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

in the show notes along with their other links. You can also just google ed Zitron, Webbies, Molly Conger Webbys and you will find them. Please do vote for them. We'll be back next week with two brand new episodes on what Tait has 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 with less ads, and go vote in the Webbies.

Welcome to him, motherfuckers. I'm Robert Eva. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that has just encountered one of the worst disasters of its career, So we'll get into this more later. This is supposed to be and he's going to be the first of several episodes about Andrew Tait and the mythopoetic Men's movement that led to his rise to fame and influence among a generation of young men.

We started recording this episode just a few hours ago with the wonderful April Clark and Grace Freud of the Girl God podcast they have anyway, we recorded a little bit with them, and then I had a minor emergency which has taken me out of the house for a while. 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 in order to get this episode done and ready for our editor asap, Sophie is going to be my guest today along with Ea, our editor, and we will get this out as soon as possible because 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 April and Grace, who are wonderful who came on and booked time for us, and I'm sorry that

things got messed up. We will have them back on the pod at 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 twenty fifth, and people can get tickets for that show at Girlgodshow dot com. You can also check out their podcast just type girl God and any of the 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.

bring it up. We had nothing to do with it.

He was he was smart, and one in a way that has allowed him to become dangerously influential to an entire generation of teenage boys, in a way that like no one on earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump is really the only other guy that I might put next to Tate in that kind and I think Tit has a wider appeal among gen Z teens and tweens than certainly Trump.

from like The Guardian. They'll like summarize his backstory in two or three paragraphs. I wanted to get into who this guy is and where he came from, because he kind of pops out of nowhere if you don't follow that. I think this is the first time anyone's really done that, So I think this will be valuable for that. But I want to start by laying out why we have to take Tit seriously and kind of explain the scale

of sort of his influence. I am not exaggerating when I say that he is maybe the most influential single person on teen pre teen mails in the US and the UK and some other parts of the West than anyone else on planet Earth. In fall of twenty twenty two, financial services company Piper Sandler released a survey of fourteen five hundred US teens taken between August and September of that year. Tate was the number one influencer on the

list in terms of popularity. He beat Kanye West, he beat mister Beast, he beat Dwayne the Rock Johnson, all.

He is the he is the number one when you type in who is into Google? Who is Andrew Tait is the number one who is question asked of Google in twenty twenty two, which is not the same as being the most google person on Earth, although he is one of the most google people on Earth. I found a couple of lists of that, and he's often at like number eight, someplace closer to like ten, but like he's incredibly famous.

constantly doing stuff. Not hard to see where he came from. Tate is a kickboxer for a while and then kind of drops off, is just sort of a guy on Instagram and then is suddenly the most famous influencer on the planet, seemingly overnight. And this is not an accident. This isn't also something He didn't just get surprised because something of has happened to go viral. This was the result of a tactic 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 only made him as popular, but it made him popular enough that you can find articles about schools in the US and the UK holding seminars for young male students and for teachers to try to talk about de radicalizing kids who have got to 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 I had not with Greta's response to him, which I thought was totally fair,

but with like people kind of cheering it on as if 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 thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old boys. I talk to kids every day who worship the guy, and I've never seen anything like it.

of this stuff. It's like I could imagine being that age right now and just being flooded with that.

a life doing the thing you hate forever. And if you kind of if that's the hook you're leading with, rather than what a lot of male influencers lead in with, which is like, here's how to pick up chicks. You know, that's an interesting spin that he's put. We get it. 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 by kind of explaining who tilled the soil that Tate grew up in.

And to do that we have to travel back in time to the nineteen nineties and the work of the first real modern masculinity.

Andrew Tait. He is the first guy to kind of bring both academic rigor and also this kind of focus on the damage capitalism has done to masculinity into this kind of it's become the men's rights movements, it's become the pickup artist community. That's not what it was called at the time. But yeah, Robert Elwood Bli is the name of the guy who kind of kicked all of this off. And he's not the dude you'd think he was. He's an American poet. By some accounts, he's one of

the most influential poets in American history. And he was born on December twenty third, nineteen twenty six, in Minnesota. Initially, Bli seemed to be on certainly not the path that he wound up on. He goes to Harvard University, he studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He receives a full Fulbright scholarship to go to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry

into English. And during this time he also gets connected to these great poets who are not Westerners, like Pablo Naruta and Rumi, and they influence his understanding of art

and the myths that underlie it. And it also leads him to feel that like modern contemporary American poetry is kind of hollow and lacks a connection to this kind of deeper mythology that he sees in some of these Eastern poets and some of these poets from other parts of the world that aren't the United States that he feels are making a deeper connection to things.

was not. I don't know. His first poem of collection of poems, which was called Silence in the Snowby Fields, was published in nineteen sixty two, 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 it's cold iron. There

is a privacy I love in this snowy night. Driving around, I will waste 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. It's 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, Yeah, for sure. 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 nineteen sixty six he co founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. 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. In nineteen sixty eight, he made a public promise to refuse to pay taxes until the end of the war, and he also made he made some very trenchiant critiques of US imperialism. In nineteen sixty seven, he wrote an article for the New York Review of Books in which he noted the fact that so 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 you would have these horrible wars being prosecuted by regimes that are on paper a lot less free than the United States, but also would have a lot more defections or people just like refusing to do their jobs because they believed that of course that the sovereign had set was unethical. And he's like, why isn't this happening in American government? Why is no one refusing to be a part of the Vietnam War?

