Passive Income is Neither

September 27, 2022 1:21 PM

Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins - from Dan Olson, the man who (sort of... not really) singlehandedly crashed the NFT market comes a wild ride into the world of passive income scams.

Focusing on "dollar store Winklevai" the Mikkelsen Twins and their Audible SEO spam training courses, Dan gets into the weeds on the winners and losers of this multi-layer marketing grift (hint: actual creators are not the winners).

posted by Laura Palmer's Cold Dead Kiss (29 comments total)

MetaFilter: pretty cheap and reasonably legal
posted by hippybear at 2:15 PM on September 27, 2022 [15 favorites]

Now if I can only hire someone to turn my comments here into an audiobook which I can put up on this new fangled Audible thing I just heard about...
posted by Catblack at 3:23 PM on September 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

“These scams work because banks have to make funds from deposited checks available within a day or two, but it can take weeks to uncover a fake.”

It seems impossible that this could be true in the year of our Lord 2022.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:29 PM on September 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

Surely you mean, the year of our G-d 5783, which just started recently....
posted by hippybear at 3:40 PM on September 27, 2022 [13 favorites]

So I watched this whole thing. It was really interesting. The revelation that gig workers are being shortchanged for their labor is not at all surprising to me, but 90% is pretty shocking.

I'd been wondering what those ads were that I was skipping with the woman sitting by the pool claiming SO MUCH INCOME... now I know.

I've done professional writing, probably underpaid but it was for a local gay publication and I felt totally special to have actual Professional Journalism to put on my resume. But that was nothing like what these folks are going through.

My one attempt at NaNoWriMo nearly ended in suicide after a week. So, never that again.

I'm glad Dan is peeling back the onion on these schemes. I got a very strong "The Rehearsal" vibes when he was doing his own writing. I don't know how deliberate that was. (I also have no idea how real The Rehearsal was, so that's fair?)

Also, this is the first time during a YouTube video when I was saying mentally to myself, to the handsome beardy-face on the screen, "take off your shirt, take off your shirt" and suddenly they were there, shirtless! That was a definite surprise.

Thanks for posting. This is a world I will mostly never engage with, but it's good to know what is going on if I ever encounter someone thinking about it.
posted by hippybear at 4:02 PM on September 27, 2022 [8 favorites]

"The personality matrix needed to succeed basically eliminates people who aren't sociopaths" - thanks, Dan Olson, for recapping everything I figured out from the years when I kept pondering either becoming a terrible gig-economy ghostwriter for quick bucks, or writing terrible books and keeping the copyright to them and selling them on my own terms.

(A LOT of the terrible gig-economy ghostwriting gigs out there are for writing diet books, and I am unwilling to engage with diet culture on that scale, so I definitely can't hack it as a gig-economy ghostwriter. But ever since then, I have relied on the assumption that the majority of diet books on Amazon were written for $250 by someone who is not being paid enough to take a stab at doing adequate research!)
posted by Jeanne at 4:40 PM on September 27, 2022 [19 favorites]

I think if you were a professional low-quality audible trending topics ghostwriter, you could probably write the books faster bc you'd be able to recycle a lot of verbiage. You know, take the same format for the book's introduction and swap the topic to the new one. But also, $250 to write a 25,000 word book!!!! And the people who own the message board that set you up with that terrible deal take half!!!!! Impressed the book('s second page) was as readble as it was.
posted by subdee at 6:23 PM on September 27, 2022

I watched the entire video. It's good, and I like Dan's other videos too.

One thing he didn't touch on (because it'd be a whole other 90 minute video) is the role that language model AIs like GPT-3 play into this. There's the usual overhyped AI promises, etc. But I write books on automation and people make "you should automate book writing" jokes at me, so I took I finally got an account to play around with GPT-3.

