Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 27, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:44:41

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

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	If you have $44 billion and you use it to buy Twitter, you make bad decisions.
	The two of them went into space because they have no other ideas about what to do with their money.
	I just want to hear it again.
	You make bad decisions.
	How do I get back here?
	The emphasis on Twitter.
	You make bad decisions.
	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 going to see the fro grow in real time.
	I got off the treadmill.
	I'm not sweating too much.
	I have cooled down sufficiently.
	If you have $44 billion 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 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 least a couple of right decisions to have a wealth, to be sufficiently wealthy to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
	Get it, get it, get it.
	Oh!
	Oh!
	People haven't seen Winnie in a little while.
	Look at this little guy.
	Oh, yes.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I gave him a bath yesterday.
	But it's like...
	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 drive people nuts.
	But 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 error in it, because this illustrates why it was relevant.
	Where is it?
	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.
	It doesn't matter.
	I basically said, if you...
	There's nothing better than people who haven't made...
	$44 billion, telling someone who spent $44 billion how they should have spent their money.
	And then the justification, the justification is he could have put a dent in world hunger.
	He might have been able to put a dent in...
	By the way, 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.
	The view, 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 whose tasks with doing that, that doesn't do it.
	I mean, there's nothing better.
	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 and saying, if you have $44 billion, you make bad decisions.
	Yeah, go ahead and tell Elon Musk how he makes bad decisions.
	And what is so stupid about it, and I'm sorry to use the word stupid, is to buy all of Twitter for $44 billion?
	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 $10,000 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 dollar store headphones.
	It's idiocy with lack of insight.
	It is arrogant pomposity.
	With lack of insight.
	Okay.
	Tonight's stream is going to be amazing.
	It's actually been in the making for a long time.
	A while back, I'm in tune with the gossips of the legal verses, but not of all of them.
	And it was in the context of a few 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 unrelated.
	Yeah, 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 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 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.
	So that's Taylor Lorenz, for anybody who doesn't know.
	Journalist, for the New York Times, Washington Post, I'm not exactly sure which or both or whatever.
	I'm seeing some people in the chat saying, so fake.
	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, 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 Rumble Rants.
	If you want to support Robert Barnes and me, you can find us at Locals, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	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 miffed.
	And just a bit of news.
	Stay tuned.
	I'm going to be live streaming from Ottawa tomorrow.
	I'm going to go hear the hearing for Randy Hillier.
	It starts at 2 o 'clock from what I understand.
	I'm going to 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.
	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 bring it up, 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 agree.
	But they don't have billions.
	Don't tell them how to spend their money.
	Auto 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 going to bring out Taylor Lorenz.
	I keep getting messed up on the names.
	Okay.
	This is going to be amazing.
	Ariadna.
	How goes the battle?
	How are you?
	It finally...
	Thank you for having me here.
	I know.
	First of all, thank you for coming and thank you for being patient because we've been talking about this back and forth every now and again.
	We say we're going to do it and then it's been like six months practically.
	I think it's okay because honestly...
	I was really scared to ever, like, talk in public about this, even though it was something I had conviction about, 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 exposed who she is, I feel a lot better, you know, just talking about it openly and, you know, I have a pending case right now, so I have to be somewhat...
	Careful of that, but I do think it's important that people understand sort of what happened to me and how it could affect them and really, you know, defamation and, you know, the powerful media companies that are very hard to hold accountable.
	And we're going to get there because the thing is this, you know, I read proceedings, you get it, you read allegations, but ultimately you don't know anything from anything.
	You don't know who's who.
	You don't know who to believe and you don't.
	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 mediaverse is nobody trusts Taylor Lorenz, and they know who she is, which might allow people to deduce whether or not you're being sincere, honest, accurate in your allegations against her in the New York Times.
	Barnes is in the house.
	I'm going to bring him in here.
	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.
	Taylor, Ariadna.
	You can call me Ari if it's easier.
	That might be easier.
	But you did pronounce my name right, so thank you.
	I knew an Ariadna back in the day.
	Okay, elevator pitch before we get into the basic stuff and then into the meaty stuff of the day.
	Elevator pitch as to who you are before we go back to the past.
	Okay.
	Yeah, so my name is Ariadna Jacob, and I was actually born in Mexico City, and both my parents are Mexican, and 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 when I was around four, and so that's why my last name was Jacob.
	And basically, I was a big computer nerd since high school.
	Before YouTube, I was...
	Editing videos and I would have to beg my parents to buy me bandwidth so I could upload my videos that I edited on the computer and share them before YouTube.
	So, you know, I pretty much got started in digital in the year like 2001 and I was on MySpace and I was helping people like Mike, 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 I think it was my junior year, I dropped out 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 pay for your company on your own.
	I basically did that bootstrapped hustle of understanding the industry, being in it.
	I could never become a YouTuber because at that time it was really difficult to monetize anything on YouTube.
	Frankly, I had to get a job and pay my bills or I was going to be homeless.
	But I learned all these things.
	And I think that it's important to understand that it wasn't just a TikTok agent.
	I think people kind of dismiss really my journey.
	And that was working for digital agencies for years, not only working for a digital agency, but at the same time working for being sort of like a client salesperson at nightclubs and nightlife venues on the weekends.
	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, you know, you can't go to college necessarily, or maybe you can now, but it's not like you can get a PhD in social media.
	So the people that were like really the early adopters, people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V, maybe some of you guys follow him.
	And, you know, a couple others were sort of, quote unquote, experts.
	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.
	Whatever.
	My point is, if you look at our careers like sort of parallel, I know that I had started way early on.
	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.
	And so sort of fast forward to when TikTok started to blow up.
	I actually bought influences dot com in 2013.
