How Hacks Happen

Social Media Smoke: Andrew Tate and The Real World

• Season 4 • Episode 4

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Why is Andrew Tate so popular with young men? With his sports cars and his obvious wealth, Tate has built a significant following out of his admittedly silly 'alpha male' rants. But behind the flashy lifestyle lies a web of controversy, including serious criminal charges. From promising young men financial independence and all the women they can handle, to the humiliations of a pro-trans hack and getting slapped down by a teenage girl on Twitter, the wild world of Andrew Tate is about as crazy as it gets. 

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Social Media Smoke: Andrew Tate and The Real World

 It was right around the winter holidays in 2022 when I happened upon a hilarious exchange of insults on Twitter about environmental issues between two famous people. One of them was an activist, Greta Thunberg, who I already knew quite a bit about. She's an extraordinary young woman from Sweden who's been speaking out for the environment since she was 15 years old, and she sparked a worldwide youth movement.

Thunberg is an inspiration to us all that we can make a difference if we aren't afraid to speak up. The other famous person I didn't really know very well. That was self-professed alpha male Andrew Tate, who had popped up on my social media feeds from time to time, spouting silly nonsense about women's place in society and showing off his gas-guzzling sports cars.

That Twitter exchange was so funny it made the news. In fact, Thunberg's response has been hailed as one of the top 10 tweets of all time. Then a couple of days later, we were in for another surprise. Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested by Romanian Police for rape and human trafficking.

So what was so incendiary about a few little barbs on Twitter about the environment? It wasn't the tweets themselves, but rather Tate's questionable activities before all that went down. In this episode of How Hacks Happen, we're taking a little tour of the world of Andrew Tate and his rise to fame via social media.

And now there's a little hack in there too. I'll be exploring the questions of how he got so rich and famous and why some young men idolize him. The answer surprised me and I figured it might surprise you too.

Andrew Tate was born in 1986 in Washington, DC but grew up in England and a working class family. He made a name for himself as a professional kickboxer, and then in 2016, he briefly appeared on the British reality show Big Brother. After his stint in sports and TV, he turned to business, specifically running a webcam business with women performing sexually online for paying customers.

This became highly lucrative. Tate then became very vocal on social media with his controversial views, and he attracted both devoted followers and a lot of criticism. In 2021, he launched an online school initially called Hustlers University, and then rebranded later as The Real World, where he charges $50 a month to teach young men how to "escape The Matrix" and become a financially independent alpha male.

Eventually, he and his brother Tristan moved to Romania, where they said there were looser laws and greater freedom. And now as of 2023 and 2024, Andrew Tate has been charged in Romania. He faces legal troubles in the UK too, related to some previous allegations of sexual assault, and now he's out on bail.

And of course, he denies all charges. Now I'm not gonna comment on the accusations against him or his upcoming trials or comment on whether he's guilty or innocent. I'm gonna let the news comment on it and the courts make their decision. But I did get really curious about his popularity. He's even mentioned by name in the Netflix series Adolescence as an influence on the main character, who's a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering his classmate, this girl, after she rejects him. 

Since so much of what we see of Tate is on social media, I decided to do an episode on him as part of the social media series, which required me to, in the name of research, listen to a bunch of interviews with him and parts of his own podcasts. And what I found wasn't what I expected at all.

Let's start with Tate's learning platform, The Real World. The Real World has thousands of paying subscribers, and at $50 each per month, that's millions in Tate's pocket every single month.

Now, sure, he has a staff and there's platform costs and all that, but he's showing off an awful lot of expensive cars and watches and his mansion in Romania, and you know, it's clear he is doing all right for himself.

So I got curious and I checked out The Real World, and listened to some of Tate's podcasts and interviews. He's actually very well spoken and a lot of what he says is sound advice, like, "Take care of yourself, exercise, and eat well. Don't just sit around playing video games. Get off your butt and make something of yourself."

You are the only one responsible for what happens in your life, so take control. All this is pretty standard self-help stuff,

And The Real World is full of courses on how to make money with side hustles. Some of them are little dubious or outdated, but not exactly subversive. Tate was early and lucky with certain business ventures like the webcams. Back when he started, it wasn't a big thing and now it's everywhere. So doing a similar thing, his students aren't necessarily gonna have the same level of success. And he's advising students to do things like invest in crypto or start a copywriting hustle, which is not the easiest thing to do. But he also says, go out and do whatever you can do. Like if all you can do is mow lawns, then mow lawns.

So far, nothing much here to see. Just some garden variety advice, things you can get from business courses or for free on YouTube, but that's only about half of Tate's offerings. The other half includes a lot of semi-political stuff about how men need to be men and take charge because the revolution is coming, blah, blah, blah. Hey, you know, people are entitled to their political opinions, Sue, whatever.

And then there's a good chunk of his philosophy devoted to his viewpoints on women, which are all aimed squarely at heterosexual men. Some of Tate's content centers on how to get a woman to date you and sleep with you. His main piece of advice seems to be get rich and get buff, and then you won't have any problem getting girls. Okay, not terribly subversive still, but maybe not for everyone, and not particularly useful to a teenage boy living at home and spending most of his time in school.

