We’ve often wondered what might have become of Aleksey Vayner had he never made his hit film “Impossible Is Nothing.” Where would he be in five years? What levels of success would he have achieved?

We’re pretty sure the answer has arrived in the form of Timothy Ferriss, Princeton ‘00. Currently a “guest lecturer” at Princeton (sounds a little misleading to us; he’s not in the official directory), Ferriss has honed self-help guruship down to an art — he’s good-looking, well spoken, and he knows you initially assume he’s a fraud. His new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, explains how to work very little (check e-mail twice a day, outsource all your work to Asians for $5 an hour) and still live your dreams. Among the dreams Ferriss has already lived: Motorcycling across China. Dancing tango in Argentina (and on Regis and Kelly). Kickboxing. Skiing in the Andes. Gaining 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks. In other words, impossible is nothing.

The book already seems to be taking off. It’s currently ranked in Amazon’s top 10. The site’s reviewers have given it five stars, nearly across the board.

And that’s where it gets weird. The Amazon comments are absurdly positive. Frighteningly positive. Eyebrow-raisingly positive. Just look at the slew of reviews left all on the same day, April 24:

C. Ashenden, April 24: I don’t give away compliments easily but I guarantee that this book will change your life. Don’t wait.

Brian Page, April 24: I’m not a reviewer of books. In fact, this is the only one I’ve ever commented on. So as the first person to review The 4-Hour Workweek, I’m going to make a prediction. Remember, I called it first. This book WILL be a best-seller.

Sherwood Forlee, April 24: Because of this book, I would have to say that my dreams will soon become reality.

Matt, April 24: I don’t know Tim, nor do I have any financial connection to this book. … I have never written a review on Amazon before, but this book compelled me to write my first. I highly recommend you get it, and I guarantee it will get you thinking about making changes in your life.

Lindsay, April 24: I have always been a little wary of books focused arond life-improvement, but “The 4-Hour Work Week” book strikes the perfect balance between practical guidebook with real-world suggestions for how to maximize the work/life balance (something everyone needs to learn to do) and inspirational encouragement that yes, the life you want is just around the corner.

Michelle Bartakova, April 24: I believe this book is going to be a bestseller, will inspire many, and I would go as far as to say it will save lives. … The revolution has began…. If this review sounds little bit over the top, well it is and so is the book. This is my first review on amazon, and who knows my next one might be written by my virtual assistant:)

(Hilarious commenter exchange on that last one is here.) When a tipster pointed out the unbroken slew of over-the-top raves to us, we saw this comment among them:

Smells fishy!, April 26, 2007
Reviewer: cyan (Sydney, Australia)
There are 18 reviews beneath me. Every single one was written on the same day. This is the only review of every single reviewer bar one. I wonder what the odds are of 18 individuals who never review on Amazon logging onto the site on the same day and giving the book 5 stars?

Even more fishily, that last comment is now gone. We have to agree, it’s hard to see more than a dozen glowing, similarly-argued raves spontaneously cropping up all at the same time — from people who have never before reviewed another title. If indeed Ferriss had a hand in arranging them, that’s not necessarily wrong — just really off-putting, really douchey, really … Aleksey.

Dear all 17,432 people who emailed us about Michael Cera’s Aleksey Vayner spoof video: Yes, thank you, we saw it. No doubt by this point you have too — maybe at Dealbreaker, or Gawker, or — wait, really? — The New York Times. We’ll share the Arrested Development star’s homage here anyway, as what struck us as kind of eh at first reveals some great touches on second viewing, like how the watercolor Cera paints at 1:48 is already framed and behind glass.

But first, may we issue a polite “deez nuts” to the cowards at YouTube? Cera’s “Impossible Is the Opposite of Possible,” produced for a McSweeney’s event, is currently a “Featured Video” on the YouTube home page, racking up all kinds of honors and 315,000-plus views as of this posting. So, YouTube is happy to jump on the Aleksey Bandwagon now, when all the legal heat is off? You’ll recall that back in October, down in the Aleksey Vayner trenches, they hung us out to dry. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen: We’ll get you for this. But first, we have to have some copies of keys made:

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When it comes to fixing public education, ideas abound. Standardized testing. Charter schools. KIPP-like behavioral reform. But these supposed solutions pale when set against the latest pedagogical theory to hit America’s public schools: “Impossible is Nothing.”

