Julian Dorey Podcast - #12 - Influencers Part 2: CLOUT CHASING

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

SOLO POD - Fyre Festival may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back—but even long before Billy McFarland’s Caribbean symphony, the influencer industry had seen clout chasing imposters invade its marketplace. These “fake influencers,” as we’ve come to know them, have undoubtedly damaged the influencer brand.   In Part 2 of our 3-Part series on influencer culture, Julian discusses the “clout chasers” in-depth—and breaks down the negative stereotypes that they’ve brought upon the influencer market in the process. While some of it’s sad to see, the many stories and examples of these “fakers” are certainly laugh out loud funny. ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  ~ Show Notes: https://www.trendifier.com/podcastnotes  TRENDIFIER Website: https://www.trendifier.com  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io  Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. But she's got 134,000 followers. And most of them are 15-year-old boys and middle-aged men who are just horny and hate their wives. But she's able to convince some brand that their

plant-based vegan Cheetos are something her followers are going to want to buy and send them to her and pay her and you know what? She'll put it out there and see what happens. Back in January of 2017, a video dropped on YouTube that got a ton of attention. It was a little mini featurette shot down in the Caribbean. Very well done. But it got attention because of who was in it.

And among the names who were in this sub two minute video were Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, Hailey Baldwin, Elsa Hosk, Alessandra Ambrosio, and more. I mean it was a who's who of Instagram influencers slash supermodels slash even actresses in some cases, I guess. And the video was promoting a previously completely unknown music festival that was set to occur a few months later down in the Caribbean. And so a couple weeks after the video dropped, some more follow-up ads dropped on Instagram. And this time, Kendall Jenner joined the party. She posted an orange square.

Again, highlighting this new music festival. Not saying much, but it was provocative. And people had been talking about the video that was released, and it was like, oh, this must be the real deal. So a bunch of people, a bunch of fans of music, trying to get a getaway down to the Caribbean, see some cool artists. I mean, some big artists were apparently going to be there. But a bunch of people bought tickets. Said, what the hell? This is a new festival.

Let's go. Let's do it what happened next I think we all know because that festival was the fire music festival run by the legendary Billy McFarlane Ja Rule and what we saw in April is that Billy

and frankly it seems like it was all Billy's fault I think Ja Rule kind of got screwed over on this one, but that's just me. But Billy McFarlane essentially promised this huge festival experience with incredible amenities, unbelievable views, the best artists in the world, amazing food, everything you could ever want, great borderline hotels that they built in the world and amazing food every everything you could ever want great borderline hotels that you know they built in the sand for all the all the visitors apparently allegedly promised all

these things and none of it happened and so now we know billy mcfarland is famously in jail for fraud. There was a class action lawsuit of over $100 million. And as the dust began to settle long before the documentaries came out, two documentaries on Netflix and Hulu in early 2019, long before that, as the dust was settling, a lot of people started asking questions and weren't just asking questions of Billy and Ja Rule and some of the people involved and how they'd all felt they were asking questions

about the influencers who got involved with the original video and then followed it up with content on their pages that hundreds of millions of people saw influencers who got paid a fuck ton of money to do it and by the way except for i think one post someone did it maybe emily radikowski did it on one of her posts but on almost none of the posts did they disclose that it was an advertisement for this so called fire festival

and people were pissed it was revealed that Kendall Jenner got paid reportedly 250 grand just to post that fucking orange square and all the models who went down for the video shoot were paid at a minimum 20 grand to say nothing of the ads they were paid for afterwards.

And the backlash they received was kind of a part of a growing trend that we were seeing at the time. With people getting pissed at Instagram influencers who were just peddling products they knew nothing about. Not giving a fuck about their followers who were buying them. And this was the ultimate example. I mean people were stranded on basically a deserted island in the Caribbean. Because some dude put on a concert that he could never actually have the resources to pull off. And he was able to attract all these poor people who actually had to go there and then figure out how the hell to get out of there.

