The Real World

Speaker 1: Kareem was trying to make amends.

Speaker 2: He's kind of made it his his life's work for the time being to try to sort of make amends for the role he's played in this whole project.

Speaker 1: That's Tim Hume, a journalist who has been reporting on the thing Kareem is trying to make amends for. Kareem was in his mid twenties when he joined The Real World, unrelated to the reality TV show from the nineties. The Real World is, amongst other things, an online educational platform. It costs 49 US dollars a month to be a subscriber or student in the real world. Once you're inside the Real World promotional materials claim, you learn ways to make money. The site lists, e commerce, crypto, copywriting, content creation, social media, stocks, and something just called millionaire mindset, which I think of us both as having, Scott.

Speaker 3: I I I was actually surprised that you said stocks there and not stonks because I suspected with that's that word soup that stonks would be the preferred descriptor for stocks.

Speaker 1: I like that it's not investing. It's just stocks. Stonks. The Real World is an online educational platform founded by a man named Andrew Tate. Emery Andrew Tate the third is an American British social media personality and former professional kickboxer. He has been expelled from every major social media platform for reasons we will discuss. He is currently facing criminal charges in Romania and The United Kingdom related to, amongst other things, abuse and human trafficking. Recently, Tate was arrested again in relation to charges in Romania. So now is as good a time as any to discuss this. It would be too easy to look at the real world as just Andrew Tate selling a twenty twenty's version of an old school get rich quick course. But it isn't just

Speaker 2: that. What I found through my reporting was what it really seemed to be was more of a, you know, a pyramid scheme, which was geared up to enrich Tate by drawing other people into the site. And, also, it acted as this kind of online PR army, this kind of prop online propaganda arm.

Speaker 1: Andrew Tate's meteoric rise has taken place on the Internet. Every day, a small army of people post and repost video content by and of him, creating and sharing clips of him on every major platform on the Internet. Even though he is banned, these fan accounts persist. And Andrew Tate's business is propelled by this social media traction. And through his reporting, Tim learned that this educational platform, The Real World, is part of why.

Speaker 2: Essentially, The Real World, while it promised to empower his young fanbase, it was scamming them and exploiting them.

Speaker 1: Once you're inside the real world, subscribers will find that the most reliable way they can actually make money is to participate in a project, which is to create Andrew Tate fan accounts, share Andrew Tate content until they reach a certain scale, at which point they can be monetized. So a lot of that Tate content, that vague sense that this man, banned from these platforms, is still somehow ever present on them, that's students of the real world, functioning as social media marketing freelancers for the man who owns the platform they are paying to participate in. And Kareem got recruited into this, And then he got out, and that's how he met Tim. Tim did some excellent reporting on this, and I wanted to understand more about this thing, so I called him up. You can find links to his coverage in the description. There's this clip of Andrew Tate on a podcast where he kind of gives it all away. He's talking about years prior when he was operating a sex cam business. And part of it was that the clients overwhelmingly male thought they were talking to the women on camera, but But they were actually chatting with Tate. Andrew carried on relationships with these men, through text, over, as we will hear, years. And he extracted exorbitant sums of money from these men. Fair warning, this one clip of Tate that we'll play has some language in it.

Speaker 3: So the chicks would sit there and hit a keyboard that wasn't plugged in, and me and my brother and eventually some staff I trained would do all the talking. The girls were just pure just for mooseers, just laughing and doing this. The titties out. And they were talking to fucking ice cold hustlers. We were taking their money, all of it. They they come and say,

Speaker 4: what kind of

Speaker 3: all of it. We're fucking milking them dry. Women haven't got a clue how to Famoosa, dude. They don't have because they rely on their looks. They don't have any of the intellect. They have no gain. Nothing.

Speaker 2: They're sick, though.

Speaker 3: They're suck. Nothing.

Speaker 2: There's something. Nah.

