Taters Gonna Tate. . .But Do Platforms Have to Platform?: Listening to the Manosphere
In March 2025, shortly after returning to the United States from Romania, where he and his brother Tristan had been held under house arrest for two years after being charged with human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal group to sexually exploit women, the social media influencer and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate’s podcast, Pimping H**s Degree was removed from Spotify for violating that platform’s policies.
According to the technology media outlet 404 Media, which first reported the news, some Spotify employees had complained in an internal Slack channel about the availability of Tate’s shows on their platform. “Pretty vile that we’re hosting Andrew Tate’s content,” wrote one. “Happy Women’s History Month, everybody!” wrote another. A change.org petition to call on Spotify to remove harmful Andrew Tate content, meanwhile, received over 150,000 signatures.
When asked for comment by the U.K. Independent, a Spotify spokesperson clarified that they removed the content in question because it violated the company’s policies, not because of any internal employee discussion. These policies state, in part, that content hosted on the platform should not “promote violence, incite hatred, harass, bully, or engage in any other behavior that may place people at risk of serious physical harm or death.”
Still, there is a veritable fire hose of Tate content available on Spotify. A search for the name “Andrew Tate” on the platform yields upwards of 15 feeds (and a music account) associated with the pro kickboxer-turned-self-help guru, many of which seem to be updated on a sporadic basis or not at all. Apple Podcasts, meanwhile, features an equally wide spectrum of shows with titles like Tatecast, Tate Speech, Andrew Tate Motivation, and Tate Talk [Ed. Note: Normally there’d be links to this media–and the author has provided all of his sources, but we at SO! does not want to drive idle traffic to these sites or pingbacks to/from them. If you want to follow Andrew Salvati’s path, all these titles are readily findable with a quick cut-and-paste Google search.–JS]
With so many different feeds out there, wading into the Andrew Tate audio ecosystem can be a bewildering experience. There isn’t just one podcast; there’s a continuous unfolding of feeds populated by short clips of content pulled from other sources.
But this may be the point exactly.
As I learned from this article in the Guardian and these interviews with YouTuber and entrepreneur MrBeast (“MrBeast On Andrew Tate’s MARKETING” and “MrBeast Reveals Andrew Tate’s Strategy”), Tate achieved TikTok virality, in part, by encouraging fans to share clips of video podcast interviews – rather than the whole interview itself – on the platform.
“Now is the best time to do podcasts than ever before,” MrBeast said in one interview. “Now it’s like the clips are re-uploaded for months on months. It gets so many views outside of the actual podcast … I would call it the ‘Tate Model’ … Like I think if you’re an influencer, you should go on like a couple dozen podcasts. You should clip all the best parts and just put it on a folder and just give it to your fans. Like literally promote you for free.” Though it can be hard to tell exactly who uploaded a podcast to Spotify, it seems that something like this is happening on the platform – that fans of Tate are sharing their favorite clips of his interviews and monologues pulled from other sources.
In its “About” section, for instance, a Spotify feed called Andrew Tate Motivational Speech declares that “this is a mix of the most powerful motivational speeches I’ve found from Andrew Tate. He’s a 4 time [sic] kickboxing world champion and he’s been having a big impact on social media.” In another Spotify feed called Tate Therapy, posters are careful to note that they “do not represent Mr. Tate in any way. We simply love his message. So we put together some of his best speeches.”
Given that Spotify is increasingly a social media platform, rather than simply an audio streaming service–users can collaborate on playlists and see what their friends are listening to–it follows that this practice of clipping and sharing Tate content may potentially expand the influencer’s online footprint. It may also serve as insurance against the company’s attempts to remove content or completely deplatform Tate: surely Spotify can’t police all the feeds that it hosts
So, what is it that Andrew Tate is saying – and how is he saying it?
To get a sense of why he has been called the “King of Toxic Masculinity,” and a “divisive social media star,” I had a listen to several of the interviews and monologues posted to Andrew Tate Speech Daily on Apple Podcasts, which, of all of the Andrew Tate audio feeds, is the most consistently updated.
The first thing to take note of is his voice. It’s brisk and aggressive and carefully enunciated – it’s like he’s daring you to take issue with what he, an accomplished and eloquent man, is saying. Above all, listening to Tate feels like being spoken to like an inferior, because that is precisely what he preys on. His accent, moreover – now British, now American – is unique, lending itself to some unusual pronunciations that can be considered as a part of his system of authority and charm.
