February 5, 2023 • 18 mins
*Content warning - topics discussed are not appropriate for children*
Topics included in this episode -
- A recent survey has found that over 30% of teen boys look up to internet celebrity and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate.
- A recent online spat with climate activist Greta Thunberg led to his arrest on human trafficking charges in Romania, after Tate left a clue to his location in one of the posts.
- Why are teenage boys resonating with the messages of Andrew Tate, and how can we respond as parents?
You can read the ABC article that Justin refers to here.
Find us on Facebook at Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families
Email us your questions and comments at podcasts@happyfamilies.com.au
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's the Happy Families podcast. It's the podcast for the
time poor parent who just once answers.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now, we have come so far as a society in
relation to our ideology around women and men and gender
in general, and yet we've got somebody out here who
is like literally out on his own limb, and he's
building traction.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
And now here's the stars of our show, My mum
and dad.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Hello, this is doctor Justin Coulson, the founder of Happy
Families dot com treu and the parenting expert and co
host of Channel nine's Parental Guidance. Season two is coming soon, Kylie.
I'm here with Kylie, my wife.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I've been tasting for a while.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I have been teasing for a long time. You're right,
and all I can tell you is coming soon. Channel
nine haven't actually told me how soon, but it's coming soon.
They keep saying coming soon to nine.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Don't hold your breath.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I know I'm holding my breath. Also, we have received
news from my publisher that my brand new book, The
Parenting Revolution, will be coming out in the first week
of May. First week of May. The Parenting Revolution will
keep you updated. Pre orders will be available soon, not
just yet, but soon. Now Kylie. I know it's a
(01:18):
Monday and we don't really talk about a light of
parenting topic, but today a topic that I think needs
to be discussed. I've had a number of people email
me about it. I've had a staff member asked me
about it. Our executive producer Craig has been on to
me saying, you've got to talk about this issue. And
the issue is a person, Andrew Tate. So today's podcast,
for any parent who is wondering what's going on with
(01:41):
this guy, is all about Andrew Tate.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I'm just going to plead ignorant. Who is Andrew Tate?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So I'm curious to like, do you really don't know
who he is? Haven't heard of him?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Okay, so I do live under a rock.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Oh, don't be like that.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Six children?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Yeah, well it's that, but we've got a whole lot
of kids.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
So here's the summary of this Guyally, he's a sort
of a pom slash yank who had I'm going to say,
a semi successful kickboxing career. So there's a whole lot
of masculinity wrapped up in the fact that this guy's
strong and gets into the ring and tries to beat
people up and have people try to beat him up.
(02:20):
Some years ago, he ended up on Big Brother, but
he got kicked off the show for having I think
we could only call it aggressive intimate relations with a woman.
He was beating her with a belt, he was barking
commands at her. In Now I've struggled to say the
next sentence, but I'm going to say it anyway in
his defense, and it's hard to say that, But in
(02:42):
his defense, they've both come out on the record and
said that it was consensual and it was simply a
case of BDSM, which is plausible, and let's just go
with that for now. But Big Brother kicked him off
anyway because he was a racist, homophobic, just a real
horrible guy on social media already, and so the controversy
(03:05):
when it came out when he was on Big Brother,
it kind of gave them an easy reason to just
kick him off the show anyway. In addition to that,
he's I think it's fair to say he's ridiculously abusive,
and he holds some not pretty he holds some disgusting views.
I've seen him on TikTok and on YouTube. So he's
been banned from pretty much all of these platforms.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
But see, how do people know him off he's banned.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Because people have gotten his videos when he was there
and they just keep on forwarding them and sharing them.
And like he still is everywhere. Even though he's been banned,
people are still sharing his content, so he is still
on there even though it's not him sharing it. But
there are videos of him saying things like, if a
woman accuses you of cheating, you should slap a face hard,
grab her in a choke hold and tell her to
(03:49):
shut up. And then there's some profanities in there. And
that's just one of many that are out there. You
can source this stuff on TikTok. It won't take long
to find it. Just do a quick search for that.
