Robert and Sophie are joined by Cool Zone Media supervising producer, Ian Johnson to discuss Andrew Tate, and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement. Includes Part 1 & 2 with less ad breaks. Update series dropping next week! Better Offline & Weird Little Guys are nominated for this year’s Webby Awards! Get your votes in by April 17th! 🗳️🗳️🗳️https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2025/podcasts/individual-episode/businesshttps://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2025/podcasts/individual-episode/crime-justice FOOTNOTES: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/108090691/chess-family-strives-to-keep-pressures/ https://youtu.be/bsu-IoE8J4A https://youtu.be/VIsKh-dtnQA https://books.google.com/books?id=-4j9wgEACAAJ&newbks=0 https://www.insidesport.in/andrew-tate-what-is-top-g-andrew-tates-religion/ https://youtu.be/EpR9ucpGpWs https://youtu.be/UVUcv7yyJIA https://youtu.be/IgdWYaz-6ZY https://youtube.com/shorts/RirKfcVP2OM?feature=share https://youtu.be/cI-Ps1NIU4w https://youtu.be/M-doheMG424 https://youtu.be/fFky34MAeGg https://youtu.be/JyNizUlYTC https://thecourseplace.net/product/andrew-tate-phd-program-full/ https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/who-is-andrew-tate-from-kickboxing-champ-to-accused-human-trafficker/ar-AA166CnO https://web.archive.org/web/20220811143550/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynistic-world-of-tiktok-new-star https://youtu.be/LqGmS_9zCkU https://www.insider.com/andrew-tate-says-women-at-house-not-allowed-out-video-2023-1 https://archive.is/MEhRiOn https://www.jointherealworld.com/ https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/andrew-tates-hospital-visit-sparks-conflicting-reports-about-his-health/ar-AA1684ty https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/andrew-tate-tiktok-fame-men-2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/30/andrew-tate-explainer-arrested-greta-misogyny/ https://rumble.com/v1gluzu-the-worst-things-about-being-rich-.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/andrew-tate-how-make-money-arrested-romania-b2256514.html https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/brothers-make-millions-using-webcam-26508739 https://archiIve.is/hAhhQ https://archive.is/lwViQ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ikrd/andrew-tate-hustlers-university https://www.vox.com/culture/2023/1/10/23547393/andrew-tate-toxic-masculinity-qa https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/02/03/mens-movement-stalks-the-wild-side/83d3e85f-1384-484c-8e43-c4e30e1229f4/ https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2021/12/a-snowy-poem-by-robert-bly/ https://ew.com/article/1991/04/19/robert-blys-mens-movement/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1967/12/21/protest/ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ikrd/andrew-tate-daria-gusa-instagram-dm?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharetwitter See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests discussing Andrew Tate?
So this Mental Health Awareness Month, take that extra bit of care of your well-being. Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, everybody. Robert here. First off, we are doing a rewind week because I've written two new Andrew Tate episodes. But also, my birthday came recently. We took some time off. So we're going to take this week to replay the first four Tate episodes with ad breaks and stuff removed.
I also wanted to tell you Ed Zitron is in the running for a Webby for his show Better Offline, as is Molly Conger for Weird Little Guys. Please go to the Webbys, vote for them. You can find the links in the show notes along with our other links there. You can also just Google Ed Citron Webby's, Molly Conger Webby's, and you will find them. Please do vote for them.
We'll be back next week with two brand new episodes on what Tate has been up to over the last couple of years and a bunch of really fucked up information that's come up. So please enjoy these episodes, the reruns with less ads, and go vote in the Webby's. Welcome to hell, motherfuckers! I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that has just encountered one of the worst disasters of its career. So we'll get into this more later. This is supposed to be and is going to be the first of several episodes about Andrew Tate.
and the mythopoetic men's movement that led to his rise to fame and influence among a generation of young men, we started recording this episode just a few hours ago with the wonderful April Clark and Grace Freud of the Girl God podcast. And anyway, we recorded a little bit with them, and then I had a minor emergency, which has taken me out of the house for a while. Things are okay.
You don't need to... flip out on Reddit or whatever. But it was a it was a problem. And we were not able to record with them to finish recording with them. And because of the holiday, we have no backlog. So in order to get this episode done and ready for our editor ASAP, Sophie is going to be my guest today, along with Ian, our editor.
Um, and we will get this out as soon as possible, uh, cause otherwise we will not have a show and we are contractually obligated to provide you with entertainment every single week, uh, until the heat death of the universe. Um, but I do want to shout out April and Grace who are wonderful, who came on and booked time for us. And I'm sorry that things got messed up.