And he went on to ask, can we imagine General Westmoreland resigning and refusing to prosecute a brutal war? 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. Bli wondered what this showed about Americans? Are we timid? Are we greedy? He thought not, And this is what he wrote. What it shows is a

disastrous split between the Americans inner and outer worlds. He does not aim to use his 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 business man gives up the inner world and clings to the outer as his way. A large body of literature denounces the business man for taking the one world

without the other. But when a writer is opposed to the Vietnam War and still accepts a grant from the government prosecuting of 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 where 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 out there, or knows, but has rejected it all is 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. 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 horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress, or like see some horrible Twitter thing culture warshit roll up, and want 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 piece of art or creativity that And I think most people feel that, 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 and attempt to discard the outer world 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 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 an attrenchient critique that makes me think a lot about myself. M Maybe check out what Bligh has

to say about the Vietnam War. And he put his money where his mouth was. He used that article to republish a letter he sent to the chairman of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities because they had offered him a five thousand dollars grant, and he turns it down because he's like, look, this is a this is an instrument of the United States government, and I

am opposed to a war they are waging. And even though I could argue that, like, well, if I take this money and won't get spent on bombs, what I'm really doing is providing legitimacy to the state that is carrying out this terrible war. And I'm simply not going to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to support it in any way even by letting it support me, which, whether or not you agree with it, is a deeply principled stance that requires sacrificing something.

creative force that you know, underlies everything in society. And Bli 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 is that he saw the Vietnam war as kind of the expression of masculinity, like running wild and leading to terrible death, and he believed that Americans needed to reconnect with femininity in the wake of the Vietnam War, which is again not an

unreasonable stance. You know, you can argue with it, but you can see where he's coming from.

there's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today. TV in the nineteen eighties was not what it is now. So he sees all this happening, and he he also just sees, like, again, what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained capitalism is doing to people. And he begins to believe that the kind of soullessness and brokenness at the at the core of the American experiment is the result now of crisis in masculinity. Right, So previously he had Yeah, there's an extent to which he thinks, like, I don't know,

we'll get into what he thinks. So in nineteen ninety he writes a book that is kind of illustrating the things that he's he started to feel here, and he calls it Iron John, a book about men. Now, have you heard of the fairy Tale of Iron John? Ian?

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 wires 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. So you know, I think we're probably missing some context there, just from culture. But it's like I get why that's not in like the the tight five of Grim's fairy tales, Like that's that's maybe the one you leave on the cutting room floor.

which is again another red flag. There's perfectly valid reasons to study young, but whenever you have somebody who is reevaluating myths using young in psychology, they always turned into Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry, that's just the way that it works. So he's trying to find lessons that are going to be meaningful for men struggling with modernity, and his basic conclusion, as far as I can tell, is that men need rewilding in order to fix the things

that are driving them crazy. Right, they need to reconnect with the wild man inside them. Now, this is going to be This is the root of a million kinds of influenzer garbage, right, everything in that funck. 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's spending twelve thousand

dollars a month on steroids, which he lied about. Now he's getting sued for one hundred million dollars 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 it, pretending to be the wild man that BLI 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 is go out and throw spears at bores and then eat their raw, uncooked organs, which I would actually say is a lot less masculine than doing the thing that our actual caveman ancestors did, which was learn how to cook meat.

talks a lot about like this. Again, all of these guys today who are talking about you have to be primal, you have to reconnect with your caveman roots.

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.

kind of worth connecting with. So I'm going to read a quote from that now to judge by men's lives in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, Zulu Lands, and in the Arab and Persian culture favored flavored by Sufi communities, men have lived together in heart unions and sole connections for hundreds of thousands of years. Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only, 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 by or touches the brim of someone's cowboy hat. Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all, and the cowboy hat things kind of weird, But that's a totally valid point. The lack of intimate male to male friendship is a deep problem in ourself.

