Andrew Tate Doesn't Read. His Business Model Relies on You Not Reading, Either.

Monosphere influencer and Global Edgelord Andrew Tate spent the weekend explaining why he's "too smart for books." He claims to be too wealthy to read and too much of a "man of action" to waste time with pages. He says he pays others to read and summarise for him, mocks anyone who still reads as "broke nobodies," and films all of this from the front seat of a supercar.

The replies were filled with push back quotes from Bukowski and Bradbury.

But the literary replies miss the point. The real question is what happens to a generation of young men if they believe him. And many do.

Because this isn't about books. It's about how boys are being shaped - or deformed - by a form of masculinity that exists almost entirely on camera.

The constant performance

Watch the clip below and, for a moment, ignore the words. Observe the setup: the car, the camera angle, the tone. This isn't merely a man speaking; this is a man performing what he thinks it means to be a man.

The constant public performance is the giveaway. Instagram-style validation seeking - the cars, the watches, the endless need for audience affirmation - reveals dependency. The persona relies on external attention and cannot exist without an audience.

The "hard man" exists within a realm of spectacle and display. This masculinity is constructed from thumbnails and clips: the shouty monologue, the cigars, the watch positioned just so on the steering wheel. Each day demands fresh proof and another round of applause.

Real masculine authority doesn't require that loop. It doesn't demand constant proof to strangers. A father with genuine authority in his home doesn't film himself every afternoon to prove he's a real man. A coach who moulds boys into players and men doesn't rely on daily content updates to sustain his aura.

This isn't to say genuine authority is always silent or never public. It can speak, lead, and even broadcast. But it doesn't rely on performance for its legitimacy. Its source is internal, and its proof lies in consistent action and earned respect, not daily digital affirmation.

What you're watching with Tate is dependence - on the algorithm, on engagement, on the constant buzz of affirmation.

A man who has internalised wisdom, tradition, or a standard beyond himself doesn't need to shout it into his phone seven times a day. The more interior life you have, the less spectacle is required. Tate has inverted that balance: almost all spectacle, very little interiority. The boys watching notice the cars; they rarely perceive the fragility.

Wealth as costume

The next defence comes swiftly: "You're just jealous. He's rich. He's proved it."

Perhaps he is very wealthy; perhaps he is moderately so. Some people insist he's worth hundreds of millions, others estimate his wealth in the low millions, while legal documents list cars and properties suggesting a more modest valuation.

The wealth here functions as costume. On camera, it only needs to appear undeniably large on the screen of a seventeen-year-old boy's phone. The cars, the watches, the houses operate as props; marketing assets existing to convey a simple message: "I have what you want; therefore, listen to me." Once that message lands, the exact amount becomes less important.

Outside his fanbase, this is obvious. Adults see the clips and recognise pantomime. Many don't assume he's secretly penniless, but they do question whether "looking rich online" should confer moral authority.

For a teenage boy who feels invisible, the costume often suffices. He doesn't need audited accounts; he needs a man who appears to be winning. Tate understands this. He constructs the image, then uses it to smuggle in a set of ideas about women, power, money - and now, reading.

This reliance on costume and image is most revealing when he discusses books.

Anti-intellectualism for them; information for him

On camera, Tate dismisses books as a waste of time. He claims that reading is for people with "slow brains" and insists he's "too smart" for it. Instead, he pays others to read and summarise books for him.

If reading were truly useless, there would be nothing worth paying for. If books genuinely belonged only to "losers," there would be no need to employ anyone to extract value from them. The moment he admits to paying people to read, he concedes that books contain something worth having.

The message to young men isn't that reading lacks value. The message is that the work of reading belongs to someone else. They're offered the distilled product: the courses, soundbites, frameworks, but without the slow, internal hard work.

That's the business model: anti-intellectualism for the audience, information asymmetry for the seller. Keep the boys under-read and over-stimulated, and they'll keep paying for shortcuts.

This is the classic grift of the guru: create a need through insecurity and ignorance, sell your distilled wisdom as the cure, and discredit the tools such as critical reading and slow thought, that would make the follower independent.

You see the same pattern across the manosphere: sneers at "nerds" and "bookworms," paired with a vast back-end of copywriting, persuasion books, sales funnels, mindset frameworks, and ghostwritten or AI scripts. The men who call books "a waste of time" rely heavily on those who read and think for a living.

Authoritarians and cult leaders have always distrusted books for this reason. The difference now is that the sales funnel lives in your son's pocket.

Why young men believe him

If this appears transparent, why does it work?

Because the emotional deal is precise.