Speaker 3: You get you get a man you get a man with game and give him a female's body, a female avatar, you will fuck a guy up. I had these guys selling their houses, life savings, loans, all of it to me. Give me it all. So, So, like and it's it's basic shit. Right? You'd have a guy bad or no? Fuck no. Give a solitary fuck.

Speaker 1: Today, Tate's targets aren't men viewing sex cams. They're young men, many 18, trying to learn how to make money online. But the social engineering of it all is conspicuously similar.

Speaker 3: Sell the dream. Sell the dream. Sell the dream. We got to the point where we had these guys falling in love with my models, serious big time in love. Right? Sending crazy money, and they're convinced they're gonna meet the chick. This is almost where I kinda felt bad because they're like, can we meet? I've sent you $200,000. Can we meet? Can we meet? Can we meet?

Speaker 2: 200. And and the What was the most that one person sent to a model? Total.

Speaker 3: Million? Wow. Wow. About a mil? In about a year? I find the name to be interesting because I feel like the real world is full of threats and cons and scams. So the fact that it's named the real world and you're, like, welcoming a young audience of people who are who are maybe ethically unaware of what they're participating in. I feel like that very much is like a lesson in the real world. They're paying for said lesson.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, the thing you should know if you embark into the real world is that there are people like Andrew Payton. He is using it in reference to the matrix, as in there is the matrix and then there is the real world and only Angertate and his cabal of, Internet boys can help you escape that simulation and realize your true potential, which is, I guess, doing ecommerce stocks and whatever millionaire mindset is.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Get the grind set. The grind set.

Speaker 1: Getting on that grind set. So, yeah, I think we get into it. K. Get into learning about the real world, about Kareem and Tim's reporting, how this fascinating, weird thing spreads and makes money, and how it kinda serves the man at the top who made it. Big thanks to Tim for taking the time to sit down and talk with me about all this. Let's get into the real world, here on Hacked. Tim, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me about this.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: For anyone that is unfamiliar, who is Andrew Tate?

Speaker 2: Andrew Tate is a notorious manosphere influencer. He, has become known as, you know, one of the most sort of notorious people on the Internet. He's red pilled. He, gives a lot of advice around sort of how to be an alpha male, you know, how to win at life. A lot of his content is around business and relationships. But he's become, you know, a subject of of of a lot of concern because of the radical misogyny that comes through his messaging. So we're hearing a lot from school teachers, you know, people dealing with with young teenage men young teenage guys from, you know, women in relationships saying their partners suddenly become, like, this radicalized weirdo under the influence of Andrew Tate. And he really he he sort of blew up around 2022, was when he sort of broke through and gained gained this sort of mainstream recognition. In August 22 was when a lot of these social media platforms, said that Bantam from their from their platforms, you know, Instagram, TikTok, and, Twitter did for a while there too. But, you know, as as I came to find out, that deplatforming didn't really take hold as as as it was sold.

Speaker 1: And it my sense from your reporting on this is that a lot of why that deplatforming didn't necessarily take hold has to do with the, social media affiliate marketing model he has pioneered for lack of a better word. Its current incarnation being the real world, a educational platform that you have reported on at length. Can you tell me a little bit about the real world?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. So the real world is built by Tate as this kind of alternative to university. It's heavily targeted at young teenage guys. You know, one of his associates has said, you know, the prime demographic for the site is young young guys aged 13 to 18. And Tate, you know, really pitches it as, an alternative to university. You know, there there's trailers out there online where he's saying, you know, you go to university and you're gonna be saddled with debt for life. You're gonna get brainwashed with all this woke ideology, and you're just gonna come out the other side, this kind of five digit wage slave brokey for the rest of your life. And what I offer you through the real world, is an alternative to that. You know, financial freedom, empowerment. You know, you're gonna be able to gain financial freedom for your family. You'll be making more than your teachers. And it draws heavily on the kind of mythology of the matrix. You know, it goes hand in hand with this red pill stuff. So you join the real world, you kind of see through these, you know, the the the veil pierce the veils of of reality, and you see things as they really are. That's what that's the that's the pitch. So and what it really is is, it's an online business school, I guess. Users are charged $49 a month, and they have access to different campuses. So he says, I'll teach you you can you can learn AI. You can learn crypto. You can learn ecommerce. You can learn copywriting. These are all the skills that you need to succeed. But what I found through my reporting was what it really seemed to be was more of a, you know, a pyramid scheme, which was geared up to enrich Tate by drawing other people into the site. And, also, it acted as this kind of online PR army, this kind of prop online propaganda arm, to promote him and his site and and his own personal agendas. So, you know, essentially, the real world, while it promised to empower his young fan base, it was scamming them and exploiting them.