But then Tate's attitude goes a little further. He doesn't seem to have a lot of use for women other than as arm candy and sexual partners and mothers to his children and as webcam performers, of course, so he can make money off them. He's made it clear he is not interested in holding hands and watching movies with any of his girlfriends. He actually calls these kinds of activities gay. I heard one interviewer laugh out loud when Tate said this, and Tate, he laughed right along with them. He said, if that's what you wanna do, fine. But to him it's gay. It, it's like him saying this kind of stuff, it's all just a big joke to get attention. And it works.

He also says that a man should only choose a woman who will obey him. Get her to fall in love with you and she'll do anything you want. She'll obey you. And he kind of just tosses that in there with sort of otherwise normal sounding stuff. Like what you want is a woman who's loyal and clean and takes care of herself and obeys you. What?

He also claims that every woman needs a man to make decisions for her and that a woman belongs to her man. When I heard this, it's like, "Oh my God, how could I have missed out on that important memo for my entire life? Here, I, I've just been trucking along with my career and no man to tell me what to do."

In case you didn't notice, that was sarcasm.

Now, judging how often from Andrew Tate laughs when he's challenged on his viewpoints, it sounds like he says these things just to get people riled up, and he's even admitted that's why he says them! Like every time he makes some kind of outrageous statement, his social media blows up and he gets more views and more subscribers and more money.

Personally, I find stuff like this kind of silly, and I'm not about to get all upset about it. I mean, as a woman in tech, I've been hearing this kind of crap for, I don't know, 40 years. So whatever. And yeah, I called it silly, but even Tate calls his rants silly sometimes.

Where things get dicey is when we look at Tate's influence on teenagers. Schools are reporting that boys talk about him constantly. He is rich, he has lots of women, and he drives flashy cars, so he must know what he's talking about, right? Even the outrageous stuff that he admits is a joke is taken seriously by these impressionable minds.

Like in one UK school, a boy asked a female teacher whether her husband had given her permission to work. I mean, how do you even answer a question like that? Another student said out loud that women shouldn't have rights and men should make all the decisions. It's giving...1910, maybe.

And then there's Tate's famous line: "What color is your Bugatti?" that he uses as a response to criticism. Oh, a Bugatti is an expensive sports car. Yeah, I had to look it up too. So like, if you don't own a Bugatti in a custom color, your opinion is worthless, I guess.

I could see why teenage boys might find Tate's attitude empowering. They're still navigating the confusing world of liking girls, but not knowing how to talk to them. And maybe wanting to be sexually active, but they don't necessarily know how to get there. If they feel awkward or insecure, being like Andrew Tate might seem like a little shortcut.

Some schools have responded by holding workshops on misogyny and online influence, and I think that's great actually. I remember my middle school days all too well, way before Andrew Tate was even born. Gender bias and harassment seemed to kick in really bad right around with puberty, and no one prepped us girls for it.

I remember sitting in French class when I was 12 years old, just, you know, conjugating verbs and minding my own business. And a couple of boys started commenting really loudly on my boobs. I mean, it was just annoying. It was like a fly buzzing around the room, like it was distracting. I was trying to get some work done and ugh,

And weirdly, it was normalized by the teacher because he didn't do anything to stop it, and it sent a message to both the boys and girls. Boys can be boys and we girls, we're just gonna have to put up with it.

So I'm glad we're having these conversations now, and I hope we're not just educating boys, but girls too, that harassment is not their fault. If a boy is being a jerk, it's because he's a jerk, not because of what you are wearing or because of how your body is changing. It is worth noting that I haven't seen anything about girls saying Tate has been an inspiration to them, like they wanna be more obedient or, "Oh my God, that makes total sense, I should never have opinions again."

Maybe these discussions will lead to a better school environment for girls where they can learn without having to fend off this unwanted commentary. Maybe the girls can take that one little bit of Tate's advice, "Man up, and don't let things happen to you that you don't want," and flip it. They can "woman up" instead and tell those boys to go stuff themselves, the same way that Greta Thunberg has "womaned up" to speak out about our society's offenses against the environment.

One of the saddest things I found out about Andrew Tate is his attitude toward art. He claims he doesn't watch TV or movies and doesn't purposely listen to music or go out of his way to enjoy art in any way. While everyone is entitled to whatever attitude they have toward art, this makes me really sad. Because in the words of famous author Kurt Vonnegut, "The arts are a very human way of making life more bearable."

You know that feeling that you get when you hear a song that speaks right to your soul or you see a beautiful photograph of a natural wonder, or the wind blows just so in a tree full of blossoms, sways in the wind. Maybe it's dressing up in costumes with your friends or seeing an amazing play or movie.