One of Tate’s main arguments about what ails men today – and it is clear from his mode of address that he assumes he is talking to men exclusively – is that they are trapped in a system of social and economic “slavery” that he unimaginatively calls “The Matrix” after the film series of the same name. Though he is somewhat vague in his descriptions, in the podcast episode “Andrew Tate on The Matrix,” he explains that power, as it actually exists in the world, is held by elites who rely on systems of representation (language, texts) to effect their will. These systems of representation, however, are prone to abuse because they are ultimately subject to human fallibility. Tangible assets, like wealth, he reasons, are susceptible to control by “The Matrix,” as they can be taken away arbitrarily by the redefinition of decisions and the printing/signing of documents. His example, though it is a little hard to follow, is that if someone says something that the government doesn’t like, a judge can simply order that their house be taken away. Instead, Tate argues that individuals can escape “The Matrix” by building intangible assets (here, he gives no examples), which cannot be taken away by elites and their bureaucracy. It is a difficult path, he cautions (and here, he sounds sympathetic), and one that not everyone has the discipline to endure.
Tate gets a little more specific in the episode “Andrew Tate on The Global Awakening. The Modern Slave System,” in which he asserts that elites are using the system of fiat currency – a term that cryptocurrency supporters like to use to disparage government-issued currencies – to keep individuals “enslaved.” In this modern version of enslavement, he explains, individuals are forced to work for currency, but, since fiat currency is subject to inflation and other forms of manipulation, only end up making the bare amount they need to survive. The result, he argues, is a system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (of course this ignores the real possibility of shitcoin and other crypto manipulation schemes). It’s quite a populist message for a guy who is famous for his luxurious lifestyle. Still, his message here is consistent: with the proper amount of discipline, a willingness to speak truth to power, and faith in God (he converted to Islam in October 2023) will result in an awakening of consciousness that will finally end the stranglehold that elites have on power – will finally break “The Matrix.”
On the other hand, Tate deems women incapable of the discipline required to break out of “The Matrix” – he seems to think that they are too materialistic, too distractible, too enamored of the chains that elites use to bind individuals to the system to see beyond them (see “Andrew Tate on ‘Fun’”). In his view, women are better off at home bearing children or fulfilling male sexual desires. (In an apparent demonstration of male dominance, Tate’s “girlfriends” often appear in the background of his videos cleaning house).
For his part, Tate claims that his own legal troubles, and his own vilification in the press, are part of a coordinated campaign of persecution against him for exposing the way that the world really works (see, for example, “Andrew Tate: Survival, Power, and the System Exposed”). From this vantage, Tate seems to be acting as what the ancient Greeks called a parrhesiastes, someone who, as Michel Foucault writes, not only sees it as his duty to speak the truth, but takes a risk in doing so, since what he says is opposed by the majority. Indeed, often congratulating himself on his bravery in the face of “The Matrix,” Tate has suggested that his role as a truth teller might get him sent to jail (“Andrew Tate on the Common Man”), or worse (“Survival, Power, and the System Exposed.”) In such moments, he plays the martyr, adopting a quiet, yet defiant voice.
Aside from the aspirational lifestyle he purveys – the fast cars, the money, the women, the flashy clothes, the jets, the mansions, the cigars, and the six pack – it seems to me that this parrhesia is a key part of what makes Tate popular among men and boys (as of February 2025, he had over 10 million followers on X [formerly Twitter]). What he reveals to them, though it is often muddled, is the way in which elites maintain social control under advanced capitalism. It’s all rather Gramscian in the sense that it is concerned with the hegemony of a dominant class, though, ironically, Tate seems too much of a capitalist himself to engage in Marxian social critique. Instead of offering a politics of class solidarity, Tate merely rehearses familiar neoliberal scripts about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps (see “You Must Constantly Build Yourself”), getting disciplined, going to the gym, developing skills, and starting a business. For Tate, life is a competition, a war, though most men don’t realize it.