Speaker 1: An educational platform that functions as a social media content mill was sort of how a lot of your, your reporting on it seemed to characterize it. Absolutely. And the character sort of at the heart of all of that was a a young man named Kareem Mahmud. Can you tell me a little bit about him?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So Kareem was a guy I got in touch with. He had been your typical Tater Top, as they're known online, the sort of a a a Tate fanboy, die hard fan. And and, you know, anyone who's spoken out about Tate or criticized them online will have come into contact with these guys because he does Tate does command this army of online sycophants that seem to just pop up and and swarm anyone who criticizes him. Kareem was was one of these guys. He's a 25 year old, student in Cairo, Egypt. And when he first came across Andrew Tate on social media, like so many other young men, he just thought he was great. He, Kareem told me he was going through a phase in his life where things were kinda chaotic. He was partying too much. And he initially found Andrew Tate's messaging kinda helpful. You know? It was sort your life out, go to the gym, set goals, you know, get things together. So it was kind of benign. It was kind of helpful. And and also, you know, he confessed to me his misogynistic kind of messaging resonated with him. He bought into it. And he signed up to the real world buying into this promise. You know, he thought, I'm gonna get rich off this. So, about a year ago, start of 2000 and, you know, 2023, he signed up and, you know, was expecting to get rich. He devoted himself wholeheartedly into, the tasks he was assigned in the site. But, you know, about four months into it, he became disenchanted. He realized he was getting scammed, and he felt that he'd been part of a cult. He described it explicitly as a as a cult like environment where, you know, basically, students were getting pushed to work exceedingly long hours where there was sort of a a notion that permeated the whole site with that. Don't listen to anyone outside of you you're in the matrix or you're outside the matrix, you know. And don't listen to anyone outside of the real world because they're agents of the Matrix. They're gonna lead you astray. And it was all riven with the same misogynistic ideology that Tate is infamous for. So he was saying, you know, this was just having an incredibly negative impact on his life. He was saying it was turning me into an incel, essentially.

Speaker 3: So

Speaker 2: But speaking to Kareem, gave me a really, he he was able to give a very rich insight into how the site operated. So there were the various campuses, the the AI campus, the crypto campus, etcetera. But he was saying it no one was really making money, you know, doing this ex and it seems clear that the the way to the only way to potentially make wealth here was through this part of the cycle, the affiliate marketing campus, which was this this was kind of the the the pyramid scheme elements of of the site, which is really quite ingenious.

Speaker 1: Can you unpack a little bit about how that actually works? Because for all of the benign self help advice, the true observations about student debt, for all of the sort of high level stuff, when you really drill down past that through the boilerplate misogyny, you get down to this money making enterprise, which really seems rooted in this this content mill affiliate marketing system. And I really wanna understand that.

Speaker 2: Here's how it works. The idea is you join the affiliate marketing site, and you then set up essentially a Andrew Tate fan page on social media. So it's on Instagram, TikTok, you know, multiple the the big platforms. And they would set these up using, you know, and using names that were nicknames that were associated with Tate, like Wodan and Morpheus. You know, he's he's built this whole mythology around him. And their job was to publish social media videos, multiple videos every day. Four to six was the target. And to do this, they were drawing on the skills that they'd learned in the other campuses. So, you know, AI or marketing, video editing. And they were given access to a huge drive of Tate's social media appearances over the years. And they'd remix, edit these, and just flood the Internet with them. And the promise was that once they reached a certain threshold, so for Karim, he was told it was once they hit 2,000 followers, they were allowed to post an affiliate link whereby every new member they recruited, they'd get a slice of their sign up fee. So this is the this is the pyramid scheme element.

