So I’ve been getting bombarded with these ads
on YouTube lately, all the hustle culture, passive income, work from your garage, goulash
of multi-level marketing, investment scams, cryptocurrency, and business guru
nonsense. You know the stuff. “I’m here, outside my garage,
just bought this new Lamborghini” “Wanna know the best way of making a big income online? It’s making a lot
of small incomes online.” “I’m here within 400 feet of an
elementary school to prove the haters wrong and to tell you about
an unmissable business opportunity.” “If you give me your money I will use
my magic powers to guarantee 500% APY” But there was one in particular that’s under
my skin, that’s got my undies in a bunch, because I and a friend kept getting it and
that’s for these goddamn Mikkelsen Twins. “The new best way to make money
online that nobody is talking about is something you’ve never
heard of before, is using Audible” “I've been getting paid a thousand dollars a
month if not more just from this app on my phone and I don't know if you can see
this but it's called Audible” These guys are part of the class of online
parasite we’ll be calling Contrepreneurs, a mix of con-artist and entrepreneur the kind of
thoughtfluencing bootstrapper who shows you his lambo before he shows you his bookshelf to prime
you for a pitch on how he can teach you how to be the best small business hustler you can be if
only you can put yourself into the right grindset. The phrase that we’re going to be hearing
a lot as we cover the subject is “passive income,” that’s the thing that’s being promised, a
source of income that requires little or no active upkeep in order to maintain, like dividends,
residuals, and royalties. You put in a couple thousand hours writing a book or making a
movie and then once it’s out there you keep making money as long as people keep buying it, and
getting people to buy it is someone else’s job. The concept in and of itself is not
fraudulent, it is in fact a pretty sweet deal and that’s why we should support
universal basic income as a political policy, but passive income in a rhetorical
context becomes a red flag because of how it’s deployed as a very effective
lure into fraudulent businesses. Contrepreneurs are a dime a dozen, there’s
mountains of these people out there, because, as we’ll explore, it’s pretty cheap and it’s
reasonably legal. We’ll get into more detail later, but as opposed to an outright fraud,
where you sell something that doesn’t exist or is deeply misrepresented, the trick
of the contrepreneur is to convince you to massively over-pay for something with
already extremely nebulous value: advice. Now, if we evaluate the grift by its own logical
mechanisms this is a sound strategy. Like, let’s set aside morality or ethics
and just evaluate it as a business. Advice costs very little to manufacture,
requires no raw materials, weighs nothing, and is evaluated in hindsight. So you have
very low production costs on one hand, and a heavily obfuscated value
proposition where you get to collect payment for a product long before
a naive buyer could ever realize the value. And on the ethical-slash-legal side, as long
as the advice you produce isn’t constructed of outright lies and falsehoods you’ve not explicitly
conned anyone. Shallow advice repackaging common, widely known, broadly available, ineffective,
or out of date information is still real advice, so really who’s to say what
that advice is actually worth? Me. I’m the one who gets to decide what it’s worth. I’ve got a certificate from the Brad
Default Presidential Academy that says so. [heavy dubstep] Styling themselves as
burnouts-turned-publishing-gurus theseDollar General Winkelvii are the villain
of today’s video, but I do really want to stress that these guys are not the end boss by any
metric. They’re not particularly successful, they’re not big names in the business, they’re
only notorious in one niche of the internet, and they’re not just clones of each other
but of thousands of other similar hustlers. I want to talk about them not because
they, specifically need to be stopped Though they do need to be
stopped, that’s, they should stop I want to talk about them not because
they specifically need to be stopped but because they are of a type, they are a
representative sample of a category of grift, and also because they’re kinda incompetent
and that makes them entertaining. Like, they’re just a little too honest about the
nature of the scam. While they do utilize a lot of the standard smokescreen vocabulary
and hard-sell tactics, they are also, often, extremely straightforward
with how bad the whole scheme is. Which goes to the nature of their grift: they
promise to train you how to become a grifter. The Mikkelsen twins are
Christian and the other one. I never remember his name. Christian
is the point man in their relationship, he’s the one who does all the talking in
their videos, he’s the one who does all the talking on their podcast, and he’s the
one whose name is on all the spam emails. Rasmus. His name is Rasmus. They’re twins. I don’t even know if I
blurred the right one for this joke. In their personal mythology they were
under-achieving burnouts drifting through community college and working
part time at various low-paying jobs like receptionist and takeout delivery
driver while smoking da weed every day. “Anyway, we only lasted about four months there
because we couldn't stand it. I find it funny how we didn't have the balls to quit or tell
our parents, so we just stopped showing up one day. Good times … Not. We spent the next
three months smoking pot every single day. “ What percent of the stories they tell
about themselves are actually true is definitely questionable, they do not
espouse reliability as narrators, and are openly willing to
just, like, make stuff up. “I feel like you’re wondering if you can do this
too,” I tell Charlotte. She nods her head. “One sec.” I take the backpack off my shoulders,
lay it on the ground, and unzip it. I reach my hand in and take out a mint condition copy
of The Freedom Shortcut by the Mikkelsen Twins. “Take this. It’ll tell you everything.” The ONLY part of that story that isn’t true
is when I pulled out a copy of this book and handed it to Charlotte. Although,
if this book had existed at that time, that’s definitely what would have happened.” That said, it’s also kinda not
worth parsing in any meaningful detail. They’re not noteworthy enough
to merit an intense background check, and even their obvious fabrications are pretty
low-rent and unambitious. Who cares if they hand out copies of their books like business cards?
