YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Shea

lines on the record: 28
first: 2025-01-20
most recent: 2025-01-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“While being such a viral misogynist would show loads of other young men that that was also a possible route to fame and money. Not just that they should be misogynist, but that they should actually become these hyper misogynistic characters and push those narratives out on social media. Whereas Tate was an anomaly when he popped up on my computer screen in 2019, I watched his videos and thought, God, there's no one out there saying things this abhorrent so confidently and with such a like laugh and wink about it If that was to happen now, he would just be run of the mill because genuinely every time I open up Twitter rumble TikTok you see tens, 20, hundreds of these men with these same lines, these same narratives just searching for that engagement. I think that is an effect of Andrew Tate that can't be overlooked. If you end Andrew Tate, the philosophy still lives on.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think even after Tate's case comes to an end, if he's found guilty, I think the impact of his ideology and what he did in order to become famous will be felt for years to come, not just because he has been so influential on some young men, but also because he has literally created these sort of mini tapes on social media. There are tons of influencers now with huge followings, people like Aidan Ross, people like Sneako. These people like Hassan, Mr. Overpaid, he's known as these people have hundreds of thousands, if not millions across their platforms. And a number of them were actual members of Andrew Tate's war room and learned from him how to become famous and how to use his techniques to achieve virality. And what Andrew Tate did perhaps unintentionally by becoming so famous.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cult leaders, it's also used by salesmen, and it's used in hypnobirthing, it has a number of both nefarious and completely nice ordinary purposes, right? But Iggy was using it to not only groom the men in the war room to try and make them more reliant on him, but he was also teaching them how to use aspects of NLP to, in his own words, brainwash women to turn them into again his own words, sex slaves. Iggy used taught them a method alongside Andrew Tate's PhD course that he likened to Pavlovian conditioning, how you train dogs. And they basically believed they could use that method to gradually make women more dependent on them and more subservient to them up until the point that they would agree to do sex work for them and give them all of the earnings.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we now know, he was called. He had a pickup artistry character. He called himself Douglas Hall. He had another character in LA that he created that he used to go to sex parties. And we basically found out he was this sort of very unusual, pretty far right hyper misogynist who adopted different characters throughout his life that he used to sort of serve different purposes. And Iggy Semelwise was a character he created around 2018. And he formed this union with Andrew Tate where he essentially used the image of Andrew Tate, used Andrew Tate as his figurehead to assemble this cult around him, this cult that we now know to be the war room. And Iggy really used cult-like practices to build and maintain that organization. He was obsessed with something called neurolinguistic programming, which has been used by lots of”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a character that seemed very out of place in this group of men smoking Wearing tightsuits, talking about making money. And we became quite obsessed with who he really was and why he was in the war room and not only in it, seemingly holding a very high position, if not the most high position in the war room alongside Andrew Tate. What we uncovered was that Iggy's real name was Miles Sunkin and he had a long and sordid history not just in cults, he was a member of two cults, but also he was a figure in the burgeoning manosphere in the 80s and 90s. And the particular movement of the online manosphere that Iggy became obsessed with was pickup artistry. He was a PUA, a man who would use various different sort of pseudo-scientific techniques to apparently attract more women to have sex with him. And then he would teach those same techniques to other men who paid money. And Iggy, well, Miles.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think Andrew Tate's movement isn't just like a social media phenomenon, but when you look particularly at the war room, there is a real sort of spiritual quasi-religious element to it in the sense that they call it tatism. They have their own tenets of tate, they call them, the sort of philosophies you should live by, rules for life. And they also have an origin myth involving a character they call Master Poe, who is based on Andrew Tate's father. And Iggy Semelwise, as he called himself, was a man who wore long wizard robes, a big trilby with a big beard. He would sometimes swap those robes for a black velor tracksuit with war and branding on it. But those were basically his two outfits. He was the spiritual high priest and grandmaster of the war room. That's his official title. And he also referred to himself as the greatest hypnotist that ever lived. And immediately he, as you could imagine, stood out to us.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wraps that all up with a sprinkling of a few true statistics and maybe like a good slogan that would be used by someone like the rock. And it's really sellable to these young men as to like why they're not happy, right? And I also think fundamentally most teenage boys, teenage girls, all teenagers, they go through a period of not necessarily being that happy with life. And the difference with perhaps us when we were young teenagers is the people we looked up to weren't there specifically targeting those growing pains trying to make money out of it, right? We might have looked up to professional footballers or Or artists or actors, people that had a skill that we wanted. These young men are looking up to a person who his sole purpose appears to be, how can I manipulate that very insecurity to make money?”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also think it speaks to this fallacy that Tate and others like him kind of build themselves, right? Which is that the world is fundamentally harder for men. And there are some metrics they point to that are true, which we should examine and try and work out what's going on, like why so many young men committing suicide. But they'll also create a whole bunch of logical fallacies and things that just fundamentally aren't statistically true. They'll say it's easier for women to get jobs now than it is for men. It's easier for women to make more money. It's easier for women to always get custody of kids. So many of these things that when you actually look at the data isn't true.