Speaker 1: And in order to just to clarify, in order to participate in this, in order to be part of the real world, it is a 49 US dollar a month subscription. That's right. So to put another way, you are spending, call it, $50 to participate in, call it a training program to take part in this conspicuously triangle shaped business model, with the end goal of, churning out Andrew Tate social media content. Is that kind of generally accurate?

Speaker 2: That's how it works.

Speaker 1: Good good stuff. Please continue.

Speaker 2: What was quite ironic was we we found cases where, you know, this was being explicitly used. You know, the this sort of standing PR army was being explicitly used to advance Tate's personal vendettas and campaigns. So what you need to know about Andrew Tate is, you know, not only is he this notorious influencer, he's also, currently facing human trafficking and rape and organized crime charges in Romania, where he's been based for a number of years. And so last year, he he start it was in December. He he suddenly launched this campaign to he was, he was claiming that he had a sick grandmother in The United States and was pushing, the US embassy and then just the authorities in general to allow him and his brother, who's also accused alongside him, to be able to leave, Romania, to go travel and visit their sick grandmother. And so, you know, the I found these messages on this on the site where these kids who had extensively signed up to, you know, learn skills to enrich themselves, etcetera, were being instructed, make, Andrew's sick grandmother videos. This is the sick grandmother campaign, and there's a competition for, you know, who gets the most, views. So, you know, this this was a pretty, vivid illustration of how this was being used for for for Tate's own, you know, completely personal goals. Yeah.

Speaker 1: You used the phrase PR army. And, you know, the thing about an army is you can kinda tell them to march wherever the heck you want them to. Absolutely. There was a quote in your story from cream. He says, quote, you're going to be stuck in your home thinking you're a victim, thinking people are out there to get everything from you. You're gonna hate women, and you're gonna hold them responsible for everything wrong in your life. You're working all the time because you think it will get you women. And then if it does, you're just gonna treat her like property. How are Tate's, I would say, well documented beliefs about women and men for that matter, woven into this money making scheme? Well, through the affiliate marketing program,

Speaker 2: I mean, it it's it's really flooding the Internet with Andrew Tate content. And the product is the real world, but the product is also brand Tate. And, you know, so there's so there's a lot of concerns that this site sort of functions as an entry point into this pipeline of radical misogyny that Tate offers. You know? So you come in so you might be a 13 year old, you know, trying to get ahead in life. Taipei, 13 year old kid, and you wanna get the jump on everyone. But you're suddenly getting, you know, bombarded with this, you know Tate is held up as the guru in this ecosystem. And what's extra concerning is the proximity to another of Tate's networks called the War Room. And this is positioned as sort of, you know so you might almost graduate the real world. And then for the elite, you move on to the war room, which is sort of pitched as this network of high net worth men, you know, captains of industry, masters of their domain, and you will learn from them. But what we know about the real world is that, you know, that side has been used for dis discussing techniques for for grooming women into online sex work. The the figures involved with it are, you know, all sort of avatars of misogyny. So that that that's the concern here. Also, the the there's also a real concern about, you know, one of the lawyers I spoke to who's been closely involved in in Tate's case. You know, he described the whole real world operation as, you know, it could be conceived of as a form of digital grooming of young people. And we saw you know, you got really vivid glimpses of how the site is exploiting quite vulnerable young guys. You know, a lot of the membership were from, developing countries. The young people, the people who don't have, the money or the time to be pouring into this worthless side. Kareem himself knew a guy that, you know, gave up his university studies because he just wanted to go all in on the real world. And I saw, you know, there were leaked lessons from the instructors where they're just saying mad stuff. They're saying, you know, when I'm working towards my goals, I go war mode. You know, I'll I'll shift down to three to four hours sleep at night, and that's what you gotta do. There was another one where an instructor is saying, there's no such thing as rest. You you sleep and then you work. So it kinda creates this, you know, boiler room type environment where vulnerable young guys are being pushed to enrich their guru.