How else are they going to get rid of them? Like they have a whole thing about
turning their life around in Community College and busting ass to get straight
As, but also admit that all the courses they took were low-stakes filler,
if not outright attendance-based, and then they complain that they didn’t
actually learn anything at college. But, you know, it’s gotta be at
least a little bit above board, since they were featured in well respected,
business-focused magazine Forbes. Wait, sorry, there’s a footnote. Featured in a Forbes
Contributor post written by Celinne de Costa, a hustle culture guru who sells online
courses on brand narrative building. Forbes Contributors are unpaid opinion bloggers
with functionally no editorial oversight and seeing as to how de Costa is herself a hustle
guru with a specialty in building narrative, and here she’s writing an article building
brand narrative for these guys on a platform that has the adjacency to editorial prestige,
I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything, I’m not saying there’s impropriety at play
here, but those facts placed adjacent to each other might suggest to an observer that there
might be maybe the silhouette of impropriety, that the possibility exists that this may or
may not have actually been a paid promotional piece for the purpose of search engine
optimization and legitimization, right? So there’s a couple different layers
to the scheme that they’ve got going, so I’ve built this griftmap to help us through it. At the top are the Mikkelsen Twins, and
they’re running what we’ll call Grift A. Grift A is a guru workshop, book, seminar
series, private Facebook group where the Twins promise that they will teach you how
to unlock passive income. This is ultimately a pretty straightforward workshop grift, and in
this layer we can find all the things that you would expect. When you visit the website there’s
a fake countdown timer and the assertion that Space Is Limited. The workshop is implied to
be live, with meaningful time slots, but the presentation itself is, of course, pre-recorded
and slots are available 24 hours a day. Christian references things that “just happened”,
like a certain number of slots filling up, despite the fact that it’s prerecorded and
thus that thing obviously didn’t just happen. “okay guys do we have a deal? there's a chat
function on your screen please go into the chat and type deal if we have a deal if you
promise that you stick around to the end and just hear what this is all about all caps
spam all right amazing thank you so much” “you have to hurry and lock in your spot
as soon as I reveal the button to join” It’s all high pressure sales tactics, up-selling
a subscription service, predictable to the point that I would call this a grift regardless
of what their product actually was. And that’s where it gets interesting,
because what they’re selling is Grift B. Grift B is called “made for you audiobooks.” “Done for you audiobooks” Done for you Audiobooks “now a done for you audiobook or dfy
for short is an audiobook that you own and makes you money but is written
and narrated by someone else so I want to be super clear on this we call these
done for you audiobooks because all the work is done for you so with these you do
not need to narrate anything yourself you do not need to write anything yourself you
do not need to design any cover yourself you do next to nothing when it comes to actually
creating your you're done for you audiobook” The idea, is that you scour Amazon and Audible
for trending topics, specifically non-fiction topics with very low standards of evidence or
ones favoured by people who are hostile towards science, pick a couple that you can smash together
into a one sentence summary, hire a ghostwriter to turn that sentence into a short book, hire
a voice actor to turn that short book into a three hour audiobook, then hire the cheapest
graphic designer you can find to make a cover, and spam the resulting package on every ebook
and audiobook platform you can get access to. For example, you might see that keto
dieting and self-hypnosis are trending, both subjects with dubious real-world value
and extremely low standards of evidence where you can say basically anything you want, and
decide to combine the two into a single book, offloading the effort of that
nonsense task onto someone else, and then aggressively spamming the resulting
product on every platform available. That is, in and of itself, a grift. The seminar
series they’re trying to sell you is, itself, teaching you to become a grifter whose
product is low-quality, exploitative spam. And then, of course, Grift B feeds back into Grift
A because the expectation is that you utilize their private Facebook groups to review trade in
order to maximize the visibility of your spam. They don’t outright call this review-trading, but they do tell you to do all the individual
steps that constitute review-trading. “the next bonus you're getting is free access
to the private AIA audiobook reviews group you go in you make a post like this saying that
you have a new audiobook on Audible and that you want to do some code swaps and leave it on
as a review on each other's audiobook and then what will happen is you'll get a bunch
of responses from people who are happy to leave an honest review on your audiobook
and then boom now you have a good starting point for your reviews and once you have
50 you now qualify for the 500 cash bonus” Okay, so this whole arrangement is kinda
extremely weird in a whole bunch of ways. The Twins are just barely successful enough at
this to have a presence that people have noticed, but they haven’t learned how to make
good use of euphemisms and innuendos. While the core of it is low effort, low
quality, a lot of what they’re telling you to do is actually violating the terms of
service for the platforms that you’re using. Basically they’re not smart enough
to disguise the fraudulent parts of their system, and have a habit
of saying the quiet part out loud. “so there are a lot of ways to get reviews but
the most important thing is to always do it ethically and buy the books and honestly
that can sometimes be a bit of a pain” “I know I just admitted that you
need to do work to make this happen, but don’t let that scare you. I have yet to
find another model that requires less effort, money, time, and skill to be successful.