	I was building an app and.
	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 at a digital agency.
	I understood how to sell to brands.
	I understood search engine optimization, coding, social media, all these things.
	And so I was kind of like a bridge between advertising executives that were trying to understand 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 Vine stars of that day, which might have been like Logan Paul and, you know, King Batch and all these guys.
	And the reason I think, too, this whole...
	It's difficult to explain to probably people like your audience or any mainstream audience is that they don't know the players, right?
	They don't know the characters.
	It's not like 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 it's difficult for people to follow.
	But for young people, 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 in at the right place at the right time and built these relationships.
	And then when TikTok came about, this was like 2019, 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 signed several of them to management contracts or some type of consulting contracts agreements that would allow me to basically develop them and pitch them to brands.
	And at this point, it was still really difficult.
	Educate brands on how TikTok worked, 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 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, you know.
	People that a lot of people would respect.
	I had attorneys.
	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 of like, you know, especially as an entrepreneur where 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 like they're about to quit right before they strike gold.
	It was like that moment where I'm like, oh my gosh, I like finally did it.
	I struck it after all these years.
	Hold on a second.
	We're going to have to back up just a few years.
	You said you were born in Mexico City.
	Your father passed away when you were two.
	Are you an only child?
	My mom got remarried and I have two sisters.
	How old were you when you came to America?
	I think four.
	Barnes, you got a question?
	You've been interested 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 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 could hear everything that women were saying, and he was trying to make a Nike commercial.
	And I loved...
	How to lose a guy in 10 days or they're like, frost yourself.
	I always want to make commercials.
	And, you know, I didn't go, I didn't finish college, but I realized at like a certain point that people were being influenced by the different apps on their phone.
	You know, at the time it 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, which is basically what, you know, influencers do today.
	So, yeah, that's what 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 death match.
	But I mean, it's pretty crazy for an eight or nine year old to have been doing those things.
	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 record over all my sister's recitals.
	But yeah, I was also always really creative.
	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, he's a little strange.
	I was on AOL chats always.
	But it was when I met Gary Vee and he was like, I believe in you.
	You're going to be something.
	I don't know what you're going to do in this industry.
	And that was like when I...
	It was like he bestowed that confidence in me that was like, well, if Gary V believes in me, then that means I'm going to be able to do something.
	This is after Gary V had transformed his parents' liquor business into the business that it became?
	Like, this is after Gary V had established himself 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.
	He was not famous.
	I was using a Blackberry to film our interaction.
	But that was a big day for me because when there's not that many people that can...
	You know, just you're young and you're trying to do this thing.
	And when there's not a lot of people that can, you know, basically give you the confidence to move forward, that was a big, big thing.
	And he was, he's still, you know, somebody I consider a mentor and a very good friend.
	For anybody who doesn't actually know who Gary Vaynerchuk is, Gary V, 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 10x it into a multi, I don't know, 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 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's what you're supposed to do in your 20s.
	Learn a skill and then go out and exploit it.
	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 Mr. Beast, 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 getting on this.
	And so, you know, 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 also, he has an agency which manages...
	I don't know what are all the brands, but all these Fortune 500 brands are basically...
	Their social media is being managed by VaynerMedia at the time, right?
	I have a random question.
	Is Logan Paul crazy?
	I don't think so.
	I think that he's really smart.
	What was your experience interacting with Logan Paul?
	He just strikes me 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 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.
	Feel as though Logan and Jake have put in a ton of work and they have an incredibly good work ethic.
	They know, you know, Jake Paul is the one, the younger one, the boxer.
	Jake Paul, he knows that he's sort of the villain, right?
	And so he plays into that and creates moments in mainstream media.
	Because back then, you have to remember, like Vine stars and YouTubers were still not sort of like anybody that anybody cared about or knew about.
	You know, many celebrities didn't know who they were.
	So, you know, 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 force.
	I mean, that's 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're basically like a mentor to these people and a guide, and hopefully they listen to you.
	But, 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 Lorenzo in the future, I think she used that to her advantage because a lot of people don't understand how this industry works.
	Right.
	So influencers are like continuous commercials then?
	Yeah, well, so you have to think about like celebrities.
	Right.
	So we maybe, you know, certain people used to look at Michael Jordan and 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 is 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.
	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, you know, it's kind of like an ongoing reality show.
	I mean, some of the most valuable 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, you know, people can associate them to just like...
	Everyday people, or maybe even the Kardashians, maybe a long time ago.
	And 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 yeah, so there's a lot of marketing, storytelling, and sort of...
	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 political advertising business, we'd study great 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, you want this 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 if the platform allows for other...
	Platforms to integrate with it.
	Like, for example, I can, you know, use a platform and see, you know, your Instagram followers, how many are male or female, where, you know, where they live, where, you know, you can pull all this data.
	It's not always 100% 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.
	They would send me screenshots of their analytics.
	And so then I would see, wow, this girl has 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.
	We 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, people like Charli D 'Amelio.
	And it's very difficult to find these sort of very brand-friendly, all-American influencers because you also have brands that are cognizant of the fact that...
	There's people like Logan Paul who started out potentially very brand-friendly, doing stuff for Dunkin' Donuts and things like that, and then had some hiccups in his career where now all of a sudden those brands are like, we have to be even more...
	There's a brand safety concern.
	And so I think having someone that had a lot of experience and a relationship with the brand executives, it's very different than traditional Hollywood where you're casting a movie and you're saying, hey, everybody come, or hey, agents.
	They're 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 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 the advertising industry.
	Whereas I think a lot of like.
	Traditional talent agents, they just don't care.
	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 I think that was...
	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 you figure out what we do with it?
	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 going to 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 needed people who would guide them that would help them understand that not everything is about fame and money.