Speaker 1: You, you you brought up the that term digital grooming that the lawyer that you spoke with during your port reporting employed to describe this whole thing. And, again, many of whom come from, you know, backgrounds in developing countries, by a man who is currently being accused of grooming women into online sex work. Can you talk a little bit more about that that sort of parallel, that recurring motif in Andrew Tate's body of work?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, the thing when you spend any amount of time reporting on Andrew Tate is the man might be the greatest self snitcher who ever existed. I mean, he is he currently stands, you know, charged with, you know, sex trafficking, human trafficking, and using and and the prosecutors at Romania have said he's used this technique called the Loverboy technique, which is, it's essentially where you try to establish coercive control over a woman by, establishing a relationship, you know, a false relationship with her. And, you know, you might use violence, alternate between, affection and and cruelty, but to it's a this extremely sadistic behavior. Now Andrew Tate has literally sold online courses in doing this. They're no longer online, but the archives of it are up where he talks about, you know, that was my job for years. And I've interviewed women for previous reporting who were targets of this. He would just sort of use that pickup artist scattergun approach of it's a numbers game, you know, bombard, send out a whole bunch of messages to women. And if anyone bit, he would use these quite calculated strategies, textbook strategies on them. And this was a woman who said she realized, oh, he was explicitly trying to groom me into online sex work. That's what he does. I mean, he he he also loves to boast about scamming people. So there's, you know, footage out there online, very easy to find of him on podcast bragging about when he ran one of his webcam sites, and they would just be scamming these punters, you know, guys that think they're conversing with the the beautiful woman taking her clothes off on the screen. And it's him and his brother, you know, typing their sweet nothings into their their laptop and and milking them for all they're worth. And he he laughs about it. He loves it. So, you know, I think it's fair to say he he he's he hasn't been quiet about his his love for scamming people. You know, he calls himself the ultimate hustler.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I was I was watching that that podcast appearance that you just mentioned before we had this conversation. He's talking about that Loverboy business kind of method. Yeah. And describing the scene where there are all these men that think that they're talking to this this woman in this cam show that they've given a bunch of money to, and they're actually talking to him and his brother, which is raises a whole bunch of other, questions about how his audience would feel about him playing that role in that dynamic. But, yeah, they were I think the quote was they were talking to ice cold hustlers. We were taking all of their money, all of it. We were fucking milking them dry. I had these guys selling their houses, life savings, loans, all of it to me. Give me it all. The host asks, do you feel bad or no? And he says, fuck no. I don't give a single solitary fuck. And you hear that quote in the context of this story and these these young guys, and you do have to wonder, does he give, to borrow his phrase, a single solitary fuck about these students of the real world?

Speaker 2: Hell no. I mean, the the it it it's it's and it's it's clear as day for for any of them to see. But, you know, as Kareem was relating to me, you know, he's kind of made it his his life's work for the time being to try to sort of make amends for the role he's played in this whole project, to try to engage with guys who were like him and just point out the very obvious, you know, gaps in in Tate's narrative, and and that he might not be the messiah. But he says they're just very, very strongly resistant to this. He really is a guru figure. He's built this cult like complete with, you know, a very expansive mythology around him. And, you know, Kareem told me personally, you know, he he was one of these guys. And it was just one day, almost by chance, he was scrolling through Twitter and happened to to see some pretty compelling evidence from a commenter under a under a an interview with one of the Tay brothers. And it just got him thinking, like, okay. Looking deeper into it, and he described the process of sort of emerging from this belief system as, like, leaving a cult. You know, he was really disorientated and kinda screwy for for a few days there. But that's what we're up against.