And that’s because I’m going to show you how to get professionals to do
most of the hard work for you.” The seminar on the whole is just a
really good example of quality filtering, where the pitch is bad, which causes the
targets to self-select for a lower standard of quality. It’s the same dynamic as the
classic 419 fraud, the Nigerian prince scam. Like small details of deranged framing, like when
they call Audible “Amazon’s best kept secret.” “well it's now time then to introduce to
you Amazon's best kept secret: Audible” Basically that one line is going to filter out so, so many people, because the only people who
are going to hear that and just accept it at face value are people who just aren’t that
familiar with, you know, a lot of things. a word from our sponsors Audible leave
this scenario in the past by signing up for Audible which is why I am most
pleased to introduce you to Audible brought to you by Audible Audible
Audible's Audible Audible Audible Audible Audible Audible Audible.com thank
you to Audible for sponsoring this video. And, like, this is mean, I feel mean saying
it, but really Christian said it first, their target market is openly people who are
unskilled and aren’t interested in learning new skills. Like the kind of person who would
say “I wrote a book” after doing the absolute bare minimum in hiring someone else to write
a book that they then put a fake name on. “that's why this is truly for beginners
with no prior experience or skills with making money online or for people who
just don't have the time or desire to learn any new skills because this is
something literally anyone can do” Including a few case studies or testimonials
makes sense in just about any business pitch, but there’s diminishing returns with
each additional one you include, and at a certain point it takes on
a character of desperate insecurity. Now, I don’t know that anyone can say, you know, mathematically where that precise line
is, but for sure, this is over it. here we have Sarah Sarah is a new mom here
we have have an email that we received from Patrick and here we have Tim from the Netherlands
here we have Chase here we have Eric what you're about to see was Trevor's Escape here we have
Pierre Sean Richard Kim Brandon here Gerald's results Destiny Carmen here who's a Limon from
Bangladesh Ricardo Rob Gary here like Yvonne here Solomon Dane and here we have Kyle here we
have Tom here we have Abhishek Rick here Henny like our no here Quan here who Amina like
Alessandro from Italy like Ed Juan Matthias Mel Yvonne here hey Jack here Juan here came
here from Ahmad savera Judy Jasmine Stacy Alex Also, like, there’s something fishy going on here. “Here we have Kelly Rhodes, award winning
narrator of about 100 audiobooks, female from New York there's a picture of her as well
as some audio samples that you can listen to” Okay, but, like, I’m sorry, what?
There’s some hijinx at play. That says female, that says
male, the samples sound like this “the majority of individuals react to new ideas
with apprehension suspicion that even denial” and an image search tells me that
this is a photo of audiobook actress Christina Delaine who is… the voice of
Valiona in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm!? “Do as the master commands, Theralian! Kill them!” Cool. Okay, the point is what is the point
of this lie? This has been manipulated, effort went into creating
this lie, but to what end? Okay, my theory is that this entire seminar is a Frankenstein creation that they update
bits and pieces of every couple months. I recently went back to watch it again in order to
try and interact with the live moderator that is, in theory, on hand to answer questions,
and got an entirely different introduction. YouTuber Emma Thorne did a video about the twins
back in September for 2021 and the version of the seminar she got is also substantially
the same with some very funny differences “you'll just say hey Don I went through a few of your samples and they were great I'd
love for you to narrate my audiobook” “wait so they're asking him to do it less” There’s already all sorts of
audio jank throughout the video, very obvious splices from completely
different recording environments, and so my original theory was maybe what happened
was at one point this said Christina Delaine, and she had to tell them to piss off because they
were sending her low quality, garbage clients. But I reached out to her and she said she’d never
heard of these guys before, and so it turns out that I don’t know what’s up, it’s a level of
deception where the reasons for the deception don’t make any sense, and the longer I think
about it the more I feel like I’m going crazy. Like, it’s just all intended to wear you down.