	You have to realize that the people that are promoting these...
	I don't know.
	I just think that...
	There's not that many people like Gary Vee who was like, "Hey, be kind and have empathy with everyone." And that's how I believed in all that stuff because 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 a like...
	A passage in a book where I was like, hey, why don't you go read outliers or go read the tipping points?
	You understand like these things that 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, 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 you're talking about 15 second pieces of content that people are consuming at an alarming rate and then bring in the pandemic, right?
	When no more, there's no, everybody's in lockdown when it happens.
	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 with LawTube, I see a lot of people, a lot of YouTubers who are legal analysts and all this stuff.
	You guys come together on each other's 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 want the TikTok audience to find me.
	I think I built, I think we, I helped Bella Thorne get a million TikTok.
	And I believe it was like a month or two.
	Yeah, I believe it was a month.
	And this is stuff that 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 I'll lay some more brickwork or brickwork, groundwork, foundation.
	You bought the Domain Influences 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, you know, it was...
	Nobody even...
	Influencer wasn't really a term back then, I don't think.
	So I definitely, you know, without hopefully sounding arrogant, I definitely feel I was ahead of my time.
	Another example of you being ahead of your time.
	This is before like...
	Instagram, whatever, where 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 doesn't cause you to position to be in a place where, but rather, you look at TikTok influences and you say, this might be the wave of the future.
	Whether or not it's COVID lockdowns or whether or not it would have happened anyhow, I think it would have happened anyhow, it goes from YouTube, it goes from Vines to TikTok.
	Yeah.
	And by the way, too, just so people understand, I had worked with celebrities, like mainstream celebrities, like people like French Montana were consulting with me.
	I worked with Canelo Alvarez, the boxer, doing deals for him.
	So I really had a broad understanding of...
	Digital world, social media world, entertainment, and brands, right?
	I worked with brands for many years in digital marketing, sales, search engine optimization, all this stuff.
	I think a lot of people that, 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 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 don't like the way it seems to be very highly addictive for young people.
	But set aside my qualms with it.
	You start representing some of the biggest names.
	Charlie D 'Amelio.
	They get millions of views on these TikToks posts, which are short videos.
	Now YouTube tried to copy them.
	Instagram, to some extent.
	You start representing these individuals, and you build up your business at its peak.
	I mean, I don't like asking numbers, but you build it up into an immensely successful business.
	How does the shit hit the fan with the hit pieces that lead to the defamation claims that lead to the lawsuit?
	What happens to bring you under the microscope of the attack of the MSM?
	And related to that, the criticism of a lot of this is the commercialization or corporatization of individual experiences.
	But basically, 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 gatekeeper's control of it through the agency structure.
	How did that play into what Viv is talking about?
	Well, it kind of happened in two phases.
	So essentially, you know, I was working with these couple, like a handful of these people that like exploded, the big unicorns, right?
	And at the time, 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 at influences.com.
	So-and-so at influences.com, Brittany at influences.com.
	And every single email that came in came to me, right?
	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 in the very beginning, around December of 2019, I believe it was, 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 exchanged it.
	You know, she could have gotten in touch with me very easily.
	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, you know, I'd love to.
	I do a story about 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, it wasn't like formalized or anything at this point.
	It was just friends getting together and making videos.
	But they were, most of the people in this Hype House were repped by me, the most valuable sort of accounts.
	And so 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 so, you know, that was part of my job.
	And we were working together with another lady named Barbara.
	And essentially, Taylor started, I don't know how, but essentially, they left me out of the conversation with the New York Times.
	And then the New York Times did an article called the Hype House Gold Rush.
	And really, that's what it was, is the TikTok Gold Rush.
	Everybody, these kids.
	We're so valuable.
	Everything they're 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 a meeting in the article and I think the chats lot lost on what the tick-tock houses or the It was called the Hype House.
	So Hype House is like, if you picture like Saturday Night Live, it's like this group of people that make videos, you know, that make content together for SNL.
	And, you know, 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 all individual talent, but they kind of get together for this, you know, show.
	They tag the Hype House.
	It's whatever.
	The point is, she did this article.
	They live in the Hype House?
	Some of them do.
	Some of them just go and visit.
	Hell on earth to an adult.
	It's like Big Brother, sort of, where people live in this house, young people.
	They do their content, whatever their specific themes are.
	How are they making money to live in this hype house?
	Well, they are getting brand deals, you know, typically at this point.
	But 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 it was like a lot of people didn't know who they were yet.
	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 don't know at the time that she's represented by UTA, which is a behemoth talent agency that represents huge people.
	You can look them up.
	There's three big talent agencies, and they're one of them.
	Taylor has her own agency.
	She's represented by UTA, which is United Talent Agency.
	Really?
	I understand that's very unusual for her.
	Taylor likes to run around and pretend she's a journalist.
	Is that a new phenomenon?
	I don't know if it's unusual.
	It's unusual by my experience.
	By a common person.
	I'm not as old as Taylor Lawrence, but almost.
	I feel like it's so fair to say that, though.
	You have to understand that before Taylor did the hit piece, or after she did the hit piece, I was like...
	In my mind, at this time, I didn't know she was working with UTA, which at the time weren't even necessarily my competitors.
	People were advising me, UTA is huge.
	Instead of competing with them, why don't you kind of work with them?
	And so I said, okay, if they bring a deal to this person, I'll commission them out.
	But what the agencies wanted was not that.
	They wanted the incoming emails.
	So I got Charli 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 Dunkin' and I'm going to take my percentage.
	Well, that's not what these agencies wanted.
	UTA wanted me to send them all the emails.
	And 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.
	Whatever they can do, I can do.
	I can negotiate these deals.
	I'm just as smart.
