Part Two: What's New With Andrew Tate?

Robert explains the weird cult Andrew Tate created with a wizard and former pick up artist to rob young men and abuse women at scale. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where tired people talk about a guy they hate, in this case, Andrew Tate.

• 0:14Robert Evans?

  How are we all doing today? Everybody full of energy? Juiced up, as the kids say. I don't think the kids say that.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Ready to go. Playoffs are about to start, Lakers in five.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Lakers in five.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  So we're good to go.

• 0:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, that's good. Lakers in five sounds like a positive development.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Very.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  I had a really enjoyable experience of texting Robert late on Sunday when he was very intoxicated, a picture of the LaBarbie that I purchased, which is LeBron James Kendall. And Robert would be like, call me and go, Sophie, what is this?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  It's just beautiful is what it is.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  And I was like, it makes me happy. That's what it is.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  The amount of grown men like standing in line trying to get this doll is just, it's, you can't make it up.

• 1:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they made like a G.I. Joe him, or is it a Barbie brand?

• 1:13Speaker 02

  No, it's Barbie.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  It's a Ken doll.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  It's Barbie.

• 1:15Robert Evans?

  They made a LeBron Ken doll. Well, he's really finally arrived, I guess.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  It sold out so fast, but I was, I was there. I did it.

• 1:25Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna guess that's the lowest percentage of Barbie dolls that have ever been bought by little girls.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Probably, probably true, probably true. But it's, you know what? It made me happy for like 45 minutes. And when I look at it, I'll feel joy. And like, the world sucks, so.

• 1:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, joy sounds nice.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Take the wins where we can get them.

• 1:46Robert Evans?

  I remember joy. That's been replaced with occasional sleep.

• 1:51Robert Evans?

  Speaking of things that bring me joy, this is not one of them, because today we're gonna be talking yet again about our friend Andrew Tate, who is not our friend.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  But who is our friend is supervising producer Ian Johnson, who's here once again.

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me back. Can't wait to hear more about the horrors.

• 2:09Robert Evans?

  Ian Johnson.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Don't do that. Don't do that.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  Nope, nope.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Robert, I've had 35 years of that. Please don't contribute.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  None of that. And man, it's, it's, I've been, I, I had a good, I, I always love it when there's like, really, really like stereotypically cheesy names in an action movie. And I just watched that very good movie, Nova Kane, starring the guy from The Boys, about a dude who can't feel pain. And it does a good job with it portraying it both as like a disability and realistically showing how he could use it, like to his advantage in a fight. And it's like very cringey because you're constantly watching this guy, like permanently damage his body. But it's a hoot, but they made the real, the real character's name Nathan Kane, which is like, okay, guys, oh, that's a little, did we need that? Was that necessary? Did you have to? I know it's going, it's gonna come out in a pitch meeting like, oh, what if we called him this?

• 3:02Robert Evans?

  But you didn't need to. You didn't, you didn't need to. Most of the movie's pretty grounded, which is kind of what works about it. And then like that happens and you're like, I don't know, guys, come on.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  You were so close.

• 3:13Robert Evans?

  There's also a scene where a bunch of bank robbers come out with like a hostage and the cops like put their guns down. And I'm like, no, this is this, this is the San Diego Police Department. You're telling me they don't just empty their fucking rifles into that fucking people, those people?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  They're like, yeah, we'll deal with the lawsuit later.

• 3:27Robert Evans?

  We'll watch the LAPD shoot up a Trader Joe's over a hostage situation.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, I remember that.

• 3:34Robert Evans?

  We don't need that shit here.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:36Robert Evans?

  Anyway, speaking of shit, nobody needs, we're talking about Andrew Tate and his digital empire, how it works. Today's episodes are going to be based on a bunch of subsequent reporting that was not available when we did our first episodes about how the war room, which is his very expensive premium service that costs about eight grand a year to join, although that's actually the low end for what this fucking thing costs to be a member of. And the real world, which is like, costs 50 bucks a month. And the real world is, you know, if it's Toyota, the world, the war room is Lexus, that's the premium brand. And the real world is, you know, the normal brand that, that actually makes them the bulk of their money. So we're going to talk about how these work, how Tate has weaponized them over the years,

• 4:18Robert Evans?

  and what some of these released chat logs have made clear about the operating culture. But first, that's the cold open. We're done.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 4:32Robert Evans?

  Picture this, you're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show-stopping moments will be answered in the all-new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 5:37Robert Evans?

  We're back and Sophie and I are commenting on our same-colored drinks.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  What's yours? Mine's electrolyte water.

• 5:44Robert Evans?

  Mine's some mix of BCAAs and water. Because this is ostensibly a workout day that

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:51Robert Evans?

  has been a little bit of a shit show, but might as well get whatever those chemicals are. People say they do something.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Sensational.

• 5:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So the doctors say, speaking of things that do something, the war room. And so the Real World is kind of the core of Tate's business because it's got between 150 and 200,000 subscribers at any given time. I think 170K is the estimate you'll hear the most often. And you've got that many people paying 50 bucks a month, you're talking some serious money. Now, there's wide turnover on that because 50 bucks a month isn't a massive upfront investment, right? People can afford to pay that and then back out later. There's a lot of people who are kind of interested in for a little while who will buy. And so there's a lot of churn over the overall use of this, right? And the goal of the Real World broadly is both to make money and to funnel users upward

• 6:43Robert Evans?

  into the war room, which is much more expensive, you know, and as a result, harder to get into, but also lower turnover once people make that kind of financial commitment. So both of these places we've known about for a while, the the real world was originally Hustler's University, which is kind of Tate's first big web platform that

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:02Robert Evans?

  Kind of taught people how to pick up women and run cam hoarding businesses, so to speak. And yeah, so we've known these places existed, but they were kind of black boxes until in August of 2023, a disgruntled, I think this is a person who would describe themselves as a rival of Tate's, like someone who saw dislikes what he's doing and wanted to get into them. I'm not, it's not clear to me how they got access to the chat logs, but they get access to internal chat logs from the war room, which is his digital inner circle, and they give them to the BBC, and the BBC uses these to put together a documentary and several articles. Their primary interest as reporters was in laying out how the Tate brothers and their cohorts traffic women, and these logs identified 45 potential victims from just the period of March 2019 to April of 2020.

• 7:48Robert Evans?

  Now.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Wow, that was just from one year?

• 7:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 7:52Robert Evans?

  And this is again, there's maybe 500 people in the war room. And these are the people, though, who are much more successful at actually doing the thing Tate is trying to train people how to do, right? The real world is filled with young men who have ambitions to be small scale digital pimps, but don't really have the the skill or the commitment. So they primarily contribute by paying classes that are supposed to teach them how to do that shit. Whereas the the war room is full of people who are actually doing the kind of Andrew Tate stuff. So that's why they were able to like, there's, there's photos posted of texts, people post pictures of the women that they're, you know, trying to bring in and traffic. So you kind of see, it's possible to actually collect data on specific potential victims, right, through that.

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  Now, the next year, in November of 2024, a group of anonymous hacktivists managed to breach the real world, which is, you know, the the larger platform. And the cyber attack exposed the data of some 800,000 people who have used it at some point or another. It was during the time when about 170,000 people were active. See, you get an idea of like the scale of this, and it's also every time, every time these pieces of shit, it's the same thing with those like Nazi leaks for a while ago. Every time those pieces of shit create something like this, it gets just, just absolutely blown up. And then everybody's data gets leaked and you find out how many of them work for the federal government or whatever.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Right, familiar, yep.

