Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
I am so excited to tell you about this iPhone game that I am newly absolutely obsessed with. It's called June's Journey. If you're a true crime fan, but you don't like anything too violent, I feel like this game is totally going to be up your alley. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery game that takes place in the 1920s, so the aesthetic is very colorful.
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games, but you truly cannot be bad at this one. I like to play it when I want to be on my phone, but I don't want to be on social media. I just want to relax and find something fun and distracting. It's great for that. Can you crack the case? Download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android.
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This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Make your brain your friend with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash cult today and get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash cult. Right now, Baze is offering our listeners 15% off your first purchase by visiting bazetravel.com slash cult.
Go to Beistravel.com slash cult for 15% off your first purchase. That's B-E-I-S travel.com slash cult. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable facts. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. People have said that I'm the greatest thing that has ever happened of all time. And people have said I'm completely full of shit and everything in between. How do you feel when you read that?
- Empathetic. Flattered and embarrassed when it's the most extreme in a good way and deeply compassionate when it's extreme in the other way. Dozens of people that have wrote nasty things about me in this industry and outside of it have apologized to me in deep detail five, seven, 10 years later and they all say the same things. I was in a really bad place and your light made me feel even worse and I just wanted to tear you down. It's all the same shit. - It's true. - It's all the same shit.
- Aye, aye, aye. - He's like so relatable because he dresses like a normal guy even though he's a millionaire and his goal is to become even richer because he came from nothing. - He's an aspirational populist who people love to hate but can't stop watching.
This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm Issa Medina, and I'm a comedian touring all over the country and currently in New York City. I'm Amanda Montel, author of the forthcoming book, The Age of Magical Overthinking. Every week on this show, we discuss a different group or guru that puts the cult in culture, from Elon Musk to academia, to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really?
And if so, which cult category does it fall into? Live Your Life, Watch Your Back, or Get the Fuck Out? For our new listeners, a Live Your Life-level cult is like a baby cult. Definitely fanatical, but mostly harmless. A Watch Your Back-level cult is borderline dangerous, checks off some of the culty boxes, but isn't totally destructive. And then we have a Get the Fuck Out-level cult, which is like QAnon-level Manson vibes, a.k.a. run for your life. After all, what classifies a cult is up to interpretation.
All right. Well, this week, I want to start off by playing you a clip from the cult of Gary Vaynerchuk. Okay. I was totally unfamiliar with this person. Had never heard of him. I know. This was Issa's idea. And I guess how to describe this man really quickly up top, Gary Vaynerchuk, a.k.a. Gary V, is to his fanatics...
An inspiring entrepreneur, social media marketing guru, tough love, motivational speaker, sort of blue-collar masculine embodiment of the American dream. But to his critics, he's more of a bro-y edgelord, a money grubber.
who plays fast and loose with the truth. Fortune magazine once called him a snake oil salesman. And more concretely, he is a serial entrepreneur in his mid 40s who co-founded a few popular companies, including Resi, if you've ever made a restaurant reservation using that platform, as well as Empathy Wines and a social media marketing agency called VaynerMedia.
He dabbles in NFTs, shocker. And we got a few requests for this episode from a few of our straggling male listeners.
listeners. Hello to the men. We love our male listeners. Yeah, it's definitely more of a male focused cult than the SoulCycle and The Bachelor of it all. But our female listeners know men who have probably heard of this dude. It's like a Tony Robbins vibe. So I'm going to play this and tell me what you think. Here we go. Who do you love the most in the world? My family. Good. Who in your family? Pick one.
- All of them. - You're very politically correct. Cool, every day, literally once a day, genuinely sit there for five minutes and make pretend one of them got shot in the face. - Whoa. - I'm being dead serious with you. Some people work out.
right, to deal with whatever anxieties or thoughts they have. I actually sit and truly try to convince myself that I have lost one of the five most important people in my life and that is the biggest thing I do that leads to the biggest happiness I have.
Isn't that crazy? Okay, I understand why you said Tony Robbins because it's like when Tony Robbins during one of his conferences singles someone out from the crowd and makes them feel really attended to and really special and he sort of breaks them down to build them back up. I mean...