He was able to attract all them with the help of these influencers and their massive followings. Now, I guess their teams and the influencers themselves didn't really do any back work on it. And yeah, it had Ja Rule attached so that seemed pretty legit there were some other people attached too and yeah it was the first time the festival was

ever going to happen so you're kind of taking a chance when it's something like that it's just a part of it but the result was disastrous and the fact that in many cases the influencers didn't even seem to care and they didn't even show up to the concert they were pumping this stuff for so long they didn't even

show up and some of them never even really addressed it and others just hid behind a statement afterwards the fact that all that happened made people say fuck you Fuck you. And this is something we've seen more and more of. And those are some major influencers. And that's one of the most prolific pop culture examples of anything in marketing over the past decade. But a lot of Instagram influencers and influencers in general. But as I said, we're really focusing on Instagram influencers in this three-part series. A lot of Instagram influencers have gotten lost in the chase.

Chasing the clout. Chasing the moolah. Trying to get the fame. Chasing the waterfalls. Whatever you want to say. And what's happened is some negative stereotypes have formed About the entire influencer industry And it's not fair to all the influencers Who work their balls off and do a great job

And provide tremendous value And in some cases are not Believe it or not Are not compensated enough for what they do But when you get some bad people to come in People tend to remember the negative experiences more and be more pissed about it. And Fyre Festival is just one of the many examples. So in this episode, we're going to be talking about these influencers.

We're going to be talking about some of the negative stereotypes that have formed. We're going to make sense of what it's done to us and our societal relationship with influencers as a whole. And we're going to tell some funny stories too. We've got to laugh. We've got to laugh at some of this shit. Some of the really basic ass influencers are hilarious. And the shit they do is mind...

It's absolutely mind-numbing. And by the way, in this episode, there's a couple times where you can probably laugh at me too, at my own expense, because I fucked up a few words here and there. It was pretty brutal. Anyway, you know what it is. Let's get down to it. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Trendy Fire. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture.

Where is the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo. Start asking questions. The Instagram influencer movement went mainstream right away. And like anything that goes mainstream in society, there tends to be an enormous pig pile that forms almost right away.

Where everyone's trying to get in on it. Especially when there's a payday involved. And with influencing, it was no different. So immediately, you had a lot of people coming into the pig pile who were sometimes just flat-out bad actors. Other times, they were just talentless and were clout chasing And many of them just had bad intentions And so over time some of these people were and have been able to break through And by break through I mean somehow they build a big following

And then brands pay them money to make a living being an influencer on Instagram And these are some of the people who have led to the culture around influencers to get a ton of negative stereotypes. You know some of these people. You know who I'm talking about. Like, you know them personally. I mean, the third grade bully?

Fucking guy's an influencer now. He's a fitness influencer, in fact. This dude posts the same mirror selfie of him flexing with steroid-infested muscles every single day. And includes with it some too-long-didn't-read, grammatically completely incorrect paragraph about some bullshit story that he probably made up that amounts to him pushing through the pain and not stopping every time he wanted to. And eventually, you know, this guy amounted and or amounted got 22 000 people to follow him i mean

don't tell him that half of them are bots but you know he's got 22 000 followers and he thinks that that following and the last 300 mirror selfie posts now qualify him to be a fucking life and business coach charging a thousand dollars a month to the dumbest people this country has to offer. And there are some. Believe me. Some people buy it. Like you know that guy. He was fucking pulling your underwear over your head in third grade.

And now he's fucking selling life and business coaching classes to people on a monthly rate. Then there's the chick from college who was like, you know, hot, but not like documentary feature cameo hot. But she's gotten good enough at airbrushing that she posts the same fucking bikini picture every day. And it's not a question of if or when. It's a question of where. Is it going to be the beach, the same one she goes to? The pool, the same one she went to yesterday? Or her back deck that we've seen a million times?

Like, which one is it going to be? You just know she's going to post one. And she leaves you in suspense. And somehow, this girl's amounted to, or gained 134,000 followers. I keep saying amounted. I've been saying that all day. I don't know why. But she's got 134,000 followers. I keep saying amounted. I've been saying that all day. I don't know why. But she's got 134,000 followers.