	You know what I'm saying?
	It's not like what they were doing.
	You might not have the same conflicts of interest that every agency in Hollywood has.
	Just to clarify this now for the chat and for the viewers, Taylor Lorenz, who's a journalist, is being represented simultaneously by an agent.
	UTA.
	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 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 New York Times, it was basically like a hagiography about UTA and didn't disclose that they represented her.
	So, I mean, you know, anyway, there was no way I would have known that Taylor was rep by UTA.
	Until I think in the very, you know, 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 theorist?
	I'm like putting like the red, you know, yarn together.
	I couldn't figure it out.
	But then once I realized she had an agent at UTA, I'm like, OK, 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 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 couldn't really...
	Oh, sorry.
	My iPod came out.
	I couldn't figure out 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 6th, 2020, by Taylor Lorenz.
	And let's just see how much we can read before.
	Well, yeah, I'm not even paying.
	I wouldn't pay 50 cents a year.
	Okay, so your story checks out.
	I lose these big clients, and then I'm like, well, it's okay.
	Like, I should keep going.
	So I...
	I kind of like, whatever.
	And then UTA signs these people, Charli, D 'Amelio, and all that.
	So then I keep going, and I go to this big conference in Orlando.
	I forget what it's called Playlist Live.
	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.
	And basically, I have a great case study, right?
	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 able to make money with ads.
	And I go to this conference and basically I was a popular person on the block.
	I helped them get brand deals so that they could get houses at this conference and travel.
	And I literally had video of them chanting, "Ari, Ari!" Just so thrilled I was working with them.
	This is like in February.
	I think February, March.
	Anyway, how is it that like a couple months later, Taylor starts digging into 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 all them like explode.
	Right.
	So I almost like I was a little like.
	I knew she wasn't anybody's friend.
	She wasn't my friend, but she was a journalist.
	But at the same time, I'm like, wow, if I can get these new kids an article by Taylor Lorenz, they're going to become millionaires too, just like the unicorns, right?
	And when I saw her at the conference, she didn't really want to have much to do with me.
	She took some pictures with my clients there, but she didn't want to sit down at lunch with me.
	I was just being overly nice.
	I had really no idea that she was an adversary or was going to be.
	We get back from the conference, and that's when I believe that she started digging in.
	And when I say digging in, I think she really, in my opinion, 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 this and this?
	And 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.
	We just got into this.
	We're not going to ruin our kids' chance when we could be working with UTA and Taylor Lorenz.
	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 now all of a sudden be very extra cautious of everything that's going on.
	So there are two articles that Taylor Lorenz writes with respect to you and influences?
	No.
	So she left me out of the Hype House article, which explodes the unicorns.
	And then she does another article just about really like the TikTok houses as a whole.
	And she sort of mentions a couple of the houses that I'm working on.
	And I think it's important for people to understand this because a 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.
	As I just said, yeah, these are.
	These are the concepts of the TikTok houses.
	And 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 Seventeen Magazine or, you know, The Drip Crib, which was like GQ and Sports Illustrated and The Kids Next Door, which was like Rolling Stone and Nickelodeon or something like, you know, so if all the influencers are posting at the same time, it's a media buy that, you know, a lot of people are going to see.
	And so those were the sort of the concepts of the houses.
	And I was investing my own personal money to try to and putting my name on the lease to help these influencers.
	Sort of follow their dreams.
	When did you first get wind that she was writing the hit piece?
	I'm trying to think.
	I think there was just a couple of rumors.
	I don't remember who specifically told me.
	There was sort of 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 influencers were already with Taylor, and 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 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 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 went out or before she reached out to us with all these allegations, she basically...
	Two of the influencers, they came to me and they were like, well, 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.
	But we're kind of over it.
	And we want to do our own thing now.
	Even though we signed production contracts with you and you gave us an advance and got us this house, we don't really want to do this anymore.
	And, you know, 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?
	They were talking to Taylor Lorenz?
	I'm telling people in the chat, this is law.
	This is a concrete application of the law where you hear the story, you hear the facts.
	Some people are going to listen to this, Ariadne, and they're going to say they're going to have, let's say, moral issues 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.
	It's a bizarre world.
	It's definitely...
	It's not my world.
	But you lease out this house so that these TikTok influencers can live there so that you can represent them.
	And, I mean, I got asked that, like, the...
	There was all sorts of stipulations, too.
	Like, they were supposed to pay for...
	I wasn't, like, some big investor.
	Like, I was bootstrapped.
	So it was, like, they were...
	It was basically, like, you know...
	I was putting in money that I had savings to put into it.
	They were each supposed to pay XML per month.
	And, you know, it was like we were building a business together.
	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.
	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 just didn't appreciate it.
	And they didn't appreciate, like, you know, what I was putting on the line, liability and all that stuff.
	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.
	You know what I'm saying?
	That kind of thing.
	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.
	Robert had asked, when did you get wind of the fact that Lorenz was writing this hit piece?
	When and how long does it take to write such a hit piece?
	She interviewed a lot of people.
	She got...
	She said that she interviewed all these business partners of mine and all these people, but I don't have any business partners.
	She definitely didn't include everyone she talked to in the piece, so I don't know who she talked to, if those people were former people I worked with.
	Maybe I was doing better than at this point.
	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 sort of friendly with her.
	And luckily, at this point, there was somebody in my life that was very well aware of how the media works and PR and stuff.
	He wasn't hired or anything.
	He was a friend and was like...
	My spidey senses are going on.
	I think something's going on with this.
	Don't just pick up the phone and chat with her because I'm pretty chatty.
	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 basically, I told her I didn't want to speak to her.
	And if she had any questions, that she could go ahead and email us.