It's definitely like that vibe, but I think it's just hilarious. He said this specific thing like he actually does and he said in multiple interviews inspires him is like pretending that his family has been like shot. Why? Because he thinks that it puts everything in perspective of being like whatever grind I have to put into the world. Like fucking who cares, bro? I have to work 15 hours a day. Well, my parents could have been fucking shot, dude. And like that's his version of pushing himself forward.
All right. All right. I understand. Okay. So he's trying to make it seem like you have no excuse not to hustle and grind every single day. That just doesn't make sense to me. But my impression of his oratory style is that you just have buzzwords and phrases flying by so quickly that you don't even have time to think.
think slowly and critically about what's being said. Almost like Donald Trump is just like spewing such passionate garbage all at once that at the end of it, you're just like, I don't know what was said, but...
Yeah, yeah. And well, it's also like the fact he uses like his deep voice and he's so angry. Like he speaks like he's on a ticking time bomb. Like he's gonna run out of time, which makes you feel like you need to get up and you need to work. And it's time to work. He's just preying on people's fight or flight and adrenaline and cortisol. He has this sort of like...
populist masculine voice and delivery that kind of communicates to people like I'm one of you when I was a kid I sucked too I was shy I got beaten up in the face yeah and now I'm rich
So before we deep dive into Gary Vee here, we should mention that this isn't just an episode about this like one cringy blowhard. It's really a bigger picture commentary on the con artistry of the marketing business itself right now and a discussion of where we draw that line between clever viral strategy and cult. So for those of you who don't know who Gary Vaynerchuk is, we're going to tell you about him.
He is the crossroad between capitalism and frat culture, I would say. The New York Times has called him the patron saint of hustle culture. Vice has called him the king. People continue to come back to him because he's done what he's told people they should be doing.
The thing is he has a very similar story to like Tony Robbins like came from nothing grew everything from zero. He is actually an immigrant from Belarus. He moved to America when he was three. So he really leans on the American dream mentality. But his business that he built for his parents, which was a wine business was already valued at $3 million when he started to build it. How's that possible?
So his parents started a winery in New Jersey and they built it from the ground up and they worked really hard. They built a business. And when he was a teenager in the 90s, like 1997, he put his parents' company on the internet.
So he was one of the first people to like create an e-commerce site for a business. All right. Not because he's a genius, but because it was the fucking 90s. Yeah, totally. I feel like, well, first of all, it's weird examining similar immigration stories to your own family and also interesting from a nature nurture perspective to kind of notice how they diverge.
Because my ancestors were also Belarusian Jews who came to this country with a dream. They didn't succeed, so they didn't get to become cult leaders. In fact, the next generation ended up becoming cult followers, which is the other side of the thing, right? There's a reason why culty MLMs in particular recruit so many followers from immigrant communities because...
because they disguise it as this Gary V style entrepreneurship opportunity that'll allow you to succeed outside of the traditional labor market. And that's a very alluring promise. I mean, I think as an immigrant myself,
I do think there is like a hustle culture because you don't have generational wealth to lean back on. Like a lot of Americans have generational wealth and you do have to hustle. And like, I feel like I hustle because of, I've seen my parents build things from nothing. Yeah. But he did get lucky in that, like his parents' company was like already $3 million and he was in the boom of the internet. Like he created an e-commerce site and it was successful because it was one of the first e-commerce sites. Okay, okay.
So it's a case of opportunism passed off as genius, snake oil passed off as bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Like it's giving Keith Raniere with less faux science platitudes and more like Pinterest aphorisms gone frat bro. Exactly. So speaking of opportunism, apparently he was also an early investor in big tech companies like Facebook and Snapchat and blogging.
When Business Insider interviewed him about that in 2017, he basically said, oh yeah, like I'm tapped into the future and I have just this intuitive ability to understand consumer behavior. So, you know, from what I can tell, he tends to position himself not just as like a marketing guru, but as kind of a loud and proud marketing prophet. Something I found funny about him was that he was kind of a scammer low key since he was a kid.
