clear.

[Amelia]

Yeah, Very, very consistent guy.

[Robert Evans]

Constantly in the limelight, constantly doing stuff.

[Amelia]

Not hard to see where he came from.

[Robert Evans]

Tate is a kickboxer for a while and then kind of drops off, is.

[Amelia]

Just sort of a guy on Instagram.

[Robert Evans]

And then is suddenly the most famous.

[Amelia]

Influencer on the planet, seemingly overnight.

[Robert Evans]

And this is not an accident. This isn't also something he didn't just get surprised because something of his happen to go viral. This was the result of a tactic.

[Amelia]

I haven't seen anyone else use, or certainly not to the degree of success that Tate used. And the tactic that he unleashed not.

[Robert Evans]

Only made him this popular, but it made him popular enough that you can.

[Amelia]

Find articles about schools in the US.

[Robert Evans]

And the UK holding seminars for young.

[Amelia]

Male students and for teachers to try to talk about de radicalizing kids who.

[Robert Evans]

Have got, who have fallen under Tate's spell. When I posted a comment about him during his spat with Tunberg, just because I was frustrated at the degree, not with Greta's response to him, which I thought was totally fair, but with people.

[Amelia]

Kind of cheering it on as if.

[Robert Evans]

He'D been beaten by it. Where my concern was like, well, the attention historically has just kind of made him more popular. And there were a bunch of comments in that post I made by teachers who were like, I don't think people understand how popular he is with like 13, 14, 15 year old boys. I talk to kids every day who worship the guy and I've never seen anything like it.

[Sophie]

One of my really good friends, Jack, this is actually a few weeks ago, we were hanging out and he was like kind of joking, but also serious. He was like, yo, I'm like, it would be scary to be a 13 year old boy right now because of the inundation of this kind of stuff that you're seeing all day, every day. And he was like, I'm not gonna lie. If I was 13 or 14 and didn't know better, I could probably fall for a lot of this stuff. It's like, I couldn't imagine being that age right now and just being flooded with that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think about that sort of thing in a lot of. I'll talk about kind of.

[Amelia]

There's elements of Tate's pitch that I.

[Robert Evans]

Think might have worked on me when I was 17, 18 years old particularly. A big part of it is working.

[Amelia]

A shit job that you hate for.

[Robert Evans]

The entirety of your youth is bullshit, which it, it is. Like, it's a terrible way to spend a life doing the thing you hate forever. And if you kind of, if that's.

[Amelia]

The hook you're leading with, rather than what a lot of male influencers lead.

[Robert Evans]

In with, which is like, here's how to pick up chicks, you know, that's.

[Amelia]

An interesting spin that he's put up.

[Robert Evans]

But we'll get more into his pitch and like, what about it is not new and what about it is new. But I wanted to. I want to start of explaining who.

[Amelia]

Tilled the soil that Tate grew up in.

[Robert Evans]

And to do that, we have to.

[Amelia]

Travel back in time to the 1990s.

[Robert Evans]

And the work of the first real modern masculinity guru in US History. Oh, boy. Now, we've talked about guys like Bernard.

[Amelia]

McFadden in the past who had elements.

[Robert Evans]

Of that, where he's big into physical culture and getting buff, and he talks about how modernity is making men weak. But Robert Bly is the guy who.

[Amelia]

Jordan Peterson is cut in his image. And so, to a degree, is a.

[Robert Evans]

Guy like Andrew Tate.

[Amelia]

He is the first guy to kind.

[Robert Evans]

Of bring both academic rigor and also this kind of focus on the damage.

[Amelia]

Capitalism has done to masculinity into this kind of.

[Robert Evans]

It's become the men's rights movements.

[Amelia]

It's become the pickup artist community.

[Robert Evans]

That's not what it was called at the time, but, yeah, Robert Elwood Bly is the name of the guy who kind of kicked all of this off.

[Amelia]

And he's not the dude you'd think he was. He's an American poet.

[Robert Evans]

By some accounts, he's one of the.

[Amelia]

Most influential poets in American history.

[Robert Evans]

And he was born on December 23, 1926, in Minnesota. Initially, Bly seemed to be on certainly.

[Amelia]

Not the path that he wound up on. He goes to Harvard University. He studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He receives a Fulbright scholarship to go.

[Robert Evans]

To Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English.

[Amelia]

And during this time, he also gets connected to these great poets who are.

[Robert Evans]

Not Westerners, like Pablo Neruda and Rumi, and they influence his understanding of art.

[Amelia]

And the myths that underlie it.

[Robert Evans]

And it also leads him to feel that, like, modern contemporary American poetry is.

[Amelia]

Kind of hollow and lacks a connection to this kind of deeper mythology that he sees in some of these Eastern.

[Robert Evans]

Poets and some of these poets from.

[Amelia]

Other parts of the world that aren't the United States that he feels are making a deeper connection to things.

[Ian Johnson]

This might be just a personal preference, but I find the Iowa's Writers Workshop to be a red flag.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah. Wait, wait.

[Amelia]

What?

[Robert Evans]

I don't know much about it. Tell me, tell me. Why is this?

[Ian Johnson]

No, it's just. It's just one of those things that gets overused in TV as, like, oh, I need to go to this. It's like it has, like a. A weird, weird elitism to it that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, I feel that way about Harvard, too.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, there's a lot of weird elitism, red flags where I'M like. But yeah, hearing Harvard University followed by Iowa Writers Workshop is usually not the best. Oh, and then there's the full, yeah, Fulbright grant. So it's, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, Iowa Writers Workshop. Sophie says, go to hell. Fuck off. Apparently, that's right, motherfuckers. I don't know much about the Iowa Writers Workshop, but that's his background.

[Amelia]

And again, this is also.

[Robert Evans]

He's coming. He's doing this at an earlier time. I mean, Harvard was very, very much that kind of thing. But I don't know, maybe the Iowa Writers Workshop was not. I don't know. His first poem of collection of poems.

[Amelia]

Which was called Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962, and it focused on moments of solitude and beauty, as we see in this piece driving to town late to mail a letter. It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted. The only things moving are swirls of snow. As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron. There is a privacy I love in this snowy driving around I will waste.

[Robert Evans]

More time which is just like this nice, quiet little. Certainly you don't see any red flags there. It's just kind of a poem about one of those quiet moments that you have in your life, you know, I don't know. I don't find it deeply affecting, but there's certainly like. It's not like he's writing anything you would see a problem with.

[Sophie]

It's unoffensive.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, for sure.

[Amelia]

The next year, he published an influential essay in which he attacked mainstream American poetry as impersonal, lacking in soul, and a willingness to look inward. His criticism of American society expanded after that, and in 1966 he co founded the American Writers against the Vietnam War.

[Robert Evans]

He is one of the very first prominent American artists to try and organize artists against the war, which is, I mean, good because it was a bad War.

[Amelia]

In 1968, he made a public promise to refuse to pay taxes until the end of the war.

[Robert Evans]

And he made some very trenchant critiques of US imperialism.

[Amelia]

In 1967, he wrote an article for the New York Review of Books in.

[Robert Evans]

Which he noted the fact that so.

[Amelia]

Few Americans have resigned from the government or from responsible posts to protest the Vietnam War is remarkable to me. And he's bringing up also cases of, like, the Russian Revolution and stuff where.

[Robert Evans]

You would have these horrible wars being prosecuted by regimes that are on paper.

[Amelia]

A lot less free than the United.

[Robert Evans]

States, but also would have a lot more defections or people just like, refusing.

[Amelia]

To do their jobs because they Believed that a course that the sovereign had set was unethical.

[Robert Evans]

And he's like, why isn't this happening in American government?

[Amelia]

Why is no one refusing to be.

[Robert Evans]

A part of the Vietnam War? And he went on to ask, can.

[Amelia]

We imagine General Westmoreland resigning and refusing.

[Robert Evans]

To prosecute a brutal war?

[Amelia]

Never. Pilots drop anti personnel bombs on small North Vietnamese villages and many of them hate it. But they don't resign with a public statement of protest. They quietly retire when their tour is over. Bly wondered what this showed about Americans. Are we timid? Are we greedy? He thought not.

[Robert Evans]

And this is what he.

[Amelia]

What it shows is a disastrous split between the Americans inner and outer worlds.

[Robert Evans]

He does not aim to use his.

[Amelia]

Life to make himself whole, to join the two worlds in himself. On the contrary, he is prepared to give up one of the two worlds. The businessman gives up the inner world and clings to the outer as his way. A large body of literature denounces the businessman for taking the one world without the other. But when a right writer is opposed to the Vietnam War and still accepts a grant from the government prosecuting the war, he is doing something similar. He is letting the world split. He lets the outer world go by him with just a wave of his hand, and then he reaches out and pulls the inner world to him. He accepts the money for the sake of my work. It will enable him to live in his inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken place. Before he begins to use the money for his work instead of trying to apply what he has learned in the actions of his inner life to the actions of the world, he pulls back inside the house, closes the door and declares he doesn't know what is going on on out there, or knows, but has rejected it all as outside his sphere of influence or his interest. He is not political. But what could be more within the sphere of interest of a writer than the world?

[Robert Evans]

And I actually find that a really affecting critique. I think about that a lot. Just in terms of, like, number one, this desire I have a lot where I'll just be kind of like churning through the muck of a bunch of.

[Amelia]

Horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress.

[Robert Evans]

Or, like, see some horrible Twitter thing.

[Amelia]

Culture war shit roll up, and want.

[Robert Evans]

To feel this urge to like, well, fuck this. I don't want to pay attention to this anymore. I just want to discard this from my life and focus on this, like, piece of art or creativity that I.

[Amelia]

And I think most people feel that.

[Robert Evans]

Most reasonable people feel that way a lot. And what he's saying is like, how can you call yourself a writer? How can you call yourself an artist.

[Amelia]

And attempt to discard the outer world.

[Robert Evans]

In favor of the one that you focus on for your creativity? Like, how can you actually be connected to your inner world in any way and feel as if you can pretend the outer world does not exist? You're doing the same thing as a businessman who focuses entirely on his desire to make money and ignores his spiritual development. Like, there's not a fundamental moral difference between what the two of you are doing because you're both rejecting half of your being in order to stick with the one that's more comfortable because of whatever you've chosen as your profession. And in the case of, yeah, I don't know, I found it a trenchant critique that makes me think a lot about myself.

[Amelia]

Maybe check out what Bly has to say about the Vietnam War.

[Robert Evans]

And he put his money where his mouth was.

[Amelia]

He used that article to republish a letter he'd sent to the chairman of the national foundation of the on the.

[Robert Evans]

Arts and Humanities because they had offered.

[Amelia]

Him a $5,000 grant. And he turns it down because he's.

[Robert Evans]

Like, look, this is an instrument of the United States government and I am.

[Amelia]

Opposed to a war they are waging.

[Robert Evans]

And even though I could argue that if I take this money, it won't.

[Amelia]

Get spent on bombs, what I'm really.

[Robert Evans]

Doing is providing legitimacy to the state.

[Amelia]

That is carrying out this terrible war.

[Robert Evans]

And I'm simply not going to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to.

[Amelia]

Support it in any way, even by.

[Robert Evans]

Letting it support which, whether or not you agree with it, is a deeply principled stance that requires sacrificing something.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, so when does he. When does he.

[Robert Evans]

Right. He's not a bad guy so far.

[Ian Johnson]

I'm waiting.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Ian Johnson]

This is not cool. People who did cool stuff.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no. So, spoiler alert. The Vietnam War ends. We don't do great. Goes okay for Vietnam, though. Well, I mean, millions of people die, but they do win. Bly remains an influential poet and thinker.

[Amelia]

In the 1970s, he organizes the first Great Mother Conference, which is still going on today.

[Robert Evans]

It's a nine day festival that explores human consciousness. And it celebrates this kind of archetypal.

[Amelia]

Idea of the Great Mother as this.

[Robert Evans]

Kind of like feminine, creative force that underlies everything in society. And Bly, the reason why he felt it was important to kind of bring consciousness and get people focused on this idea and on this celebration of femininity.

[Amelia]

Is that he saw the Vietnam War.

[Robert Evans]

As kind of the expression of masculinity.

[Amelia]

Like running wild and leading to terrible death.

[Robert Evans]

And he believed that Americans needed to.

[Amelia]

Reconnect with femininity in the wake of.

[Robert Evans]

The Vietnam War, which is, again, not an unreasonable stance. You know, you can argue with it.

[Amelia]

But you can see where he's coming from.

[Ian Johnson]

And I are, like, both waiting for it.

[Sophie]

I'm just waiting for.

[Robert Evans]

You're waiting for the shoe to drop. Motherfucker's coming, is coming.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So as the aftershocks of Vietnam faded.

[Amelia]

America enters the swinging 80s. Bly becomes concerned with something else entirely.

[Robert Evans]

He sees in the Reagan years this.

[Amelia]

Vapid consumer culture, you know, malls and.

[Robert Evans]

Shit, the increasing spread of popular music as, like, a concept in a way that it really hadn't been. Oh, no.

[Ian Johnson]

Music horrible.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, look again.