about aspects of this. But BLI is wrapping his arguments and respected academia, 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, Guys like Ivan Throne and whatnot who were in the masculinity influencer thing. He's doing conferences, He's having rooms full of people, men gather and he's speaking to them, and he's like running

them through. He's basically bringing them to these moments of emotional height, and you can see some there's a little bit of Werner Earhard in this. You know, there's a reason this is all coming out at the same time as we start to get the self help craze hit. But he's basically holding these big pep rallies for adult men. In nineteen ninety one, more than a thousand men went to see him at the Eastfold Auditorium in Parkland, Washington,

paying seventy five nineteen ninety one dollars lois for the privilege. Yeah. A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes the scene thusly, as the customers file in a dozen white guys flail away incompetently on African drums. When the crowd is seated, the drummers quit the stage, and Bly and Michael Mead, a storyteller who helps run the workshops, begin to recite,

rambling myths and bits of verse. Meat occasionally bangs a bongo, Bly plinks a bazouki, the Greek version of the Mandolins, sending mournful notes wafting out over the audience. So that sounds good, right, It sounds like a fun time.

spawn the modern men's self help industry. Quote Bli urges men to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their wild nature. Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear of brutality, have labored to breed fierceness out of men, creating the sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt might have said, I could carve a better man out

of a banana. Bli believes that inside of every such male, there's a wild man yearning to get out, a radiant inner king, just waiting to confirm masculine pride and suareness of purpose. Bli insists he doesn't blame women for men's sorry state. He blames older men who have failed to provide young ones with the role models they crave. In traditional societies, boys worked alongside men, plowing fields and fashioning arrowheads,

but the Industrial Revolution severed that connection. The title character and 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 and manly self discovery, five day wild Man Excursions, in which groups of one hundred men take to the woods under the tutelage of Bly and others to dance around fires, banging on drums.

It's just the usually in like the way our society works, just the woman who's raising the kid. That's what he's saying, then, that 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 now he's saying, the problem is that feminists have bred fierceness out of men instead of being 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 they're raised are raised largely by their mothers. Well, that also means an unfair burdens being placed on the mother. You could see this, there's a way to have solidarity between the genders here and be like, oh, yeah, this is all of a problem of this system we've 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 much money at all. The only job my dad could get was in New York City, and there was a period of more than a year where he was gone. He was living on a friend's couch, 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 there's a thing to identify with their But you can see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well, what's the problem is that feminists have tried to make men less fierce? That's not really the problem, Robert BLI like.

he says, channel wildness into socially approved acts. And again you see kind of this, like, well, why is the prob 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 compete and work in ways

that are really unhealthy for kids. But anyway, you can look at the sea of other self help grifters at the time, Wrener Earhard, Aron Hubbard who had come around at this point, and you could say that BLI is just kind of another dude and that he's doing a lot of the same things a lot of these other self help grifters are doing. But one of the things that differs him is those guys are mostly pil like plying nonsense based on bad interpretations of Eastern religion and

psychological abuse. And BLI is kind of he's not insulting or attacking people, he's not calling them them weak. He's he's making some reasonable points about stuff that's toxic about our society. And then he's trying to create like mutual cathartic experiences with the men in his audience who are being invited to kind of see the men around them as brothers in a way that's more intimate than maybe

they had been trained to do previously. So again he's there's there's something interesting going on here that he isn't even wholly toxic that I think is kind of worth acknowledging as we lead to the parts of it that are a lot more toxic. And it's one of those things where, like I've spent a lot of time on in cell message boards, and they do talk a lot about this feeling of disconnection with society. So when he says that like young men are not connected to their communities.

He's making a decent point. He also one of the points he makes that I thought was interesting is he talks about the differences between female sex at and male sex at. 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.

have it. Three million sperms start out and they find themselves immediately in a hostile environment facing an egg approximately forty thousand times bigger, where 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, sure, well, actually all of us are their product of spermnas that's the only way people happen.

audience member announces that he seceded from society. I'm not paying my tab, I've bought an AK forty seven, and I'm farting around with ammunition just in case I have to back up my decision, he says, softly but firmly. Bly, and many others have spoken out against the Gulf War, yet nobody criticizes the AK forty seven fellow. And when Bli asks the Vietnam Vets to stand to be honored, the rum erupts with the applause for about three 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, cool, Look, we're not anyway whatever. BLI died last year. He lived a.

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

bunch of other authors in this. The argment 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 we need in order to make men healthier, we need to reintroduce like this kind of mythic understanding of masculinity and of the world that like that's kind and a lot of it is they're like looking at like Native American cultures and so of the

different rituals around masculinity they had and being like, well, maybe well 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 a lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD

in an era before they understand it. And a thing that occurs during this period is that some of them have buddies who are also struggling with PTSD and are Indigenous Americans and who invite 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 in some of these indigenous societies to deal with what happens to men when they go to war and they invite their friends back, and that stuff

works better than just getting a job working for an accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam. And so people are starting to study this and write about it. And one of the things that the mythopoetic guys take is this belief that you should basically just kind of like steel wholesale from these cultures and dress white people up in headdresses and give them drums and stuff, as opposed to being like, oh, well, maybe you know, 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 like 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 there, 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 some of this is bl some of these guys outside of bly Is they're they're making they're like putting a bunch of like white accountants in sweat lodges that they make the wrong way and lecturing them about you know, young and Joseph Campbell, or they're like making them dressed like