Going to see a comedian, hearing some song lyrics that say exactly what you're feeling, singing along with your friends in the car. For me, it's jamming in an improvised band with an old beat up outta tune ukulele with my friends, banging on handheld spoons. These are the kinds of moments I'm not willing to live without, and it makes me very, very sad that Andrew Tate, he's living without such moments. Hopefully, if any young men out there are absorbing Tate's messages, they don't take too seriously his attitude of casting aside art in the process.

So let's talk about Andrew Tate's relationship with social media. Back in 2021, 2022, he was all over YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and then YouTube banned him in 2022, and so did TikTok and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook. They all cited policy violations including hate speech, and dangerous misinformation.

So how did he keep talking to his audience? Well, Elon Musk reinstated Andrew Tate to Twitter in 2022. You know Twitter now called X. And Tate also moved his podcast content to platforms like Rumble, which don't have the same amount of content moderation.

He rebranded Hustler's University as The Real World, as in the opposite of The Matrix.

But the blabbing on social media just never stopped. He kept saying things like, depression doesn't exist, and if you're a woman and you don't cook and clean, you're useless. Which got him a lot of publicity because mental health experts and feminist groups were bashing him publicly. 

(I guess I'm useless. I don't do the cooking and cleaning. Anyway, moving right along.)

And yet all this backlash, this like helped Tate build this empire, as more and more people were watching his content and he was getting the ad revenue for it, and more and more people were subscribing to The Real World,

Which brings us back to that infamous Twitter exchange in late 2022. Tate, a grown man who for some reason decided it would be an alpha male thing to do to taunt a teenage girl about environmental change. He posted a photo of his cars and tagged Greta Thunberg. 

Tate: Hello, at Greta Thunberg. I have 33 cars. My Bugatti has a W 16 8.0 liter quad turbo. My two Ferrari 8 1 2 Coone have 6.5 liter v twelves. This is just the start. Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective, enormous submissions. 

And Thunberg, she had the perfect reply. 

Thunberg: Yes, please do enlighten me. Email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.

When the internet got such a laugh outta that, you could say it was a laugh heard around the world. It was perfect. In fact, that response is hailed as one of the top 10 tweets of all time. 

Now, Tate, it was maybe a little bit hurt, not necessarily by Greta Thunberg's response, but by the fact that everybody found it so hilarious.

He responded 10 hours later of a video of him in a Versace robe, smoking a cigar and enjoying a freshly delivered pizza. 

Tate: Thank you for confirming via your email address that you have a small penis at Greta Thunberg. The world was curious. I do agree you should get a life. 

And in the video, Tate says something about how he is not upset at all and how he's going to like get his revenge by not recycling the pizza box.

I mean, you tell her, Tate. The response is to the video, not from Thunberg, but from the Twitterverse at large are pretty savage. 

Comment 1: Sadly, one of the saddest things an adult has ever done. Remember kids? 

Comment 2: Remember kids, if you ever get embarrassed on Twitter and want people to respect you again, that journey begins by putting on a kimono and ordering Domino's.

Comment 3: You've been very publicly humiliated, Andy. Pipe down now.

Comment 4: Didn't think you could possibly embarrass yourself further. Congrats, champ. 

According to some reports, that video with that pizza box helped police confirm that Tate was in Romania. And it's one of the things that helped them pinpoint where he was so they could arrest him the very next day, on December 29th, 2022.

So you could say social media brought him up, and then social media took him down. 

Oh, and now we get to the hack. The hack! We have to talk about the hack.

The Real World platform is built off a clone of social media platform Discord, where you can have these channels to go look at different stuff and you can also have live conversations with people. But this clone platform's backend was known to be not very secure. And so in 2024, some hackers got in with just one or two lines of code. Instead of causing damage though, they decided to just have some fun.

They changed all the available emojis to rainbows and trans flags and some AI generated images of Andrew Tate where he wore a pride cape, and professing affection for "femboys". And this was all over the platform. And you might say, well, so what? Well, what made it funny is that Tate is known to be anti-gay and anti-trans. And many of the chats in the real world express those same views. We know this because one of the things the hackers did was grab all the chats and download them and publish them publicly.

One of the things we saw from the leak is that there's a course you can take for additional money called a PhD course, short for Pimpin' Hoes Degree. It gives advice on how to seduce and emotionally manipulate women and socially isolate them, and then you can convince them to become cam girls. 

After the breach, you know, Tate kind of downplayed the damage. He said, oh, well, you can see all that stuff if you just joined The Real World. But just like the Ashley Madison hack, the risk wasn't to the platform. It was to the users, people who could now be embarrassed or blackmailed even. But you know, Andrew Tate, you didn't care, didn't affect him personally, so not his problem.

And that's the tale of Andrew Tate, and here I am playing right into his hands by talking about him. But at least now you get the Cliff's Notes version, so if the subject comes up or he turns up in the headlines, as he surely will in the upcoming months, you've got a little context.

This is Michele Bousquet from How Hacks Happen signing off for the day. And remember, don't believe everything you see on social media 'cause a lot of it is just smoke and mirrors.