	And she was very annoyed about that, it seemed like.
	Finally, she sent us 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 somebody around DeSantis' team and said, like, you have an hour to respond or whatever it was.
	So they said, you know, we have all these allegations and you have, you know, 24 hours to respond.
	And at that point.
	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.
	And then my other lawyer is like, well, you can't give him everything because if you give him everything, then you could be held liable because, you know, for example, she said that I...
	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 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 this stuff on background.
	You can't publish it.
	Um, and also it's my, it's my IP.
	Like 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, I won't take that because we won't take anything on background.
	And so then we said, well, why not?
	And she said, well, that's not New York Times' policy.
	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.
	Well, yeah, of course.
	I'm trying to explain how they set up the game here.
	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 they have access to other stars.
	So all that's going to do is make their relationship better, and all of them are going to prosper.
	It's just important that people understand.
	I'm going to bring this up, 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 was 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 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 to Ari because they don't even understand it.
	We're going to dumb it down.
	Not dumb it down.
	We'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 on background?
	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, well, first of all, the New York Times is on background reporting.
	I mean, the New York Times spread weapons of mass destruction based on on background reporting.
	Many of the...
	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 extraordinary.
	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.
	Maybe the UTA helped her get a bonus in terms of moving from the Times to the Post.
	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 doxed his libs of TikTok.
	Just an amazing prosecutor.
	The broader context is...
	The efforts to democratize the advertising space and the efforts of the gatekeepers to monopolize that space, that's part of the story.
	Another part of the story is the deep conflict within all of the Hollywood agency industries.
	It's regular, it's routine, how it's not led to more and more.
	And the media.
	Oh, yes.
	Well, I'm going to get to that.
	That's the third part.
	How they work together, yeah.
	The second part is that these agencies are conflicted all the time.
	It happened to Wesley Snipes.
	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 here's the problem.
	His agents...
	We're also representing Ryan Reynolds and representing other people.
	I mean, 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 evade major liability and accountability.
	I mean, Johnny Depp was the recipient of very bad advice.
	But the third aspect is the real rule, especially of the...
	Of the media in general, but of the tech media space in particular, has been to make sure that big tech and the tech space is dominated by the same gatekeepers for an institutional narrative.
	Like what enrages Taylor Lorenz about libs of TikTok is its success.
	So the goal was how to prevent the replication of that success.
	Do a hit piece and dox libs of TikTok.
	Not so much to get at libs of TikTok.
	But to prevent and deter and discourage anyone else from trying to replicate.
	That's where the hit piece 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 controlled gatekeepers at a corporatized, institutionalized level and to protect and promote them.
	And that's what, I mean, the New York Times, that's like tech reporters.
	She's not a reporter.
	She's not a journalist.
	She's a smear merchant.
	Yeah, and what it felt like, I used to be a figure skater and it like, I mean, I don't.
	I don't 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 it's a message to anyone else who wants to replicate that.
	That's what all of these hit pieces have in common.
	That's who Taylor Lorenz is.
	And it's the reason why this story and this case play a role.
	So the piece comes out.
	What's your reaction to it?
	Hold on.
	Before we even get there, we don't need to get into the allegedly defamatory allegations.
	Suffice to say, some of them were you didn't remit the funds to your clients as needed.
	Others were that you leaked nude photos of some of them.
	Were you responsible for that?
	Mistreatment?
	Whatever you can imagine as being the slanderous, if you want to elaborate on some of the allegedly defamatory.
	So, sort of, I think the anchor of her reporting was a Labor Commission dispute filed by one of the influencers against me.
	And it seemed as though, like, a few weeks after that was filed, that was sort of 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, that case, I didn't have to, it got settled out of court.
	There was no money exchanged.
	Anyway, 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 other 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.
	The Talent Agency 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 that stuff.
	And anyway, by the time Taylor wrote the article, the negative article, I did have a talent agency license 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 several people in the piece, including one of the girls, 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 about the COVID vaccine 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 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, 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 them.
	So now all of a sudden, Taylor Lorenz is calling them.
	And you know what I'm saying?
	So I don't know if it's a quid pro quo type of thing or what, but it just felt like...
	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 brands that wanted to work with me or influencers, the reason I lost...
	Pretty much all my clients was because she wrote in there, essentially that I take advantage of kids.
	Now, most of the people I was working with were all over 18. And they all, like, for example, I think she wrote that I had cameras in the house without...
	And without consent, which wasn't true.
	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 what happened afterwards was I was furious because I'm like, how is this legal?
	How is this allowed?
	I would go.
	I went to my, you know, in the nude images thing, by the way, the one of the 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 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, 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, 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 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 their houses.
	But it was 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 going to do?
	Soothe the New York Times like you don't have any money.
	And I'm like, OK, but like.
	Well, what are we doing?
	And they're like, well, you can't sue the influencers, but then you'll probably never work in Hollywood.
	And, you know, they're already saying that you're an 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, 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 was like one of the most.
	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 Colt 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 situation.
	So you sue them.
	Hold on.
	I've lost my screen here.
	I can hear.
	You sue them for defamation.
	You sue Taylor Lorenz and the New York Times.
	What's the status of the lawsuit?
	Yeah, so it's right now.
	We're waiting for the judge to rule on their motion to dismiss.
	You know, I think it's important for anybody that feels like Taylor Lorenz's journalism is unethical and anybody that supports her is a problem.
	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 discovery of...
	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 how can a normal, a non-public figure, how can we ever fight back against these huge corporations and these huge...
	It would be really disappointing.
	I definitely have a lot of confidence that it's going to move forward.
	But, you know, I don't know.
	I'm not an attorney or judge.
	He's a Puerto Rican immigrant.