cavemen while playing you know, African drums. There's a lot of like 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. But Bli and the initial mythopoetic influencers were not They saw themselves as therapists, and again I don't think they were good at this, But they were not political. So 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 the culture war didn't exist in the same way then that it does now. And it's interesting because Bli expressly says this is an a political movement. You might criticize him because he had just written a really kind of beautiful essay during the Vietnam War about

the cowardness of being a political but whatever. I found an article from the Washington Post in nineteen ninety one that talked to a number of men who had been most active in the movement, and there's some interesting pieces

in there. Quote. An affirmation and strength comes from 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 dancing, roaring, hugging, and weeping. 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 and some personal wasteland of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why. 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 auto parts stores and shit 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 and saying that like, the situation of American men was pretty unpleasant in the early nineteen nineties. They were struggling against a capitalist culture that thrived on the obliteration of meaning. However, men, of course, are not the only ones suffering from this, nor are 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 problems with the society we live in and then cutting men off from the rest of that society and thus cutting off possibility of solidarity. So you can't look at this kind of alienation and loss of meaning and be like, wow, men and women and everybody is being harmed by the meaninglessness this hole at

the center of our culture. You have to say men are being harmed, and then that invites like, well, there must be women that are doing it, and it must we should be looking at how feminine I rather than because he's a door for.

in the future. I think it would be interesting to try and find out look into all these men's groups in the Washington in the state of Washington in this period of time and see how many of those guys wound up being elders and the proud boys thirty years later. But that's that's that's a more in depth work for someone in the future if they want to do it.

and this, yeah, it's it's it's it causes problems. Later on, one of the most ridiculous aspects of the myth of poetic men's movement was the creation of wing Span, the Journal of the Male Spirit. Don't you just want to sit down? I in with a copy of Wingspan read out quotes to your buds.

place where influencers could advertise their events. Quote. The last issue of Wingspan lists dozens of publications and events for men around the country, including a new Warrior training adventure Weakened 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 HONLD started in June of nineteen eighty eight with fifty men, is the largest, with two thousand members and fifty newcomers arriving for each monthly meeting. Late one night in January at the Council's meeting in

the Washington Ethical Society Auditorium on Upper sixteenth Street. Honald shed his Clarkkin image as he leads five hundred men who are pounding drums and chanting. The sweating windows shape with rhythmic thunder that reverberates up and down the street as they raise Honald, 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. So that's a little problematic, a little bit just to scoche. A number of other masculinity grifters followed. Bli, Robert Moore, and Douglas Gillette wrote the bestseller King, Warrior, Magician Lover, which purported to that's that's

a title right there. I want to be a king, Warrior, magician lover. And these are 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 you need to shed your your mastery and your sense of ownership in order to become a lover. But I don't think that's the point they're making. Moore is a Youngian analyst and

a professor of psychology. Gillette, like doctor Jordan Balthasar Peterson, was a mythologist. I found a good write up that described the main arguments in their book by Aaron Innes. The book's second shared premise is that there are universal male archetypes inherent to every male body 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 Mora Jellette, is in large part the story of his failure or success at discovering within himself the archetypes

of mature masculinity. Following Jungian psychological theory, they claim that if men are not given room to express these archetypes in a healthy manner, they will act them out unconsciously in ways that are damaging and violent, either directed outward at other people as overtly hostile male behavior, or 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 women are at an advantage to men spiritually and that minstrel 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 warm angering tyrants in the world is for women to use touch and the beautiful arts of seductive love to disarm men, and that this will solve male violence. Oh you girls just gotta touch us right, and we'll stop doing genocides. Oh my god, 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 want to continue this joke. But what dating?

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

It's 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, ikey. So, most regular listeners of the show are broadly familiar with the way men's empowerment gurus and men's rights influencers evolved over the last twenty years or so, a mix of right wing culture war politics intersecting with very divorced men.

And I think we haven't talked about this yet. But these guys are all extremely divorced, right, there's a there's a lot of weakened dad energy in the sense.

to say it was all toxic. So yeah, again, you have most people listening are kind of familiar with where things descend after the mythopoetic men's movement, which still kind of is around, but more or less Peter's out over the course of the nineties, and after that point, you've got a mix of right wing culture war politics that intersects with these very divorced dudes angry over custody, you know,

yelling about how men are discriminated against. And then we have pick of course, starting in the early two thousands, 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 pick up artists intersecting with the men's rights activists intersecting with the right wing culture war politicians intersecting with these literal Nazis, and from that slurry we get gamer Gate and the alt right and

at least a portion of Donald Trump's political success. Right, So that is the story. Well, I mean, this is we haven't on into this on the show, and it was something I was broadly aware of, but I didn't know much about. But I think this is especially leading into a story about a guy like Andrew Tait, who is the most toxic, arguably calls himself the most like toxic man on the internet, and is certainly an ARCon of male toxicity. I think it kind of behooves us

to talk about what led to him because it's interesting. Anyway, this is the end of episode one. Anybody anybody got some thoughts here at the end of things.