He actually there was a video that I saw where
he advocates not putting her in a chokehold, but holding
a mashety to her throat. I mean, the guy's violent, aggressive,
(04:12):
and well, I think pretty gross is a real understatement.
Beyond that, though, he is a self confessed misogynist, like
he's happy to say yes I am, that's the word
that he uses. A misogynist, for those who are not
familiar with the term, is someone who has dislike of,
(04:32):
or contempt for, or an ingrained prejudice against women. So
he's on the record publicly is saying yep, that's me,
and I'm cool with that. That's who he is. And
of course the most recent thing was, in fact a
couple of recent things. He got into a big fight
and argument with Great Tundberg around issues to do with
(04:53):
the environment. As you know, she's a big environmental activist,
and he started posting pictures of all of his sports
cars and talking about how he doesn't care about the
environment at all and he can do whatever he wants
because that's the kind of guy that he is, And
so they had a big back and forth, which was
kind of silly really, And then he was recently he
moved to Romania so that he could start an e
brothel with his brother. He said that the police in
(05:15):
Romania are less likely to investigate any sexual or domestic
abuse in Romania. So I don't know anything about Romanian
politics and policing and laws, although I know that the
country doesn't have the best standards when it comes to
policing and legal stuff. It may not it may be
more corrupt than Australia. He's what I'll say, but I'll
say maybe because I don't know a lot about it.
(05:36):
I have a friend who told me, and I'm going
to go with my friend because he knows more than
me about that sort of stuff. But he has been
imprisoned in Romania, had his home raided over reports of
human trafficking. The guy, I mean, the guy is just horrible.
He's absolutely horrible.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
So I'm trying to understand that if he is everything
that you're suggesting that he is, why is there so
much traction behind him.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
So I read an article just a couple of weeks ago,
and I've had several teachers tell me this. As you know,
I'm in and out of schools regularly talking to stuff.
In fact, I was in a school in Adelaide last
year and they wanted me to talk about Andrew Tate
without mentioning his name. They said, we basically want to
talk to you about who you're being influenced by as
a student. And they said, and we know that our
kids are being influenced by Andrew Tate, but we don't
(06:22):
want you to mention Andrew Tate. And I found in
a news dot com Dot a U article a little
while ago maybe like two weeks ago where a school
teacher basically said, quote my male students, just quote his name.
I could be teaching a class about pyramids in Egypt
and they'll be like, what do you think about Andrew
Tate Lthy'll start chanting his name, which becomes this huge disruption.
(06:45):
So what is happening is this guy's got enormous traction
even though he holds these repulsive, repulsive views. An ABC
article just came out I think I was published on Wednesday,
the twenty fifth. We'll linked to it in our show notes.
Survey finds a third of teen boys look up to
internet celebrity and self described misogynist Andrew Tait. So this
(07:09):
guy is out there, he's everywhere, and it's our boys
in particular, not so many girls, but our boys in
particular who say that they're looking up to him, and
they are. They're connecting with a lot of his messaging.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
So we obviously have a house full of girls. Yeah,
but as a result, we actually associate with humorous amount
of boys as well. Right, and I have a hard
time believing that the kinds of boys that my girls
are associating with would feel any identification towards a man
(07:44):
who is openly sharing these kind of just disgraceful views.
So what is it that's drawing kids to I mean,
does he have any redeeming qualities?
Speaker 3 (07:54):
I'll share what I think about that upbreak. It's the
Happy Families podcast, the podcast for the time for parent
who just wants answers. Now, Kylie has asked the question,
does Andrew Tate have any redeeming qualities? So this is
the thing when it comes to this guy. We put
some stuff on Facebook a couple of weeks ago where
I raised the topic, and while the overwhelming majority of people,
(08:17):
overwhelming majority of people said this guy is just a
dirt bag, there were a handful of people, mums and
dads who came to his defense and said he's not
that bad. He actually says some really good stuff, and
if you can just ignore the bad stuff, he says
some stuff that's really good. So what's really happened here
is you've got a guy who's got an outsized online profile.