	And I've heard some of the things he's spoken to, 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 Loren 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, I believe it 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.
	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 5% of what they did was true and they don't have the resources to move forward with it.
	I luckily was 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.
	I know nobody probably cares.
	And then I think people started to realize, well, if she's doing this to somebody like Ari, there's no end to who she can attack and what she could do and whatever her motives are.
	You know, so I think I got 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 is like 15 years of my life.
	I can't go back to my 20s.
	And, you know.
	Find a husband and get married.
	I'm single at this point because I put all my energy into building a company.
	And I can never get that time back.
	And I can never get that time in the past back when TikTok was exploding.
	You get what I'm saying?
	It was like all the things came together.
	I'm not to say I'm 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 going to spend the rest of my life wondering what if I did.
	And I'm so grateful that I did.
	And for anybody else that something like this happens to, I really encourage you to try to fight back.
	Because if you have the truth on your side, you just got to try, I think.
	What state, where's the court?
	It's in New York Federal Court.
	Federal Court, Southern District of New York.
	I mean, I think 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 we'll leave that for another day.
	We'll wait for the judge.
	Maybe the judge will make the right ruling legally.
	If he doesn't, then that'll be a subject of future Sunday conversation.
	Now, so you decide to...
	How have you tried to...
	How did you 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 is the kind of person who pretends she's in her 30s when I think she's almost 50. You know, that's who she is.
	But how are you otherwise transitioning from the hit piece that they did on you?
	Well, I'll tell you something that was really interesting.
	Obviously, when she wrote the article, I'm like, "Well, there's got to be someone else out there that'll write about this." And when I realized that everybody that writes about social media and technology wants to either be Taylor Lorenz or they're scared of her.
	And another reporter wrote an article, was 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, you know, not only did 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 asked to go on Tucker Carlson.
	And, you know, I never really watched the show.
	But, you know, I...
	I did follow that he didn't like Taylor Lorenz.
	And so I'm like, OK, well, 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, I believe.
	Don Lemon, the Young Turks, Robin Roberts.
	They have a thing with Good Morning America, a thing with 2020.
	I mean.
	Who was going to tell my story?
	Who was going to write a blog about it?
	And people were going to hear it.
	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 my no-one.
	But in this case, so I go on Tucker Carlson and I felt he was very fair.
	Let me.
	Say what I needed to say and I felt good about that.
	Basically, all the people that always defend Taylor, they're just quiet.
	Nobody says anything else.
	Nobody has me on to talk about it.
	Nobody says anything else.
	That should be an indicator of how the media works.
	When it doesn't follow the narrative, then they're just going to shut you out.
	I'm glad I went on Tucker.
	I got a lot of support, and that really helped me mentally.
	It's amazing.
	People are reluctant to go on Tucker because they'll be called racist or whatever.
	It's nuts.
	I got one question that someone asked a while back.
	I'm curious.
	I'm going to tone it down in terms of the direction of accusation.
	I don't care if you were involved in any Fauci juice promotion, but in your experience, did that occur in the TikTok?
	Influencer world where TikTokers were in fact being paid by government or intermediary agencies to promote the Fauci juice.
	That's vaccine.
	Yeah, I was basically already wiped out by that time that happened.
	But there was an influencer, Ellie Zeiler, whose mom mentioned me in the article and said some not so nice things that I believe were untrue.
	But that influencer was part of that whole article that Taylor wrote about the government or a company paying influencers to promote the vaccine.
	That same influencer, Ellie Zeiler, was also, I think, part of that phone call about...
	You know, it's an influencer that is injecting themselves in a lot of political stuff.
	So for those people that don't understand it, the broader context of this is not just the sort of gatekeep.
	One of the reasons for the gatekeeping control, 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 going to end up in a rabbit hole of crazy right wing beliefs and all this.
	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 today.
	Not coincidentally.
	And it's part of it, like we recently saw, you know, the U.S. 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 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.
	And this is how the managerial class controls.
	So they take somebody that really likely has no concern whatsoever politically, 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 monetary support.
	And 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.
	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 its selective censorship and the rest.
	And has been just a smear merchant and a propagandist for the institutional interest, including defaming and doxing whoever gets in the way.
	Usually...
	Picking on more vulnerable targets.
	The only reason why she hasn't been sued into oblivion is because she's been careful about which target she's picked.
	She doesn't pick Peter Thiel, generally speaking.
	She picks other people to go after.
	I think she had no clue I would ever come up from my...
	Well, most people don't.
	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 very expensive to fight, definitely to fight the New York Times.
	And so out of the gate, there's a financial limitation.
	Then there's the invasiveness of discovery that takes place, as we're seeing kind of in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard case.
	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.
	And so that's a huge deterrent.
	And then third, you have a judicial system that's biased in favor of the big actors.
	They have no problem having Alex Jones be sued into oblivion for a misrepresentation of what he did and said.
	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.
	No more discovery should take place here.
	This is the New York Times.
	We need to take a full review of this.
	Yeah, I think that's why it's important to pay attention because you see the lawsuits, Sarah Palin, Project Veritas, Donald Trump.
	But I'm not any of those people.
	I'm not political.
	So hopefully this moves forward so we can hold these people to account.
	And I feel like even the New York Times, to be quite honest, nobody wants to pick a fight with the New York Times because all journalists want to be on the New York Times bestseller list.
	They have so much influence.
	It's like an $8 billion 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 after we filed the lawsuit, three days later, Taylor posted on Twitter going on book leave and I won't be back until January or something like that.
	And I think what I would guess is that the New York Times was probably like, you need to chill out.
	You just got us into a lawsuit.
	Please stop tweeting and continue.
	But I think somebody like Taylor, 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 it.
