Andrew Tate is a scammer

being everywhere on social media within a few months. Videos featuring his name as a hashtag have been viewed over thirteen billion times, and before it was shut down, his TikTok account had over eleven billion views. He had four million Twitter followers, four point seven million Instagram followers, almost eight hundred thousand YouTube subscribers, and millions and millions of clicks and shares across Facebook. So who is Andrew Tate. Well, Andrew Tate is kind of like Joe Rogan on steroids.

Just like Rogan, At one time, Andrew Tate was a professional martial artist, and also, like Rogan, Andrew Tate did a stint in reality television. Tate was on Big Brother in where he was known for being really respectful and

thoughtful of others. Oh wait, sorry, just kidding. It says here he was actually known for homophobia and violence against women after a video surface where he was beating a woman with a belt while screaming at her quote, if you ever message another guy whether we're together or not, you're fucking dead. Tate was kicked off Big Brother after only being on the show for six days. Andrew Tate's podcast is called Take Speech, and it's basically exactly what

you think it is. He's part of what we call the man of Sphere, a loosely connected ecosystem of online websites and influencers that traffic in misogyny and racism on places like four Chan and Reddit. If you listen to our episode with Laura Bates, a researcher and writer who went undercover in the mano Sphere to research her book Men Who Hate Women, then you know exactly what I'm

talking about. So Andrew Tate's whole thing is these clips of him speaking on his podcast wearing sunglasses and doors you know, like you do, and smoking a cigar while he basically says the most violent, sexist nonsense that makes him sound like an alpha male like. Here is his take on why he is anti breakfast. This is an actual quote from him. I don't have food in the mornings. I don't like the idea of breakfast, waking up from sleep instantly with available food that you didn't have to

hunt and kill. Breakfast breathes arrogance and laziness. I will not eat until work has been done. Instead, I start my day with hunger and memories. My path to the top wasn't a straight line. There's been bumps in the road, tears, blood. I sit and remember the worst times of my life, the pain and the heartache. Some mornings, if I try, I can almost cry. I take all that anguish and pain and then add a little nicotine and caffeine to set my blood on fire, and I enter the world

ready to win life or die. While I'm trying, angry men siege nations. I don't have time for cheerios. The universe will pay me what she owes me, all the money and power I deserve. So yes, sounds pretty healthy. Definitely sounds like someone who is going to help the start to the day and encouraging others to do the same. Andrew Tate's brand of hyper violence, toxic hyper masculinity, and

misogyny basically says that women are property of men. This is something that he's actually said, and he advocates for men using violence and relationships. He outright said that if a woman ever asked him about cheating, he would physically

attack her. In a really good piece for Grid, reporter Christian Thorsburg spoke to Josh Ross, a political sociologist and senior research fellow at Deacon University in Melbourne, who says that Tate represents a dramatic shift taking place in online misogyny, moving beyond the sexualization and dismissal of women which much of Tate's material promotes, to also encouraging gendered hate and violence.

So basically, it's not just men are better than women, it's men are better than women, and therefore men should be able to use violence in service of establishing and maintaining that hierarchy. And this is even more troubling when you consider that the majority of Tate's audience are young men and boys. Teachers have been writing about how Andrew Tate's popularity with boys has been creating problems and disturbances.

In their classrooms. So Tate is popular with boys, but he's also really popular with young men who are just starting to navigate their way into young adulthood. Going back to Rus from that grid piece, Ruce also said, if you want to know where Andrew Tate is gaining traction, it's more likely to be the white collar sector. Among educated younger men who work out at gym's on the weekend or after work. Younger men are more likely to hold anti women attitudes in terms of women's rights, that

women's rights has gone too far. So on top of all of this, Andrew Tate is also a scammer. Let's get that straight right away. He used to operate a porn webcam business with his brother that his brother outright described as quote a big scam, But that scam is actually the least scammy scam that Andrew Tate is involved in, because his whole thing, his whole ethos, his whole identity

is a scam. So I've actually written about the ways that misogynistic podcasters and content creators and influencers who make up the Manno sphere are all basically just scamming. They prey on men and boys with low media literacy who may feel lonely, get into their heads and convince them to send over money. Podcasts like Fit and Fresh, the late Kevin Samuel's they all basically convinced young men and boys to send them lots and lots of money or give them lots and lots of engagement in service of

learning how to become high value men. I actually wrote a piece on this for the Nation, talking about the Fresh and Fit podcast, which you can read in the show notes. Let's take a quick break center back, so

let's talk about Andrew Tad's scam. Specifically, it is called Hustlers University, where for the lolo cost of fifty dollars a month, men and boys can learn about cryptocurrency from three guys they Michael, Adam, and Daniel no less name given, and learn about just the general concept of quote freelancing from Dylan and Colston no last name given. Also, given that Andrew Tad's audience mostly includes young men and boys,

don't worry. According to Hustlers Universities, frequently asked questions it is not a problem if you are not a legal adult, because they have plenty of young guys inside of Hustlers University who are below eighteen and are pulling in several thousand dollars a month. Do you have access to the internet. That's all you need. By the way, this is a little bit nipicky, but I just have to say it.

On the Hustlers University website frequently ask questions, it says that you do not need any money to start because most of the Hustlers University students are doing freelance work, and that freelance work does not require any money to do. Take it from an actual, honest to god freelancer, this is just incorrect financial advice. You absolutely need money to freelance.

