Part of the Romanian Prosecution’s case against Andrew Tate is that he supposedly confessed to his crimes in videos he posted online. This is ridiculous, but the idea is related to something I have been intending to write about since beginning in this blog, namely, the various “voices” and personae Andrew Tate uses online.
As I began to really study him last summer, I thought there were two Andrew Tates online, one that was fairly “straight” and likely to be the everyday Andrew Tate you would meet if you were his housekeeper or neighbor. The other, I thought, was a crafted persona, a character who loudly proclaimed the most egregious of Tateisms.
Fairly quickly, I saw that there were more than two Andrews, and I also realized that none of the Andrew Tates on videos were the real man. Tate (and his brother, to a lesser extent, perhaps) have been at this game of trying to become famous for a very long time. Fight promos, pre- and post-fight interviews, reality television appearances (Ultimate Traveller for Andrew, Shipwrecked for Tristan) made them camera savvy by their mid-twenties.
You can bet that each digitally-preserved event in the public eye brought the perspicacious Andrew Tate to make refinements to the “real Andrew Tate as he appears in video.” And from time to time, the actual “real” Andrew Tate changed his mind about how he wanted the public to know him, what kind of reaction he wanted to provoke.
It’s easy to imagine the “real Andrew” watching a tape of himself in a post-fight interview, thinking, “I talk too rapidly, better slow it down next time.” Or, “I shouldn’t grin too widely, I look too boyish.” Or maybe, “The female interviewer was into me, I should interact more boldly in that sort of situation.”
Ultimately, when the day came to go full throttle into the online influencer role, Andrew Tate found he already had several “voices” speaking through variously dressed (and partially dressed) Andrews. The comic Andrew and the provoke-the-audience Andrew were loudmouths, and both appeared in podcasts like Your Mom’s House and Fresh and Fit. The storytelling Andrew Tate evolved from a street-smart Andrew Tate to a cooler Andrew Tate whose timing was impeccable, even between lifting weights in a Dubai gym. And businessman Andrew Tate, seen on podcasts with Leeds and Delingpole, was more subdued overall: chest covered, polite but not too quiet, and given to moments of animation.
Everyone who wants a life in the public eye curates his public image. Sylvester Stallone, Tucker Carlson, Tom Brady: all of them have changed over time, and not by accident. So it is with Andrew Tate.
As Tate became more and more famous over the last year, podcasters who had interviewed him were frequently asked the question, “What was he like off-camera?” Virtually all of them had the same answer: businesslike, quieter than on-camera, polite, and punctual. (One commented that Tate “smelled really good.” I wish I knew what cologne Andrew uses. When I was young, I would go to the men’s fragrance counter in a department store, sniff the cologne samples of high-end products, and try to guess which one Jackie Wilson or Don Everly wore. A few years ago, I wrote something about this on my Jackie Wilson blog, ans someone contacted me to tell me what was “always on Jackie’s dressing table.”)
But, for those who are new to Andrew Tate, where is a good place to start? I would say both Tucker Carlson interviews, both James English interviews, both Patrick Bet-David interviews, the Samuel Leeds interview (along with a shorter clip by Leeds about Tate), and the podcast with Mike Thurston in the Dubai gym. That’s actually 30-40 viewing hours, I guess. When you consider that I have watched most of that twice, plus hundreds of hours of other video, you can see that I have done a deep dive on Andrew Tate.
Updated November 28,2023.
Conundrum Andrew Tate 