Sidebar with Ariadna Jacob - Suing NYT & Taylor Lorenz for Defamation! Viva & Barnes LIVE!

If you have 44 billion dollars and you use it to buy Twitter, you make bad decisions. Yeah, we have all these counts, right? 44 billion. I mean, the two of them went into space because they have no other ideas about what to do with their money. If you have 44 billion dollars and you use this one—I just want to hear it again—you make bad decisions. The emphasis—how do I get back here?—the emphasis on Twitter: make bad decisions on Twitter. Four billion dollars and you use it to buy Twitter, you make bad decisions. Can you imagine the pompous—where am I looking, by the way?—you're gonna see the—the fro grow in real time. So I got off the treadmill; I'm not sweating too much; I have—I have cooled down sufficiently.

If you have 44 billion dollars and you use it to buy Twitter, and you all made fun of me when I put a “huh” in Whitmer—at least there’s an “h” in Whitmer; there’s no “h” in Twitter—can you imagine the pompous audacity of people who have not accomplished—love him or hate him, he’s accomplished something, through crook or through hook, I don’t know what the—if that’s the proper expression—love him or hate him, like the way he made his fortune, or think he’s a fraud in the way he made his fortune, he’s made at—at least—at least a couple of right decisions to have a wealth, to be sufficiently wealthy to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars. People haven’t seen Winnie in a little while. Look at this little guy. Oh yes, thank you, thank you. Um, he—I gave him a bath yesterday, uh, but it’s like—and—and then—and then the rationale because—so hold on, I’m going to add this back to the stream. I’m not going to play it again, people, because it’ll—it’ll—it’ll drive people nuts, but I—I put out a tweet yesterday. How do I get back here so I can see it? Okay, here we go. I put out a Twitter—a Twitter tweet—I put out a tweet yesterday, and I had to correct a material deci—a material error in it because this illustrates why—um—why it was relevant. Let me see where is it? Why we got this British guy who went to Walmart and can’t distinguish between a pellet gun—oh, forget it, I can’t find it. Doesn’t matter. I basically said if—if you—there’s nothing better than people who haven’t made 44 billion dollars telling someone who spent 44 billion dollars how they should have spent their money. The—and then the—the—the justification—justification is he could have put a dent in world hunger. He might have been able to put a dent in—by the way, uh, Elon Musk, I believe, has made an offer to solve world hunger, and it involves a little bit of transparency as to what the actual people—not with billions of dollars, not with trillions of dollars, with hundreds of trillions of dollars—are doing with our money that they take for the purposes of solving the world’s problems. You—this—the view—these—these hosts look to a private individual who’s made a supreme fortune through ingenuity or craftiness or whatever, and they’re looking to him and blaming him for not solving world hunger when you have an existing government with trillions of dollars in its coffers who’s tasked with doing that that doesn’t do it. I mean, it’s—there’s nothing better than—and I won’t say that they haven’t accomplished anything because I guess metric-wise they’ve accomplished more than me. I’m sitting in my basement yelling at a camera, so I won’t say that they haven’t accomplished anything in their lives. They’ve accomplished something; they’re making millions of dollars a year on the View. Personally, I’d rather be in my basement with the company of you through my camera, but they’re looking at this guy: if you have 44 billion, you make bad decisions. Yeah, go—go ahead and tell Elon Musk how he makes bad decisions, and it—what is so stupid about it—and I’m sorry to use the word stupid—is to buy all of Twitter for 44 billion dollars. If it’s a bad decision, it’s no worse of a decision for any of the investors in Twitter. It’s not a better decision because you’ve only invested a million dollars in it. It’s not a better decision because you’ve only invested ten thousand dollars buying some common stock. If you think it’s a bad company, you are basically saying everybody who’s invested in that company has made bad decisions. What are you eating? Those are my headphones—crazy, like dollar store headphones. Um, it’s—it’s—it’s—it’s idiocy with lack of insight. It—it is arrogant pomposity with lack of insight. Okay.

Um, tonight’s stream is gonna be amazing. It’s actually been in the making for a long time. Uh, a while back, I—I—I’m—I’m in tune with the—um—with the gossips of the legal verse, but not of all of them, and it was in the context of a few uh, defamation lawsuits against the New York Times that we kept noticing—everybody will probably remember some Super Chats from one Ariadna—influences by Ariadna—which I had no idea what it was at the time—about her defamation lawsuit against the New York Times. Now I’m going to bring this one up just because I was going to start with this one, but I figured we’re going to get to it sooner than later in the stream, so I could start with something totally—totally unrelated. Uh, yeah, let’s—let’s go with this one. Let’s go with this one because this is going to be relevant for tonight’s discussion. I’m not—I’m not just playing this; I’m not playing this to make fun of somebody; I’m playing this because this is going to be relevant to determining one of two things: either total lack of sincerity in the emotions displayed in this—in this 10-second bit, or total hypocrisy if these emotions are real. This is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t circumstances, and I’ll play it here. Take a listen, if I can play it.

“You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life, and it’s so isolating and terrifying. It’s horrifying. I’m so sorry. It’s overwhelming. It’s really hard. You feel like anything…”

So that—that’s Taylor Lorenz, for anybody who doesn’t know—journalist—for the New York Times, Washington Post—I’m not exactly sure—uh, which or both or whatever. I’m seeing some people in the chat saying, “So fake.” Uh, this is one of those situations where it’s either fake, in which case it’s bad, or it’s authentic, in which case it’s bad, given that a few short weeks later, uh, this individual goes out and doxes someone, but how—or at the very least puts on blast the private information of the creator of Libs of TikTok. We’ll get there. Okay, and I see Ariadna is in the backdrop, so I’m going to bring her in 30 seconds. Standard disclaimers: first of all, thank you for the Super Chats. YouTube takes 30% of Super Chats. If you don’t like that, we’re simultaneously streaming on Rumble. Rumble takes 20% of their equivalent, called Rumblerants. If you want to support Robert Barnes and me, you can find us at locals.vivabarnslaw.locals.com. Um, if I don’t get your Super Chat and you’re going to be miffed if I don’t bring it up, I can’t even bring that one up. Don’t give it—I don’t like people being uh, miffed. And just a bit of news: stay tuned. I’m gonna be live streaming from Ottawa tomorrow. I’m gonna go see—I’m gonna go hear the hearing for Randy Hillier. It starts at two o’clock, from what I understand. I’m gonna go early, live stream from Ottawa because you cannot live stream or record or broadcast from the court. Do a little live stream beforehand and a live stream follow-up afterwards. So stay tuned; it’s going to be awesome. Um, hold on one second. Let me just do this before I bring in Ariadna, who’s been very patient in the back. Okay, here we go. This is what I mean: if I—if I bring it up—I—I—no commitment to bring up or read the hubris of anyone telling a billionaire how to spend his money. “Why aren’t those millionaires giving their money to feed the hungry? I’m disgusted by the View, and they have bad ideas too.” I—I agree, but they don’t have billions. Don’t tell them how to spend their money. All the celebrations Friday and Saturday, with church Sunday. I’m also going to be in Ottawa this weekend. Okay, Ariadna, get ready. Ariadna’s coming in. We’re gonna bring out—um—Taylor Lorenz. I keep getting messed up on the names. Okay, this is gonna be amazing.

Ariadna, how goes the battle? How are you? It—it finally isn’t here. I know. Well, first of all, thank you for coming and thank you for being patient because we’ve been like—we’ve been talking about this back and forth every now and again. We say we’re gonna do it, and then it’s been like six months practically. I think it’s okay because honestly, uh, I was really scared to ever like talk in public about this, even though it was something I had conviction about, um, because the New York Times is frankly kind of scary and powerful, and so is Taylor Lorenz, but now that sort of—she’s kind of—um—exposed who she is, I feel a lot better, um, you know, just talking about it openly, and—and you know, I have a pending case right now, so I have to be somewhat uh, careful of that, but I—I do think it’s important that people understand sort of what happened to me and—um—how it could affect them and really—um—you know, defamation and—and you know, the powerful uh, media companies that are very hard to hold accountable.

Well, and we’re going to get there because the thing is this, you know, I read proceedings, you get—you—you read allegations, but ultimately you don’t know anything from anything. You don’t know who’s who; uh, you don’t know who to believe, and you know, everyone gets dirty in battle, and you don’t know who to trust, except whether or not people decide to trust you. I think now the consensus in the social media verse is nobody trusts uh, Taylor Lorenz, and they know who she is, which might allow people to deduce whether or not you’re being sincere, honest, uh, accurate in your allegations against her in the New York Times. Barnes is in the house. I’m gonna bring him in here. Uh, hold on. How do we do this? Like this? Do we like this? I think we decided we liked this better, and I’ll go on the bottom section so that I can put the chats this way. Yep. And Viva, I recently sued the airline because my luggage was misplaced. Turns out I lost my case. I get jokes today, people. Um, Taylor—Ariadna—and I said, I’m telling you, you could call me Ahri if it’s easier. It might be easier, but you did pronounce my name right, so thank you. Well, I—I knew in Ariadna back, and it was Ariadne back in the day, but uh… Okay, elevator pitch before we get into the basic stuff and then into the—into the meaty stuff of the day. Elevator pitch to who you are, um, before we go back to the past. Okay.