The excessive use of shallow testimonials is there to overload your critical thinking, wear down
your skepticism, and push past your concerns, so that when it comes time for the hard sell they
can literally tell you to push past your concerns. “even if you're a tiny bit unsure I need you to go
there and secure your spot what we've learned is the people we want to work with are those of you
who take not just fast action but instant action so when you want something you take it because
that tells us you're a big time action taker” The seminar actually does include a few
really amazing morsels of information. Not information about the publishing industry,
or how to succeed in any legitimate industry, but for sure some deeply entertaining
insights into the Twins and their operation. For example Christian drops this “this right here is just a fraction of
our audiobooks that I could fit on one screen and most of these aren't even
on Audible yet just because I've been too busy which is exactly why we're
looking for partners to do this with” Now, this is maybe initially
impressive until you spend literally any time actively looking at it, because
if you actually try and ingest the information, the details, rather than accepting the
initial impact at face value, then you realize that most of these are repeats. Of the
60 books shown there’s only 25 unique titles. Stoicism for [censored] is up there three
times, How to make your [censored] [censored] [censored] is on there twice, and we’ve
even got two copies of [long censored]. Now, why these were blurred out I have no clue, I
don’t know what they’re hiding there, it could be… anything. One sec [muzak] How To Make Your Wildest Sex
Fantasies Come True by Molly Harrison, it’s worth noting that the
stock photo used is, like, one of the top twenty hits on shutterstock
just by searching the term “bondage”. 69 Sex Secrets Every Man
Needs to Know by Frank Jameson And then last, but hardly
least, we’ve got Stoicism. For [ __ ]. By Stanley Barnes. Now, unfortunately I wasn’t able to track
down copies of any of these because, despite what Christian said earlier “this right here is just a fraction
of our audiobooks that I could fit on one screen and most of these
aren't even on Audible yet” These are not books they hadn’t published
yet, when recording the seminar in early 2022, but rather books they had already published in
2018 and 2019, which have since been taken down. In fact of the 40 some odd books they are
listed as the publisher for on Google Books, a scant few of them are still available
in any capacity, and even then it seems to be mainly because I forget to check
Audible.com and instead checked Audible.ca. Now, there is a good chance that there’s
more out there that I just didn’t find: across 45 different titles they used 43 different
pen names, and the only reason I found all these is because they listed themselves as the
publisher, and there’s titles that I did find that didn’t come up in the publisher search, but
came up through direct searches. It’s all just boring details to say that this is probably an
incomplete list, and sadly I wasn’t able to get my hands on a copy of Stoicism for [ __ ] or How
to Make Your Wildest Sex Fantasies Come True, not that it would matter if we did, because we know
these two ding dongs didn’t actually write them. So without access to any of these books, how are we to discover what comes
out of this sausage factory? Why, we give it a go ourselves, obviously. Now, I didn’t bother signing up for their actual
paid content because it is transparently not going to be worth the money. What they promise as
part of that are some one-on-one calls with their coaches, who are just some people who have
worked their way up the recruitment ranks, MLM style, access to a case study
that I’ll talk about in a second here, and, the big thing, they claim they will
basically hand you your first book subject, saving you the step of scouring Audible
trending topics for something to copy. The case study is also pretty questionable
since in the seminar they already summarize what this guy did to see his audiobook success,
which, hilariously, isn’t even the Mikkelsen method. He just took a bunch of books he
had already written years and years ago and got them turned into audiobooks. That’s not
made-for-you audiobooks, that’s just audiobooks. So it was tempting purely to see just how bad I’d
get screwed on all this stuff, especially the one on one calls, but the cost was just too high.
They’re asking for over $2000, and that’s before the inevitable up-sells, and I know it’s not worth
this much, because I’m a certified worth-decider. [aggressive dubstep] What I did decide to do was follow their method. I went on Audible, I looked up some keywords, I
pretended to care about rankings, and I smashed a bunch of them together in an incredibly
tasteless combination because I figured, hey, if we’re going to prod this system
we might as well test its limits. Now, the Mikkelsens recommend a specific
ghostwriting service, The Urban Writers, to the point that in the seminar Christian says
they’re friends with the owners and teases that buying the premium AIA package gets you
access to things like discount codes. “we've worked out an exclusive
deal with our favorite ghostwriting company to provide you with the lowest
ghostwriting prices humanly possible, it's the same deal normally only we can
get because we're friends with the CEO” Following all of Christian’s advice,
minus the options that no longer exist, I picked the cheapest package available, 25,000 words, and let The Urban Writers
make as many decisions for me as possible. So, what did I give them? Well. I wanted to test the ethical limits of the system
by presenting something that was just ever so over the line, because the hitch in this is that once
you submit your pitch to The Urban Writers there’s a whole back end where the writers basically
compete to take posted projects. Obviously if I cooked up something very deliberately offensive
there’s a good chance that no one would take it on as a project, and I wouldn’t consider
that to be an ethical success of the system. And on the off-chance someone behind the scenes
did take the job, that’s either because they’re so desperate that they’re willing to write
hate speech or they’re just already comfortable writing hate speech, and I didn’t want to
be party to either of those possibilities. So let’s keep it at least a little bit
lighter: what if we make some just truly irresponsible health claims and use that as
the basis to create a book that’s not hateful, but still really shouldn’t exist? Can self-hypnosis treat epilepsy?