• 9:16Robert Evans?

  So both leaks are are interesting for different reasons, but I want to start with the real world because that again is kind of what funnels peoples up. The site's ad copy claims it as quote, "The world's most advanced financial education platform." But it's also geared towards helping young men escape the matrix and avoid wasting their lives as a brokey, uh, which thanks to Tate has become one of the more common adolescent slang terms for young boys in the UK. And it means you don't have much money, right? You get this fucking, you you hear this a lot with like the way these kids talk to their teachers and their parents were like, were you just a brokey? Like, why would I listen to anything you have to say about life or the world? You don't have as much money as, you know, for example, uh, this guy that I'm paying

• 9:59Robert Evans?

  50 bucks a month for my mom's credit card to to learn how to like mostly make like AI scam books and stuff to sell on Amazon. Like, that's honestly the biggest thing that the real world does right now.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  That's the grift.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  This was originally the Hustler's University thing, yeah?

• 10:15Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yes, and so there's

• 10:17Speaker 01

  It's all just like scams to get rich quick, essentially, right?

• 10:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, scams to get rich quick. And it's all this, this very much like, it it's the same cons that you encounter if you're on like YouTube and you get a bunch of like con ads for, oh, here's a video of a guy in his fucking bit, uh, garage with a, with a sports car and a bunch of shitty business books and him walking you through it. He makes $20,000 a month or whatever on Amazon drop shipping or, you know, making Kindle AI books. Again, that's now kind of the big one. And while initially Hustler's University was more focused just on getting women to work in your cam business, the real world is a mix of very standard, like, uh, pick-up artists stuff, like, here's, here are the different tips and tricks for getting women

• 11:02Robert Evans?

  interested in you and how to like, you know, mentally abuse them so they don't leave you. And then the next set of them is Or the next set of things on it is like, here's a bunch of different scams for how you can get rich. And they're all, again, they're all these like drop shipping scams and AI scams and stuff. So it's, none of it is, for as much as he talks about like, being this jet setter who's, who's got all of these innovative ideas, like his primary money, it's an MLM, right? Like, this is a thing that most people who do this will never make a dime really doing it. His money is in selling them and selling subscriptions, right?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40Robert Evans?

  Well, the platform provides courses on common like passive income schemes. That's another term you'll hear a lot. Its primary service for Tate is both to milk money out of these kids in the hope that they'll believe for a time that they're going to get rich, but also to utilize them for free labor to keep his name trending. Again, the way this guy went from a nobody to being at least the most well-known name on social media is by gathering this group of young men together and handing them, once they're paying for access to the site, they get access to this archive of all of Tate's videos and interviews. And they can cut up clips from that to edit into YouTube and TikTok content, right? And this content doesn't get them viewers. Like, that's kind of what its build is doing, is

• 12:25Robert Evans?

  like, you can use Andrew's fame in order to build your own platform. That doesn't really work. But what does work is if you've got thousands of people constantly posting their shit to different social media.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  You turn them into a content mill.

• 12:37Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  And the algorithm will continue to prioritize your name and stuff related to you, you know? And that, that's really how all this stuff works.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  It's just free propaganda for him.

• 12:49Robert Evans?

  It's free propaganda, and that's the actual, the real insight that he had. Like, all of these cons are just stuff he rips off from elsewhere in the internet. The, taking the MLM structure and adapting it to, instead of having them try to sell his products, having them try to keep his name going viral, so that the algorithm rewards his content. That's a, that's a unique and creative move that he's made. And it's, it's gotten him quite, quite a bit of what he has right now. Now, one of these BBC articles I came across interviews a former member. Of the real world Mahmoud who was pulled into Tate's orbit when he started coming across some of these videos that were just like being spread across his his different social media timelines. He fell for the con. He believed that like, okay, this guy can probably teach me how

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  to get rich. I want to get rich. You know, life's hard in the UK as a young man like I need to figure out some way that I can make a bunch of money. So he pays 50 bucks and he joins quote, before long, he was completely immersed in Tate's universe, isolating himself from friends and family. Mahmoud would regularly spend 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes as many as 16 at his computer, editing and publishing social media videos promoting Tate daily as part of the required coursework. He'd become a cog in the same sophisticated PR machine that had initially drawn him to the influencers web.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  So he's giving these kids homework to just like make as many TikTok videos of him as possible.

• 14:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if you want to stay in, if you want to keep getting access to these different instructors that I've had, if you don't want to be kicked out, or you want a chance of getting into this, he has an affiliate marketing program. You have to post a certain number of videos a day, and they're really, they're just trying to keep these kids on as often as they can, pumping out like 16 hours a day for free. I mean, not even for free. They're paying for the privilege.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:35Robert Evans?

  And again, there's not any one specific thing that's unique about the real world outside of this. All of the money making scams they teach people are the same stuff you'll come across in these like YouTube ads. There's this basically like this forum type experience. I think it's mostly conducted through Telegram. So there's different private channels where users can talk to each other about their business ideas, or about how to pick up women. And this allows Andrew to put in a lot less actual work in the system, right? He doesn't have to teach people directly, and he doesn't actually have to manage this. He just has to put out his own content, and it'll all get kind of fed into the churn. Andrew has promoted coaches in order to handle the day to day task of managing this place. These are members of the war room who are also paying him. They'll

• 15:18Robert Evans?

  call him his general sometimes too. And in addition to, you know, subscriptions to the real world, he sells classes and tickets to live events around the world where he will travel and, you know, travel alongside other Men who are kind of in the Tate universe and they'll give events for these, these just unbelievably sad young men who desperately want to know how to pick up women and get rich enough to, to not just rent their Maserati at a day rate. The centerpiece of his whole platform, the, the main thing that he is geared towards selling through the real world is his PhD, what stands, of course, for pimpin' hose degree, right? We talked about this last time. No, it's always, it's always just the worst thing when I have to tell people that.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but every, every time it hurts, it's just.

• 16:06Robert Evans?

  Again, there's nothing at all that is unique or creative about this. What's actually happening here is this, all these warmed over techniques from like the game and the first couple of years of the pickup artist community are being repackaged into a degree. And then that is being made into, number one, it's a prerequisite to join the war room. And the goal here is not to just seduce women to have sex with them, which is kind of what the pickup artists were doing. It was all about adding notches to your, your belt or whatever. In this case, the goal is to coerce women, make them fall for you, isolate them from their loved ones, and then get them working for you on camera as a sex worker, right? And convincing them to hand over all of the money they make doing so.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  That's.

• 16:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  That's just evil.

• 16:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Pure evil.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Hard to even process. It's so gross.

• 16:57Robert Evans?

  It's such an interesting evolution of, this is about how to, how to, if you, if you were kind of paying attention to the early days of the pickup artist community, it was always very toxic, but it was less like outwardly evil, like a lot more of it was framed as like, well, this is just teaching young awkward men how to be charming and how to like, uh, yeah, you know, get, get, and that turned into, there's a reason why this fed so much into the far right and to the alt-right, why there were guys like Roush V and whatnot, who were initially big in that, who tried to become right-wing influencers, but nearly all of them failed in part because this was a creature of the older internet, right? This pickup artistry stuff, and it didn't really

• 17:39Robert Evans?

  age well into the kind of late social media period. And the other thing that was going on with this is that it's not the kind of thing that self-selects for people who are culture warriors. It self-selects for people who are like. Almost throwbacks at this point to like the old Hugh Hefner Playboy era. And Andrew Tate is, is, I don't know if I'd say he's the first, but he's the most successful at merging the whole right wing culture warrior narrative where you're fighting against the matrix and you're fighting for traditional values with a lot of this pickup artistry stuff.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:13Robert Evans?