And most of them are 15-year-old boys and middle-aged men who are just horny and hate their wives. But she's able to convince some brand that their plant-based vegan Cheetos are something her followers are going to want to buy and send them to her and pay her, and you know what, she'll put it out there and see what happens. And then you have that really good looking guy from high school. You know, not the athlete, but the guy who fucked everything with a pulse and who probably sold all the weed on campus to everyone out of his locker

and smoked enough of it too to assume that he had a brain cell upstairs or at least convince himself he did and who now uses said brain cell and his drug money to fly to third world countries and take dramatic pictures and pretend

that he actually cares and now brain cell Braden here, he's got like 709,000 fucking followers on Instagram. And a feed filled with blue steel candids that he probably abused a seven-year-old native to take in exchange for a fucking Hydro Flask. And he's probably making a lot of fucking money.

Now whether or not you know the fitness guy the bikini chick or brain cell braid in there you at least know of people like this and they're what have taken away from what it means to actually be an influencer. Now, I found a blog on Medium by this woman, Eleanor Cohen, who, she's a marketing expert. She founded a company, I have the name of it up here. What is it? Engagement Strategy Group. So I think she does some influencer marketing work. But I really like the idea she put out there

because she was explaining that the negative stereotypes that we associate with influencers should be separated from the good influencers who you should really refer to as thought leaders and her point was these thought leaders these good influencers are the ones who really give a shit about their niche they want to learn everything about it. They already know a lot about it, and they're willing to pass off whatever expert advice they can to their following so that their followers get value.

I kind of covered that in the last episode. But she made a good distinction talking about herself in this article when she said, as an example, I love to travel. Who doesn't? But I can't say i am passionate about hotels airline food or the quality of towels in a bmb i am however passionate about storytelling community development and marketing get the difference and her point is if she loves to travel she's saying that a lot of people just say oh well i fucking love I fucking love to travel, so they become a travel influencer.

But then they don't really care about the details and the things that matter, that people want to learn about traveling. Everyone loves to travel. That doesn't mean that you can then do the work to become an expert in the space. And that's where we've seen the disconnect, because a lot of people are free-riding,

calling themselves some sort of influencer under some sort of subcategory. And really they don't know fuck all about it. I also found another article in The Drum, which is a marketing publication. And it was by this, why do I always pick authors with the hardest names to pronounce? I'm going to butcher this. But I think it's Auro Trini Castelli. I don't know if that's a guy or a chick. Let's check that.

Let's see. All right, that is a guy so Aro wrote a great article here and he led it off with the point that Andy Warhol it was a quote he had back in the day that was pretty prescient and what he had said was in the future

everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes and so Andy Warhol knowingly or unknowingly i guess unknowingly because it was in the past define what internet virality was going to be and so you get a lot of people who get the quick attention for whatever reason something clicks and then boom now people are looking at them but very often often, not always, but very often, then they don't have anything else to offer. And some of these people then clamor to be able to keep that attention. And they just keep on putting out something that they think is going to catch the eye so they can keep the following or continue to build the following and be able to monetize what they have without ever having a plan and so what ro was

explaining in this article is that instagram influencing has become like homogenized did i really just say that like that homogenized i did homogenized wow rough day anyway what that means in english is that all these people are starting to look the same in the same way that we compete in our post to post the same shit that the last person did because of our whole comparison culture thing influencers are doing the same thing on just a massive scale of attention level and so we almost can't tell the difference and it's all the same shit and to take that point a step further sometimes influencers build their following without ever even having a moment where they go viral they just just do it by, I mentioned it in the last episode, like pre-existing social clout.

I mean, not to pick on them, but a very common example here would be like celebrities' kids who do nothing in many cases. And sometimes they have like millions of followers. For what? What do you think they're going to do when they get that? They already got to live in the shadow of their parents. Well, now they got followers, so they're going to try to fucking sell to you.