Can it maybe even cure it? We don’t have the answer to that, but we have a lot of leading questions that’ll
let you come to that conclusion on your own in Treating Epilepsy with Self-Hypnosis: A Guide
to a Free and Healthy You by Brad Default I cooked up the title, came up with a pen
name, threw together an outline that felt like it would at least be able to hit
25,000 words, mashed in Keto dieting and something about prions just to cover
my bases, tag-wise, and submitted it. Now, the Urban Writers as an outfit is
worth some scrutiny in their own right. The Urban Writers is the creation
of Marco and Natasha Moutinho, a husband and wife team of
Canadian… entrepreneurs. “what's up everyone I'm Marco and
I'm Natasha and we're the Moutinhos” The Urban Writers was founded in
2017 as a division of Dibbly Inc. alongside Dibbly Publishing, both
also creations of the Moutinhos. No, I don’t know why their own name
is misspelled on their own website. The Urban Writers manages to look mostly
legit at first blush and if you don’t know anything about the industry of ghost
writing then it all sounds… normal? The Urban Writers functions as a job-posting
board for ghostwriting contracts. In the Mikkelsen presentation it is postured
as though there’s the option to just, like, submit something and walk
away, let TUW assign a writer, and then just come back and pick up
the deliverables when it’s all done. Maybe that was the case in the past, but that was not accurate to my
experience and I suspect I know why. See, the critical word in there
was “assign.” If The Urban Writers are assigning projects to specific writers
then that’s not a contractor relationship, that person is an employee. So, and
you probably already guessed this, The Urban Writers is, in fact, a post-Uber gig
economy nightmare where “””freelancers””” are treated like employees to the maximum
extent the owners can get away with. “What makes us unique is the culture
we have fostered within our community.” Yeah, sure. So my pitch gets picked up by Scott. Scott is
not his real name, because writers at TUW are not permitted to use anything other than a pen name,
and are subject to disciplinary action if they use their real names, disclose their real names,
or provide a means of being contacted outside the platform. They’re also not free to negotiate
their own rates, but we’ll get back to that later. Scott is a champion. Scott took all
Brad’s insane ideas about prions and keto and self hypnosis and epilepsy and
very delicately tied them together into a somewhat morally defensible product. Just
to really drive this point, we like Scott. The end result is not good, it’s more
or less exactly what you would expect, but it exists and was delivered on time,
and that alone is something of a miracle. Before I get into some of
the details about the book, I want to talk a bit about those expectations,
and kinda broadly about ghostwriting itself. I do not mean for this to be, in any way, an
impugnment of ghostwriting as a craft. It’s a niche of writing that requires professionalism
and a set of specific skills. Ghostwriters need to be able to adopt the voice of their subject
and typically need to work under particularly rigorous delivery timelines, something not
all writers can do. So a bunch of the flaws and failings that we’re going to go into
are not strictly the result of ghostwriting in and of itself, but are the product of
the overall environment that is curated. When I say “it’s exactly what you would
expect” I mean that if you know a thing or two about writing long form nonfiction then
you can probably look at the expectations and draw a few natural conclusions about what the
end product more or less needs to look like. The deliverable is 25,000 words, the turnaround
is 30 days with a few days in there for administrative junk, so basically 25 days of
actual writing, average of 1000 words per day, that’s a pretty stiff pace but not an absurd
requirement of a professional. The big hitch there is research. The main thing that slows down
a nonfiction writer is the need to look stuff up, source quotes, and fact-check claims.