We will have them back on the pod, um, at some point in the near future. And I wanted to let people know, uh, that there is, they have an upcoming show, uh, at JFO Vancouver, uh,
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Chapter 2: What is Andrew Tate's influence on Gen Z and social media?
Um, so my limited knowledge of him is he's a, I believe a former MMA fighter who I don't know how he made a lot of money, but it seems like he has a lot of money from what I've seen on the internet.
We will be talking about how, yeah.
And he's into a lot of misogynistic men rights kind of stuff. And, uh, he got thoroughly destroyed online by, um, Greta. So I, I do remember that. Um, and I think he's in jail now.
He is in jail now. Unrelated to the Greta stuff, there was a little bit of confusion about that. But yes, he is in jail for sex trafficking in Romania. Sophie, is that more or less your understanding of the guy?
Yeah, he fucking sucks.
Yeah, he does indeed fucking suck. Unfortunately, he's also kind of worth studying in detail because he's managed to do something with social media that I don't think anyone else has ever managed to the same degree of success. He has he's he's smart in one very specific way, even though he also did a bunch of dumb things and some really dumb crimes that hopefully have ruined his life.
He was he was smart in one in a way that has allowed him to become dangerously influential to an entire generation of teenage boys in a way that like no one on Earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump is really the only other guy that. that I might put next to Tate in that kind. And I think Tate has a wider appeal among Gen Z teens and tweens than certainly Trump ever has.
Yeah, it's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content shows up.
Yeah. We're going to be talking about all that. I am... One of the things, when I started looking into this guy, there's a ton of articles about... Because he blew up kind of mid-2021 up until, you know, the arrest a couple of weeks ago. There's not...
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Chapter 3: What is the background and rise of Andrew Tate?
Yeah, I was going to say, anybody who's that famous on YouTube, I'm a little bit like, hmm.
Yeah. No good people get famous on YouTube, which is what I text our friend Cody Johnston every single day when he releases a new YouTube video.
Fair.
Anyway, the Andrew Tate hashtag on TikTok has received more than 10 billion views over the course of 2022 alone, which is fucking nuts. That is insane. That is like... incomprehensibly viral. He was also, he will always claim that he's like the most Googled person on earth. I looked into what he actually is. That's not quite it.
He is the number one, when you type in who is into Google, who is Andrew Tate is the number one who is question asked of Google in 2022. which is not the same as being the most Googled person on Earth, although he is one of the most Googled people on Earth. I found a couple of lists of that, and he's often at, like, number eight, someplace closer to, like, ten. But, like, he's incredibly famous.
I just tested that, and it is in factory.
Yes.
Top ten most Googled person on the planet is – that's a lot of people.
That is a fuckload of people. And in some accounts, he's like beating Donald Trump, which again, Trump is the literal president. And it's interesting because his career – you can compare him to a guy like Joe Rogan, right? Joe – there's nothing that people like wonder why he's popular, but there's no mystery as to how he became popular. He's got a very – he's been consistently – The trajectory.
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Chapter 4: Who is Robert Bly and what is his role in the mythopoetic men's movement?
He accepts the money for the sake of my work. It will enable him to live in his inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken place before he begins to use the money for his work. And I actually find that a really affecting critique. I think about that a lot just in terms of like...
number one, this desire I have a lot where I'll just be kind of like churning through the muck of a bunch of horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress or like see some horrible Twitter thing, culture war shit roll up and want to feel this urge to like, well, fuck this. I don't want to pay attention to this anymore.
I just want to discard this from my life and focus on this like piece of art or creativity that I think most people feel that most reasonable people feel that way a lot. And what he's saying is like, How can you call yourself a writer? How can you call yourself an artist and attempt to discard the outer world in favor of the one that you focus on for your creativity? Like, how can you actually...
be connected to your inner world in any way and, and feel as if you can pretend the outer world does not exist. You're doing the same thing as a businessman who focuses entirely on his, his desire to, to make money and ignores his spiritual development. Like there's not a fundamental moral difference between what the two of you are doing.
Cause you're both, uh, you're both rejecting half of, of, of,
your being in order to to stick with the one that's more comfortable because of whatever you you've chosen as your profession and in the case of of yeah i don't know i found an attrition critique that makes me think a lot about myself um maybe maybe check out what bly has to say about the vietnam war and he put his money where his mouth was he used that article to republish a letter he'd sent to the chairman of the national foundation of the on the arts and humanities
Because they had offered him a $5,000 grant, and he turns it down because he's like, look, this is an instrument of the United States government, and I am opposed to a war they are waging. And even though I could argue that like, well, if I take this money, it won't get spent on bombs. What I'm really doing is providing legitimacy to the state that is carrying out this terrible war.