Speaker 1: I hear, the architecture of it is dependent on an in group out group dynamic. It's all about us versus them. It's all about you're either part of the matrix or you are not part of the matrix. I then hear, you know, this sort of hustle and grind culture, spin on what if you slept for three hours a day because you were just too busy grinding? I'm like, yeah, sleep deprivation. In group, out group, sleep deprivation, separate you from your community. I don't even a guru figure sort of above all of it with an elaborate, you know, system of mythos surrounding him. It's like it who's to say what a cult is, but man, it fucking sounds like a cult.

Speaker 2: Absolutely.

Speaker 1: How did so you you said that Kareem got out of it because of this Twitter post before he did, and I I'm I'm just curious. Practically, do we have any numbers on whether people actually make money doing this? Because way back down the line, there is you get into this because you think you're gonna make some money. Do we have any stats on do people pull a profit doing this?

Speaker 2: Look. It's it's very difficult to get anything concrete, but the, you know and and the real world promotional material obviously sort of touts these success stories, but there's no way of verifying it. And certainly, my impression is the vast majority of of people are not making any money. They're the you know, it's money down the toilet. And Kareem's impression from being inside the site and just talking to other people on these servers and these chat groups, they were grinding away. There was there was nothing coming out of it. He said also in their profiles, there would be sort of a a section where you could see wins, you know, and the vast majority of people had had no wins. And as I said before, there there were also just messages from a lot of people, a lot of members that were clearly struggling. You know, they're literally making these posts going, please, mister Tate, you know, I I live in Indonesia. I don't have a lot of money. I've put everything into this site. My family are angry at me. You know, throw us a bone. Like, nothing nothing's working here.

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Speaker 1: Andrew Tate is currently banned. His pages, to to be clear, are banned on, I think, YouTube and TikTok. Most major social media platforms don't allow him. There's exceptions to that. But generally speaking, that's the case. K. I wanna understand a little bit about how the platforms have responded to the real world as, like, a as a piece of software. Apple and Google have both banned it from their app stores. Correct?

Speaker 2: That's right. That was only when I started writing about it, though. Previously, it was it was online. It was available on both stores. So it was only when, Oh, wow. So so I should say, you know, doing the series of of stories, I was working closely with, as a source, was was a campaigner in Australia, a guy named, Nathan Pope. He's an Australian guy in his thirties who, you know, there's a whole community of people out there like this that are just deeply concerned about what they see of Tate's influence in society. And he decided to try to do something about it. So he's just been chipping away doing these kind of, you know, campaigns to try to get these tech giants to essentially deplatform the site, take action, stop enabling it. But he wasn't getting any traction. You know? He was alerting the sites the same things, and it wasn't until I actually wrote about it that, late last year, first Google Play removed the app from their App Store and Apple, sorry, from the Google Play Store and Apple took it down from the App Store. But then there was an incongruity there in that, you know, while Google removed the app from Google Play, we were still finding his stuff all over YouTube, which is Google owned. And and even more so, you know, there there was a big hullabaloo in August 2022 when there was this initial sort of wave of concern about Tate and his misogynistic message, which saw the social media giants all say that they had deplatformed Tate, banned him from the site. So what this reporting really brought into focus was that these bans had been half hearted, completely ineffectual, really. You know? For example, there was there was one site that was probably the main, the real world site. It had 450,000,000 followers, I believe, you know, huge numbers of views. So there's these huge sites still churning out this content. Now as a result of my stories and a lot of back and forth with YouTube, there's been about a dozen big sites taken down. But it's a very piecemeal approach, and, you know, I actually found that Google had been you know, some of these channels were monetized. YouTube had been making money off some of these, the real world channels with, you know, huge numbers of views. So, you know, speaking to experts about this, about what's going on there, their take is I, you know, I spoke to the the Center for Countering Digital Hate. They said, you know, these platforms have the means to do something about it, but, essentially, the incentives are all pointing the other way. You know? It takes money and effort to really tackle it properly. If they don't do anything, then there's no real consequences for them. And, you know, if this high engagement stuff remains online, it's actually bringing in money. So, yeah, that the the the it it it was eye opening in terms of the the approach of the social media giants to this content.

