Emily Gellis's Court-Ordered Apology and Mikayla Nogueira on Jay Shetty

0:00Tanya Zuckerbrot just got everything you're supposed to want after an online pile on leads to a legal victory. Yet the Internet still isn't buying it. Zuckerbrot is the dietitian who founded F Factor, a high fiber diet company. You may have seen it. It was very big in 2020. At that time, a fashion influencer named Emily Gellis started posting that the diet was making people sick. She was sick of Zuckerbrot. She was sick of all her social media posts. And then she started sharing what she claims people were sharing with her, that the diet was making them sick. It started as criticism, like a lot of online influencers deal with.

0:45The online hate that they'll label as hate really just starts as criticism. But then the criticism towards Zuckerbrot took a turn. It became 4 ,500 Instagram stories in 75 days. She talked about DM saying that people had miscarriages, heart attacks, even heard of a death due to F-Factor. That's no longer a grievance. That's a campaign. F-Factor's revenue collapsed and the company shut down. Zuckerbrot sued and six years later, it's settled. Gellis has to pay her$240 ,000, $500 a month for 40 years. And she has to keep an apology video pinned to her Instagram for three and a half years. I don't know if you've seen the video or not.

1:33It looks hostage video mixed with like an Elizabeth Holmes vibe. The whole thing seems very inauthentic. In fact, I told Katherine Rossman, she's a reporter at the New York Times, She did a story about this case, and I said that it felt less like a heartfelt apology and more like a negotiated correction. But the online conversation shows that Zuckerberg is still at a 62 percent negative sentiment. So that leads to the question, was it all worth it? Then there's Michaela Neguera. You know her. She's the big Boston brashy beauty influencer. For years, people have brought her up to be one of the top beauty influencers out there.

2:17But now a lot of people are starting to say that what she shows online doesn't match real life. She sat down with Jay Shetty to talk about it. And she said something that most content creators who've become multi-millionaires because of the platform won't admit. And I give her credit for that. This week in the podcast, I explain it. Take a listen.

2:48I had forgotten about the Tanya Zuckerbrot and Emily Gels thing. Was I a big follower of them? Not necessarily. Like I knew of it, but I didn't know a lot about it. So this is what popped up on my Instagram over the weekend. But this is Tanya Zuckerbrot's Instagram page. She has 200 ,000 followers. I'm going to bring this up right here. So this is an apology that popped up on my feed over the weekend. And I was confused by it because it read very hostage video to me. It read forced. And it also read a little Emily. I'm sorry, a little Elizabeth Holmes with the blonde hair and the turtleneck. So the black turtleneck a la Steve Jobs.

3:36And I thought, what is this all about? So I had to dive in and look at it. So this is Emily Gellis. So she was like a fashion kind of influencer. I think she was somewhat of a designer. She was online. She needed to post this to her Instagram because of a lawsuit. It's a defamation and cyber stalking lawsuit. They have been at this for six years. Then I started looking it up and I saw this right here. I was like, oh, you have a press release. Tanya Zuckerbrot, founder of F Factor, resolves lawsuit against Emily Gellis after six years of litigation. So this came out a couple of days ago, October 5th.

4:19So, you know, when you have a press release attached to this, this is a part of a PR campaign. It is a reputation reset. So here we have. So PR Newswire, Tanya Zuckerbrot, RD, is a registered dietitian, founder of F-Factors, resolved her defamation on a cyber-stalking lawsuit against fashion influencer Emily Gellis after six years of litigation. As part of this settlement, Gellis is publishing a public video apology on her Instagram account, acknowledging that the allegations she promoted were not supported by verified evidence. I'm just going to read the quote here. Quote, I've spent 25 years building my career in F-Factor, only to watch a smear campaign built on lies, destroy my company within months, said Zuckerbrot.

5:00While I was fighting to save everything I had worked for, I was also enduring relentless cyber stalking and harassment that reached into my home and my family's life. An apology cannot undo the damage or give us those years back, but this settlement represents accountability. Now I'm focused on rebuilding F-Factor, returning to the work I love and reclaiming the future I work so hard to create. To be accused of harming people's health when your entire career was dedicated to healing people, to inspiring them to live their best lives was something I can't even explain.

5:36Mikayla Nogueira: It was like it killed my soul. It was character assassination. Now, I'm curious, any of you, any of you follow it and and see this case? And I am curious, too. Did you follow these two back in around 2020? And this matters. And this is why I want to ask you this question. Can anyone give me an example of someone you follow online who started as a content creator? They have, let's just call it lifestyle, lifestyle-esque. They may have an expertise. They might have letters behind their names. Started in 2020 and then they crazy blew up. Okay, blow up, blow up, blow up. And with the blow up, blow up comes the money.

6:19And now all of a sudden they have a lot of money. This case kind of follows that. And the reason why I mentioned 2020 is as someone who followed around in 2020, I didn't really get on TikTok until, I don't know, 2021. So I missed the first wave. But if you think back to 2020, what was happening? I know in my life, a lot was going on at once personally, which drove me to go to the Internet. OK, which I drove to the you go to the Internet, you go to social media. But back then, we had a lot of content creators who were making a lot of money online. And this comes from this kind of earlier wave where a lot of online marketers just took off.

7:02Social media algorithm favored self-help people who had followings and communities. If you had a community on Facebook or you had a community here, they were rewarded. I'm thinking Jay Shetty would be an example. And this is a Mel Robbins, another example. Also what happened in a 2020 George Floyd. OK, also what's happening, the pandemic. So many people were driven to online worlds. This case starts in that online world during that time frame. And it matters. Another name from 2020. If you think about the explosion and then the downfall, like like Tanya Zuckerbrot exploded and then came the downfall.

7:44This lawsuit is claiming that Emily Gellis is the reason why her business paint. But where I want to highlight here is where Gellis started. Now, Zuckerbrot built F Factor and her husband is the founding manager, partner, co-CEO of Monday Properties. So I want to give a little bit of context to their lifestyle. I read a lot of stories from Catherine Rossman. So she is a reporter for the New York Times. I love her stories because, as I said, like I've done a lot of content around pieces that she happened to happen to do. She reached out to me yesterday because she's publishing a story today that should come out at any moment, actually, about this case.

8:30And I gave her some quotes for it. And we were discussing this case and kind of the timeline. So we sidetracked a little and we were just having this conversation. And I was telling her, I know this isn't your story, but I want to tell you where my thesis comes. This video that Emily Gellis posted, it reads very much hostage video. And I felt like it was manufactured. You know, it was a negotiated video that she had to post. And if you were an influencer who was forced to do a video, what would you do? You'd wear black. You would speak exactly like this into the camera that you are being forced.

9:07I mean, it really does read like a hostage video. But also, she's standing in front of light. Like the window is behind her, which everyone knows you don't film in a window, but it's almost like you see these little nods there. But then she's forced to post it to her page. So it's on Emily Gels' page and on Tanya Zuckerbrot's page where she highlights not only the video itself, but she has a video of herself in with the New York Post headline, how Tanya Zuckerbrot lost her 40 million diet empire to one troll and the six year fight for justice. Emily Gellis, when she started this, and if we think around 2020, what we want to highlight here is, well, really, who is Emily Gellis?

9:49Did she deserve this type of punishment? I question, is it really effective when someone is forced to say that they were right? I don't know. I don't know. If anyone's watched this video, you'll have to give me your opinion on that. When someone is forced to say that they were wrong, you know, does it work? Now, here's the important distinction here. And I go back to 2020 for a minute. 2020 was a time where emotions everywhere, particularly, you know, in the U.S., but really worldwide. But if you think about the U.S., they were raw. Is that fair to say? For everyone, everyone was dealing with just the rawness of life.

10:31People were driven to Netflix and streaming. They were driven to watch the Tiger King. They were driven to watch anything, drivel, anything we could watch. Crime talk goes up. People just want to binge. They just want to be in another world. This is also a time when people had wealth. They showed it. It was a time of wealth porn. You saw content creators like Atanya Zuckerberg show that wealth at a time when a lot of people were struggling. Another person to do comes to mind, Rachel Hollis, another person who was her rise conferences. She's filling stadiums. I mean, she's filling arenas. All the money is coming in.

11:11And then she does that one TikTok video where she said, you know, do I need to be relatable? I'm not. Listen, I think she said, listen, sis, I'm not relatable. Like, don't expect me to be relatable. And she essentially effectively canceled herself before using that term. And here's the reason why. Here's the rub. People online follow, follow, follow. But then when it seems like the person they follow, where they're getting advice from that person, when the social contract goes from follower to educator, follow to content creator, that makes you feel something, influences you to buy something or be a part of something or even, you know, envy something.

11:53You see that lifestyle. it's all good. But the social contract changes when the content creator monetizes off the backs of the followers. So this was big in 2020, but I see it now today. And I talked to a lot of my content creators about that. There is a social contract. That's where if you watch the previous post from the Semelie Gellis, she seemed like one of those people. She was really resentful of what Tanya Zuckerbrot created and built. And she saw a lot of this wealth that she probably assumed came from her husband, whose family owns a lot of real estate. And there's just a lot of wealth there.

12:34And the lawsuit came in 2020. So when there's a lot of money, there's a lot of envy. And then sometimes in this world, we get this schadenfreude where people want to bring people down. When Emily started going after Tanya Zuckerberg, the lawsuit wasn't first. The first thing that happened is Tanya struck back and she started knocking Emily. Now, do we blame her for that? No, it's a very human reaction to want to fight back. And I know this from people who hire me. Heck, I know it myself. When people come after me, I want to go back and, you know, I want to say something too. But I don't. But that human reaction, that emotion comes in.

13:17So there's this kind of tit for tat, tit for tat. But Kelly Dodd, who used to be a real housewives, but she goes toe to toe with a doctor. She's a she's a plastic surgeon. And the two of them go back and forth. So it creates a lot of like algorithm there. But it's this fight, right, where they get they make accusations and they get in under each other's skin. That's exactly what happened here. Emily Gellis wasn't a troll or a hater. She was an aggrieved follower. The aggrieved follower is where, this is where I get hired with aggrieved followers. It's when the social contract breaks and when the follower feels duped.

13:57So I mentioned Rachel Hollis earlier. When Rachel Hollis and her husband at the time, her ex-husband, now the late Dave Hollis, they had all their RISE conferences. Okay, fine. But then they had a marriage conference where they charged over, I believe,$1 ,300 for marriages, for couples. Well, right after that, they announced that they're divorced. Followers felt had. And to this day, Rachel Hollis still has not like accepted that piece of the accountability. So it creates this environment that's just waiting to explode. And when she had that TikTok video about not wanting to be relatable, when her entire empire was built on relatability, that was the match that brought it down.

14:36So in this environment, like think like an Emily Gellis feels that way about this Tanya Zuckerberg. Where the tension point goes from a tension point to excessive is that Emily got excessive. She posted 4 ,500 stories in 75 days, 50 ,000 posts. That's not a grievance anymore. That is a campaign. And that distinction is where we are. That distinction is where I come in. The question that Katie Rossman was asking me from the New York Times was about this lawsuit. Will it create this environment where other people will now, you know, who get online hate, want to sue everyone? And I don't think it's a true cautionary tale because Emily Gellis did go to extreme lengths.

15:25She did. It went beyond. But she was getting triggered by Tanya Zuckerbrot. And Emily was also arguing that people who she sent to say things online possibly set her up because Emily did get a lot of anecdotes from people that said this F-factor diet made them sick. And I also want to show this piece of it as well. This is an important piece of it. Catherine Rossman, she also, this is her story in the New York Times. October 12th, 2022, four years ago. In a lawsuit, eight women claim the F-factor diet made them sick. The plaintiff's site, Tanya Zuckerbrot, the creator of the High Fiber Eating Plan and her company alleging that they suffered gastric distress and other ailments from F-factor supplements.

16:11There's the factor right there. That is the F-factor, the supplement factor. She's making money selling supplements and the people who buy the supplements are the followers. But now we have a lawsuit from people. So this is where the social contract changes. So if you are an Emily Gellis and these people are reaching out to Emily and the DMs, and I'll say people do that all the time. People come into my DMs all the time to drop receipts. If I'm talking about a certain story, they do it all the time. And then she did, and then Catherine Rossman did another story, October 8th, 2020. Wow, October is really the month.

16:53Maybe it's the new legal month, But that's the tension point I want to highlight there. It's right before Emily went too far. And Emily in a lot of her posts said that Tanya Zuckerbrot had Mossad agents come after her, an investigator. They felt like she was being bullied and that she was being followed and that there was aggression against her family. So it got really personal. And then it just went off the rails. Tanya Zuckerbrot had the wealth and the ability to go big and go hard in this lawsuit. And that's what she did. When Captain Rossman asked me, do you think this will kind of set, you know, a bar for lawsuits?

17:31I didn't think it would because Tanya Zuckerbrot has access to assets that many probably online creators may not have unless there's someone who becomes a multimillionaire and then they might. But they're usually not going to go that hard particularly if there were questions there before. And Emily Gellis, it's fair to say that she did not have the funds to do that. So let's talk about this big question, you know, about this. When does criticism stop being criticism? In the Emily Gellis case, it started with criticism. Criticism is healthy. Criticism is fine. If Emily Gellis is getting people telling her how sick the F-factor diet made them, she has every single right to mention that.

18:24She does. Anecdotally. She can say, anecdotally, people in my DMs are saying this about the diet. You can do that without being sued because it's anecdotally. But then you say, I don't have any proof. I don't know this. This is just what's being told to me. But there does come a responsibility, and this is where she crossed the line, was the misinformation where she said it caused miscarriages and death event and a heart attack. That's where she crossed the line, and this is where Zuckerberg had a case. Something that comes up a lot in my work is this confusion over criticism. Now, criticism is really, really difficult to handle, but criticism is a very healthy part of the online discourse because it does give you insight into how people are thinking.

19:14All right. So let's go to the tape, as they say. And I want to show you where this case is right now. And then we're going to move over to Michaela because I sat and listened to that Jay Shetty. And if I listen to that, we are going to talk about it. All right. So over at Muckrack right here, we're looking at the articles over time in this first box right here. Peak October 5th. That was a couple days ago. So this is when the story peaked right here. You're going to get a lot of New York. You're going to get a lot of anyone, any outlet that's either reporting on culture or they want to kind of capture that online conversation about it.

19:54So this is why it peaked. I think this is a story that will, you know, go away eventually. The share voice by articles. Tanya Zuckerbrot, of course, is going to have a higher share of voice than that big piece of it. She put out a press release, PR Newswire. So they're going to they're going to pick it up over Emily. Share a voice over time. Tanya on the 6th. Why? The press release came out the day before. So she's going to get a lot. Here we go in this circle right here. You can see it. And I will post all these to our after article so you can see it. The combined sentiment. This is important.

20:28It is negative. So that speaks to even though Tanya Zuckerbrot won this case, is it helping Tanya in her story? She may have won the lawsuit, but do people empathize with Emily in the beginning? Not when it went off the rails, but in the beginning. Sentiment comparison right here. Emily, of course, most of it is negative because all the press about her is negative. It doesn't mean that everyone thinks that Emily Gellis is negative, but all the stories are reporting on what Emily did per the lawsuit. So it's going to be negative. But Tanya has 62 % negative. There is the positive there because there were pieces like I showed you the New York Post piece where they are highlighting Tanya's video.

21:20So that's where she's going to get some of that positive reinforcement from her. But she gets a lot of the negative as well. So the Emily Gellis word cloud right in the beginning, public video apology, that's going to trail with her for a long time. Tanya Zuckerbrot word cloud, public video apology. Where is F factor? It's underneath it, but it's next to allegations, Gellis. And then the Emily, Tanya word cloud together, public video apology is right up there in the beginning. So I guess the thesis that I have here is she won the lawsuit and, you know, she claimed that she lost everything because of Emily Gellis, which certainly easy to assume that she did.

22:03But how much of it was lost because a number of people were feeling the same way as Emily Gellis, but they just didn't take it to the extreme. People reacting to kind of the wealth porn aspect of Tanya Zuckerberg. In a video that she posted to the New York Post, she took Emily Gellis's apology video, but she spliced it with videos of Emily, some of her more unhinged posts in there, and also discussed that she was respected by the media as an expert, but she showed a clip from The Doctors. The Doctors is a syndicated talk show that it's not even on the air anymore, but very Dr. Oz-esque, right?

22:47But then you also have the increase in a million other companies, like hyping powders and proteins, fiber, you know, Tanya's big thing was about fiber and everything. But also what do we have? We have Emily Gels, but what else get in the weight loss piece in this same timeframe? GPL ones, right? Same thing. So maybe that business would have gone through a downturn anyway. So that's the question to look at it. So I'm saying this lawsuit is not really an accurate cautionary tale for why you should never criticize an online creator and people should be worried about it. And if you are an online content creator or you own a business or you're one of those content creators who strike it rich and get big and then you have your own brand and business, F Factor, Michaela Nogueira, we're going to talk about that, and other content creators who are now multimillionaires.

23:37If haters come at you, can you sue them? I'm saying no, because Emily went a little much, but online criticism is not something that you can sue for unless you can prove that it damaged your business. So let's move over to Michaela now, which is similar in our Venn diagram, very similar, but a little different. So my take, I'll just say this right up top here, bottom line up front. She falls into one of those categories. I don't love or hate. I always admire scrappy people who come from Poy Poyville. And she talks about, you know, how she started. She went to Bryant University. She was like a mass comm major.

24:26I will come back to that for a moment. This matters. And I always love makeup. Her mom, she says, very creative. And if you find this boring, well, then you'll find the Jay Shetty podcast boring because so much of it is just about, you know, Michaela. And I'm going to tell you why it doesn't work, why I don't think it works. So Michaela rises up and then she talks about how she got her start at Ulta. She wanted to be behind the counter, but they gave her her makeup brushes and then she could start doing makeup. So she's been doing makeup for a while. Her rise is it charts in a way where the the The internet rewards you.

25:00And I am saying that it is true. I am someone who experienced the same thing, though clearly not at the same level as a Michaela. But when I started on TikTok in 2021, I posted videos looking just all sorts of bad because I didn't think anybody would see it. And I didn't get any follows, any follows, any follows. But then, or likes, whatever. But then I did one post about Rachel Hollis because that's when they were peak. Dave and Rachel Hollis were just trying to recover from things that were going on. And in the morning, the day before I said, I'm quitting TikTok, this is such a waste. And I remember looking at the post going, 600 views, I am not, I'm done with TikTok.

25:45And then I put my glasses on and I went, oh, it's 60 ,000. So I saw the benefit of the boost. I experienced a boost. I have whatever, 600 ,000 followers on TikTok because of the boost of it. If you are an FBO, the first, the best, the only, you're going to get the boost. That's it. You're going to get the boost. Michaela got the boost because she wasn't the first makeup influencer. But I would say she was the first makeup influencer who wasn't someone who you would traditionally think is a makeup influencer. That very authentic, raw Massachusetts vibe and persona. It was perfect for TikTok. talk.

26:27Now, in the interview with Jay Shetty, we've discussed Jay Shetty before, his monk era for how he became the self-help guru. He's another one of those big people. But now he has a platform. So these podcast platforms, the SiriusXMs, the Spotify, they're looking for people that are great interviewers. They're looking for people who have great content. They're looking for people with followers. That's it. People who have a point of view and followers. So Jay Shetty, this big self-help guy, also who presided over Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez's wedding, okay, random, is sitting down and interviewing Michaela Neguera, which is the reason why it didn't work, that why the interview was so incredibly bad.

27:12He just sat there. He absolutely, he just sat there because of Jay Shetty's self-help. Why does he care about Michaela? He doesn't care. So it became an entire story about her beginning and how she felt, how she didn't have confidence or anything like that. Is it bad that she tells her story? No, but her story is similar to anybody's story, right? But here's where it's interesting. In the interview, she says some very interesting things. She says such important things that are absolute truths about her and her brand. Now, before I get into those quotes, she now, she has her POV beauty. So she has her own brand, her own line of cosmetics.

27:56She's making scratch. We see a lot of Michaela content around wealth. Okay. What I said earlier about Tanya Zuckerbrot, what incited, what triggered an Emily Gellis, what triggers a lot of followers when you start with a with a with a content creator and you're just this scrappy Michaela and people love you because you're so scrappy and you're putting out the content. And that's the other thing. These the creators who kind of like take off and get big. They're the ones who post every single day. They're constantly posting. I had a client who said they're almost addicted to posting. And I thought, wow, that is an addiction.

28:36I do not share. I hate posting. But Michaela, as she was grinding, posting, posting, posting. I think one of her first cancel moments, and I always do this now, air quotes, because I hate the term, but we all know what the term means, is when someone was complaining at her in the comments. Like she likes to go one-on-one and take on the haters, you know, the haters in the comments, but it was a criticism. It wasn't really hate. It was a legitimate criticism because she said, you should try being an influencer. You don't know how hot it is to be an influencer. Now, is it hard to be an influencer?

29:09Yes. It is. It's not easy. It's not easy to do it and edit and do that every single day. But is it also hard to sit and grind at a desk all day or doing a job that you hate or you're in a life where you're just grinding there and you're making an hourly wage? Yeah. So for someone who is starting to build wealth off the platform and they say to a follower, try being an influencer. That's that trigger point. That's that trigger point. Like, people didn't like that. And then when Michaela came back at them, she's saying you're just online haters, online haters. This is the advice I give my clients.

29:46You must distinguish the two. Online criticism is like gold. It's gold. Any new mothers know the term liquid gold. It's a nutrient that you want. You have to work for it, but it's a nutrient that you want. You want that critical feedback because it tells you specifically what someone is saying about you. It's hard to read. So that's why I tell people, you don't read it. Get your team to read it. Your team cannot be emotional like you and call everyone a hater. You can't do that. You need someone on your team who can look at and go, they have a point from there. And then you work from it because people had a point.

30:22So then Michaela grows, grows, grows. And this is what I give her. She grew because of her persona. Then it gets into the accent. And this is what I wanted her to say. Or this is what I wanted to point out. As she was growing, she talked about how she started because her mother, who was a teacher, wanted to go on TikTok. Her mom didn't know anything, so she went on TikTok. And she noticed something. This is important. You never hear this in videos, but it came out in the Jay Shetty podcast. Now, if Jay Shetty were a good interviewer, he would have stopped her right when she said this line that the algorithm made her.

30:56She said that she was posting.

31:00Mikayla Nogueira: TikTok was blowing up during COVID because everyone's on their phone looking for something to distract themselves. Michaela is revealing the secret formula. She's revealing that she got the boost because she's an FBO. She's a first best only. She's not the only makeup expert, but she's the only raw Boston giving it to you straight. Someone who says, I'm not a traditional beauty. Wow, that's authentic. That's why she took off. And Michaela knows that. If Jay Shetty were actually a decent interviewer, he would have said, Whoa, tell me more about that. Because then he would have uncovered something important.

31:38Where I give Michaela credit for this, honestly, she admitted it. I gotta tell you, most of the clients who I talk to, they don't admit that. I always have to say, surprise, let me tell you a little bit. I share that just because you have X amount of followers doesn't mean all those followers love you. And I give them the stats, you know, from the Pew Center research that shows people who follow you, some love you, some are just curious about you, Some hate watch you. They don't like you. Some are your competition. Michaela knows it. And that's where I give her credit. But Jay Shetty, let it go right by because he's not a good interviewer.

32:13He's just doing this podcast because he has all those followers. Okay. So now that was the COVID back to 2020, that year.

32:21Mikayla Nogueira: So then Michaela says, I'm posting these videos. I have no followers, by the way, none, zero. Yet these videos were getting thousands of views. And I thought to myself, wow, this app has a really interesting algorithm. I noticed the algorithm right away. You could have no followers and you could have a video blow up and that could be a turning point. Exactly. That's it. OK, so Michaela is admitting right there. She gets it. So I'm giving her points for that. She gets it. The algorithm rewards. Then she said, what I discovered was it wasn't the content they wanted to see. It was me. They didn't care what the topic of the video was.

33:07Mikayla Nogueira: They just liked my personality. That's amazing. They liked who I was. Yes, Michaela. That's it. That's it. They liked you and you were being rewarded for it. It's easy to have a viral moment. The viral moment happens. Boom. That's it. What do you do next? That's the question. How do you build something out of this? And I took that very seriously because thankfully I do have that business mindset, too. So and that's what a lot of people lack. Right. They have the ability to create the content, but they don't know how to make it a business. So you see that Michaela now has a full understanding of how the internet works.

33:45Did Jay Shetty go down this path? Of course not. Because Jay Shetty honestly is sitting there like, I have nothing to give in this interview. Like, and you could see it. He had nothing to give. I actually felt bad for Michaela in that interview. People are going to love you, but they're also going to hate you within that following, which Jay Shetty even said that, you know, the closer you get to the top 1%, the more likely you have a 50 % love or hate relationship. But Michaela isn't doing anything wrong there. And I'm using her as a case study because of that trigger point. So then she starts explaining the accent.

34:20And this is where Michaela starts to lose the plot a little. Because as I said to you earlier, she's explaining how the Boston voice works and that how people like it. Because she does have an accent. She does. She does. But it's subtle. She can turn it on when she wants. A lot of people come at her online saying your accent isn't authentic. Ergo, you're not authentic. Ergo, how dare you sell makeup to young people and to women when you're not authentic? That's when you're getting into a critic to a hater because Michaela has every single right to to amp up her her Boston accent. It is no different than car sales ads back in the 80s and the 90s.

35:07It is no different than Oprah Winfrey going, you get a car, you get a car, you get a car, you get a car. You know, that's a reason why it's now, you know, a meme today. That's why people can can just kind of ham it up and people will put on that affect because it works. And any people do it in our normal lives. We do. We speak differently with our friends as we do with our parents. I see like if I talk to my kids on the phone, I have to ask them something. They'll go, yeah. But if they want to talk about, oh, my God, you see the Red Sox game, you know, the affect changes. So Michaela does not have to apologize for her accent.

35:44But what I did not like is that she's trying to defend her accent against the hate. And she's missing the mark on the hate about the accent. It's people don't like the inauthentic piece of it. So when she explains it to Jay Shetty, she's kind of getting there, right? She's getting there and she's explaining it. goes a little off, like I said, when she said, well, I'm a, you know, mass comm grad and we learn how to use our voice. So I think she's just kind of using that in the talking points of it all. But where she goes off is that in her account or TikTok, she goes off on people about the accent.

36:21She goes, enough about my accent. Like, no, I mean, what they're saying is legitimate. Online in a persona, she should say, yes, it's my persona. This is my TikTok online persona. This is what it is. You know, kind of deal with it. That's all she has to do. And she only has to do it once because then it shuts up the people. But she doesn't do that. And that's why the people keep going. And also, online hate is algorithm and it is views and it is clicks. So I saw a post from her yesterday where she's saying, I am so sick of people coming down on me and making fun of my looks. There is a thread out there.

37:01a person who I follow, Dr. Kathy Nickerson. I really like her. She's a therapist. She talks about a fair recovery a lot. And she was doing content around Michaela. And she was saying how unfair it is that people were criticizing Michaela's looks, which I agree, you know, just criticizing someone's looks. And Michaela, I think, has been very authentic and open. She says, I'm not a traditional beauty. And I give her points for that. But this post that I saw is she's coming at people with the side by side photos. OK, because people are saying you use filters and Michaela is saying I don't use filters.

37:38Now, Michaela has been on TikTok for years now, like six years. And she's saying I don't use filters, but I'm saying this as a content creator. Social media gives you filters. When you see me on Instagram or you see me on TikTok, I look a lot better because it gives me, I don't know if it's an over 50 plus filter or what, but they're giving me a filter. You don't see it in my profile. It doesn't say I'm using, I've never used the filter to filter me. I just know if I post direct to an app, I just look better than if I just put up my phone. So this is where Michaela, I think, is using this argument about all this online hate about how she looks in life compared to how she looks online.

38:18And she's like, I just use a light, you know, and it's just a light. What's the big deal? And so people are coming at her with that. And that's, again, why the people online start to get riled up. Like, just admit it. And they have a point, okay? It is a criticism because that's someone where the criticism starts. She is someone who has made multi-millions off of her followers. That's why her followers feel that they have a right to complain about the use of filters. Another example was the Michaela Mescaragate. when it was L 'Oreal, I believe, telescope, when she was using it and people were analyzing it and they're saying this isn't real because there's a filter there.

39:00Well, now you're getting into ad buys, you're getting into products and people started complaining about it and they had a right to. So in conclusion, where we wanna go, it becomes a trap when a creator goes after people for criticizing them and they call it online hate. If you are online or you work with someone who's online, you want to distinguish between the two. It's so incredibly important. Emily Gellis is the case of an online critic. Tanya Zuckerbrot kind of poked her right back and then she became an online hater or, you know, she's someone who would people would call like trolling. She went there.

39:44But I caution content creators like don't label everyone in one big group because they criticize you. because you created a social contract with those followers. You're a multimillionaire because of your followers. Not because you got a job, Michaela, at Ulta and because you're great at makeup. You're a multimillionaire because your followers made you a multimillionaire. And now that Michaela is starting to show a lot of her wealth, people don't like that because it's that disconnect. And that's what I warn my content creators is when you start making big, big, big, big, big money, don't forget how you got it.

40:15You got it from your followers. You got it there. And where I give props to Michaela is she talked about on the Jay Shetty podcast, but she's not doing that, you know, back on her Instagram and her TikTok. She's coming after the critics out there. Everyone, thank you so much for joining me. I will tell you, I do have in the membership right now in our professional section, my very first training just for professionals. It's for health care, self-help content creators. When they are online, they get targeted a lot. that video training is on there. And then I have downloads in there as well that you can use.

40:50Like if you are hit with someone like going in a crisis like this or an influencer comes after you, instead of picking up the phone and calling me, you can just go in and you can download it. We have another one coming up in October. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for joining me. Have a great day. Bye for now.

41:15Thank you.