[Amelia]

TV.

[Robert Evans]

There's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today.

[Amelia]

TV in the 1980s was not what it is now.

[Ian Johnson]

No, no.

[Robert Evans]

So he sees all this happening, and he also just sees again what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained capitalism is doing to people. And he begins to believe that the kind of soullessness and.

[Amelia]

Brokenness at the.

[Robert Evans]

Core of the American experiment is the.

[Amelia]

Result now of a crisis in masculinity. Right.

[Robert Evans]

So previously he had. Yeah, he.

[Amelia]

There's an extent to which he thinks.

[Robert Evans]

Like, I don't know, we'll get into what he thinks. So in 1990, he writes a book.

[Amelia]

That is kind of illustrating the things that he started to feel here, and he calls it Iron A Book About Men.

[Robert Evans]

Now, have you heard of the Fairy Tale of Iron John, Ian?

[Sophie]

No, I'm so familiar.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, not big. Grimm's Fairy Tales, people. That's fine. Neither am I. I had not heard about this either.

[Amelia]

I think maybe it's bigger in Germany.

[Ian Johnson]

Grimm's Fairy Tales. Red flag continue.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Wow.

[Amelia]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

That's a red flag. One of the greatest works of art.

[Amelia]

In, I'm gonna guess, German history.

[Robert Evans]

Sophie.

[Ian Johnson]

Robert.

[Robert Evans]

Wow. I feel like you just hate German history reflexively. For reasons that have nothing to do with anything that has ever happened in history.

[Ian Johnson]

I have no comment on that.

[Amelia]

Wow. Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Well, Red Flag.

[Sophie]

Turned it right back around on you.

[Ian Johnson]

That's what he does.

[Robert Evans]

I think. Iron John, again, it's a fairy tale. And I think I'll give a brief summary of how that fairy tale goes, because it's, again, none of us.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, I mean, you brought it up. You should tell us what the fuck I'll tell you.

[Robert Evans]

I'm gonna do it. So.

[Amelia]

God Damn.

[Robert Evans]

So I'm gonna quote from a write.

[Amelia]

Up in the New York magazine here. That story goes like this. Something in the forest is killing a kingdom's hunters. A stranger arrives, goes into the forest with his dog, and returns with a large hairy man he's extracted from a pond.

[Robert Evans]

This is the wild man whom the.

[Amelia]

King locks in a cage. The king's son, playing with his ball, lets it slip into the cage, and the wild man tells him he'll give it back if the boy steals the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow and sets him free. The boy unlocks the cage, but fearful that he'll be in trouble with his parents, flees on the wild man's back to the forest. After the boy fails a series of trials and acquires a head of golden hair, the wild man kicks him out of the forest. But after he sinks to the low status of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom, the wild man helps him become a mighty warrior. And he wins the hand of the princess, is reunited with his parents, and becomes the rich, heroic king in his own right.

[Robert Evans]

So, you know, I think we're probably missing some context there, just from culture, but it's like, I. I get why that's not in, like, the.

[Amelia]

The type 5 of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

[Robert Evans]

Like, that's. That's maybe the one you leave on the cutting room floor.

[Sophie]

That's like the B sides.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's like a B side. Yeah, that's like. That's like, I don't know, the. One of the. One of the Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore.

[Ian Johnson]

Well, to be. To be fair, like, it's up against, like, Snow White Cinderella.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. It's not a Snow White grade fairy tale. It would be funny to see, like, modern Disney try to do this.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah. I mean, the actual Grimm's fairy tales are pretty horrific, to be honest.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This one, it also might be one of the tamer ones. I don't know. I'm not an expert on fairy tales.

[Ian Johnson]

Well, that's why Disney was, like, too tame, not into it.

[Robert Evans]

And again, I feel like. I feel like this is an example. I think sometimes we look at these.

[Amelia]

Stories that have been around a long.

[Robert Evans]

Time and are like, wow, there's some deep wisdom in there, which is why we should keep telling them. But I'm looking at this, which is.

[Amelia]

It'S a parable about manhood.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And about becoming an adult. And I'm like, you know, it's a better parable about manhood and becoming an adult for a Star wars movie.

[Sophie]

That's a good point.

[Robert Evans]

Much better one. Much better one. Look, George Lucas knocked it out of the park. Fuck you, Grim. You know who else is George Lucas?

[Ian Johnson]

No, Robert. Who else is George Lucas?

[Amelia]

The sponsor of this podcast.

[Ian Johnson]

I mean, that would be so incredibly based.

[Robert Evans]

That would be pretty. Would be. Actually, George, you have the cash. Sponsor this podcast and we'll, we'll, we'll make it work, buddy. We got you. Anyway.

[Tristan Tate]

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 a session, which adds up fast. But with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save on average up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and on time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it, and the price is within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life, plus switch therapists at any time. Your well being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com behind to get 10% off your first month.

[Amelia]

That's BetterHelp.

[Tristan Tate]

H-E L P.com behind I'm Nancy Grace.

[Nancy Grace]

This is Crime Stories. Breaking news tonight, the return of Tot mom. It feels like a dirt sandwich in my mouth. Tick tock. Stardom ahead as Casey Anthony haters beg. Please go away, guys. Please don't miss this. Please join us. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Robert Evans]

We are back.

[Ian Johnson]

Are we?

[Robert Evans]

And no, but maybe. Okay, so here we are. We're talking. We're having a good time. Are we? So Bly's book looks at this myth.

[Amelia]

Of Iron John and he reexamines the.

[Robert Evans]

Myth using Jungian psychology, which is again, another red flag. There's perfectly valid reasons to study Jung, but whenever you have somebody who is re evaluating myths using Jungian psychology, they always turn into Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry, that's just the way that it works. So he's trying to find lessons that, that are gonna be meaningful for men struggling with modernity.

[Amelia]

And his basic conclusion, as far as.

[Robert Evans]

I can tell, is that men need.

[Amelia]

Rewilding in order to fix the things that are driving them crazy, right?

[Robert Evans]

They need to reconnect with the wild man inside them. Now, this is going to be.

[Amelia]

This is the root of a million.

[Robert Evans]

Kinds of manfluencer garbage, right? Everything in that fuck. Like, you guys know the Liver King, that guy who was telling people that he got super jacked by eating nothing but raw animal livers that he hunted. He was spending so much steroids, $12,000 a month on steroids, which he lied about. Now he's getting sued for $100 million because he defrauded people by convincing them to take his liver enzyme pills. So funny. But what the Liver King is doing is this is. He's basically setting.

[Amelia]

Pretending to be the wild man that.

[Robert Evans]

Bly talks about and being like, this is what you have to do in order to be healthy and deal with all of these toxic things about our modern lives and go out and throw spears at boars and then eat their raw, uncooked organs. Which I would actually say is a.

[Amelia]

Lot less masculine than doing the thing.

[Robert Evans]

That our actual caveman ancestors did, which.

[Amelia]

Was learn how to cook meat.

[Sophie]

You make a really good point.

[Robert Evans]

It's also the root of. We just started this year with a.

[Amelia]

Couple of more episodes of Jordan B. Peterson's show. He talks a lot about the need.

[Robert Evans]

For men to be controllable beasts and also references another Grimm's fairy tale.

[Amelia]

The one that he chooses is, well.

[Robert Evans]

I think it's a Grimm's fairy tale fucking Beauty and the Beast. I don't know.

[Amelia]

Maybe not.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe that started as a Disney thing.

[Amelia]

I don't know where it started.

[Robert Evans]

But he talks a lot about, like, this. Again, all of these guys today who are talking about, you have to be primal.

[Amelia]

You have to reconnect with your caveman roots.

[Robert Evans]

You have to, like, the pain.

[Sophie]

I think I saw Jordan B. Peterson, like, video on Instagram the other day, and I didn't know it was him. I was just scrolling and he was. But now that you say that, I'm pretty sure it was him because he was talking about. About how men should be dangerous. Like, it should be dangerous, but it's like knowing when to use the threat of violence or not. It's like, just because you're dangerous doesn't mean you're, like, a violent person, but you should have that capacity or some shit. That's what makes you a true man. It's like, what?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Crazy.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, and that's. You can see, like, Peterson is not an. He never has been an original thinker.

[Amelia]

He's cribbing from Bly, right? They all are. Bly is the origin of this.

[Robert Evans]

And it's also worth noting that while Bly's book has been. And the descendants of Bly's book are.

[Amelia]

Pure reactionary gibberish, Bly himself was not. Again, we went through this guy's background.

[Robert Evans]

He's a deeper thinker than that. And there's passages in his book that are kind of worth connecting with. So I'm going to read a quote.

[Amelia]

From that now to judge by men's lives in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, Zululands, and in the Arab and Persian.

[Robert Evans]

Culture, flavored by Sufi communities, men have.

[Amelia]

Lived together in heart unions and soul connections for hundreds of thousands of years. Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only, in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear. After work, what do men do? Collect in a bar to hold light conversations over light beer unities that are broken off whenever a young woman comes.

[Robert Evans]

By or touches the brim of someone's cowboy hat.

[Amelia]

Having no sole union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all.

[Robert Evans]

And cowboy hat thing's kind of weird, but that's a totally valid point. The lack of intimate male to male friendship is a deep problem in our society.

[Ian Johnson]

What does he have against light beer?

[Robert Evans]

I. I mean, because I. I think he's just sort of. I mean, okay, whatever. He's. He's getting into a little bit of masculinity there, but I know the point he's making is like, yeah, yeah, sorry, Sophie, famous lover of light beer. It's okay. I. I love. I love my champagne beer, too.

[Ian Johnson]

I just.

[Robert Evans]

I had some lovely. I actually wish I had some Peroni right now.

[Ian Johnson]

Peroni's delightful.

[Amelia]

Peroni is a lovely, nice, wonderful.

[Robert Evans]

Especially on a hot day.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah. Nice hot day.

[Robert Evans]

I've gone on long runs with nothing but a backpack full of Peroni to keep me going.

[Ian Johnson]

That sounds very believable. Actually.

[Robert Evans]

Peroni.

[Amelia]

It is essentially water.

[Sophie]

I can smell the ad dollars coming in right now.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, Peroni sponsor us, you cowards.

[Robert Evans]

But you see, like, what he's making there. And this is not a point that, like, this is not a point Andrew.

[Amelia]

Tate would make, right?

[Robert Evans]

Because these guys are all hyper competitive, right? And that's a huge part of, like, what they're talking about. Whereas one of the, like, Bly is.

[Amelia]

At his core, a large part of.

[Robert Evans]

What he's complaining about is totally rational.

[Ian Johnson]

Which is, like, again, Ron, men aren't allowed to learn. Where is it? Where is the thing?

[Robert Evans]

Well, that's not the only thing in the book. He's also talking a lot of.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, I'm waiting for it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we're getting to it.

[Ian Johnson]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Iron John spends 62 weeks on the New York bestseller list. Yeah, I don't think anything spends that.

[Amelia]

Long on the bestseller list anymore.

[Ian Johnson]

That's a long ass time.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, that is.

[Sophie]

This is in the 90s still.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, this is 1990.

[Amelia]

1990-91.

[Robert Evans]

Cause it's on there for more than a year. And it turned Bly from a respected.

[Amelia]

Poet and activist into the first masculinity guru in modern US history.

[Robert Evans]

Now again, we had guys like Bernard McFadden before who had talked about aspects of this. But Bly is wrapping his arguments in respected academia.

[Amelia]

And the way he's connecting with his people is exactly the same as the kind of shit that Jordan Peterson and other folks do today.

[Robert Evans]

Guys like Ivan Throne and whatnot who.

[Amelia]

Were in the masculinity influencer thing.

[Robert Evans]

He's doing conferences, he's having rooms full of people.

[Amelia]

Men gather and he's speaking to them.

[Robert Evans]

And he's like running them through.

[Amelia]

He's basically bringing them to these moments of emotional height. And you can see some.

[Robert Evans]

There's a little bit of Werner Erhard in there. You know, there's a reason this is.

[Amelia]

All coming out at the same time.

[Robert Evans]

As we start to get the self help craze hit. But he's basically holding these big pep.

[Amelia]

Rallies for adult men. In 1991, more than 1,000 men went to see him at the Eastbold auditorium in Parkland, Washington, paying 75. $1991.

[Robert Evans]

That's a lot for the privilege. Yeah. A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes the scene thusly.

[Amelia]

As the customers file in, a dozen white guys flail away incompetently on African drums. When the crowd is seated, the drummers quit the. And Bly and Michael Mead, a storyteller who helps run the workshops, begin to recite rambling myths and bits of verse. Mead occasionally bangs a bongo. Bly plinks a bouzouki, the Greek version of the mandolin, sending mournful notes wafting out over the audience.

[Robert Evans]

So that sounds good, right? Sounds like a fun time.

[Sophie]

Yeah, it sounds like a great way to spend $75.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I always love white guys playing African drums in my gigantic stadium speech series by a fucking poet. Anyway, bly, who in 1984 had been called the most influential living American poet by current biography, became a kind of.