And I think this is the key to understanding Tate’s parrhesia – it’s not only that he is speaking truth to power in his criticism of “The Matrix”; he also sees himself as speaking an uncomfortable truth to his listeners, truths that they might not be ready to hear. As in the movie, The Matrix, he says in “Andrew Tate on the Global Awakening,” some minds are not ready to have the true nature of reality revealed to them. In his perorations, therefore, Tate often takes a sharp and combative tone, accusing his listeners of being guilty of complacency and complicity in the face of “The Matrix.”
“If I were to explain to you right here, right now, in a compendious and concise way, most of you wouldn’t understand,” he says in “Andrew Tate on The Matrix.” “And those of you who do understand will not be prepared to do the work it takes to then actually genuinely escape. But those of you who are truly unhappy inside of your hearts, those of you who understand there’s something more to life, there’s a different level of reality you’ve yet to experience … But if your mind is ready to be free, if you’re ready to truly understand how the world operates and become a person who is difficult to kill, hard to damage, and escape The Matrix truly, once and for all, then I am willing to teach you.”
For those persuaded by this line of thinking, or who are otherwise made to feel guilty about their complicity in “The Matrix,” Tate offers a special “Real World” course at $49 per month, which teaches students how they can leverage AI and e-commerce tools to earn their own money and finally be free.
And that’s really what it’s all about – all the social media influencing, all the clip sharing, all the obnoxious antics, and deliberately controversial statements – they are all calculated to raise his public profile (good or bad) so that he can sell the online courses that have made him and his brother Tristan fabulously wealthy.
It is for this reason that I don’t think that Spotify’s deplatforming of one of Tate’s shows will ultimately do anything meaningful to stem his popularity. If anything, the added controversy will likely confirm to his fans that he has been right all along – that the elites who are in control of “The Matrix” are so threatened by the truth that he tells about the world and about women that they will first deplatform him and then send him to jail.
No, we will only rid ourselves of Tate when he becomes irrelevant. This may happen if he ends up going to prison in Romania or in the UK (where he also faces charges of rape and human trafficking). But even then, there are many vying to take his place.
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Featured Image: Close-up and remixed image of Andrew Tate’s mouth and arm, Image by Heute, CC BY 4.0
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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.
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This post also benefitted from the review of Spring 2025 Sounding Out! interns Sean Broder and Alex Calovi. Thank you!
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A Feast of Silence: Listening as Stoic Practice
In honor of International Podcast Day on 30 September, Sounding Out! brings you Pod-Tember (and Pod-Tober too, actually, now that we’re bi-weekly) a series of posts exploring different facets of the audio art of the podcast, which we have been putting into those earbuds since 2011. Enjoy! –JS
Zeno of Citium, the Hellenistic philosopher who founded the Stoic school at the turn of the third century BCE, once had this advice to give to a garrulous young man: “the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so that we might listen more and talk less.” The more we speak, Zeno was saying, the more self-absorbed and foolish we become; in learning to listen, we temper our own egos and attune ourselves to the truths of the world around us.
This piece of wisdom from a 2,300-year-old philosophy was a part of the marketer and best-selling author Ryan Holiday’s reflection on stillness and silence on the October 4 edition of his Daily Stoic podcast, a daily affirmational that brings listeners “a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do.” In citing Zeno, Holiday’s point was that while our highly mediated culture often rewards loudness, extroversion, and “hot takes,” we might do better to listen, and learn from others, rather than simply talk over them.
Over the past decade, Stoicism, which teaches that self-discipline, moderation, and emotional equanimity are key to overcoming hardship and living a good life, has had something of a revival as a self-help paradigm – and Holiday has been one of its most energetic evangelists. Articles in Vice, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian, Forbes, Wired, and Sports Illustrated have all taken note of his influence among Silicon Valley tech workers, corporate executives, professional athletes, military personnel, and celebrities to whom he markets the philosophy as a “life-hack”; his six best-selling books on the subject, meanwhile, have positioned him as perhaps the most commercially successful author in a mushrooming genre of Stoic literature; and The Daily Stoic’s A-level guest list, which has included Malcom Gladwell, Camilla Cabello, Matthew McConaughey, and Charlamagne Tha God, has established Stoicism’s cultural cachet as a practical guide for living, and positioned Holiday as its authoritative interpreter.