Speaker 1: When we I first started kind of reading your reporting on this. The The reason that seemed relevant to our audience is, you know, we talk about technology with sort of an eye towards hacking and security and that side of things. And it seemed like this was a story about and it is, but it seemed like this was a story about social engineering. I think about the students of this and the sort of psychological process that they go through from the beginning to the end that this is a story about social engineering. And I I think, our conversation has revealed that unfortunately to be true. There is another side of it, and it has to do with what you just said, which is on the platform side. It does, by all accounts, seem like he's figured out a way to hack the algorithmic and financial systems of these platforms, whether it's them wanting the eyeballs on the content even if they're not willing to stand by letting him have a a page up on it, whether or not it is the PR army, to use your phrase, that he has sort of engineered that gets people uploading this content. It seems like he's figured out kinda how to hack these systems. What would you suggest couple steps we those platforms can be taking to build a little bit more resilience into these systems to stop this kind of thing from happening?

Speaker 2: Look. I'm really no expert in this side of things, but, you know, I think they just have to be more aware of what's going on here and more receptive to this problem. You know, I've I've found it incredibly frustrating to you know, I've gotta say, all of my interaction really was with recently has been with YouTube, and I've found their responses to be sort of baffling and kind of, you know, very opaque throughout the whole process. But to their credit, I mean, they've been the platform that's actually taken action. I mean, Instagram and TikTok have not responded in any way at all. So I think they really do need to look closely at what's going on here, but, currently, there's not a lot of pressure aside from the occasional pesky media report for them to do so. And, you know, looking closely at this operation, it really is ingenious and endlessly adaptable. You know? You'd see how Kareem was telling me how, you know, certain platforms would have certain levels of moderation in place. But because of the sophistication of the operation and and just the size of the network, they were able to improvise and adapt and find workarounds. So he was saying, you know, he found TikTok to be the hardest site at the time to post Tate's image on. But what they would do is they would edit out his face, place it with sort of a surrogate that was associated with him, or they could just use other footage, with Tate's, you know, very distinctive voice over the top, and it would still register with with the bass. Or they just use a substitute. You know, Tate's, kind of right hand man is a guy called Justin Waller, and he became this kind of substitute face of the operation when the Tate stuff was getting filtered out too much. He said it's been been taken, down. He's lost his YouTube site, but they are very adept at improvising and finding ways around this stuff. But, yeah, I mean, the the platforms clearly need to take this more seriously.

Speaker 1: This is an aside. You ever just come across a YouTube video of, like, a 19 year old talking suspiciously like Andrew Tate? Like, it's like there's, like, a funny linguistic thing that's starting to happen where I'm like, that's a really specific accent for a kid from Nebraska to have.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. There is an army of these copycats. We started calling them, the bottom g's. It's one of the most terrifying cultural developments I've come across. But, yeah, there's there's an absolute I mean, that goes to the heart of what this is all about. You know, he's just spawned this, you know, wave of copycats who think, yeah, I wanna be this, brash, obnoxious human trafficker.

Speaker 1: What would you say to the next Kareem? You know, the next kid staring into that void with their back to the whole world who's starting to have suspicions that maybe they're the one being kinda hacked in this situation. What would you say to them?

Speaker 2: Open your eyes. I mean, I I don't know how to get through I don't know how you get through that pitfall of programming, but, you you have to hope that something's gonna get through.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: The the the the evidence is is all out there that, as I said, this guy is not the messiah.

Speaker 1: Tim, thank you for chatting with me. Thank you for disreporting. I think this is a very important one in your your coverage on it. It's been excellent. So thank you. Appreciate your time.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.