[Amelia]

Celebrity that hadn't previously existed. So he's filling stadiums with people who want to hear him talk, but he's also, he's engaging them in a way that's going to spawn the modern men's self help industry. Quote, bly urges men to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their wild nature. Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear of brutality, have laid, labored to breed fierceness out of men, creating the sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt might have said, I could carve.

[Robert Evans]

A better man out of a banana.

[Amelia]

Bly believes that inside of every such male, there's a wild man yearning to get out, a radiant inner king just waiting to confer masculine pride and sureness of purpose.

[Robert Evans]

Bly insists he doesn't blame women for men's sorry state.

[Amelia]

He blames older men who have failed to provide young ones with the role models they crave. In traditional societies, boys worked alongside young plowing fields and fashioning arrowheads. But the industrial revolution severed that connection. The title character in his bestseller is a wild, hairy fellow who in a grim fairy tale, is fished up from a pond and becomes a boy's mentor. That image is also the inspiration for his most extravagant exercise in manly self discovery. Five day wild man excursions in which groups of a hundred men take to the woods under the tutelage of Bly and others to dance around fires banging on drums.

[Ian Johnson]

I mean, honey, just say you have daddy issues and move the fuck on.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, this is. There's this element where he's like, society is fucked because feminists have tried to breed the violence out of me.

[Ian Johnson]

What year is this?

[Amelia]

91.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah. Okay, so, you know, you have. It's like, like astonishing to me that people are paying $75 and like selling out big. I mean, that's more like. That's more than they. People were paying for, for Coachella in the early, early 2000s.

[Sophie]

The crazy thing is like, at the core of what he's saying, it's like most of that sounds like he's making some good points, valid points about how men have evolved in our society. So I'm just like, where's the twist?

[Robert Evans]

Cause where is it?

[Amelia]

You've seen it start to happen here.

[Robert Evans]

Because the valid thing in that passage is he's like, hey, look, young boys used to grow up learning alongside both their father and the other men in whatever community they were in. And that taught them what it meant.

[Amelia]

To be a man.

[Robert Evans]

And now, because capitalism has kind of.

[Amelia]

Taken the man out of the house.

[Robert Evans]

You'Re supposed to be working 40, 60, 80 hours a week. Right.

[Amelia]

They're not there to raise. It's just the.

[Robert Evans]

Usually in, like, the way our society works, just the woman who's raising the kid. That's what he's saying. Then we've cut men off from this process of learning how to be adult men. And, like, that is actually a pretty valid critique. And the problem is that he's saying, the problem is that feminists have bred.

[Amelia]

Fierceness out of men instead of being.

[Robert Evans]

Like, capitalism separates parents from children for huge amounts of time, and that's bad for kids. And actually, if you look at it like, you could see in that very scenario of, like, men are out of the house working, so kids are raised largely by their mothers. Well, that also means an unfair burden's.

[Amelia]

Being placed on the mother. You could see this.

[Robert Evans]

There's a way to have solidarity between the genders here and be like, oh, yeah, this is all of a problem.

[Amelia]

Of this system we've built.

[Robert Evans]

Built that, like, separates families in ways that are really fucked up. Like, I identify with that when I was a kid, because we didn't have.

[Amelia]

Much money at all.

[Robert Evans]

The only job my dad could get.

[Amelia]

Was in New York City. And there was a period of more.

[Robert Evans]

Than a year where he was gone.

[Amelia]

He was living on a friend's couch.

[Robert Evans]

Working there, sending money back to us. And it was. It was. It's not just him that made a sacrifice. I made a sacrifice as his son, and my mom made a sacrifice dealing with the entire job of, like, raising me. Like. Like, there's a thing to identify with there. But you can see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well, the problem is that feminists have tried to.

[Amelia]

Make men less fierce.

[Robert Evans]

That's not really the problem. Robert Bly.

[Sophie]

One interesting thing, just before you keep going, is, I think in that quote, did he say that justifiably, they tried to breathe brutality out of men or whatever. So even there, on some level, you know, you can kind of like, okay, like, I kind of see what the point is making. You know, men do perpetuate a lot of the bullshit that happens to women in our society.

[Robert Evans]

So, like, he's not nearly. He's not anywhere. He's not on the same planet of toxicity as a lot of, like, as. As guys like, you know, Andrew Tate, who we're about to talk about, or even, like, Jordan Peterson. But you can see the root of it right where he is.

[Sophie]

That's like, the star. Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

He's. He's still saying, fundamentally, part of the problem is feminists want men to be less aggressive and like, no, that's not really part problem that you have adequately identified. Um, yeah. He warns his listeners, the young boys are drowning in female energy in the schools.

[Amelia]

Every young man has a fantastic need for initiation. That's why we all became so crazy about our football coach. Such initiations, he says, channel wildness into socially approved acts.

[Robert Evans]

And again you see kind of this like, well, why is the problem isn't female energy? Like, it's not that, like it's that young men, it's that families are being split up by this like, need to.

[Amelia]

Compete and work in ways that are really unhealthy for kids.

[Robert Evans]

But anyway, you can look at the sea of other self help grifters at the time, Werner Erhard, L. Ron Hubbard.

[Amelia]

Who had come around at this point.

[Robert Evans]

And you could say that Bly is just kind of another dude in that.

[Amelia]

He'S doing a lot of the same.

[Robert Evans]

Things a lot of these other self help grifters are doing. But one of the things that differs him is those guys are mostly plying.

[Amelia]

Nonsense based on bad interpretations of eastern religion and psychological abuse.

[Robert Evans]

And Bly is kind of, he's not insulting or attacking people, he's not calling them weak.

[Amelia]

He's making some reasonable points about stuff.

[Robert Evans]

That'S toxic about our society. And then he's trying to create mutual.

[Amelia]

Cathartic experiences with the men in his.

[Robert Evans]

Audience who are being invited to kind.

[Amelia]

Of see the men around them as brothers in a way that's more intimate.

[Robert Evans]

Than maybe they had been trained to do previously. So again, there's something interesting going on here that isn't even wholly toxic that.

[Amelia]

I think is kind of worth acknowledging.

[Robert Evans]

As we lead to the parts of it that are a lot more toxic. And it's one of those things where I've spent a lot of time on.

[Amelia]

INCEL message boards and they do talk a lot about this feeling of disconnection with society.

[Robert Evans]

So when he says that young men are not connected to their communities, he's.

[Amelia]

Making it a decent point.

[Robert Evans]

He also, one of the points he makes that I thought was interesting is he talks about the differences between female.

[Amelia]

Sex ed and male sex ed.

[Robert Evans]

And he points out that because of like just basic biological realities of how periods happen, young girls are instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys are not. And it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about their bodies, talking about health problems. And that's probably a valid thing to point out.

[Amelia]

Sure.

[Ian Johnson]

But definitely goes both ways.

[Amelia]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

And again, he's very, he's completely ignorant to. Well, I I'm sure there's a lot of things actually, especially today that women are not taught about their bodies because of. Anyway, again, these are a lot of two way problems. And he's focusing just on the male aspect of them, but he's not inherently wrong about the male aspect of them. He's just leaving a large part of the equation out. And that's where the toxicity comes in here.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready.

[Amelia]

Bly has reached his fundamental message.

[Robert Evans]

Men and women are essentially alien and neither should apologize. They're different tribes. He is saying, my father was an alcoholic and yet if you look underneath.

[Amelia]

His weakness, there was something there that my mother didn't have. She was fine, but she didn't have it. 3 million sperms start out and they find themselves immediately in a hostile environment.

[Robert Evans]

Facing an egg approximately 40,000 times per bigger. We're the product of the one survivor that didn't give up. Which is, it's really weird to be like setting up the gender struggle as like sperm versus egg, where it's like, well actually all of us are the product of sperm and eggs. It's the only way people happen.

[Ian Johnson]

I just want to emphasize on the last part of that quote there, you said we are the product of the one survivor that didn't give up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. What's the other half of that equation? Is it just, is it just one little bit of, a bit of cum that makes a baby Robert fly? Is there another part to the baby equation?

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, I just want to be like, honey, did you not show up for sex ed class that day? Did you miss that lesson?

[Robert Evans]

He's framing it as like the sperm have to murder the eggs so that one can survive. That is not the way it works.

[Amelia]

Bly actually insists that he is not preaching old style machismo. And he takes pains to tell his audience that in fact, male rage is weakness. We're not talking about aggression, he calls out. A few of his listeners seemed confused.

[Robert Evans]

At the height of an hour long.

[Amelia]

Discussion of the Gulf War, one audience member announces that he's seceded from society.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not paying my taxes, I've bought an AK47 and I'm farting around with ammunition just in case I have to.

[Amelia]

Back up my decision, he says softly but firmly. Bly and many others have spoken out against the Gulf War, yet Nobody criticizes the AK47 fellow. And when Bly asks the Vietnam vets to stand to be honored, the room erupts with applause for about three minutes.

[Robert Evans]

Minutes. And you can see There, too. The seeds of a lot that's going on right now. Right where. Yeah, he's like, we're not talking about. Men need to be more aggressive. And then a guy's like, I have dropped out of society and started buying guns. And everyone's like, that's great.

[Ian Johnson]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

Look, we're not. Anyway, whatever.

[Amelia]

Bly died last year.

[Robert Evans]

He lived a long time.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, I would say.

[Robert Evans]

And you can find people, you know, reappraising his work and stuff. There are some folks who will say that, like, his greater talent was for self promotion rather than poetry, and he wasn't as good a poet as people had said. I don't know. I'm not a poetry guy. I'm not gonna analyze his poetry in that way. I do think sometimes, because somebody turns out to age into a problematic person, people are like, well, I guess their work that everybody loved in the past sucked. And I think that's kind of cowardly. Like, nah, people liked his poems that were influential. And then he turned into a crank.

[Amelia]

That's fine. That happens.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah. Anyway, you know who isn't a crank and who will never do anything problematic? My favorite filmmaker, Roman. Oh. Oh, you know what? I Googled his name right as I was saying that. Oh, boy. Oh, dear. Well, I'm gonna go burn all my DVDs of Rosemary's Baby, and y'all check out these ads. Ah, we're back. Really glad I caught myself with a.

[Ian Johnson]

Google that bit, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

A little while. I thought it was good with, like, the talk about reappraising artist works and the. Thank you. Thank you. I thrive on praise.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, that was something different. Good for you.

[Robert Evans]

So Bly died, but his work launched.

[Amelia]

What scholars have called the mythopoetic men's movement.

[Ian Johnson]

Oh, my God. That's what they call it. That's amazing.

[Robert Evans]

It is a somewhat fucking prickish name to call it. I guess I don't enjoy what they mean by mythopoetic. I should explain.

[Amelia]

What they're saying is the argument Bly and the other.

[Robert Evans]

Because there's a bunch of other authors in this. The argument they're making is that our society has stripped mythology out and has become this, like, kind of coldly competitive engine for creating cash value and that.

[Amelia]

We need, in order to make men.

[Robert Evans]

Healthier, we need to reintroduce, like, this kind of mythic understanding of.

[Amelia]

Of masculinity and of the world.

[Robert Evans]

That, like, that's kind. And a lot of it is they're, like, looking at, like, Native American cultures.

[Amelia]

And some of the different rituals around.

[Robert Evans]

Masculinity they had and being like, well, maybe we'll. And there's actually. Again, there's a scientific basis to. A lot of this is cultural appropriation. But, like, one of the things that's happening in this period is you've got.

[Amelia]

A lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with.

[Robert Evans]

PTSD in an era before they understand it.

[Amelia]

And a thing that occurs during this period is that some of them have.

[Robert Evans]

Buddies who are also struggling with PTSD and are indigenous Americans and who invite their. Their white and black and Hispanic battle buddies back to do stuff like sweat lodges in order to cope and other kind of different rituals that have existed.

[Amelia]

In some of these indigenous societies to.

[Robert Evans]

Deal with what happens to men when they go to war and they invite their friends back.

[Amelia]

And that stuff works better than just.

[Robert Evans]

Getting a job working for an accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam. And so people are starting to study.

[Amelia]

This and write about it.

[Robert Evans]

And if. And one of the things that the mythopoetic guys take is this belief that you should basically just kind of, like, steal wholesale from these cultures and dress white people up in headdresses and give.

[Amelia]

Them drums and stuff, as opposed to.

[Robert Evans]

Being like, oh, well, maybe there's a way that isn't that to look at the value that some of these rituals have in healing people. You know, I'm not the person to analyze that completely, but that's part of what they're saying here is that they're kind of recognizing there's something hollow at the center of American culture that is not hollow in some of these other cultures. And instead of being like, maybe there's things that we should fundamentally change about American culture, they're saying, what if we dress up like these other people? Right. That's essentially what's going on with a lot of the mythopoetic movement. So a big chunk of this. And these are.

[Amelia]

Some of this is Bly.

[Robert Evans]

Some of these guys outside of Bly is they're making. They're like putting a bunch of white.

[Amelia]

Accountants in sweat lodges that they make.