  Which, you know, it, it, that's kind of the, that's the position that he occupies. Now, this used to be, the PhD used to be something he advertised on his major website. But because of all of the lawsuits against him, you can't find that degree being advertised normally. So it's pushed entirely in private through the real world. And the BBC got access to a number of these internal ads. These are like slideshows where Andrew's trying to convince these young men who are already locked into like the most basic stage of his platform, that they should join the war room and pay it eight grand a month. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna share here.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  It's eight grand a month?

• 18:48Robert Evans?

  Or eight grand a year. Sorry, eight grand a year. Yeah. Either way, that's an insane amount of money.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:53Robert Evans?

  So this first slide just says, will the PhD system change your life? And it's above four pictures of a mix of, it's like Andrew usually sitting and sipping a drink or wearing a fucking short sleeved shirt next to different, various young women, right? Will the PhD system change your life? Do you have a girl who completely trusts your decisions, will do anything you say and loves you deeply? Yes or no? If your answer is yes, I guarantee 90% of you are lying to yourselves. Read the question again. Understand what I mean when I say anything and ask yourself if you've ever tested that your belief. If your answer is no, you're missing out on one of life's greatest pleasures. Doesn't matter your age, you should have a loving girlfriend. If you're too busy to get one, good. The PhD system was made for you. If you're happy touching your own dick, this

• 19:38Robert Evans?

  power is not for you.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  So you see who he's advertising for here, right?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:44Robert Evans?

  Is these, yeah, these guys are like, well, I could spend 16 hours at a computer, but like, I don't want to go out and like, actually make a connection with somebody, right?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:50Robert Evans?

  Um, and there's little bits of nofap in there. There's so many different little corners of the creep internet that, that come together in making Andrew Tate.

• 20:00Robert Evans?

  Final thoughts. I will be teaching you every step to building a girl who is submissive, loyal, and in love with you. From your first message to testing if you want to keep her, to as long as you want the relationship to go on, I am the most capable man in the world to teach you this power, and I am 100% confident in my program. I have a warning. There's responsibility when you have someone completely loyal to you. I've had some girls for over a decade. When someone gives themselves to you completely, their life path is in your hands. Be wise. And then there's a little box at the bottom that says, "Join the PhD program."

• 20:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Well, at least he's teaching them to be responsible with that kind of power, right?

• 20:35Robert Evans?

  Sure, sure. You gotta be responsible when you come to own a woman via using Andrew Tate's Mind Domination Program. And then the last slide here is, "What exactly do you get with the PhD programs?" This is a big ad slide. Hours of video content. Well, I will teach you how to text women, how to build your social medias to pick up women, best first dates to bring women on, best follow-up dates, how to approach women, the framework that all male-female interactions are based on, how to see if a woman is high-quality, my opening lines, how to get women in bed, the critical mistakes most men make, how to stay on her mind without interaction.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  How to see if a woman is high-quality?

• 21:15Robert Evans?

  Yes. Now, if you've watched Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the degree to which all of this mirrors the Dennis system, which is, one of the characters is a creepy sex criminal, and has like a flirt- like, it's one-for-one. Like, there's absolutely- literally, one-for-one.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ. You know what else is one-for-one, Robert?

• 21:35Robert Evans?

  Speaking of one-for-one, I'll give you one ad break in exchange for one chunk of listening to my podcast.

• 21:47Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutigrevir Lamivudene. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients, or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 22:46Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 22:55Speaker 06

  It's 6:47 on a Friday. Your team's already gone home. And somewhere, a phone is ringing. It's a customer. They're ready to book. Nobody picks up. So they call the next company. That's a missed call and missed revenue. With Quo, you don't have to choose between doing the work and answering the phone. Your team can share calls, texts, and customer conversations in one place. And when no one's available, Quo's AI assistant can answer, handle questions, and even book the appointment for you. So whether you're on a job, in a meeting, or done for the day, your business can keep answering. Setup takes minutes. Keep the number you already have and add your team as you grow. No IT required. It's why over 90,000 companies trust Quo,

• 23:38Speaker 06

  the number one rated business phone system on G2. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, then get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/behind. That's Q-U-O dot com slash behind.

• 23:57Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Ah, so we're talking about Andrew Tate, mind control wizard.

• 24:05Robert Evans?

  Who's, he's just like, you know, this is, again, like, I bring up the Dennis system, but this is all, what's kind of interesting to me is he clearly, to put this together, he and the people who made this spent a great deal of time combing the internet for the last 20 years of different get-rich-quick and like flirt with like, flirting with women, like, pick-up artists scams and all that stuff. Like, there's a whole generation of like, Creepy dude, kind of right wing adjacent content and he's just an aggregator. It's like somebody put the last 20 years of like dudes being assholes on the internet that led us directly to Trump and like use chat GPT to remix it into a guy with bad tattoos. So I find that, I find that very interesting. Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:50Robert Evans?

  Now, the stuff I read, these kind of, these clips, uh, advertising the PhD system, like the way in which he describes it in this advertisement is disgusting. But in other interviews, he's dropped additional hints about some of the curriculum, which does include physical violence. So I, I played that clip earlier about Tate talking about using a machete on a woman who caught him cheating, right? About like, you know, what happens if she catches you cheating and she tries to attack you? And he says, you know, hit her in the face with a machete, right? This is something he talks about a lot and it's, it's this, this mix of like stuff like that, these like extreme, this extreme violence. And then these tactics that are almost like quaint, right?

• 25:30Robert Evans?

  Like he, one thing he'll tell people to do is to start your relationship with ordering, by ordering the woman in question to bring you a box of chocolates. Uh, and at first I was like, oh, is this just, this is just like very basic, like almost 50s era stuff, but no, it's, it turns out it's more related to like this neuro linguistic programming technique where you get someone doing you favors and you use that to ask them to do other favors. And Tate clearly, he doesn't even really seem to grasp much of like the underlying logic here because when he, there's, there's male BBC journalist who tries to interview him for this documentary on this leaked stuff, wants to interview Tate and Tate does the same thing, tries to get him to bring a box of chocolates, um, and hand them directly to Andrew and the journalist has to like talk to his editors to see it there.

• 26:16Robert Evans?

  And there's this whole weird, it's, and what he's trying to do is he's trying to establish a pattern of obedience because he thinks that lets him manipulate people, that it's like this hack to get into someone's brain. If you get them doing one favor to you, they'll do other favors to you. This is very old power of positive thinking, salesmanship kind of stuff. You'll get this in stuff going back to the 1950s, including a lot of like the Norman Vincent Peale shit that Donald Trump was being raised on as a kid. I've seen versions of this that go back decades. And the thing you're supposed to do as time goes on, you're supposed to give the subject of your focus more tasks. And you let your language get increasingly strict. You start by asking like, hey, would you do this for me? And you end by giving them commands, right? Where like, this is what we're doing today. This is your job for the day.

