content�*s amassed hundreds of millions of views. his enthusiasm for misogyny, cars and wealth has delivered fame, thousands of fans and many thousands of dollars. he's also being held in romania as part of an investigation into rape and people trafficking. tate denies all the allegations. do you ever wonder why some people who you've never heard of before, all of a sudden, appear everywhere? and that clip we just heard? well, that was the journalist matt shea, who gained access to tate�*s compound in romania. to get inside, i had agreed to endure a professional cage fight in romania... i know he's going to lose, but wow, he's actually in there! ...along with a hundred tate superfans. matt shea, welcome to the media show. thank you. you've made this film for vice, it's called the dangerous rise of andrew tate. i wonder when you first decided to try and make contact with him? well, i was actually first brought onto this story by a brilliantjournalist
the better in terms of sharing content of his. so, you know, it's notjust him posting these videos. it's an army of young people and that's very difficult to — tiktok and other platforms are finding it very difficult to shut that down. did he acknowledge as much when you spoke to him? i tried to get him to speak on that, and he sort of says, you know, "oh, iwouldn�*t claim to have any control over", his exact words were — "some random 14—year—old singaporean who re—edits my clips" and tried to sort of say that it wasn't his intention, but really, this is a very well thought out and kind of ingenious campaign to make him famous. now, we've already alluded to some of the challenges forjournalists and for the media as to whether to engage with someone like andrew tate or not. it's fair to say at times, matt, you had a reasonably immersive experience when in the compound. this is part of your film when you are face to face with members of what's called the war room',
this, you can't do that. you can ask this, you can't ask that? well, we were always up front with him that we would be making an objective documentary and telling all the facts as we saw them. but, yes, when we were there, you know, there were attempts to control our access. we had chaperones constantly, we were told, "don't go in there, that door is locked, if you try and go in there, someone will put a gun in yourface". we had, you know, sort of tall, scary, intimidating, strong men behind us when we were interviewing everyone, monitoring our questions and all of that. so, yeah. well, thank you for coming on to speak about your film. and andrew tate�*s story more broadly connects directly to how media content is made, distributed, moderated and consumed. and we're going to spend today's edition of the media show understanding that with the help of matt shea, but also with helen lewis, who's staff writer at the atlantic, also presenter of the recent bbc podcast series the new gurus, which looks at online personalities with big followings. hi, helen. would you consider andrew tate a form of guru? 0h, absolutely.
covering people like this. as matt said earlier, for them, no publicity. you know, there is all publicity is good publicity because itjust puts them in front of people. and the other part of this is the kind of post—cancellation sphere of social networks that we now have. so if you get driven off youtube, then you go to rumble, which is a, you know, has even fewer safeguards. hustlers university takes place on discord, which is chat servers that are closed to outsiders. you know, you can't surf past them accidentally. the tiktok algorithm itself is incredibly opaque. we don't know what it prioritises, who's in charge of it, what the rules of it are. so that is the other part of this is that it's actually functionally what happens is people get driven to places where you and i can't see them any more. you know, my tiktok algorithm delivers me videos of sharks and horses having their hooves cleaned. if i'd logged into that and signed up as a 14—year—old boy and watched a few of these videos, it would be very different. and, you know, i interviewed jordan peterson, who is in different part of the manosphere from andrew tate in 2018. but my male friends kept reporting to me that when they watched that on youtube, they were then
he fits very firmly into what's known as the kind of 'manosphere'. so these are a suite of gurus who attempt to tell young men how to live. and, you know, there is a very strong ideology behind them, which is that a form of masculinity has been lost. and, you know, having watched matt's excellent documentary, the thing that strikes me is it's very much like a 13—year—old boy's idea of what it means to be a man. a guy goes up and introduces and says. _ "my name's alpha wolf". and how matt did not laugh at that point... but it's like so much stuff on the internet now where it is both ironic and not ironic, in the sense that they're saying, i'm a misogynist, you know, or of course everyone calls me a misogynist, you know? and there's understood to be a performance there, but it is also serious at the same time. and that's something i think journalism really struggles to grapple with, is saying that someone is putting on a show for you, but underneath the show there is something nasty going on at the same time. and we're going to get into those dilemmas, questions for journalists when they choose to interact with someone like andrew tate. let's also bring in scott galloway, host of the biggest business podcast in the us, the prof g show, as well as
that the guilty party are if he and his brother have. committed crimes in romania, i hope he's held to account. but i would say the culprit in the us— or what is not helping - are social media platforms that see benefit to having algorithmsl elevate content - that's controversial, that creates a discourse that's more coarse. - and they claim, if you question tiktok, they'll claim _ he's been banned. they say, 'we've banned him'. and yet he's still everywhere. and what you're seeing — and the eu's taking - a real lead on this — is they're saying if hate i speech offline is illegal, it's going to be illegal online. i but to that point, matt, you were saying that the hustlers university, which andrew tate has created, circumvents some of the bans from the big tech companies that scott's just listed. yeah, that's right. and it's important to remember, the hustlers university's now been replaced with the real world. but yeah, this is the thing. how do you stop kind of this kind of misogynistic content spreading when it's not him posting it, it's his army? and let me just read you a couple of comments.