It's impressive, and better Markov chains and your phone's autocorrect, but it's not a sentient being or anything. It can produce grammatically-correct but utterly tepid and generic sentences about the prompt you give it. It's like they made a robot based on a high school student who plagiarizes Wikipedia for a school report. But man, it is so confident in its tone about the information that it delivers to you. It'd make a great politician or corporate PR flak.

There's a scene in the 1985 movie Real Genius where precocious college students are at a campus bar celebrating their recent engineering project success. They're visited by a recluse eccentric genius who tells them their laser project is high-energy, portable, unlimited range, one-shot capacity and that means it's only useful as a space-based assassination device. The college students have unknowingly built a weapon to kill people. "This is not good," a young Val Kilmer says.

I had a similar realization with GPT-3. It's grammatically-correct but utterly inane. It produces the sort of bland, says-nothing content of spam blogs, but it can produces enormous quantities. And this comes at a time when Trump has absolutely proven that people don't care about the actual words you use, but just want to consume more and more of a general vibe. These natural language models are perfect for producing content farm drek and empty political rhetoric to power social media propaganda bots.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:42 PM on September 27, 2022 [38 favorites]

I really, really wish he turned this into an article. I am deeply interested in this but cannot sit through an hour of video.
posted by rednikki at 7:02 PM on September 27, 2022 [23 favorites]

people don't care about the actual words you use, but just want to consume more and more of a general vibe

Literally half of the art hanging on my walls was generated by DALL-E2 from my prompts, because I only care about the general vibe (as you say) and I got tired of people saying I needed shit on my walls. AI plus Costco Photo equals "Art"! Yay! Problem solved!

...so, point being, yeah the apocalypse is pretty much already here and jesus christ we're hosed and also it's my fault. Goddammit we keep getting the Most Stupid Apocalypse and while I am personally to blame for some of it I feel like maybe my guilt is out of scale and it's way way way too late so perhaps we need to stop saying "this is probably bad" and do a lot more of "well, what the fuck do we do now?" thinking.

I dunno, it increasingly feels like complaining about gravity, or entropy, or such.
posted by aramaic at 8:02 PM on September 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

I really, really wish he turned this into an article.

I really, really am happy that he didn't. This type of video is something I enjoy. I also enjoy articles, but it is nice to live in a world in which information and entertainment can be had in a variety of mediums.

Personally, I dislike it when people make movies out of things I would prefer were books. I really wish they were catering to me and my inability to sit still through a movie.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:51 PM on September 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

Blame capitalism for why things are videos. Videos get people paid way better than articles.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 10:12 PM on September 27, 2022 [9 favorites]

I really, really wish he turned this into an article.

Well, I guess you can yourself, by... clicking "Show transcript" and then copying it all to a text file? Okay, that's a sucky method and just gives you a massive wall of text. Though if you insert the chapter headings from YouTube to give it some structure, it's surprisingly readable thanks to its (by construction) conversational style...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xyc8opsf8noqq69/contrepreneurs.md?dl=0
(I suggest zooming in and really narrowing your browser window)

N.B. I only did this as an experiment to see how much mileage you could get out of the transcripts with minimal effort, and it's more than I expected! I am not suggesting this will be at all satisfactory to someone who actually wishes to read an article.
posted by a car full of lions at 12:35 AM on September 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

The video is fairly inefficient, but they can't all be "Line Goes Up", which was brilliant.

A lot of it was what he went through to try writing a low quality book in 25 days.

It's basically about people who don't care about quality trying to get money for teaching how to produce a low-quality audible book scam. I'm curious about how much money they get, but that's probably hard to find out.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:13 AM on September 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

I can't wait to incorporate "Big Time Action-Taker" into my daily vocabulary, it's so beautiful.

N.B. I only did this as an experiment to see how much mileage you could get out of the transcripts with minimal effort...