And when their tax bill comes, I hope the people who were told that they need zero dollars to freelance are not surprised when the government expects him to pay self employment taxes. So again, you can see how he's kind of praying on people who might not have a lot of financial literacy or media literacy. And it's awful. And it gets worse because guess what. The entire thing is basically a pyramid scheme. Like most pyramid schemes, the

courses aren't really the thing. The thing is getting. There's to sign up for the courses. Students of the program got a commission for convincing other dupes to join via affiliate marketing. So just like lu La Row and every other MLM scam that somebody from your high school message you about on Facebook who was all like, hey, hon, have you ever thought about starting your own business? I think you would really slay at it. It's a scam,

and honestly probably a lucrative one. According to The Daily Beast, the program had some a hundred and nine thousand members before its closure. And this is actually why you might know who Tate is because Tate specifically told his students to flood social media with videos of his content to promote his scam university. According to Hope Not Hate, a UK based advocacy group that uses research to challenge mistrust and racism, Tate tells his supporters they can earn significant

sums by sharing his videos. In one podcast, he claimed that a sixteen year old hustler University student was making forty five thousand pounds a month from publishing his clips on the TikTok, which is basically how he gamified the program. Even though he's banned from TikTok his content is still really prevalent there because his students just flood the space with his content. And I think he definitely is someone who needs social media. He's just game in the algorithms

because he knows that algorithms specifically boost inflammatory content. They will always give content that is inflammatory or divisive more engagement. Andrew Tate was a banned from Twitter back in seventeen over a thread commenting on Harvey Weinstein where he said quote, if you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bear some responsibility. I'm not saying it's okay

you got raped. And TikTok took down Andrew Tate's account for breaking its policies regarding quote content that attacks, threatens, incites violence against for otherwise to humanize as an individual or group based on attributes including sex. This is what a TikTok spokesperson told The Washington Post. He was also kicked off Facebook and Instagram for violating the rules around dangerous organizations and individuals. But as always, let's not give

the platforms too much credit. Pretty much, whenever they decide to remove somebody who is dangerous from their platform or make any kind of policy change like this, it's typically because of the work of organizers who have been pushing them behind the scenes, and this time it's no different. Hope not Hate filed a petition for platforms to drop Andrew Tate and has been monitoring him for years. So great job to all the organizers who did the work

behind the scenes to make this happen. But also what we learned from how Alex Jones uses Facebook. You might remember that Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened so that even after Alex Jones was banned from Facebook, he carved out a loophole so that other people could still post his content on the platform. Even though Tate has been banned from these platforms, it might not actually even really matter if his whole thing is having other people his students, post

his content on his behalf. And I also should just probably note that in April, The Daily Beast reported that Andrew Tate's house in Romania was rated as part of

an investigation into crimes of human trafficking in rape. Tate lives in Romania, and in a now deleted YouTube video, he said that the reason why he moved there is because Romanian police were less likely to pursue sexual assault allegations, Um so yeah, you tell me and to me, Andrew Tate represents the mainstreaming of really violent, dangerous ideas and rhetoric and those things, you know, not just being fringe but flooding popular social media apps like TikTok. Tate has

also treated like a thought leader. He's given a huge platform by popular podcasts like bar Stool, which gives him a huge audience of a young man and boys and hosts who really don't push back on any of the dangerous things that he's saying. And overall, like I've said time and time again, these people are all scam artists. They do not care about their audience, They do not care about the men and boys that they're talking to, They do not care about the students of their so

called university. Ease to them, these men and boys and their pain and loneliness and anger is just a tool that can be exploited and weaponized to make more cash. It is the most cynical, exploitative ship in the world and it works. Listen. To be clear, I am not against people asking tough questions and having the thorny media conversations about relationships, sex and gender. In fact, I believe that we need more people spearheading those conversations in meaningful

and thoughtful ways. But Andrew Tate is not actually interested in men and boys having healthy relationships, because people who are in healthy relationships do not send over fifty dollars a month to a charlatan to teach them how to be high value successful men. People like Tate need to keep their audience of men and boys angry. They need to stoke their feelings of loneliness and inadequacy and anger and tell them to keep pointing those feelings at women

so they keep shelling over more money. So this is my call to everyone listening. If you have a young man or boy in your life, talk to them about what kind of content they're consuming, talk to them about what they think about women and girls, and you honestly might be surprised. And it really really matters. The implications are huge. Here's so Laura Bates, author of Men Who

Hate Women, put it during our interview. We've never really seen it because we are at the kind of hovering on the edge of the first real generation coming of age who have lived their whole lives on social media. We have this kind of unique political moment that never

really gets picked up on this. I find it wild that we're living at this moment in history has never happened before and will never happen again, and yet it's never really discussed where a generation of non digital natives is parenting and educating a generation of digital natives, and there is this chasm, there, this huge gap in culture and understanding of what their world is like, what the day to day landscape of their online world is like amongst parents who grew up in a pre Internet age,

and that general Asian will becoming of age, and what will that look like when our political representatives are being drawn from a generation who have literally grown up with the sheer daily bombardment of racism and misogyny and transphobia that comes with living your life on the Internet in the way that young people do today. And I don't think we'll know what that looks like until we get there, and I think when we do, it will be a shock.

But for now, Andrew Tate, good riddens. And if this means I have to see you one last video of a guy wearing sunglasses inside and smoking a cigar on my for you page, I'll take it. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our work store at tangdi dot com. Slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tandi dot com. There Are No Girls on the

Internet was created by me Brigita. It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unboss Creative edited by Joey pat Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amata was our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from I heeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.