His social media profile was outsized. Obviously, he's been deplatformed
(08:39):
by everyone, although Twitter has let him back of now,
but Elon Musk has taken over there. But he's got
this outsized profile, and he's said and done a range
of things that are, in a word, transgressive. He's saying
and doing things that no one else will say. And
while many of those things are really terrible, there are
(09:00):
actually a whole lot of things that he also says
that are not terrible at all. So he's kind of
got this quasi inspirational momentum around him where he's saying,
if you get up early, and if you do this
in the morning, and he kind of steps his followers
through a range of things that he thinks can help
them to be more productive, or to be healthier, or
to live life to the fullest based on whatever it is.
(09:23):
It's just that he's doing it. And what I would
consider to be essentially a values free system, particularly as
it relates to the way we treat other people. It's
very women specific women specifically other people more generally. I mean,
he's pretty happy to encourage people to be boys and
men to be brutal to other boys and men as well.
It's a doggy dog world, and he's absolutely convinced that
(09:43):
if you can kick the absolute heck out of somebody,
that you're more of a man than they are. So
he is absolutely misogynistic. But he doesn't only recommend that
men are unkind, violent, prejudiced towards women. He recommends that
they are like that to one another as well. To
be the alpha, to be the top dog, but he
does I mean, I jumped on. I got lost in
(10:04):
the Andrew Tate rabbit hole for a couple of hours recently,
just so that I could really get my head around
this guy. And he says a whole lot of things.
He's not a good speaker, he's not inspirational at all.
But because he's transgressive and because he is the alpha
dog in the eyes of so many young boys, remember,
boys who want status, boys who want to be tough,
(10:24):
and boys who wants to be transgressive. Because it gets
it's like their great big middle finger to everyone in
their school, or everyone in their class, or everyone in
their community. They get to say, you can't tell me
what to do. I'm tough. I can do it because
Andrew Tate told me to. So a lot of people
are coming to his defense and saying, not that big
of a deal, but they're missing the worst of what
he does, or they're downplaying it because apparently there are
(10:46):
some redeeming aspects to some of his messaging in some places, I'm.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Listening to your talk and I honestly my stomach is churning.
I'm really struggling to sit with any amount of comfortability
about who he is and what he stands for. And
that's coming secondhand. I'd hate to actually be engaged in
this firsthand. But what intrigues me is that as we
(11:12):
go throughout life, we find ourselves in unfamiliar settings, we
find ourselves in places where we're not sure where things
fit with our value systems, and as an adult with
maturity and life experience, more times than not, we're able
to as one parent. You've actually obviously said already one
(11:34):
parent is you're able to take the good and leave
behind the bad. You're actually able to separate in spite
of the fact they might come from the same place.
You're able to say, you know what, this actually works
for me. This sits really well with my value system.
But this stuff over here, I'm going to leave this
to the side. This doesn't fit. But when we're talking
about teenagers and boys in particular, and we know that
(11:58):
you're the psychologist, so you're probably explain it a bit
better than me, But we know that their brains don't
they're not fully formed yet, that their executive function is
not one hundred percent. And so you've got this celebrity who,
from time to time says something brilliant, but he also
says a whole heap of stuff that is so damaging
and so negative, and they can't filter through it all,
(12:22):
and they just there's this idolization process that comes with
that celebrity status, and they hang on every word and
that idea that because he's so popular, I just want
to be like everybody else. Everybody knows what his lady's
thing is, everyone knows what he's talking about, and I
want to be that. I actually don't know where to
go with that, because I can see in so many
(12:45):
ways we have come so far as a society in
relation to our ideology around women and men and gender
in general. And you know what is deemed respectful across
the board, whether it be in the work environment, the
school environment, the home environment. And yet we've got somebody
(13:07):
out here who is like literally out on his own
limb and he's building traction. What does that say about
where we are?