We know, we know, it’s dead. Which is probably why one first-year Teach for America corps member thought it safe to turn would-be i-banker Aleksey Vayner’s ubiquitous maxim (well, technically Adidas had it first) into classroom philosophy. A poster in a New York TFA office reads as follows, according to a tipster:

NYC Corps Members are Building the Movement

Sean Reidy, TFA ‘06, 7th grade math, Bronx

Sean is building the movement by investing his students in his class motto, “Impossible is nothing.” Students believe they can and will succeed in math class. They dress up on test days and have learned what it means to dress for success. Almost two thirds of Seans’ seventh grade students joined the Mathletes, an after school club where students can compete against each other in challenging math questions.

For the record: Anything remotely connected to Vayner that also involves “dress up” is highly suspect. But who knows, maybe Vayner will get the last laugh after patching up our nation’s troubled education system. Whether that happens before or after the inevitable daytime talk show “Aleksey!”, we can’t say.

When Harvard’s Pforzheimer House announced it was throwing an official Aleksey Vayner-themed party last week, we assumed it would be a 495-lb. blast. People could come in karate robes, or Under Armour and dance pants; gently serve tennis balls at 140 miles an hour; there could even be a little table in the back for plagiarizing books about the Holocaust. Picture it: 2 a.m., hundreds of “Impossible is Nothing” acolytes swilling Aleksey Ale and Vayner Vodka Tonics, ballroom dancing to the beat of “Solamente Tu Amor” and “The Way of the Sword” — what could go wrong?

Alas, as the above photo shows, the event was rather under-attended. In fairness, it was up against Winthrop House’s “Country Clubbin’: A Harvard-Yale ‘Tea Partay’.” More depressing pics after the jump; either this means Alekseygate has officially gotten old (should we cancel our Christmas benefit gala for Youth Empowerment Strategies?), or it’s just the usual case of Harvard kids unable to have fun when it’s handed to them on a platter.

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Props to the Yale Herald for being the first college publication to get an interview with Aleksey Vayner. Too bad they left their spine on the mantelpiece next to their keys that day. Here’s a snippet:

YH: One endeavor your résumé mentions is Vayner Capital Management, a business that you reportedly created. Could you describe this business?

AV: We’re a limited liability corporation, based in New York.

YH: Is that all you can say about it on the record?

AV: Yes.

Now that, folks, is what we call a follow-up question. The piece is so hard-hitting the byline is blank; no one on staff seems to want to take credit for it. Keep on sluggin’, guys.

You know, in all the stuff we’ve written about Aleksey Vayner, we’ve never actually used the word “douchebag.” Well, we’re getting pretty close to using that term right now. Only we’re not talking about Aleksey.

Daro Mott and Marcelino Pantoja (Yale ‘06, above) sent the book query below to the Wiliam Morris mega-agency. G’head, read it, we’ll wait.

From: “Mott, Daro” [redacted]
To: “Suzanne Gluck” [redacted]
CC: “Marcelino Pantoja” [redacted]
Re: Query: Aleksey Vayner, a Memoir

October 25, 2006
Suzanne Gluck
William Morris Agency
1325 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY  10019

Dear Ms. Suzanne Gluck:

We would like to preface our query letter with a short paragraph about ourselves. My name is Daro Mott and I graduated from Yale University in May of 2006; I currently live and work in Louisville, Kentucky. My co-author’s name is Marcelino Pantoja; he lives and works in Tracy, California and he also graduated from Yale this previous spring. We are budding writers and intend to produce a memoir regarding our puzzling friend, Aleksey Vayner, whom we met as undergraduates at Yale.

In our book, we reveal the most intriguing and entertaining Ivy League persona of today: Aleksey Vayner.

The story of Aleksey Vayner is both sensational and seemingly apocryphal. On the one hand, Aleksey and his family, penniless, emigrated from Uzbekistan to the United States; at eighteen, he gained admission to Yale University as a tennis recruit. On the other hand, Aleksey Vayner sexed up his accomplishments one time too many: recently, he single handedly became the laughing stock on Wall Street after sending an eleven page résumé and
promotional video to UBS AG, the world’s largest asset wealth manager.

On October 9, 2006, the New York Sun went to press on Aleksey. Within the span of a week, the Wall Street Journal, the Dow Jones News Wire, Fox News, US News and World Report, London Times, Daily Mail, Forbes, the Yale Daily News, Market Watch, the New Yorker and dozens of other national and international media ran articles on Aleksey. The New York Times, the Today Show and other media picked up the story the following week. Following suit, Aleksey Vayner was featured on Inside Edition and MSNBC early this week. Blogs can’t get enough. Yale students scream Vaynergate. Public interest is skyrocketing!  Why?