Yeah, so my name is Arianna Jacob, and I uh, was actually born in Mexico City, and um, both my parents were—are Mexican, and um, my father died when I was two years old, so we moved to the United States, and my mom actually married an American, and he adopted me and when I was around four, and so that’s why my last name was Jacob. And uh, basically I was a big computer nerd since high school. I was before YouTube; I was editing videos, and I would have to beg my parents to uh, buy me bandwidth so I could upload my videos that I edited on—on the compute—you know—and share them before YouTube. Um, so you know, I pretty much got started in digital in the year like 2001, and uh, I was on MySpace, and I was helping people like uh, this mic—the situation from the Jersey Shore—with digital and building his website and all that kind of stuff. I taught myself graphic design and videoing all that stuff. I went to San Diego State, and uh, I think it was my junior year I dropped out uh, to start my own company, and my dad basically said, “Great, congratulations on your company, but you’re cut off. You have to figure out how to favor your company on your own.” And um, you know, I basically did that bootstrapped hustle of like understanding the industry, being in it. I—I could never become like a YouTuber because you know, at that time it was really difficult to monetize anything on YouTube, and frankly, I had to get a job and pay my bills, or you know, I was going to be homeless. So, but I learned all these things, and I think that it’s important to understand that you know, it wasn’t just a TikTok agent. I think people kind of dismiss, you know, really my journey, and that was you know, working for digital agencies for years, not only working for a digital agency but at the same time working for—um—you know, being a sort of like a client uh, salesperson at nightclubs and nightlife venues on the weekends, and then you know, on my free time working on an app. So I was always like—I always had like three jobs; I was always just trying to make it, and I think um, you know, there—you can’t go to college necessarily, or maybe you can now, but it’s not looking at a PhD in social media. So the people that were like really the early adopters—people like Gary Vaynerchuk, GaryVee—maybe some of you guys follow him—um—and you know, a couple others were sort of quote-unquote experts, and but there wasn’t like—there’s not a ton of people that really have been in this from like day one, and I think you know, Taylor Lorenz talks about you know, she started on Tumblr like in 2009, um—whatever. My point is, if you look at our careers like sort of parallel, I—I know that I had started way early on, um, you know, a lot of times in points where it wasn’t lucrative, right? Like I was the person that would work for free for so and so for a year just to like, you know, get more knowledge about media, social media, build relationships, and do all those things. Um, and so sort of fast forward to when uh, TikTok started uh, to blow up, I actually bought influences.com in 2013. I was building an app, and uh, I realized that there was a lot going on on like Vine stars in LA, so I moved from San Diego to LA and basically started working with you know, all these—I call them kids, but they weren’t kids; they were probably like definitely over 18, 18 to 22-year-old content creators that wanted to connect with brands, and I had had all this experience from when I worked a digital—digital agency. I understood how to sell to brands; I understood search engine optimization, um, you know, coding, uh, social media, all these things, and so I was kind of like a bridge between uh, advertising executives that were trying to understand what—how to work with influencers and sort of like young and cool enough because I worked at nightclubs at one point in my life to get along with you know, the—the Vine stars of that day, which might have been like Logan Paul and uh, you know, King Bach and all these guys. And—and the reason I think this—this whole thing is difficult to explain to probably people like your audience or any you know, any mainstream audience is that they don’t know the players, right? They don’t know the characters. It’s not like you know, this has to do with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and their agents. It’s like they don’t know who a lot of these people are, so the context is sometimes you know, it’s difficult for people to follow, but for young people, you know, Gen Z, they know who all these people are. These are the people that they consider famous, and they want to emulate. So I pretty much got at the right place at the right time and built these relationships, and then when TikTok came about—this was like 2019—um, before the pandemic, and basically you have to look at TikTok as this platform that nobody really took seriously, right? It was kind of like—I found all these ponies in a field; they were TikTokers, and I’m like, “Gosh, there’s some opportunity here to work with these sort of new faces,” and so I—I signed several of them uh, to management contracts, um, or you know, some type of consulting concept—contact—contracts—agreements that um, would allow me to basically develop them and you know, pitch them to brands, and at this point you know, it was still really difficult. I mean, I was trying to educate brands on how TikTok worked, uh, educate influencers on how to work with brands, and finally we hit this point where, “Wow, the world woke up to TikTok,” and every brand wanted to work with TikTokers, and my little ponies in a field grew unicorn uh, horns and wings, and then everybody wanted a unicorn, and I think you know, I think that was where I didn’t really realize how cutthroat the Hollywood and entertainment space would be, but you know, I was doing everything above board. I had advisors that were big time in entertainment, um, you know, people that a lot of people would respect. I had attorneys; um, a lot of people believed in me and what I was doing, and it was sort of like that point in your life where everybody dreams is like you know, especially as an entrepreneur where you—I don’t know if you guys seen that like meme where it’s like an entrepreneur and they’re like digging for gold and—and like they’re about to quit right before they strike gold. It was like that moment where I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I—I like finally did it. I struck it after all these years.”

Hold on a second. We’re gonna have to back up just a few years. You said you’re born in Mexico City; your father passed away when you were two. Are you an only child?

Um, my uh, my mom got remarried, and I have two sisters. And so how old were you when you came to America?

Like I think four. Okay. And uh, what did… Barnes, you got a question. Uh, you know, you—you’ve been interested in—in some aspects of this space since you were very young. What led to that originally? In other words, was it being exposed to Hollywood culture, TV—I mean, what was it that led to your interest in this uh, from the time you were young?

I always wanted to make commercials. Like my favorite movie when I was younger was *What Women Want*, when Mel Gibson like could hear everything that women were saying, and he was trying to make a Nike commercial, and I loved uh, *How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days*, or they were like frosty yourself. I always want to make commercials, and you know, I didn’t go—I didn’t finish um, college, but I realized at like a certain point that people were being influenced by the different apps on their phone. You know, the time was like MySpace and Facebook and things like that, and so I really—I really love the idea of like making sort of like short-form commercials, um, which is basically what you know, influencers do today. Um, so yeah, that’s what like got me excited about it, and I was always a storyteller. I mean, there’s a YouTube video—well, now it’s on YouTube, but before it was just my mom’s camcorder where I would you know, be filming myself, and I would even do like—what’s it called?—like stop motion. I would watch that *Celebrity Deathmatch*, but I mean, it’s—it’s pretty crazy for an eight- or nine-year-old to have been doing those things, and I mean, I think you know, when you have the—you know, nowadays you put those tools in front of a young person, and they can do those things. I was really lucky that my dad sort of gave me his hand-me-down computer, and my mom would give me—I guess she let me use her camcorder and—and record over all my sister’s recitals, but—but yeah, I was always really creative, and—and I think you know, I think it was like in around 2009 when I met Gary Vaynerchuk, who was not famous at all, and nobody understood what I was doing, including my parents. They just were like, “Okay,” or “He’s a little strange,” she’s always—but I was on AOL chats always and—but it was when I met GaryVee and he was like, “You are—I believe in you. You’re gonna be something. I don’t know what you’re gonna do in this industry,” and that was like when I—somebody—it was like he bestowed that confidence in me that was like, “Well, if GaryVee believes in me, then that means I’m…”

To be able to do something, this is after Gary Vee had transformed his parents’ liquor business into the into into the business that it became. Like, this is Africa if you had established himself as um as a as a successful entrepreneur or business—well, mostly a wine person. He had just released his first book, which I think was *Crush It*, and I kind of basically stalked him down at a book signing. I had tweeted at him, and he was not famous. You know, I was using a Blackberry to film, you know, our interaction. Um, so, you know, and and but that was a big day for me because, you know, when there’s not that many people that can um, you know, just you’re young and you’re trying to do this thing, and when there’s a lot of people that can um, you know, basically give you the confidence to move forward, um, that was a big big thing. And he was, he’s still um, you know, somebody I consider a mentor and a very good friend.

For anybody who doesn’t actually know who Gary Vaynerchuk is—Gary Vee, I mean—founder of VaynerMedia, and now he’s doing… VaynerMedia took over his parents’ or he got involved in his parents’ wine store, liquor store, you know, made a 10x exit into a multi—I don’t know if a multi-million dollar business, but he used to give—I mean, back in the day when I was when I first discovered him—he gave some amazingly good advice. One one piece of which was: find a mentor that you want to work for and work for free for a year when you’re young, that you’re supposed to do in your 20s, learn a skill, and then go out and exploit it. Um, was it was and also too, just you know, even now, like if you watch him talking about NFTs, I think he’s made like I don’t know how many tens of millions in NFTs. But you hear about MrBeast, which is I think the biggest YouTuber in the world, and people like Logan Paul, and they talk about how much they admire him, and everything he touches turns to gold in terms of, you know, getting on this NFT and get in on this. And so, you know, um, so so in my world, he was like a god, you know what I mean? Like, in my world of YouTubers and TikTokers and all these people. And and also he has an agency which manages, you know, I don’t know what are all the brands, but like all these Fortune 500 brands are are basically um their social media is being managed by VaynerMedia at the time.

Right. I have a random question. Uh, is Logan Paul crazy? I don’t think so. I mean, what was your experience interacting with Logan Paul? He just strikes me as a little as a little unique. Well, I would say both of the brothers are incredibly intelligent; they like really work so hard. And, you know, that’s the thing: a lot of a lot of these influencers, they think like they can just get from point A to point B without, you know, doing all the work that it takes to get there. And I definitely feel as though Logan and Jake have put in a ton of work, and they have an incredibly good work ethic. Um, they know… Jake Paul is the one that, the younger one, the boxer Jake Paul—uh, he knows that he’s sort of the villain, right? And so he plays into that and and creates moments in in mainstream media because back then you rather remember like Vine stars and YouTubers were still not sort of like anybody that anybody cared about or knew about. And, you know, many celebrities didn’t know who they were. So um, you know, I I think that they were really pioneers in the industry. I think that they made a lot of mistakes along the way, potentially because, you know, who were the people that were helping them? You know, “Hey, Logan, don’t post this video of somebody in a suicide forest.” I mean, that’s and and really that’s the job of somebody like myself. At the same time, you can’t control human beings. I mean, people have free will to do what they want, so you can you you’re basically like a mentor to these people and a guide, and hopefully they listen to you, but um, you know, there’s so much behind the scenes that happens that people don’t understand. And I think that, you know, as we talk about Taylor Lorenz, the future, I think she used that to her advantage because a lot of people don’t understand how this industry works right now. So influencers are like continuous commercials.

Then yeah. Well, so you have to think about like celebrities, right? So we maybe, you know, um, certain people used to look at Michael Jordan be like, “I want to be like Michael Jordan.” Well, now somebody can look at somebody like Logan Paul or Charlie D’Amelio or these people and say, “Hey, that person’s just like me. That person went to high school, and that person made TikTok videos, and now this person’s super famous.” And so they can picture themselves in those influencers’ shoes more than they can, you know, uh, Michael Jordan. Because if you want to be Michael Jordan, then you gotta know how to play basketball, right, really well. And I think that um, you know, it’s it’s it’s kind of like an ongoing reality show. I mean, the some of the most valuable uh social media pages or Instagrammers that get paid a lot of money are people that came off of *The Bachelor* or *Real Housewives* or whatever because um, you know, people can associate them to just like everyday people or maybe like even the Kardashians, like maybe a long time ago. But I feel like um, and you know, those people when they promote a product, it’s like QVC on steroids, right? Because it’s like, who follows people from *The Bachelor*? Probably affluent women over the age of 25 in the US and Canada, which is essentially what you want, you know. So um, so yeah, so there’s a lot of marketing, storytelling, and sort of um, you know, building a personal brand, which is really like kind of what Gary was all about from the beginning, is not just, “Hey, this is my company,” like, “Hey, this is who I am.” Now now you see it all over the place. You see Dave Portnoy and, you know what I’m saying? So it’s like the face of a company and the brand.

