Behind the BastardsRobert explains the weird cult Andrew Tate created with a wizard and former pick up artist to rob young men and abuse women at scale.
Also media, Oh boy, welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where tired people talk about a guy they hate, in this case Andrew Tate. How are we all doing today? Everybody pull of energy? You just don't know, as the kids say. I don't think the kids say that.
Ready to go. Playoffs are about to start, Lakers and five, so we're good to go.
Yeah, well that's good. Lakers in five sounds like a positive development.
I had a really enjoyable experience of texting Robert late on Sunday when he was very intoxicated a picture of the Labarbie that I've pur purchased, which is Lebron James Kendall, and Robert like call me and go, Sophie, what is this?
And it's just beautiful is what it is?
And I was like, it makes me happy, That's what it is.
The amount of grown men like standing in line trying to get this dolls just it's you can't make it.
They made like a g I Joe, a m or is it a is it a Barbie brand?
Now it's like it's a doll.
Made a Lebron Kindle. Well he's really finally arrived.
I guess yeah, it's sold out so fast, but I was well, I was there, I did it.
I'm gonna guess that's the lowest percentage of Barbie dolls that have ever been bought by little girls.
Probably probably true, probably true.
But it's you know what, it made me happy for like forty five minutes, and when I look at it, all feel joy and like the world sucks.
So yeah, yeah, joy sounds nice.
Take the winds where we can get them.
I remember joy that's been replaced with occasional sleep. Yeah. Speaking of things that bring me joy, this is not one of them. Because today we're going to be talking yet again about our friend Andrew Tait, who is not our friend.
But who is our friend is super residing producer Ian Johnson, who's here once again.
Yeah, thanks for having me back. You can't wait to hear more about the.
Horrors Ian Johnson.
You don't do that. Don't do that. No, No, Robert, I've had thirty five years of that. Please don't contribute.
Yeah, none of that, man, it's it's I've been I had a good 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 Novakane starting a 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 character's name Nathan Kane, which is like, okay, guys, oh that's a little Was that necessary?
Did you have to?
I know it's going to that's going to come out out in a pitch meeting, like, oh what if we called him this? But you didn't need to.
You didn't.
You didn't need to.
Most of the movies 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, you're so close.
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, 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 those people.
I won't deal with the lawsuit.
Later We'll watched the LAPD shoot up a trader Joe's over a hostage situation and killing him.
We don't need that shit here.
Yeah, anyway, speaking of shit nobody needs, we're talking about Andrew Tait 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 cost fifty bucks a month in the real world is you know, if it's Toyota, the war Room is Lexus, that's the premium brand, and the real world is you know, the normal brand that actually makes them the bulk of their money. So we're gonna talk about how these work, how Tate has weaponized them over the years, 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, We're back and Sophie and I are commenting on our same colored drinks.
What's yours, mine's electrolyte.
Water minds, some mix of BCAAs and water. Because this is ostensibly a workout day that yeah, has been a little bit of a shit show, but might as well get whatever those chemicals are. People say they do something sensational. Yeah, yeah, so the doctors say, speaking of things that do something. The war room and so the real world is is kind of the core of Tate's business because it's got between one hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand subscribers at any given time. I think one hundred and seventy k is the estimate you'll hear the most often. And you've got that many people pay in fifty bucks a month. You're talking some serious money. Now, there's wide turnover on that because fifty 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 them for a little while who will be 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 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 real World was originally Hustler's University, which is kind of Tate's first big web platform that kind of taught people how to pick up women and run cam horing business.
So to speak.
And yeah, so we've known these places existed, but they were kind of black boxes until in August of twenty twenty three, a disgruntled I think this is a person who would describe themselves as a rival of Tates, like someone who saw dislikes what he's doing and wanted to get into them. 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 in several articles. Their primary interest as reporters was in laying out how the Tate brothers and their cohorts traffic women and these logs identified forty five potential victims from just the period of March twenty nineteen to April of twenty twenty.
Now, wow, I was just from one year. Yeah, that's crazy.
And this is again there's maybe five hundred people in the war room, and these are the people though, who are much more successful in actually doing the thing Tait 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 skill or the commitment, so they primarily contribute by paying classes that are supposed to teach them how to do that shit. Whereas the war room is full of people who are actually doing the kind of Andrew Tait stuff. So that's why they were able to Like 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. Now, the next year, November of twenty twenty four, a group of anonymous activists managed to breach the real world, which is, you know, the larger platform and the cyber attack exposed the data of some eight hundred thousand people who have used it at some point or another. During the time about one hundred and seventy thousand people were active, So 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 leagues for a while ago. Every time those pieces of shit create something like this, it gets 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.