A young man who feels small, invisible, and humiliated hears a promise: status without long term effort. No need to endure the discomfort of feeling inadequate in front of a difficult book. No need to cultivate an inner life. No need to stand beside the greatness of others and feel the gap.

The offer provides a way to bypass that experience. Copy this script, imitate this swagger, chase this money. Repeat the phrase that you're "too smart" for anything that makes you feel inadequate.

This is an identity that doesn't require formation; it arrives ready-made. You can wear it like one of his watches: heavy, shiny, reassuring. The watch works best when directed at other people, and the identity functions in much the same way. It’s something to display, not something to cultivate over time.

Books demand something different. A great book doesn't flatter the reader. It doesn't adjust itself to a shrinking attention span. It doesn't treat the reader as finished. It assumes they're unfinished and asks them to grow.

A boy who already feels behind doesn't want to hear that development takes years, that he'll feel foolish, insignificant, and confused along the way. He wants someone to validate the version of himself that already feels clever on TikTok and to dismiss anyone who suggests otherwise as a "broke nobody."

What reading builds

So what does reading actually do for a young man?

Over time, reading develops discernment. It trains the mind to recognise when words serve as a smokescreen, to see when someone's story about themselves doesn't align with the facts, to spot the leap from "I have money" to "therefore my view on everything is correct." Discernment allows one to see where the performance ends and the person begins.

Reading expands the imagination. It introduces him to lives and worlds that never appear in the algorithm: men who suffered without cameras, who built things that cost them everything. It opens a space within him that the spectacle economy continually tries to flatten, offering him a vision of a life that doesn't require an audience.

Reading cultivates patience. A boy who can sit with a challenging chapter can also sit with a difficult feeling. He can endure boredom, confusion, and ambiguity; the very qualities the spectacle economy seeks to extinguish. Patience becomes the muscle that lets him resist the constant buzz of instant gratification and persevere with demanding tasks that don't yield immediate rewards.

Reading also connects him to standards beyond the influencer ecosystem. After spending time with a serious novelist, historian, or philosopher, the "Top G explains life in 60 seconds" format begins to seem superficial, which of course it is. Standards outside that ecosystem shatter the illusion. Once he embraces these, no single man on a screen can claim to be the ultimate authority.

Reading makes a boy harder to fool.

Not that reading guarantees wealth, politeness, or respectability. Reading makes him less vulnerable to men whose income depends on his ignorance.

Tate's aura and the script that remains

Tate's aura isn't what it used to be.

He remains famous and continues to attract views and attention. But the initial shock has diminished. Beyond his core followers, an increasing number of people view the performance and recognise the dependence: a man trapped by his own need for attention, someone who feels compelled to constantly prove he is who he claims to be.

This doesn't diminish his importance. It makes him an archetype.

Even if he vanished tomorrow, the script would remain. Another figure would don the costume: the cars, the contested wealth, the disdain for books, and the promise that all the slow work can be outsourced while the label "man" remains intact.

That's the deeper risk. Not only that a particular son might admire Andrew Tate, but that he internalises Tate's script for manhood: money over meaning, action over thought, spectacle over substance, and the belief that he's "too smart" for anything that humbles him.

To the young man, and his parents

If you're a young man who has heard the phrase "books are for losers," ask yourself:

If books were worthless, why would anyone pay to read them? If security were genuine, why would proof of it be broadcast every day? If the offer is freedom, why does it depend on your constant attention to his feed, his courses, and his next rant?

Why do those who resist him turn to writers? Why are the men who have shaped the world, the thinkers, builders, and statesmen, almost always great readers?

If you're a parent, understand the choice facing your son. He can be shaped gradually, mostly offline, through books, teachers, real-world responsibilities, and people who don't need to be on camera. Or he can be shaped quickly, predominantly online, by men whose livelihoods depend on him remaining angry, insecure, and under-read.

The manosphere offers boys a path. It has rules, rituals, and a language, which is why it appeals to them. Many boys turn to it because the alternatives such as progressive spaces that regard masculinity as inherently toxic, or absent fathers who provide no guidance, leave them with nowhere else to turn.

But this path is primarily commercial. It creates consumers before it cultivates men.

Formation works differently. It's slow, difficult, and often unprofitable. It takes place in libraries and in silence, within families and quiet rooms, with dead authors and living mentors. It happens away from the X feed.

Andrew Tate claims he's too intelligent for books and too rich to bother reading them.

You're too smart to believe him. You're too valuable to remain ignorant. Choose one book this week. Start with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - a Roman emperor's private notebook on how to live.

Richard Morrissey