I swear I thought this was going to cut to a car full of lions selling seminars on how you too can make loadsa passive $$$$$ by copying video transcripts (easy, see??) and hiring narrators (no skills needed!!!!) to turn them into audiobooks and raking in that dough!!!!!!!!!!!!
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 1:27 AM on September 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

On the one hand it probably didn't need to be over an hour long, on the other hand he spent 84 hours writing a low-quality book as research for the video - and that was just the tracked time on that one part of the video. If I'd spent that much time I'd want to get more than a 10min video out of it too.
posted by subdee at 3:29 AM on September 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

Maybe no real transcript, but Dan did post the e-book of his hastily produced book on his Patreon.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:09 AM on September 28, 2022

I always wonder how many of those sorts of "you can retire in (x) off this passive income!" cons are also, y'know, no big deal due to cost of living differences. Like, to a midwestern American you see (x) as a beautiful tropical island country, but anyone with $100k to their name would be set up fairly well if they're willing to sell their home and go live the expat beach bum lifestyle.

Not minimizing that $100k is still a lot of money, but it's not the lottery winning billionaire lifestyle that these sorts of "entrepreneurs" suggest it is, either.
posted by Kyol at 7:15 AM on September 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

"We live in an era of fraud in America...what bothers me isn't that fraud is not nice, or that fraud is mean, it's that for 15,000 years fraud and short-sighted thinking have never worked...I thought we were better than this..."

To me it's becoming clear that we are way out over our skis in terms of what kind of political economy we're running on a monkey brain that just can't hack it.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 7:23 AM on September 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

Call me shallow if you must, but after watching the whole thing, I've decided I need a Worth Decider certificate too.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:59 AM on September 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

I've decided I need a photoshoot of my library science degree with an aggressive dubstep soundtrack.
posted by Jeanne at 8:02 AM on September 28, 2022 [18 favorites]

[heavy dubstep]
posted by zenon at 9:45 AM on September 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

I found Dan's increasingly dishevelled attire, untrimmed beard, and depressed affect, as he got deeper into writing his book, very funny. This would not have been so amusing in written form. The other aspect which benefited from the video form was the extracts of narration from the Mikkelsens' promotional materials. Perhaps it's my imagination, but Christian's tone of voice seems very flat as he lies about how easy the programme is and how much passive incomes participants are guaranteed, and then a note of desperation enters as he pleads for the listener to send him money. I thought I could hear a man caught in his own grift—he's not a particularly talented grifter, the pool of suckers willing to send him dollars is drying up, and he doesn't have any genuine skills to fall back on.

Note that Dan released A Skeptic's Guide to Hypnosis under a Creative Commons license, so you can find it here on archive.org if you really want to see what he was able to come up with under the ghost-writer (-ish) constraints.
posted by cyanistes at 10:10 AM on September 28, 2022 [9 favorites]

[aggressive dubstep]
posted by zenon at 11:15 AM on September 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Grift A - Grift B formula also reminds me of something that I've read about Amway: they no longer concentrate on selling soap or other stuff in bulk, especially as big-box stores such as Costco and Sam's Club have eaten into that market; they concentrate on selling motivational tapes to distributors on how to grow their downline.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:39 PM on September 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

I, too, wondered about whether these ghost writers used text generating software to make these word counts. I know I would.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:47 PM on September 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

I signed up for a got-3 account last night and yeah, you could easily do that. I don’t know enough about how training your model works, but I suspect with a little bit of technical savvy, you could easily feed it subject matter data and have it improve on the specific topic (I think).
posted by [insert clever name here] at 8:38 AM on September 29, 2022

His book about Hypnosis linked above by cyanistes is actually a decent overview of Mesmerism and stage hypnosis.

I was looking for more background about Dan Olsen (he has the same name as some business guru) and there's a Vice interview that summarizes his lecture in less than 2 hours.
posted by ovvl at 10:56 AM on September 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Pounded in the Butt by the Ghostwriting Grindset is not Tingle's best imo.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:27 PM on September 29, 2022 [4 favorites]