[Robert Evans]

The wrong way and lecturing them about Young and Joseph Campbell, or they're making them dress like cavemen while playing African drums. There's a lot of weird, uncomfortable racism in the mythopoetic men's movement. That said, it is less toxic than the men's rights movement that would follow it. Things kind of get increasingly aggressive and toxic from this point out. Out. But Bly and the initial mythopoetic influencers were not.

[Amelia]

They saw themselves as therapists.

[Robert Evans]

And again, I don't think they were good at this, but they were not.

[Amelia]

Political, so they were not.

[Robert Evans]

This was not a conservative movement. They were not billing themselves as right wing. They were not really, like, weighing in on culture war issues, in part because.

[Amelia]

The culture war didn't exist in the.

[Robert Evans]

Same way then that it does now. And it's interesting because Blythe expressly says this is an apolitical movement. You might criticize him because he had just written a really kind of beautiful essay during the Vietnam War about the.

[Amelia]

Cowardness of being apolitical.

[Robert Evans]

But whatever. I found an article from the Washington.

[Amelia]

Post in 1991 that talked to a number of men who had been most.

[Robert Evans]

Active in the movement, and there's some interesting pieces in there. Quote, an affirmation in strength comes from.

[Amelia]

A bonding between men that's impossible to put into words, says Ed Honold, the mild mannered federal lawyer and founder of the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals of.

[Robert Evans]

Dancing, roaring, hugging and weeping.

[Amelia]

The experience was known to men in the past, but has been forgotten. American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it. There are large numbers of men wandering, lost in some personal wasteland of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why.

[Robert Evans]

He pauses thoughtfully and adds, there's a lot of hurting cowboys out there now. These guys are not cowboys. These guys were like middle managers at.

[Amelia]

Auto parts stores and shit.

[Robert Evans]

Like, they are absolutely not hurting cowboys. And also actual cowboys aren't what this guy thought they were. But he's not wrong again in saying that, like, the situation of American men.

[Amelia]

Was pretty unpleasant in the early 1990s.

[Robert Evans]

They were struggling against a capitalist culture.

[Amelia]

That thrived on the obliteration of meaning.

[Robert Evans]

However, men, of course, are not the.

[Amelia]

Only ones suffering from this, nor are.

[Robert Evans]

They suffering worse than any other group of Americans. Right? This is just alienation under capitalism. Part of what he's doing here that is noteworthy and becomes a huge problem later on is he is identifying real.

[Amelia]

Problems with the society we live in.

[Robert Evans]

And then cutting men off from the.

[Amelia]

Rest of that society and thus cutting.

[Robert Evans]

Off the possibility of solidarity. So you can't look at this kind.

[Amelia]

Of alienation and loss of meaning and.

[Robert Evans]

Be like, wow, men and women and everybody is being harmed by the meaninglessness.

[Amelia]

This hole at the center of our culture.

[Robert Evans]

You have to say, men are being harmed. And then that invites like, well, it.

[Amelia]

Must be women that are doing it.

[Robert Evans]

And it must be we should be looking at how feminine is it rather than being.

[Sophie]

It opens the door for the toxicity to flow right in.

[Ian Johnson]

It's interesting to see like just how far John Wayne's like reach impacts the way men think.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there's a lot of hurting cowboys. Motherfucker, you are not a cowboy.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And by the way, cowboys were mostly like poor black and Hispanic and indigenous men who were being exploited for their labor. Like this is. None of what you're saying means anything. You are entirely. You're talking about the emptiness of culture and your understanding of history has been entirely formed by the movies you watch.

[Ian Johnson]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like anyway, do better, do better. Well, some of them will eventually in the future. I think it would be interesting to try and find out.

[Amelia]

Look into all these men's groups in.

[Robert Evans]

The Washington, in the state of Washington in this period of time and see how many of those guys wound up being elders in the Proud Boys 30 years later. But that's a more in depth work for someone in the future if they wanted do it. So one of the most dangerous aspects.

[Amelia]

Of the mythopoetic men's movement is that.

[Robert Evans]

It was not as toxic as its descendants.

[Amelia]

Again, it, it identifies real problems but then it recasts them as things that just men, mostly white men, are suffering from.

[Robert Evans]

And the answer is like kichi kind of racist larping as member like that. That's basically what they're doing, right? And this. Yeah, it causes problems later on. One of the most ridiculous aspects of the mythopoetic men's movement was the creation.

[Amelia]

Of Wingspan, the journal of the male spirit.

[Robert Evans]

Ah, don't you just wanna sit down, Ian, with a copy of Wingspan? Read out quotes to your buds.

[Sophie]

I start every morning with it.

[Amelia]

With it?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Just spreading your wings.

[Amelia]

So in the pre Internet era this.

[Robert Evans]

Acted as a clearinghouse for the movement.

[Amelia]

And a central place where influencers could advertise their events. The last issue of Wingspan lists dozens of publications and events for men around the country, including a new warrior training adventure weekend in Wisconsin, Drumming and Dancing for Men in Massachusetts, Brother to Brother in New York, Healing the Father wound in California and Afro American males at risk in New Jersey. A recent grandfather ceremony at the Fairfax Unitarian Men's Council featured drumming on a five and a half foot thunderheart drum in this area. There are three large councils in Virginia, one in Gaithersburg and another in Baltimore. The Men's Council of Greater Washington, which Honnold started in June of 1988 with 50 men, is the largest with 2,000 members and 50 newcomers arriving for each monthly meeting. Late one night in January, at the council's meeting in the Washington Ethical Society auditorium on Upper 16th Street, Honnold Shed his Clark Kent image as he leads 500 men who are pounding drums and chanting. The sweating windows shake with rudder rhythmic thunder that reverberates up and down the street as they raise Honnold, gyrating and clapping high overhead and parade him about the room. Then group leaders circulate with large feathers and clay pots, wafting the smoke of burning sage into the waiting faces in what is termed a Native American ritual designed to put you in touch with generations of male ancestors.

[Robert Evans]

So that's a little problematic.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, just a little bit.

[Robert Evans]

Just a skosh.

[Amelia]

A number of other masculinity grifters followed Bly. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette wrote the bestseller King, Warrior, Magician Lover, which purported.

[Robert Evans]

To that's a title right there. I want to be a King, Warrior, Magician Lover. And these are like the archetypes of male masculinity. I don't think they're in order because you probably don't start as a king and end up as a lover, although maybe you do. That would be progressive, actually saying that you need to shed your mastery and your sense of ownership in order to become a lover. But I don't think that's the point there making Moore is a Jungian analyst and a professor of psychology. Gillette, like Dr. Jordan Balthazar Peterson, was a mythologist.

[Amelia]

I found a good write up that.

[Robert Evans]

Described the main arguments in their book by Aaron Innes.

[Amelia]

The book's second shared premise is that.

[Robert Evans]

There are universal male archetypes inherent to.

[Amelia]

Every male bodied person that are represented in myth and story around the world but are suppressed in the dominant culture. The developmental history of every man, says Morin Gillette, is in large part the story of his failure or success success.

[Robert Evans]

Of discovering within himself the archetypes of mature masculinity.

[Amelia]

Following Jungian psychological theory. They claim that if men are not given room to express these archetypes in.

[Robert Evans]

A healthy manner, they will act them.

[Amelia]

Out unconsciously in ways that are damaging and violent, either directed outward at other.

[Robert Evans]

People as overtly hostile male behavior or.

[Amelia]

Directed inward, which saps the vitality of the men involved. It's worth noting that the authors of both books, as well as their contemporary followers, seem a hell of a lot more concerned about remedying male acting out that's turned inward and creating male malaise than they are about male violence directed towards others. Take the essay why Men Find it so Hard to Feel by Mythopoetic workshop leader Darren Austin hall, who says that.

[Robert Evans]

Women are at an advantage to men.

[Amelia]

Spiritually and that menstrual cycles mean women are energetically connected to cycles of the moon, which in turn is energetically linked to our unconscious. This leads him to the conclusion that the solution to warmongering tyrants in the world is for women to use touch and the beautiful arts of seductive love to.

[Robert Evans]

To disarm men, and that this will solve male violence.

[Sophie]

Oh, there it is.

[Robert Evans]

You girls just gotta touch us, right? And we'll stop doing genocides.

[Sophie]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

That's incredible. Hitler wouldn't have done all that bad stuff if I get. Well, I mean, he was dating his cousin, so I don't really wanna continue this joke, but.

[Ian Johnson]

What?

[Robert Evans]

Dating. Dating's the wrong word. You know that story, Sophie, we've talked about Hitler and his cousin.

[Ian Johnson]

Oh, yeah, the one who killed herself.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's a bad. It's a really bad story. Again, bringing up Hitler and the cousin that he may be murdered is definitely, perhaps a good way of pointing out how fucked up it is to say.

[Amelia]

The problem of men's violence is that.

[Robert Evans]

Women don't touch them the right way. It's pretty bad. It also brings to mind I'm thinking about our Liberia episodes and the. That sex strike that a bunch of women went on to get the warlords to come to the table to negotiate and how it's like literally the opposite. It's number one, one of the most amazing stories of activism I've ever heard of. And it's literally the opposite of what these guys are saying. But I don't know. I don't know. This is all so gross. Yeah, icky. So most regular listeners of the show.

[Amelia]

Are broadly familiar with the way men's empowerment gurus and men's rights influencers evolved.

[Robert Evans]

Over the last 20 years or so.

[Amelia]

A mix of right win culture war politics intersecting with very divorced men.

[Robert Evans]

And I think we haven't talked about.

[Amelia]

This yet, but these guys are all extremely divorced.

[Robert Evans]

Right. There's a lot of weekend dad energy in these.

[Sophie]

That makes sense.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Okay.

[Sophie]

That's why they're all so bitter. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. There's just no way anything else is going on here. Elon Musk would have been really, really would have fit in at these. Maybe it would have kept him from buying Twitter. You know, I don't want to say it was all toxic. So. Yeah, again, you have. Most people listening are kind of familiar.

[Amelia]

With where things descend after the mythopoetic men's movement. Which still kind of is around, but.

[Robert Evans]

More or less peters out over the.

[Amelia]

Course of the 90s.

[Robert Evans]

And after that point, you've got a mix of right wing culture war politics.

[Amelia]

That intersects with these very divorced dudes.

[Robert Evans]

Angry over custody, yelling about how men are discriminated against. And then we have people pick, of course, starting in the early 2000s, these pickup artists selling the secret to fucking chicks at bars. And this all gets brewed up into this slurry. And, you know, you've got the pickup artists intersecting with the men's rights activists, intersecting with the right wing culture war politicians intersecting with these literal Nazis.

[Amelia]

And from that slurry we get Gamergate and the alt right and at least a portion of Donald Trump's political success.

[Robert Evans]

Right, so, boy howdy, that was a paragraph.

[Amelia]

That is the story.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I mean, this is. We haven't gone into this on the show, and it was something I was broadly aware of but didn't know much about. But I think this is especially leading into a story about a guy like.

[Amelia]

Andrew Tate, who is the most toxic.

[Robert Evans]

Arguably calls himself the most like, toxic man on the Internet, and is certainly an archon of male toxicity. I think it kind of behooves us.

[Amelia]

To talk about what led to him.

[Robert Evans]

Cause it's interesting. Interesting. Anyway, this is the end of episode one. Anybody, Anybody got some thoughts here at the end of Things?

[Sophie]

I mean, I think that was a really great explainer on kind of laying the groundwork for where the ideas that eventually became Andrew Tate, you know, started and took a foothold. And yeah, after you broke it down, it makes sense and I can see how we got there, you know, but it is interesting that, you know, some of the initial original points, like you said, were valid and do kind of highlight some issues in our society that maybe we should be focusing more on or addressing. But also, as you said, it's not just a men's problem. It's a problem for everyone and everyone's being affected by it. And we should be finding solidarity in that. And how can we help everybody improve our lives? Not just, oh, it's a problem that's only affecting men, so it must be women, you know, those are the problems.

[Robert Evans]

It's so interesting to me how many people see, oh, men are being made to like, spend their entire young and mature adult lives, like, laboring for somebody else's profit in a factory or whatever. And as a result, their kids barely know them, which is a real problem a lot of kids raised in like, the 50s, 60s, 70s have. And translating that as. And, like, seeing, you know, their mom struggling to, like, keep the house going and raise the kids through all that and. And the kids suffering and be like.

[Amelia]

Well, this is clearly a men's problem.

[Robert Evans]

No, this is a cultural problem. Everybody's problem is this.

[Ian Johnson]

Anyway, Sophie, I'm really not looking forward to what's coming next.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, Sophie, it's gonna be terrible. And you're gonna have to play a lot of clips.

[Ian Johnson]

So I'm so sorry, listeners, but it is. I'm sorry, but it is necessary.

[Robert Evans]

You know what?

[Amelia]

I'm not sorry.

[Robert Evans]

I'll never apologize. That's what I learned from Andrew Tate.

[Ian Johnson]

I think you wrote a really good script, though.

[Amelia]

Thank you, Sophie.

[Ian Johnson]

You're welcome, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

I love me, too. All right, everybody, that's gonna do it with us for us today at behind the Bastards, the podcast that will be.

[Amelia]

Recorded again immediately after this.