He tells this story about how when he was a kid, he used to go around his neighborhood and pick flowers off the garden of his neighbors, like steal the flowers, put them in a bunch, and then sell them back to his neighbors. Like he would sell the flowers back. And he tells the story proudly. Oh my God. You know what's so creepy about that is that like, I'm not even going to say there's a fine line between just like on the books capitalism and scammery because at
At this point in our culture, to succeed at all, you kind of have to be a bit of a scammer. Yeah. I mean, it's just endlessly fascinating to me to think about when fake it till you make it crosses over from a piece of great American advice into cult leader territory. Because while Gary Vee is a very on-the-nose example of...
American Protestant capitalism conditions us all to oversell ourselves as a way to get ahead. Especially if you don't already come from wealth. Yeah. Because the game is so rigged against so many people that it's like...
To create generational wealth within one lifetime is like he has this mentality because I don't know. It's like I'm not trying to be like you have to do it. Right. That's not you don't have to do that. But like he has to take advantage of someone else. And I think he is so proud of that. And people love to hate him and hate to love him for that. Whereas a lot of really successful rich people are less talkative and less forthright about their scammery, you know.
- Exactly, and I think the reason he is so forthright is because if you look at his whole big picture is like, he's ultimately just like a mega influencer. - Yeah. - Which he tries to pretend he isn't. He is like the epitome of no press is bad press. - Right. - And that's essentially what he's done. So he went on to build his parents' wine business by not only putting them online and creating an e-commerce site, but he also created a YouTube channel
where he would try wines and critique them like very frattily, like he would drink wine and then eat it with a cereal and then describe the wine in a really grotesque way. Like this wine tastes like if you farted in your hand and then like microwaved it. And so like,
he went viral doing insane dumb things. Oh my God. I see. So he's just like, literally if you took every type of guerrilla marketing and like threw it in a bag full of Scrabble tiles and dumped it out and was like, that's how you build a brand folks. Exactly. And he ultimately ended up building this brand called VaynerMedia or VaynerX is like one of the conglomerates of VaynerMedia. And I know people who worked there, quote, very WeWork vibes. It's a
type of space where they work in marketing. They're working 70 to 80 hour weeks. They are allegedly way underpaid and they are behind some of like the greatest like Super Bowl commercials because he created such a name brand for himself on the internet that brands just wanted to work with him because he was one of the first people who understood like virality. Hmm.
So what if
What even is VaynerMedia? Like we've been talking about this guy for 10 minutes and I still don't like understand what his businesses are. So I feel like the reason you don't understand it is because we're so past having to hire a company to create social media for us because we all inherently understand it. But he created this company that was a media company that companies like Coca-Cola or Disney would hire to be like, how can we get...
on TikTok before TikTok existed? How can we go viral on YouTube? How can we go viral on the internet? But now they kind of have been deemed irrelevant in my opinion because people have in-house social media teams. So like VaynerMedia, what a company would do is like, let's say,
mattress company goes and is like, oh, we're like a new mattress company and we're hip and cool, but we don't really have a brand yet. They go to them and they're like, hey, what do you think you can create? And then they're like, you guys are going to be like the company for hipsters and you're going to use the color blue because that
is proven in research that it attracts millennials more. And you're going to pitch to ages 33 to 35 because those are the people that are buying nice sheets, but not nice enough. And so they do all of this research. It's like marketing. Yeah, it's marketing. So how does he make his money now? And like, what is his reputation now?
Yeah, so now he still has all these companies. They're still really well known in media and marketing. But I think his main source of income from what I can assess, because obviously like it's not transparent on the internet, I think his main source of income is literally being an influencer. He allegedly makes $100,000 to $200,000 every time he gets hired to be a
public speaker. He has 9.9 million followers on Instagram, over 3 million subscribers on YouTube, 3 million followers on Twitter, and he has over 30,000 members of his Discord. I don't even understand what Discord is. Is that a lot?
Yeah. I mean, it's essentially like creating a group chat on Instagram. It's a live chat. It's wild. You know, I personally don't find Gary Vee charismatic at all. But clearly there is a certain demographic that just gets caught up in his energy, which, you know, cannot be underestimated. I wish I had that much energy. He seems to have it in spades.