Among the lessons Holiday draws from Stoicism, the practice of stillness (as his 2019 book puts it) is key: a way of quieting the mind, of “hear[ing] only what needs to be heard,” and really listening to the truth of the world in order to achieve the kind of tranquility (what the Greeks called apatheia) that will help us “think well, work well, and be well.”
With this emphasis on stillness, silence, and listening, it would seem quite appropriate that Holiday would turn to the aural medium of podcasting to proclaim the ancient wisdoms of Zeno, Cleanthes, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, for the Stoics, listening was a foundational skill through which one cultivated the habits of discipline, self-control, and self-reflection that are the heart of the Stoic way of life (askesis); for it is in quieting ourselves and listening that we begin to open ourselves to the teachings of the masters and think about their application in our own lives.
And Holiday is hardly the only Stoic podcaster. As I write this, a simple search on Stitcher yields over 30 podcasts with “Stoicism” in their titles or descriptions, many of which have been updated in the past month (December, 2021), including the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci’s Stoic Meditations, Stoicism Discovery, Stoicism on Fire, The Sunday Stoic, The Stoic Handbook, The Walled Garden, Stoic Coffee Break, and Stoic Solutions.
Elsewhere, Stoicism has been promoted by self-improvement podcasters like the tech investor and lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss,and retired Navy SEAL and leadership coach Jocko Willink; and – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the ancient Stoics were white men who emphasized values like rationality and self-mastery, which are typically coded as male – it has been advocated as a tactic for modern living by masculinity podcasters like Brett McKay and Ryan Michler.
Navigating this space can often feel like a small world (or, perhaps a promotional circuit): Holiday has been a guest on The Tim Ferriss Show, The Art of Manliness, and Order of Man, and has hosted Willink, McKay, and Ferriss on The Daily Stoic.
A full exploration of this network is outside my scope here. For now, I will consider the ways in which podcasting is particularly well-suited to Stoic askesis; and specifically, how the very act of listening – on our commutes, on long drives, at the gym, on hikes, and in moments of quiet meditation – constitutes what Michel Foucault (who himself drew upon Stoic texts in his later work on ethics) called a technology of the self: those techniques, “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”
Part of a larger project investigating the historical emergence of discourses of sex and sexuality in Western culture, Foucault in his later writings and lectures turned his attention away from the normative and disciplinary systems of subjectivation that had previously concerned him, and toward the study of ethical modalities by which individuals actively fashioned their own subjectivity. Focusing particularly on the ethical practices of the ancient world, he discovered a more autonomous framework for individual conduct, one that centered on self-imposed standards and daily habits rather than a prescribed moral code.
This precept of the “care of the self” (epimeleia heatou), Foucault maintained, could be traced from Alcibiades to the Imperial period, and had impelled individual Greeks and Romans (the free white men, at least) to embark upon their own stylized projects of self-transformation.
Among the practices that interested Foucault – and indeed, the one he understood to be essential to the “subjectivation of true discourse” – was the act of listening. In the first hour of his March 3, 1982 lecture at the Collège de France (published in English in The Hermeneutics of the Subject), for example, Foucault explained that listening is
the first move in as[k]esis … since listening, in a culture which you know was fundamentally oral, is what enables us to take in the logos, to take in what is said that is true. However, if conducted properly, listening also makes it possible for the individual to be convinced of the truth spoken to him, of the truth he encounters in the logos. And, finally, listening is the first moment of the process by which the truth which has been heard, listened to, and properly taken in, sinks into the subject so to speak, becomes embedded in him and begins to become suus (to become his own) and thus forms the matrix for ethos (p. 332).
This emphasis on listening, Foucault noted, is evident as far back as the Pythagoreans, who required initiates to spend five years in silence so as to be able to learn the community’s exercises, practices, and philosophical precepts. The themes of silence and listening were further developed in the culture dominated by Stoicism, Foucault noted, and emerged as a “new pedagogical game” that contrasted with the earlier dialogic model. Now, the master spoke, and the student listened.