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.

and be like, well, this is clearly a men's problem. No, this is this is a cultural problem. Everybody's problem. Is this.

I think he was briefly on the show Portlandia. But he was fired from being the mayor because he had a sexual relationship with a teenage staffer, and then got re hired by current Mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, who's a giant piece of shit, Yeah, to be the mayor's body man basically, And then this week Sam announced that he was retiring because he had an iron deficiency, and then Ted Wheeler told everyone, no, he's retiring it because he wouldn't stop threatening and bullying women in the office.

Both of you guys suck and it's very funny this happened. Also, I 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.

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

Now I did find one, and this is, honestly, the only texture you get on his childhood that I have come across is from an article he wrote for a website for kickboxing that sells kickboxing gear, and the title of it is the Life of Andrew King Kobra Tait. So again, this is not a credible source, but the way in which he writes about his childhood and what he wants you to believe about it does tell you a lot about the man. So we're still going to be covering it, but do not take this as literal truth.

That should be obvious. Here's how he talks about his birth. I was born in Washington, d C. At Walter Reed Army Hospital, early one morning, December first, nineteen eighty six. The doctor wanted to award me a perfect ten on the birth scale, but settled on nine point five. Already, already. That's the saddest thing anyone has ever bragged. That's so pathetic, absolutely heartbreaking.

It's so funny.

had not heard of this guy. But I don't care for chess or for yeah chess. Yeah. The Washington Post describes Emory Tate Junior as a trailblazer for black chess players. He was like one of the first. I don't know, he may have been like the first, like super famous, really well known, like black professional chess players. Again, I don't understand chess. I don't understand why you would play a war game that doesn't include orcs. But a lot of people who love chess say that he was one

of the most fun players watch. I did read a lot of like writing like fans and like reddit and stuff talking about Emory Tate, and one thing they all seem to agree on is he was just super entertaining to watch play.

is not true. He was an international master, which is a lesser rank. He never quite made it to grand master. I found again chess discussions online by nerds about chess who will say that he didn't make it to grand master mainly because he wasn't able to. He wasn't willing to do like certain things that you have to do to do that. But he was. He had a really good record. He regularly beat grand masters. Some people say he was as good as Bobby Fisher. Again, I have no way to evaluate any of this.

The title was triple xclam with three explaanation points, The Life and Games of Emory Tate, Chess Warrior, which is kind of fun. I think he literally died at the table in twenty fifteen playing a game of chess. Like this man, This motherfucker loved chess. He wears a white fedora with a gold band on the cover, which also gives you a little bit of insight into where Andrew Tate gets some of his taste in style. And Andrew

idolizes his father, and he 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 twenty twenty two, Andrew Tait noted this about the male side of his family background. My grandfather, Imrie A. Tait Esquire, fought in World War Two 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 meal through the hard clay dirt of Georgia. Forced to work on the farm at age twelve, he pushed a plow that only grown men normally handled. Then he ran away, never to return to the farm. He did some bare knuckled fist fights as young man, and distinguish himself hand to hand during the war years. And

again I'm sure parts of that are true. Everything about his dad and his grandpa always veers into how good they were at hand to hand combat, and there is no evidence of this. Like the stuff about working on a farm, Yeah, that seems plausible. The stuff about how we fought the Nazis hand to hand, I don't know, maybe, but that actually doesn't happen often.

were at fighting. Quote his son. My dad, Emrie A. Tait Junior, was a young athlete, learning wrestling in school and developing the early forms of tate shin kai strikes as a youth, which I guess is his own martial arts thing. His job in the military for eleven years took him on many adventures and little is known for sure except that my dad never loses. He is my role model in many ways, even as I write poetry

like he does. So I mean, also, I think his dad would have been in the military, let me double check here, Yeah, during Vietnam, which would mean that he did, in fact lose. So sorry, Andrew, but I don't want to be mean to Emory Tait because well, this is a little bit his fault. So yeah. The closest thing that Andrew has written or said that comes close to being emotionally impactful at all is when he writes about

his father. I will give him that he writes with like some amount of actual sincerity about his feelings towards his dad, And I'm going to give you an example of that now. I never learned to cry for attention. I only used grunts to indicate hunger or discomfort, but mostly I was silent. I had a large new crib, but most every night I spent a sleep on my dad's chest. He would place me there and sleep still, never moving in the night, and our heart beats were and are as one.

one inch from cracking into the far wall. That was the final test. Kind of sounds like your dad was just shoving you because he was pissed and drew it.

