Sam Parr interviewed Andrew Tate after reaching out via direct message, then held the episode for a year as cultural attitudes shifted. When Tate appeared on other podcasts without controversy, Parr released it, focusing on Tate's character and business model rather than his provocative statements. The New Yorker cited the episode.
Andrew Tate, what's the guy like? You met him in person, right? We had DM'd a couple of times. I thought that he was just an interesting person from the perspective of a lot of commentary about things. So I interviewed him. He definitely said some things that I was like, oh, I can't release this interview. This is kind of a little spicy. And then a year later, society had changed. He started to become much bigger. He went on a couple of podcasts. He said a lot of the exact same things and people didn't have a problem with it. Culture became like a little bit more acceptable, including things around like the vaccine and like that type of stuff. People just had more information to kind of evaluate these situations. I was like, all right, it's still a little spicy, but let's release it. One of the final points to deciding whether we were going to release it or not was I didn't really care so much about really hardcore perspectives as much as like, who are you as a person? How do you make money? What was his business at the time? He had a bunch of them. They were like online businesses. It was the first time that ever a podcast episode I had done was like cited in articles where people were like writing pieces critiquing him. So I'd get like a Google alert notification like, oh, you've been mentioned in The New Yorker. And I'm like, oh, must be awesome. Obviously I'm a cool guy.