And it's obviously working really well because his videos have a lot of views. And he's not just talking about business. He seems to have like no shame running his mouth on topics from, I don't know, gym routines to how to love yourself. Exactly. So he's not just a business coach. He's crossed over into lifestyle guru, I would say, in my opinion. His point is just to create noise. Got it. Okay. Okay. He is a noisemaker. Oh my God. That's got
gotta be like a new phrase there's influencer there's thought leader there's tastemaker he's a noisemaker yeah so then it seems like he has these books that he's quote-unquote written they're published by harper business which is a real a real imprint of harper collins which also which a different imprint of harper collins published my books tear um so talk talk a little
a little bit about his attitude toward the workplace. Like, what is he really trying to build? Because when we're talking about Elizabeth Holmes, we were speaking a little bit about the difference between a con artist and a cult leader. And he has created this like obsessed cult following. Are those people genuinely inspired by him? Or are those people kind of like hate tuning into him? Yeah, that's a good question. I think a
lot of those people are hate tuning. I think a lot of his following comes from people hate tuning or his like popularity, but the people who actually like follow him and click the follow button, join his discord. I think those people are inspired by him. But I found this quote from one of his followers that said, Gary is a good motivator and helps keep my spirits up when times are tough. He is inspirational, but not so much educational.
I feel like that's like us. Well, God, I think it's just so interesting. I mean, he Gary Vee really is such a reminder that there is a cult for everyone because I look at a dude like this and I'm just like, how could you ever even tolerate hearing his voice long enough to feel inspired by it? Yeah. You know, but I think
Already, if you're attracted to this message and this delivery, you're probably not feeling the dissonance that I think a lot of us who live under capitalism already feel. You know what I mean? When I think about how much money I would like to have to live, I think...
I want to live a life like the Scandinavians where maybe you have like six weeks off during the year. You like have your medical expenses taken care of. Maybe you own property. But in order in this economy to have that type of life, you have to hustle and scam on some level.
And that's just like dissonance that I am tortured by every single day. But it seems like his followers are not even tortured by it. They're like, let's scam. I think it's where you have to scam people if you're coming from nothing, which is the message that he sends. I see. So that's where I think it gets culty because he didn't come from nothing. And he's also lying, in my opinion, in that his strategy is what made him succeed. He didn't have a strategy.
Right. He got lucky. Right. Which is why I think that quote from one of his followers resonated with me so much is that like he was like, yeah, sometimes I like need to get him to like snap me out of things to inspire me. But he's not educational. Like you shouldn't take business advice from this man. So what are like some worst case scenarios with Gary Vee? Because if he's just like on the Internet being an influencer spouting blowhardy bullshit. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, like that sucks, but it's just an influencer. Yeah, like he's not part of an institution like MLMs. He's not taking advantage of people's mental health. Like what exactly is he doing that's so culty? So I think there are a couple aspects about him that are culty. And I think the first one is like his company, VaynerMedia. I know people very well who work there. It is very much this like bro frack.
culture. Allegedly, the turnaround is really high. And if you don't immediately fall into the bro culture, you're not going to have a career there. And Gary, being an influencer, having millions of followers, he comes into the office often. And you can see him doing his little videos.
And so what she said is that like people who work there then want to get close to the people who are close to him. So that's what I think was culty. So there's this sense of conforming to this really problematic culture. There's a cult of personality going on, like in a lot of culty companies, not just this one. I'm also seeing that if you Google what it's like to work at VaynerMedia, one of the first things to come up is a Reddit post where someone says,
cultish. No work-life balance, low paying, low production value creative. And another person says it's a business capitalizing on the name of a popular LinkedIn motivational speaker. But the company also has a 52% positive rating on Glassdoor. So, you know, clearly somebody has enjoyed their time there well enough, which is not to say it's not culty.
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Go to Beistravel.com slash cult for 15% off your first purchase. That's B-E-I-S travel.com slash cult. What is he going after? Like what is his end game? Do you think he even has one or is it just to like make as much money as possible, exploit his persona as much as possible and then get the fuck out of there? Is that what it is?