Right, right, familiar, yep.
So both leaks are interesting for different reasons. But I want to start with the real world because that, again is kind of what funnels people's 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 brokie, 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 hear this a lot with like the way these kids talk to their teachers, and their parents were like, were you just a brokie? Like why would I listen to anything you have to say about life or the world. You don't have as much money as for example, this guy that I'm paying fifty bucks a month for my mom's credit card 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, that's the grift.
Yeah, literally, the Hustlers University thing, yeah.
Yes, right, yes, and so's there's all just like scams to get rich quick essentially, right, yeah, scams to get rich quick, And it's all this this very much like 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 garage that with a sports car and a bunch of shitty business books and him walking you through how he makes twenty thousand dollars 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 pickup artists stuff like here's here are the different tips and tricks for getting women interested in you and how to like, you know, mentally abuse them so they don't leave you. And 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 there are 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 jetsetter 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.
Well.
The platform provides courses on common like passive income schemes. That's another term you'll hear a lot. It's primary service for Tait is both to milk money out of these kids and 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 it's build is doing, is 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 the right, yeah, and the algorithm will continue to prioritize your name and stuff related to you, you know. And that's that's really how all this stuff works. Just free propaganda for him, 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 on the Internet, 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 unique and creative move that he's made, and it's gotten him 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 different social media timelines. He fell for the con He believed that, like, Okay, this guy can probably teach me how 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 fifty 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 ten to twelve hours a day, sometimes his Mania sixteen and his computer editing and publishing social media videos promoting Tate daily as part of the required coursework. He'd become a cog and the same sophisticated Pierre machine that had initially drawn him to the influencer's web.
God. So he's giving these kids homework to just like make as many TikTok videos of him as possible.
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 sixteen hours a day for free. I mean not not even for free. They're paying for the privilege. Right, 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 call him his general sometimes too. And in addition to you know, subscriptions to the real world, he sells classes and tickets to life 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 not just rent their maserati at a day rate. The centerpiece of his whole platform, the main thing that he is geared towards selling through the real world is his PhD. What stands of course for pimpinhose degree. Right, we talked about this last time. No, it's always so. It's just the worst thing when I have to tell people that, yeah, yeah, it.
Puts every time it hurts.
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 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. That's yeah, that's just that's the business.
Hard to even process. It's so gross.
It's such an interesting evolution of this is about how to at a 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 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 ruche Vee 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 age well into the kind of late social media period. And the other thing 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 tait 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, which you know, 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 the 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 slide shows 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 share here. It's eight grand a month or a grand a year, sorry year, Yeah, either way, that's so so much money.
Yeah.
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 fucking shorts leaved shirt next to different various young women. Right, will the PhD system change your life? Do you have a girl who completely trust your decisions, will do anything you say, and loves you deeply? Yes or no? If your answer is yes, I guarantee ninety percent. If 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 power is not for you. So you see who he's advertising for here, right, Yeah, these guys are like, well, I could spend sixteen hours at a computer, but like, I don't want to go out and like actually make a connection with somebody. Right, And there's little bits of no fap in there. There's so many different little corners of the creep Internet that come together in making Andrew tait 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 one hundred percent confident in my program. I have a warning. There's responsibility when you have someone completely loyal to you. I've had some girls from 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 joined the PhD program. Yeah, and then at.
Least he's teaching them to be responsible with that kind of power.
Sure, you've 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 media is to pick up women, best first dates, to bring women on, best follow up dates, how to approach women. The framework that in all that all male female interactions are based on how to see if a woman is high quality? My opening line had to get women in bed the critical mistakes most when men make, how to stay on her mind without interaction.
How to see if a woman is high quality?
Yes, Now, if you've watched Always Sonny in Philadelphia. The degree to which all of this mirrors the Dinnist system, which is one of the characters is a creepy sex criminal and has like a flirtato like it's it's one for one, Like there's pretty it's literally one for one.
Jesus Christ, you know what else is one for one?
Robert, Speaking of one for one, I'll give you one ad break in exchange for one chunk of listening to my podcast. And we're back.
Ah.
So we're talking about Andrew Tait, mind control wizard, you know who's he's just like, you know, this is again like I bring up the dinnist system, but this is all what's kind of interesting to me is he clearly to put this together. He the people who made this spent a great deal of time combing the Internet for the last twenty years of different get rich quick and like flirt with like 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 twenty years of like dudes being assholes on the Internet that led us directly to Trump and like use chat ept to remix it into a guy with bad tattoos. So I find that I find that very interesting. Yeah, Now the stuff I read these kind of these clips 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 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 of the 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, 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. H And at first I was like, oh, is this just this is just like very basic, like almost fifties 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 journalists 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 and hand them directly to Andrew and the journalist that's like talk to his editors to see it. And there's this whole weird It's 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 nineteen fifties, including a lot of like the Norman Vincent Peeale 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 in by giving them commands right where like, this is what we're doing today, this is your job for the day, 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 I want people who would ostensibly be like, hey, what are you doing? This is kind of sucking weird.
