Sebastian Giorgio hates excuses. He’s only 24 years old, but he manages to “Seven figure marketing agency. He owns several “dream cars” and is currently building his “luxury dream home” in Scottsdale, Arizona. Ghiorghiu is a producer, he says. 98 percent of every day. gone from “skinny fat” to “lifter. He believes in God. He was born into a poor family who immigrated from Romania and got rich just because he decided to. If he can do it, why can’t she?
“If you’re a guy in your 20s and you don’t own a Lamborghini, you should sit down and have a serious discussion with yourself about why you don’t own a Lamborghini.” He said on a podcast in January. “It’s so easy, and there’s a lot of money in there.”
He’s right, at least in the latter part. There really is He is Lots of money, and Ghiorghiu is just one of countless internet influencers who are dedicated to teaching other guys how to get a piece of it. These self-appointed gurus often share interests—sports cars, wristwatches, combat sports, strict diets, rocket ship emojis, long Twitter threads, Sun Belt mandates with relatively low tax burdens—but they tend to make millions in many different ways. For Giorgio, it was like that A combination of most, if not all, of the most popular revenue streams for this class of entrepreneur: house and car flipping, selling online courses, crypto gambling, digital marketing, YouTube advertising, and most importantly, drop shipping. (I reached out to Ghiorghiu for an interview but have not received a response.)
Drop shipping, or the practice of buying cheap goods, usually from China, and selling them on a legitimate-looking website for a profit, is an estimated $225 billion industry, according to one reportand is expected to rise to $1.2 trillion by 2030. Videos are used as an easy way to earn “passive income” by YouTube influencers, as conversion channels for viewers to sign up for an online course worth thousands of dollars. It may or may not teach you anything; An unofficial scroll through the Drop Shipping forums will reveal a lot From people who spent everything they had on Facebook ads and Google to market their products, only to accumulate thousands of debts (or… Literally children asking how to start their express shipping business).
But according to Giorgio and other wealthy lifestyle influencers like him – Alex HermozyAnd Iman GadjiAnd Jordan WelchAnd Andre GehAnd Max MaherAnd Brett MalinowskiAnd Mike VestelAnd Tan ChaudharyThere’s a lot more – making passive income is as easy as watching a YouTube video. Many of them call their posts a variation on “44 Passive Income Business Ideas to Start With Just $1K” or “Watch these 55 minutes if you want to become a millionaire in 2022. Watch hustle bro content long enough and you’ll feel like an idiot for never flipping a rental property before or starting your own AI marketing company (these guys are very into AI right now, for obvious reasons. A sample of some recent YouTube titles:)7 Untapped AI Companies to Get Started Now“,”I have found the easiest way to earn $1000 using artificial intelligence,“”Use AI to get ahead while others panic (Get ready now)That’s kind of everything, though: Any time or money you don’t use to make more money is a waste of time.
It is easy to scoff at this view of the world, which is as vulgar as it is unpleasant. A typical bro hustle meme might contain a macro photo of Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort Or Cillian Murphy as his character in Poor disguise Along with statements like “your network is your net worth” that promote prioritizing money and self-improvement over relationships and free time. Several common parody accounts, such as an intentional misspelling @tweetskewered into this corner of the influencer world, using terms like “sigma grinding maleAs an abbreviation for movement in general.
Arguably, the glorification of hustle bros is the masculine coded version of what author Gia Tolentino describes as the female millennial drive to “Always be improving.” In short, it is the feeling that our primary goal as individuals is to make our lives as effective and efficient as possible. For millennial women, the “enhanced” life might look like gym class and Sweetgreen and Barre. Men, freed from the feminine requirements of appearing as if they were hardly equal Try To look so perfect, but restrained by the delicate balance of posting online while still looking masculine, she tends to be a bit more overt. Hustle gurus encourage their followers not only to become unfathomably wealthy, but also to increase the time they spend on “improving themselves,” by which they often mean intense exercise, a highly restricted diet, or Abstain from porn and masturbation. They are by nature distrustful of any institution or intellectual movement that is not merely about the pursuit of money and quantitative gain.
– 8 hours of sleep
– No porn
– You reach the gym
– I make a lot of money
– You have a big familyThis is the magic of life.