Well, I feel like he's been doing it for so long that at this point, I don't think even if he accomplished his end game, he wouldn't get the fuck out because he's more addicted to it than he knows. But I saw that his end game is to buy the New York Jets. He's saying he wants to be rich enough to buy the New York Jets. And then I was like, okay, how much are the New York Jets? They were last sold for $630 million in 2000.
but his net worth is only 130 million, which I don't say only in that, like that's not a lot. It's a lot of money, but for all the work he does, I'm like, you're only worth 130 mil, bro. Well,
Well, and it's hard to trust net worth projections anyway. I think he's like, if you're going to make it in this world, like you only need to think about yourself. Right. And hustle and grind. And he literally is the type of person who's like, only think about yourself. Pretend your family fucking died, I guess, to like keep grinding. And he says, I'm passionate about eating shit and like taking shit in order to keep grinding. Like I put in the work even through like bleeding and grinding. I'm like, what are you bleeding about?
You shouldn't be bleeding. You're in marketing. That is so representative of a cult leader and the speech that they use because it is so much about the delivery and how that person makes you feel, not at all about what they have to say. Yeah. You know how like you in reaction to MLMs are like, oh, I know we're not supposed to judge these people, but how the fuck could you ever believe that this is really available to you? Yeah. I'm having that instinctive reaction to Gary Vee and particularly in regard to MLMs
to MLMs, like how do people still believe that these companies can deliver on their promises? Like with the internet and anti-MLM culture, anti-scam culture, all the information that exists on YouTube and even TikTok, like how can people still buy into this? And I think, well, first of all, like we always say your algorithm is only going to show you what you want to see, encourage your confirmation bias and all that.
But also, like, we live in a time when get-rich-quick schemes are almost more believable than ever because people can become rich overnight. That's what I was going to say. I feel like makes him a little less culty than MLMs. Like, his businesses are…
are ultimately like real businesses. He's selling a service to a company. And it's not like you have to recruit someone to get into the business. And then with his inspirational speeches, he's inspiring people to like go viral, which like you can do. Like you can get famous overnight. That's what I'm saying. Like TikTok influencers becoming overnight sensations. Yeah. And people getting rich overnight from crypto. Yeah. This message...
especially in this economy, is like resonating in a way it never has before. Exactly. The problem with him, I think, is that he's saying that there is a recipe. Right. But there is no recipe. Like he's leaning into like the luck of the algorithm, which is what he got.
And that's like the MLM promise too. It's like, this is a good system. A good system always works. If you follow the system exactly and have a good attitude, you will become a millionaire in a year. And his system is like, it's not a pyramid scheme, but it is.
is equally a false promise in that you can do everything right on social media and never have anything go viral. But because of our values of individualism and exceptionalism, we think, no, I'm going to be the one to succeed. Exactly. So let me ask. I mean, clearly he is an expert in something. He's an expert in how he himself went viral. And
Marketing and cultishness overlap in significant ways. What makes his marketing strategies culty enough that we're discussing them on this podcast? I think first off the bat, what makes them like culty is that he is tapping into people's like ethos. Like he's tapping into the way that people like
live their life, not just the way that people work. Conduct business. Yes. Okay. And so he's like, you have to turn into a machine. Every part of you needs to be a machine. And the way that he delivers that is in a very preachy way. He does it in this godlike manner. Like I know what's right.
and you have to follow it. And his own website and his bio scream his own praises. He never gives credit to anyone for any of the work that he's accomplished.
He thinks he's done everything on his own. Right, right. And he's constantly repping his own brand, wearing his own merch. I mean, it's just so funny because like if someone were to give good marketing advice, it would sound a lot like this. It's just that most people aren't bold enough to actually go this far. Yeah. Him personally, he's been on the record saying that he has no friends. He has no social life, that he works.
15 plus hours a day. He's glamorizing that hustle culture in a way that like, I feel like in our social circle, we're just like, no, I'm not going to do it. I give up. The American dream is a lie. We've accepted this. But in his circle, they haven't given up yet. Yeah. And I think
that doesn't prevent us from hustling, you know, but we know our priorities. Like mental health is like at the front of culture now. Like people take like time off. It's so important to like not make your work your entire life. And we know that. And yet look at us.