And I'm simply not going to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to support it in any way, even by letting it support me, which whether or not you agree with it is a deeply principled stance that requires sacrificing something.
Yeah, so when does he... Right, he's not a bad guy so far. Yeah, I'm waiting.
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Chapter 5: What is the myth of Iron John and how does it relate to masculinity?
After the boy fails a series of trials and acquires a head of golden hair, the wild man kicks him out of the forest, but after he sinks to the low status of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom, the wild man helps him become a mighty warrior, and he wins the hand of the princess, is reunited with his parents, and becomes the rich, heroic king in his own right.
So, you know, I think we're probably missing some context there, just from culture, but it's like... I get why that's not in like the, the tight five of Grimm's fairy tales. Like that's, that's maybe the one you leave on the cutting room floor.
That's like the B sides. Yeah.
That's like a B side. Yeah. That's like, that's like, I don't know the, one of the, one of the Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore. Um,
To be fair, it's up against Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood.
It's not a Snow White grade fairy tale. It would be funny to see modern Disney try to do this.
Yeah. I mean, the actual Grimm's fairy tales are pretty horrific, to be honest.
Yeah, this one also might be one of the tamer ones. I don't know. I'm not an expert on fairy tales.
Well, that's why Disney was like, mm, too tame, not into it.
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Chapter 6: How did the mythopoetic men's movement develop and what are its criticisms?
Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country in the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain.
What would you say has been the most hardest recent test of fear? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith.
That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, dickless version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless Dickless Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show.
We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out.
It's a work in progress.
Listen to Beardless Dickless Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We are back. Are we? No. But... Maybe. Okay. So... Here we are. We're talking. We're having a good time. Are we? So Bly's book looks at this myth of Iron John, and he reexamines the myth using Jungian psychology, which is, again, another red flag.
There's perfectly valid reasons to study Jung, but whenever you have somebody who is reevaluating myths using Jungian psychology, they always turn into Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry. That's just the way that it works. So he's trying to find lessons that are going to be meaningful for men struggling with modernity.
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Chapter 7: What are the connections between the mythopoetic men’s movement and modern masculinity influencers?
That sounds very believable, actually.
Peroni, it is essentially water.
I can smell the ad dollars coming in right now.
Yeah, Primoni, sponsor us, you cowards.
But you see, like, what he's making there, and this is not a point that, like, this is not a point Andrew Tate would make, right? Because these guys are all hyper-competitive.
Right, right, right.
And that's a huge part of, like, what they're talking about, whereas one of the, like, Bly is, at his core, a large part of what he's complaining about is totally rational, which is, like, men aren't allowed to love each other.
Where is it? Yeah. Where is the thing?
Well, that's not the only thing in the book. He's also talking a lot of, yeah.
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Chapter 8: What are the problems and toxic elements emerging from the mythopoetic men’s movement?
And you could say that Bly is just kind of another dude in that he's doing a lot of the same things a lot of these other self-help grifters are doing. But one of the things that differs him is those guys are mostly plying nonsense based on bad interpretations of Eastern religion and psychological abuse. And Bly is kind of, he's not insulting or attacking people. He's not calling them weak.
He's making some reasonable points about stuff that's toxic about our society. And then he's trying to create like mutual cathartic experiences with the men in his audience who are being invited to kind of see the men around them as brothers in a way that's more intimate than maybe they had been trained to do previously.
So again, there's something interesting going on here that isn't even wholly toxic that I think is kind of worth acknowledging as we lead to the parts of it that are a lot more toxic. And it's one of those things where like I've spent a lot of time on incel message boards and they do talk a lot about this feeling of disconnection with society.
So when he says that like young men are not connected to their communities, he's making a decent point. He also one of the points he makes that I thought was interesting is he talks about the differences between female sex ed and male sex ed.
He points out that because of like just basic biological realities of how periods happen, young girls are instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys are not. And it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about their bodies, talking about health problems. And that's probably a valid thing to point out. Sure, but definitely goes both ways. Sure.
And again, he's very he's completely ignorant to. Well, I'm sure there's a lot of things actually, especially today that women are not taught about their bodies because of. Anyway, again, these are a lot of two way problems and he's focusing just on the male aspect of them. But he's not inherently wrong about the male aspect of them. He's just leaving a large part of the equation out.
And that's where the toxicity comes in here.
Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready.
Bly has reached his fundamental message. Men and women are essentially alien, and neither should apologize. They're different tribes, he is saying. My father was an alcoholic, and yet if you look underneath his weakness, there was something there that my mother didn't have. She was fine, but she didn't have it.
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