	So she went to the Washington Post where now she could go on MSNBC and cry about how she's getting bullied and attacked.
	We're going to get there in a second.
	And I'll tell you this, Arianna, 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.
	It's complicated.
	And even your story, I knew a ton of the details beforehand.
	It's complicated even having that backdrop.
	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 a very lovable target of hatred, if I can put it that way.
	She's made herself sufficiently loathed within the public community that even if people...
	I read the chat, people are not in love with what the industry is, not you as an individual.
	I totally get it, yeah.
	And I have my own thoughts.
	I think Big Brother...
	You know, X on the Beach.
	I think all of these shows are tremendously exploitive, but to each their own, that's life.
	But Taylor Lorenz 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, this shirt.
	Listen to this.
	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.
	The libs of TikTok...
	Was really not a public figure.
	And you were not really a public figure.
	Taylor Lorenz is.
	And there she is.
	She's crying about how terrible it is that people talk about certain aspects of her life 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 doxing.
	It's just kind of doxing.
	Yeah, I went to her house.
	Yeah, I disclosed her name.
	Yeah, I accidentally disclosed her phone number, which she lies about.
	This is, I assume, a clip from the...
	Philip DeFranco.
	There's a useless guy if there ever was one.
	I got the clip more easily.
	I was trying to find it.
	But her first excuse for doxing the libs of TikTok was...
	One of her first ones was, maybe libs of TikTok is Russian.
	I mean, look at her.
	She's a nutjob.
	I mean, she's a nut.
	But here she is propagandizing again on the Russiagate, Spygate, Ukraine war nonsense by saying, I had to look at libs of TikTok just in case they're foreign.
	While saying she's a tolerant individual and 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.
	It's probably not an invasion of privacy, legal tort claim for the Libs of TikTok.
	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 and the hit piece on Ari was a...
	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.
	Which is exactly who and what she is.
	But yeah, that's the broader background.
	And her excuses are just lame.
	But in this context, her other excuse for going after Libs of TikTok is Libs of TikTok was at January 6th.
	And everybody knows they're domestic terrorists.
	Let me bring it up, Robert.
	No one's been charged with that.
	If anybody's a domestic terrorist, Taylor Lorenz is a domestic terrorist, by her definition.
	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 crock.
	I'm gonna bring it up.
	I said you can't stop the Barnes train when he gets...
	I'm not saying triggered 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 have been inside the barrier at the insurrection last year was notable.
	It's notable.
	Because, you know, that's...
	You know, the people that stormed the Capitol are essentially domestic terrorists.
	And so I think the fact that this woman who previously spread election fraud conspiracies says that she was there during the Capitol, live-tweeted it, now sort of shaping this new groomer discourse, again, I just thought that it met the bar for newsworthy.
	And 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 don't know why they always have to have that annoying voice.
	Just drives me in.
	But this is someone who probably tried to be normally influential.
	This is just a guess.
	But if that probably tried to go through the normal means of influence, failed at it.
	And figured out that being a libeler on behalf of institutional power would give her that recognition.
	Because anybody who's out there trying to pimp 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.
	It's somebody who's driven by a deep pathology that she projects onto other people.
	She's kind of like the Amber Heard of journalism.
	I've heard that.
	Honestly, one of the most telling things, I listened to an interview with her and Jason, I forget what his last name is.
	But anyway, she was talking about how all of her experience and how she became a journalist and whatnot.
	And she's like, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but she basically said, 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 going to 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 out for 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, you know.
	Top Ramen and live in their cars or whatever it might be.
	Too much a Swiss boarding school, you know?
	It's going to be more like envy than empathy.
	Splendiferous had asked, how often do defamation suits against MSM succeed?
	Robert, in the U.S., exceedingly rare, right?
	Yeah, very, very difficult.
	At least that are published.
	I mean, you obviously have settlements, so you can never know for sure.
	But I'll put it this way.
	Within the legal community...
	The assumption is that one of the reasons why they libeled the Covington kids is 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 went public and said to represent him for free was to equalize the playing field.
	And then went public on Fox and other places, said 48 hours to retract and some other fun stuff.
	Which 90% of them did, to their credit.
	But only because normally they face no risk.
	They normally face no legal exposure of any kind.
	Because the biggest ones, like medical malpractice, nobody sues.
	Most people don't suit.
	It's just unaffordable for most people to file suit.
	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.
	Easy money is a contingency lawyer.
	Products liability, personal injury, 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 could sue defamation Joe Schmoe lies about you.
	That, you could probably get recovery.
	But it's the New York Times?
	Oh, man.
	They're the holy grail.
	They come up.
	I mean, look at what happened with Sarah Palin.
	The judge denies her claim, goes up on appeal.
	The court appeal says, no, you were wrong.
	You have to reinstate her 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, you know, that's the mindset.
	And, you know, I've said what I...
	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?
	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 have a current case, but I'll leave that alone for the time being.
	That's the hurdle.
	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.
	But that's why.
	Most lawyers would tell you it's not worth it unless you have money and you're Peter Thiel and you just don't care.
	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 ballgame.
	But it's rare that you get through the judicial bias in favor of institutional media.
	And I'll just say, from the Canadian-British perspective, you just need to Google it.
	It's a lot easier in that it occurs more often that the press is held liable, but that's because 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.
	But Arianna, Marion Holtzman is asking, please tell us how we can monetarily support your guest.
	I'll be glad to contribute.
	Do you have a fundraiser?
	Yeah, I have a givesendgo.com slash influences.
	She's using givesendgo people.
	That's already a good sign.
	I'll put the link up afterwards.
	I had a lot of, you know, tech.
	Big wigs, I think, found out about me because I filed a lawsuit against Taylor and I was advised, you know, just be careful because you may start a, even though my thing isn't political, they could find a way to take away all the money you raise.
