Andrew Tate: A dangerous role model to young men or an internet idol for a disjointed generation? – Opinion

Andrew Tate is blowing up online right now, and his controversial opinions on ‘being a man and making money’ are creating headlines across the web. Recently the kickboxer, casino owner and millionaire entrepreneur has been appearing in more streams and has caught the attention of some parts of the Twitch and gaming community, especially after a heated debate with streamer HasanAbi.

Some young men are listening to Tate’s advice, his ‘Hustler’s University’ training programme which claims to have amassed 110,000 students in a year, and are taking it as the gospel. Others are saying his misogynistic views and promotion of arrogance, of the self, over compassion and empathy, are having a negative impact on young, impressionable minds. Andrew Tate has also been banned by Facebook and Instagram. ENUK editor Dom Sacco weighs in with his views in this opinion piece.

“The nicer your cars and the more money you have, sometimes the bigger the trouble [you have]. Legal trouble, lawyer trouble, you can end up in jail, all these things.

“The key to happiness is not having a happy life. It’s having a mindset that allows you to be happy in any situation.”

Read those quotes again.

These are not quotes taken out of context and thrown together, they’re from this video of Andrew Tate talking about having money and what comes with it.

‘The key to happiness is not having a happy life, it’s having a mindset that allows you to be happy’. Even when you have legal claims made against you and even if you’re in prison, you can still be happy (with the right mindset, of course).

I’ve listened to this and absorbed it, like I have with other things Tate has said, and I can’t get on board with it.

Is having a mindset that allows you to be happy not in itself a happy life? Can you truly be happy if you lose everything, these material things that Tate flaunts, and go to prison? This is just one example of Tate’s teachings.

I’ve listened to a lot of his videos, and I can see how he’s leaving a mark on people. He’s assured, confident and motivational.

But he also talks a lot of shite.

“Depression isn’t real,” being one example.

Tate talks about kings of bygone eras being able to sleep with more than one woman, as a reason for him to be able to cheat or have multiple partners.

As a parent myself, one thing I can’t understand is someone who isn’t a mother or father giving advice on taking care of children, for example.

In this Andrew Tate video interview with Layah Heilpern, he said ‘a father doesn’t need to be around’ their children, that it’s the mother’s job to look after kids, and that he saw his dad once a month when he was younger.

“If you’re home all the time, you lose a degree of mystery,” he says, “and for a female to retain her attraction to a man, there has to be mystery”, before saying fathers were at war or down in the coalmines, and how ‘this is how it’s always been’. The man is stuck in the past, he’s fighting for it but can’t accept times have changed. Perhaps like a lot of other people can’t. And in placing feelings women have for him over being there for his children in the future, that shows exactly the kind of self-centred person he is.

“I’m 100% gonna have kids and I’m excited to have kids, I’m gonna raise them the same way I was raised, with nothing, with zero, I was raised the hard way,” Tate added in the video linked at the top of this article.

Maybe Tate will dress up his toddlers in business suits, shave their heads, stick sunglasses on them and get them doing push-ups. Maybe he’ll book them onto his course at five years old.

He thinks he knows what he’s talking about here, and while I respect his views on his father, it’s clear he has no experience of being a parent himself, because he isn’t a parent. He doesn’t have a clue, but he will, his perspective will change, and I’d love to see just how much money he spends on his kids if or when he has them.

I can see where he’s coming from when he says kids don’t need expensive toys, but the fact is kids need other things. They need clothes, amenities, attention, love and things that can help with their creativity, imagination and learning, whether it’s books or activities. They need time and money invested in them, and there’s nothing cheap or easy about being a parent. For Tate to educate his followers otherwise is irresponsible and damaging.

Aside from this, I question the content in the $50-a-month Hustler’s University and how it’s framed, as explored in this video on the Hustler’s University by YouTuber Coffeezilla.

And like Excel Esports’ talent manager Freeman Williams says, while some of what Tate says might make sense around self-will and his motivational talks, a lot of what he says is utter rubbish. Beyond that, in my opinion, it’s also dangerous:

Confidence and controversies

So why is Andrew Tate the talk on everyone’s lips right now? He’s seemingly everywhere, many of his videos are getting popular on TikTok, and he’s a mix of confident and controversial.

He’s gone from pro kickboxer to founding an adult webcam business (which he admitted scammed men out of money), an OnlyFans agency and owning casinos in Romania. Most recently, he’s become an internet star with a legion of followers, his own ‘Hustle University’ training programme and is now crossing into the gaming and streaming community.

A few years ago, he was also on TV show Big Brother, which he was kicked off after Channel 5 “became aware of [certain] information”, and past homophobic and racist tweets he made had surfaced. A video of him threatening and hitting a woman with a belt also emerged, though Tate later said he was friends with the woman and they were joking.

He said if a woman ‘puts themselves in a position to be raped, they must bare some responsibility’, said “40% of the reason” he moved to Eastern Europe is because ‘it’s easier to get off on rape charges’. He’s also been allegedly investigated for sex trafficking (though his brother Tristan Tate says a jealous boyfriend of a girl who was at their house, wrongfully accused them of them holding her against her will).

There’s a whole archive of disgusting things Andrew Tate has done and said here, and after looking into some of these, part of me is surprised he’s still being idolised by some people, but part of me isn’t. This is the internet, and followers latch onto personalities.