Yeah, you're doing everything this guy tells you. Are you working sixteen hours a day? Like on doing an only fans that he gets the money from, Like that seems kind of fucked up. Now, I want to play you a clip linked 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 trigger warning Andrew Tate's voice.
Well, her family, right, she really strong, soial, So that's all.
No more around saying and then we're gonna catch that's all business their side story. Only you're about nine out. Why that line just pass? It gets in there. It's not time And the things we're talking about us are excitement. He never catching all these things time into ice and taking away from the house, every house.
All.
Yeah, I hate this guy.
So disgusting, the smallest little man in the world because women won't shut the fuck up.
It's like, well, I.
Mean it's it's taking this very basic misogyny because you're again, his audience is not it's framed aus like we're an alliance of powerful men, you know, making sure they're 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 on the world. Are you right?
Are you really powerful if you can't handle your partner having Checksnos, a friend.
Friend, no, 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 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. 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 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, the moones, 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. No, she has concerns which aren't involving you, right, 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 you will anything else in you cause 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 with someone or provide them with anything they need. You're preerly 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.
And what about my PhD.
We had to practice if a girl comes.
At you and you cheat it, you cheat it, it's bang on the machete, boom in her face.
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 youat cheating, Like that's the actual context of.
All of this insane.
Yeah, it's pretty nuts. Yeah, like just the fact that like you're building in well, obviously your people are going to get attacked because the stuff that they're they're doing is so like incredibly gross. We have to try and like train them to fight these women that were also teaching them to try and like mentally dominate, which is simultaneously this admission that like the tactics don't work that well.
So you're going, yeah, his stance there, if I'm understanding correctly, is if woman speaks in a way you don't like, you slice them. Yeah.
Yeah, that's exciting, and you have to train people to slice them. Yeah machete, 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.
Yeah.
That's insane.
Yeah, 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 Douterra or whatever. But your business is like coercing women in the 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. 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 fifty bucks a month, but if you want to get this degree, it's another four hundred dollars. The war rooms 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 ever got there on his own, right, so'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 MLN 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 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 businesses.
It's got Keith Ranieri energy Yeah.
We'll talk a little bit about Keith Ranieri, because there's a lot of Keith Ranieri to Andrew Tait, 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 Ranieri 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, he probably wouldn't have been as successful because I think he's just kind of inherently also a dick, but he's he he's certainly shaped by like the tides of history around him. 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 described 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 Tait. 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 in the war room, right, And I'm not one hundred percent in agreement with the BBC on the how much this guy is actually running things behind the scenes, but he's certainly a major figure. He is a real person. Will give his real name. His nickname is odd to me. When I first heard Iggy Simolwiz, 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. But I look him up and I remember 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 simbilwise 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 as sceptics. You know, people always die when we give surgery or we cut off their limbs. What if we like cleaned things first, what if we cleared this song?
Great? What a great idea, my guy. Yeah, great idea.
Sounds like a good guy.
He was a good guy.
Yeah, he was who.
Really really really really really likes hand sanitizer.
Yeah.
Wellay, symbol Weis is the father of hands out. 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.
Clean is somebody who unfortunately surgery this year. Thank you, my guy.
Wow, now you say it at 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 Simowiz was hounded into a 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 because because they were washing their fucking hands.
I mean, god, I do get a lot of joy when I know something that my doctor brother doesn't.
Yeah, like the father of being, Like, wash your fucking hands, people, God, now everybody.
Just so tiny, just so tiny, wash your hands.
I mean they do it.
Now, they got around do it. We just had to lose illuminary first. Now again, the pick this name. I don't understand that. I don't know because he has nothing to do with this guy right, other than maybe he feels like he I guess I could make a clickcase that like, oh, he probably sees the world he's in is filled with like germs, which is, you know, other people having rights, And maybe he's the he's he's the persecuted doctor who like sees the way things should be.
Step away from the computer screen, touch grass, go to therapy.
No, I don't want this guy to go do anything. The real dude is an American named Miles Sonkin, Right, that's the actual guy.
Who Yeah, all right.