How much do you look at data for what you’re doing? I mean, you’ve taken a lot of people and helped bridge them from, you know, small nobodies to somebody substantial. How much, when you’re looking at that, are you studying marketing data? Like, in the average political advertising business, we’d study great, you know, demographics. If we advertise on this show, we reach, you know… So there’s a reason why political ads are all on *Jeopardy!*, you know. It’s you want this uh over-60 voter, et cetera. How much do you look at that, or how much of it is instinctual from just absorbing a lot of information on a daily basis? Well, yeah, you have to look at data. And I think that the biggest thing to understand about why my expertise was so valuable, I believe, during the early stages of TikTok is because you have platforms that can essentially guess or give a pretty good estimation uh if like the platform allows for other platforms to integrate with it. Like, for example, I can, you know, use a platform and see uh, you know, your Instagram followers, how many are male or female, uh where, you know, where they live, where, you know, you can pull all this data. It’s not always 100 percent correct unless the influencer like allowed access for Instagram and this platform to pull their data. But with TikTok, you didn’t have that, right? And I think same with Snapchat, you don’t know that. So the only way to really know was like, okay, I was managing the influencers, I could… they would send me screenshots of their analytics, and so then I would see, wow, this girl has all female, you know, mostly female followers in the US and Canada over the age of 18. This is a really hot profile, and then I would know like enough to go to a Fortune 500 brand and be like, “Hey, this is really low-hanging fruit. You’re paying the Kardashians a million dollars for a post. Well, you could be paying this like person that nobody knows on TikTok right now, you know, a fraction of that.” And I was pushing these people who frankly nobody really even knew about, like people like Charlie D’Amelio and, you know… and it’s very difficult to find these sort of like very brand-friendly, all-American um influencers because you also have brands that are cognizant of the fact that, you know, there’s people like Logan Paul who started out potentially like very brand-friendly, doing stuff for Dunkin’ Donuts and things like that, and then, you know, had some hiccups in his career where now all of a sudden those brands are like, “We have to be even more… there’s like a brand safety concern.” And so I think having someone that had a lot of um experience and a relationship with the brand executives, it’s very different than traditional Hollywood where, you know, you’re casting a movie and you’re saying, “Hey, everybody come and,” you know, or, “Hey, agents are going to pick their people and have them be cast in the movie.” With digital marketing, it’s like, you know, a digital person in an office, it’s like, “Hey, who should we use to promote so-and-so thing?” And then, you know, you want to have somebody like probably myself who’s like, “Hey, this is why the art, you know, this is why the ROI of working with this influencer is best.” And I think that, you know, one of the things that I always try to do is I never pushed anybody that I was representing to such a high rate that I knew that the brand it wouldn’t back out for the brand because then I knew they would never call me again, and I knew the influencer would have a bad reputation in Hollywood, or sorry, not in in the advertising industry. Whereas I think a lot of like traditional talent agents, like they just don’t care, right? They just want the brand to spend as much as possible; they don’t care if the brand doesn’t sell one thingamabob or not; they just want… And and I think that was, you know, I had just different ways of thinking because they came from a marketer standpoint. But because I was working like that with them, then the brands were like, “Well, hey, we want to spend 200 grand on TikTok; do you want to just take the budget and and you figure out what we do with it?” And you… so then it was great, right? Because all of a sudden now everything was funneling through me. Well, obviously the agencies didn’t find that so great.

I’m gonna bring this chat up just because I think people in the chat who didn’t know who you were before this might be confused as to where we’re going with this. This is only incidentally related to what it means to be an agent for talent on the TikToks because this is leading into the defamation lawsuit. We’re laying the brickwork. People not following the whole concept, I fear. People going gaga over celebrities is one thing, but actively encouraging that seems to be another. Help Pasha Moyer. I don’t know that we can help you with this tonight. Well, yeah, that leads to a question: what are your thoughts about like some of the criticism has been that influencer culture is a bad influence on culture itself? What’s your thoughts about that? I mean, I definitely feel like the influencers that I worked with um needed uh people who would guide them, that would help them understand that not everything is about fame and money. And um, like like you have to realize that the people that are promoting sort of like these… I don’t know… I think I just think that there’s not that many people like GaryVee who was like, “Hey, be kind and be have empathy with everyone,” and you know, that’s how I I believe in all that stuff because, you know, that’s who I am as a person, but also because my mentor said all those things. I couldn’t even get some of the influencers to read like a passage in a book, or I was like, “Hey, why don’t you go read *Outliers* or go read *The Tipping Point*? You understand like these things.” They didn’t want to; they’re like, “We know everything.” And and then there was people encouraging them, you know, like… so it’s yeah, I mean, that’s a whole nother discussion. I definitely think that, you know, uh, but but it’s not going anywhere; it’s not going to go away. We’re where we are now, so we have to just understand that. And I think for anybody that doesn’t understand what I was talking about earlier, it’s like these influencers on TikTok were getting, you know, 20, 40, 50 million views a video. I believe like a Super Bowl commercial is like 30 million views or something like that, right? So so you’re talking about 15-second pieces of content that people are consuming like, you know, at an alarming rate. And um, then bring in the pandemic, right? When no more there’s no… everybody’s in lockdown when it happens, and there’s no productions happening in Hollywood. So what does that mean? How do advertisers advertise? Well, the only way is to use social media influencers if you want to market your products. And so part of it was that I had a lot of experience, and another part was that everything kind of came together to put me in a position where I was really valuable to brands and to the influencers because the influencers knew that I had the connections to the brands, and they knew that I had developed other influencers in the past. And just like, you know, with LawTube, I see a lot of people, you know, a lot of you YouTubers who who are legal analysts and all this stuff, you guys come together on each other’s um streams so that you can expose other lawyers to the audiences, right? So that’s how you grow; that’s how you grow your accounts. And so one of the things that I help the influencers do is I help them connect with each other. “Oh, I want to make a video with Logan Paul, or I want to make a video with Bella Thorne because that’s going to elevate me to a whole new audience.” And then Bella Thorne’s like, “Well, I wanted the TikTok audience to find me.” I think I built… I think we… I helped uh Bella Thorne uh get a million uh TikTok uh followers, and I believe it was like a month or two, or yeah, it really was a month. But, you know… so and this is stuff that I did; I didn’t get paid to do; I did it so I could help them, and then hopefully she would let me bring brand deals to her. So there was just a lot of things I had to do to put myself in the position where I was at that point, which was basically the height of my career. And and I’ll I’ll lay some more brickwork or brickwork groundwork, foundation… You bought the domain Influencers.com in 2013 for $4,000. If I may ask, what’s it evaluated at today? I don’t know, probably like $50,000 or more even. I mean, it’s all about what you do with that real estate. But at the time, uh, you know, I it was um nobody even… influencer wasn’t really a term back then, I don’t think so. Um, I definitely, you know, without hopefully sounding arrogant, I I definitely feel I was ahead of ahead of my time. And yeah, another example of you being ahead of your time: this is before like Instagram or whatever where you were you had the concept of people posting videos and raiding nightclubs so that people could share videos and share images and know which nightclubs they wanted to go to. I’ll say ahead of the time; it leads you or it it doesn’t cause you to position to be in in a place where but rather you look at TikTok influencers and you say, “This might be the wave of the future,” whether or not it’s coveted lockdowns or whether or not it would have happened anyhow. I think it would have happened anyhow. Uh, it goes from YouTube; it goes from Vines to TikTok. Yeah, and by the way, too, just so people understand, I had worked with um celebrities like mainstream celebrities, like people like French Montana were consulting with me. I worked with Canelo Alvarez, the boxer, um doing deals for him. So I really had a broad understanding of of uh digital world, social media world, entertainment, and brands, right? I worked with brands for many years in in digital marketing, uh sales, search engine optimization, all this stuff. So um, and it was, you know, it I think a lot of people that um, you know, are super tech-nerdy and like you fall into one bucket, right? You’re either like, you know, friends with people that are out at nightclubs or you’re, you know, coding at home. Like, there’s… and for whatever reason, I happen to have a little bit of all of this stuff, which like really put me in a good position for what happened when TikTok exploded.

So you become the a you become an agent, representative, whatever you want to call it, of TikTokers, and you get… for anybody who doesn’t know, you may not like the platform, people… I personally don’t like TikTok, and I and I don’t like the way it seems to be very highly addictive for young people. But set aside my my my qualms with it, you start representing some of the like the biggest names—Charlie D’Amelio, for anybody… they get millions of views on these TikTok posts, which are short videos. Now YouTube tried to copy them; Instagram to some extent… you start representing these individuals, and and you you build up your business into, at its peak—I mean, I don’t like asking numbers—but you build it up into an immensely successful business. How does the hit the fan with the the hit pieces that lead to the defamation claims that lead to the lawsuit? Like, what what happens to bring you under the microscope of the attack of the MSM? Yeah, and related to that, like the the criticism of a lot of this is the commercialization or corporatization of individual experiences, the but basically that’s but the flip side of that is what you were part of was the democratization of the advertising space, and that is going to run afoul of the gatekeepers’ control of it through the agency structure. What how did that play into what Viva is talking about? So um, well, it kind of happened in two phases. So essentially, you know, you’re you’re… I was working with these couple like a handful of these people that like exploded, the big unicorns, right? And at the time, um, some big talent agencies started reaching out to my clients. And you have to understand that these influencers, it was very clear who was working with them because on all their social medias it had charlie@influencers.com, so-and-so@influencers.com, brittanyadamsons.com, and every single email that came in came to me, right? Because and my company. So these people were reaching out to them, you know, in other whatever ways they could. And what was really interesting is that at the very beginning, around December of 2019, I believe it was, uh, Taylor Lorenz, who I had known from like two years past, she was working at *The Atlantic*, so she had my phone number; we were friends; I believe we’re friends on social media; we had to exchange it, you know, she could have gotten in touch with me very easily. Um, she reached out while I was working with these people, and they had my email on their page. She reached out to Charlie’s mom, I believe, on an Instagram DM and said, “Hi, I’m a reporter at *The New York Times*. Like, um, you know, I’d love to do a story about the Hype House and these influencers that were basically living in like collectives. So if you think about like tech incubators, they were kind of living in these like content houses where they could make content together, but it was very like um it wasn’t like formalized or anything at this point; it was just friends getting together making videos. Um, but they were they most of the people in this Hype House were repped by me, the the most valuable sort of accounts. Um, and and so we’re we’re sort of educating the parents at this time, too. You have to understand like this is like, ‘Holy crap, my kid is famous; I can’t even go to school,’ and they’re trying to process all these things. And uh, so, you know, that was part of my job, and we were working together with another uh lady named Barbara. And and essentially Taylor started… I don’t know how… but essentially she started… they left me out of the conversation with *The New York Times*, and then *The New York Times* did um an article called “The Hype House Gold Rush,” and really that’s what it was—is the TikTok gold rush. Everybody… these kids were so valuable; everything they were doing was…

Valuable, and and they exploded after Taylor did this article about them. I thought it was a little strange that Taylor didn't mention me in the article. And well, now I think the chat's a lot lost on what the TikTok houses are, or or the what.