• 27:00Robert Evans?

  This is what you have to do for the day. And at the same time, and this is the thing that I think actually makes much more of an impact effectively. You're also supposed to be isolating your target from their family and social support network. So you're getting them in the habit of doing things that you say. And you're also cutting them off from their friends and family. So they don't have anyone else in their life, but you.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Right. The people who would ostensibly be like, hey, what are you doing? This is kind of fucking weird.

• 27:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're doing everything this guy tells you. Are you working 16 hours a day? Like on doing an OnlyFans that he gets the money from? Like, that seems kind of fucked up. Now, I want to play you a clip leaked from one of these in-person seminars he gives on mentally dominating women. The question he's asked right before giving this answer is, can you say more about the restrictions and boundaries? That you put on a woman in terms of who she can talk to?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Trigger warning, Andrew Tate's voice.

• 27:53Speaker 07

  But if you really want to show you so much of Kate, she's yours. When I say she's yours, I mean, she's facing you. Her family, your family, that's basically it, right? If she has like a really strong social circle and she really insists on seeing them, they're gonna have to give you the control. And it is in your best interest to give her away from that social circle. So, not so long, right? We don't want her out of whoever's saying whoever. And then women can't shut the fuck up either. They'll talk their business, they'll give their side of the story only. You're a bad guy now. Why don't we do that? Even though the fish are lying, just trying to flex. You know what I mean? It gets in their head, right? So now try and isolate that. And things you've talked about thus far, at some degree, adding excitement, her never catching you stripping.

• 28:36Speaker 07

  All these things tie into isolate her and keep her away from the outside of this. Every outside of you is trying, all of them.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I fucking hate this guy so much.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  He's just like disgusting.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  He's the smallest little man in the world.

• 28:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Cause women, she won't shut the fuck up. It's like.

• 28:56Robert Evans?

  Well, I mean, it's taking this very basic misogyny because you're again, his audience is not, it's framed as like, we're in alliance of powerful men, you know, making each other more powerful. But his audience is all guys who have never like, I mean, it's not even guys, it's children, right? It's kids who haven't been out in the world.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Are you really powerful if you can't handle your partner having checks notes? A friend? A friend.

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  No, but like this is these people, most of these people have never had partners, right? And, and the Tate and kind of the older men who are running things, they've got, they're all jacked. They're all generally on gear. They're all, they all have like nice tailored clothes. They all either have or rent sports cars and these little kids are minds are just putty in their hands. They like see, they see the physical symbols of wealth that these people have and they're like, well, then they must know what they're doing. Like this must all be the path to, to get what I want. And this is pretty classic cult leader behavior, both from Tate influencing these young people and the stuff he's telling them to do to women, right? And he frames this as saying like, there's no perfect girl for you. You have to make her.

• 30:08Robert Evans?

  You have to make her using these techniques, right? And per a quote from the Daily Dot, which originally published a lot of these leaked war room videos, in another clip from the same meeting, Tate explains why the woman, the woman his members want to date should not have normal jobs. If she has a normal job, she's got a social circle. She's got a support network. Tate bemoans, she's having a bunch of conversations you don't know about. She knows a bunch of dudes who are trying to get in her ear. She has no, she has concerns which aren't involving you, right? And, and that's a problem. Tate says, her brain power is dedicated to things that have nothing to do with you. It's a massive influence. And there is this like deep insecurity, right? That if your woman has anything else in you, because you're going to be, you're going to make her miserable, right? You have no desire or intention to actually like be in a relationship

• 30:53Robert Evans?

  with someone or provide them with anything they need. You're purely trying to take things from them. And it's obvious that's not going to make anyone happy. I wanted to run through another section of this curriculum from Tate's PhD. So this is from That same clip that gets played around a lot of Andrew Tate talking about hitting women with a machete. What's not usually played in the context when people discuss this, because I've seen like all of the big interviews that he's done recently, he gets asked about this. What's not played is that this is him talking about like one of the physical tests that you have to pass in order to get this PhD degree. And I really wish people would talk about this because this is kind of one of the more like fucked up things I've heard about in relation to what Tate is actually trying to teach the people who take his classes.

• 31:37Speaker 07

  When I got my PhD, we had to practice if a girl comes at you. Ah, you cheater, you cheating. It's bang out the machete, boom in her face.

• 31:46Robert Evans?

  This is the actual full context is like this is part of a test. You have to like, in order to pass this degree, you have to take a physical test on how you would defend yourself against one of these women you're trafficking catching you cheating. Like that's the actual context of all of this.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 32:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's pretty nuts.

• 32:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like just, just the fact that like you're building in, well, obviously your people are going to get attacked because the, the stuff that they're, they're doing is so like incredibly gross. We have to try and like train them to, to fight these women that we're also teaching them to try and like mentally dominate. Which is simultaneously this admission that like the tactics don't work that well.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  So you're gonna need to be able to fight.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, his, his stance there, if, if I'm understanding correctly is if a woman speaks in a way you don't like, you slice them?

• 32:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. You have to train people to slice them. Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  With shitty machete?

• 32:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, with your terrible machete. And that's why you have it. It's not because you're being targeted by the deep state and the matrix. It's because your girlfriends are going to get angry at you and you have to be able to hit them.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  It's insane.

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 33:00Robert Evans?

  So giving speeches like this, and this is like part of the curriculum for this, this PhD program, you know, sold on in the real world and operated as a prerequisite for getting into the war room. Making stuff like this is how Tate makes his money now, right? He is not primarily in the pimping business anymore because that doesn't make nearly is it's an MLM thing, right? It's an MLM that sells being a pimp, right? This is the same as like DoTerra or whatever, but your business is like coercing women into working on camera for you. And Tate's at the top now, so he doesn't have to actually have to do that. There's much more money in making content like this.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 33:39Robert Evans?

  Now, the purpose of all of these programs is to get people to buy other classes, right? That's what's really sold. The real world's 50 bucks a month, but if you want to get this degree, it's another $400. The war room's eight grand a year, but there are access to additional secret chat rooms that cost thousands of additional dollars a year, right? And there's access to classes that cost thousands more, and there's all these in-person gatherings that cost money. And one of Tate's mottos is that no great man ever got there on his own, right? So he's, he says like, you need these, you need to be part of this network. And it's all so familiar to like the ML, the standard MLM schema when you really look at it like that. And that's what's really changed my understanding of Tate from this is an influencer who is

• 34:23Robert Evans?

  mobilizing his fan base to make himself more famous to this is a guy who, whatever his initial goal was, he's now Amway. He's now the Amway of hitting women, right? Like that's, that's what Andrew Tate's business is.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  He's got Keith Raniere energy.

• 34:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about Keith Raniere because there's a lot of Keith Raniere to Andrew Tate.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:44Robert Evans?

  And I think to some extent, it's maybe if Tate had come up in an earlier era before all the anti-woke stuff got as big as it was before the far right was ascendant, he would have tried more for the culturally kind of like left-wing image that a guy like Raniere cultivated where like, no, no, no, I'm part of like this progressive movement, empowering women. I think Andrew might have gone in that direction.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 35:08Robert Evans?

  He probably wouldn't have been as successful because I think he's just kind of inherently also a dick, but.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  He's, he's, he's certainly shaped by like the tides of history around him.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:17Robert Evans?

