#103 with Tai Lopez - Tai Lopez Opens Up About His Past and Addresses Critics

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
What's up, everybody? All right, this episode is going to be a doozy. We had Tai Lopez, the guy who's internet famous for being a marketer. Some people think he's a scam artist. He basically built this super viral YouTube campaign that started off with him in his garage with a Lamborghini that he said he owned, he said he leased. Some people think he rented it. There's all kinds of controversy around it.
So we brought Tai on and we had a conversation about three things. First, we kind of press him on a little bit of his history and the criticism that he gets and how he responds to it.
The second thing we did was we talk about what he's doing now, where he's buying out old brands like Pier One and Dress Barn and turning them from brick and mortar to e-commerce ventures, which I actually think is really smart.
But some of the things that he was saying, we wanted to understand his model. And then at the end, the conversation gets all over the place. We talked about, Sam started asking him if he smokes weed or does LSD, and he started quoting a bunch of things from books that he's read, and this conversation wandered a little bit. And at the end, at the very end, if you can make it there, this is a long podcast, but at the very end, he asked us, he's like, what will your listeners think of this? And we said, well, it's going to be a mixed reaction. Some people are going to be mad we even had you on the podcast. Some people are going to love it and they're going to think it was interesting. And a lot of people are going to say, oh, you guys were too easy on him. You didn't ask him about X. And so he just told us, he said, all right, what's the hardest-hitting question you got? Ask me. And he wanted us to press them. And so we pressed them a little bit on some things. And so I think you're going to like it. It's a long podcast with Tai Lopez. All right, enjoy.
I'm here in my garage, I got my Lambo, I got Tai Lopez on the podcast. I had to do it.

**Shaan Puri** (1:54)
Tai, and by the way, we're gonna be respectful for you, I mean, we're all, we're respectful to everyone. We're definitely gonna like be as honest.

**Tai Lopez** (2:01)
I'm gonna set my record on for you guys, so that in case the backup audio.

**Shaan Puri** (2:05)
Good, we don't hold back, and it always comes from a respectful place though, so we try to be pretty straight shooters here, so.

**Sam Parr** (2:12)
Yeah, and we're not journalists, like I'm not like some researcher or a journalist. We're both founders, we're both entrepreneurs, and we just like talking to interesting people.
And today when we tweeted out, hey, we got Tai Lopez coming on the podcast, I knew that people have like mixed feelings about you or whatever, but man, my Twitter blew up, and it seems like tech slash the Silicon Valley Twitter, which is kind of our audience, at least that's my audience, they don't like you. And a lot of people there were like very, I thought there was two reactions that one I expected, one I didn't expect.
The one I expected was sort of like, oh, Tai Lopez, I roll, I've seen the guy's ads, isn't he kind of like one of those internet marketer dudes, whatever. I thought that would be the kind of the reaction. And we've had a bunch of different type of people on this podcast, right? We've had some people that are super successful entrepreneurs, billionaire types, we've had investors, we've had social impact entrepreneurs, poker players, whatever. So we've had a wide variety, I didn't think people would really get too hot and bothered.
But some people got hot and bothered. Some people were really passionate about it. And so for me, this was an unusual day on Twitter. I try to be controversial, but I can't get this kind of reaction. For you, this has to be like the norm. Is this a normal day on Twitter for you, where you get this type of polarized, I love them or I hate them reaction?

**Tai Lopez** (3:30)
A lot of that's Silicon Valley. I'm popular. I always have a friend from Staten Island, he said, Tai, you're popular in the streets. I actually kind of grew up a little bit ghetto. I grew up in a mobile home and things like that. And so, you know, Silicon Valley, a lot of virtue signaling. There's a lot of people sure that what they're doing is ethical and what I'm doing is in, and that's fine. Look, you know, at the end of the day, people who actually get to know me are always surprised 100% of the time. Every single hater, you know, people, because I think of it this way. One, I'm a big fan of evolutionary psychology.