Aleksey lifts 495 lbs of steel, clocks a tennis serve at 140mph, whirls around a ballroom dance floor with a gorgeous dancer, shatters six bricks with a karate chop, pulls off fantastic stunts with skis-he choreographs all this information and more in his promotional video. Moreover, Aleksey boasts of being the CEO of Vayner Capital Management, a partner in a mega real-estate development firm, a professional athlete and the founder of Youth Empowerment Strategies (YES), a non-profit. He even claims to have self-published a book on the Holocaust from the perspective of female survivors!  Aleksey has chutzpah!

But Wall Street erupted with laughter. And they have not stopped. Aleksey is being bombarded with requests for interviews. The calls have not stopped. Wall Street circulated Aleksey’s video and résumé because, Aleksey, whether we like it or not, is simply entertaining.

In the light of this, his cadre of friends proposes to write a book about Aleksey situated in Yale University where we first met him. As his closest friends and recent graduates of Yale, we have personal access to him; in other words, we are self-anointed experts of Aleksey.

In his memoir, we detail the reality that is Aleksey with a flavor made possible from having tasted the “inside scoop.” We raise interesting issues and get down to bottom of life at Yale with Aleksey Vayner. We will answer soul searching questions: Who is he? What does he want out of this gift of life? What is folklore, what is reality? Did the allure of Wall Street make a zany guy even zanier? Is he a typical Ivy Leaguer? Is Aleksey Vayner legitimate or is he an imposter? We know the truth.

We look forward to speaking with you.

Respectfully Submitted,

Daro Mott
Marcelino Pantoja

Choo choo! All aboard! The Aleksey Vayner gravy train is leaving the station! Good to know that even during these tough times, Aleksey’s “closest friends” are standing by him … ready to cash in on his fame.

Seriously, though — most intriguing Ivy League persona? The New York Sun as catalyst? “What is folklore, what is reality?” Sign us up, you “budding writers,” for the “flavor made possible from having tasted the ‘inside scoop’” on your “puzzling,” “zany” friend.

Yale Daily News reporter Tom Kaplan is our new hero. Only a freshman, he’s penned a piece about Aleksey Vayner with actual (gasp) reporting! Unlike the toothless Times, credulous MSNBC, or effortlessly spun New York Post, Kaplan’s piece moves the ball, noting that the president of Charity Navigator has asked New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to investigate Vayner’s fake charity.

Also — and this is pure sugarcane — it’s apparently Academic Integrity Awareness Week at Yale now, but deans are stonewalling on whether they’re looking into Vayner’s several plagiarisms.

Kaplan’s piece is a serious take, but the last two sentences are the funniest thing we’ve read all week:

Vayner’s attempt to stand out in his application appears to have backfired, although advertising executive Donny Deutsch said on MSNBC he would hire Vayner immediately for his creative genius. Director of Undergraduate Career Services Philip Jones declined to comment on whether Vayner’s strategy is a sound one.

But with Halloween less than a week away, some Yalies in need of an outfit may have found inspiration of their own in the Vayner scandal: some students said that “Aleksey Vayner” will likely be a popular costume on campus this year.

One Metro North ticket to New Haven for Oct. 31, please! If we come out there, will someone throw a party?

Breaking our promise already, sorta. We don’t want to cover this, but we can’t ignore it. Welcome to the party, NYT; headline says it all.

The Resume Mocked ‘Round the World [The New York Times]

UPDATE 3:19 p.m. Oct. 21: Oh look, Michael J. de la Merced’s story made it into the Times print edition. But with the guts cut out — what little there were in the first place, anyway. This part makes us want to ram an airplane into an apartment building:

The Internet scrutiny also raised questions about some of Mr. Vayner’s claims in his résumé, including assertions that he ran his own charity and investment firm.

There have also been questions over whether he copied sections of a self-published book, “Women’s Silent Tears: A Unique Gendered Perspective on the Holocaust,” from Web sites.

Mr. Vayner, 23, contends that both the charity and investment firm are legitimate. And the accusations about his book, he said, were based on an earlier draft that has since been changed.

Oh! Well then! Mr. Vayner contends, does he? Then everything must be A-okay. You keep doing that tough reporting, Michael J. de la Merced.

It’s time to declare a moratorium on all things Aleksey Vayner. This horse is not only beaten to death — it’s been shipped off to the glue factory, buried out in the yard, and decomposed into its component minerals.

Yet here we are.