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. The news in his town, which is like South Bend, was talking about the release there was a movie coming out about Bobby Fisher, who I guess was good at chess, and so they were writing about that, and they wanted a human interest piece, so they talked about young Andrew Tate,

who was six when they wrote this article. He had started a chess club in South Bend with some other kids, and he had taught them chess because he wanted people to play against. It includes the article a couple of quotes that are interesting. Every kid wants to be like his dad, the elder Tate said, but father had recently limited son's playing time, encouraging other activities. I don't think that a kid his age should spend so much time

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

a kid like I am bored all the time. This is the only thing that I like. It Also, you know, gives you a little bit of a look into like there's for whatever reason, one of the things I take with in this article is that Imory Tait didn't want his son to follow him as a chess guy. It might have been some insecurity about not wanting his kid to be better than him, or it may have just been understandably like, you know, I never made a lot of money playing chess. I want you to do something

else with your life. I don't want you to like be locked into this thing.

He did lose three out of five games, and his dad eventually had to pull him out of the tournament because, quote, he got very upset because he thought he was failing. So Emory withdrew his son from the game to quote save him from crying in front of all those people. And we're not keyed into what precisely happened there?

if you're gonna throw a fit when you lose. Or Andrew was doing okay and wanted to keep playing, and his dad was angry that he was losing and didn't want him to keep, like risk losing again, even though three to two is not a bad record for a six.

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 in that new article shows six year old Andrew focused in the picture frame, face taking up a third of the frame playing chess. Well, just Tristan's hand is visible in the right third, and as the brothers grew up, Andrew would consistently stay in focus. Well, Tristan would always just sort of be off to the side.

you do anything if I don't want to. And it's like weirdly abusive because they're both men who were in their thirties, like Tristan, you don't have to take that like things got harder for them after South Bend because they their mom and dad. It's not a good marriage, and they divorce. I have found very little detail about why that divorce happened. We can infer the that it was an extremely painful time for Andrew, and this is

all he's willing to write about it. Dad was working minimum wage jobs 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 life there only minus dad. And he's not willing to write like, you know, the marriage didn't work out or and again we don't know why.

I'm going to avoid like theorizing what might have happened there, but this is clearly he idolizes his dad and he's taken away from him forever basically, and obviously Mom might have had a perfectly good reason for doing that. I'm not trying to be critical. We just actually don't really know.

But this is definitely like the fact that he's not willing to even acknowledge the basics of what happened kind of suggests This leaves a pretty profound impact on young Andrew, so by age eleven, he was, in his words, man of the house, looking after his younger brother and now sister. The town in England they live in was called Luton and it is still. I think it's usually pronounced by English people Luton. But you know, you know how they are.

the worst place to live in England. I actually found a poll from like seven days before I write this script from Bedfordshire Live that voted at the worst place to live in England. It is a tough town. Andrew and his family have basically no money. They live in public housing and they are just barely getting by. We know this for certain, like this is a confirmed fact about his upbringing. Now Andrew again definitely acknowledges that they were poor. This is actually an important part of his

own self mythology. But he also makes some claims that we do not know for sure or true. He claims he got a job as soon as I was old enough, although he does not say when that was quote as soon as I was old enough, I got a job moving eighty pound boxes of frozen fish into the market at five am, and a full day of school weekends found me at the market stall, where it perfected my

knife skills, flawlessly fileting fish at blinding speeds. After some time, I never cut my hands at all, not even a nick. I learned to play drums. And yeah, that's interesting. I'm sure some Again, I'm sure pieces of all of this are true. I don't know about his knife skills or the blinding speed, but I'm sure pieces of this are true. Now, trist Or Andrew interestingly says that the only one of them who got into a real world fight when they were kids was his brother Tristan. Some kid was bullying

him and he beat him up. I don't know if that story is true or not, but it is worth noting that Andrew claims in this article, I have never struck a person in anger. Now we know that's not true, because he has beaten at least what like Yeah, we know that's not true. We will talk about that later. But this is the claim that he is making in this thing that he writes in like twenty twenty two, when he was a young adult, he was introduced to a kickboxing trainer and he started training, as did his

brothers soon after. By two thousand and eight, he was the seventh highest ranked heavyweight kickboxer in Britain. A year later, he won his first championship and became the number one ranked kickboxer in Europe for his division. Two years later, in twenty twelve, he was the second best heavyweight kickboxer on the planet. That sounds very impressive, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean second best kickboxer on the planet. That means you can kick to death anybody but one guy. Yeah,

that is not what that actually means. So I'm gonna 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 x kickboxer on the planet. They'll talk about his championships and like lists the numbers. I was the first draft of this, actually, I just wrote that and then moved on and was like, hey, he's really good at kickboxing. Lots of bad people are really good at something. I assumed he was, as like, I

figured that that was true. I looked at his Wikipedia page, which says he has like seventy nine wins and nine losses and lists his championships, and he did win a bunch of what are called world championships. However, that's not how boxing works, because I also looked up a bunch of discussions of boxing fans analyzing his actual performance, and one thing they'll point up is that, well, there's not

just one guy who's the best at kickboxing. Kickboxing is actually an incredibly fragmented sport, and there are a bunch of different I think, I don't know if they call him 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 more amateur stuff, and he was really

good at beating amateur kickboxers. One of the critiques people will note who are into kickboxing is that the league that he became world or light heavyweight champion in only covers Europe.