you know, the guy is a kickboxer. he, you know, he plays he's like a heel in wrestling and he will play that. but what you have to do, i think now we have to think more about in the media is about the idea that when you put out to your audience, what's the package, what's the stuff you put around it, how do you give people the information to understand not just this captivating performance that they're seeing? but, helen, you're right. if we watch the whole of matt's documentary, there's a huge amount of context which is valuable to judge the exchanges with andrew tate. but actually, matt, you document yourself how you went onto his podcast and then your appearance on that podcast and the way that tate dealt with you was chopped up in a way that presented the whole thing to viewers on tiktok in a way that didn't really represent what had happened. so even though you were taking as many precautions as you could, your involvement with tate instantly got misrepresented. and that's the reason i went on the podcast was to try and figure out how this machine works. and you're right, within kind of seconds of going, within minutes of going on there, his arms were cutting, you know, that podcast up and resharing
served 15 more jordan peterson videos. you know, the algorithms know very much what it is that, you know, who you are demographically and what you want to watch, and they serve you more and more of it. i was going to say, i think sort of one exception to that is providing a useful context for people to learn about andrew tate within. so for example, he's already out there, his content has been viewed over 13 billion times on tiktok alone. right? so if your viewers haven't heard of him, their sons, their nephews will have. and for the first time through our reporting, we've managed to give a voice to kind of women from his past. so now when someone googles him they won't just see andrew tate and him talking about himself and justifying himself, they'll also get a chance to hear the voices of women who allege that he raped and physically abused them and make a more informed decision about whether to follow him. if he's committed crimes... and by the way, helen, i i think he made absolutely the right choice because having someone who's a credible - journalist from the atlantic just creates a halo -
at the end of the day, in my opinion, look, l it reverse engineers to anyl time you have an arbitrage, you transition something to another source. - there's emissions, whether it's oil to petroleum or it's - attention to advertising. and we have these mediums now that are very _ profit—motivated, where some of our most talented people i and well—resourced companies have a profit motive _ in elevating contentj that enrages people because enragement. equals an engagement. and there's a real. externality to that. and until we hold these platforms to the same i responsibility and _ accountability that we would hold the bbc or the new york times or the atlantic, - they're going to continue to. engage in these externalities and let people continue to smoke or put carbon| into the air. it's that simple. scott, yours will be the last thought on this matter because we're out of time. thank you very much indeed to you, that's professor scott galloway from the prof g podcast and the pivot podcast. thanks to you, to helen lewis, staff writer at the atlantic, and to match matt shea, the film—maker who's produced the dangerous rise of andrew tate for vice. that's it for this edition
well, the response to the new gurus has been one of, i mean, iwas worried because, as you say, lots of these communities are innately hostile to the mainstream media. they don't want to engage with you and they think you will only ever stitch them up. and any kind of objectivity is kind of taken as offensiveness. so, but it was one of the less alarming responses i've ever had. but matt's right to bring this up, this is a continuing issue forjournalists, is that luckily news organisations are becoming better at safeguarding their reporters from this. but if you are reporting on communities like this, you should expect everything from death threats to doxxing, to people trying to hack into your emails, to your social media accounts. and news organisations have to have a duty of responsibility to protect and supportjournalists in those circumstances. and to that final point, scott, if whole communities are set up to be suspicious of the mainstream, you're advocating mainstream media evolves what it does, but perhaps it can't reach those people because they already have a fixed view of the type of media content that will be coming from those sources. that's a tough one.