THE KNAWLEDGE COMEBACK: Remember Tai Lopez?
He dominated YouTube ads in the mid 2010’s with his quote on quote KNAWLEDGE.
Tai’s video format was pretty simple.
He usually recorded himself in front of flashy things like lamborghinis, private jets, and
mansions.
But, in the video itself, he usually dismisses these materialistic objects and claims that
true wealth is KNAWLEDGE.
He would go onto claim that you can get this KNAWLEDGE by buying his extremely cheap courses
that “only” cost a few thousand dollars each.
While this was pretty simple pitch, it was extraordinarily effective.
Something about him recording on his phone and the low production quality gave his videos
a sense of authenticity.
There was of course people who always hated this guy and thought that he was a scammer.
But, there’s no denying that his videos were quite persuasive and hard to ignore.
If you go through his comments today, you’ll see paying saying things like “5 years ago
we were forced to watch this.
Today we look it up and enjoy it.”
“We’ve come full circle.
I used to never be able to escape this ad and here I am years later looking it up.”
With comments like these, you know it’s an internet classic.
But despite his popularity in the mid 2010s, Tai more or less fell out of relevancy in
the later part of the decade and throughout the 2020s.
He never really stopped posting altogether, but his channel metrics were on a substantial
decline.
His subscriber count stalled at 1.3 million and was actually starting to go down.
Meanwhile, he was getting tens of thousands of views per video which was terrible for
someone who was once getting millions per video.
This was until recently when he hit the YouTube algorithm once again, and boy oh boy, he hit
bigger than ever.
In the last 30 days, Tai was able to pull in 170 million views and gain over 200,000
subscribers.
And this wasn’t just a one time fluke either.
Tai has been pulling these numbers since August.
So, here’s the rise, fall, and rise again of the most infamous internet marketer of
all time: Tai Lopez.
SPREADING KNAWLEDGE: Taking a look back, Tai’s internet journey
starts long before his fame as meme.
In fact, it dates all the way back to 2007 at which point most people would’ve described
him as a bum.
According to Tai himself, he was living in a trailer park with $47 in his bank account.
He didn’t have a college degree, much work experience, or any connections resulting in
this less than ideal situation.
But, he was determined to make changes.
So, he grabbed a yellow pages book from his kitchen, went to the finance section, and
looked for the biggest ad on the page.
He figured that whoever was paying for this ad had a lot of money and more importantly
you know knowledge.
So, Tai tracked down the man who was paying for this ad and it turned out to be some guy
named Mike Stainback.
Tai would offer to work for Mike for free in return for Mike teaching him what he knows
and Mike would agree.
And this is what would eventually lead to Tai starting his first online business in
2007: Elite Global Dating LLC.
As the name suggests, this was a dating website, and honestly, Tai was actually way ahead of
his time.
Tinder, for example, wasn’t even started till 2012 and today it pulls in well above
a billion dollars per year in revenue.
But, maybe, Tai was a bit too early as he struggled to garner very many users.
Tai wasn’t willing to quit though and it didn’t take him long to switch to sketchy
strategies atleast according to allegations.
The story goes that Tai created and ran a bunch of fake profiles with pictures of attractive
females.
While some people saw through it and left terrible reviews, many simps fell for it.
And you just have to take one look at a popular website today to know just how lucrative this
can be.
Tai would use the money that he made off this website to start a nightclub in hollywood
and before you knew it, he was actually pretty well off.
He could’ve called it a day right here, but it was clear to Tai that the real opportunity
was the internet.
So, it mid 2014, he started posting on his YouTube channel about the books he was reading
and the main takeaways.
He posted about a dozen of these, but none of them really gained much traction.
So, in early 2015, he would give a Ted talk to hopefully grow a larger audience.
As you might’ve guessed, the Ted Talk was about reading books as well.
This definitely gave him a push forward, but the real leap didn’t come till summer of
2015 when he decided to film a video in his garage and run paid ads.
This ad basically became ubiquitous across YouTube, and while many were complaining,
some went down the Tai Lopez rabbit hole and that’s all he needed.
Over the next few years, Tai would solidify his own credibility by collaborating with
already credible people.
For example, he had Michael Jordan’s trainer Tim Grover on the channel and he even had
Mark Cuban on the channel.
Aside from these credibility establishing videos, Tai also posted a bunch of videos
that casually showed of his lifestyle.
Sometimes he was at casinos, sometimes he was in supercars, and othertimes he was just
walking around his mansion.
But, regardless of the background, a few things were constant which were the crappy production
quality and his apparent indifference to the situation.
You would usually never associate this attributes with successful ad campaigns, but this was
Tai’s secret formula.
These attributes made it seem like Tai wasn’t trying to sell you anything and that he was
genuinely just sharing his thoughts and wisdom.
All of this would build up to his second most iconic video of all time: here in my backyard.
This video wasn’t all that different from any of his other videos, it pretty much followed
the exact same formula.
But, the reason this video is so important is not because it was super popular.
No, the reason this video is so important is because people with power would start questioning
Tai’s credibility for the first time.