Speaker 3 (13:16):
It says a lot about the algorithms quite honestly, I mean,
the algorithms reward people who are transgressive, the algorithms reward
people who are inciting outrage and inflaming and stoking fires
of frustration.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
It's all about numbers, very very much.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
I think that if this guy had appeared on the
scene before the algorithms do what they do, he would
have just been put into a box and everyone would
have walked away from him. But the algorithms have actually
lifted him and elevated him, because that's one of the
I was going to say unforeseen, but I'm not sure
if that's quite the right word. But that's one of
the side effects of having the social media world that
(13:57):
we have my interest here, as we try to deal
with this guy whose viewpoints surrounding hyper masculinity and misogyny
and homophobia and racism, our kids continue to be exposed
to him and those of his ilk. I think what
we really need to do is spend some time talking
just in the last mineral or two of the podcast,
(14:18):
about what we can do as parents if our kids
start to talk about this guy, and maybe even suggest
that they have a level of interest, a level of compulsion,
a level of fascination with him, And my number one
thing would be I would say, so you like Andrew taate,
why why don't we sit down and watch some of
it together? Like I would literally sit and watch a
(14:39):
couple of videos together and find the original stuff. Don't
find people's reaction videos on YouTube. Go and find a
couple of original pieces and listen to what he says,
Listen to what he says in interviews, listen to what
he said on a podcast, and as he says things,
pause every time he makes a claim and ask you
a child, is that healthy? Is that safe? Is that
consistent with the values that we've raised you with? And
(15:00):
you'll find that I reckon about forty fifty maybe even
sixty percent of the time you're not on your head and go, yeah, yeah,
it actually it is. And then he'll say something at
the end of a sentence, usually where everybody will just go,
holy cow, is this guy for real? And that's when
you get to say to I, kiddo, and what about that?
And you'll watch your child just maybe squirm a little
(15:21):
bit and saying oh yeah, but and you say no, no, no, no,
oh yeah. But the first half of the sentence was
probably okay, but the second half of the sentence. And
here's the analogy that I like. I would say to
my kids, Okay, so fifty percent of it's good and
fifty percent of its rank. If I made you a cookie,
a chocolate chip cookie with fifty percent real ingredients and
fifty percent dog poo, would you eat the cookie? And
(15:45):
the answer is going to be no, No one's going
to eat a fifty percent dog pooh cookie. And if
Andrew Tate even comes in at ten percent or twenty percent,
and I can assure you, having watched what I've watched,
that it's worse than that. No one's going to be
eating that cookie if it's a real life cookie. So therefore,
why are we consuming his content and just writing it off?
It's not helpful. My sense is that if we have
(16:05):
those kinds of gentle but honest conversations with the kids
and show hey, we're big enough, we're grown ups. We
can listen to this stuff and then pick it apart,
teach them how to critique it, that's where we're going
to get the cut through. And then the question becomes,
so if this comes up at school or if everyone's
talking about it, what do you reckon? Is the best
way to respond and get the kids involved in the
problem solving. That's where we make the progress, and that's
(16:28):
where we get to help our children, even though they're
differentiating from us in their adolescent years, particularly, we get
them to consider what their values really are and respond
to us with useful and proper conversations.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
So, even though you haven't articulated this very clearly and
in your response, I'm going to suggest that one of
the most important things in having these conversations with our
kids is about being able to come into the conversation
almost non bias.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
I think it's even better than that. Come in and say,
I'm not really across this, but let's learn about this together.
Don't come in as the expert, come in as the interested.
I'm worried and I'm hearing things. Let's investigate, let's figure
it out together.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
It's really as easy as a parent when you're worried
about things to kind of come across angry or want
to step down hard and put in rules and boundaries
in place to keep our children safe. But when we're
talking about teenagers and their absolute need for autonomy and independence,
(17:32):
I think the most important thing for us to remember
is that the more we can come at it, as
you suggested, from that inquisitive framework, we're actually going to
have more influence than we will if we come in
as the parent who's stepping down hard.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah, because force creates resistance. That's it. So we really
hope that this has been a useful conversation for those
of you who are not across the guy. Hopefully you
don't even need to go and look him up, and
hopefully your kids aren't that interested. Remember, the stats are
showing somewhere between twenty five and thirty three percent of kids,
our teenage boys are looking up to him. That means
that a whole lot of boys actually recognize that he
is what he is, which is a human who is
(18:11):
not living and encouraging values that are consistent with what
we would hope. And therefore that means that a lot
of us are not going to find this relevant. But
hopefully for those of us who are struggling with it
or wanted to know more, there's enough here to just
be that little bit more helpful for you. The Happy
Family's podcast produced by Justin Ruland from Bridge Media. Craig
Bruce is our executive producer. If you'd like more, and
(18:33):
fo about how to make you family happy. Please visit
us at happy families dot com, dot a
It's the Happy Families podcast. It's the podcast for the
time poor parent who just once answers.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now, we have come so far as a society in
relation to our ideology around women and men and gender
in general, and yet we've got somebody out here who
is like literally out on his own limb, and he's
building traction.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
And now here's the stars of our show, My mum
and dad.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Hello, this is doctor Justin Coulson, the founder of Happy
Families dot com treu and the parenting expert and co
host of Channel nine's Parental Guidance. Season two is coming soon, Kylie.