And what are they qualified to sell? They were just born to people. There was actually a really hilarious example of this in hindsight. Where, oh, what's her name? Lori Loughlin, the – one of the actresses who was caught up in the whole Hollywood college payoff scandal. Lori Loughlin's daughter Olivia, who I think had to drop out of school after all that came out. Olivia had a massive following already. And her following today is, it's in the millions.

I think it's like one point something million. And so even when she was going to college before the scandal broke, she was already a monetizable influencer because of the attention she had so amazon prime college or what was it amazon prime amazon prime student that's what it is decided to partner with her for a campaign about going back to school to fill out your dorm room. So, you know, Olivia posts some basic fucking picture of her sitting on a bed in a dorm room. And it says sponsored by Amazon up top. And says, buy your supply for school. Like as if she's just a regular kid. Like it doesn't even mean anything.

But Amazon sees the following. They say, oh, celebrity's kid. Okay, we'll pay her to put this out there and who knows maybe they made some money on it but now with the whole scandal coming out that really doesn't look smart it already didn't have any validation in the beginning because olivia didn't really do anything to get her following she doesn't really have a reason to be following other than you than she was born to celebrities. But add the double whammy of that of now it looks really stupid that even one of the biggest companies in the world partnered with her on a campaign that later became her parents' downfall.

You also see some bullshit from a lot of influencers too. Like even legit influencers, so to speak, who kill their reputations because they post stuff like quick weight loss pills or cosmetic routine. They're not cosmetic routines, cosmetic surgical procedures. Like they put this stuff up there and say oh my god i just i just did this i had this procedure with dr so-and-so for my nose and you know it's it's so amazing i look so much better and you should try to and so all these fucking 13 year olds are watching these these videos where these influencers are describing their nose job and they're running home to mom and dad saying i need a fucking nose job now it got so bad that instagram in september of 2019 began to restrict content like this so specifically like weight loss pills and lose fat fast pills and shit like that and cosmetic procedures if you're below age 18 it's restricted you can't see it and many times instagram just removes the

posts altogether which i guess is like censorship so that's kind of like damned if you do damned if you don't but that's a whole nother topic either way point is like there's also probably a lot of just straight up shit influencers who are pushing that stuff and not really legit people so it's just another thing to say like eye roll these people suck and by the way i keep on touching on this point you know clout chasing and i might have explained this a bit in the last episode but i want to get to this right now because when I say that I'm not just referring to the average schmo who's trying to become an Instagram influencer you know across society it it's everybody it's a societal wide problem that affects even the most powerful people so some great evidence of this was in a report, an investigative report that the New York Times did, I guess a couple years ago.

It was like summer 2018, and I will have the article in the show notes. But they discovered this shady-ass company called Devumi, D-E-V-U-M-I. So I think it's pronounced Devumi. And they started to realize that what this company was peddling was fake – things like fake followers. Now, they had a bunch of services like fake YouTube views where they wouldn't call it fake YouTube views, but they said, we'll get you YouTube views. Yeah, how's that going to happen? Or SoundCloud listens. I think they did some stuff on Instagram. I'm not sure about that. But their main service, their breadwinner, was they would get you Twitter followers. And the reason the New York Times looked into them is because they started to get some, I assume, like crowd-based reports that certain important people seem to have followers that didn't look

very real or were very sketchy and so the new york times went in and they discovered that davumi would sell these packages of twitter followers maybe they'd offer 400 000 new followers to somebody for two thousand dollars or something like that and the way they would do it was literally like kind of fraud but on twitter some of the handles that like they don't have to be case sensitive so let's say your name is lauren hill and you decide you're going to make the L lowercase and the A uppercase. You can do that. And so actually on that L example right there, a lowercase L and an uppercase I looks the same on Twitter.

So I think that was like an example of some things that Davumi would do. But they would go find real people's accounts. Like regular people's accounts. And if there was a letter like L. They would change it to the uppercase I. Steal their profile picture. And create a whole new account. They usually posted shit like porn.