EXPOSED: Likely the biggest channel that called out
Tai was h3h3 productions who was able to find Tai’s house on Zillow.
Now technically, the listing does say off market, but Ethan from h3h3 would describe
Zillow as a short term rental website and basically allege that Tai was just renting
this house for his videos.
And given that this video got over 6 million views, it led to quite a bit of drama.
More people would start looking into Tai and the more they looked the more they realized
that Tai basically had no background or reputation other than the one that he portrayed on his
YouTube channel.
For obvious reasons, this made people quite suspicious.
Tai would go onto address this video head on by inviting Ethan to his quote on quote
rented house.
Tai would give him a tour of the house and show him his supercars and whatnot.
Tai was probably hoping that this confrontation would give him more credibility, and to his
credit, he did explain himself pretty well.
He came clean about how he didn’t own many of the things he showed off like his house
and his cars and that he leased them instead.
He also clarified that he leased these items not because he couldn’t afford them but
because it made more financial sense to lease.
And there is truth to this.
It makes no sense to sink a quarter million into a lambhorghini or $15 million into a
mansion when you can invest this money into things like Google, Apple, Tesla, the S&P
500, or your own business which would all likely generate far higher returns.
So, while Tai did have a good explanation as to why he leased, people didn’t exactly
trust him and it wasn’t because his explanation was bad or that people suspected that he wasn’t
actually rich.
Honestly, his wealth never really should’ve been a question from the start.
To run the type of ad campaign that Tai ran, you need millions of dollars.
So, he either had this money himself or he had access to investors who had this money.
Both of these scenarios point to Tai being rich himself, so that was never really the
question.
The real question was whether this guy could be trusted, and this confrontation made it
clear that the answer to that question was a hard no.
Throughout the house tour, we would see a dozen or so attorneys, bodyguards, investors,
or whoever they were monitor each and every interaction and this just raised a bunch of
red flags.
Pretty quickly, Tai went from being rich and genuine to rich and shady and more people
started to see Tai’s ads for what they really were, not authentic life advice, but brilliantly
designed ads.
And given that Tai’s entire brand image was built around his apparent authenticity,
as this disappeared from the equation, so did Tai’s prominence and viewership.
This isn’t to say that Tai was doing bad financially though.
Tai had already convinced a large portion of his viewers that he was some sort of genius
mentor, and these guys would continue to buy Tai’s new courses making him even richer.
So, while Tai’s internet popularity was falling off a cliff, the same could not be
said about his net worth.
TAI REBORN: All of this brings us to where we are today.
For the past few years, Tai has primarily been marketing to people who have already
bought into the Tai Lopez brand, but he has struggled to bring in new people until recently
and that’s all thanks to YouTube shorts.
Tai is by no means a new player when it comes to short form content.
Usually, he’s very quick when it comes to jumping onto new trends whether it be SnapChat,
Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts.
But, Tai wasn’t gaining much traction with his regular just trust me bro advice.
So, he started experimenting with some other formats which led him to a goldmine: feel
good shorts.
Usually, this consists of soldiers returning home, acts of kindness, and anything is possible
type motivation.
And let’s just say these shorts are exploding in popularity.
Tai’s most popular short literally has a hundred million views and he has dozens of
shorts racking in millions if not tens of millions of views each.
More times than not, I don’t think the viewers of these shorts even realize who’s posting
them.
And even if they read the name, I don't think they actually know who Tai Lopez even is.
This is extremely powerful because it basically gives Tai a brand new slate to work with.
These people don’t know anything about his background and they just know that he posts
feel good videos.
If they start following him because of these shorts, they’ll eventually be served shorts
about his business advice leading to more sales for his courses.
And the best part about all of this for Tai is that he doesn’t even have to pay for
the exposure.
All of these views are completely organic and they’re getting more views than his
paid ads.
So far, I haven’t really seen anybody on YouTube notice this or really point this out.
But, if Tai keeps getting this number of views, it’s just a matter of time until someone
starts exposing him all over again.
I’m looking at CoffeeZilla here.
But, in the meantime, Tai Lopez is very much back and he’s bigger than ever.
THE TRUTH ABOUT TAI LOPEZ: At the end of the day, many people like to
criticize Tai and call him a scammer.
And yes, the bottomline is that he does sell overpriced courses mainly consisting of content
that you can find for free on the internet.
But, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to learn from him.
The learning opportunity with Tai is not his courses or whatever else he’s selling.
The real learning opportunity with Tai is his marketing, his story telling, and his
persuasion.
Now, I’m not recommending that you go sell online courses yourself, but maybe you could
apply some of his strategies into your own marketing efforts.
If you’re doing a job interview, how do come off as authentic and confident as opposed
to rehearsed and nervous.
If you own a business, how do you create brand image that feel genuine and resonates with
your target market.
So, as Tai goes through this second wave of popularity, you shouldn’t buy his courses.
But, you should pay close attention to why Tai’s winning but that’s just what I think.
Do you think Tai Lopez is a scammer, a marketing genius, or some combination of both?
Comment that down below.
Also, drop a like if you hope people see through Tai’s pitch this time around.
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