Like if you picture, like Saturday Night Live, you it's like this group of people that make videos that you know, that make content together for SNL. And you know, they're they they come in and out, but there's like the staple people. So it's kind of like that, but on TikTok, where you have like, you know, they're they're all individual talent, but they kind of get together for this, you know, show that they tag the Hype House, it's whatever. The point is, this article—they live in the Hype House, some of them do, some of them just go and visit. Um, hell on earth to an adult, but okay.

So it's like uh, this mother, um, well, it's like Big Brother sort of, where people live in this house, young people, they do their content, whatever their whatever their specific themes are. And how are they making money to live in this Hype House? Well, they are getting brand deals, you know, typically at this point. But this, it was so early on that this is the point where I'm in the background like calling, you know, Fortune 500 brand being like, "You got to work with Charlie and and." It was like a lot of people didn't know who they were yet. Um, and and anyway, Taylor does this article about them. I don't really know anything about Taylor except for that she's a technology reporter. I I don't know at the time that she's represented by UTA, which is a behemoth talent agency that represents huge people. Um, you know, you can look them up; there's like three big talent agencies, and they're one of them. Taylor has her own agency; she's represented; she's represented by UTA, which is United Talent Agency. Really, Taylor, Taylor, I can understand that's very unusual for journalists. Taylor likes to run around and pretend she's a journalist. Well, well, isn't that a new phenomenon? I don't know if it's unusual, but you know, if you go look at—unusual by my experience, but almost no—I feel like it's so fair to say that though, because like I had no—you have to understand that before Taylor did the hit piece, like or what—after she did the hit piece, I was like, in my mind like at the SA at this time, I liked—I didn't know she was working with UTA, which at the time weren't even necessarily my competitors. Like people were advising me, UTA is huge; instead of competing with them, once you kind of work with them, and you know, and so I said, okay, oh, if they bring a deal to this person, I'll commission them out. But what they what the agencies wanted was not that they wanted the incoming emails. So I got Charlie D'Amelio, she's got Charlie at influences on her page, and then Dunkin' Donuts emails. And so guess what? Well, that's my client; I'm going to respond back to Duncan, and I'm going to take my percentage. Well, that's not what what these agencies want. UTA wanted me to send them all the emails that I'm like, well, I don't understand; you guys didn't do anything; like you guys go out—they wanted to be order takers, and I just felt like I—whatever they could do, I could do; I could negotiate these deals; I'm just a smart, you know what I'm saying? Like it's not like what they were doing, and you might not have the same conflicts of interest that every agency in Hollywood has.

So but now, just just to clarify this now for the for the chat um and for the viewers, uh, Taylor Lorenz, who's a journalist, is being represented simultaneously by journalism agent UTA. Yeah, what is you—I mean, um, and if if you know—I'm just asking myself questions out loud—what does she do? Does she do brand deals in addition to being a journalist? And then if she's a journalist, how does she report on things that she's involved in? She has a book deal with Simon & Schuster, which UTA negotiated for her. And I think, you know, listen, I didn't know anything about this; like I didn't know that uh reporters were repped by agencies. And by the way, Taylor wrote an article about UTA called—well, about UTA and like I think she mentioned CAA, but it was called "These Agents Are Signing All the Influencers," while she was at the New York Times. It was basically like a hey geography about UTA and didn't disclose that they represented her. So I mean, you know, so anyway, there was no way I would have known that Taylor was rep'd by UTA until I think in the very, you know, that after she did a hit piece about me, I started like—I thought I was going crazy; I'm like, am I like some conspiracy theories? I'm like putting like the red, you know, uh yarn together. I couldn't figure it out, but then once I realized she had an agent at UTA, I'm like, okay, that's—that's so—what happened is she writes a story about the Hype House, and then almost immediately these kids won't talk to me, the people I was representing, they went away, the the big ones, these big influencers. And so I really took it on the chin because I thought it was like, you know, I thought it was something I did, or maybe whatever I did. I couldn't really—oh, sorry, my iPod came out—I couldn't figure out what um what had happened. And anyway, I'm bringing this up real time; I don't know if I'll get to the article because it seems to be behind a paywall: "These Top Hollywood Agents Are Signing All the Influencers," April 6, 2020, by Taylor Lorenz. And let's just see how much we can read before uh—well, yeah, I'm not even paying—I wouldn't pay 50 cents a year. Okay, so just three checks out, clients; I lose these big clients, and then I'm like, well, it's okay; like I could I should keep going. So I I kind of like whatever. And then UTA signs these people, Charlie and Addison. So then I keep going, and I go to this big conference uh in FL, in Orlando uh I figured it's called Playlist Live with all with and and I basically ended up signing all these other people because you have to think about it, too; at that point a lot of TikTokers didn't have representation. Um, and uh basically I have a great case study right behind me because I'm like, well, I did represent these people, and so those influencers knew who those people were, and they were like, well, we want to work with you. I was like getting inbound like all these people that wanted to work with me. So I end up, you know, working with smaller people, but they were still make, you know, able to make money um with ads. And I go to this conference, and I and it and basically I was a popular person on the block, right? These I helped them uh get advertise or brand deals so that they could get houses on at this conference and travel, and I literally have video of them chanting, "Ari, Ari," sorry, like, you know, just so thrilled I was working with them. This was like in in February, um I think February, March. Anyway, how is it that like a couple months later Taylor starts digging in? And by the way, I saw Taylor at the conference, and it was so weird because I just saw her as someone that helped Charlie and Addison like explode, right? So I almost like I was a little like afraid. I knew she wasn't anybody's friend; like she was my friend, but she was a journalist, but at the same time I'm like, wow, like if I can get these new kids an article by Taylor Lorenz, like they're gonna become millionaires, too, just like the ones, the unicorns, right? And I saw her at the conference; um she didn't really want to have much to do with me; like she took some pictures with my clients there, but like she didn't want to sit down at lunch with me; like I I was just being overly nice; I had really no idea that she was an adversary or was gonna be.

But then we get back from the conference, and that's when um I believe that she started digging in. And when I say digging in, I I think she really like, in my opinion, like inserts herself into situations where potentially somebody doesn't have a problem, and then she's like, well, did you hear about the allegations about like this and this, and you know, she's talking to sometimes 16-year-olds or 18-year-olds or even parents who are like, well, the New York Times is saying this about Ari; like we just got into this; like why are we gonna—we're not gonna ruin our kids' chance like when we could be working with UTA and and Taylor Lorenz; like do you get what I'm saying? So she's kind of like planting a seed, and people don't know any better than to listen, or at least, you know, now all of a sudden be very extra cautious of everything that's going on. So there are there are two articles that Taylor Lorenz writes with respect to human influences uh no, so she left me out of the Hype House article, which explodes the unicorns, and then she does another article um just about really like the TikTok houses as a whole, and she sort of mentions a couple of the houses that um that I'm working on. And I think it's important to like folk—like for people to understand this because, you know, big part of this is going to be I think the New York Times in their legal proceedings is trying to say that I'm a public figure or limited-purpose public figure because Taylor mentioned me in an article. And I think it's like, you know, if you start a bakery and you know a newspaper comes and says like, do you want to talk about your blueberry muffins? Like, of course, as an entrepreneur you're going to be like a normal person that's not—now, so you know, understanding of journalism today is going to be like, yeah, like please talk about my bakery and my blueberry muffins; that's all I did, right? Is I just said, yeah, these are this is these are the concepts of the TikTok houses, and um to understand sort of like what the concept was is I saw them as like media companies. So there was like a Girls in the Valley house with, you know, girls in it that you could consider like 17 Magazine or, you know, the Drip Crib, which was like GQ and Sports Illustrated, and the Kids Next Door, which was like uh Rolling Stone and Nickelodeon or something like, you know. So so if all the if all the influencers are posting at the same time, it's a media buy that, you know, a lot of people are gonna see. And so that those were the sort of the concepts of the houses, and I was investing my own personal money to try to and and putting my name on the lease to help these influencers uh sort of follow their dreams.

And um, when did you first get—when that she was uh writing the hit piece? Well, I uh so trying to think, I think there was just like a couple rumors; I don't remember like who specifically told me; there was sort of like, you know, the influencers that were already sort of on Taylor's like train, and then there was a couple that like I think felt bad, and they were like, hey, something's gonna happen, but like these big these big influencers were already with Taylor, and they didn't want to—these other ones didn't want to get—I mean, it's like high school, right? These kids are just mean to each other; they get they bully each other; it's like, well, if you don't go along with what we're doing, then you know whatever. And I think uh it was a really manipulative situation, but it was crazy because before I think it was like a week or two weeks before the article um went out or before she reached out to us for uh with all these allegations, um she uh basically one—two of the influencers, they they came to me, and they're like, well, uh we don't want to pay you for any of the stuff you've done, and we know that you just signed a lease for a house for us for 20 grand a month, um but we're kind of over it, and um we want to do our own thing now, even though we we signed production contracts with you, and you gave us an advance and got us this house, um we don't really want to do this anymore, and you know, if if you don't let us out of our contract, something bad's going to happen; like it's up to you. So what was the bad thing that was going to happen? But I I'm I'm telling people in the chat like this is law; this is this is a concrete application of the law where you hear the story; you hear the facts; they're not—some people are going to listen to this area, and they're going to say like they're going to have uh let's say moral issues with you with the idea of leasing out a house so a bunch of kids can go be TikTok influencers and do what they do in a house, and like I it's it's a bizarre world; it's definitely—it's not my world, but you're—you lease out this house so that these TikTok influencers can live there so that you can rep—you represent them. Um, and I mean, I I got asked like the the the there was all sorts of stipulations, too; like they were supposed to pay for—I wasn't like some big investor; like I I was bootstrapped, so it was like they were—it was basically like, you know, I was putting in money from that I had savings to put into it; they were each supposed to pay X amount per month, and um you know, it was like we were building a business together, um and it wasn't like, you know, I put them in a house and was like slave labor; like go make content. Like, to be quite honest with you, they were supposed to like do their own content every day; like I think 10% of it got done; like they just didn't do it, and it was kind of like running a sorority house with, you know, people that just—I think that they um they just didn't appreciate it, and uh they didn't appreciate like, you know, what I was putting on the line, liability and all that stuff, um but we were doing everything above board; of course, it wasn't The Bachelor; we didn't have 100 producers there and all this stuff, but it was like a makeshift sort of Bachelor house, or what, you know what I'm saying? Like that kind of thing. Yeah. And so you're doing this with young people who have shown the judgment of—I forget if it's Jake or Logan Paul—whoever went to the forest.