  Now, former members of the war room, not only are they being kind of taught to groom these women that they're trafficking in a culty way, they also describe the war room as a cult itself. And the basis of that BBC report is that the leader of the actual cult inside the war room isn't even Tate, he's just the figurehead. The individual responsible for most of this content and curriculum and for the culture of the platform is a completely different guy, who goes by the pseudonym Iggy Simmelweis on, you know, in the war room, right? And I'm not 100% in agreement with the BBC on the, how much this guy is actually running things behind the scenes.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Is he a real person?

• 35:56Robert Evans?

  He's certainly a major figure. He is a real person. We'll give his real name. His nickname is odd to me. Iggy, when I first heard Iggy Simmelweis, I was like, that sounds familiar. And me being me, whenever I'm like, well, that guy's name sounds familiar, my assumption is like, so he's some sort of Nazi, right? Like, this is some sort of guy, like, but I look him up and I remembered where I read about him from, because he's someone I've intended to tell his story on bastards for a while. He's actually not a bastard, but there's a lot of awful stuff in his story. Ignat Simmelweis was a real guy, and a really, the precise opposite of a bad guy. He was a, he was a Hungarian German doctor. And he's the guy who was basically first in like, an organized way making the scientific case for like, hey, we should use an aseptics. You know, people always die

• 36:39Robert Evans?

  when we give surgery or we cut off their limbs. What if we like, cleaned things first? What if we cleaned the saw?

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Dude, what a great, what a great idea, my guy.

• 36:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, great idea.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Sounds like a good guy.

• 36:51Robert Evans?

  He was a good guy, yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  As somebody who really, really, really, really, really likes hand sanitizer.

• 36:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Well done.

• 36:58Robert Evans?

  Iggy Simmelweis is the father of hand sanitizer. He's also the father, he was the first major figure, who was like a respected Western scientist, to be like, surgeons and doctors should probably wash their fucking hands, right?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe we should clean some shit.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  As somebody who unfortunately had surgery this year, thank you, my guy. Wow.

• 37:16Robert Evans?

  You say that Sophie, but it turns out that, no, he was fine, but at a certain period of time, telling doctors that they needed to wash their hands was very dangerous. Because if you're telling doctors, hey, before you reach your hand into someone's chest cavity, you should like wash it with like soap and stuff. You're telling doctors, your hands are covered in germs that get people sick. And doctors are better than regular people, right? They are educated gentlemen. And if you're telling an educated gentleman, you're dirty and you might get a poor person sick by touching inside of their body. That is deeply offensive. And it really pissed off a lot of people, so many that Semmelweis was hounded into a,

• 38:00Robert Evans?

  like hounded into like having a mental break and then forced into a mental asylum where he was beaten by guards and died of an infected injury.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Cause they weren't washing their hands.

• 38:10Robert Evans?

  Cause they weren't washing their fucking hands.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  I do get a lot of joy when I know something that my doctor brother doesn't.

• 38:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  I'm like, ha ha.

• 38:19Robert Evans?

  The father of being like, wash your fucking hands, people.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  God.

• 38:24Robert Evans?

  Now.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Is everybody just so tiny? Just so tiny? Wash your hands.

• 38:31Robert Evans?

  No, I mean, they do it now. They gotta round do it.

• 38:35Robert Evans?

  We just had to lose a luminary first. Now, again, the real.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Why would he pick this name? I don't understand.

• 38:41Robert Evans?

  That I don't know, because he has nothing to do with this guy, right? Um, other than maybe he feels like he, I guess I could make a case that like, oh, he probably sees the world he's in is filled with like germs, which is, you know, other people having rights.

• 39:00Robert Evans?

  And maybe he's the, he's, he's the persecuted doctor who like sees the way things should be.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Step away from the computer screen, touch grass, go to therapy.

• 39:09Robert Evans?

  No, I don't want this guy to go do anything.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 39:12Robert Evans?

  The real dude is an American named Miles Sonken, right? That's the actual guy who uses the name.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  I don't, yeah, all right.

• 39:19Robert Evans?

  I don't know.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Weird little guy, okay?

• 39:21Robert Evans?

  When the BBC got access to a bunch of leaked chats for its documentary, The Man Who Groomed the World, the journalist behind it, Matt Shea, came away with the opinion that Sonken is the brains and the ideological weight behind Tate's whole war room operation. And he makes a pretty good case, again. I disagree with aspects of it. Shay has put more time into this than I have. And he spent a lot of time around Tate. He's met Sonken in person. He's met a number of key figures here. So I'm going to yield to his expertise, even though I'm not sure I agree with him entirely. And we'll talk about who this guy is. But first, let's talk about who our advertisers are, other than great people, which they are.

• 40:02Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Dovato, Dolutigrevir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Dovato was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Dovato is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

• 40:26Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Dovato is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Dovato without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Dovato if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetolide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Dovato and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 41:02Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 41:11Speaker 06

  It's 6:47 on a Friday. Your team's already gone home. And somewhere, a phone is ringing. It's a customer. They're ready to book. Nobody picks up, so they call the next company. That's a missed call and missed revenue. With Quo, you don't have to choose between doing the work and answering the phone. Your team can share calls, texts, and customer conversations in one place. And when no one's available, Quo's AI assistant can answer, handle questions, and even book the appointment for you. So whether you're on a job, in a meeting, or done for the day, your business can keep answering. Setup takes minutes. The number you already have and add your team as you grow. No IT required. It's why over 90,000 companies trust QUO, the number one rated business phone system on G2.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  Money is on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free, then get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/behind. That's Q U O dot com slash behind.

• 42:12Robert Evans?

  Sonken was born in Chicago, 1961, and he's been described in interviews by family members as a smart kid. And here's the most dangerous word we ever use on the show. He was also an autodidact, right? So he's this kid who learns a lot on his own and doesn't really go to high school, but educates himself. Now, unfortunately, when you do that, there tend to be holes in your education.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Right. I feel like you can get pretty siloed into some weird shit.

• 42:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. This is one of our great problems is that if the things you're interested in wind up being worth a lot of money, you can get by never learning about anything else and also convincing yourself that you understand the world because you've made a lot of money. And I think that's kind of what's going to happen to Sonken. And he pays an initial, he pays initially some like consequences for it because he immediately gets sucked into two different cults.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  I just sent Ian a picture of the guy. That's why his face is doing that.

• 43:05Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. No, he does. He does look like a wizard, right? He looks like an evil wizard. Yes.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  It's so bad. This beard is terrible.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  It's very pointy.

• 43:14Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. No, I'll believe he's using the fucking dentist system to get his, get himself a harem.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Malcolm, please insert a picture here, please. There's, there's, there's a good one. You'll know which one.

• 43:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Wizard.

• 43:33Robert Evans?

  So his self-education makes him kind of vulnerable to getting taken advantage of as a young man. And as a result, he joins two different cults, right? When he's a young person, or as I say, two different organizations widely regarded as cults. And the second is the Rajneesh movement, who was the focus of the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. So he gets sucked into that for a while as a young man. And I think like the eighties, late eighties or nineties. Now, the details of his specific involvement in either cult are not available at this time, but over the years, Sonken evolved from a spiritual seeker into someone who believed that he in fact had the answers. During the early age of the social internet, he became a pickup artist and was one of the first prominent ones online. Starting

• 44:17Robert Evans?

  like the late 90s, early 2000s, he's like on the ground floor of pickup artistry as like an online subculture. He gets really interested in hypnosis and neuro linguistic programming alongside this. And he began to become an advocate of mind controlling women by repeating certain words and phrases. You might recognize this as Pavlovian training applied to dating, and he seems to be the origin of Tate's, you know, get them to bring you chocolate, you know, establish a pattern of obedience in order to break their ability to think separately from you. Now, Sonken is also a self-described wizard. He believes he literally, he's literally casting spells on people. He does that to this journalist when he tries to like interview Andrew Tate.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Well, the look matches, so.