Depending on the subject it might take a really long time just to find a couple
useful sources, and often the way that you discover a source is garbage is by
spending hours and hours processing it. Nothing stings quite as much as spending a whole
bunch of time tracking down some obscure 19th century text only to then spend several more hours
reading it only to come to the conclusion that it contains no insights, no new information, and is
incredibly poorly written and not worth quoting. So with these constraints in mind, the
number one prediction we can make is that the final product is more likely than not
going to be quite shallow and repetitive, leaning heavily on easily available
sources. The timelines are just too tight to really delve into the subject
or worry about being creative and clever, and you just have to imagine that the
emotional investment is going to be pretty low. If you’re reading this, you, a friend, or
a loved one have likely been diagnosed with epilepsy. Perhaps it is a recent diagnosis, or
you’ve been living with it for years. Regardless, you are no doubt familiar with the
challenges that come with his disease. However, there are limits to conventional
medicine. Epilepsy treatments don’t work for everyone. Sometimes they are ineffective,
other times they are too time-consuming. In the search for respite from epilepsy, sometimes
the remedy comes with its own set of caveats. I’ve studied hypnotherapy for years and have been
a firm believer in the power of self-hypnosis. Let’s pause for a second and talk about ethics. I said one of my goals in this was to push
the ethical boundaries of the system, but, shockingly, the system doesn’t have any. From The Urban Writers’ own training materials: Do books need to be objective? The short answer is “not always!” Many of our non-fiction customers
have books written because they want to market their business/product or
to further their business interests. They do not necessarily want both side
of the story told! Especially when an objective book might harm their business
interests/sales/potential customer base. A customer might not be too pleased if our writers
point out that they’re actually selling something that’s ineffective to their clients or that
their business’s claims are unsubstantiated! So just openly, if the customer wants you to lie,
misrepresent facts, or make fraudulent claims, your job is to facilitate that, they’re the
one taking credit for it. Just, you know, lower your standards. There’s nothing illegal about that, per se,
but it’s telling, it’s indicative of the internal culture of the company that they’re
like “oh yeah, this is just what we do.” Now, I don’t want to make too much fun of Treating
Epilepsy with Self-Hypnosis: A Guide to a Free and Healthy You by Brad Default because ultimately
it’s a product that I got someone else to make. The insane claims, like sexual activity increases
your prion score and thus impedes self-hypnosis and makes you more susceptible to epilepsy is not
some organic nonsense, it is entirely synthetic even if the person doing the actual writing needed
to behave as though the request was sincere. And for the most part, somewhat predictably, Scott
minimized the presence of this insanity, mostly leaning on shallow, easily available information
in order to meet word count. Most of the book, like approaching two thirds, is just defining
stuff or loosely summarizing very basic history. The end result is pretty much what we
were expecting, which would support our hypothesis about what needs to be
done to get something like this done. But I’m not satisfied with that. That feels too…
distant, too sterile. Like, sure, I know what it’s like to write thousands of words of nonfiction,
I know what it’s like to do research, and I even vaguely remember what it’s like to have meaningful
deadlines, but that’s not the same thing. The only way to really, properly visualize what
it means to try and churn out this kind of content mill detritus is if we, like, actually did it
ourselves and then documented the whole process. it's fine it's fine so I've been digging into
these ghost writing outfits and really looking at the numbers that are involved so I'm commissioning
this book from the undergrad writers and then in parallel with that I am going to try to also write
a book at the same pace and the topic that I've selected for myself at the moment is a skeptic's
guide to hypnosis so the book is going to be 25 000 words I'm giving myself a month to
do it they assume a thousand words per day so that's 25 writing days plus five
days for like editing an administrative slop and then delivery to the client so
I want to try to keep Pace with that so I'm gonna try to do a thousand words per
day for 25 days on the subject of hypnosis okay got some developments just from last night
so I've got the outline and I have instinctively just structured it the same as I structured
the outlines for scripts and I could just try to write it the way that I normally would and
then afterwards uh try to bulk up the word count basically that that once it's once it's done done
once it's like drafted then just try to make it longer until it uh until it hits word count now
my worry about that is that if I do it that way I will write myself into too many corners my
normal style will get in the way of accomplishing the accomplishing the task so that's what I'm
worried about the the other approach would be to just try to brute force it more or less
from the beginning and just like beginning to end plow forward through it like what chapter
are you on you're writing that chapter of course many people outright dismiss hypnosis has a
thing entirely insisting that it's all in all a hoax and the motivations for making this claim