And now it was this fake Twitter account. That they put into their portfolio. And would then siphon off to people who came to buy followers off them. So the New York Times uncovered this whole thing, and it was amazing because, I mean, they discovered that media members were doing this, prominent athletes, scientists, politicians, foreign governments. I mean, it had no ends. And the worst part of all, not the worst part, the funniest part of all, was this Davumi company. I don't remember the guy's name, but it was run by this really shady-ass dude

who made up his entire resume. And he operated the company out of, like, an abandoned apartment above a taco restaurant in the shitty part of West Palm Beach. Like this is who these people were dealing with. And like some of the names that were caught, these aren't stupid people or most of them aren't. Michael Dell was caught as a client. Kathy Ireland. Steve Mnuchin's wife, Louise Linton.

The Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua, I think that's how you say it, Lennon Marino, who's the president of Ecuador, his campaign was caught doing it for him. I mean, it knew no bounds. And when they get these followers, they're fake accounts. They can't even interact with them like i i mean maybe maybe these accounts were trained to do likes and retweets so maybe that's not true but who's following those accounts the whole point of a retweet is to get it trending and to get other new feeds to see it and retweet it as well so it kind of defeats the whole purpose but the new york times uncovered this whole thing and this is just one example this happens all the time you even see

it with famous people on instagram and big time influencers using influencer growth methods i remember back in the day i was working with an llc and it's like a side thing we offered insta zood stupidest fucking thing ever and i had it on my account and so i got like 500 followers over six months or something like that and who the fuck knows if any of these things were real so i deleted all of them it was very very stupid but that's the point like why did i even do that like why do we feel like we gotta do this that's clout chasing 101 like that's hypocrisy 101 on my part but i'm like a guy you know the people i'm listing off here these are people who already have followings they're already big names they already can get attention if they want it and

they're even out here just trying to get the easy way out and trying to get an extra 500,000 followers just to be able to say they have them so they have clout that's a societal problem and it is a direct result of this entire culture that we push which is just attention and follows attention and follows and loses sight of the entire point of what it means to be someone of value. An influencer. Who genuinely helps their following. And helps their following. Provides their following with value in their lives. And behavior like this has contributed to this whole influencer stereotype of total self-obsession.

A complete lack of self-awareness and entitlement. So I collected some stories some of the funniest ones to give some examples of this and you've heard a lot like this i just found some ones that we can get a good laugh to and frankly i could have put a million in here if you want to see some go to google type in influencers gone wrong or asshole influencers or hilarious influencers you will find stories like this the first one i want to start with though is a more drawn out one because it's a back and forth email exchange and the context was it occurred between a wedding photography company and the assistant for a prominent social media influencer

i'm i'm gonna stop giving details it's hilarious so let's just get to it when i say assistant it's pretty clear this was probably the influencer on some fake gmail anyway the first email from the influencer to the wedding photographers good morning my client is a well-known social media influencer who is planning to be married at the Redacted on the 10th of April, 2021. In the lead up to her wedding, beginning this summer, she would like a documentary style video, an hour long, and photos taken at bridal fittings,

which could be shared with her followers on the day of the wedding she would like a video documenting the whole day which must be one hour plus in length and a package that includes approximately a thousand photos she wants a lot in exchange she is willing to extensively promote your business to followers on Instagram and Facebook. A combined amount of $55,000. Including story shoutouts. And will offer a discount of at least 25% on your packages. Look, she's already offering discounts.

Just so you are aware. These people, they don't know when to cut it off. It's already bad. It's already a train wreck. They keep going. It's like they're addicted to cut it off. It's already bad. It's already a train wreck. They keep going. It's like they're addicted to it. Anyway, just so you are aware, we've approached four other similar businesses in your area, so a fast response will be beneficial to your business.

Now, at no point in this email did the influencer reveal their name or or the influencer the influencer's assistant i should say reveal the influencer's name or even like a link to the influencer's blog or pages just to something something just to prove that the influencer's legit and allow before the wedding photographers take up this business proposition allow them to decide for themselves how legit this is and how good of an opportunity it actually is for them so the wedding photographers came right back at him and their email was hilarious they said hi melissa thanks for your email and we really appreciate the offer. We don't usually offer our services for anything other than our regular going rate. However, we would consider making an exception in this case.