[Robert Evans]

Although I will probably start drinking because it is now quite late. So huzzah, Huzzah.

[Nancy Grace]

I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Breaking news tonight, the return of Tot Mom. It feels like a dirt sandwich in my mouth. TikTok stardom ahead as Casey Anthony haters beg. Please go away, guys. Please don't miss this. Please join us. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah.

[Ian Johnson]

No, no, no.

[Robert Evans]

Sophie, Sophie.

[Ian Johnson]

No, I.

[Robert Evans]

It's late.

[Ian Johnson]

We ended the last episode where I was like, wow, you're such a great writer. That was so good.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you so much.

[Ian Johnson]

And then you come in and then you do that. What?

[Robert Evans]

Well, Sophie, you may not understand this because of your womanliness, but I was embodying the archetype of the magician, wild man.

[Ian Johnson]

I don't. You're fired.

[Robert Evans]

That's fair. That's fair. Well, I have started drinking. Got a nice glass of port Rue Talisker here. And I want to start this episode by giving a shout out to a.

[Amelia]

Friend of the pod. Former mayor of the city of Portland, Sam Adams. Now, y'all may not know Sam. I think he was briefly on the.

[Robert Evans]

Show Portlandia, but he was fired from.

[Amelia]

Being the mayor because he had a.

[Robert Evans]

Sexual relationship with a teenage staffer and.

[Amelia]

Then got rehired by current mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, who's a giant piece.

[Robert Evans]

Of shit to be the mayor body man, basically. And then this week, Sam announced that.

[Amelia]

He was retiring because he had an iron deficiency.

[Robert Evans]

And then Ted Wheeler told everyone, no, he's retiring. And because he wouldn't stop threatening and bullying women in the office, both of you guys suck. And it's very funny. This happened. Also, I gotta say, shout out to Sam Adams. Honestly, going from sexually harassing a teenager to being a bully to adult women, that's a step forward.

[Ian Johnson]

Okay, disagree.

[Robert Evans]

Sophie.

[Ian Johnson]

You'Re fired. I don't know what else to say.

[Robert Evans]

Look, one of the two things isn't a sex crime. So that's a real personal growth for former mayor of Portland, Sam Adams.

[Ian Johnson]

Anyway, Ted Wheeler. What the fuck is wrong with you?

[Robert Evans]

Great, great hiring. Look, honestly, fuck Sam Adams.

[Amelia]

He's a piece of shit.

[Robert Evans]

But incredible hiring decision from Ted Wheeler. Yeah, let's get the guy in here who had sex with a 17 year old staffer. Let's get him back in city hall. We really need his insights. Great, great work, Ted.

[Ian Johnson]

Really shocked about, you know, how well liked he is in the city of Portland.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, I mean he's not. But you can let him know how.

[Amelia]

You feel about his decision to hire and then fire Sam Adams at tedwheeler.

[Ian Johnson]

When he got the tear gas thrown on him.

[Robert Evans]

That was cool. I do remember that. So I started talking about Ted Wheeler and Sam Adams.

[Amelia]

Cause they're both toxic men.

[Robert Evans]

And today we are finally getting into the direct personal story of one of the most toxic men of all time.

[Amelia]

Emory Andrew Tate iii.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, that's quite a name. That's quite a name. Now, Emory Andrew Tate III was born.

[Amelia]

In Washington D.C. on December 1, 1986.

[Robert Evans]

Now that fancy name might lead you to think that he came from some like British ash. British. British ass noble family or some shit. That sounds like a duke's name to me.

[Ian Johnson]

It's very formal.

[Sophie]

It sounds like old money for sure.

[Robert Evans]

He is not.

[Amelia]

Now, most of the texture that we get on his childhood comes from Andrew.

[Robert Evans]

Himself, which is not ideal because he is a liar. But there's just not a lot of other. Again, I haven't found. No one's done a critical biography.

[Amelia]

There's not a big long New Yorker.

[Robert Evans]

Piece that really delves into his backstory.

[Amelia]

So I kind of had to do.

[Robert Evans]

That myself to the best extent that I could do. Now, I did find one. And this is honestly the only texture.

[Amelia]

You get on his childhood that I.

[Robert Evans]

Have come across is from an article he wrote for a website for kickboxing that sells kickboxing gear. And the title of it is the Life of Andrew King Cobra Tate. So again, this is not a credible source. But the way in which he writes.

[Amelia]

About his childhood and what he wants.

[Robert Evans]

You to believe about it does tell you a lot about the man so we're still going to be covering it.

[Amelia]

But do not take this as literal truth.

[Robert Evans]

That should be optimistic. Obvious. Here's how he talks about his birth.

[Amelia]

I was born in Washington, D.C. at Walter Reed Army Hospital, early one morning, December 1, 1986. The doctor wanted to award me a.

[Robert Evans]

Perfect 10 on the birth scale, but settled on 9.5. Already.

[Amelia]

Already.

[Robert Evans]

That's the saddest thing anyone has ever bragged about.

[Ian Johnson]

That's so pathetic.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely heartbreaking.

[Ian Johnson]

Oh, my God. That's on somebody's fucking, like, dating profile for sure.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Amelia]

Two weeks overdue.

[Robert Evans]

But I was a nose.

[Amelia]

I was nose breathing already as the.

[Robert Evans]

Doctor held me upside down by my.

[Amelia]

Heels and my right fist was inside of my mouth as I suckled. The doctor pinched my thigh to get a response, and I growled, knitting my brow and trying to crane my head up to see who had attacked me. The doctor paled, shocked at my defensiveness. Powers.

[Robert Evans]

I did not cry.

[Sophie]

Oh, my God, I hate this fucking guy.

[Robert Evans]

That's. That's so funny, though, bragging about how tough you were as a baby.

[Sophie]

As an infant.

[Robert Evans]

As a baby, like, wow, unbelievable.

[Ian Johnson]

I'm, like, incredible. And I, like, keep rereading what you. What you just said, and it's.

[Amelia]

I'm going to tell y'all right now.

[Robert Evans]

Because, again, everything I found just kind of glosses over his. His childhood. Cause we don't have a lot of, like, detailed, like, someone hasn't gone through and, like, interviewed a shitload of people that he knew as a little kid or knew. Right. That hasn't happened yet. I'm sure it will. And I was thinking we were just.

[Amelia]

Gonna have to brush over his childhood. And then I found this article he.

[Robert Evans]

Wrote about himself on a kickboxing website, and it made my week. It made my week. It's so funny.

[Ian Johnson]

You're writing about your own birth like you did fucking anything.

[Robert Evans]

So if you're curious about Andrew's parentage, his mother, Eileen, is indeed English as shit.

[Amelia]

And she's a white lady. She worked as a catering assistant. His father is Emory Tate junior And Emory, well, was Emory Tate Junior. Emory Tate junior Was a black American man and a Chicago chess prodigy. Actually, up until a year or two.

[Robert Evans]

Ago, Emory Tate was much more famous than Andrew Tate. We actually had in our work chat, Mia was shocked to learn that Andrew Tate was Emory Tate's son. I had not heard of this guy, but I don't care for chess or for chess. Yeah.

[Amelia]

The Washington Post describes Emory Tate Jr. As a trailblazer for black chess players.

[Robert Evans]

He was like one of the first. I don't know, he may have been like the first super famous, really well known black professional chess players. Again, I don't understand chess. I don't understand why you would play a war game that doesn't include orcs. But a lot of people who love.

[Amelia]

Chess say that he was one of the most fun players to watch.

[Robert Evans]

I did read a lot of like writing, like fans and like Reddit and stuff, talking about Emory Tate.

[Amelia]

And one thing they all seem to.

[Robert Evans]

Agree on is he was just super entertaining to watch play chess.

[Ian Johnson]

Thank you. Why does. When you type in Emory Tate into Google, why does the first suggested thing come up as CIA?

[Robert Evans]

What?

[Ian Johnson]

I typed Emory Tate into Google and the first thing that autofills is CIA.

[Robert Evans]

Hmm.

[Ian Johnson]

He was in the CIA.

[Robert Evans]

Well, Andrew says that he was in the CIA.

[Ian Johnson]

Is that what's happening?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Amelia]

So he was in the Air Force as a sergeant and he served as a linguist.

[Robert Evans]

There's not actually hard evidence that he.

[Amelia]

Was in the CIA that I have seen.

[Robert Evans]

Like this is based on. Again, Andrew is kind of, and we're.

[Amelia]

About to get into this.

[Robert Evans]

He's really plumping his dad's reputation to make him into like, not just a chess guy, but a badass.

[Ian Johnson]

So may or may not be somebody who worked.

[Robert Evans]

I have not seen any independent confirmation that he worked in the CIA.

[Amelia]

Maybe he did a lot of guys.

[Robert Evans]

In that period who like, did some sort of, like, weird work where they would have just been listed as a State Department employee. So it's not impossible. But I have not come across confirmation that he was in the CIA.

[Amelia]

So the Washington Post and most sources.

[Robert Evans]

Who write about Andrew's dad will call.

[Amelia]

Him a grandmaster at chess.

[Robert Evans]

This is not entirely true.

[Amelia]

He was.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, this is not true.

[Amelia]

He was an international master, which is a lesser rank.

[Robert Evans]

He never quite made it to Grandmaster.

[Amelia]

I found again, chess discussions online by nerds about chess who will say that.

[Robert Evans]

He didn't make it to Grandmaster, mainly because he wasn't able.

[Amelia]

He wasn't willing to do certain things that you have to do to do that.

[Robert Evans]

But he had a really good record. He regularly beat grandmasters. Some people say he was as good at Bobby Fischer. Again, I have no way to evaluate any of this.

[Ian Johnson]

Robert, taking a big anti chess approach here.

[Robert Evans]

Again, there's no battle tanks in chess.

[Amelia]

There's no titans with chainsaw hands. The ultimate game of strategy is still Warhammer 40,000.

[Robert Evans]

I think we can all agree on that. Yes, of course, it's been true for generations. But anyway, Emory Tate, great at chess. A chess historian wrote a book about.

[Amelia]

Him, which gives us some idea as to where Andrew Tate got his sense of style and personal branding. The title was Triple Exclam with three exclamation points. The life and games of Emory Tate, Chess Warrior.

[Robert Evans]

Which is kind of fun hardcore.

[Amelia]

I think he literally died at the.

[Robert Evans]

Table in 2015 playing a game of chess. Like this.

[Amelia]

Man, this motherfucker loved chess. He wears a white fedora with a gold band on the COVID which also.

[Robert Evans]

Gives you a little bit of insight into where Andrew Tate gets some of his taste in style. And Andrew idolizes his father and he does it particularly. I'm not going to pretend to know the man's emotional state, but in his public writing, he particularly celebrates his dad. In that Kickboxing website article 2022, Andrew.

[Amelia]

Tate noted this about the male side.

[Robert Evans]

Of his family background.

[Amelia]

My grandfather, EMORY A. Tate, Esquire, fought in World War II before becoming a lawyer in Chicago during racially charged times. As a black man, this shaped his worldview and he was very strict, very hard indeed. As a boy, he pushed a plow with mule through the hard clay dirt of Georgia. Forced to work on the farm at.

[Robert Evans]

Age 12, he pushed a plow that.

[Amelia]

Only grown men normally handled. Then he ran away, never to return to the farm. He did some bare knuckled fist fights as a young man and distinguish himself hand to hand during the war years.

[Robert Evans]

And again, I'm sure parts of that are true. Everything about his dad and his grandpa always veers into how good they were.

[Amelia]

At hand to hand combat.

[Robert Evans]

And there is no evidence of this. Like the stuff about working on a farm.

[Amelia]

Yeah, that, that seems plausible.

[Robert Evans]

The stuff about how we fought the Nazis hand to hand. I don't know, maybe, but that actually doesn't happen often.

[Sophie]

That just gives me like my dad can beat up your dad vibes. Like it sounds like something like a.

[Ian Johnson]

Kid would say he bragged about his own bir.

[Robert Evans]

I mean it's like you don't have to lie about him fist fighting Nazis.

[Amelia]

It's okay if he just shot them.

[Robert Evans]

A lot of dudes did. And that was rad. Like he doesn't have to be great at punching just because you grew up to punch people for a living. That's kind of a weird thing to focus on Andrew, but he loves talking about how good his dad and grandpa were at fighting.

[Amelia]

His son. My dad, emory A. Tate Jr. Was a young athlete learning wrestling in school.

[Robert Evans]

And developing the early form of of Tate Shin Kai strikes as a Youth, which I guess is his own martial arts thing. His job in the military for 11.

[Amelia]

Years took him on many adventures, and little is known for sure, except that my dad never loses.

[Robert Evans]

He is my role model in many.

[Amelia]

Ways, even as I write poetry like he does.

[Robert Evans]

So, I mean, also, I think his dad would have been in the military. Let me. Let me double check here. Yeah.

[Amelia]

During Vietnam, which would mean that he.

[Robert Evans]

Did, in fact, lose. So, sorry, Andrew, but I don't want to be mean to Emory Tate because, well, this is a little bit his fault. So. Yeah, the closest thing that Andrew has written or said that comes close to.

[Amelia]

Being emotionally impactful at all is when he writes about his father. I will give him that. He writes with, like, some amount of.

[Robert Evans]

Actual sincerity about his feelings towards his dad. And I'm going to give you an.

[Amelia]

Example of that now. I never learned to cry for attention. I only used grunts to indicate hunger or discomfort.

[Robert Evans]

But mostly I was silent. I had a large new crib, but.

[Amelia]

Most every night I spent asleep on my dad's chest. He would place me there and sleep still, never moving in the night.

[Robert Evans]

And our heartbeats were and are as one.

[Ian Johnson]

I just picture a baby like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, just too angry to cry. Now, bits like this do contrast with.

[Amelia]

Passages where Andrew will relate stories about.

[Robert Evans]

His dad that sound kind of abusive.

[Amelia]

Quote, I learned to defend myself soon after I could walk. Long before my first punch into a pillow. I learned to balance how to step backward after being pushed gently in the chest.

[Robert Evans]

Dad made a game of it, a.

[Amelia]

Game which ended with a savage shove across a little, sending me into a dramatic backpedal. I stopped myself with my head 1 inch from cracking into the far wall.

[Robert Evans]

That was the final test. Kind of sounds like your dad was just shoving you because he was pissed, Andrew.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, that kind of sounds not great, bro.

[Robert Evans]

Do you need to talk about this, man?

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, no talking. Just.

[Sophie]

Yeah, just angry grunts. Shoving grunts.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, look, if I was gonna raise a child, I'd be lying if.

[Amelia]

I said that the shoving method didn't.

[Robert Evans]

Hold some appeal, because I do a lot things by shoving. It's how I move my furniture. It's how I record podcasts. I'm shoving a walking desk around the room right now. We actually. Daniel spends, like, 13 hours a week editing that out before we can even get the audio off. Off to Chris. That's most of his job. It's. It's really. It's a good part of our work.

[Ian Johnson]

Ian, remind me to tell you about the time when Robert got a Foot massager, and he refused to not use it while recording.

[Robert Evans]

And it would go to a, you want me to plug this bad boy in?

[Ian Johnson]

And it would go directly into the mic. And, like, there's no hazard pay. That's enough. Truly. Don't take it out.

[Sophie]

Don't plug it in. No, he's plugging it in.

[Ian Johnson]

I'm sorry, Ian. That was my fault for bringing it up.

[Robert Evans]

That was your fault for bringing it up. But more importantly, not my fault, because nothing is. Speaking of toxic masculinity, let's get back to Andrew Tyler Tate.

[Ian Johnson]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

So Andrew was raised initially in the D.C. area and then Indiana, and he.

[Amelia]

Seemed to want to follow in his father's footsteps. He started playing chess at age 3. He started competing at 5, and he eventually competed in adult tournaments while still a child. And this is where we get the very first news article on Andrew Tate, who at that point was referred to.

[Robert Evans]

As Emory A. Tate.

[Amelia]

It is a local news piece, and.

[Robert Evans]

This is the first, like, objective, ish.

[Amelia]

Piece of journalism that, like, it's not.

[Robert Evans]

Just, like, him writing about his background. And it's really the only insight we get into his childhood that doesn't come directly from A. Tate. It's again, a local news piece.

[Amelia]

The news in his town, which is.

[Robert Evans]

Like, South Bend, was talking about the release. There was a movie coming out about.

[Amelia]

Bobby Fischer, who I guess was good at chess.

[Robert Evans]

And so they were writing about that.

[Amelia]

And they wanted a human interest piece.

[Robert Evans]

So they talked about young Andrew Tate, who was 6 when they wrote this article.

[Amelia]

He had started a chess club in South Bend with some other kids, and he had taught them chess because he.

[Robert Evans]

Wanted people to play against.

[Amelia]

It includes the article, a couple of.

[Robert Evans]

Quotes that are interesting.

[Amelia]

Every kid wanted. Wants to be like his dad, the elder Tate said.

[Robert Evans]

But father had recently limited son's playing.

[Amelia]

Time, encouraging other activities.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think that a kid his.

[Amelia]

Age should spend so much time playing chess.

[Robert Evans]

As a parent, I'd like to see.

[Amelia]

Him become a top level player, but I realized there's so much more to life than just chess. He learned how to swim this summer, and he plays with his friends and stuff like that. Andrew, however, says he plays because. Because he's bored all the time. Most of the time I am bored, and that's the only thing I want to do most.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, interesting.

[Amelia]

There's some insight into the actual kid there.

[Robert Evans]

That is a response I understand from a kid. Like, I am bored all the time. This is the only thing that I like. It also, you know, gives you a.

[Amelia]

Little bit of a look into like there's.

[Robert Evans]

For whatever reason, one of the things I take away from this article is.

[Amelia]

That Emery Tate didn't want his son.

[Robert Evans]

To follow him as a chess guy. It might have been some insecurity about not wanting his kid to be better than him, or it may have just been understandably like, you know, I never made a lot of money playing chess. I want you to do something else with your life. I don't want you to like be locked into this thing. I don't know. There's some interesting questions that answers or asks.

[Amelia]

The author of this article notes that Andrew had just competed in his first adult chess tournament where he had.

[Robert Evans]

And he. And again Andrew's. Later on when he starts putting out propaganda, trying to make himself a badass, will point out that like at age 6 he was playing an adult chess tournaments.

[Amelia]

He did lose three out of five.

[Robert Evans]

Games and his dad eventually had to.

[Amelia]

Pull him out of the tournament because, quote, he got very upset because he thought he was failing. So Emery withdrew his son from the game to, quote, save him from crying.

[Robert Evans]

In front of all those people. And we're not keyed into what precisely happened there. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

[Ian Johnson]

I thought he didn't cry. Why are we worried about that?

[Robert Evans]

It sure seems. Seems like his dad said he did. Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

[Ian Johnson]

Fact check.

[Robert Evans]

And again, I'm going to guess one or two things happened there. Either Andrew was just throwing a fit because he was losing and his dad was like, well, you can't be at a chess tournament if you're going to.

[Amelia]

Throw a fit when you lose.

[Robert Evans]

Or Andrew was doing okay and wanted.

[Amelia]

To keep playing and his dad was angry that he was losing and didn't.

[Robert Evans]

Want him to keep like risk losing again.

[Amelia]

Even though three to two is not a bad record for a six year.

[Sophie]

Old playing six playing against adults.

[Robert Evans]

Either way, we don't know which of.

[Amelia]

Those is the case.

[Robert Evans]

Either possibility is interesting to me.

[Amelia]

Andrew's parents had another boy, Tristan, two years after Andrew was born. And the two brothers have been inseparable their whole lives. They played chess together, but Tristan never competed.

[Robert Evans]

They would later kickbox together, but Tristan never competed. He's like always there, but he also.

[Amelia]

Doesn'T seem to get to live a full life because he exists purely in.

[Robert Evans]

His brother's shadow as an agent of his greatness. It's kind of a weird relationship for Tristan, but I don't think he's self aware enough to understand that it's weird. One photo in the news are in.

[Amelia]

That news article shows six year old Andrew focused in the picture frame face.

[Robert Evans]

Taking up a third of the frame.

[Amelia]

Playing chess while just Tristan's hand is visible in the right third. And as the brothers grew up, Andrew would consistently stay in focus while Tristan.

[Robert Evans]

Would always just sort of be off to the side.

[Ian Johnson]

Is that. And that's true to this day, right.

[Robert Evans]

To this day I have, I don't have it in the script. We could play it. There's a very funny video of his brother like telling him to go out to like film their cars for this video they're doing about how nice their life is. And then when his brother goes out.

[Amelia]

Andrew cuts the feed just to be.

[Robert Evans]

Like, haha, fuck you, this is my show, I don't have to like let you do anything if I don't want to. And it's like weirdly abusive because they're both men who were in their 30s like Tristan. You don't have to take that. Things got harder for them after South Bend because their mom and dad, it's.

[Amelia]

Not a good marriage and they divorce. I have found very little detail about.

[Robert Evans]

Why that divorce happened. We can infer though that it was.

[Amelia]

An extremely painful time for Andrew and this is all he's willing to write about it. Dad was working minimum wage jobs overtime since his military career had been ended. Both mom and dad worked so that we could survive. Things became so hard that we decided to go to England and try a.

[Robert Evans]

Life there, only minus dad. And he's not willing to write like, you know, the marriage didn't work out or and again we don't know why. I'm going to avoid like theorizing what.

[Amelia]

Might have happened there. But this is clearly he idolizes his.

[Robert Evans]

Dad and he's taken away from him forever basically. And obviously mom might have had a perfectly good reason for doing that. I'm not trying to be critical, we just actually don't really know. But this is definitely like the fact.

[Amelia]

That he's not willing to even acknowledge the basics of what happened kind of.

[Robert Evans]

Suggests this leaves a pretty profound impact on young Andrew. So by age 11 he was, in.

[Amelia]

His words, man of the house, looking after his younger brother and now sister. The town in England they live in was called Luton and it is still.

[Robert Evans]

I think it's usually pronounced by English people, Luton, but you know, you know how they are.

[Sophie]

I didn't think we would get an accent this episode, but I'm glad we did.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, I'm from Leon. That's how they sound.

[Ian Johnson]

Robert, you know how much that upsets certain.

[Robert Evans]

When I do my. When I do my accent, should I do my Boston accent to get him back on board?

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, your Boston accent's really good.

[Robert Evans]

Oi. From Boston. And oy loy. Kathy and Ch.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, that's a.

[Robert Evans]

That's my Boston.

[Ian Johnson]

He sounds like an.

[Robert Evans]

That's my bin.

[Ian Johnson]

After an Australian person underwater being strangled.

[Robert Evans]

Boston. Just Western Australia, Sophie.

[Ian Johnson]

Anyways, Robert, it's time for an ad break.

[Robert Evans]

It is time for an ad break.

[Amelia]

So go to Dinkin Donuts and have you a caffeine.

[Robert Evans]

Robert, that was my Boston.

[Ian Johnson]

It's so bad.

[Robert Evans]

I think it's pretty good.

[Sophie]

It's like, honestly, it's so bad that it's impressive. Like, thank you. I feel like that takes a lot of skill and control to be that bad again.

[Robert Evans]

I'll take any kind of praise. I don't care. Bad attention, good attention. It's all the same to me. Welcome to our podcast about toxic masculinity.

[Amelia]

And we're back.

[Robert Evans]

So Luton is. It's not an easy place to grow up. It is in fact close to, if not the very hardest place to grow up in England. It is one of the poorest places in the country.

[Amelia]

It has been repeatedly voted the worst place to live in England.

[Robert Evans]

I actually found a poll from like seven days before I read this script.

[Amelia]

From the from Bedfordshire Live that voted it the worst place to live in England.

[Robert Evans]

It is a tough town. Andrew and his family have basically no money. They live in public housing and they.

[Amelia]

Are just barely getting by.

[Robert Evans]

We know this for certain. Like this is a confirmed fact about his upbringing. Now Andrew again definitely acknowledges that they were poor. This is actually an important part of.

[Amelia]

His own self mythology.

[Robert Evans]

But he also makes some claims that we do not know for sure are true.

[Amelia]

He claims he got a job as soon as I was old enough, although.

[Robert Evans]

He does not say when that was. Quote, as soon as I was old enough, I got a job moving 80.

[Amelia]

Pound boxes of frozen fish into the market at 5am Then a full day.

[Robert Evans]

Of school weekends found me at the market stall where I perfected my knife skills flawlessly.

[Amelia]

Filleting fish at blinding speeds. After some time, I never cut my.

[Robert Evans]

Hands at all, not even a nick. I learned to play drums and yeah, that's, that's interesting. I, I'm sure some. Again, I'm sure pieces of all of this are true. I don't know about his knife skills.

[Amelia]

Or the blinding speed, but I'm sure.

[Robert Evans]

Pieces of this are true.

[Amelia]

Now Trist or Andrew, interesting, interestingly says.

[Robert Evans]

That the only one of them who.

[Amelia]

Got into a real world fight when they were kids was his brother Tristan.

[Robert Evans]

Some kid was bullying him and he beat him up. I don't know if that story is.

[Amelia]

True or not, but it is worth noting that Andrew claims in this article.

[Robert Evans]

I have never struck a person in anger. Now we know that's not true because he has beaten at least what like. Yeah, we know that's not true. We will talk about that later.

[Amelia]

But this is the claim that he.

[Robert Evans]

Is making in this thing that he writes in like 2022.

[Amelia]

When he was a young adult, he was introduced to a kickboxing trainer and he started training, as did his brother, soon after. By 2008, he was the seventh highest ranked heavyweight kickboxer in Britain. A year later, he won his first championship and became the number one ranked kickboxer in Europe for his division. Two weeks two years later, in 2012, he was the second best heavyweight kickboxer on the planet.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Amelia]

I looked at his Wikipedia page which says he has like 79 wins and nine losses and lists his championships.

[Robert Evans]

And he did win a bunch of what are called world championships. However, that's not how boxing works. Because I also looked up a bunch.