• 44:59Robert Evans?

  He does have like a little bit of a Saruman. If Saruman got his hair done behind a 7-Eleven look. Sonken is a self-described wizard, and as he got into magic, he got more interested in the self, in the more esoteric segments of the far right through the early aughts, the like weird Hitlerism shit. And this is all growing up kind of, for the most part, before people become super aware of it. And then Gamergate helps flood a lot of it. And then the alt-right. Sonken is kind of right in the middle of that. He and Tate seem to have started working together in 2018. And at this point, Andrew Tate is basically a late undergrowth of the pickup artist community focused on camera sex work type stuff. It's unclear how Miles is involved with him, but I think he probably helps to

• 45:44Robert Evans?

  write and formulate a lot of the courses that Andrew was selling during this period. A former member of the War Room, which was established in 2019, describes Iggy as "at the top and the real leader of the platform." And it's, you know, I don't know if I, if I like taking away credit from Tate for being, you know, a puppet master, but these guys are both definitely partners, you know? Sure. And, and, and the kind of things Tate's teaching, a lot of these are not things he came up with himself or wrote himself. The things Semmelweis kind of had on deck that Tate decided to slap his name on. And even this has layers, right? One former member described the War Room as "a bunch of Telegram chats, some for business, or girls, or money."

• 46:27Robert Evans?

  But there are more prestigious rooms that users who have already put in thousands of dollars are expected to shell out thousands more to join. In messages on the War Room Telegram, we can see Sonken posting a simile and giving the same advice Tate gives from that speech we listened to earlier. And this is a message from him to War Room members. "Isolating her from her family, friends, past is the kindest thing you can do for her if you are taking responsibility for having sole authority over her." And then in another post, "We deliberately reduce attention and note if she chases. Then we set up a coffee date and execute a move to find if she's willing to pay for our coffee and serve us. After that, it becomes a series of gradual steps to remove her entire support structure from her life. Then we punish her for her transgression, real or imagined, by having her get our name

• 47:09Robert Evans?

  tattooed on her, leaving her family's home, apartment, town, country. Webcam-ing and stripping, walking the track for us, getting us girls escalate, escalate, escalate." So this is really Keith Raniere stuff. They're doing the branding thing, right? Where you have to get tattoos or scarify yourself with the name of this guy.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Pretty gross.

• 47:30Robert Evans?

  It's pretty gross. Now, I think it'd be wise, if you wanted to do so, to view the War Room and the real world as kind of a modern day answer to the Church of Scientology.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, yeah, there's so many parallels. I was thinking of this entire time.

• 47:45Robert Evans?

  Ton of parallels. And obviously Hubbard is a reflection of the big self-help culture of his time. The Scientology starts off as an offshoot of the self-improvement movement with a book called Dianetics, which instructed readers on a series of exercises that would clear them of trauma and bad habits and make them superhuman. One of the dominant subcultures of the early internet age, as I've said, was the pick-up artist scene. And the inherent scamminess of a lot of this culture influenced the growth of the modern YouTube scam economy, as well as the ecosystem of far-right content creators who helped birth the Trump administration. So it does make sense that Tate and Sonken would form a cult around what is at its estance, rebranded pick-up artistry.

• 48:30Robert Evans?

  The BBC documentary makes it sound like this was all Sonken's plan from the beginning, and it quotes former members who described his ultimate goal as "world domination through the spread of his ideology," right? He wants to get this to everybody. He wants to take over the world with this. But also, how is anyone going to make money with their cam businesses in that future?

• 48:51Robert Evans?

  It's like if you wanted to take over the world by building a bunch of tire shops. So well, at a certain point, your tire shops aren't going to be worth any money. There's two, do you not understand supply and demand? I don't know. Not the most logical movement.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Math, math's not adding up at all here.

• 49:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the math's not really adding up. So Samuel Quinones was interviewed for a Vice article. This is a, he is a founding member of the war room, but says that he quit about six months in because, quote, "I recognize the up-selling of useless courses and events, much like an MLM."

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, so dumb enough to join, smart enough to leave.

• 49:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's another guy who's like, yeah, I was working on their socials for a while. I didn't realize they were trafficking women. And the interviewer asked, like, do you feel bad for that? And he's like, well, no, I didn't really know what was going on. Okay, man, I don't know. There were still some unknowns, such as how much financial advantage is taken of in the war room, inner circle members, right? We don't know if Andrew's getting money from each of these guys in the war room, a cut of their profits from, you know, trafficking women. But we do know that about 1% of the people who join actually get a lot of money, which is not super different from Amway, right?

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, like, were there any, like, success stories or people who actually did get rich from this? And it sounds like no.

• 50:07Robert Evans?

  It's hard to really tell, but I mean, I'm sure there are definitely people making money from having women do this for them. But anyone who winds up net in the black is fairly rare. Mahmoud, a former member, told Vice, "There was nobody that was making any real money," he said, citing conversations he had with other students in the platform's chat rooms and the empty win section on most users' profiles that track the lack of earnings. "These people inside there that are reliving, that are leaving their schools or units to pursue this," he said, adding that one of his friends on the platform told him that he had abandoned his university studies to go all in on the program.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 50:41Robert Evans?

  I don't know. I don't know. Like, if you could be convinced not to go to university because you're hoping that, like, you could become the next Andrew Tate, maybe you shouldn't be getting whatever degree you were getting.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  There's this, uh, there's this, like, trend on TikTok right now that's like, uh, needed, I just needed a hug thing. It's like, fuck, did something, did something like crazy, but really just needed a hug. And it's just so many of these things, I'm like...

• 51:14Speaker 02

  You just need like one person like

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Aware of like one person being aware of what was going on in your life to be like, "Hey, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's an MLM," or like, "Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, "Manosphere, Manosphere," or, "Ah, no, no, no, no, no, we don't abuse women."

• 51:30Robert Evans?

  And the thing that you're being kind of continually pushed to do in the real world is put out more videos that will get more people to subscribe to Tate services. And if you get out enough, and you have a certain number of people watching you, you get affiliate status, right? Which is where you get a cut of people who join and you pay into Tate programs through your videos. So, top war room generals act as social enforcers using humiliation to force young men to go into war mode, where they would labor for days, often 16 to 20 hours at a time, with very little sleep in order to make Tate content go viral. States were required to post four to six videos a day and harassed with their met, if their metrics weren't good enough. And, you know, I would make more about how horrible this is, but a lot of this just sounds out how like working at Facebook is right now. So, I don't know.

• 52:14Robert Evans?

  Could be a better boss, could be worse. Both in the war room itself, discussion tended to focus around sharing clips of text with messages from different women members who were, from different women that members were pursuing or trying to converse into what we would call trafficking. The most granular write-up of how people converse in the war room documentary, in the war room, come from the Substack of a guy called Crabman, who is the source for the NBC's documentary, right? He brings them some of these leaked documents, and he takes great pains to break down what's going in and on each of these discussions. In one chat in the Great Hall, which seems to be a general discussion area, Tristan described how well-trained Andrew's girls are, and that girls who don't play ball are expelled. Crabman writes, "Here's the thing, it's all the game to Andrew.