Now, okay, so Robert had asked like, when did you get the idea—when did you get wind to the fact that Lorenz was writing this hit piece? When and how long does it take to write such a hit piece? I mean, she's had—she interviewed a lot of people; she got a—she got—she said that she interviewed um all these business partners of mine and all these people, but I don't have any business partners; like it was just—it's very like I don't—she definitely didn't include everyone she talked to in the piece, so I don't know, you know, I don't know who she talked to; if those people were former uh you know people I worked with that maybe I was doing better than at this point like and I don't know; I didn't know who she talked to; I just know a couple people. Basically, she reaches out, and I had been like sort of friendly with her, um and luckily at this point there was somebody in my life that was very um well aware of so how the media works and PR and stuff; he wasn't hired or anything; he was a friend and was like, ah, my spidey senses are going off; I think something's going on with this; like you do—don't just pick up the phone and chat with her because I'm pretty chatty; like I probably if I wasn't suspecting I would just sit there and talk on the phone with her, especially because I wanted to promote these things that we were doing, and uh and and basically uh I I told her I didn't want to speak to her uh and if she had any questions that she could go ahead and email us, and she was very annoyed about that, it seemed like uh and um finally she sent us a a whole thing of questions, and you know, it's kind of like what happened to I think Libs of TikTok was—what they reached out to um somebody on Ronda Santos's team and said like, you have an hour to respond or whatever it was. So they they said, you know, we have all these allegations, and you have, you know, 24 hours to respond. And at that point uh one of my attorneys that's big in entertainment at the time, he was like, just say no comment; like, you know, whatever. And I'm like—and in my mind I'm like, no; I'm like, I didn't do anything wrong; I have the truth on my side; give him everything; I'll give him all the receipts; give him—and then my other my lawyers like, we can't give him everything because if you give them everything, then you could be held liable because, you know, for example, she said that I uh you know I didn't pay people; I didn't pay people. So basically saying like I stole money from influencers, and I'm like, no; show them—show them when I paid them; I paid them when the money came in. And it's like, well, Ari, if we show them that, then you're going to expose this Fortune 500 company which you're under NDA with and saying that they paid late, and now they're going to be in trouble. So you can't actually show her that unless it's on background. So I'm like, okay, hey, Taylor, we'll send you all the stuff on background; you can't publish it. Um, and also it's my it's my IP; like I I had, you know, contracts that I had spent a lot of time tweaking and making perfect to what we were doing, so I'm going to show her also my intellectual property to print all over the New York Times; like there was a lot of reasons—not sure—but we said we'll show you, just so I can exonerate myself. Was she was the judge, jury, and executioner apparently. And um so but she said, no, we—I won't take that because we won't take anything on background. And and so then what we said, well, why not? And she's, well, that's not New York Times policy. But so she set up a game, but she set it up unfairly because the other people that were making these allegations, she did take stuff on background from them. Oh yeah, I'm trying to explain how they set up the game here, and and the reason why it's important, and I hope people listen is because I don't have a political affiliation; there's no—what is her excuse going to be for what she did to me except for potentially, you know, the way I see it, maybe gaining favor with people that had something to gain with my demise and that making her more famous, right? Taylor gets her book deal, and then she gets—these agencies are very well connected with the media with Variety and with Hollywood Reporter and all these people, and and they have access to other stars. So all that's going to do is give—make their relationship better, and all of them are going to prosper. Um, it's just important people understand—Robert, this is for you, Robert—does it make you feel old to know that you struck out on your owns in the 1900s? I don't know—I thought this in the 1990s. I thought that was a joke about how old Barnes is because Arianna—the internet says you're 37. I don't deny the internet—you're still speaking in one generation younger than me. I know what's going on with TikTok, but what you're talking about, I can understand it, but my goodness, it's a different—it's a different um culture. Well, and that's why it's so difficult for people to like be like enraged; they're like, I can't believe that Taylor did this, sorry, because they don't even understand it. We're gonna we're gonna dumb it down—not dumb it down, but they're going to oversimplify it. A lot. First of all, what is meant by on background? Because you said she asked for some background stuff. What did you mean by onboard? So on the record means that anything you say they can print as you said it, and if I show them a receipt or an invoice or a contract, they can print it verbatim. If you say, I'll give this to you on background, it basically means you can't print it; you can use the information.

As I guess, like, “substantive” is that I mean, I don’t know. Robert, you’re shaking your head like you know better than I do.

Oh, sure. I mean, I mean, well, first of all, the New York Times’ background reporting—I mean, New York, the New York Times spread weapons of mass destruction based on on background reporting. Uh, many of the fake news that we’re getting to, I mean, all the fake news related to Russiagate, for the most part, was on background reporting by the New York Times. So, to hear Taylor Lorenz lie about on background reporting is is extraordinary.

What I mean, the broader story—there’s two, there’s a contemporary context and there’s a broader context. The contemporary context, for those that don’t know, is Taylor Lorenz is the reporter who just doxed Libs of TikTok. That’s who Taylor Lorenz is. She now works at the Washington Post. Uh, maybe the UTA helped her get a bonus, the uh, in terms of moving from the Times to the Post. Uh, the and and the week before she had gone on TV crying about how it was terrible that people had ever doxed her, and then the next week she doc—doc—doxes Libs of TikTok. Just amazing fraudster.

The broader context is the efforts to democratize the advertising space and the efforts of the gatekeepers to monopolize that space. Uh, that’s part of the story. Another part of the story is the deep conflict within all of the Hollywood agency industries. There, it’s regular, it’s routine how it’s not led to media.

Yeah. Oh yes. Well, I’m gonna get to that, how they work together. Yeah. The second part is that just that these agencies are conflicted all the time. It happened to Wesley Snipes. They they were, they redid Blade 3 in a certain way to relegate Wesley Snipes for the future and elevate Ryan Reynolds for the future. It didn’t work out because Reynolds wasn’t really good in Blade, but there but here the problem—his agents were also representing Ryan Reynolds and representing other people. This is, I mean, the the agency business should not be a consolidated business; it should be a bunch of small boutique practices because the conflicts are so all over the place that it makes no sense that the agency business has been consolidated. But the way they’ve done it is through these conflicts of interest, favoring institutional insiders, managed to uh, evade major liability and accountability. I mean, Johnny Depp was the recipient of very bad advice.

But the third aspect is the real role, especially of the of the media in general, but of the tech media space in particular, has been to make sure that uh, big big tech and the tech space is dominated by the same gatekeepers for an institutional narrative. Like, the what enrages Taylor Lorenz about Libs of TikTok is its success. So, so the goal was how to prevent the replication of that success—do a hit piece uh, and dox uh, Libs of TikTok, not so much to get it off TikTok, but to prevent and deter and discourage anyone else from trying to replicate that. That’s where the hit piece on on you was, in part a hit piece on you individually, but also it’s discouraging, in this new democratization of advertising space, ordinary everyday people from having more control and influence in that space. They want these people funneled in to control gatekeepers at a corporatized, institutionalized level and to protect and promote them. And that’s what the New York Times—that’s like, tech reporter—she’s not a reporter; she’s not a journalist; she’s she’s a she’s a smear merchant.

Uh, and yeah, it felt like I was—I used to be a figure skater, and it like, I mean, I don’t, you know, I have any proof that they were conspiracy, but it felt like the whole Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan thing, right? Like, right when she’s about to compete, at the height of her career, they take her out so she doesn’t even get a chance, and um, and it’s a message to anyone else who wants to replicate that that that’s what all of these uh, hit pieces have in common. That’s who Taylor Lorenz is, um, and it and it’s it’s the reason why this story and this case play a role now.

So, the the piece comes out. What’s your reaction to it? Uh, hold on, before we even get there, just uh, okay, we don’t need to get into the allegedly defamatory allegations. Suffice to say, some of them were—you didn’t pay your uh, you didn’t you didn’t remit the funds to your clients as needed. Others were that yeah, you leaked nude photos of some of them were responsible for that mistreatment. Whatever you can imagine being the slanderous—if you want to elaborate on some of the allegedly allegations.