But the nature of audition could be somewhat ambiguous for the ancients, Foucault explained, in that it was a passive (pathetikos) activity, yet it is the primary sense through which we receive the logos, the rational substance that the Stoics believed to govern the universe. In his treatise On Listening, for instance, Plutarch (46 CE – c. 116CE) wrote that it was imperative for young men cultivate the art of listening because they must learn to listen to the logos throughout adulthood, and so must learn to distinguish truth from the artifices of flattery or rhetoric. One must listen to the words of the master attentively, so that the logos might penetrate the soul. “The man who has the habit of listening with restraint and respect,” Plutarch wrote, “takes in and masters a useful discourse, and more readily sees through and detects a useless or false one, showing himself thus to be a lover of truth and not a lover of disputation” (On Listening, IV).
Perhaps the most striking of the texts Foucault discussed, however (see The Hermeneutics of the Subject, pp. 343-344), is Philo of Alexandria’s (20 BCE – c. 50 CE) description of the practices of the Therapeutae, a closed community of ascetics who renounced their earthly possessions in order to pursue “perfect happiness,” and the salvation of their soul (De Vita Contemplativa, §12). In his text, Philo takes specific note of the group’s elaborate banquet rituals, during which an elder comes to the fore and gives a discourse on philosophical doctrine or on sacred scripture (“teaching very slowly, lingering and emphasizing with repetitions, engraving the thoughts on the souls” [§76]). During these talks, the audience remained silent and motionless, adopting a precisely prescribed posture intended to fix their attention on the speaker, so that the discourse “does not stay on the tips of the ears, but comes through the hearing to the soul and there remains securely (§31).” In these feasts of silence, mastery of the body is the foundation of the care of the soul.
Though modern Stoic podcasting does not demand nearly this level of physical discipline of its listeners, we are nevertheless encouraged to incorporate podcasting into a daily ritual of silence and reflection – a new, digital feast of silence. As we listen through our headphones, in our cars, or in some other quiet personal space, we are joined in intimate connection with our hosts, who guide us in our contemplation of timeless Stoic wisdoms, engraving these thoughts in our minds so that we might have them ready at hand in order, as Holiday often says, to make them the principle of our actions.
It is this possibility of principled living that is perhaps at the heart of Stoicism’s twenty-first century appeal. As Elizabeth J. Peterson has written, in our age of seemingly perpetual crisis, Stoicism’s resurgence is undoubtedly due to its reputation as a practical guide for surviving difficult times. “Between President Trump, Brexit, the Middle East and the domestic issues in virtually every country,” she writes, “it’s not difficult to see why many people, across the world, need a source of clarity, calm, and fortitude.” (And that was before the pandemic, which occasioned a spate of articles explaining how Stoicism might help us endure a moment of profound uncertainty).
But the headlines aren’t the only source of our anxieties; we have plenty of it in our own lives. At a time of deepening economic precarity, in which we are routinely urged to become self-reliant, self-enterprising subjects in order to maximize our value in the marketplace, Stoicism offers a ready-made coping mechanism with a pedigree of centuries: at once a framework for cultivating emotional resilience, and a self-help paradigm for transforming ourselves into more disciplined, effective, and successful individuals.
When co-opted by late capitalist culture, when marketed as a “life-hack” and configured as an ethics of personal success, then, Stoic principles quite easily align with neoliberal imperatives that we endlessly labor on ourselves in order to better compete in an agonistic struggle for personal fulfillment and economic security. From this perspective, even the advice that we embrace stillness becomes a way of momentarily refreshing ourselves, only to return to work to “persevere” and “succeed.”
One of the most trenchant critiques of Stoicism is that by advising us not to concern ourselves with that which we cannot control (see Epictetus, The Discourses, 2.5.4-5), it is fundamentally a philosophy for living in the world as it exists, and not for challenging it (indeed, Stoicism’s popularity among the Roman elite indicates something of its congeniality with the established order). And while, as Sara Ahmed has written, “neoliberalism sweeps up too much when all forms of self-care become symptoms of neoliberalism,” it is nevertheless worth considering how an ostensibly self-directed ascetic practice is complicit in more hegemonic (neoliberal, patriarchal, and misogynistic) templates of subjectivity.
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Featured Image: “Marcus Aurelius Headphone Stand!” by JM3is3D @Etsy. Image used for purposes of critique.
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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.
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SO! Podcast #78: Ethical Storytelling in Podcasting–Laura Garbes, Alex Hanesworth, Babette Thomas, Jennifer Lynn Stoever
SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes
Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt
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