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The trial is sort of getting underway. There have been a number of appeals about the holding of assets and about various pieces of evidence, whether they should be allowed to be submitted. But it's underway. It's just still going through a number of sort of proceedings that slow it down. It's going to be like human trafficking investigations on average in Romania take about a year to two years. So it won't be an overnight thing. He does now have a second set of additional charges that have been filed against him in Romania. Further accounts of human trafficking, including trafficking of a minor and sexual intercourse with a minor.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was really shocking to be in the middle of it, right? Because you always hear about online disinformation, these crazy conspiracy theories, but to open your phone. Know Matt is a top matrix agent. It was a very unusual situation to be in, but I could only imagine a million times worse for those alleged victims, right? Because they've They went through a four year police investigation. Some of these women are now speaking to us seven years after the alleged incidents occur. They've been fighting for that long to try and get justice. And from a significant portion of the population, the response was not even that I don't believe you, but that you're not even real. You're an actress. So it wasn't so much even that they didn't believe these women. They entirely discredited them by saying they don't even exist.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disproved and debunked. Have you seen the documentary? Like, no, no, but I just heard that it was completely disproven. You could really see the dual information spheres that we live with in action in that if you spoke to normal friends, colleagues, et cetera, or like looked at the reviews in the press, they were all relatively positive and there was lots of support for the women who had made these allegations against Andrew Tate. But then if you spoke to any Andrew Tate fan or a lot of men who just spent too much time on Twitter in particular, you would see this polar opposite understanding. And you speak to people that think that our documentary and its debunking is the reason why Weiss went bankrupt. Matt had people claiming that he was a stooge being fed lines by a giant media organization, sort of whispering things into his ear. There was an allegation that I was an FBI informant. They just so much disinformation came out of the film that it was.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through their own tears detail their allegations about how they say they were sexually assaulted, physically abused by Andrew Tate. We thought surely this will be the end of any kind of support for him. And yet that was completely not the case. We had people saying that these women were actresses, that they were paid, that they were lying. And many people didn't watch her documentaries. They only watched Andrew Tate's own clipped-out bits with his own editing that he released on social media. And according to Andrew Tate and his supporters, and he has a vast network of supporters on social media, according to them, our documentary had been debunked and discredited and we were totally discredited as journalists. So when people came up to us in the street and you recognized, for example, me from the films, they would be coming up to us as, oh, you're the guy who was lying about Andrew Tate and got”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The methods he developed for grooming women, which he then taught to millions of young men through social media, which then directed them to his courses, were perhaps developed in Luton when he was running a webcam house there. The reaction to your story, because you then released a documentary, don't you? A very visible... Award winning documentary. And there's been a huge reaction, isn't there to the allegations that you're making and the testimonies that you're platforming? What was that like? Well, it was pretty disheartening because we thought when people see, including Andrew Tate fans, when they see the accounts of these women who”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I have kids, and once you have them sort of ensnared and have potentially moved them to another location to be with you, you then start to turn on them and manipulate them into sex work. And we ask them about that in 2022. And that was kind of the start of the fraying of the relationship. When we got back to London was when we basically uncovered allegations of not just grooming but also sexual assault and serious physical assault from women who had either dated Tate back in 2014-2015 or women who had worked for Tate in his webcam company. And these are allegations that he denies, but these women, when he James worked for his webcam company, this was in Luton before he moved to Romania. And it appeared if what they're saying was true.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose victimized by him. So tell us a bit about what you began to hear. We'd had suspicions about Tay since we first started reporting on him. As we mentioned, he has a cause called the Pimping Hose degree. He had this webcam business which had red flags all over it. There was a few other things we picked up on. He was following a number of pretty young women from across Romania on his Instagram. They weren't celebrities or influencers and there was no real logical explanation for why this man in his 30s would be following them. But so when we first in 2022, which was when he was at the height of his fame, Matt did ask him about the lover boy method, which is a specific type of grooming human trafficking used by pimps and human traffickers where you basically portray yourself as romantically interested in someone, sell them sort of dream life, dream scenario. I want to marry you.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Door secret society and got to meet all these other men. If we are just from the get go said no to his crazy suggestions, we would have been kicked out. And then I don't think we would have uncovered all of the really important stuff that we did. And so you return back from Romania and your relationship with Tape begins to fray, doesn't it, as you pivot your investigation towards the unbelievably harrowing testimony of women that have been...”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that was the great thing about working advice they were willing to let producers and let directors make on the ground risk assessments as you go, right? And if it ever got to a situation where I thought Matt was actually like really, I mean, I was standing right by the ring. If he'd taken a big punch, I would have tried to jump in. But basically, if you... What would you have done? Just thrown myself in front of you and become a human shield, anything but get sued. With all of these kind of stories, right, you have to push yourself in really far if you want to get the most access possible. And through saying yes to these sorts of things and through Matt's bravery, we didn't just get to do an interview with Andrew Tate. We got to spend, we got to have conversations with him over like a four or five year period. We got to go to his house in Romania. We got to meet with him for drinks in London. We got to go for interviews in London. And then we got invited into his closed.