Speaking of which, Tate appeared on a Twitch stream the other day where he had a heated debate with streamer Hasan ‘HasanAbi’ Piker.

HasanAbi grilled Andrew Tate on several matters, including the idea that his Hustler’s University is a pyramid scheme, Tate’s view that women are worse drivers than men and more. And while Tate was irked at points, I also think Hasan came across as jealous and doing it for the content.

Fellow streamer, Brit Greekgodx, who was recently banned on Twitch again after an on-stream twerk and rant about women, is someone who several people are saying has been massively influenced by Andrew Tate.

“I will stream while you [my future partner] cook for me and you clean for me and you look after the children, while I gain all the money and I give it to you and our children for a healthy, secure life. Okay?” Greek said in a weird sexist rant, with some saying he’s watched too many Andrew Tate videos.

And Greek stuck up for Tate after the HasanAbi stream, using personal insults, as Tate does to people he often doesn’t agree with:

Another UK streamer, Gross Gore, is someone who says he has Andrew Tate for pulling him out of a depressive period and motivating him to get out of a difficult situation, going from being broke to making money streaming more regularly again:

Others like UK esports’ Nathan Edmonds are less impressed with Tate, and some like Dr Respawn are looking to put together a list of male streamers that are more positive role models to young men:

It’s not just Tate. There’s been a rise of other personalities some have described as toxic and lewd, for example, IShowSpeed, who was banned on Valorant after making a violent rant against women, and recently apparently banned from YouTube after displaying a virtual sexual act in an adult Minecraft mod (please don’t look it up, it’s fucking weird).

‘You are absolutely alone’

Tate says: “Nobody cares about you is coming to save you. You are absolutely alone, and the only person who gives a shit about your life is you. Believe you’re the man and you can achieve anything easily.”

I’m also thinking Tate might be a Sith Lord.

He says: “Get angry – anger is a fantastic force.”

His views, for me, are the antithesis of love, unity and empathy. Of family.

Like Tate, I’m his age, I’m bald and I do like to wear cool sunglasses when I’m out, but that’s where the similarities end. I don’t have expensive cars, casinos in Romania or multiple models to date. I write about playing video games, I have a weedy frame and I am not a multi-millionaire (and I’m okay with that). Good luck to Andrew for amassing his wealth.

But I suspect beneath Tate’s macho, extravagant veneer, there is a lonely individual, who perhaps hasn’t experienced or doesn’t want love (I’m talking genuine love and care, not lust or want), who has done what he’s done to make up for that, to try and find something to fill a hole. Or he could just be successful, and I’m the one that’s talking shit here.

Regardless, the point I’m making is amassing wealth can solve problems, but it won’t solve all of them. Money also brings its own problems, as Andrew himself admits. It brings fake friends and more and more outgoings and vices. So if I had to choose between being ‘rich’ in monetary terms, or having an enriched life with a loving family and people who care for me, and I of them, I will always choose the latter.

I am lucky enough to have a loving wife, children and parents, who make such a difference to my wellbeing and attitude to life, that if I didn’t have them, I genuinely don’t know which path I might have gone down.

I can see where Andrew is coming from when he says’, ‘get angry’. Anger is an energy, and some of my better opinion pieces have come after I’ve reacted to something emotionally, and that anger has struck motivation within me, like a match lighting a fire.

So, who knows, if I didn’t have what I have now, and I was 10-15 years’ younger, maybe I would’ve been jealous of other more successful people like Tate was, maybe I would’ve got mad, and maybe if I was somehow able to ignore his awful takes in place of his better ones, even become one of Andrew’s followers myself.

I’m old, a boomer as some call me. I’ve been there, I’ve seen people like Andrew, I’ve seen where the path of womanising and greed leads, and I want nothing to do with it. It leads to a lonely, selfish existence. Go and look up Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, and how people saw him before he died.

Pamela Anderson thought he was lonely when he passed away. The Hollywood Reporter described Hugh Hefner as “fragile, lonely and slightly sad” in his final days, and “perhaps incapable of achieving real intimacy, even as he must have craved it”.

In life, he was all about fast women and money, and in the end was missing something. If he was happy, and Andrew Tate is happy with this lifestyle, and his followers are too, then good luck to them.

There are a lot of young, impressionable guys out there that feel lost or directionless, or are battling their demons, and are lapping up his content. They want someone or something to believe in and he is speaking to them and connecting with them, for good or ill.

“Do you want it? Or not?” writes a blurb on the hustler programme.

I definitely don’t, but thanks Andy, you do you.

So it’s not for me. And I’m not sure it’s for every one of Tate’s followers, many of whom are probably still developing and finding themselves. But for many of them, they need a guide, and Tate fits the bill. This might seem great to some, but are they not ‘sheep’ blindly following Tate, like the sheep he describes in circles he doesn’t agree with?

For me, he’s what a certain demographic think they want, but he’s really not what they need in the long-term, and for many of them I don’t think they’ll learn that until they’re much older and actually wiser.

I’ll leave you with a recent quote from the former Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, who was talking to Piers Morgan about today’s internet communities.

“A lot of typewriter worriers on the internet are creating idealised fantasies for themselves in the privacy of their own bedrooms that their mum and dads are paying for,” he said. “It’s all about being selfish.

“A lot of people don’t actually know how to think.

“Let all those that follow the nonsense, sink with that ship.”

Dom Sacco

Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.

As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.