When the behemoth Today Show limps into the story, getting pretty much every fact wrong (“Someone at one of the Wall Street firms is believed to have sent the video to YouTube” — no, you hacks, we did!), and not even mentioning the fraud angle, we feel obligated to do one. last. post. And to make it a doozy.

We’ve obtained (best word in journalism, right there) the first 11 pages of Women’s Silent Tears, Vayner’s self-published book about women in the Holocaust. The book’s host, Lulu.com, took it down after reading our initial report that segments of the work were plagiarized. Well, now that Vayner’s work is freely available for download (cease and desist this, Alex), you can Google it for yourself, or follow our handy guide below.

But first, we just have to share this bit from his wholly original “Acknowledgements” section:

[A]nonymous gratitude goes to the generals and intelligence officers who provided the hands-on skills and knowledge that expanded my horizons and changed my perspective on the world forever.

Now for the more Kaavyaesque bits. From the preface:

Women’s voices have given rise to many powerful accounts of the Holocaust, and yet few researchers have analyzed these perspectives to learn what the horrifying events meant for women in particular. [Stolen from: Experience and Expression: Women, Nazis, and the Holocaust]

From the “Broad Overview of the Holocaust” section:

In ancient times, when there was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the priests of the Temple would offer animal sacrifices to God. Some sacrifices would provide the priests with meat for their own consumption, while others would be wholly consumed and only ashes would be left. The latter type of sacrifices was called, in Greek, holokauston, which means, “wholly burned.” In Hebrew, the word for this type of sacrifice was ‘olah.’ However, when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion and translated the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament into Latin, they borrowed the term holokauston from Greek and rendered ‘olah’ as holocaustum. The English term derives from the Latin word. [Stolen from: The Holocaust History Project]

Then there’s this bit from his section on euthanasia, which appears to be lifted in full.

The term euthanasia (literally, “good death”) usually refers to the inducement of a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual. In Nazi usage, however, “euthanasia” was a euphemistic term for a clandestine program which targeted for systematic killing institutionalized mentally and physically disabled patients, without the knowledge or consent of themselves or their families. [Stolen from: Holocaust Encyclopedia]

There. We’re done. Forever. We’ll update if the guy gets expelled or charged, but that’s it. We’re not even going to tell you about how we got in contact with the guys who made the ski video he bought.

Listen, we tried to put this dog to sleep on Friday, we really did, but it just keeps waking up. If you’re still following Alekseyfest 2006, you might get a kick out of these “developments.” (If you’re new to all this, you’ll have to start at the beginning.) We don’t blame anyone who wants to tap out at this point. Anyway, here’s the latest on our meal ticket:

Even Aleksey Vayner’s lawyers are denying any connection to Aleksey Vayner. The Wall Street Journal phoned Vayner’s legal team and found this:

“After initially saying in an interview that he was exploring privacy lawsuits, Mr. Vayner asked that further requests go through his Fort Lee, N.J., attorney. The lawyer said, via her assistant, that she doesn’t represent Mr. Vayner.”

We took the Journal’s cue and called up Ron Bar-Nadav, the guy Vayner cc’ed on his “cease and disist” letter. We asked him if he represented Vayner: “No, sorry.” Click.

Aleksey’s partner from the ballroom dance segment of the video wrote us to “clear my name.” “I’m just a bystander in this whole mess,” Nansi says, noting that Aleksey is not her regular dancing partner, that she had no other role in creating the video, and that she’s been getting a lot of pervy attention from Internet weirdos. “And my outfit for the video is what I actually wear at dance competitions,” she adds, “so please do not make a big deal out of that since it is nothing out of the extraordinary in the ballroom world.” Noted! (As for Aleksey’s Under Armour, there’s really no excuse.) Nansi’s full e-mail is after the jump.

Aleksey may — may — have bought the ski footage in his video off Craigslist. A tipster wrote us last night with what could be an amazing document — if it’s real. He claims to have a copy of a Craigslist post from August; the file looks real, but then again, Craigslist pages might be the most easily faked on the Internet, and there’s a rash of fake Aleksey stuff floating around. Plus, who saves Craigslist pages? Judge for yourself:

Ski Racing Video Needed
Reply to: aleksey.vayner@gmail.com
Date: 2006-08-01, 4:48PM EDT

I want to purchase high resolution, quality racing/freestyle skiing to add to a school project on skiing. Length not important since i dont need more than 10-15 seconds max. Just needs to be sharp, fast, and impressive. Email asap if you got something

no — it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Compensation: negotiable

188956917

Any nerds out there who could bunk or debunk this? Get in touch.

UPDATE: Oh, and he made The New Yorker, too.

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