The 2024 Olympic Summer Games in Paris kicked off on July 26, with many of the best athletes in the world gathering to compete for their countries. Some of the world’s best photographers are there, too, capturing all the action. Here’s a look at some of the most dazzling images so far.
Braden "Clavicular" Peters walks the runway during the Elena Velez Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2026-2027 fashion show on Feb. 12, 2026 in NY.
YouTube has taken down two channels by the controversial “looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular. The streamer, whose real name is Braden Peters, took to social media on Thursday seeking help to recover his accounts.
“Very sad news this morning,” Peters wrote on X. “My YouTube channels @ LiveWithClav & @ ClavLooksmax were terminated this morning with no warning or explanation. The channels consisted of livestream VODs and free courses created by me to help empower young men to be the best versions of themselves. Me and my team worked hard to ensure we followed YouTube’s TOS very strictly, blurring out all inapproriate language and sensitive topics.” Before ending his message, he tagged YouTube’s X accounts and asked, “Could you please help in recovering my accounts?”
Despite Peters’s claims that the video platform did not give him an explanation for pulling his channels offline, he shared what appeared to be screenshots of emails from YouTube. “We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube,” the emails read.
A YouTube spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter that after terminating Peters’ original channel back in November 2025 for “facilitating access to websites that violate our Illegal or regulated goods or services policies,” the platform “removed these additional channels under our terms of service, which prohibit creating new channels after a termination.”
Last week, Peters was hospitalized for a suspected overdose. “Just got home, that was brutal,” Peters wrote on X the next day. “All of the substances are just a cope trying to feel neurotypical while being in public, but obviously that isn’t a real solution. The worst part of tonight was my face descending from the life support mask.”
MrBeast on Sept. 13, 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
MrBeastYouTube and GameChanger 24/7, two production companies owned by YouTube star MrBeast, have been sued by a former employee, Lorrayne Mavromatis, who alleges having experienced sexual harassment, emotional distress, and pregnancy discrimination.
A federal complaint filed in North Carolina details the work culture under MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, in which Mavromatis claims she was “treated differently than her male counterparts,” including being dismissed from otherwise entirely male meetings. The documents suggest that this extended to the executive level and alleges that male employees exhibited “demeaning treatment towards women.” In one instance, the complaint alleges “male executives laughed and made jokes at the office about female contestants of BeastGames who complained they did not have access to feminine hygiene products and clean underwear while participating in the show.”
Mavromatis also claims in the paperwork that she was sexually harassed by James Warren, former CEO of the companies, who made her “meet him in his home for one-on-one meetings while commenting on the way she looked in her clothes.” She also claims that Donaldson “would not work with her on certain projects,” which she confronted Warren about. In response, the documents state, “he told her that she is a beautiful woman and her appearance had a certain sexual effect on Jimmy.” Later, the complaint elaborates on this, claiming Warren told Mavromatis, “Jimmy gets really awkward around beautiful women. Let’s just say that when you’re around and he goes to the restroom, he’s not actually using the restroom.”
The lawsuit claims Mavromatis experienced retaliatory consequences for raising concerns about the harassment and hostile work environment. Besides being told that her claims were “unsubstantiated,” the filing also claims Mavromatis, who worked as head of the company’s Instagram team, “was promptly demoted and transferred to an obscure role known by MrBeast employees as the division where ‘careers go to die.'”
Mavromatis later spent time away from the company under the Family and Medical Leave Act. Her leave was related to her pregnancy. Mavromatis alleges she was let go from the company less than three weeks after her return. She claims the company told her “that she was ‘too high caliber’ for the role she was demoted into after formally complaining about sexual harassment and the hostile work environment at MrBeast.”
Mavromatis is seeking “lost wages, lost benefits, reinstatement, front pay in lieu of reinstatement, liquidated damages, compensatory damages, punitive damages, injunctive relief, pre-and post-judgment interest, and reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs,” according to the legal filing.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, representatives for Beast Industries slammed the lawsuit as a “clout-chasing complaint,” saying, “There is extensive evidence — including Slack and WhatsApp messages, company documents, and witness testimony — that unequivocally refutes her claims. We will not submit to opportunistic lawyers looking to manufacture a payday from us.”
The company specifically pushed back on claims that Mavromatis was unaware of its parental leave policies and disputes the implications of Warren’s alleged statements to Mavromatis. “This is an allegation fabricated for the sole purpose of sparking headlines,” representatives said. “It’s also disgusting that the lawsuit is exploiting Jimmy’s eye condition and Crohn’s disease — two medical conditions he has been publicly open about — in their attempt to secure a multimillion-dollar payday.”
On a crisp November day in Aspen, Colorado, Rick Perry is stumping for iboga, a psychedelic shrub native to the Congo Basin rainforest in Central Africa known for producing powerful waking dreams. It is the heart of Bwiti, a centuries-old spiritual discipline primarily practiced in Gabon, and recently, the darling of the American psychedelic right. “ Take on the mantle of being the Johnny Appleseed of iboga, every one of you,” the former governor of Texas tells the audience while a delegation from Gabon watches impassively. “The medicine clearly showed me things that I’d never seen before,” Perry later tells me. “In the presence of God, I knew it — he loves me with great intensity. Pure white light.”
How iboga made its way from the jungles of Gabon to the lips of Rick Perry is a story that often feels like a waking dream itself. Just a few years ago, “the psychedelic right” would have sounded like a record-needle scratch, but as more and more veterans find healing from psychedelics, and return to tell the tale in masculine and religious terms, a new demographic of Americans is getting hip to the fact that psychedelics are plants of divine providence. Iboga is “from God, from eternity,” one Bwiti elder in Aspen tells me. Meanwhile, Perry says iboga may be the biblical tree of life. “The leaves of the tree will heal the nations,” he predicts, quoting Revelations 22:2.
Perry and his wingman, Bryan Hubbard, an eloquent lawyer who would be played by Zach Galifianakis in the movie version of this story, are the main evangelists behind Americans for Ibogaine, a lobbying group that hosted the conference in Aspen. They were there to build on their recent success in Texas; last summer, after a landslide vote in the legislature, Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 2308 into law, placing $50 million of longhorn taxpayer money toward studying ibogaine, the main active molecule in iboga (much like psilocybin in “magic” mushrooms), with hopes of developing a new drug that can curb opioid addiction. This means that Texas, a place where weed is still illegal, is now the top state investor in psychedelic research.
And not just any psychedelic.
In Aspen, everyone kept referring to ibogaine as a dark horse. “It was really a niche within a niche,” says Dalibor Sames, a chemistry professor at Columbia University who thinks ibogaine could be the next “antibiotic” in terms of its impact on humanity. “It was even a niche within psychedelic-underground culture.”
Now, Americans for Ibogaine wants to take it mainstream. While initial research suggests it could be an effective treatment for a wide range of conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, Americans for Ibogaine focuses on opioid addiction, which kills nearly 10 times as many people today as in 1999. Small studies suggest it can dramatically reduce opioid dependence — often with just one dose.
Perry (center) and Hubbard with Gabonese Ambassador Noël Nelson MessoneEthan E. Rocke/Americans for Ibogaine“There’s nothing that comes close to being as powerful a negative-pattern interrupter,” says Trevor Millar, co-founder of Ambio Life Sciences, an ibogaine clinic in Mexico, where the drug is unregulated. Other psychedelics might help someone psychologically get past addiction, “but nothing’s going to cut through those withdrawals that come from opiates. Ibogaine is the only thing we know that can do that.”
So far, more than a dozen states have passed legislation to study ibogaine, including Arizona, home of former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who retired from the Senate in 2024. Sinema, alongside Perry, has emerged as a leading champion for ibogaine, although her advocacy has drawn scrutiny; one recent whistleblower complaint alleges she has not abided by the mandatory two-year cooling-off period designed to prevent former federal employees from lobbying. Sinema, in response, said she was acting as a private citizen speaking for an issue “I care very personally about.”
Either way, ibogaine’s popularity has already made the jump from a few former politicians turned believers to institutions with far-reaching influence. In December, the American Legislative Exchange Council jumped on board to promote ibogaine in a model bill, the first time the conservative think tank has ever recommended anything pertaining to drugs other than increasing penalties.
Then, on April 18th, the Trump Administration signed a landmark Executive Order expediting psychedelic research, including on ibogaine. The directive also orders the Department of Health and Human Services to “allocate at least $50 million from existing funds to support and partner with State governments” – such as Texas – that are already developing psychedelic drugs.
“This decisive step [is] to confront one of the most urgent public health challenges facing our nation, the mental health crisis,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while Joe Rogan, who was reportedly the middleman between Americans for Ibogaine and President Trump on the shift in federal policy, stood by his side.
Yet for all of the breathless enthusiasm surrounding iboga, scientists admit they have only a nascent idea of how it works. “When you take iboga, they call you a banzi, which means you’re a ‘baby,’” says Joseph Barsuglia, a clinical psychologist, paid adviser to a number of ibogaine clinics, and Bwiti practitioner. “You’re reset to this innocence.”
“Banzi” is also the perfect word for where the West is in its relationship to iboga, raising complex questions about how traditional experts in Gabon should be compensated if Texas succeeds in developing an iboga-derived drug. “I’m a 10-year student in Bwiti, and I’m in preschool,” Barsuglia admits. Jonathan Dickinson, another ibogaine researcher who has been initiated into Bwiti, agrees: “There’s a lot of thought that’s gone into that for a very long time. Brilliant scholars designed that, you know?”
The iboga plant produces bright-orange fruit, but it’s the bark that is used to make the sacrament.Before iboga came to the West — before, even, it was the sacrament of Bwiti — it was stewarded by the Babongo people, also known (nonpejoratively in Gabon) as the Pygmies. No one knows for sure how iboga traveled from deep inside the rainforest, where the Babongo traditionally reside, to the various other ethnic groups who use it today. According to anthropologist James W. Fernandez, who wrote an ethnography about Bwiti in 1982, one branch, Fang Bwiti, developed partially in response to French colonial rule. Many Fang men were exposed to the Bwiti religion and iboga in French lumber camps — similar to how in Brazil ayahuasca spread among rubber tappers in the early 20th century as a way to resist and heal from colonization.
Bwiti ceremonies often involve harp music, drumming, and dancing. Some rituals emphasize the retrieval of one’s spiritual name. Others are about balancing masculine and feminine principles, using white and red body paint to represent the two.
According to Me Boubeyi Bouale, grand master of the Missoko branch of Bwiti, an initiate would be asked, “Who is your mother? The mother of your mother — who is she?” The goal is to go back as many generations as possible; Bouale says he stopped at 10. The point is to show “there are no fences between the world of the dead and the world of the living,” he says in French via an interpreter. “The link is always working.”
Iboga’s association with addiction came much later, in Lexington, Kentucky, at the first U.S. “Narcotic Farm,” a type of Progressive Era prison that the U.S. experimented with starting in the 1930s to try to treat drug addiction more humanely. Nestled into the bluegrass hills, inmate-patients could play golf, milk cows, or take up in the farm’s jazz band, packed with so many hepcats like Benny Green, Chet Baker, and Sonny Rollins that some addicts would reportedly get locked up on purpose just to practice their scales. During the 1950s, they were also, thanks to MKUltra, the CIA’s covert mind-control program, given a lot of drugs for free.
In 1955, Narcotic Farm doctor Harris Isbell is credited with conducting the first known experiment linking ibogaine to addiction treatment when he gave 250 mgs each to eight Black morphine addicts. Due to the secretive nature of the program, not much else about this initial human trial is known. Seven years later, in New York, a 19-year-old heroin addict named Howard Lotsof unwittingly repeated the Kentucky experiment when a chemist friend suggested he try ibogaine for fun. After a distinctly not-fun trip that lasted some 30 hours, Lotsof was surprised to realize he had no desire to shoot up. Amazed by this unexpected side effect, Lotsof gave ibogaine to several fellow addicts, and most of them also reported immediately kicking their habit — unheard of in the world of heroin-addiction recovery.
Ibogaine access became Lotsof’s life purpose until his death in 2010. In 1987, with the help of the esteemed Gabonese pharmacologist Jean-Noël Gassita, Lotsof, his wife, Norma, and their colleague Bob Sisko traveled to Gabon where they met with President Omar Bongo, himself a student of Bwiti. In an exchange recorded in the 1997 book The Ibogaine Story, Lotsof invoked the legacy of slavery, insinuating that if Bongo gave him a supply, he would be able to help African Americans suffering from addiction, descendants of those “kidnapped perhaps from this very land.” Bongo was astonished to learn Lotsof had eaten iboga, and agreed to give him 40 kilos of the bark. “This will be Gabon’s gift to the world,” he purportedly told Lotsof.
Following his visit to Gabon, Lotsof filed several ibogaine patents, and almost got an FDA trial off the ground in 1995. But it wasn’t completed due to lack of funding, as well as concerns about cardiotoxicity following a woman’s death during an ibogaine treatment in the Netherlands in a clinic overseen by Lotsof. Now, 30 years later, Americans for Ibogaine is determined to finish what Howard and Norma Lotsof started.
A Bwiti ceremony in Gabon. Iboga is the religion’s sacrament, and a central part of its rituals.AnneClaire Stapleton/Americans for IbogaineAfter “dark horse,” the second most common term I heard in Aspen was “moon shot.” Americans for Ibogaine’s initial idea was for Texas to put up $50 million of public money — an amount that only the wealthiest biotech companies and philanthropists have traditionally committed to psychedelic research — and find a private drug developer to do a dollar match. This public-private entity was supposed to then execute a single FDA trial. But on March 31, Texas announced a major pivot: It now plans to develop the drug alone. The reason given by state Rep. Cody Harris? None of the applicants were willing to give the state 20 percent of all commercial revenue. Now, the medical-research center UTHealth Houston will carry out the FDA trial, with lawmakers promising to shake the missing $50 million out of the state’s oil-flush budget next January.
To date, it seems that no state has ever developed a drug, placing Texas in deep, uncharted waters. But the move also reflects a dawning realization among both Republicans and Democrats that states are going to have to take charge on funding psychedelic research given the federal government’s previous aversion. “If we’re gonna sit around and wait for the federal government, we’re not gonna be successful,” Perry advised the audience presciently in November. “They will follow our lead though.”
Were Americans for Ibogaine just a Rick Perry venture, it would be easier to dismiss as the trippiest new form of extractive capitalism. But the picture is somewhat complicated by Bryan Hubbard, its CEO.
Raised by union coal miners in Virginia and educated at the University of Kentucky, where he received his law degree, Hubbard was exposed to the opioid epidemic while working for a Kentucky firm that handled Walmart’s worker-compensation claims. Yet despite also being from Appalachia, Hubbard is no J.D. Vance. Instead, he preaches with such a grip on class consciousness that often I wondered, in Aspen, whether the spirit of Mother Jones had possessed his body.
“The Gabonese were doing it for centuries. If we do whatever we want, we’re gonna fail.”
“The arrogance of Western empiricism,” he opened the conference in his Holy Ghost drawl, “has driven a tremendous amount of scientific advancement and the improvement of the human condition.” But, he acknowledged, so-called progress has also “been a double-edged sword” for many Indigenous and poor people, who have given up their “knowledge and resources” in exchange for nothing but “hardship.” Having watched corporations strip coal out of his native Virginia and dump OxyContin back in, Hubbard knows this pattern well. The only way to heal it with respect to iboga, he says, is to insist on “cultural and economic reciprocity” with Gabon, so that “the traumas imposed on my people … are not replicated in any project that I have anything to do with.”
“Traumas imposed on my people” is not your standard GOP bootstrapping talk. Rather, Hubbard’s politics come down to God and smart spending. “The separation from the reality of divine love is the source of all human suffering,” Hubbard tells me. “There is not an institution within American society that has the credibility to reestablish spiritual reality. Not the government, not the chamber of commerce, not the organized church. It has got to come from on high. Which means it comes straight from the ground.”
In 2022, Hubbard was tapped to chair Kentucky’s Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, a task force charged with sagely investing the state’s $842 million of opioid settlement money. He was maddened by the treatment options: abstinence combined with an opioid derivative such as methadone or Suboxone. He crunched Kentucky’s Medicaid numbers. According to his estimates, the average person, in an attempt to get clean, goes through the system five times, costing taxpayers roughly $700,000. There had to be a better way.
Hubbard first encountered the word “ibogaine” on Julia Reibelt’s Substack, “The Journey,” in 2022. But it was a phone conversation with a woman named Juliana Mulligan that would change his path forever. Today, Mulligan is a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in ibogaine-assisted therapy. In her youth, she struggled with opioid addiction.
In 2011, in a desperate attempt to save her own life, Mulligan traveled to a clinic offering ibogaine in Guatemala City — and nearly died. The doctor had accidentally given her twice the safe dose, causing her to go into cardiac arrest. “[He] thought he had a magical shamanic ability to know how much ibogaine I needed, which meant he was not measuring the dose at all,” she recounted in Aspen.
But when Mulligan awoke in the hospital, her first thought wasn’t anger or fear — it was freedom. “Oh, my God,” she thought. “This is the future of substance-use-disorder treatment.” The cravings were gone. So was the guilt and shame. “I literally felt like I had been given a new brain,” she says. “I saw all of those years of suffering as my internship.”
Hubbard (seated left) at a Bwiti ceremony.AnneClaire Stapleton/Americans for IbogaineDespite almost dying, Mulligan was “on fire” for ibogaine, and dreamed of somehow making it an FDA-approved treatment, a process that can cost up to a billion dollars due to the high costs of clinical trials. Now, here was Hubbard, a government insider with potential access to major money. By 2023, Hubbard had hatched a now-familiar plan: Take $42 million from Kentucky’s opioid settlement fund, find a private drug developer to match the amount, and initiate an FDA trial. He floated the unorthodox idea to Daniel Cameron, the former attorney general of Kentucky. Cameron, who was running for governor as a Republican, seemed on board. But before the initiative could get off the ground, Cameron lost to Andy Beshear — a Democrat who still makes Hubbard’s lip curl — and the political winds changed.
Just miles from the Lexington Narcotic Farm, Hubbard watched his dream to bring ibogaine back to Kentucky die on the vine. Demoralized, he took the idea to Ohio, then South Dakota, but it was deemed too outlandish, and state budgets were strapped. Finally, in August 2024, the nonprofit Texans for Greater Mental Health, which advocates for psychedelic policy, came calling. The state legislature was about to have a $16 billion budget surplus, they informed him. Texas, they wagered, was ready for its next big project.
Hubbard’s next call was to ex.-Gov. Perry, who had been supportive of ibogaine for some time after watching it transform the lives of Marcus and Morgan Luttrell, brothers and Navy SEALs who used ibogaine to treat PTSD. “ I ain’t from your state and don’t want to come in as an outsider without a horse to ride,” Hubbard recalls telling Perry. “Is this something you might want to get interested in?”
“Well, you know, I left office in 2015,” Perry replied. “The new guy never likes the old guy hanging around, so I’ve stayed pretty well out of sight. But this is the most important thing I could possibly do with the rest of my life.”
One POV notably absent in the Texas Legislature last summer was that of Gabon. In Aspen, a motley delegation was trying to establish a dialogue. In its ranks were Ambassador Noël Nelson Messone and several members of Blessings of the Forest, an NGO that often acts as a middleman between Gabon and the West on matters of iboga, facilitating the first and only fair-trade shipment of it in 2023. Also present was Stéphane Lasme, a former NBA player whose company, Reset Health, is in the running to supply iboga to UTHealth Houston. But the most commanding presence in the group was Me Moubeyi Bouale, the Bwiti grand master.
“We shouldn’t call it a drug, but a ‘scanner’ that reads what needs adjusting in the body and brain.”
Initiated into Bwiti by his father after he completed law school, Bouale now leads an organization of about 3,000 practitioners and 69 temples across Gabon. Wearing a knit skull cap and speaking French, Bouale explained that traditional medicine has been declining in Gabon for a long time. Logging has pushed elephants out of the jungle and into villages. Villagers, in turn, have left their homes for the city. Now, due to increased demand, the same poachers who hunt ivory are hunting iboga (though there are other sources of ibogaine, such as the Voacanga plant, which many clinics are now using to reduce pressure on the slow-growing iboga shrub). Whereas before, Bwiti practitioners would simply walk into the forest, find an iboga plant, and strip the root bark, now they must walk for days to find enough for a ceremony. In some cases, alcohol is being used as a substitute.
While there is no monolithic opinion in Gabon about whether iboga should be shared with the West, or how, there is a general consensus that Gabon needs to receive a share of any windfall derived — simple in theory, but revolutionary in practice. According to U.S. law, plants cannot be patented, but modified compounds can. Historically, this has meant that pharmaceutical companies can profit off medicines like aspirin without ever paying Indigenous people, even though they were the ones who first treated sick settlers with willow bark, later found to contain salicylic acid, which Bayer then tweaked into aspirin. Today, some estimates put yearly sales of aspirin around $2.5 billion.
Hubbard in GabonAnneClaire Stapleton/Americans for IbogaineNow, Bouale is on a mission to make sure iboga doesn’t go the way of the willow. Speaking virtually last summer at the biennial conference hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, Bouale argued that ibogaine is “not a chemical formula,” but a “living entity” that grants singular knowledge about self and the divine. “We are not against research,” he said. “We are not against worldwide access to this medicine.… But we are against postcolonial erasure and amnesia.”
Bouale wants the U.S. to sign the Nagoya Protocol, a 2010 international treaty designed to ensure benefit-sharing from genetic resources. The Nagoya Protocol has been used successfully, if modestly, before: In 2019, South Africa compelled the rooibos-tea industry to pay the San and Khoi peoples 1.5 percent of their tea’s pre-export price, as they were the ones who first shared its benefits with the individuals who later commercialized it.
There is just one problem — the U.S. is not a signatory, nor is Texas interested in adopting its framework. “I thought Nagoya was a type of company that made Mexican food down in Texas,” replied Perry when I brought it up in Aspen. “I think you’re narrowly focusing on a very tiny little sliver that may or may not make any difference.”
Chase Rowan, an Army Ranger who credits ibogaine for saving his life, thinks the Gabonese perspective is paramount. “They know what the fuck they’re doing,” he says of the Bwiti healers. “They were doing it for centuries. If we want to just take ibogaine and do whatever we want to do, we’re gonna fail.”
Rowan is one of the spokespeople for Americans for Ibogaine. A self-described “adrenaline junkie” who had previously struggled with substance abuse, he deployed to northern Iraq in 2005, where he “saw a whole lot of stuff.” Then, in a freak accident a month after returning home to Fort Worth, Texas, he jumped out of a plane during a routine training exercise, and his parachute malfunctioned. He hit the runway going 50 mph, and though he miraculously survived, he received eight staples in his head, and had trouble walking for six months. Somehow, he was not in terrible pain, he says. But when the doctors asked him if he was, “the addict came out in me.”
“Yeah, I got a little pain,” he told them.
Within six months of going to the Department of Veterans Affairs for the first time, Rowan says, he was getting 60 OxyContin, 60 Adderall, and 45 Klonopin in the mail on the first of every month. The VA, he says, was the “greatest drug dealer” ever. OxyContin led him to heroin. Heroin led him to fentanyl. He went to rehab twice — “it was awesome,” he says, “like high school” — but would relapse as soon as he was stressed.
In 2022, after his second time totaling his car while driving high, his wife took the kids and left. Alone, unemployed, and in the depths of withdrawal, Rowan fixated on suicide — a fate that had claimed seven of his veteran friends. He wrote his letters and made plans to hang himself in the garage. It was April 29, 2023.
He remembers the date because the next day he happened to hear Joe Rogan interviewing Dakota Meyer, a fellow veteran, about how ibogaine helped him overcome his PTSD. Rowan, who knew nothing about ibogaine at the time, started bawling. “This is going to save my life,” he thought.
Rowan got himself to a psychedelic church run by Justin LaPree, a Marine veteran who connected him to the Mission Within, an ibogaine clinic in Mexico run by Dr. Martín Polanco. Polanco is widely celebrated for having apparently administered ibogaine to more people in the West than any other doctor; over the past 25 years, he’s reportedly treated more than 5,000 people, including 1,300 veterans. But Rowan’s hopes were dashed by the price: $6,500. “Fuck!” he told the lady on the phone. “I don’t have that.”
Ibogaine is prepared for use in a guided psychedelic experience at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, July 26, 2024.Mark Abramson/”New York Times”/REDUXAfter white-knuckling sobriety for five months, Rowan eventually scraped together the money. He hopped on a plane to San Diego, where a van was waiting to take him to Tijuana. There, in a beautiful house overlooking the Pacific, he swallowed his first capsules of powdered ibogaine, and asked the most straightforward question he could think of: “Why do I use drugs and alcohol, and why can’t I stop?”
Rowan says ibogaine answered his question with a crystal-clear life review that he describes as “every addict’s dream.” He experienced himself as a 12-year-old, the night his mother woke him up and drunkenly told him that his dad had died. He saw his wife and kids chasing him, begging him to come back as he left on another bender. “But the crazy part,” says Rowan, is that ibogaine didn’t make him feel what he was feeling in those moments. “It allowed me to feel what they were feeling.”
This kind of radical introspection is only part of ibogaine’s magic, says Dalibor Sames, the chemistry professor at Columbia. The other part is how it effectively eliminates opioid cravings and withdrawal symptoms, partially by detoxifying opioid receptors, allowing patients an opportunity to make new decisions without being influenced by intense cravings or pain. These new choices then get laid down in what scientists call a “critical learning window.”
According to Dr. Gül Dölen, an ibogaine researcher at UC Berkeley who spoke alongside Sames in Aspen, “ ibogaine seems to be special in that it reopens this window for the longest.” The concept of critical windows was popularized in the 1930s by the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who found that geese hatchlings will form a lifelong bond with anything moving nearby in their first 48 hours of life. Now, science recognizes many more critical periods for learning skills like language and motor function. This may be why, Dölen speculated, there are anecdotal reports of injured patients walking again post-ibogaine.
If Dölen’s hypothesis is correct, it would track with how Bwiti members have long explained iboga as taking initiates back to the womb. “By returning initiates to the uterine condition … it restores them to their own integrity — their pristine conditions,” wrote Fernandez, the anthropologist.
Additionally, Sames tells me, ibogaine is unique in how the molecule seems to interact with multiple systems in the body at once. Traditionally, scientists have thought of pharmacology in terms of locks and keys: A drug binds to a receptor, triggering a change. Ibogaine, on the other hand, says Sames, “is just not doing that.” Instead, he describes it as an octopus whose tentacles are “brushing through and tweaking the entire living matrix.”
“We shouldn’t really call it a drug,” he says, musing that ibogaine is more like a “scanner” that reads, from a system-wide vantage, what needs adjusting in the brain, body, and spirit. Sames’ awe for ibogaine was perhaps one of the most striking parts of the conference, as was his willingness to describe the molecule as possessing a “deep intelligence” based on how it behaves at the neurochemical level — not so different from how Bwiti lore describes iboga, phenomenologically, as a teacher.
At the same time, Sames, like many of the researchers I spoke with, has a personal stake in wooing audiences with the miraculousness of ibogaine; in addition to being a professor, he is the co-founder of Gilgamesh Pharma, a biotech company that, in 2024, was awarded a $14 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop a safer ibogaine analogue — a chemical compound that is structurally similar but modified to reduce certain side effects. In the case of ibogaine, Gilgamesh wants to make a drug that minimizes its cardiac risks — a potential side effect that is likely to be its biggest hurdle in the eyes of the FDA.
According to one 2012 estimate, ibogaine fatalities occur in an estimated one out of 300 patients. Dr. Martijn Arns, a scientist who runs Brainclinics Foundation in the Netherlands, and is close to publishing an updated study, believes the more accurate number of deaths may be “tenfold less.”
Nevertheless, they still happen. In 2022, a patient died at Beond, a popular treatment center in Cancún, Mexico. Then, as I was writing this article, a patient died at Ambio, the clinic in Tijuana. “The increasing complexity of powerful synthetic opioids and numerous other additives that appear in street drugs introduce a complex and opaque set of variables that can be difficult to mitigate,” said Ambio in a statement, suggesting that fentanyl had been a factor in the patient’s death.
For Hubbard, these tragic outcomes are why ibogaine must be medicalized in the United States “so as to assure that there is a uniformly applied clinical standard that assures safety.” But he also counters that ibogaine deaths must be contextualized. “ In the United States, every year at least 3,000 people die of methadone overdoses, and it’s never talked about,” he tells me. Meanwhile, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 54,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2024.
Barsuglia, one of the researchers who’s been initiated into Bwiti, says Western doctors have much to learn from Bwiti experts about how to keep charges safe. Fatalities are generally attributed to how ibogaine can prolong the heart’s QT interval, meaning the organ takes too long to recharge between beats. To counteract this, the standard protocol is to give patients a magnesium drip, something that Bwiti healers accomplish with a banana. They also make patients sit upright to keep the heart from slowing, a basic yet effective technique. “One of my teachers, he saw our clinic, and he’s like, ‘You guys are putting people in the dead-man’s pose,’” Barsuglia tells me.
He feels certain such methods are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Bwiti knowledge about how to administer ibogaine safely. “There’s probably thousands of different rituals and plants and techniques they use to address the different things that can come up,” such as anxiety or dehydration, he says. “I’ve seen dozens, personally.” But, he reminds me, Bwiti is a protected oral tradition.
“I’m telling you things I know that are public, but there are things that only they could share.”
Despite owning equity in clinics such as Beond, Barsuglia thinks conserving Bwiti access and knowledge is more important than getting ibogaine to the masses, an opinion that Americans for Ibogaine does not share. It’s easy to understand why; for individuals and families in the midst of suffering, there is no price too high for relief. One of the most chilling testimonies during the conference was from an athlete whose traumatic brain injury was so bad he wanted to hurt his children every time he heard the sound of their laughter; he credits ibogaine with saving his life and theirs.
But Americans for Ibogaine is also driven by something far higher-octane than ordinary human empathy, and that’s direct religious experience. Many of ibogaine’s biggest proponents have had vivid downloads of themselves as apostles tasked with spreading the gospel of plant medicine. (These visions, it should be noted, are not the product of white saviorism alone; there is also, in Gabon, Bwiti belief about how the time has come for iboga to travel abroad and heal humanity.)
Hubbard and Perry at the Americans for Ibogaine meetingEthan E. Rocke/Americans for IbogaineBut in a strange wrinkle to the story, many Westerners aren’t receiving this message from ibogaine, but from 5-MeO-DMT, a totally different psychedelic that many clinics are now offering as a complementary chaser to ibogaine. Also known as bufo, it is derived from the Sonoran Desert toad. Millar, who runs Ambio, says he is grateful for 5-MeO-DMT because it can speed up the recovery time from ibogaine, a 24- to 48-hour period that can involve intense nausea and vomiting. And, he says, it “puts an exclamation point at the end of the week.… It tends to be a very spiritual experience.”
At the Mission Within, Rowan received several exclamation points. His first two hits of bufo didn’t work; the staff reported he crawled on the floor saying, “I can’t be fixed.” But the third catapulted him into heaven, he says. He saw his seven Ranger buddies who had died by suicide, as well as other friends whose lives had ended prematurely due to addiction. “Then all of a sudden, my head gets turned very slowly,” Rowan recalls, and he knew it was God’s hand. Rowan was looking at a city full of people, but he couldn’t see their faces. He was made to understand he was looking at the people still in anguish on Earth. “You’re the conduit to get them to me,” God told him.
“I came out of that fucking medicine and stood up. I’m in a full-body sweat, tears. Fists clenched, flexing every muscle. I looked out over the ocean and was like, ‘Let’s fucking go.’”
Rowan had a classic, if testosterone-juiced, bodhisattva experience: the epiphany that no one is enlightened until all sentient beings have been freed from suffering.
“This makes me nervous to say this,” Rowan says, “but I feel such a strong calling right now that this is like a discipleship.”
Rowan left Tijuana feeling his life had meaning again. But not everyone thinks layering 5-MeO-DMT on top of ibogaine is a good idea. For one, it introduces two variables in the data, even if just anecdotally. Ibogaine is “not really officially what actually turned my life around completely,” Rowan tells me on the last day of the conference. “What turned my life [around] was 5-MeO-DMT.”
The unstudied combo also risks commodifying two extremely spiritual substances, says Mulligan, the therapist who nearly died from ibogaine. “Sometimes the best thing is for people to sit through that discomfort and work through it. We have this tendency within capitalism to think, ‘Oh, more is better.’ And that’s just not the case.”
Hubbard, for his part, says bufo helped his own ibogaine recovery tremendously. When I caught up with him in March, he was on his way to a meeting at the Pentagon, and told me that ibogaine’s rollout in the U.S. is beginning “to take on an air of inevitability.” At the time, they seemed like bold words given how the FDA had just declined to fast-track a psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression. But Hubbard, ever the believer, was holding the vision. “We are in a race against time,” he said. Humanity is profoundly spiritually ill. “And the advancement of plant medicine is the best shot.”
J. Cole playing with the Rwanda Patriots
J. Cole’s time as a professional basketball player in China was cut short after only one game, due to visa issues.
The six-foot-three rapper, who previously had stints with leagues in Rwanda and Toronto, was scheduled to play at least three games with the Nanjing Monkey Kings this spring, but work obligations delayed him from obtaining the necessary work visa.
“I recorded Nadeska, Lost in Vegas, and then Melo all within one week,” Cole wrote in a blog post, referring to podcast appearances with Apple Music’s Nadeska Alexis and Carmelo Anthony. “[I] had to immediately head to Hong Kong to wait for a visa so I could play basketball in mainland China. The work visa process took way longer than expected, so I was only able to play in one before heading back.”
Still, Cole said he valued the experience and his “mad cool” teammates. “I got to play 8 minutes in one of the top leagues in the world, got a few good looks but wasn’t able to hit one,” Cole added. “A couple more games and maybe those shots would have started to fall!”
He was also “blown away” by the reception he received in China, saying he didn’t “realize there were so many people in China that rocked with my music. Thank you to everybody who showed up and brought an album to sign.”
Over the past few years, the 41-year-old has returned to the sport he played in high school. He played a few games with the Rwanda Patriots in the Basketball Africa League and with the Canadian Elite Basketball League’s Scarborough Shooting Stars in Toronto in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
He teased a possible return to the Nanjing Monkey Kings once he wraps up The Fall-Off World Tour. “I told the team that if I could stay in shape I would be down to play for a longer amount of games next year,” Cole added. “I’m wildin???? We’ll see. DREAMER.”
What is it like to live your entire life in front of an audience of millions — from your birth to potty-training to puberty to adolescence? For many child influencers, this is their reality. They are public figures before they are even born; both the milestones and the mundane moments of their lives are captured by their parents and sold as content. Though child influencers — and the mom influencers and family vloggers who prop them up — are part of the multibillion dollar influencing industry, until now, we haven’t known much about what it was like to be one. That’s what I’m changing with my book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online. To answer these questions, I talked to kid influencers themselves, family vloggers, experts in the industry, digital ethicists, psychologists, and more.
A factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to child influencers is the staggering amounts of money that can be made in this industry. When we discuss why parents put their children’s entire lives on the internet, money is a big part of the answer. Though I’ve been reporting on the child influencer industry for years, I still found myself shocked by what I uncovered in this chapter of my book, where I dug into the amount of money parents and their kids are making.
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IN HER BEST YEAR AS A FAMILY vlogger, Rossanna Burgos and her family made $1 million. It all started 10 years ago, when Rossanna’s husband posted Vine videos with their two young children that went viral. Rossanna (known to fans as Mama Bee) remembers asking her husband why so many people were watching. “He said, ‘People love us. They see themselves in us.’” Once their content started taking off, Rossanna’s husband Andrés (known online as Papa Bee) made the family YouTube and Instagram accounts. They now have 10.4 million YouTube subscribers and 1.9 million Instagram followers.
The Bee children, Gabriela and Roberto, were around nine and 10 years old when the family started creating content. The kids loved making videos with their parents, Mama Bee says. Their most popular video of all time has 106 million views and features Papa Bee placing covered plates in front of the kids who play rock-paper-scissors to determine who is going to eat a gummy food version of the real food the other one is going to eat. Roberto wins and chooses a covered plate that turns out to hold a gummy hamburger. Both kids cheer and bite into their burgers. The video continues with several more rounds of rock-paper-scissors and gummy foods including peppers, soda, and pizza.
Within a couple of years, the Bee family was approached for brand deals. Their first, Mama Bee remembers, paid them $500, which seemed “unbelievable” at the time. Outside of YouTube, Mama Bee worked in pharmaceuticals, and Papa Bee worked in market research, both netting six-figure salaries. As their platform continued to grow, there came a moment of reckoning. “And so my husband and I had a very serious conversation of, ‘We don’t want to look back when we’re 90 years old and say, I wonder what would have happened if we had [gone] all in.’” So they quit their jobs and dedicated themselves to YouTube. It took a few years before their new career exceeded their previous salaries, but in their best year, they made “in the vicinity of one million [dollars].”
Mama Bee says, “It’s amazing, but it can be very dangerous in the wrong hands. I have seen a lot of families sacrificing the well-being of their family, of their morals in order to try to chase that.” Her heart breaks for kids who were born with cameras in their faces or for kids shown in vulnerable moments. Mama Bee sees herself as distinct from these kinds of creators. A quick scroll through the Bee Family’s content shows videos mostly focused on challenges and skits; there aren’t videos about the children going through puberty or struggles they had in school.
Mama Bee doesn’t want to be seen as a family vlogger, because she thinks of family vloggers as people who vlog every single moment “from morning to night, hoping to capture something that will stand out” as opposed to the more challenge-focused and scripted content on her channel. Meeting other vloggers at creator conventions like VidCon solidified her view. “We’ve met a family where their daughter pulls her hair out of her head because the parents have a camera in her face at all times, hoping they’ll capture something witty and funny and clever,” she says. I ask her how she heard about the girl pulling her hair out, and Mama Bee says the girl’s mother told her in a very “matter-of-fact” way. “You’re focusing on dollar figures, you’re focusing on likes, you’re focusing on comments.”
In our conversation, I get the sense that YouTube and content creation have left the Bee Family behind. “It’s not what it used to be,” Rossanna says. “Thanks to MrBeast, where he made videos of such tremendous — I’ll use the word sensationalism — ‘I bought an island and I bought an airplane, and I did this.’ You can’t compete with that. And that’s when we decided to take a pause.”
In February of 2024, the Bee Family posted a video titled “Why Our Family Changed,” which currently has only 129,000 views.
“Sensationalism killed the creator,” Rossanna says while sitting next to Papa Bee. The couple goes on to explain that they’re stepping back from constant content creation, but viewers should keep up with their kids, Gabriela and Roberto, who are growing their music careers. (A quick check shows that Gabriela has 10.9 million TikTok followers and Roberto has 246,000.) The family also creates Roblox games, which gives them another stream of income.
Mama Bee tells me that each of their children have money saved in a trust. How much? I ask. She’s evasive, calling it a “good chunk of change.” “I hate to push,” I say, “but I have to ask. Is it hundreds of thousands? Is it millions? What are we talking?”
“I would say millions,” Rossanna says.
So yes, she says. If given the chance, she would do it all again.
CLARISSA LASKEY, A FORMER mom influencer turned influencer marketing manager, told me that she is astounded by the amount of money influencers make, every single day. “In a giant program we just ran, a creator was paid over $150,000 for one TikTok post.” Brandon Stewart, the founder of Brandon Studios and a former producer at AwesomenessTV, tells me he worked with kid influencers who would make $100,000 a month.
How do influencers make their boatloads of money? For the answer to that question, I reached out to Brendan Gahan, the CEO of the influencer marketing agency Creator Authority. Gahan, who has worked in the industry for 15 years, sends me an email of notes he’s written up for me to look over.
First, Gahan’s email explains, there’s income from the platforms themselves: the TikTok Creator Fund, which pays creators who have more than 10,000 followers for eligible views on videos longer than a minute, and YouTube Adsense, a program through which eligible YouTube creators are given a 45 ⁄ 55 split in ad revenue in favor of the creator. They’re paid based on the CPM, which refers to the cost per 1,000 impressions. Basically: A creator gets a cut of what advertisers pay when an ad is placed on their video (though not all videos have ads and not all views are eligible for payment).
The Family Fun Pack, a YouTube family with 10.4 million subscribers, has over 15 billion lifetime views. By the time I speak to Gahan, they’ve netted 89 million views in the previous 30 days. Gahan looks over their data while we’re chatting, calling their billions of lifetime views impressive. I ask him to take a shot in the dark on how much money the Family Fun Pack is making per month just on YouTube from AdSense. “I would think $200,000,” he says. “A month?” I ask. Yes, he says.
The second way creators make money is through brand deals and sponsored content. Brand deals are the largest source of income for creators, according to the Goldman Sachs Creator Economy Report. “Amongst creators as a whole, this is still the bulk of where they generate their income,” Gahan says. “It powers most of the creator economy.” I scroll through my Instagram feed and happen upon a sponsored post from @maiaknight (1.6 million followers on Instagram, 7.6 million on TikTok) for Dove skin products (#GetCozyWithDove). When I ask Gahan how much he thinks Knight was paid for the ad, he notes that she’s repped by Digital Brand Architects, a firm he considers to only represent premium influencers. His guess for the 30-second Dove Instagram ad is that Knight made around $50,000 though he wouldn’t be surprised if the profit reached up to $100,000. And it’s not only influencers who have millions of followers who are raking in the money on brand deals. A mom influencer who has just over 500,000 Instagram followers told me she made over $300,000 through brand deals in the last year. “But the year before that wasn’t even close to half of that so every year is different,” she adds.
The third way creators make money is through their own products or businesses. “More and more creators are attempting to use their platforms to launch their own companies,” Gahan says. I think of the teen mom TikTok creator who launched her own boutique after gaining millions of TikTok followers or the family vloggers who sell merchandise with their kids’ faces on it. The biggest creators lend their faces to products, like the Ryan’s World-branded toys in Target or Walmart.
Fourth, Gahan says, big creators do appearances, speaking engagements, or conferences, for which they are paid (though this seems to be the least common way for creators to make money).
And fifth, the largest creators can even be acquired, invested in, or given equity in larger companies. Shay Carl Butler was one of the first family vloggers with his channel The Shaytards. Butler had millions of subscribers when he cofounded Maker Studios, a production company that was eventually acquired by Disney for $550 million, a deal for which Butler was rumored to have made $20 million.
Then there’s affiliate links. According to the people I spoke with, the whole industry is shifting toward sites such as Like To Know It (also known as LTK), where influencers gain commission by providing links to every item of clothing they’re wearing and the products they are using.
“There’s crazy, crazy amounts of money,” Tyler Chou, an attorney for YouTube creators, says of affiliate links. “Being a family influencer is the best because as the mom, you can do everything, right? You can do fashion, you can do home goods, you can do all the kids’ foods. All foods, all foods basically you can touch. You can do kitchen appliances, you can do furniture. Of all the creators, I think being a family channel is probably the most profitable.”
From the beginning of your transition from an influencer to a mom influencer or a vlogger to a family vlogger, there are so many sponsorship and affiliate opportunities. Trying to get pregnant? Do a Modern Fertility brand deal detailing how you’re tracking your cycle. At the point of taking pregnancy tests? There’s a Clearblue sponsorship waiting for you. Packing your hospital bag? Link to everything you’re bringing and swim in the affiliate cash. And then when the baby is born? The opportunity for content explodes — you can link to your favorite diaper brand and do sponsorship deals for baby clothes and bottles and formula.
As the kids grow, so do the opportunities for commissionable content — you can link to sippy cups and front-facing strollers and your favorite toddler outfits. You can set up brand deals for their supposed favorite snacks or Target-sponsored back-to-school shopping trips. And it’s not only kid-specific stuff — moms can do deals for any product related to running a household which is, uh, almost every product. I once saw a mom influencer make a sponsored post for batteries. “You can literally do anything,” Chou says. “Everything can be touched with a family channel.”
ONCE VLOGGERS AND INFLUENCERS start to make real money, says Anthony Ambriz, a YouTube strategist in Utah, they offload the work of their channel — and household. “They hire editors from the Philippines to cover editing and channel management,” Ambriz says. “They have videographers, household managers, nannies, housekeepers, managers for brand sponsorships.” Ambriz used to hold creator meet-ups where prominent family vloggers would get together to discuss the best strategies and content ideas. At one of these meetings, Ambriz and a vlogger dad were preparing a presentation to give to the rest of the group; Ambriz asked the dad what he thought the title of the presentation should be. The dad’s suggestion? “How to get rich exploiting your kids.”
Among vlogging families, it’s common knowledge what type of content does best, Ambriz says, including content where a child is sick or hurt and content surrounding a pregnancy or the arrival of a new baby. “There was that jealousy, where someone would be like ‘I’m not growing as fast, but they are. Their kid keeps getting sick, of course they’re going to grow.’”
It’s not only sick kid content that does well — generally, content with children tends to do better than content without children. Clarissa Laskey, former mom blogger turned social media marketing manager, says she noticed this herself when she was a mom creator. If she was traveling without her kids, people would always comment asking where they were. And when she posted with them, those posts did better than her solo posts. Research backs Laskey up: Pew Research Center found that YouTube videos that featured a child or children under the age of thirteen were substantially more popular than videos that didn’t feature children.
Because of her past as a mom influencer and her present as an influencer marketing expert, Laskey is the perfect person to ask the question I’ve always wanted to know the answer to: How much money are these people actually making? For YouTube creators with 10 million subscribers, Laskey estimates they’re making between $5 million and $8 million annually between YouTube ad revenue and sponsored posts. Even people with only 500,000 subscribers can make $6,000 a month on ads alone.
Laskey estimates that Maia Knight, a 28-year-old mom of twin daughters Violet and Scout, who has 7.7 million followers on TikTok, could be “in that $3-million-to-$5-million range a year annually,” she said. Knight no longer shows her daughters’ faces on any social media platform, which she called “a choice to protect [them]” in a TikTok video explaining the decision. According to Laskey, almost all creators who historically showed their kids online and then decided to take them off made less money after taking their kids offline. How much money were they losing? I ask. “Half,” she says. And sometimes the reality can be even more stark than that. A source I interviewed for a story for The Washington Post, Grant Khanbalinov, the dad behind @lifeofbreaandgrant on TikTok (3.1 million followers) told me that once he stopped showing his kids in content, he went from making $100,000 a year in sponsored content to “pretty much zero. Since we stopped, we’ve gotten one brand deal in the last year,” Khanbalinov told me. “There’s no amount of money that someone could pay me right now to say, ‘Hey, put your kids in a video right now for TikTok.’”
“It becomes this joke of, should we have a kid so we can start growing [our channel]?”
Katie Beach, a mom influencer with nearly 150,000 followers on Instagram and 114,000 followers on TikTok, doesn’t show her kids online. If her toddlers are in her videos, they’re filmed from the back or side. “I hate the idea of strangers being able to recognize my child,” Beach says. But that protective instinct has cost her. “I’ve turned down numerous five-figure brand deals because I wouldn’t show my children,” she says. “I’ve had diaper brands, for example — not only would I not show my kids, I would never show my kids in a diaper. There are baby food companies who want to show your kids eating, which is another thing I would never do. And just so many toy companies that want to show your kids playing with the toy.” She’ll offer to do the ad without her kids, “and brands pass,” she says.
Though more mom influencers are choosing to keep their kids offline in recent years, some brands just aren’t open to ads or sponsored content that doesn’t feature children, says Monica Banks, the founder of Gugu Guru, a marketing firm that connects mom influencers with paid opportunities. And for brands, there’s no lack of creators to pull from. “There are still plenty of moms who are okay with showing their kids in the content,” Banks says.
Ambriz also mentions that pregnancy and newborn content can be particularly lucrative. “And then it becomes this joke of, should we have a kid so we can start growing [our channel]?” Ambriz says. “I think it’s a joke that sometimes stems from reality.”
Laskey, the mom blogger turned marketing manager, addresses this oft-repeated rumor — that vloggers and influencers have kids specifically to create content. “I hate to say this, but over the years, I’ve known people who have had more children because those brand deals are really lucrative.” It stops me in my tracks: “Is that true?” I ask. “I’ve definitely been in circles with certain influencers [where they’re] all of a sudden adding a fourth or fifth child. Or before their baby’s even here, they already have brand deals lined up and what they can get and how they can get their nursery paid for now.”
I ask her how explicit the thinking of the influencers is. Is it literally, I need to have another kid because it is good for business? “That is definitely a thing,” Laskey says. “It’s a thing of saying, ‘You know what? This was a great ride. Now my kid is six years old and no one cares as much. You know, maybe we should have another baby and get these brand deals going.’” She continues, “I personally don’t think it’s great because those little kids that you have with the great brand deal, they grow up and those deals go away and now you’re still raising a child.” But while it’s good, it can be great. “There are family vloggers that live in gated communities next to NBA players and CEOs of airlines,” Ambriz says. According to Dani Abraham, who used to be the senior manager of talent partnerships at AwesomenessTV, a media company that cultivated kids’ YouTube channels, “These kids would rake in $100,000 a month.”
When we talk about the family vlogging industry and what it’s like to be an influencer kid, we need to talk about the money. This is life-changing money. I know there’s a bleak lens through which to view this: Parents are exploiting the privacy of their children in exchange for cash. In some cases, that might be true but that’s not the whole story, and ignoring the complexities of this industry doesn’t do the kids at the center of it any justice. I think of Bethanie Johnson of @thegarciadiaries, with 322,000 followers on Instagram, who makes about $500,000 a year. Though she’s considered pulling back from influencing, she knows there’s no other job in which a single mother of five with only a high school education could make half a million dollars a year.
Or MariClare, a teen mom who has 2.2 million followers on TikTok, who makes between $10,000 and $30,000 a month, and tells me she’s never had a job outside of content creation besides briefly waiting tables.
One family vlogger told me they netted about $360,000 in their best year; before family vlogging, they were living paycheck to pay- check.
Kaci, who with her husband, Casey (yes, both their names are Casey, and they’re high school sweethearts) has 1.6 million followers on TikTok, didn’t reveal exactly how much money the family makes but offered the information that her husband was an exterminator before they took off on social media. When their account first went viral, they were making “three times that. Now it’s a whole different world to us.” I ask her what that freedom feels like. “Honestly, it’s nice not to have to worry about bills or food. There was a time when we had to choose between getting gas in our car or paying a bill. It’s so nice not to have to deal with that anymore.”
Adrea Garza, the mom behind @garzacrew with 5.2 million Tik-Tok followers, features the lives of her twin eight-year-old daughters Haven and Koti. When Adrea found out she was pregnant with twins, she realized that if she continued to work, her entire paycheck would go to daycare costs. Instead, she decided to stay home. Now, five years after her daughters first went viral, the girls’ social media presence is Adrea’s full-time job. “I’m constantly on the phone, Zoom calls, talking to friends to brainstorm ideas for content, talking with our accountants, our managers, my attorney. My day is pretty much spent managing this Garza Crew media company that I’ve now created.” Adrea estimates that this year, she and her daughters will rake in somewhere between “$500,000 and $1 million, just depending on how the year shakes out.”
Though influencing is a global career, it seems to me a uniquely American pursuit. It appeals to the best parts of the American Dream, the ones we can’t help wanting to believe in: that anyone can be a success and have the white picket fence house and three-car garage to show for it. In a country where economic stability feels so precarious and increasingly unreachable for all but the wealthiest among us, is it any wonder Americans are taking their turn playing the viral lottery? In late-stage capitalism, where everything is a commodity, including you and your child, there’s a part of me that understands trading privacy for economic stability.
In an ideal world, childhood would be sacred, existing outside of the bounds of being turned into profit. But we’re not in that world — we’re in this one, where there are fewer and fewer paths to the ever-shrinking middle class, where childcare costs often outpace a parent’s entire salary, where student and medical debt continues to balloon — and where one sponsorship can net more than the average salary. I wonder if, when people rage against influencer parents, what they’re really raging against is the system that offers so few opportunities for advancement besides the commodification of the self. All you have to do is post.
Copyright © 2026 by Fortesa Latifi. From the forthcoming book LIKE, FOLLOW, SUBSCRIBE:
Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi to be published by Gallery
Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.