In the evening time making this podcast. Seriously, it's like this message is packaged in a way that personally does not appeal to me whatsoever. But that grind, as much as I want to question it and destabilize it, those messages like are still in me. So is he a cult? Is he not a cult? And how cult he is he? How do you see him in comparison to MLM culture maybe? Ah.
It's tricky because he does have a lot in common with MLM culture. The idea that if you just put your nose to the grindstone, you will succeed, you will follow in his footsteps. But that's an ethos that also exists in influencer culture in a subtler way. It's like, if you only tried hard enough, if you only rearranged your priorities, then you could be as glamorous and beautiful as me. So there is this toxic
positive energy that exists in MLM culture. But I think the difference is that he hasn't actually done anything illegal. Yeah. Yeah. He's just like deeply annoying. Yeah, exactly. And he is, I think he's so focused on like making his money that he's like, why would I get in legal trouble by formally scamming people when I can influence people to scam themselves? Totally, totally. Yeah.
oh, wow. Yeah, he's like encouraging you to become your own cult leader. Yeah. You know? And he does it in a way that he isn't held liable. Right. But I do think, you know, there are aspects that put him on the edge of being able to flip a switch and start a cult the day he wants to. Yeah. Yeah.
Expectations always lead to very vulnerable frameworks. One of the biggest reasons a lot of you don't do the right thing is because you expect somebody to do that in return after you do it. The expectation of others and the opinions of others are
Okay, so out of the three cult categories, live your life.
Watch your back or get the fuck out. What level of cult do you think Gary Vee is in the end? Spoiler! I think he's a watch your back. Oh, you do? Yeah, I think he's a solid watch your back because he has these communities. He doesn't just have like these large 9 million follower communities. He has these like smaller insular communities, 30,000 discord followers that...
has already convinced to think like him. I also went on the Discord and read some things that the people were saying and people were joking about how they're in a cult. They're like, yeah, we're in the cult of Gary Vaynerchuk. They're joking about it, but
it's one of those things where like if he turned around and said like let's all go to an island tomorrow and I'll teach you how to like market yourself right like a crypto island you know because he feels very much like in that same space of like this is all perfectly legal and yet it all feels like a cult at the same time yeah exactly and he is leaning into the crypto space now he started selling NFTs like
he just keeps getting cultier and cultier. But like you said, he hasn't yet done anything that is like red, red flag. So I think he's a solid, solid watch your back. Oh God. I want to say he's a get the fuck out. Really? You can't call him a get the fuck out and say that like other things we've said are watch your back. Yeah. I mean, I guess we said, what are the exit costs?
Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, we said that Tony Robbins was a get the fuck out. That's true. But I feel like Tony Robbins promises are a lot more spiritual, like walking on rocks, you're physically burning your feet.
That's true. That's true. But you know, the funny thing is, is that money is God in the United States. Like money is spirituality in the United States. The American dream is in a way just as much a cultish fantasy as heaven. The imagery of one involves a pearly gate. The imagery of the other involves a white picket fence. But
That's the same sort of image. It's the same sort of promise that like paradise exists. It's behind this barrier. And if you want to access it, you have to buy into this lie. Yeah, but he's just selling you the lie. He's not forcing you to buy it.
And that's a watch your back. Yeah, I'm mad about it, but I'm going to agree. It's probably a watch your back. Oh, Amanda. You cracked me. Well, that's our show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with a new episode from Issa next week and an episode from me the week after that. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. Bye.
Sounds Like a Cult was created, hosted, and produced by Issa Medina and Amanda Montel. Our theme music is by Kasey Colt. To join our cult, follow us on Instagram at soundslikeacultpod. I'm on Instagram at amanda underscore montel. And feel free to check out my books, Cultish, The Language of Fanaticism, and Word Slut, A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language.
And I'm on Instagram at Isamedina, I-S-A-A-M-E-D-I-N-A-A, where you can find tickets to my live stand-up comedy shows or tell me where to perform. We also have a Patreon, and we would appreciate your support there at patreon.com slash soundslikeacult. And if you like our show, feel free to give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And if you don't like our show, rate other podcasts the way you'd rate us.
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