aren't without justification there's a lot of conflicting sometimes incoherent information out
there people claiming that hypnosis is the best way to quit smoking or rewire your eating habits
incredulous claims about hypnotic regression and of course famous Tales of hypnosis being used
to unlock the truth about alien abductions oh boy okay so uh so I'm I'm behind I'm already
like uh 4 000 words behind so that's not a great uh that's not a great rate even just having to
like answer emails in the morning on a different subject um can like really delay how quickly I
can get into a mindset to think about this this book project that's a me problem yeah so I think
I'm going to stop this find one of these Mickelson books um and like just like read the free excerpts
whatever like just get the voice just try to get the get that writing voice and then go back
and try and stretch what I've got like taffy okay today was fun but I think my batteries
are dying so I'm gonna try to be quick here uh I managed to get through over
2500 words today I learned some like really weird interesting historical facts in uh
in writing about the history of hypnosis turns out that Mesmer uh was a real strange guy yeah
I'm feeling good about today went well foreign where we're halfway through we're more or less
halfway through the uh writing period um we're not not quite half done the book we're behind any
part where I need to do like synthesis research is is substantially more difficult so my normal worry
with my method is that I end up with these like weird Junctions and weird repetitions and blah
blah blah maybe that's just not a problem now yeah it's um it's getting harder I don't know I don't
know there's some things that I'm worried about um and I'm behind okay oh Okay so yesterday was intensely frustrating
I was in I was in a bad mood I couldn't Focus nothing was happening and I think the big thing
was is that I was doing sort of the math on things and that's what was making me like kind of acutely
angry I just didn't feel like I was making like sufficient progress that like my like I was not
doing enough to overcome my my style and instincts I had made what felt like a lot of progress um
and it was still just like basically like almost like half as long as it needed to be however I'm
trying to pad them it's just not enough and I realized two key strategies two key techniques
for padding word count that that would meet my criteria so the first one definitions Define words
spend a lot of time defining words you can eat up a lot of word count and like at very low effort
by just including more definitions classic classic coping technique of the the stressed freshmen
just include more definitions the other is quotations use use more quotations and uh over
quote the ghost writing company that that I've uh commissioned uh won't allow their writers
to have more than 10 percent of a book be quotation okay so we'll take that as a baseline
ten percent of a book is a lot of the book so that's like five pages because there's an entire
like two days of writing that you can are just gimmies so rather than treating that ten percent
as a limit treat it as a budget use it or lose it Comedian magicians and Skeptics Penn and Teller on
their 2004 program [ __ ] dismiss stage hypnosis as merely collective imagination which does
strike me a bit as dismissing a sandwich as mainly a collection of bread fillings and
condiments. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about hypnosis, demonstrated by the
stage hypnotist, is the mundanity of it, the persuasive power of set and setting,
the power of suggestion in a collaborative, negotiated relationship, the amplified
state of being open to being persuaded, and the ways in which that is
in and of itself interesting. I want to get this done with it's pretty
bad from uh from a structural standpoint and there's not really a clear Focus so it's all
right that's all right um we're over halfway we're halfway there we got 10 days to
do the remaining half so is what it is okay I have eight days remaining I have somehow managed to find it within
me after two days of writer's block to to not not merely get caught up but actually get fully completely ahead of quota I wrote over 4 000 words today there's walking immediately
above me which uh amounts to two whole chapters based off of our 2000 words per chapter uh uh
uh original original plan there's there's eight days remaining and my words per day is now under
a thousand we're ahead at this moment I feel just completely drained of ideas but but I have yet
to write the introduction and the conclusion which which can be a lot more autobiographical
those those are the ones that I can very easily pad by just telling stories about myself
and and the journey that I have now taken I was I was feeling overwhelmed this
morning and now now I'm in a good mood oh that could come crumbling down real fast I'm so close I'm so close to done I've got 3
500 Words remaining where do I put them as I get closer to the end it both gets easier
because it's like the the about the amount that I need to write gets less but I'm also like
kind of closing off like where where I can just put large blocks of new stuff it's getting
easier and it's getting harder I just gotta figure out like where where can I get those it's
just that simple it's that simple and that hard twenty five thousand and nine words these
last these last 2 000 words have been so stressful just just like not not neces I
don't want to say not hard because it was clearly hard it was it was just it was like
but it is it's just it's a process of going through and figuring out like what you can
cram in that's not going to really involve like new research because research
absolutely murders the the like pay per hour Okay, so, I want to do a numbers breakdown.