I don't know, weird little guy. The BBC got access to a bunch of leaked chats for its documentary The Man Who Groomed the World. The journalists behind it, Matt Say, came up with the opinion that Sonkan is the brains and the igeological weight behind Tate's whole war room operation. And he makes a pretty good case. Again, I disagree with aspects of Shay has put more time into this than I have, and he spent a lot of time around Tait. He's met Sonkan in person, He's met a number of key figures here. Somebody 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. Sonkan was born in Chicago nineteen sixty one, and he's been described in interviews by family members as a smart kid. And here's the most dangerous word we ever used 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.
I feel get pretty siloed into some 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.
Cited in a picture of the guy. That's why his face is doing that.
Oh yeah he does. He does look like a wizard, right, he looks like an evil wizard.
Yes, it's so bad. This beard is terrible.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, no, I'll believe he's using the fucking dnnist system to get his get himself a harem.
Yeah yeah, Malcolm, please insert a picture here, please, there's there's a good one.
You'll know which one.
Yeah, wizard. 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. Are sially two different organizations widely regarded as colts, and the second is the Rajniche 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 night, late eighties or nineties now the details of his specific involvement in either cult are not available at this time, but over the years Son can evolve 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 pick up artist and was one of the first prominent ones online serting like the late nineties early two thousands, he's like on the ground flow or of pick up artistry as like an online subculture. He gets really interested in hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming alongside this, and he began 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 Tates. You know, get him 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's literally casting spells on people. He does that to this journalist when he tries to like interview Andrew Tait, Well, he does have like a little bit of a Sarramon if Saramon got his hair down behind a seven to eleven block. 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 a growing up kind of 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 twenty eighteen, 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 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 twenty nineteen, describes Iggy as at the top and the real leader of the platform, and it's you know, I don't know if I like taking away credit from Tate for being, you know, a puppet master, but these guys are both definitely partners, you know. And the kind of things Tate's teaching a lot of these are not things he came up with himself or wrote himself. They think similwise kind of had on deck that Tate decided to slap his name on. And even this has layers right when a former member described the war Room as a bunch of telegram chats, some for business or girls or money, but there are more prestigious rooms that users who have already put in thousands of dollars are expected to shill out thousands more to join in messages on the Warroom telegram we can see song and posting as similwize and giving the same advice Tate gives from that speech we listened to earlier, And this is a message from him to war reim 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 a transgression real or imagined by having her get our name tattooed on her, leaving her family's home, apartment, town country, webcamming, and stripping walking the track for us, getting us girls. Escalate, Escalate, escalate. So this is really Keith Ranierie stuff doing the branding thing right where you have to get tattoos or scarify yourself with the name of this guy.
Yeah, it's pretty gross.
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.
Okay, Yeah, there's so many parallels. I was thinking that this entire time.
A 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 pickup 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 break the Trump administration. So it does make sense that Tait and Sonkean would form a cult What is at its around what is at its essence rebranded pickup artistry. The BBC documentary makes it sound like this was all Sonkan'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, and I but Also, how is anyone going to make money with their camera businesses in that future? Sure, it's like if you wanted to take over the world by building a bunch of tire shops, 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.
Uh movement math not adding up at all?
Yeah, the maths not really adding up. So Samuel Quinone's 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 upselling of useless courses and events, much like an MLM.
Okay and okay, so dumbino hard enough to leave.
Yeah right. There's another guy who's like, yeah, I was working on their socials for a while. I didn't realize there were trafficking women. And the interview 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 warm 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. We do know that about one percent of the people who join actually get a lot of money, which is not super different from amway.
Right. 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.
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. Mahmood, a former member, told Vice there was no 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 attract a lack of earnings. These people inside there that are reliving, that are leaving their schools the 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. Oh no, 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.
Right, there's this like trend on TikTok right now that's like, uh needed I just needed a hug thing. It's like, yeah, 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, you just need like.
One person like aware, like one person being aware of what was going on your left be like hey no no, no, no, no no, that's an MLM, or like uh no no no, no, no no no manosphere, manosphere or no.
No no, no no no. We don't abuse women.
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, if you have a certain people watching you, you get affiliate status, right, which is where you get a cut of people who join and you pay inditate 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 off in sixteen to twenty 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 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 about Facebook is right now, So I don't know, 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 pursued 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 and the War Room come from the substack of a guide 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 in the on aage 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 rights, here's the thing. It's all the game to Andrew. He tells our warroom 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 got to 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 just like it. Some girls system the system works, but if we have another guy, they kind of have, like or whatever, outside influences. Sometimes you do them when you play hardball. But I play hardball ball anyway because it's all I'm interested in. I want the one hundred, I don't give want the five, so I'll gamble it. That's the basic premise. Romantic yeah prick.
