GaryVee’s NFT Restaurant is a Dystopian Fever Dream

What could be better than an exclusive club full of wealthy crypto-bros?

Austin Harvey
4 min readFeb 14, 2022

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Photo Source: Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk, the loud-mouthed bad boy of motivation, is a crypto-bro now, and he’s a huge fan of NFTs.

Gary started out selling his father’s wine online, made a few good investments, and spends most of his time appearing on different podcasts, making videos for his online audience, and getting paid upwards of $200,000 for in-person speaking events. He’s known for his off-the-rails approach to motivating people in business and life.

Gary “I’m grinding when you’re sleeping” Vaynerchuk’s form of motivational speaking essentially boils down to interrupting the person who asked him a question, going on a tirade that says nothing new but says it in a unique, wild way, and then dunking on his haters with all the money he has.

Take the time, for example, when a clearly nervous woman attending one of his events (which cost around $500 and up) began to ask a question relating to her business, only to have Gary interrupt her and ramble on about how every day she should “literally, once a day, genuinely sit there for five minutes and make pretend one of them got shot in the face.”

Because, you know, it’s all about perspective.

NFTs: GaryVee’s Next Big Hustle

GaryVee is the human embodiment of hustle culture. Every speaking engagement he has, he turns into the “GaryVee Origin Story,” talking about how his childhood hobbies involved selling trading cards and lemonade. These things, he says, were his “craft.” He’d never even heard the word “entrepreneurship” — he just loved selling, and his favorite thing to sell is the Perfect Capitalist Dream in which he, the guy who’s worked the hardest, wins.

He never mentions that he never spent $1,000 to see someone stand on stage and shout at them about their dead family members.

He was also accused, in several circles, of “pumping and dumping,” or building hype to raise something’s value and then selling it all off before the bubble burst. It’s not hard to draw parallels to his endless hype about NFTs.

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Austin Harvey

Writer, editor, and podcast host. Currently a staff writer at All That's Interesting. Host of History Uncovered and Conspiracy Realists.