Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as Gary Vee, recently appeared on a podcast with Mark Normand and Sam Morrell, and the reception from fans and fellow comedians has been anything but warm.
The episode quickly became a talking point online, with many pointing out the irony of two sharp comedians sitting across from a man who has been a punchline in comedy circles for nearly a decade.
Gary Vee built a multi-million dollar brand by telling people to stop making excuses and then selling them courses on how to do exactly that. He is the king of motivational one-liners, someone who tweets things like “greed is good” and “I’m going to suffocate all your excuses.” Somehow, he has millions of followers treating his posts like gospel.
Back in 2017, comedians Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker dedicated a segment of their podcast to pointing out how hollow Gary Vee’s brand of inspiration really is. Shane could barely finish his sentences because the idea of taking Gary Vee seriously was already the joke. Tim Dillon spent years making reaction videos to Gary’s content, getting them taken down repeatedly in the process.
Yet nearly ten years later, Mark and Sam brought Gary on not for laughs, but genuinely seeking marketing advice ahead of Mark’s upcoming Netflix special. The results were about what you would expect.
Gary advised them to start a live social shopping channel, film every second of their lives, and post at scale. He also floated the idea that AI comedians would eventually replace working stand-ups, which is when the pushback finally started.
As Gary put it: “There will definitely be a writer who is going to stand up an AI standup comic that they own. They’re Walt Disney. That’s their Mickey Mouse. It just happens to look literally like a human.”
Mark responded: “Why do you sound like a super villain right now?”
Gary’s promotional pitch for the Netflix special was no more reassuring. After being handed a phone and asked to help market the show, his contribution amounted to: “Hey, it’s a good special. A lot of jokes. Very funny.” Not exactly the output of a generation-defining marketing mind.
The comment section of the episode was not kind. Fans pointed out that this is the same pattern that overexposed other comedians before them, and that taking Gary Vee’s advice unironically puts Mark and Sam in difficult territory.
As one observer noted, Gary gives the same cookie-cutter advice regardless of who is sitting across from him, whether it is a comedian, a plumber, or anyone else with a product to move.
Gary Vee has not touched al**hol in 12 years, which made his appearance on a podcast centered around drinking all the more surreal, particularly when he sampled their w**skey straight from the bottle and immediately pivoted to pitching them a live shopping event at his family’s wine store in New Jersey.