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Jamie, I mean, the point a bit of journalism, I guess, that people see less of is your fraught, responsible role as a producer in all this. And, you know, I imagine you were like phoning your bosses back in London and the insurance companies and everything else. I mean, it must have been absolutely terrifying to see your presenter. Yeah, and it's not something you're normally prepared for. We did have multiple calls with the security team. And to be honest, they were happy for Matt to do it once he got a bit of basic training, which was basically like, how can you fall over without like really injuring yourself?”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those other men that did get basically, there was a direct correlation between how hard you tried to win the actual fight and how hard you. Going to get beaten. And loads of these men, we were speaking to them before they go through, and they're like, I'm trying to win. I'm going to win this dog. I've got this. They like, these are untrained fights. These are guys, no formal fight training. A lot of them aren't in very good shape.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I was just praying he would say no, but he got in the ring And to be honest, once he got in the ring and I saw that his I don't want to sound mean here, Matt, but his attempt at fighting was basically just running away from this guy. And then when he got punched a few times, like kind of hugging him until he submissed you, submitted you, I felt. Basically, as soon as the fight started, I was like, okay, this is going to be all right.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of, yeah. And to be honest, I'd said to Matt multiple times, I don't think you should do this. Like, it's not a very controlled environment. Andrew Tate doesn't really like you very much. You're from the liberal media. He's invited us here. But like, I was just terrified of what was going to happen in that ring. Was he going to get knocked unconscious? Was it all a setup? Andrew Tate was great at trolling the media and getting engagement bait. And I wondered, was this just a very clever ploy from him to get this journalist out to the woods in Transylvania and embarrass him and film it and get content? Matt is probably one of the most like determined and brave people I've ever worked with. So he obviously was happy to go through with the fight. But when he wrote yes.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be honest, I was really, really hopeful that Matt was going to be one of the people that said yes, found out a little bit more information, and then right before the fight said, no, this is stupid”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This course wasn't hugely popular at the start. It sort of bubbled around in the manosphere. But what we later found out through our investigations was that if you joined Andrew Tate's war room, the PhD course became an integral part of what you were taught. So Andrew Tate ended up by 2022 having a network of hundreds of men who paid him thousands of pounds a year and one of the key tenants of what they were learning was how to apply his methods of grooming women to get women to make the money in the webcam industry.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out step by step his methods for finding online and then recruiting in real life women who you think are susceptible to being gradually manipulated into working in the webcam industry and giving you the money. And beyond that, then in his ideal world, those same women will help you recruit more women to work for you. And in that PhD course, he says the methodology that he's teaching is very similar to what PIMPs do, street pimps. But what Andrew Tate did was apply it through a sort of modern social media lens. So he says the main tool you'll use to get women and find them, for example, is Instagram. That was what he would do to seek out young women. And then rather than having them walk the streets as a pimp might do, he claims he would have them sit and work on webcam.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when we first started speaking to Andrew Tate, he was at that time running a webcam company. At least he said he was. But he'd been doing that since about 2015 back in the UK. And he claims he made millions of pounds from doing this, getting women to essentially strip on webcam and give him a large proportion of their earnings, if not all of them. And the reason he claimed he was able to extract so much money from these women and be so successful in his business was because these women started off as his girlfriends. That was what he would say. So he thought, how can I sell a package teaching other men to do what I've done? I've now accrued these millions of pounds. I know other young men want women and they want money. I can sell them that package. So he created a course called the PhD, which stands for the Pimping Hose degree. And in that course, Andrew Tate basically laid”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, a business mastermind, right? He's someone who's acquired some money through a series of alleged crimes, but he's managed to convince a number of a large number of young men that he is the person who can teach them about how to succeed in this fraught economy.”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it speaks to the power of his marketing as well because lots of young men attracted him not just because of the misogyny, but also because they see him as some sort of like entrepreneurial genius, this guy who came from a working class background in Luton and is now, if you believe his own words, a billionaire. Almost certainly not, but that's what he claims. When you actually analyze the various ways in which Andrew Tate appears to have made money throughout his life, he had a short stint on reality TV. self-profess he claims himself he ran a webcam company, which is now being investigated. But so another way he made money was by allegedly exploiting women in sex work. He ran casinos when we first started speaking to him in 2019. He was opening casinos. Those casinos were apparently involved with an organized criminal group from Eastern Europe. So he's hardly...”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was late 2019, and Matt and I were both working at Vice Media and I was making a lot of films about sort of cults and conspiracy theories, looking at sort of the 5G movement, basically just sort of disinformation groups that had a cult-like attitude. A friend and colleague of ours called Lexi Rose, her best friend's younger brother had become obsessed with this guy called Andrew Tate. He wasn't that famous. He had about 50,000 Instagram followers, but what he did have was something called the war room. He sold a number of online packages, courses that you could buy from him, but the most premium product was this thing called the war room, an elite network of men, his own words, and for a cost of about £3,000 at the time, £3,000 a year, you could join the war room, get access to Andrew Tate and his elite network and learn from them how to be just like him. This young man, this 21-year-old friend of a friend's young”
2025-01-20 · Intelligence Squared · Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere, with Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT