What’s it like to be an influencer ? Is it a one-way trip to superstardom , or do the demands of the role cause influencers to suffer from success ?
One influencer, who made himself famous by licking a toilet bowl at the height of the pandemic, says his family won’t talk to him anymore. Is it because of the toilet bowl thing? He claims it isn’t.
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This is Larz.
Larz ( or LARZ, as he styles himself on Instagram ), describes himself as an athlete who makes “YouTube videos or whatever.” He has 422,000 followers on the platform, which is an impressive total on its own, but not even in the same ballpark as the top Instagrammers in the game.
Do you recognize him?
Larz first gained widespread recognition when he shared top billing with a toilet in a 2020 video. Just as the pandemic was getting serious, Larz capitalized on the news cycle by putting out a video where he licked a toilet bowl.
Days later, he tested positive for coronavirus .
Has toilet licking led to fame?
Not really. His Twitter account was suspended after the toilet thing, and his Insta hasn’t been updated in over two years. But Larz is still out there. He recently appeared on an Australian podcast to discuss his personal life.
He doesn’t speak to his family anymore.
On an episode of ‘The Kyle and Jackie O Show’ , he said, “Of course [I no longer speak to my family]. I stopped talking to them so long ago, it’s actually embarrassing that people would think I still talk to them.”
He’s the hero of his own story.
“I’m just more famous than everyone and I won’t talk to people who aren’t unless they get the same amount of followers as me,” said Larz, who hasn’t updated his Insta since 2020 and is most famous for licking a toilet.
Who does he actually talk to?
Larz was pressed on who he actually does talk to, and he responded by saying that he’s friends with Cardi B.
“We met on Twitter in 2015 and ever since have talked fluently,” he said, failing to bring any kind of receipts.
This is very on-brand for Larz.
For the dozens of people who care about Larz, this revelation isn’t surprising. That’s because he appeared on an episode of Dr. Phil a few years back to talk about the exact same thing: not talking to his family because he’s so famous.
“That’s what happens when you become famous: you cut people off.”
By building an identity around being so famous that he won’t talk to his family despite constantly talking about them, Larz is kind of like the ex who insists they’re over you even as they send you 50 texts a day.
This is the 2020s in a nutshell.
Andy Warhol once said that in the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame. He didn’t predict that this fame would hinge on toilet licking and family neglect, though.
Let us know what you think of this trainwreck of a story in the comments section.