[Amelia]

Of discussions of boxing fans analyzing his actual performance.

[Robert Evans]

And one thing they'll point up is that, well, there's not just one. One guy who's the best at kickboxing. Kickboxing is actually an incredibly fragmented sport and there are a bunch of different. I don't know if they call them leagues or whatever. There's a bunch of different types of kickboxing championships and some are more impressive than others. Right. Some are people who are really good at kickboxing, some are people who are more amateur. And Andrew kind of stayed doing the.

[Amelia]

More amateur stuff and he was really.

[Robert Evans]

Good at beating amateur kickboxers.

[Amelia]

One of the critiques people will note.

[Robert Evans]

Who are into kickboxing is that league.

[Amelia]

That he became world heavy or light.

[Robert Evans]

Heavyweight champion in only covers Europe. So you guys might notice there's a couple of places that are the world that aren't Europe that I assume, I assume there's some kickboxers in those places.

[Sophie]

At least one or two.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, at least a couple. The other thing they'll point out is.

[Amelia]

That of all of these fights that.

[Robert Evans]

He had and he claims like 79 wins, they can only verify like 40 something fights. Because, and this is, that may not.

[Amelia]

Mean that he's lying.

[Robert Evans]

It's all of the ways that this shit gets reported are weird, right? And there's so many different weird leagues and shit.

[Amelia]

He might be lying about the total.

[Robert Evans]

Number of wins and games he was in. But of the things that we can verify, only this is something kickboxing fans will point out.

[Amelia]

Only five of his fights are against.

[Robert Evans]

Guys with Wikipedia pages. And that may sound silly, but it means like guys who are notable enough that they have quote, like, are good enough at kickboxing.

[Sophie]

So most fights were against like nobodies, amateur guys who just, you know, fight on the weekends or something.

[Robert Evans]

Of the notable five fights he was in, he lost three of them.

[Amelia]

The allegation kickboxing fans will make is.

[Robert Evans]

That he mostly fought amateurs to pad his record. Now, everyone agrees he's still, that's still pretty good at kickboxing, but he is not the second.

[Amelia]

He was never the second best on.

[Robert Evans]

The planet earth at kickboxing. That's just simply not the case. And I think it's, I think it's, it's fair to say, yeah, he's pretty good at kickboxing. He was never as good as he claimed. And this is a part of the self mythologizing that he engages in, kind of vastly exaggerating his competency at kicking people a bunch with his feet. So, yeah, it's also worth noting that like the level Tate actually was at.

[Amelia]

Did not pay terribly well.

[Robert Evans]

The per fight amount is impressive. He could make between 50 and $100,000.

[Amelia]

Per per fight that he was in.

[Robert Evans]

But he was having like one or two fights per year, which is not terrible income.

[Amelia]

But you're paying for a coach, you're paying for gym access, you're paying for.

[Robert Evans]

The medical care that comes from this. And he's going to have several serious injuries. So he's not living well off of this salary.

[Amelia]

And in fact, he and his brother.

[Robert Evans]

Are living in a cheap apartment, I.

[Amelia]

Think in Bedfordshire and eating as cheaply.

[Robert Evans]

As they possibly can. In order to afford.

[Amelia]

Afford to keep being in kickboxing.

[Robert Evans]

Because it's like, that's kind of what it is when you're competing at this kind of awkward level that he's at. And Tate relates aspects of this himself in a video from 2022. And I'm going to play this so.

[Amelia]

Everyone can get a look and listen.

[Robert Evans]

To the guy before we can go any further. This is from his video on Rumble. This is his like, like Rumble is right wing YouTube. And his, his channel is called Tate Sports Speech, as in hate speech. But you guys get it, right?

[Amelia]

I don't need.

[Ian Johnson]

Here it is. First. The first, first clip.

[G]

World level athletes with no money. We invented a dish that was so bland, we called it flavor because it was the only way you could add flavor to the dish. So it had the name flavor, but it was extremely bland. And it was white rice, frozen peas, because they're cheap kidney beans. Kidney beans have more protein per 100 gram grams than minced beef. Did you know that? I found out when I was broke walking the aisles of the grocery store trying to find the cheapest protein money can buy. Couldn't bring myself to be a vegetarian, so I'd add a little bit of meat, minced beef, and if I was really rich, I'd have hot sauce.

[Robert Evans]

And I actually suspect he's probably not.

[Amelia]

Lying too much there.

[Robert Evans]

That seems like a reasonable story.

[Amelia]

And I know some people who are.

[Robert Evans]

Professional athletes at that similar awkward level where you're like a pro but you're not rich, who are like, yeah, you do whatever it takes to like stay fueled. Or that means cooking giant pots of like, not delicious things just to stay anyway. That seems broadly speaking, like he's probably not lying entirely about that now. He is lying about he and his brother being world class athletes.

[Amelia]

You might say he was.

[Robert Evans]

That's going to be up to what you define that as.

[Amelia]

But Tristan is not competing in kickboxing.

[Robert Evans]

He is working as like a coach kind of. Although people will criticize that in ways that are too weirdly nuanced and involve knowledge of kickboxing. So we're just going to move on.

[Amelia]

Now.

[Robert Evans]

The height of his career as a guy who kicks people for money comes in like 2012, 2013. 2013, I think is his last big championship.

[Amelia]

And not long after that, he, he.

[Robert Evans]

Decides to leave professional sports as a full time thing.

[Amelia]

Injuries play a major role in this.

[Robert Evans]

Tate does not like talking about vulnerability, but he was worse at taking hits than he likes to pretend.

[Amelia]

He suffered detached retinas in Several fights.

[Robert Evans]

And had to have surgery for his eyes.

[Amelia]

So he.

[Robert Evans]

Like, he's. I mean, again and again, that's the. I'm. I'm pointing this out because he will never admit it.

[Amelia]

Like, if you're a professional kickboxer, at.

[Robert Evans]

Some point you're going to get hurt enough that you can't keep doing kickboxing, boxing. Like, we all saw, like, Muhammad Ali go from, you know, Muhammad Ali to, you know, a guy who has severe.

[Amelia]

Injuries as a result of being a boxer.

[Robert Evans]

All this stuff's bad for you. Like, you either quit at a certain point or it destroys your body and mind the same way that, like, football or whatever it does. I mean, we all just got a reminder of that a couple of weeks ago with. Oh, the guy who had a heart attack on the. Yeah, yeah. This is all pretty, like, normal sports stuff, right? Like, you are.

[Amelia]

When you're watching guys do these kind.

[Robert Evans]

Of combat sports, you are watching people, like, mortgage their bodies in the hope of getting rich. And Tate kind of had to accept, at a certain point, my body is going to give out before I get rich doing this. So, you know, that's the thing that he recognizes. And he decides, I need to, like most professional athletes do, I need to find something else I can do that's easier on my body that I can support myself with. You know, some people open car dealerships. Some people decide to, you know, sell ads for different things and be. Be pitchmen. Some people go into professional baseball. Tristan decided to become a webcam sex pimp. So that's it. That's an interesting call. I do think history would have been.

[Amelia]

Different in fascinating ways if that's the.

[Robert Evans]

Choice Michael Jordan had made. Sophie, don't give me that look. Anyway. What?

[Ian Johnson]

I'm just saying that look, you deserved it.

[Robert Evans]

I usually do.

[Amelia]

So for three years, they run a.

[Robert Evans]

Rapidly expanding business finding women to act as cam operators. Now, this is not an inherently dishonest business. I guess if you are building a studio and building, like, a platform by which you can bring these cam workers attention and they understand their contracts and it's a reasonably fair split. I don't have an ethical issue with building a company that allows sex workers.

[Amelia]

To do cam work, right, that's fine. But the business that Tate and Tristyn operated was not fine.

[Robert Evans]

It was fundamentally pretty toxic.

[Ian Johnson]

No shit. The Grunt brothers didn't have a. All right, cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I'm going to quote now from an article in the Mirror, which is not.

[Amelia]

An ideal source, but it's who entered.

[Robert Evans]

Them about this And I don't know why they would lie about something this.

[Amelia]

Shady and gross, because it makes them.

[Robert Evans]

Seem like sex criminals. Quote, some of their customers fall for.

[Amelia]

The belief that they can have a real relationship with the women they see on screen. But Tristan brazenly told the Sunday Mirror, it's all a big scam and bragged that he doesn't feel any guilt because no one cares.

[Robert Evans]

And it's their problem, not mine.

[Amelia]

The more punters hand over, the more models earn. Some women will claim to have crippling university debt, a family member in need of private health care, or a dream of moving to the uk, sometimes even.

[Robert Evans]

Telling men they want to meet them.

[Amelia]

Whatever the excuse is, it is a lie.

[Robert Evans]

Tristan said. So he tells.

[Amelia]

He tells a story in this article about this guy who wanted to give a cam operator $20,000 his life savings.

[Robert Evans]

And Tristan's like, can I try? I talked him out of it. I told him, you know, he shouldn't do that. She was actually making good money.

[Amelia]

And then he came back a couple of months later and fell in love with another.

[Robert Evans]

And this time I was like, yeah.

[Amelia]

Man, we'll take your money.

[Robert Evans]

Which, definitely a lie.

[Amelia]

Tristan and Andrew Tate have never turned down 20 grand that a desperate man.

[Robert Evans]

Offered them for lies.

[Sophie]

Yeah, there's no way they're. They're trying to talk somebody out of that. No, there's no way.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely not.

[Ian Johnson]

Bread and butter.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I am going to continue that quote from the Mirror, but first, you know what I am going to continue first is capitalism.

[Ian Johnson]

Oh, I am.

[Amelia]

I am keeping this nightmare engine alive.

[Robert Evans]

On my own by advertising for products on this podcast.

[Ian Johnson]

So on your own.

[Robert Evans]

That's it.

[Amelia]

I am the linchpin holding the global economy together.

[Ian Johnson]

On your own.

[Amelia]

Look, after Facebook fell apart, it's just me, baby.

[Ian Johnson]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

What?

[Amelia]

Name another company.

[Robert Evans]

Sophie. It's just this podcast.

[Ian Johnson]

Just run the ad. Just run the Raytheon. Just run the ads. Just run the ads. He's out of control.

[Robert Evans]

We are back. So I'm going to continue that quote from the. From the Sunday Mirror of Tristan Tate being interviewed.

[Amelia]

He believes he is beyond the reach of the authorities because of two lines in the terms and conditions he said. One is broadcasting is for entertainment purposes only. That means if a model says she has a sick dog or a sick.

[Robert Evans]

Grandma, it doesn't have to be true. The next is that all cash given.

[Amelia]

To models is a voluntary sign of.

[Robert Evans]

Gratitude for their time broadcast casting. Now, I'm not a lawyer, that kind.

[Ian Johnson]

Of sounds like they're taking their Money.

[Robert Evans]

It does sound like you're taking their money.

[Amelia]

That said, he may be in the right there. The Mirror did a journalisty thing and they reached out to a lawyer to.

[Robert Evans]

Be like, is this true? And the lawyer said, maybe. But also, generally, UK laws say that.

[Amelia]

You can't defraud people and take their.

[Robert Evans]

Money on fraudulent terms. But also the laws haven't kept pace with technology.

[Amelia]

There's a good chance he was in.

[Robert Evans]

A legal gray area.

[Amelia]

They did not get charged.

[Robert Evans]

So probably is fair to say they were in enough of a legal gray.

[Amelia]

Area that they were reasonably safe.

[Robert Evans]

And to be, like, perfectly honest, I suspect they could have done this indefinitely.

[Amelia]

If Andrew Tate hadn't been a sex.

[Robert Evans]

Criminal, which is what we're getting to here. So Andrew Tate later wrote this on.

[Amelia]

His personal website, shady Business teaching men.

[Robert Evans]

To run their own webcam porn station studios. This is a thing he does later, but this is how he talks about his webcam business and how he makes it work. Oh, God.

[Ian Johnson]

Okay.

[Amelia]

How did I become rich? Webcam. I've been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade. I've had over 75 girls work for me, and my business model is different than 99% of webcam studio owners. Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time. And of all my girlfriends, none were in the adult, adult industry, entertainment industry before they met me. My job was getting women to fall in love with me. Literally, that was my job. My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she'd do anything I'd say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together. Whether you agree or disagree with what I did with their loyalty, submission and love, for me doesn't matter. You cannot reject the results. And the results are simple. My girlfriends would do more for me than 99.9% of me men's wives would do for them.

[Robert Evans]

So what does that make y'all think?

[Sophie]

Disgusting. That's one of the grossest things I've ever heard.

[Robert Evans]

That is really gross.

[Sophie]

That's fucking horrible.

[Ian Johnson]

And, like, voluntarily listed on his own site. And it's just fucking.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. He bragged about this. Now this is potentially him describing sex trafficking, Right? Especially if that's what it sounds like if you're. If the women are not getting. Again, there's not like a law that says you can't have someone fall in love with you and then contract with them to do sex work.

[Amelia]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

That's not a thing that there's a law against. However, if they are not getting paid for it and if they are not being allowed freedom of movement, well, then what happens is that you have, like, entrapped them and you are sex trafficking them.

[Amelia]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

This is what's called. Law enforcement calls this the lover boy method. Right, where you get someone to fall in love with you. And also this is. This goes on. This is a very old tactic in like, shall we say, pimping, where like, yeah, you make a woman feel like, or a person be in love and dependent on you, and then you kind of emotionally abuse them into doing sex work.

[Amelia]

This is a thing that happens that.

[Robert Evans]

Is like a recognized part of a criminal enterprise. Now, obviously, getting charges based on those.

[Amelia]

Words on his website is going to.

[Robert Evans]

Be hard to do, but just kind of the stuff that he had published.

[Amelia]

For a while was enough that people at the time should have known that.

[Robert Evans]

He was up to a.

[Amelia]

What was a likely illegal business. Now, if you came across articles about.

[Robert Evans]

Tate in 2021 or 2022 and they.

[Amelia]

Went into any detail about his webcam career, the most you were likely to learn was what the Mirror wrote here. After three years, they moved to Romania, saying the UK had gone downhill. They have women on a number of CD sites, operators take a 40% cut and the rest goes to the studio.

[Robert Evans]

So that's what they claimed for years had happened. Like, you know, we did it in the UK and then the UK got.

[Amelia]

Woke and so we switched to Romania.

[Robert Evans]

That is not what actually happened. So they started running this cam business in 2012, three years after 2012 when they moved to Romania. It's 2015 now.

[Amelia]

Just a few days ago, after his arrest, a story dropped that made it clear why they actually left the uk. And it had nothing to do with wokeness or the country going down downhill. Andrew Tate was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse. In 2015, Vice broke the story. Quote, Two women told Vice World News they were violently abused, one raped, the other repeatedly strangled by Andrew Tate. And that UK police in the Crown Prosecution Service mishandled their case, leaving him free to rise to global fame on.

[Robert Evans]

The back of his unchecked misogyny.

[Amelia]

Police took four years to pass their investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service, whose job involves assessing whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction, at which point the CPS declined to prosecute.

[Robert Evans]

So that's the reality of why they had to leave the uk.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah, he's a fucking vile, disgusting human being.

[Robert Evans]

And the timeline makes a Lot more.

[Amelia]

Sense when you know that.

[Robert Evans]

When he's like, yeah, oh, we had to bounce. Cause, you know, things just got too.

[Amelia]

Woke for us and Romania.

[Robert Evans]

And he would also. He later made the claim that, like, I had to leave Romania because in the uk, a man can get accused.

[Amelia]

Of rape for anything.

[Robert Evans]

Right? And you know Romania, it's much harder to get accused of rape. And so I moved to Romania, not because I'm a rapist, but because I like freedom.

[Amelia]

No, man.

[Robert Evans]

You were accused of rape by multiple women and then investigated and you decided.

[Amelia]

To leave because you didn't know.

[Robert Evans]

Know if the UK was going to come for your ass at some point. And the story is actually a bit.

[Amelia]

More fucked up than that because back in 2014, a woman who Vice refers to as Amelia filed a police report alleging sexual and physical abuse by Tate. She claims that she and Tate met in 2009. They were friendly for years until 2013.

[Robert Evans]

Which is when Tate was transitioning away from kickboxing to webcam pimping.

[Amelia]

The two decided to go out on a series of dates at the end of that year. And after several weeks, they were in her room when.

[Robert Evans]

And Andrew forced himself on her. Now, she describes him stopping.

[Amelia]

Like, she tells him to stop when.

[Robert Evans]

He starts, like, trying to go to have sex. And she tells him that she doesn't want to have sex.

[Amelia]

And he tells her.

[Robert Evans]

She says that he, like, sits quietly for a moment, and then she asks.

[Amelia]

Him what's going on. And he says, I'm debating whether I.

[Robert Evans]

Should rape you or not.

[Amelia]

What the.

[Ian Johnson]

What the fuck?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, boy. Howdy.

[Amelia]

It's.

[Robert Evans]

It's bad.

[Amelia]

Within an instant, he changed who he was. He wasn't the same Andrew that I knew. That was funny.

[Robert Evans]

That would make me laugh. It was like his eyes went.

[Amelia]

And I didn't have a clue who that person was.

[Robert Evans]

That is terrifying.

[Ian Johnson]

Terrifying. Disgusting. That's horrible. I'm so sorry that happened to her.

[Amelia]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And it's. So here's one of the things about this is she goes to the cops, he rapes her, and it takes. They have.

[Amelia]

After that point, she consents to sex. She says a couple of times over.

[Robert Evans]

The next six months, which is not uncommon in situations like this.

[Amelia]

But eventually she goes to the police.

[Robert Evans]

To make a complaint. And the police are like, do you.

[Amelia]

Want to proceed with charges? Right.

[Robert Evans]

Cause that's an option that you have in the. This case. And she decides, obviously, hopefully, I don't think I have to explain this to this audience, but, like, there are a lot of horrible personal consequences that can come to charging your rapist, right. To pursuing criminal charges.

[Amelia]

She decides.

[Robert Evans]

And there is, and this seems like a positive thing.

[Amelia]

There's an option in the UK where.

[Robert Evans]

You can just log a complaint and.

[Amelia]

Say, this guy raped me without proceeding.

[Robert Evans]

With criminal charges, which she decides she.

[Amelia]

Doesn'T want to do at this point.

[Robert Evans]

And so that's what she does. And. And then this is again, 2013, 2015.

[Amelia]

Is when those two women who worked.

[Robert Evans]

In his cam studio push press charges.

[Amelia]

Against him and the police.

[Robert Evans]

And this is a positive step. It's about to get less positive. But the police find out, oh, there's a report logged against this guy two years earlier.

[Amelia]

And they reach out to Amelia and.

[Robert Evans]

They'Re like, more women have come forward saying that this guy assaulted them.

[Amelia]

Do you want your charges, do you want your allegations basically to be added to theirs in this case that we're building?

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Amelia]

And she says yes. And she hands over her phone to the cops, which contained numerous audio notes.

[Robert Evans]

Because she had told Andrew and like, texts and stuff like, hey, you know, like, you raped me. That's why I don't want to know you anymore.

[Amelia]

And he had responded to her, and he had responded to her using voice notes where he admitted to what he had done.

[Robert Evans]

And yeah, I'm going to play a couple of notes of Andrew Tate here.

[Amelia]

For you because before we hear him.

[Robert Evans]

In his, like, 15 year old boy influencer voice, we should hear how he talks to somebody like Emilia when he doesn't think it's going to be on the news.

[G]

Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn't like it, the more I enjoyed it. I loved how much you hated it. Turned. Turn me on. Why am I like that? Why? I am one of the most dangerous men on this planet. Sometimes you forget exactly how lucky you were to get fucked by me. Would you rather me pin you down and make you do things you didn't like, or would you rather fuck you didn't like that? I was thinking, I can do whatever I want to you. That's what it is. I'm the smartest person on this fucking planet. Are you seriously so offended I strangled you a little, little bit. You didn't pass out. Chill the out. Jesus Christ. I thought you were cool. What's wrong with you?

[Robert Evans]

Oh.

[Sophie]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

So that's not great. That's not great.

[Sophie]

That's so upsetting. That's so upsetting.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God. Yeah, it's pretty bad. He's. He's a pretty bad dude.

[Ian Johnson]

And what's vile Disgusting. Despicable.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Waste of like. Again, normally, self diagnosis is the thing we avoid on this, but, like, that's just very obvious. Textbook narcissism.

[Amelia]

I am the smartest man in the.

[Robert Evans]

World, you know, like, he is. It's not hard to see what's going on with this guy. And I don't know his dad or, like, how that all went down. But there's this.

[Amelia]

If you look at the way he.

[Robert Evans]

Talks about his dad and his grandpa.

[Amelia]

There'S this need to, to, like, associate.

[Robert Evans]

Himself with greatness and I don't know, like every. Everything that's going on here makes sense, but it's also so bleak. And I. I don't know. There's probably a better writer and thinker than me might be able to draw a more trenchant connection between the kind of stuff Bly was talking about, about how lack of connection, connection to other.

[Amelia]

Men and to older men and how.

[Robert Evans]

Not knowing what your place is in society leads young men to feel disconnected.

[Amelia]

And that that can be the root.

[Robert Evans]

Of some bad behavior. And the fact that Tate idolizes his.

[Amelia]

Dad and is separated from him and.

[Robert Evans]

Becomes so needful to kind of convince others of his greatness while using violence.

[Amelia]

And threats against them.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. Know that there's a connection there, but it's. It's, I think, kind of worth thinking about, I guess in the same continuum. I don't know.

[Amelia]

This is still. Stuff like that.

[Robert Evans]

I'm kind of muddling through too. But it's. It's not. It's not surprising to me that this guy has this. This kind of obsession with his.

[Amelia]

Because that's what it's about, right?

[Robert Evans]

It's never about, like, that he wanted, you know, sex or whatever. It's about the power and control.

[Amelia]

It's about power. He had this.

[Robert Evans]

And it's about the fact that she didn't want to have sex with him is like an attempt from her to exercise agency.

[Amelia]

And no one else in the world.

[Robert Evans]

Gets to exercise agency. Just Andrew Tate, right? Like, that's the way this guy thinks about things. I don't know. There's a lot going on there worth worth pondering. And I guess we will ponder. Ponder it for a while while we.

[Amelia]

Wait for part three of this series where we will talk about the fallout.

[Robert Evans]

From these cases and the, the social media presence that Tate builds when again, nobody knows this at that. I mean, this, this. This young woman knows it and a couple of police officers know it. But as a spoiler, the police don't.

[Amelia]

Proceed with the charges.

[Robert Evans]

And in fact, they. It's really fucked up.

[Amelia]

The police say that they believe her, or Amelia says what to Vice when.

[Robert Evans]

They talked to her is that the.

[Amelia]

Police told her that they believed her claims, but they couldn't go forward with the case because there was a shred of doubt about Tate's guilt.

[Ian Johnson]

There's a shred of doubt.

[Robert Evans]

It does seem like he admitted it.

[Ian Johnson]

Directly admits to being a sexual predator.

[Robert Evans]

What are we.

[Ian Johnson]

What are we really fucking piece of shit cops?

[Amelia]

There's some fucked up cop gaslighting here.

[Robert Evans]

Because they tell her, like, look, going.

[Amelia]

Through the process of.

[Robert Evans]

Of pressing charges against a rapist is so traumatic to the woman that we don't do it unless there's no shred of doubt. We're trying to protect you from, like, an ugly court, which is like, cop gaslighting is on another level.

[Ian Johnson]

That's so disheartening. I'm so sorry, Amelia. That's.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's fucking bleak.

[Ian Johnson]

That's.

[Robert Evans]

This whole story is bleak.

[Amelia]

And after this point, Andrew and Tristan move to Romania.

[Robert Evans]

They move their sex trafficking webcam business to Romania. And we will pick up that story in part three, where it gets a lot bleaker in some ways.

[Amelia]

But also, we get to make fun.

[Robert Evans]

Of Andrew Tate videos.

[Ian Johnson]

So, you know, something to look forward to.

[Robert Evans]

Take your wins where you can get them, kiddos. What do we.

[Amelia]

Who are we? Who are we here?

[Sophie]

We're the bad boys of podcasting, obviously.

[Ian Johnson]

Well, Robert, I think. I think both shows are actually sold out, but you will be at SF Sketchfest this coming weekend, and you'll be doing a Behind the Bastard show. And you will also be doing Francesca Fiorentini. Yeah, Fiesta Fiorentini's the Habituation Room show.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Great.

[Sophie]

Francesca is great. Francesca on Internet Hate Machine. Lovely episode. Should check that out. If you haven't.

[Ian Johnson]

We love Fridge something. Why, yes, Robert, it is a week from when we are recording this.

[Robert Evans]

All right, well, we will finish recording the Andrew Tate episodes, and then I will figure out what the fuck I'm doing for this live show that apparently a bunch of you assholes have decided to show up at. God damn you. Thank you all for buying tickets. Before we close out, I want to.

[Amelia]

Thank again April Clark and Grace Freud.

[Robert Evans]

Of Girl God, the Girl God, the podcast. Both great comedians. They have an upcoming show at JJFO.

[Amelia]

Vancouver on February 25th. People can get tickets for that@girl godshow.com.

[Robert Evans]

They were on the early version of part of this, but I had an emergency and we had to bounce and now, we are recording this late at.

[Amelia]

Night because it is the only way.

[Robert Evans]

That we can make this show work in a way that is we are contractually obligated to. So thank you, April and Grace. Thank you, Ian and Sophie for being guests on my show last, last minute.

[Ian Johnson]

And yeah, you're welcome, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you. Everyone else can go to hell, though.

[Ian Johnson]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Nancy Grace]

I'm Nancy Grace. This is crime stories. Breaking news tonight, the return of tot mom. It feels like a dirt sandwich in my mouth. TikTok stardom ahead as Casey Anthony haters beg. Please go away, guys. Please don't miss this. Please join us. Listen to crime Stories with Nancy grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.