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 text 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 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.
Yeah, it's your face, asshole, That's what it is.
So he's just like basically admitting that, like, none of this shit really works, but you just got to keep trying and keep giving me money and yeah you'll get lucky.
Yeah, exactly. So he's breaking 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 destroys PhD success right, seriously, unless you want to be a sugar daddy, which I don't. 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 hinders 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 so dumb. Yeah, it's such like pickup artists and sell stuff and also such again it's a dentist system.
Artist.
It's negging. None of it's new. It's just been repackaged in a way that 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 care, their their personal characteristics will be successful enough with this to convince themselves that it's worth worth worthwhile. And ninety nine percent will have nothing happen, but they'll pay for long enough that it makes it worthwhile. Right, It's the same thing 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 one percent of Amway. Everyone else has kind of taken a bath. Now, there's also kind of in the Vernieri vibe. Within these kind of like the elite war room chats, there's a lot of discussion on how to permanently mark women, which is considered the open 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 sivil wisest 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 a tempting 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? And he says, you know, now, as soon as 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 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. Too young, it's very young. Again, this is these are the people that they are being reached out towards, right.
These are not adults.
They're not people who are like, have mature brains.
Yeah, bigas but Shelby with your fingers, how big?
I'm very comfortable.
Yeah, it's gross.
Now.
The messages posted here are from back in twenty nineteens. 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 we know of the network suggest 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 layout who is involved in this community. The BBC documentary did a lot of it. Dullingcat did an article on it. 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 a 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 one of the leading lights of the war Room. Bellincat 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.
He wants you to think he's like out here being.
He's some sort of like mercenary special operator spines like now you worked for like a healthcare company directing security, and again there's not nothing that, but it's not quite what you're claiming it is exactly. Yeah. Another key general of Andrews goes by the Twitter title First Prince of Wudan, 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 Tates techniques to try and coerce women into doing sex work for his financial benefit. Yeah, it's all just like the grossest dudes. Like some of them do have money, 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 Tates things. 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 pulling 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. 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'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, 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 going on.
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 like the control of women and manipulating people and everything.
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 uh, one of my favorite side facts of this is there's some messages that Tristan Tate posts to the warm about how a guy named Ivan Throne is crashing on their couch in Romania. Have either of you heard of Ivan Thrown No, So he's he's he's a really low grade man fluencer 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 go tee. He always poses in a suit. He wrote this book about like the dark triad Man, which is like, I know, 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 tight style griff 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, which are again mostly like pick up artistry, like right wing like like low grade right wing propaganda bullshit. And the reason I bring up Ivan is that he was part of my favorite moment in the history of Twitter. So I'm going to 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 and anost she's gotten nipples.
It's provocative.
It's provocative, and even 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 hashtag deis volt 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 dorkass looseness fucking knocked he and he just like that was it for Ivan, Like I understand why he's crashing on Andrew tates couch for a while, because that just fucking nukes him as a human, going and learning that like Tristan Tates his buddy, and he was like bumming like CouchSurfing with the Tates in twenty nineteen twenty. 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 tromania, 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 got 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 the 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 visited and 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 finding 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 twenty girls at the table, Security knows me, no one fucks with me. Why leave? And I think 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 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.
Yeah, and that's a god in Romania, is like why would I go anywhere else? Like I write pretty good here?
Yeah, and he might get away, yeah you know, Yeah, all right, that's what I got. That's the Andrew Tate update. That's where he is right now.
So it sounds like he's still a piece of shit.
Okay, still a piece of shit. Update Ill, yep, update, you gross guy. We're done with him for a while. Again, Probably don't have to go back to Andrew taituh for a minute, until until some of this court cases get more adjudicated. Right, yeah, yeah, I guess yeah.
Gross.
So that's it. That's our update on Andrew.
Uh, and you have anything you want to plug.
I just want to plug the Los Angeles Lakers and Mike Glorious King Lebron James. The 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.
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 eight thousand dollars a year if they want to. Wouldn't that be nice?
Coolest, the coolest Zone Media.
We're not.
We're not that desperate.
Give me eight thousand dollars Zone Media.
Wherever I ask you for eight thousand dollars, it's not us.
It's a scam terribly.
I say, it's definitely me. Yeah, you know, in which case it's definitely me. I would never lie to you unless someone cloned my my voice with AI, in which case I would definitely that we.
Lie to you.
Oh God, you know, Andrew Tate isn't great.
My mate, Lakers.
Lakers.
I'm gonna like stand outside in the sun or some ship.
They don't even play today. I'm just excited.
Yeah great.
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