I'm here with Kylie, my wife.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I've been tasting for a while.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I have been teasing for a long time. You're right,
and all I can tell you is coming soon. Channel
nine haven't actually told me how soon, but it's coming soon.
They keep saying coming soon to nine.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Don't hold your breath.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I know I'm holding my breath. Also, we have received
news from my publisher that my brand new book, The
Parenting Revolution, will be coming out in the first week
of May. First week of May. The Parenting Revolution will
keep you updated. Pre orders will be available soon, not
just yet, but soon. Now Kylie. I know it's a
(01:18):
Monday and we don't really talk about a light of
parenting topic, but today a topic that I think needs
to be discussed. I've had a number of people email
me about it. I've had a staff member asked me
about it. Our executive producer Craig has been on to
me saying, you've got to talk about this issue. And
the issue is a person, Andrew Tate. So today's podcast,
for any parent who is wondering what's going on with
(01:41):
this guy, is all about Andrew Tate.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I'm just going to plead ignorant. Who is Andrew Tate?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So I'm curious to like, do you really don't know
who he is? Haven't heard of him?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Okay, so I do live under a rock.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Oh, don't be like that.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Six children?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Yeah, well it's that, but we've got a whole lot
of kids.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
So here's the summary of this Guyally, he's a sort
of a pom slash yank who had I'm going to say,
a semi successful kickboxing career. So there's a whole lot
of masculinity wrapped up in the fact that this guy's
strong and gets into the ring and tries to beat
people up and have people try to beat him up.
(02:20):
Some years ago, he ended up on Big Brother, but
he got kicked off the show for having I think
we could only call it aggressive intimate relations with a woman.
He was beating her with a belt, he was barking
commands at her. In Now I've struggled to say the
next sentence, but I'm going to say it anyway in
his defense, and it's hard to say that, But in
(02:42):
his defense, they've both come out on the record and
said that it was consensual and it was simply a
case of BDSM, which is plausible, and let's just go
with that for now. But Big Brother kicked him off
anyway because he was a racist, homophobic, just a real
horrible guy on social media already, and so the controversy
(03:05):
when it came out when he was on Big Brother,
it kind of gave them an easy reason to just
kick him off the show anyway. In addition to that,
he's I think it's fair to say he's ridiculously abusive,
and he holds some not pretty he holds some disgusting views.
I've seen him on TikTok and on YouTube. So he's
been banned from pretty much all of these platforms.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
But see, how do people know him off he's banned.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Because people have gotten his videos when he was there
and they just keep on forwarding them and sharing them.
And like he still is everywhere. Even though he's been banned,
people are still sharing his content, so he is still
on there even though it's not him sharing it. But
there are videos of him saying things like, if a
woman accuses you of cheating, you should slap a face hard,
grab her in a choke hold and tell her to
(03:49):
shut up. And then there's some profanities in there. And
that's just one of many that are out there. You
can source this stuff on TikTok. It won't take long
to find it. Just do a quick search for that.
He actually there was a video that I saw where
he advocates not putting her in a chokehold, but holding
a mashety to her throat. I mean, the guy's violent, aggressive,
(04:12):
and well, I think pretty gross is a real understatement.