Firstly, we would just like to check if there might have been a typo in your original email, specifically relating to a missing zero on the amount of combined followers your client has across all of their platforms. As I'm sure you probably know, 55,000 is not usually the level of following which can command the free transfer of products worth between $3,000 and $4,000. In total, especially when you take into account bots, duplicate accounts, and the types of followers who are not our target audience. As another example, we have friends that have more than 55,000 followers on one single platform, and they have even been known to pay certain suppliers a fair day's wage for their goods and services. I love this passive aggression. It's great.

Having said all that, I'm aware that this wedding date is nearly two years off. So if you are confident predicting that by April 2021, your client will have gained the minimum level of following that can realistically put them in the category of influencer, then we would be happy case require a clause in their contract stating that promoting us in your stories to anything less than half a million followers across one single platform by the time of the wedding will trigger the full price in dollars for the services you have requested thank you also for your thoughtful suggestion of a 25 of a 25 cut in our fee for any followers that book through your client's promotional posts. Previously, when we have received recommendations and promotions from high value clients, we've been able to actually raise our prices in reflection of their strong

reputations. So in that vein, it's helpful to know in advance that being linked with your client will automatically knock 25% off the perceived value of the product we have spent so many years honing. This email goes on. It's great. I'm going to stop it there. What I loved more than anything though, just for the self-awareness point, was the fact that after those guys, that wedding photography company, took the time to write out that email that was very clearly, you know, through angry teeth that hey, who the fuck do you think you are?

After they did all that and made a lot of extremely valid points that you can't really argue with, you would think the influencer would have thought, okay, you know, my bad. Maybe I'll apologize or better yet, I'll just kind of go the other way.

They didn't do that, though. They came back with another email. And it was pretty fucking funny. Good afternoon. Frankly, my client and I find that kind of unprofessional email appalling. It's appalling. And we will no longer be considering you as contenders to shoot what would have been a very lucrative wedding. Oh, they're not contenders anymore.

I can tell they're so upset. It would have been a great, of OF, by the way, it would have been a great opportunity for you to network with other social media influencers and some celebrities who will be making TV appearances later this year, probably on like, what's that channel? Like HQ, the one where they sell the infomercials. I'm guessing that that's probably the closest this person is getting to someone that's going on TV. Not that anyone watches TV anymore, but I digress. She continues, on top of that, we've had other businesses reply to us with additional offers

of goods and service, basically paying us to work with them because we're so important, you should want to pay to work with us rather than giving us a load of crap like what you just have. This wedding is really important to my client as her mother has been diagnosed with cancer. I'm not laughing. I don't even know if that's true. I doubt it's true, but even if it is, I'm not laughing at the mom being diagnosed with cancer. Hold on. Has recently been diagnosed with cancer and it's really unfair of you to be so mean when you could of of again of just said no politely typical influencer turning it back on them to make everyone else feel like they're the fucking victim and the world runs around them and the audacity audacity of this wedding company who

works their balls off to come back at them and say no you know we're going to need to get paid this is kind of ridiculous typical influencer making it all about them and she closed this email by the way saying please don't email again as we will have to name and shame you if you continue with this abuse as if they didn't know that they were going to get they didn't know but it's the other way around hun you're the one getting named and shamed here and actually they were nice enough not to name you because you didn't even give them a real name either way that is the ridiculousness we see this this is a common type thing influencers feel like they can just get shit for for free

there was another story where there was a guy who, and when I say influencers get shit for free, I'm saying like even the smallest influencers think they're like way more important than they are and that people are going to be honored for the right to network with some of the individuals that said influencer brings around. Like it's just crazy, but this is what they think. They think they can get stuff for free. So there was this guy in Los Angeles who runs an ice cream truck. And so many quote-unquote influencers came up to him saying, hey, you know, can we get some free ice cream?

And then we'll just post on social media about you. And, you know, it'll be way more beneficial for you. So many people came up to him and who knows how many of them were actually influencers and said that that he turned around and said you know what uh no and if you're an influencer the price is now double so instead of four bucks you pay eight which was passive aggressive or just straight up aggressive and fucking hilarious and there's this guy jack wagner who's the host of the yeah but still podcast which i think is a pretty big podcast he hosts it with

a comedian i forget who but i'll have the link in there so you can find out but he does a lot of funny shit exposing some of the influencer culture that we've seen and so one of the things he did was in 2018 he he had a a little wall painted in la and it was painted like it was shitty but it was his wall with wings on it and he promoted it online as like the go-to place where instagram influencers go to take pictures now and even hired a security guard there to explain that if you don't have 20,000 followers at a minimum you can't take a picture he was doing it to prove the point that a lot of people were going to show up and they did and literally like at one point there was a father-daughter combo who showed up it was like trying and trying to get a page going or something

that was a really basic ass page and they had like 19,500 followers or something, and the security guard just turned him away. He's like, no, no, you can't come in. You're not important enough. And people just fell for it. They couldn't even tell that it was such an obvious joke that usually these murals you actually see where all these Instagram influencers go to take pictures

are these frankly artistic way over the top but very cool things and then they all ruin it because they take the same picture there and pretend it's original but this guy just created one that was terrible and people still showed up like crazy and thought it was dead ass serious that like oh this is like an exclusive place to go one of the one of the really cringeworthy ones as well was when all the wildfires were going on out in california so that that was obviously like a serious thing it was very sad people were losing their homes left and right i feel like that went on for months um but while this was going on a lot of influencers would post on Instagram with like heart emojis and say like, my heart goes out to all the victims of this beautiful state's wildfires that are ravaging this beautiful state, whatever, you know, something like that. And when they would do the post with that as the caption, it would be like if it was a guy who's

an instagram model it would be like him shirtless like doing a candid pose on the beach or you know a fitness influencer pumping pumping her arms up in the air like they're hilarious like the the complete lack of self-awareness on these posts was you can't even make that like you wonder sometimes the whole rule that you get taught as a kid right where it's like count to five before you press send and then decide if it's still a good idea obviously these people don't do that or if they do they're just really stupid and they dead ass post stuff like this like it's not going to get people to roll their eyes or, even worse, just totally want to cancel them, which is a whole other thing. But anyway, the final one I want to bring up as an example is there is an account, and I don't think it's the only one, but there's one that's at least verified called InstaRepeat. And I think it's insta underscore repeat and what they do

is they go find pages with you know certain relatively high followings that post some of literally the same exact pictures as each other and then they post them all together to show how it's all the same shit so they did one where they just posted all these influencers who are holding out their hands you know looking at their watch with nature around them some scene and heavily photoshopped and then put them all on this page and you just scroll through it and you see it's it's all these guys with these big accounts doing it they're they're all just doing it because someone else did it there's no value there there no creativity. They're giving it all a bad name. And so now what's happening is all the stories like this and all the examples like this and

all the everyday of seeing influencers who just seem to be a lot of them disconnected and shouldn't even be there in the first place, not really having the right credibility to be a quote-unquote influencer. All of this stuff is now statistically starting to have an effect on us. And it's why I pointed out that, you know, we have this negative stereotype, and it's real, it's in numbers. 52% of millennials, according to Marketing Insider,

no longer trust influencers. Millennials are the generation who enabled and built influencers. And 52% of us completely don't trust influencers. Millennials are the generation who enabled and built influencers and 52% of us completely don't trust them. I mentioned in the last episode, a number from maybe it was DMI talking about how many people rely on influencers to make a purchase, like the ultimate form of trust. And it was like half. And that was from 2018. And now we're really starting to see people just straight up forget purchases they're just like yo fuck influencers man because they've seen enough of of the bad

basic shit that they're like it's all the same which again isn't fair but this is what happens when you get bad actors to come into the room that's what happens furthermore stylist conducted a study see i like i read a i told you I read a lot of different random shit. I'm reading Stylist. It's like the second time I quoted them. it was just women in general, I'm sorry. They found that 33% of women, and I'll caveat that by saying 33% of women who admitted this, right? So it's really probably higher, but 33% of women openly admitted to following influencers who made them feel worse about themselves. And so when you think about like why we do this at all, like, okay, you're following someone who's making you feel worse in your day Well, why do you do it? Well, it's it goes back to the whole comparison culture thing and when it's with an influencer

It's just upward social comparison We view these people because of their follower counts and their quote-unquote legitimacy as someone who's important and as someone that in some way we identified with at some point to follow them and we should therefore want to be like them and aspire to be them so what do we see we see their perfect curated feed in many cases with these influencers and all we're seeing there is the final product of what they do which may even be fake right it may not be a real reflection of their life. In many cases, it's not. But we don't know that. So we just assume, like, oh, they have it, great. And I don't. My life sucks. And it's just a constant reminder. It's stressful. It's every day. It's like, wow, I don't have that. Wow, I'm not as good as that. Wow. I'm not as good looking as that guy. What the fuck? I'm never going to be that. It's not good for mental health. So with so much of the focus in society on mental health now, you got to understand a lot of influencers aren't exactly doing a lot to make that whole situation better.

They're making people feel worse about themselves. You know what though? We got to take some blame in this. We got to look ourselves in the mirror a little bit. Like in general. Like the general public. All of us. All of us who are victim to comparison culture.

Who let this shit bother us all the time yes you would prefer not to have people try to show you how great their life is even especially when that's not even the case because it makes you feel bad about yourself i get that i've been there too but at what point do we start to understand that we can take power over it and accept the fact that you know what that's that's not real even if it is very few people actually have that and you know what maybe maybe my life is actually just all right maybe it's actually really good maybe i'm i'm spending so much time getting worried about what other people have who I don't fucking know that I'm never going to be able

to focus on myself and actually go after some of the things that might make me happier. There is enough information out there and enough people talking about this at this point that we actually should be at the point where we take some responsibility for ourselves and figure out that, you know what? No, maybe I shouldn't follow that Instagram influencer if their content makes me feel worse about myself.

Or if I do, maybe I should just accept the fact that, you know what, hopefully they're happy doing what they're doing, that's cool, I'll toss it a like and move on. Because it's not me. We can sit here and complain about the culture all day. We can complain about how social media has rewired our brains all day. We can throw a shit fit, put out 280 characters and pretend that that makes it all better because we get enough retweets to make us happy for the next 20 minutes

or we could actually do something about it and it's really up to you like it's up it's up to me myself it's up to any of you listening if this is something that you're like well shit yeah i'm i'm constantly i'm constantly looking at at other people like not even just influencers like just other people in general like fuck man my my life is is no good those people have it great well then maybe get the fuck off social media it's it's not gonna kill you trust me like it's actually not a bad thing i don't know anyway i hope this episode had some laughs in it i definitely found some of it funny and like i said it obviously focused on a lot of the negative connotations gave a pretty full picture of it the next episode is going to change

the vibe up we're going to talk about what a lot of Instagram influencers are doing to fight back against some of these negative trends in great ways. We're going to talk about how content is moving to a more authentic place or the emphasis on content being more authentic is really held in a whole new light at this point we're also going to talk about some outside the box stuff that's occurred as a result of all this so that's a little bit different in there but the final thing we're going to discuss in the next episode is a really cool theory

that came out last year in 2019 I forget when, sometime in 2019 but it was from you know a relatively small influencer that that i will get to who's got a pretty interesting backstory and i don't for the life of me understand how it didn't go viral because the theory this guy dropped, in addition to being one of the most mind-blowingly true things I've ever heard, it was – I mean it changed my life. It changed my outlook on how I look at things and how I look at – you know what? I'll save it for the next episode, but it's fucking awesome.

So I'm looking forward to closing off part 3 with that point and just part 3 in general I think it'll be good and yeah until then, give it a thought get back to me see ya