and there's so many different weird leagues and shit. He might be lying about the total number of wins and games he was in, but of the things that we can terrify only this is something kickboxing fans will point out. Only five of his fights are against guys with Wikipedia pages, And that sounds, but it means like guys who are notable enough that they they have caught like are good enough at kickboxing.

simply not the case. And 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 all It's worth noting that, like the level Tait actually was at did not pay

terribly well. The per fight amount is impressive. He can make between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars per fight that he was in, but he was having like one or two fights per year, which is not terrible income. But you're paying for a coach, you're paying for Jim access, you're paying for the medical care that comes from this, and he's going to have several serious injuries. So he's

not living well off of this salary. And in fact, he and his brother are living in a cheap apartment I think in Bedfordshire and eating as cheaply as they possibly can in order to afford to keep being in kickboxing. Because it's like that's kind of what it is when you're competing at this kind of awkward level that he's at, and Tate relates aspects of this himself in a video from twenty twenty two. And I'm going to play this so everyone can get a look and listen to the

guy before we can go any further. This is from his video on Rumble. This is his like you Like Rumble is right wing you tube and his channel is called Tate Speech as in hate speech. But you guys get it right, I don't need here.

Now he is lying about he and his brother being world class athletes. You might say he was. That's going to be up to what you define that as. But Tristan is not competing in kickboxing. He is working as like a coach kind of, although people will criticize that in ways that are too weirdly nuanced and involve knowledge of kickboxing. So we're just going to move on now.

The height of his career as a guy who kicks people for money comes in like twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, twenty thirteen, I think is his last big championship, and not long after that he decides to leave professional sports as a full time thing. Injuries play a major role in this. Tate does not like talking about vulnerability, but he was worse at taking hits than he likes to pretend. He suffered detached retinas in several fights and had to have surgery for his eyes. So he was like, he's

I mean again and again. That's the I'm pointing this out because he will never admit it. Like, if you're a professional kickboxer, at some point, you're going to get hurt enough that you can't keep doing kickboxing, like we all saw, like Muhammad Ali go from you know Muhammad Ali to you know, a guy who has severe injuries as a result of being a boxer. All this stuff's bad for you, like you either quit it 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, this is all pretty like normal sports stuff, right like it you are when you're watching guys do these kind of combat sports. You are watching people like mortgage their bodies in the hope of getting rich, and Tate kind of had to accept at a certain point, my body is going to give out

before I get rich doing this. So you know, that's the thing that he recognizes, and he decides I need to let my most professional athletes do. I need to find something else I can do that's easier on my body that I can support myself with. You know, some people open car dealerships. Some people decide to you know, sell ads for different things and be pitchman. Some people go into professional baseball. Tristan decided to become a webcam

sex pimp. So that's that's an interesting call. I do think history would have been different in fascinating ways that that's the choice Michael Jordan had made. Sophie, don't give you that look anyway.

to do cam work, right, that's that's fine. But the business that Tait interest and operated was not fine. It was fundamentally pretty toxic.

want to meet them. Whatever the excuse is, it is a lie, Tristan said. So he tells a story in this article about this guy who wanted to give a cam operator twenty thousand dollars his life savings, and Tristan's like, and I try. I talked him out of it. I told him, you know, he shouldn't do that. She was actually making good money. And then he came back a couple of months later and fell in love with another and this time I was like, yeah, man, we'll take

your money, which definitely a lie. Tristan and Andrew Tate have never turned down twenty grand that a desperate man offered them for lies, trying to.

chance he was in a legal gray area. They did not get charged, so probably is fair to say they were in enough of a legal gray area that they were reasonably safe. And to be like, perfectly honest, I suspect they could have done this indefinitely. If Andrew Tate hadn't been a sex criminal, which is what we're getting to here. So Andrew Tate later wrote this on his personal website, slash Shady Business, teaching men to run there

on webcam porn studios. This is a thing he does later, but this is how he talks about his webcam business and how he makes it work. God, how did I become rich webcam? I've been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade. I've had over seventy five girls work for me, and my business model is different than ninety nine percent of webcam studio owners. Over fifty percent of my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time, and if all my girlfriends, none were in the 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 her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she do anything I'd say, and then get her on webcams so we could become rich together. Whether you agree or disagree with what I did with their loyalties, submission and love for me doesn't matter. You cannot reject the results.