Beyond that, though, he is a self confessed misogynist, like
he's happy to say yes I am, that's the word
that he uses. A misogynist, for those who are not
familiar with the term, is someone who has dislike of,
(04:32):
or contempt for, or an ingrained prejudice against women. So
he's on the record publicly is saying yep, that's me,
and I'm cool with that. That's who he is. And
of course the most recent thing was, in fact a
couple of recent things. He got into a big fight
and argument with Great Tundberg around issues to do with
(04:53):
the environment. As you know, she's a big environmental activist,
and he started posting pictures of all of his sports
cars and talking about how he doesn't care about the
environment at all and he can do whatever he wants
because that's the kind of guy that he is, And
so they had a big back and forth, which was
kind of silly really, And then he was recently he
moved to Romania so that he could start an e
brothel with his brother. He said that the police in
(05:15):
Romania are less likely to investigate any sexual or domestic
abuse in Romania. So I don't know anything about Romanian
politics and policing and laws, although I know that the
country doesn't have the best standards when it comes to
policing and legal stuff. It may not it may be
more corrupt than Australia. He's what I'll say, but I'll
say maybe because I don't know a lot about it.
(05:36):
I have a friend who told me, and I'm going
to go with my friend because he knows more than
me about that sort of stuff. But he has been
imprisoned in Romania, had his home raided over reports of
human trafficking. The guy, I mean, the guy is just horrible.
He's absolutely horrible.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
So I'm trying to understand that if he is everything
that you're suggesting that he is, why is there so
much traction behind him.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
So I read an article just a couple of weeks ago,
and I've had several teachers tell me this. As you know,
I'm in and out of schools regularly talking to stuff.
In fact, I was in a school in Adelaide last
year and they wanted me to talk about Andrew Tate
without mentioning his name. They said, we basically want to
talk to you about who you're being influenced by as
a student. And they said, and we know that our
kids are being influenced by Andrew Tate, but we don't
(06:22):
want you to mention Andrew Tate. And I found in
a news dot com Dot a U article a little
while ago maybe like two weeks ago where a school
teacher basically said, quote my male students, just quote his name.
I could be teaching a class about pyramids in Egypt
and they'll be like, what do you think about Andrew
Tate Lthy'll start chanting his name, which becomes this huge disruption.
(06:45):
So what is happening is this guy's got enormous traction
even though he holds these repulsive, repulsive views. An ABC
article just came out I think I was published on Wednesday,
the twenty fifth. We'll linked to it in our show notes.
Survey finds a third of teen boys look up to
internet celebrity and self described misogynist Andrew Tait. So this
(07:09):
guy is out there, he's everywhere, and it's our boys
in particular, not so many girls, but our boys in
particular who say that they're looking up to him, and
they are. They're connecting with a lot of his messaging.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
So we obviously have a house full of girls. Yeah,
but as a result, we actually associate with humorous amount
of boys as well. Right, and I have a hard
time believing that the kinds of boys that my girls
are associating with would feel any identification towards a man
(07:44):
who is openly sharing these kind of just disgraceful views.
So what is it that's drawing kids to I mean,
does he have any redeeming qualities?
Speaker 3 (07:54):
I'll share what I think about that upbreak. It's the
Happy Families podcast, the podcast for the time for parent
who just wants answers. Now, Kylie has asked the question,
does Andrew Tate have any redeeming qualities? So this is
the thing when it comes to this guy. We put
some stuff on Facebook a couple of weeks ago where
I raised the topic, and while the overwhelming majority of people,
(08:17):
overwhelming majority of people said this guy is just a
dirt bag, there were a handful of people, mums and
dads who came to his defense and said he's not
that bad. He actually says some really good stuff, and
if you can just ignore the bad stuff, he says
some stuff that's really good. So what's really happened here
is you've got a guy who's got an outsized online profile.
His social media profile was outsized. Obviously, he's been deplatformed
(08:39):
by everyone, although Twitter has let him back of now,
but Elon Musk has taken over there. But he's got
this outsized profile, and he's said and done a range
of things that are, in a word, transgressive. He's saying
and doing things that no one else will say. And
while many of those things are really terrible, there are
(09:00):
actually a whole lot of things that he also says
that are not terrible at all. So he's kind of
got this quasi inspirational momentum around him where he's saying,
if you get up early, and if you do this
in the morning, and he kind of steps his followers
through a range of things that he thinks can help
them to be more productive, or to be healthier, or
to live life to the fullest based on whatever it is.
(09:23):
It's just that he's doing it. And what I would
consider to be essentially a values free system, particularly as
it relates to the way we treat other people. It's
very women specific women specifically other people more generally. I mean,
he's pretty happy to encourage people to be boys and
men to be brutal to other boys and men as well.
It's a doggy dog world, and he's absolutely convinced that
(09:43):
if you can kick the absolute heck out of somebody,
that you're more of a man than they are. So
he is absolutely misogynistic. But he doesn't only recommend that
men are unkind, violent, prejudiced towards women. He recommends that
they are like that to one another as well. To
be the alpha, to be the top dog, but he
does I mean, I jumped on. I got lost in
(10:04):
the Andrew Tate rabbit hole for a couple of hours recently,
just so that I could really get my head around
this guy. And he says a whole lot of things.
He's not a good speaker, he's not inspirational at all.
But because he's transgressive and because he is the alpha
dog in the eyes of so many young boys, remember,
boys who want status, boys who want to be tough,
(10:24):
and boys who wants to be transgressive. Because it gets
it's like their great big middle finger to everyone in
their school, or everyone in their class, or everyone in
their community. They get to say, you can't tell me
what to do. I'm tough. I can do it because
Andrew Tate told me to. So a lot of people
are coming to his defense and saying, not that big
of a deal, but they're missing the worst of what
he does, or they're downplaying it because apparently there are
(10:46):
some redeeming aspects to some of his messaging in some places, I'm.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Listening to your talk and I honestly my stomach is churning.
I'm really struggling to sit with any amount of comfortability
about who he is and what he stands for. And
that's coming secondhand. I'd hate to actually be engaged in
this firsthand. But what intrigues me is that as we
(11:12):
go throughout life, we find ourselves in unfamiliar settings, we
find ourselves in places where we're not sure where things
fit with our value systems, and as an adult with
maturity and life experience, more times than not, we're able
to as one parent. You've actually obviously said already one
(11:34):
parent is you're able to take the good and leave
behind the bad. You're actually able to separate in spite
of the fact they might come from the same place.
You're able to say, you know what, this actually works
for me. This sits really well with my value system.
But this stuff over here, I'm going to leave this
to the side. This doesn't fit. But when we're talking
about teenagers and boys in particular, and we know that
(11:58):
you're the psychologist, so you're probably explain it a bit
better than me, But we know that their brains don't
they're not fully formed yet, that their executive function is
not one hundred percent. And so you've got this celebrity who,
from time to time says something brilliant, but he also
says a whole heap of stuff that is so damaging
and so negative, and they can't filter through it all,
(12:22):
and they just there's this idolization process that comes with
that celebrity status, and they hang on every word and
that idea that because he's so popular, I just want
to be like everybody else. Everybody knows what his lady's
thing is, everyone knows what he's talking about, and I
want to be that. I actually don't know where to
go with that, because I can see in so many
(12:45):
ways we have come so far as a society in
relation to our ideology around women and men and gender
in general. And you know what is deemed respectful across
the board, whether it be in the work environment, the
school environment, the home environment. And yet we've got somebody
(13:07):
out here who is like literally out on his own
limb and he's building traction. What does that say about
where we are?
Speaker 3 (13:16):
It says a lot about the algorithms quite honestly, I mean,
the algorithms reward people who are transgressive, the algorithms reward
people who are inciting outrage and inflaming and stoking fires
of frustration.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
It's all about numbers, very very much.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
I think that if this guy had appeared on the
scene before the algorithms do what they do, he would
have just been put into a box and everyone would
have walked away from him. But the algorithms have actually
lifted him and elevated him, because that's one of the
I was going to say unforeseen, but I'm not sure
if that's quite the right word. But that's one of
the side effects of having the social media world that
(13:57):
we have my interest here, as we try to deal
with this guy whose viewpoints surrounding hyper masculinity and misogyny
and homophobia and racism, our kids continue to be exposed
to him and those of his ilk. I think what
we really need to do is spend some time talking
just in the last mineral or two of the podcast,
(14:18):
about what we can do as parents if our kids
start to talk about this guy, and maybe even suggest
that they have a level of interest, a level of compulsion,
a level of fascination with him, And my number one
thing would be I would say, so you like Andrew taate,
why why don't we sit down and watch some of
it together? Like I would literally sit and watch a
(14:39):
couple of videos together and find the original stuff. Don't
find people's reaction videos on YouTube. Go and find a
couple of original pieces and listen to what he says,
Listen to what he says in interviews, listen to what
he said on a podcast, and as he says things,
pause every time he makes a claim and ask you
a child, is that healthy? Is that safe? Is that
consistent with the values that we've raised you with? And
(15:00):
you'll find that I reckon about forty fifty maybe even
sixty percent of the time you're not on your head and go, yeah, yeah,
it actually it is. And then he'll say something at
the end of a sentence, usually where everybody will just go,
holy cow, is this guy for real? And that's when
you get to say to I, kiddo, and what about that?
And you'll watch your child just maybe squirm a little
(15:21):
bit and saying oh yeah, but and you say no, no, no, no,
oh yeah. But the first half of the sentence was
probably okay, but the second half of the sentence. And
here's the analogy that I like. I would say to
my kids, Okay, so fifty percent of it's good and
fifty percent of its rank. If I made you a cookie,
a chocolate chip cookie with fifty percent real ingredients and
fifty percent dog poo, would you eat the cookie? And
(15:45):
the answer is going to be no, No one's going
to eat a fifty percent dog pooh cookie. And if
Andrew Tate even comes in at ten percent or twenty percent,
and I can assure you, having watched what I've watched,
that it's worse than that. No one's going to be
eating that cookie if it's a real life cookie. So therefore,
why are we consuming his content and just writing it off?
It's not helpful. My sense is that if we have
(16:05):
those kinds of gentle but honest conversations with the kids
and show hey, we're big enough, we're grown ups. We
can listen to this stuff and then pick it apart,
teach them how to critique it, that's where we're going
to get the cut through. And then the question becomes,
so if this comes up at school or if everyone's
talking about it, what do you reckon? Is the best
way to respond and get the kids involved in the
problem solving. That's where we make the progress, and that's
(16:28):
where we get to help our children, even though they're
differentiating from us in their adolescent years, particularly, we get
them to consider what their values really are and respond
to us with useful and proper conversations.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
So, even though you haven't articulated this very clearly and
in your response, I'm going to suggest that one of
the most important things in having these conversations with our
kids is about being able to come into the conversation
almost non bias.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
I think it's even better than that. Come in and say,
I'm not really across this, but let's learn about this together.
Don't come in as the expert, come in as the interested.
I'm worried and I'm hearing things. Let's investigate, let's figure
it out together.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
It's really as easy as a parent when you're worried
about things to kind of come across angry or want
to step down hard and put in rules and boundaries
in place to keep our children safe. But when we're
talking about teenagers and their absolute need for autonomy and independence,
(17:32):
I think the most important thing for us to remember
is that the more we can come at it, as
you suggested, from that inquisitive framework, we're actually going to
have more influence than we will if we come in
as the parent who's stepping down hard.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah, because force creates resistance. That's it. So we really
hope that this has been a useful conversation for those
of you who are not across the guy. Hopefully you
don't even need to go and look him up, and
hopefully your kids aren't that interested. Remember, the stats are
showing somewhere between twenty five and thirty three percent of kids,
our teenage boys are looking up to him. That means
that a whole lot of boys actually recognize that he
is what he is, which is a human who is
(18:11):
not living and encouraging values that are consistent with what
we would hope. And therefore that means that a lot
of us are not going to find this relevant. But
hopefully for those of us who are struggling with it
or wanted to know more, there's enough here to just
be that little bit more helpful for you. The Happy
Family's podcast produced by Justin Ruland from Bridge Media. Craig
Bruce is our executive producer. If you'd like more, and
(18:33):
fo about how to make you family happy. Please visit
us at happy families dot com, dot a
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