	And really, it's just about raising capital to be able to, you know, support myself through to when the lawsuit happens and all this stuff.
	I mean, but yeah, I appreciate that.
	That's really nice.
	Someone else has asked about the dog.
	Did I notice a Chinese Cresset?
	He's like sleeping on the ground now.
	Is it a Chinese Cresset 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, you know, stay tuned as to what happens.
	What I was going to say about why it's so difficult, I was going to say too, is if you file in a state that has anti-slap laws, I'm not a lawyer again, so basically if they dismiss your case, then you're liable if they hit you with anti-slap, but you're liable for paying for all their legal fees.
	So not only are you suing the New York Times or whoever, but then if they...
	If there's the anti-slap law, then you're liable for that.
	So it's like, not only do you not have the money, but if you lose, now you're going to have to pay and you're going to be in debt or destitute or whatever.
	So it's really scary.
	I mean, I wouldn't wish this to happen on anyone.
	And I will say so many people have reached out to me, people that weren't famous that have had hit pieces written about them by Taylor Lorenz.
	One person like...
	Luckily, she said she's married and her husband supports her family, but she had to leave her career entirely.
	And those are the people where I feel like 5% was true.
	And so I'm just so grateful that...
	At least in my eyes, like 0% was just, she got like my name spelled right, but that was about it.
	And she twisted, you know, she would twist things even, and that's the really scary part is that, you know, can they just print lies because someone else was quoted saying this, even though she has all this proof?
	I mean, I don't know how all these things shake out, but it'll be interesting.
	I mean, legally, no.
	Legally, you can't hide behind quotations.
	Unless you're talking about a court proceeding or something like that.
	Unless you're fairly reporting what took place in 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 the 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.
	Now, what are you doing everyday business-wise?
	Are you still in the influencer space?
	And how is that going?
	I moved to Vegas and I basically got like an entry-level job at a hospitality company, 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, it was good that I got experience working for a corporation.
	And I also like mentally needed to like.
	Just step away from everything that had happened and just, like, do something else.
	And in Vegas, like, nobody cares about TikTok or anything like that.
	So I used my skill set in marketing to sort of work my way up.
	And now I'm trying to start a new talent agency, and I have a couple clients.
	It's much more difficult 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.
	You know, I'm doing I did a really cool thing where I brought Sam Asghari, which is Britney Spears's fiance to Vegas and Britney came.
	And so that was really cool.
	You know, if anybody's like, well, you know, she is a public figure.
	She's verified on Instagram.
	I got some good press because 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.
	So I think, like, I feel like at the very least, my reputation is coming back.
	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 to people.
	In the back of your mind, you're like, did they read that article?
	What do they think about me?
	And your confidence is like...
	It just takes such a hit.
	But I now feel like, at the very least, that was rock bottom.
	When 85 clients dump you on the same day, it's worse than the worst breakup you've ever had in your life, especially because you care about these people, right?
	You're intimately involved with their lives.
	And so that was extremely emotional.
	But now I'm like...
	Okay, like, what's Taylor going to do to try to cancel me again?
	You know, I know that I don't have any crazy skeletons in my closet.
	And if I got to 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 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 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.
	And for what?
	For a story.
	For one story, and arguably to make her handlers happy and her employers happy.
	Everybody should read John Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed to appreciate 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.
	And now she's doing it to libs of TikTok and she's justified it to herself by saying she's essentially a domestic terrorist.
	Anything goes.
	I'm only republishing some small account with 7,000 followers published so I can put it on blast to the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever.
	And I think there's a problem too with...
	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 2020 on stories about technology, TMZ, now MSNBC, CNN.
	She is going to, she's probably trying in the trajectory of being like a Gary Vee type of person, but Gary Vee is the complete opposite of what she is.
	And it's dangerous because if you talk about Older people, people that are in power and 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 I believe that there's a chance that it's possible that 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 TMZ is calling for comment on.
	X, Y, Z. And we get to take that person out.
	I mean, listen, this is just my thoughts or, you know, what other people honestly have told me.
	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 that.
	What she did was probably good for UTA as well because they picked up a lot of big names that you, as getting in at the ground level, had, what's the word?
	You didn't scoop them.
	You were there at the ground level and found them early.
	But, okay, first of all, Ariana, before we check out, I'm going to end it with a tweet from Tim Pool saying she'll get the spotlight that she deserves, and Tim Pool gave it to her.
	Thank you very much.
	I'll put the links to your social in the pinned comment.
	Everybody knows this story.
	You may have a limited interest in the story chat, people watching.
	It's interesting nonetheless.
	The business...
	I can see people being reluctant 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 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, Godspeed on your journey, Ariadna, but I'm not optimistic, but who knows?
	The New York Times have lost a defamation lawsuit in like 50 years or something.
	So I guarantee you if 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 streak of 50 years.
	I mean, that's what I'm hoping for.
	Obviously, I know it's going to 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.
	Stick around after this.
	I haven't ended the stream with a video, but we're going to do it today just because it's apropos.
	Where is it?
	The Washington Post.
	Here we go.
	Let's just end it with this.
	Let's just end it with this.
	And stick around, Taylor.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes afterwards.
	Thank you.
	you I wonder if...
	I did everything wrong.
	Forget it, people.
	Anyhow, there you go.
	That's what's going on there.
	Tim Pool bought an electronic sign in New York City that 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 Loren's doxing libs of TikTok and her otherwise history.
	She's, just think, Amber Heard of journalism, just a lot older.
	Just a lot older.
	Much older.
	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.
	Thanks for being here, people.
	See you soon enough.
	Ariadna, Robert, stick around.
	We'll say our public advice.

▲