• 52:57Robert Evans?

  He tells our war room members, 'You have to risk it all by losing to get to the next bet. Sometimes you lose. I've lost girls, doesn't always work, but that's why you gotta find new ones. And the ones that it does work for, those are the ones you keep. That's just how you build a good harem of girls, you know? Because some girls ju, it just like it. Some girls, the system, the system works, but if we have another guy, they kind of half like, or whatever outside influences. Sometimes you do lose them when you play hardball. But I play hardball ball anyway, because it's all I'm interested in. I want the 100. I don't give, want the five, so I'll gamble it. That's the basic premise."

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Ugh.

• 53:29Robert Evans?

  Romantic.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Prick.

• 53:33Robert Evans?

  Now, Andrew blames that this PhD test alone, being able to defend himself from angry women was fundamental to becoming a millionaire, right? A little further down, though, in texts within the war room, he complains that nothing he tries works as well since he got famous, right? Quote, "Girls are too defensive. They instantly assume you message every hot girl. It destroys PhD success rate. Seriously, unless you want to be a sugar daddy, which I don't." So even he's like, "Yeah, now that people know my face, nobody wants anything to do with me."

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's your face, asshole.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  That's what it is.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  It's your face, it's not your-

• 54:09Speaker 01

  So he's just like, basically admitting that like, none of this shit really works. Like, "But you just gotta keep trying and keep giving me money and maybe you'll get lucky."

• 54:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. So he's bragging that his old techniques don't work since he's been verified on social media. Quote, "Girls are too defensive. They instantly assume you message every hot girl. It destroys PhD success rate. Seriously, unless you want to be a sugar daddy, which I don't." Uh, other members post pictures of cars that they purportedly bought with funds earned by their harems and give blow-by-blow accounts of their own flirtation journeys. A popular thing to post are messages from women that the poster has ignored as part of Andrew's strategy hinges on denying attention in order to build interest. So there's just like clips of women being like, "When are you coming? Hi, why are you ignoring me?" And like, "See, look at this win. I'm not responding to this woman that I like." And it's just, it's both this-

• 55:00Speaker 01

  So dumb.

• 55:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's such like pick-up artist and sell stuff and also such, again, it's the dentist system.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like the nagging shit from like, pick-up artists.

• 55:09Robert Evans?

  It's nagging, none of it's new. It's just been repackaged in, in a way that-

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:15Robert Evans?

  It's been repackaged to sell an MLM, right? It doesn't matter if this works. Some number of men will always, I don't know if it's because of the individual people they're going after or something about their chara- their, their, their personal characteristics, um, will be successful enough with this to convince themselves that it's worth, worthwhile. And 99% will have nothing happen, but they'll pay for long enough that it makes it worthwhile, right? It's the same with like, yes, some people sell Amway- Products, or at least sell a few Amway products and then get a lot of people to sign up for Amway. And so they do make money. That's just about 1% of Amway. Everyone else is kind of taking a bath. Now, there's also kind of a Raniiri vibe within these kind of like the elite war room chats.

• 55:57Robert Evans?

  There's a lot of discussion on how to permanently mark women, which is considered the ultimate sign of success. That like you have gotten this person so in your spell that you've gotten them to tattoo your name on their body. This seems to be a core aspect of Similwise's teachings. I think he's the main person who introduced this. It's kind of unclear to me, but all these guys are constantly posting either them attempting to convince women to do this. And, you know, there's this mix of like people saying no and getting dumped. So this message here is between like Tate, she's like showing him a tattoo that she's got. And he's saying like, I want you to get my name tattooed on you. I don't want this like other tattoo. And she's asking him like, when will we get married?

• 56:42Robert Evans?

  And he says, you know, now, as soon as you you get the tattoo. And she's like, okay, but then if you leave me, I'll still have your name on my body. And that's kind of fucked up. And he's like, why would I leave? Are you saying you're not going to be good to me? There's kind of the most telling thing at the end here is she eventually, he says, yes, it'll make me happy if you get this tattoo. And she says, okay, I'll do it. I cannot write great. My dad does not have to see. So I don't know how old this girl is.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Too young.

• 57:14Robert Evans?

  Very young. Again, this is, these are the people that are being reached out towards, right? These are not adults. These are not people who are like have mature brains. Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Thing is, but show me with your fingers how big I'm very uncomfortable.

• 57:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's gross. Now, the messages posted here are from back in 2019. So this is an older era of the war room and it's hard to say where things are now with the culture there. Since the beginning of the litigation against Andrew, when he was initially incarcerated, he made a lot of claims that his war room friends would watch out for his interests and even take care of his stuff while he was away. There is an extent to which this seems to be true. And what we know of the network suggests an intricate community and a number of people who do have resources. And this kind of cult like devotion to Andrew and to the group. Now, there's been some good work done to kind of lie out, lay out who is involved in this community. The BBC documentary did a lot of it. Bellingcat did an article on it.

• 58:14Robert Evans?

  One of these guys, you know, these people who are like, these are both folks who are presumably paying Andrew thousands or tens of thousands of year, a year, but are also like working and getting money of their own. You might call them the high level Amway distributors of the war room in the real world. One of them is a guy who has a YouTube channel called Sartorial Shooter. He's a former Australian soldier and a current Dubai resident, lot of Dubai residencies here, who claims to have gone into the intelligence world and worked all around the planet. He claims to have weapons and tactics trading facilities everywhere. Now, as is always the case with these guys, that's a bit of an exaggeration. His real name is Joel Sullivan. He's, you know, one of the leading lights of the war

• 58:57Robert Evans?

  room. Bellingcat revealed that he was a former director of international security for a global healthcare company, which is not a nothing job, but it's not exactly James Bond.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, he wants you to, he wants you to think he's like out here being a super spy.

• 59:12Robert Evans?

  Some sort of like mercenary, special operator spies. Like, no, you worked for like a healthcare company directing security. And again, there's not nothing there, but it's not quite what you're claiming it is.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 59:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Another key general of Andrew's goes by the Twitter title First Prince of Wu Dong, which will remember is he's got this sort of pretend mythic story about how he learned to be a martial arts master. The actual guy behind this account is a current Delta pilot and a former US Air Force major who the BBC detailed posting about his use of Tate's techniques to try and coerce women into doing sex work for his financial benefit.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  God.

• 59:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's all just like the grossest dudes. Like, some of them do have money. So, so it is like, it's not like these are, like, the people at the top, number one, they're generally people who have had a degree of success before getting involved in Andrew Tate's thing. So, number one, they have some money of their own. So, they're able to like bootstrap themselves until they can make money getting, you know, affiliates, basically, People in and selling them on subscriptions, which they seem to get a cut of. And they're also just people who have been more successful. They're older, so they can kind of replicate some degree of the scams that Andrew has carried out. And I really think like, that's all that's going on here with these guys.

• 1:00:31Robert Evans?