So, sort of, I think the anchor of her reporting was a uh, labor commission dispute filed by uh, one of the influencers against me, and uh, it seemed as though like a few weeks after that was filed, that was sort of the the catalyst to her story, why she could, you know, write all these things. But you have to remember that a, we hadn’t gone to court to prove that I’d done anything wrong, and I never got, you know, in that case, um, I I didn’t have to uh, it got settled out of court. There was no money exchanged anyway. The the but the interesting part is that that influencer was the one that I was trying to work symbiotically with UTA, and the one that wanted me to hand over all the emails, but I wouldn’t do it. And so then, all of a sudden, she files this labor dispute saying that I don’t have a talent agency license. That’s a whole nother thing in the weeds, I won’t get into, but basically, you don’t have to have a talent agency license to represent influencers on TikTok, and if so, there’s never been a precedent set, and this the talent agency’s act was, I think, written so that, you know, people that were going to the casting couch and getting taken advantage of that wouldn’t happen. You had to be, you know, the agents had to get a background check and all stuff. But anyway, by the time Taylor wrote the article, the negative article, I did have a talent agency license, just just to protect myself, just so I would have it. But the point is, somebody filed a frivolous lawsuit; they’re also represented by UTA, and then um, several people in the piece, including one of the girls, um, is also represented by UTA, and after the hit piece, she shows up on Good Morning America and all these positive pieces with Taylor Lorenz uh, about, you know, the coveted vaccines and the government talking to TikTokers. I mean, this influencer, in my eyes, was rewarded for going along with Taylor’s narrative and then got all these um, things to make them more famous. So, you know, it’s like people like Taylor have the ability to hand out little blue check marks because the way it works with Instagram—how do you get verified? You have to have mainstream press, and uh, you know, so so the influencers, and by the way, I told them, hey, how did Charlie D’Amelio blow up? Well, Taylor Lorenz did a story about that. So now, all of a sudden, Taylor runs is calling them, and you know what I’m saying? So there, it’s I don’t know if it’s a quid pro quo type of thing or what, but it just felt like um, so that’s sort of what’s going on, but I think that, you know, in the article, the main things that really hurt me in terms of anybody that uh, brands that wanted to work with me or influencers, uh, the reason I lost pretty much all my clients was because um, she wrote in there essentially that I take advantage of kids. Now, most of the people I was working with were all over 18, um, and they all, like, for example, I think she wrote that I I had cameras in the house without any without consent, which wasn’t true. As she wrote it as a quote, so she did all these things kind of like as quotes. She did a whole other huge section of the article where she quotes this girl, Tiana Singer. Well, Tiana Singer wasn’t even my client. That’s like the same thing as like, you know, a disgruntled worker from wherever is getting interviewed and put in this piece, but that person never ever worked for that company. How can you do that? And so I what happened afterwards was I was furious because I’m like, how is this legal? How is this allowed? And I would go I went to my, you know, in in the the the nude images thing, by the way, the one of the uh, influencers in the house, somebody another manager texted me and said, hey, you might want to be aware, there’s all these nude images of your one of the guys in your houses who was like a leader. So I text the guy and I go, why are your nudes all over the internet? And he texts me back and says, well, there was an iCloud hack, and all my nudes are all over the internet. But then, in the article, it says I leaked his nudes. And I think my lawyer wrote like, you know, one of the things like saying like, you know, that’s the equivalent of somebody sending something to HR, and then you use the word “leaked.” Like, I think “leaked,” in the dictionary, is literally like making a private thing public, and so that word in and of itself, I hope I see it as defamatory because it’s like any common person reading that is like, this chick didn’t pay them; she leaked their nudes; she was basically a pervert like filming them without permission. Like, it makes me look like the Wicked Witch of the West, which was devastating because I was quite literally the opposite of that. I was like putting in all my money to like help them, and and you know, it wasn’t like I was making millions of dollars. You have to remember, the people that were making millions, the unicorns are gone already. So now I have these lit, you know, smaller accounts that I’m trying to build up, and it was not as lucrative as Charlie D’Amelio and those people. And so um, it was going to be—we were at that time where, you know, again, the pandemic happens, and now all these people want the TikTokers in the houses, um, but it was uh, what I found out was that there’s like not a lot you can do. Right? I remember sitting with an attorney, and he’s like, well, well, there’s not much we can do, honey, like, you know, this sucks that this happened to you, but like, what are you gonna do? Sue the New York Times? Like, you don’t have any money. And I’m like, okay, but like, what are we doing? And they’re like, well, you can sue the influencers, but then you’ll probably never work in Hollywood, and you know, they’re already saying that you’re evil witch, so if you go and sue them, and what money do they have for you to get, even if you won at this point? You know, oh, there was just all these sort of what-ifs, and it basically drew me down this like path of understanding, you know, what has happened in the past. I mean, even Peter Thiel, who’s like one of the most um, you know, wealthiest tech investors who invested in Facebook and all this stuff, at one point he wanted to take out Gawker, and people told him the same thing, like, hey, good luck, that’s not going to happen because the media does whatever it wants, and even if they’re mean-spirited and they do things, good luck with that. Peter Thiel was able to take out Gawker by funding uh, Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit and everything like that. But this wasn’t Gawker going up against me, and I’m not Peter Thiel. This is the New York Times and little me. It was definitely, in my eyes, like a David and Goliath um, situation.

So you you sue them. Hold on, I’ve lost my screen here. I I I I can hear—you sue them for defamation; you sue Taylor Lorenz and the New York Times. Uh, what’s the status of the lawsuit?

Yeah, so uh, it’s right now um, it we are waiting for the judge to rule on their motion to dismiss. Um, you know, it’s I think it’s important for anybody that feels like Taylor Lorenz’s journalism is unethical, and anybody that supports her is a problem. Um, I believe that one of the only ways to hold these types of people accountable is in court, and we have to see the evidence and the you know, the discovery of who was who were these people talking to, what were they saying, what is Taylor going to say in depositions? And if we don’t even get there, then like, how can a a normal, you know, a non-public figure, how could we ever fight back against these huge corporations and these huge you know, um, like it just it would be really um, disappointing. I I definitely have a lot of confidence that it’s going to move forward. I mean, um, but you know, I don’t know, I’m not an attorney or judge. He’s a Puerto Rican immigrant, and um, I’ve heard some of the things he he’s spoken to um, young people, young lawyers, and I think he looks like a great guy, so I just hope that he gives us a chance. And I think, you know, people that are looking at the Taylor Lorenz situation, it’s like, you know, most people I think that get reached out to by somebody like Taylor, they say, “no comment,” and it’s hard. I think what we have on our side is that we answered like, I believe was like 50 questions, allegations that she gave before she printed the story, so she had to know at least that there was a strong chance that what she was writing was false, um, and you know, a lot of people don’t do that; they don’t give up all this 50 questions of information and all this stuff. And I think sometimes when people get smeared, maybe five percent of what they did was true, or you know, um, and so and they don’t have the resources to move forward with it. I luckily was um, paying attention to when Taylor started causing a fight with Marc Andreessen, who’s another really big tech billionaire, and I started going into rooms and just like, hey, this is what happened to me, like I know like nobody probably cares, and then I think people started to realize, well, like, if she’s doing this to somebody like Ari, like there’s no end to who she can attack and what she could do and whatever her motives are, um, you know, I think that um, you know, so I think I I got um, just information by by starting to talk about what happened, and then that’s how I met my lawyer. And I gave my—you only have like a year, I think, to file for defamation, and a lot of people were like, are you talented? Like, just forget about this. And I’m like, no, this was like 15 years of my life; I can’t go back to my 20s and you know, find a husband and get married. Like, I’m single at this point because I put all my energy into building a company and you and and I can never get that time back, and I can never get that time in the future—I mean, in the past back when TikTok was exploding. You get what I’m saying? It was like all the things came together, and I’ll I’m not to say I’m not never going to be able to do anything again, but what she took away was so devastating that as an entrepreneur, like I wasn’t going to let that go. And I gave myself one year—if you can’t do anything, if you can’t file the laws, if you can’t find anyone to represent you after a year, you got to let it go, and you got to move on with your life. But I’m like, if I don’t try, then I’m gonna spend the rest of my life like wondering what if I did, and I’m like so grateful that I did. And for anybody else that something like this happens to, I really encourage you to like try to fight back because if you have the truth on on your side, like you know, you just gotta try.

I think what uh, what state uh, where’s the court uh, it’s in uh, New York federal court. Federal court, Southern District of New York. Yep. So the uh, I mean, I think uh, the case should survive a motion to dismiss. The Southern District of New York has, shall we say, an interesting history when it comes to the New York Times, but uh, well, we’ll we’ll leave that for another day. We’ll wait for the judge. Maybe the judge will make the right ruling legally. Uh, if he doesn’t, then that’ll be a subject of future Sunday conversation. The uh, now uh, so you decide to—how have you tried to uh, move on from this in terms of what other than filing the suit, trying to at least establish in the court of public opinion what happened, and the dangers of the New York Times’ power and corrupt, you know, propagandists like Taylor Lorenz? I mean, Taylor Lorenz—the kind of person who pretends she’s in her 30s when I think she’s almost 50. You know, it’s that that that’s who she is. But how did you uh, how are you otherwise uh, transitioning from the hit piece that they did on—

Well, I’ll tell you something that was really interesting. Like, obviously, I wanted—when she wrote the article, I’m like, well, someone else is—there’s got to be someone else out there that’ll like write about this. And what I realized is like, everybody that writes about social media and technology wants to either be Taylor Lorenz or they’re scared of her. And like, another reporter wrote an article like was uh, writing an article about me, and before she published, Taylor Lorenz called her editor and said, you better not let this reporter write, you know, publish the story about Ari because Ari’s an abuser. So she went around all these people, so I couldn’t even like sh, you know, not only does she take me out, but she makes sure I stay down. And so that like I was like, well, I want to tell my side of the story. And it wasn’t until I was finally um, asked to go on Tucker Carlson, and you know, I never really watched the show, um, but you know, I I did follow that he didn’t like Taylor Lorenz. And so I’m like, okay, well, um, but I did I was like, maybe maybe because he’s very polarizing, maybe I could go somewhere else to talk about it. But what I didn’t realize is—who else, by the way—all these people are either friends with Taylor or they’re repped by UTA. Anderson Cooper is repped by UTA, believe it or not; Don Lemon, The Young Turks, Robin Roberts—they have a thing with Good Morning America thing with 20/20. I mean, who was going to tell my story? Was going to write a blog about it, and people are in here. So I mean, and not to say anything negative about Tucker, but I was like, I’m going to go on—a lot of people in entertainment were like, you shouldn’t do that because then all these people are not going to like you. And I’m like, well, my thing isn’t political, and by the way, the left-leaning media should be leaning into someone like me. I thought that they support minority, but in this case—so I go on Tucker Carlson, and I thought he was very fair; let me say what I needed to say, and I felt good about that. And um, and then, you know, basically uh, all the people that always defend Taylor, they’re just quiet; nobody says anything else; nobody has me on to talk about it; like, nobody says anything else. So that should be like kind of a I think like an indicator of how the media works, right? It’s like it when when it doesn’t follow the narrative, then they’re just going to shut you out, you know. And so I’m glad I went on Tucker, and I think that um, Eli got a lot of support, um, and that really helped me like mentally. It’s amazing—people are reluctant to go on Tucker because they’ll be called, you know, racists or whatever. It’s it’s nuts.

I I got one question that someone asked a while back. I’m curious. I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna tone it down in terms of the direction of accusation. Was Arianne—I don’t care if you were involved in any uh, Fauci juice promotion, but did that—well, I’ll ask—in your experience, did that occur in the TikTok uh, influencer world where TikTokers were in fact being paid by government or intermediary agent intermediary agencies to promote the Fauci juice—that’s vaccinated?

Yeah, I was already I was basically already wiped out by that time that happened, but there was an influencer, Ellie Zeiler, who whose mom mentioned me in the article and said some not so nice things um, that I believe were untrue, but uh, that influencer was part of that whole article that Taylor wrote about uh, the government uh, or somebody, a company paying influencers to promote the vaccine. Um, that same influencer, Ellie Zeiler, was also I think part of that phone call about Ukraine uh—

You know it's an influencer that is injecting themselves in a lot of political stuff, people that don't understand it. The broader context of this is not just that sort of gatekeeping. One of the reasons for the gatekeeping control is because, basically, the New York Times for several years waged selective war against different people in the tech space. They did a huge hit piece where they had Dave Rubin and Stefan Molyneux, and they said if you watch these people, you're gonna end up in a rabbit hole of crazy right-wing beliefs and all this stuff. It was a hit piece on YouTube to require YouTube's algorithms to be manipulated in favor of the New York Times' gatekeeper control and to start its purge, which it started to do not long after that hit piece—uh, not coincidentally—um, and it's part of it.