And the results are simple. My girlfriends would do more for me than ninety nine point nine percent of men's wives would do for them.

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. This is a thing that happens that is

like a recognized part of a criminal enterprise. Now, obviously getting charges based on those words on his website is going to be hard to do, but just kind of the stuff that he had published for a while was enough that people at the time should have known that he was up to a what was a likely illegal business. Now, if you came across articles about Tate in twenty twenty one under twenty twenty two and they went to any detail about his webcam career, the most you were likely

to learn and 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 forty percent cut and the rest goes to the studio. So that's that's what they claimed for years had happened, like, you know, we did it in the UK and then the UK got woke and so we switched to Romania. That is not what actually happened. So they started running this can business in twenty twelve.

Three years after twenty twelve, and they moved to Romania. It's twenty fifteen now, just a few days ago after his arrest, a story drop that made it clear why they actually left the UK, and it had nothing to do with wokeness or the country going downhill. Andrew Tate was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse

in twenty and fifteen. Weiss 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 and the Crown Prosecution Service mishandled their case, leaving him free to rise to global fame on the back of his unchecked misogyny. Police took four years to pass their investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service, whose job involves assessing whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction, at

which point the CPS declined to prosecute. So that's the reality of why they had to leave the UK.

I like freedom. No, man, you were accused of rape by multiple women and then investigated, and you decided to leave because you didn't know if the UK was going to come for your ass at some point. And the story is actually a bit more fucked up than that, because back in twenty fourteen, 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 two thousand and nine. They were friendly for years until twenty thirteen, which is when Tate was transitioning away from kickboxing to webcam pimping. The two decided to go out on a series of dates at the end of that year, and after several weeks, they were in her room when Andrew forced himself on her. Now she

describes him stopping. She tells him to stop when he starts like trying to go to have sex, and she tells him that she doesn't want to have sex, and he tells her she says that he like sits quietly for a moment, and then she asks him what's going on, and he says, I'm debating whether I should rape you or not.

and she decides, obviously, I don't. I hopefully I don't think I have to explain this to this audience, but like, there are a lot of horrible persons consequences that can come to charging your rapist, right to pursuing with criminal charges, she decides, and there is, and this seems like a

positive things. There's an option in the UK where you can just log a complaint and say this guy rape me without proceeding with criminal charges, which she decides she doesn't want to do at this point, and so that's what she does. And then this is again twenty thirteen, twenty fifteen, is when those two women who worked in his cam studio push press charges against him and the

police 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, and they reach out to Amelia and they're like, more women have come forward saying that this guy assaulted them. Do

you want your charges? Do you want your allegations basically to be added to theirs in this case that we're building, right, And she says yes, and she hands over her phone to the cops, which contained numerous audio notes because she had told Andrew and like text and stuff like, Hey, you know like you rate me. That's why I don't want to know you anymore. And he had responded to her.

And he had responded to her using voice notes where he admitted to what he had done and Yeah, I'm gonna play a couple of notes of Andrew Tait here for you, because before we hear him in his like fifteen year old boy influencer voice, we should hear how he talks to somebody like Amelia when he doesn't think it's going to be on the news?

fucking pass out? Chill the fuck out, Jesus Christ. I thought you were cool. What's wrong with you?

And I don't know, like every everything that's going on here makes sense, but it's also so bleak, and I I don't know that there's probably a better a better writer and thinker than me might be able to draw a more trenchant connection between the kind of stuff that I was talking about about, how lack of connection to other men and to older men and how not knowing what your place is in society leads young men to feel disconnected and that that can be the root of

some bad behavior. And the fact that Tate idolizes his dad and is separated from him and becomes so needful to kind of convince others of his greatness while using violence and threats against them. I don't know that there's a connection there, but it's it's I think, kind of worth thinking about. I guess in the same continuum, I

don't know, this is still stuff like that. 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 because that's what it's about, right, It's it's never about like that he wanted, you know, sex or whatever. It's about that.

thinks about things. I don't know. There's a lot going on there worth worth pondering, and I guess we will ponder it for a while while we wait for part three of this series, where we will talk about the fallout from these cases and the social media presence that Tate builds. When again, nobody knows this ath I mean this, this this young woman knows it, and a couple of police officers know it. But as a spoiler, the police don't proceed with the charges and in fact they uh,

it's really fucked up. The police say that they believe her, or Amelia says what she said to to Vice when they talked to her is that the police told her that they believed her claims, but they couldn't go forward with the case because there was a shred of doubt about Tate's guilt.

for that at Girlgodshow dot com. They were on the early version of part of this, but I had an emergency and we had to bounce, and now we are recording this late at night because it is the only way that we can make this show work in a way that is we are contractually obligated to. So thank you April and Grace, Thank you, Ian and Sophie for being guests on my show last minute, and.