  None of them are, Andrew wants them to look like they're like the secret masters of the world, and they're not that. They're guys who are probably making like mid to low six-figure salaries, like they're doing well. They're, they've got positions that afford them a decent degree of income and they want to be more. And so I think a lot of this for them and why it's worth, because you know, a pilot, that kind of income, you can afford to throw eight grand at some shit like this, especially if you're making some of it back through whatever the affiliate scheme pays you. And maybe the fantasy of being part of this like elite group of men is worth more to you than whatever amount of money that you kind of burn.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Right. It's like speaks to a larger issue. Like it's not about the money for them or like trying to get rich. It's like a deeper issue of like the control of women and manipulating people and everything.

• 1:01:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, there's a lot that I could really get into, like more stuff about all this here. One of the more difficult parts of doing this was knowing how to, what to cut out and what to include. I do want to note one thing, which is that some of the, one of my favorite, uh, one of my favorite side facts of this is there's some messages that Tristan Tate posts to the war room about how a guy named Ivan Throne is crashing on their couch in Romania. Have either of you heard of Ivan Throne?

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:01:50Robert Evans?

  So he's, he's, he's a really low-grade manfluencer hack. He's like a big bearded dude who always poses in like a suit or he's got like, kind of like a fucking goatee. He always poses in a suit. He wrote this book about like the dark triad man, which is like using the power of sociopathy in order to like make yourself a better business leader or whatnot. And he used to do, he did, he had a Tate-style grift that just didn't do well called Throne Dynamics, where like men would pay to go to these summits where they'd eat steak and smoke cigars and talk about, you know, make connections about their, their great businesses, uh, which are again, mostly like pickup artistry, like right-wing, like, like, like low-grade right-wing propaganda bullshit.

• 1:02:35Robert Evans?

  And the reason I bring up Ivan is that he was part of my favorite moment in the history of Twitter. So I'm gonna share that with you. So he posts a picture of there's this like very photorealistic statue of like a beautiful young white lady with long flowing hair. The fabric work on the statue is really nice. Like you can see she's got this sheer shirt. It's like, it's, it's like a sexy sculpture, right? Like it's definitely meant to be. She has nipples. She's got nipples.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  It's provocative.

• 1:03:03Robert Evans?

  It's provocative. And Ivan posts this to his Twitter account and says, "This is called art. This is the legacy and heritage of the West. This is what the men of the West fight, sacrifice, and die for. This is victory. #DeusVult." And one of his followers asks him, "Is there an example of a female sculptor who committed himself to the same level of detail that a man does with a woman?" And Ivan responds, "None that come to mind. That sculpture's an act of worship before heaven, and it shows." And someone just responds with a picture of the artist next to its sculptor and says, "The sculptor is a Chinese woman, you dork-ass losers."

• 1:03:41Robert Evans?

  Fucking knocked. And he, and he just like, that was it for Ivan. Like, I understand why he's crashing on Andrew Tate's couch for a while, because that just fucking nukes him as a human being.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  You can't come back from that.

• 1:03:51Robert Evans?

  And learning that like Tristan Tate's his buddy, and he was like bumming, like couch surfing with the Tates in 2019, 20, extremely fucking funny to me. Now, one of the other things that's kind of missed, the great mysteries that's answered from these leaks is why Andrew keeps coming back to Romania, which I had to have to admit, as I kept looking through like what he's doing, what's going on with him, this was like a constant thing for me. Like, why in the fuck is this guy not, he's, he does have money. He's not poor. He's got millions at least that they still didn't have access to. They didn't get everything. He has friends in Dubai. He is able to, he could get a permanent residency in Dubai. And if you think you might go to prison for all of your sex crimes and you're this guy, Dubai is where you want to wind up. And the fact that he like visited and

• 1:04:35Robert Evans?

  then came back, that he went back to Romania, I didn't know why until I found this post of his on The War Room, that I think kind of explains it, right? "I've been everywhere, and let me tell you a few things. The world is basically the same. Temples and churches are bullshit, and you're better off fighting..." The best spot you can and becoming a local force than float around all day like a digital nomad dork. There's no club on earth better than the club here in Romania. I have 20 girls at the table. Security knows knows me. No one fucks with me. Why leave? And I think that that really gets right down to it is he's like, he's found his place. And he's pretty confident that Romania will botch the prosecution against him enough that he can continue to live there. And I think he,

• 1:05:15Robert Evans?

  he doesn't really want to live in Dubai because as much of a like stereotypical place as it is for guys like him. It doesn't have the same kind of opportunities for the sort of debauchery that he's into, right? It just there. It's a stricter culture in some ways than that, even for some guys with money. And he could, if he was posting the kind of videos that he tends to post, he could get in trouble at some point. And I think he's just, he's just convinced of the fact that he can make this work for himself. That's, that's really what I'm saying.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's like they treat him like a god in Romania. He's like, why would I go anywhere else? Like I have it pretty good here. Yeah.

• 1:05:53Robert Evans?

  And he might get away. Yeah. You know?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Robert Evans?

  All right. That's what I got. That's the Andrew Tate update. That's where he is right now.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  So it sounds like he's still a piece of shit. Okay.

• 1:06:03Robert Evans?

  Still a piece of shit.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Update. Ew.

• 1:06:07Robert Evans?

  Yep. Update. Ew. Gross guy. We're done with him for a while again. Probably don't have to go back to Andrew Tate. For a minute until, until some of this court cases get more adjudicated, right?

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess.

• 1:06:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  Gross.

• 1:06:25Robert Evans?

  So that's it. That's our update on Andrew.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Uh, Ian, you have anything you want to plug?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just want to plug, uh, the Los Angeles Lakers and my glorious king LeBron James. Uh, playoffs are about to start Lakers in five. That's all I gotta say. And, uh, listen to hood politics. It's a good show.

• 1:06:42Robert Evans?

  Listen to hood politics. It's a good show. Don't subscribe to the war room. Sophie, we should have a place. People can give us $8,000 a year if they want to. Wouldn't that be nice?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Cool. The coolest zone media.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  We're not, we're not that desperate.

• 1:06:56Robert Evans?

  Give me $8,000 zone media.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  If we're ever asking you for $8,000, it's not us. It's a scam.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Something's gone terribly wrong.

• 1:07:06Robert Evans?

  Unless I say it's definitely me.

• 1:07:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  You know.

• 1:07:13Robert Evans?

  In which case, it's definitely me. I would never lie to you unless someone cloned my voice with AI, in which case I would definitely lie to you.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  Oh, God. You know, Andrew Tate isn't great.

• 1:07:27Robert Evans?

  Andrew Tate isn't great.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  Lakers in five.

• 1:07:31Robert Evans?

  All right. So if he's gonna go watch the Lakers, I'm gonna like stand outside in the sun or some shit.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't even play today. I'm just excited.

• 1:07:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Great.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:09Speaker 07

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Crew sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events,

• 1:08:52Speaker 07

  DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at bkfsea.com.

• 1:09:07Speaker 05

  Hear every word and feel every beat with VIZIO's powerful and immersive soundbar lineup. Whether it's a streamlined all-in-one, flexible surround sound with the 4.1 Pro Wireless, or pure cinematic surround sound and thunderous bass with the 5.1 Wireless Soundbar, VIZIO has the perfect fit for any room and any setup. Blast your favorite tunes and podcasts with the iHeartRadio app and hear every beat.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  Every beat like you're sitting front row. Upgrading your entertainment has never been easier. Discover Vizio's Full Soundbar Collection at Walmart or walmart.com today. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.