Like we recently saw, you know, the US government is offering large sums of money to TikTok influencers to promote the war in Ukraine. So, if you have them within a control structure, they're not democratized. You don't have a small bunch of small boutique shops that are managing them, but they're controlled by a couple of big agencies, then those agencies can say, "You're going to need to do this in order to keep our ongoing relationships with"—and this is how the managerial class controls and manipulates information broader. So they take somebody that's really likely has no concern whatsoever politically, and they and they make them be political. But part of the way to do that is to control their business managers, the agents, the people that are in the intermediaries of their of their uh monetary support, and that's why it's abroad.

Taylor Lorenz has been part of that as well, has promoted all of it. I mean, that's why she's panicking at Elon Musk buying Twitter; that it's not a coincidence. She's one of the main people going berserk about it. She does not want people to understand how this game really works. She's helped cover up and be complicit in the cover-up of what Twitter has been up to and what Big Tech has been up to, and it's selective censorship and the rest—uh—and has been just a smear merchant and a propagandist for the institutional interest, including defaming and doxxing whoever gets in the way, usually picking on more vulnerable targets. Uh, you know, the uh—with the only reason why she hasn't been sued into oblivion is because she's she's been careful about which target she's picked. Uh, she doesn't pick Peter Thiel generally speaking; uh, she picks other people to go after.

I think she had no clue I would ever come up. From my most people don't, most people, you know, I when I took on the representation of the Covington kids for free, it was because most of them would not have sued otherwise. Normally it's too—it's very expensive to fight, definitely to fight the New York Times—um—and it's uh—so out of the gate there's a financial limitation. Then there's the invasiveness of discovery that takes place, and uh, as we're seeing kind of in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard case, I mean all all the medical records are out and about. Everything in his private life is fully in order to vindicate himself; he has to disclose everything in his personal life, everything in his professional life—um—and and so that's a huge deterrent. And then third, you have a judicial system that's biased in favor of the big actors that they have no problem, you know, having Alex Jones be sued into oblivion for a misrepresentation of what he did and said—uh—but if it's the New York Times, all of a sudden a different legal standard comes in. Even Project Veritas figured that out; they got a good ruling from the state court at the trial court level, goes up to the court of appeals; they're like, "Oh, no, no more discovery should take place here; this is the New York Times; we need to take a full review of this by," you know.

Yeah, I think that's why it's important to pay attention because like you you see the the lawsuits: Sarah Palin, Project Veritas, Donald Trump. But I'm I'm not any of those people; I'm not political. I'm so so hopefully this moves forward so we can hold these people to account. And I feel like even the New York Times—um—to be quite honest, like nobody wants to pick a fight with the New York Times because you know all journalists want to be on the New York Times bestseller list. They have so much influence; it's like an eight-billion-dollar company, all this stuff. And I didn't want to really pick a fight with the New York Times, but I think what's interesting is like after we filed the lawsuit—um—three days later Taylor posted on Twitter—um—going on book leave and, "I won't be back until January or something like that." And look, and I think what I would guess is that the New York Times was probably like, "You need to chill out; like you just got us into a lawsuit; like please stop tweeting," like and continue. But I think somebody like Taylor, like that's what she thrives on. And so for whatever reason, maybe my case was taking too long, and the New York Times didn't want, so she went to the Washington Post where now she could go on MSNBC and MSNBC and cry about how she's getting bullied and corrected.

And I'll tell you this, Ariana, the problem with litigation is like as a lawyer, everyone comes to you and they say, "You know, tell the story of my case," and I said nine out of ten times most people are not going to be interested, not because they're selfish, just because they're busy with their own lives. First, complicated, you know, and even your story—I knew a ton of the details beforehand—it's complicated. Even having that backdrop, you tr—you try to get people—what's the word—invested in your story; it's very difficult. What makes it a little easier is that Taylor Lorenz has turned herself into an into a a very lovable target of hatred, and if I can put it that way, she she's made herself sufficiently loathe uh within the public community that even if people like—I read the chat—people are not in love with what with what the industry is, not not you as an individual. I totally get it. Yeah, and I I have my own, you know, my own thoughts. I I think uh Big Brother, uh you know, Ex on the Beach, I think all of these shows are tremendously exploitive, but to each their own; that's that's life. But Taylor Lorenz is a is a loathsome individual.

And just to explain a little, I showed the clip at the beginning, but I'll give another one just in case anyone had any lingering doubts. We see this right now of this this this shirt. Let's listen to this. And I also thought that the fact that she claims to be have been inside the barrier at the insurrection last year—sorry, context, this is her talking about the Libs of TikTok individual that she just—Robert, we're going to discuss whether or not she doxed her, but she certainly—yeah, I mean, by her own definition, I mean, just a week before she was on MSNBC saying people disclosing things about her life, and if there's anybody that's a public figure, by golly, Taylor Lorenz is a public figure. Uh, the uh Libs of TikTok was really not a public figure—uh—and and you are not really a public figure. Taylor Lorenz is, and there she's crying about how terrible it is that people talk about certain aspects of her life as a as a public figure, and then she turns around and goes after the Libs of TikTok and says it's okay. She gives different excuses at different times. One time she says, "Well, it's not really private information; it's not technical doxxing; it's just kind of doxxing." Yeah, I went to her house; yeah, I disclosed her name; yeah, I accidentally disclosed her phone number, which she lies about. And because this is I assume clipped from the Philip DeFranco—there's a useless guy if there was one—but the uh—well, he's just like, "I got the clip more easily; I was trying to find it"—but yeah, yeah, the—but her ex—her first excuse for doxing the Libs of TikTok was it was already done. One of her first ones was, "Maybe Libs of TikTok is Russian," maybe. I mean, this is these are the—I mean, just look at her; she's a nut job. I mean, she's a nut. The uh—but you know, here she is propagandizing and uh again on the Russia-gate, Spygate, Ukraine war nonsense by saying, "I had to look at Libs of TikTok just in case they're foreign"—um—and the uh—well, just while saying she's a tolerant individual, wants to defend tolerance and all the rest. Then her second excuse was, "Some of the information was public," that's arguable in terms of how this works. Uh, it's probably not an invasion of privacy legal tort claim for the Libs of TikTok—um—but its real goal wasn't Libs of TikTok; its real goal was to intimidate anyone else from replicating Libs of TikTok, just like the goal in the hit piece on Ari was intended to not only hit her but to discourage anyone else from trying to enter this space. Look what happened to her. If you go into this space also, it elevated her role as a gatekeeper. You know these people, okay, these people not—um—which is exactly who and what what what she is. But the—but yeah, that's the broader background that and her excuses are just lame. But in this context, her other excuse for going after Libs of TikTok because Libs of TikTok was at uh January 6th. Yeah, and so and everybody knows they're domestic terrorists. Let me bring you—no one's been charged with that. If anybody's a domestic terrorist, Taylor Lorenz is a domestic terrorist by her definition. But the uh the the—but this gives an idea of how political she is, and she's held out by the New York Times and the Washington Post not as an opinion writer but as their fact-reporting journalist, which is a croc.

I'm gonna bring us—I said you can't stop the Barnes train when he gets—when some—I'm not saying triggered in the in the typical sense—when Barnes gets into it, listen to this. This is the context in which she's describing Libs of TikTok. Listen to this: "And I also thought that the fact that she claims to be have been inside the barrier at the insurrection last year was was notable because you know that's you know the people that storm the capital are essentially domestic terrorists—um—and so I think the fact that this woman who previously spread election fraud conspiracies—um—says that she was there during the capital, live-tweeted it—um—now sort of shaping this new groomer discourse again, I just thought that it met the bar for newsworthy, and I that"—well, this is the—and this is the—this is the same person now without her role as an institutional gatekeeper promoting lies and libels on behalf of the institutions; she would be nobody. Just listen to that voice. Can you listen to that voice for longer than two minutes? I mean, I I don't know why they always have to have that annoying voice; it just drives me in. But this is someone who probably tried to be normally influential through the—if you—this is just a guess—but uh—if that probably tried to go through the normal means of influence, failed at it, and figured out that being a libel or libel or on behalf of institutional power would give her that recognition because anybody who's out there trying to pimp the victim stuff like she was the week before on MSNBC—"I have power and I have value because I've been a victim," made-up victim stuff. But it's part of that cultish mindset; is somebody who's driven by a deep pathology that she projects onto other people. She's uh she's kind of like the Amber Heard of journalism.