– Sebastian Giorgiu (@cbassg16) January 6, 2023
To those get-rich-quick gurus who really owe their popularity, however, are the older statesmen of motivational speakers: Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, and Gary Vaynerchuk, who built fortunes telling others how to replicate their business successes. Like their younger counterparts, these men often espouse a deep distrust of higher education and government, and encourage their followers to devote their time and money to learning how to market themselves and their businesses. Sometimes, that can be exactly what people want to hear.
Steve Machuga, a 46-year-old Los Angeles veteran, discovered Grant Cardone through Audible at a time when both his company and his marriage were falling apart. “I’m a big fan of taking responsibility for one’s own actions, because it gives you the power to dig yourself out of whatever hole you’ve dug yourself into,” he says. “As opposed to ‘I got a bad hand, but that’s life.’ A lot of people, including my ex-wife, live their lives like that.” Through Cardone, he discovered motivational influencers such as veterans like Jocko Willink and David Goggins, as well as Joe Rogan, whose letters encouraged him to relaunch. I believed him That helps veterans struggling with mental health through games.
However, what he doesn’t like is the younger generation of YouTube gurus who seem more interested in tapping their followers with online courses to learn supercharge or get rich quick schemes. “I don’t follow most tech kids and 23-year-old crypto kids,” he says. “I’m 46. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m 23, please tell me with all your vast experience of just getting out of high school two weeks ago, how you’re going to teach me how to live my life.'”
The problem is that it has never been so easy to look like a billionaire businessman. Lambos can be rentedAfter all, all it takes is one viral video for millions of people to believe that you can help them get rich. Within the Drop Shipping community, for example, it’s Fairly general knowledge The best time to get started was in the early 2010s, before the market became completely saturated. Nowadays it’s very hard to create the kind of SEO required to get your product to fill the first page of Google, and Facebook ads don’t see the same ROI as they used to. But interest in dropshipping has only grown over the past decade. Especially over the past five years. Jarvis Johnson, a popular 30-year-old YouTuber and podcaster, blames part of that rise on TikTok, as it’s easy to be seen by millions of people no matter how many followers you have or your SEO build. In other words, it’s easy to go viral by casually pointing out the fact that you made a million dollars from drop shipping and hopefully converting those viewers into people who will pay you thousands of dollars for the online course “Introduction to Drop Shipping”. “It’s like if Mark Zuckerberg had one of those podcasts and he was like ‘Just start a social network!'” But no one can repeat it, because the path is closing.
Johnson understands the appeal of motivational influencers — he says he listened to a lot from Vaynerchuk when he was early in his tech career and felt like he wasn’t achieving enough — especially the way platforms like YouTube and TikTok make viewers feel like they can trust the person they’re looking at. “You have individuals brandishing billionaire philanthropic playboy behavior, which then becomes more attainable because you combined that with the social salient element,” he explains. “There are a lot of young people who feel so sad and so ignored by the world, and here’s someone who seems to be winning. But it’s all aesthetic.”
Allegations of educators like Ghiorghiu and other young YouTube millionaires are often vague and unsubstantiated. Recently real estate youtube Anthony Vicino published an extensive report He debunks many of the strategies used by these types (though polite), which include mixing different definitions of “millionaire,” using risky gains in cryptocurrency to demonstrate their investment expertise, and implying that “anyone” can do what he did. And he gets rich if they simply work hard enough (as Ficino points out: too many people work hard!).
The exact details of Ghiorghiu’s allegations are far less convincing than the fact that he’s a good-looking, charismatic young man who seems to have it all. Whether his followers will feel bad about some of his other views—which a man’s wife must do is left to be desired I don’t have male friends or Work outside the homewhich he will “Having a hard time getting along with someone who is very overweight,” that is There are only twothat men in their 20s who don’t own $100,000 sports cars are idiots – they’re practically beside the point (and who knows How much he really believes in any of them or says it just to get attention.) “People will say I’m out of touch with reality,” he said in the infamous Lambo video, “and they can suck it up.”
He’s still right about there being a lot of money in the world. But increasingly, that money stays in hands of the super rich. If you’ve been taking ideas for AI startups or drop shipping from online videos with hundreds of thousands of views, you’re already lost. This is a fact about media literacy, not business or science, and it’s much harder to learn than watching a YouTube video that basically goes to “8 Easy Ways to Lose Your Life Savings.”
This column was first published in the Vox Culture newsletter. Register here In order not to miss the next message, in addition to receiving our exclusive newsletter.