I've heard that honestly. One of the most telling things—I I've listened to an interview with her and Jason—uh—I forgot what his last name is, but anyway, she was talking about how all of her experience in uh how she became a journalist and whatnot, and she's like, "You know, I I'm paraphrasing, but she basically said, 'I started my own consulting firm, and I did it for about a year and a half, but it's really really hard to own your own business; like it's really hard.'" And he's like, "Yeah, it's hard to like think about how you're gonna make payroll," and she's like, "Yeah, it's a lot easier to work for a company that like hires, you know, the most expensive lawyers in the world to look after me and stuff," and I'm like, "Gosh," like for somebody that—I guess that's why she has no empathy to like working entrepreneurs that had to, you know, eat Top Ramen and live in their cars or whatever it might be. Splendiferous had asked, "How often do defamation suits against MSM uh succeed, Robert, in the US?" Exceedingly rare, right? Yeah, very very difficult, at least that are published. I mean, the uh—I mean, you obviously have settlements, so you can never know for sure—um—but I'll put it this way: within the legal community, the assumption is that you—like one of the reasons why they libel the Covington kids is they're like, "They're ordinary individuals; even if a few of their parents have money, they're not going to have a lot of money; they're not going to mess with us as institutional media," and that was why I uh uh went public and said to represent him for free was to equalize the the playing field and then went uh public on Fox and other places said, "You know, 48 hours to retract," and some other fun stuff. The uh—which 90% of them did to their credit—but uh—but only because normally they face no risk; they normally face no legal exposure of any kind—uh—because the biggest ones like medical malpractice, nobody sues. Most people don't sue; they—it's uh—it's just unaffordable for most people to file suit; that's that's the biggest hurdle by far. The lawyers cost money, and it's rare that you're going to be able to make a financial—there's not a lot of contingency lawyers in this space. You know, easy money is a contingency lawyers' products liability, personal and particularly personal injury, automobile accidents; that's the cash flow. You're not going to get a big cash flow in this area. And then you have the judges protecting institutional media like you—you could sue defamation; Joe Schmo lies about you; that you you could probably get recovery, but it's the New York Times; oh man, they're they're they're the holy grail. They come up—I mean, look at what happened with Sarah Palin; you know, the judge denies her claim; goes up on appeal; the court appeals says, "No, you you are wrong; you have to reinstate your case; give her a trial," then he interferes with the trial and says the case is crap and he gets notified right to the jurors because they're on the notification list of what he says in the docket, and so he, you know, that's the mindset. And and you know, yeah, well, I mean, just do some math: if you're a federal judge, particularly in certain districts in this country, do you want to upset or offend or go against the most powerful local media and national media paper in your area, right? I mean, just do a little math. Maybe it's not a coincidence. One of these days I'll raise that explicitly in a case. I had a recent—I have a current case where, you know, but I'll leave that alone for the time being—um—but the—so that there are—that's that's the hurdle, and it's it's also they usually drag you to their jurisdiction; they're doing it in the Covington kids; that's why I'm having to appeal part of the case up to the appeals court system—uh—but that's why it's for the person; it's very—most lawyers would tell you—it's not worth it unless you you you have money like Peter Thiel and you just don't care, like you're—back in—but Hulk Hogan never would have pursued that case but for Peter Thiel saying, "I'll fund it; I'll give you everything you need to fund it." That's what changed the ball game—um—but it's rare that you get through the judicial bias in favor of institutional media. And I mean, I'll just say from the Canadian British perspective, you just need to Google it; it's a lot—I mean, easier in that it occurs more often that the press is held liable, but that's because we have a—we don't have as much of a—we're a little bit softer on First Amendment. And in Quebec, for those of you—I've mentioned it a number of times—there can be defamation even if what the person said is true if it was specifically done with the intent to harm. So we're unique in Quebec—um—but Ariana—Marian Holtzman is asking, "Please tell us how I mean how we can monetarily support your guests; do you have a do you have a fundraiser?" Yeah, I have my uh GiveSendGo.com/influencers. He's using GiveSendGo; people that's already a good sign. I'll put the link up afterwards. I had a a lot of, you know, tech bigwigs—um—I think found out about me because I filed a lawsuit against Taylor, and—um—I was advised, you know, "Just be careful because you may start"—even though my thing isn't political, they could find a way to take away all the money you raise. And really it's—it was—it's just about raising—um—capital to—um—be able to, you know, support myself through to when the lawsuit happens and all this stuff. I mean—um—but uh yeah, I appreciate that; that's really nice. And—um—did I notice a Chinese Cresent? He's like sleeping on the ground now, dog, Harry. I don't know; is it a Chinese Cresent or did I miss—C—no, he's a mutt from Mexico, from Tijuana. My social medias are all Little Miss Jacob, so if you want to follow me there and just—um—you know, stay tuned as to what happens. But uh—but yeah, what I was gonna say about the the why it's so difficult, I was gonna say too is if you file in a state that has uh anti-SLAPP laws—I'm not a lawyer again, so I, you know—basically if you if they dismiss your case, then you're liable—if they hit you with anti-SLAPP—but you're liable for paying for all their legal fees. So like not only are you like suing the New York Times or whoever, but then if they if there's an anti-SLAPP law, then then you're liable for the—so it's like not only do you not have the money, but if you lose, now you're gonna have to pay, and you're gonna be in debt or destitute or whatever. So it's really scary. I mean, I I wouldn't wish this to happen on any anyone. And I will say so many people have reached out to me—um—people that weren't famous—um—that have had hit pieces written about them by Taylor Lorenz. Um, one person like completely, you know, luckily she's she said she's married and her husband supports her family, but she had to leave her career entirely—um—and and those are the people where I feel like, you know, 5% was true, and so I'm just so grateful that at least in my eyes like 0% was—she got like my name spelled right, but that was about it—um—and she twisted, you know, she would twist things even—and and that's the really scary part is that, you know, can they just print lies because someone else quote was quoted saying this, even though she has all this proof? I mean, I don't know how all these things shake out, but—um—I mean, legally, no, legally you can't hide behind quotations—um—unless you're talking about a court proceeding or something like that, unless you're fairly reporting what took place in like a congressional session, court pleading, etc. Otherwise you can't hide behind, "Well, I didn't tell the lie; I just quoted somebody else telling a lie." That's not an excuse, as they found out in the Covington cases because a lot of those were just quoting people and whatnot. But the uh—now what are you doing every day business-wise? Uh, are you still in the influencer space, and how is that going? Uh, I moved to Vegas, and I basically got like an entry-level job at a uh hospitality company—um—you know, like answering Instagram DMs. So I definitely like was demoted; like probably got like—like I was making like a sixth of what I had been offered in a past job, and so that was very humbling, but I think at the same time—um—it was good that I got experience working for a corporation, and—um—I also like mentally needed to like just step away from everything that had happened and just like do something else. And—um—in Vegas like nobody cares about TikTok or anything like that, so uh I used my skill set in marketing to sort of work my way up and—um—

And now I'm uh, you know, I'm trying to start a new uh, talent agency, and I have a couple clients. Um, it's much more difficult uh, because this time around I'm vetting all the people. Not everybody I rep now is a TikToker. Some of them are like, Katie Welch is a musician; she's amazing. Um, you know, I'm doing—I did a really cool thing where uh, I brought uh, Sam Asghari, which is Britney Spears's um, fiancé, to Vegas, and Britney came, and so that was really cool. You know, if anybody's like, well, you know, she's a public figure, she's verified on Instagram, I got uh, some good press because uh, Britney came to Vegas and said she had never been treated so well by a group of people, and that was really like my—like I did that; I helped do that, is bring her.

And so I think like I feel like, at the very least, um, my reputation is coming back. I, you know, hopefully people understand that I'm not an evil witch, but at the same time, you know, it's always when you get to fame like this, you're always thinking in the back of your mind, especially if you're a salesperson or somebody that's outwardly talking, people in the back of your mind you're like, did they read that article? What do they think about me? And and your confidence is like just—it just takes such a hit. Um, but I—I now feel like at the very least that was rock bottom. Like when 85 clients dump you on the same day, it's like worse than the worst breakup you've ever had in your life, especially because you care about these people, right? You're like intimately involved with their lives. And um, so that was extremely emotional, but now I'm like, okay, like what's Taylor going to do? Try to cancel me again? You know, I—I know that I don't have any crazy skeletons in my closet, and if I gotta go on TV and or like, you know, just like Johnny Depp and expose everything, I feel okay about it. But and you know, not to compare myself with anybody, but I definitely have been watching the Johnny Depp trial because it's like I think at one point he said, I'm upset they're trying to hurt—paint him out as an obsessed ex-husband, and he's like, I'm just obsessed with the truth, and I can't like—I like—I really understand what that's like because it's just—it's infuriating to have someone destroy your character.

And after so many years of, you know, working for free for people, helping people, and you're like, that's not who I am. No, no. And and for what? For—for a story? For one story? And and arguably to make her—her handlers happy and her employers happy. Everybody should read John Ronson's *So You've Been Publicly Shamed* to appreciate like the absolute—the absolute callous lack of a soul that it takes to destroy someone in the absence of any necessity to do it. Project Veritas and James O'Keefe and he says it well: if you're going to do it, there has to be a compelling reason above and beyond an article to get clicks that day. You know, and now she's doing it to Libs of TikTok, and she's justified it to herself by saying they're essentially—she's essentially a domestic terrorist, so I can—anything goes. Uh, I'm only republishing what, you know, some small account with seven thousand followers published, so I can put it on blast to the Washington Post, to the New York Times, or whatever.

Um, well, and I think that there's a problem too with, um, you know, that article she did about me got her to another level, and then this thing with Libs of TikTok gets her to another level, and you have to understand she's giving comment to 20/20 on stories about uh, technology, uh, TMZ, now MSNBC, CNN. She is going to—she—she's probably training the trajectory of being like a GaryVee type of person, but GaryVee is the complete opposite of what she is, and it's dangerous because if you talk about older people, people that um, are in power and um, have influence, if they're listening to her as she's the end-all be-all of not just TikTok, just technology, social media, and youth culture, that's really dangerous. And and I believe that there's a chance that it's possible that, you know, she—before I was never like an active public figure, but maybe she thought, well, she's on her way to—eventually she could be the person that uh, TMZ is calling for comment on XYZ, and and we gotta take that person out. I mean, listen, this is just my thoughts, or you know, what other people honestly have told me, um, but it's just dangerous. And I think that if she continues without any type of accountability, what's next?

Well, we'll end on this right after I say like what she did was probably good for UTA as well because they—they picked up a lot of big names that you—as—as getting in at the ground level had—had what's the word? You didn't scoop them; you—you were—you were there at the ground level and and found them early. But okay, first of all, Arianna, before we—before we check out, I'm going to end it with—with—with a something from a tweet from Tim Pool saying she'll get the spotlight that she deserves, and Tim Pool gave it to her. Um, thank you very much. I'll put you—I'll put the links to your social in the pinned comment. Everybody knows this story. You may—you may have a limited interest in the story, chat, people watching it; it's interesting nonetheless. The business—I—I—I can see people being reluctant or or skeptical about the business, anything involving young people making the decisions they make. Fine. When it comes to the defamation, the hit pieces, how the New York Times operates, what they—what they do to target who they perceive to be threats, competition, and they do it with impunity. I mean, out of principle. And now that we know who Taylor Lorenz is, God's speed on your journey, Ariadna. But yeah, I—I—I'm not—I'm not optimistic, but who knows? We—we—well, the—the New York Times lost a defamation lawsuit in like 50 years or something, so I guarantee you if uh, Taylor Lorenz caused them to, you know, be in this position, it's going to be a pretty big deal to follow along. Like this TikTok story ruined our—our—our streak of 50 years. I mean, that's what I'm hoping for, obviously. I know it's gonna be challenging, but I really appreciate you having me on, and Robert, you have such like great—like you totally get it, I feel like with your explanations of it. So yeah, we'll see what happens next, but stick around after this. I'm going to end it; I haven't ended—I haven't ended the stream of the video, but we're going to do it today just because it's—it's—where is it? When you put the Washington Post here, we go. Let's just—let's just um, end it with this and stick around, Taylor. We'll say our proper goodbyes afterwards. I wonder if David—yeah, I did everything wrong. Forget it, people. Anyhow, there you go. That's what's going on there. Tim brought a—bought an electronic sign in New York City that uh, reminded the Washington Post that their "Democracy Dies in Darkness" language—that democracy is dying in the darkness that is the deep shade of Taylor Lorenz doxing Libs of TikTok in her otherwise history. She's uh—just think Amber Heard of journalism, just a lot older—just a lot older—much older—uh, peop—okay, Ariadna, Robert, stick around, people. Tomorrow, live streaming from Ottawa, somewhere. It might not be good; I might just be walking and getting Tim Hortons, but I'll be in Ottawa tomorrow. Uh, thanks for being here, people. See you soon enough, Ariadna, Robert, stick around. We'll see our public advice; peace out, peeps.