Let’s get, let’s get some charts in here. The standard rate for a ghost writer at this
level is about 10¢ per word, or $10 per 100 words. At that rate 25,000 words should cost about
$2500. That may seem expensive at first blush, but let’s really break it down. On a 25 day
writing cycle that’s only $100 per day. If you constrain it to 8 hours of work a day,
that’s only $12.50 an hour. Not the worst, but it’s not really anything to write home about. That 25 day cycle also comes with the
expectation of writing 1000 words per day, which, as has been demonstrated,
is a pretty substantial ask if the process of writing also includes
meaningful amounts of research. It is by no means impossible if you have the
luxury of treating it as a full-time job, which 10¢ per word kinda just barely crosses
the line on. And this 25 day expectation doesn’t include slack for the editing process. If
you maintain this pace and do one book a month you’re only making $30,000 per year,
before taxes. Depending on what city you live in that might be an honest, modest living, or
barely covering for your half of the bunk bed. In my own writing exercise I kept track of
all the hours I was spending doing research, the hours I was spending physically writing,
and all in all it took me a little over 84 hours to throw together a very low quality,
very repetitive book, and while those hours reflect the time I was spending at the computer
actively working with a stop-watch running, they don’t reflect the time I spent worrying
about it, thinking about it in the shower, looking up information on my phone at the grocery
store, and generally letting it ruin my life. Even the days where I wasn’t
sitting down and working on it, the days where I was burnt out and
miserable, those days were still about the book. Avoiding working on the book
takes almost as much energy as working on it. In fact the reason the time spent actively
writing is so low is because I was actively trying to keep it low, because I, and
Scott, were not being paid 10¢ per word. For the Rising Package with The Urban Writers I
paid $603.75 to cover both writing and editing. My writer was paid 1¢ per
word. $250 for 25,000 words. $250 of that $603 goes to the
writer, the rest is a split, almost 50/50 between the editor and TUW itself. In one sense I spent only 84 hours
writing A Skeptic’s Guide to Hypnosis, honestly not that absurd. In another sense I
spent 84 hours writing it. At this pay rate, at 1¢ per word, that’s $2.97 an hour. The Urban Writers don’t just need to
do 1000 words per day in order to make something even resembling a living,
they need to do 1000 words per hour. and all of this I'm just I'm I'm just
sitting here thinking about the fact that this is the most like this as an exercise is
so comically stacked in my favor because I know exactly what it is I know what my standards
are and I I know that I as the commissioning person have I'm I'm not going to read a submission that I make and go Oh no you're taking this
the completely wrong direction that I want you know no I don't want you to talk about like
this aspect I don't want you to frame it this way I don't want you to discuss these elements
I'm I'm not going to surprise myself with those kind of constraints because I am the person
who would be the source of those constraints um which means that you know there's there's
no real stress and while I was tracking while I was tracking my like theoretical
pay no one is actually going to pay me 250 bucks now that the book's
done so that's not a stressor that was hanging over my head all of the stressors
that I needed to deal with in this exercise are purely self-inflicted it's trying to stay to a
schedule it's trying to maximize words per hour in order to keep a derived theoretical number from
getting just awful they're fake rules that I have self-imposed as a creative exercise in order
to get a glimpse at like what is required in order to do this thing and in order to like have
a material have material to use as I work through the rest of uh the rest of the process of this
ecosystem and and that's not you know authentic um so I just I I am keenly aware of the ways
in which my interaction with this is just very very emotionally different from someone who is
relying on this for income uh if I actually had the threat of losing you know my grocery money
if I didn't have this done in two more days I I don't think I would be able to work at all I
think that would be just like a paralyzing amount of extra stress like if I needed this money if I
needed that 250 dollars then I would absolutely be doing you know whatever whatever it took if I can
write this whole thing in three weeks that gives me a week of slop for revisions and changes
and getting sick and just dealing with life if I can write it in two weeks then I I like it
doesn't it doesn't matter that my words per hour and my pay per hour got bad I'm just I'm just
done it that much faster and in theory if I can turn it in and they can sign off on it and we can
deliver I can start the next project and I might make 500 bucks this month that's this miserable
that's nightmarish because it's it's terrible it's just an awful awful awful arrangement so
I'm I'm under No Illusion that what I did is comparable to the bad deal that um
others are are actually operating under And, you know what, this makes some sense in the
scope of things because at the end of the day this is what The Urban Writers was founded to do. Dibbly Publishing, the thing that
the Moutinhos made shortly before making The Urban Writers, let’s
take a look at their output. A Complete Guide to Mining Cryptocurrency A Stoic’s Journey Mindfulness for Beginners How to Stop Procrastinating Manifesting: How to Use the Law of
Attraction to Manifest your Dreams Why, this all sounds like the Mikkelsen method. In March 2017, Marco and Natasha decided
to start a self-publishing business in the pursuit of earning passive income. This evolved
into The Urban Writers we know and love today! The Urban Writers exists specifically
because this grift needed a steady source of cheap writers. The numbers just
don’t work out if you have to pay writers $2500 per book which, as we’ve already
pointed out, is still not great pay. Bringing this all back to the griftmap,
we’ve got the Mikkelsens doing Grift A, which is teaching you how to do Grift B, which
involves utilizing outfits like The Urban Writers who are themselves engaged in Grift C, which
is basically the whole of the gig economy. All of this is just trying to exploit the
next person down the chain. Readers and actual creatives, the people who actually make
stuff, are just gristle to be churned through. PART 3: Reflections Lets actually, just for a bit, not
talk about Audiobook Income Academy, the seminar level grift, but the actual merits
of the material that they teach. Like, let’s evaluate it as though it were a real class that
was actually trying to teach you to do something. There are, in my mind, two major outstanding
problems with the Mikkelsen Method. The first is that it makes you into
the worst kind of client possible. Brad Defaux was not a good client, but he also
didn’t take the Mikkelsen Method 100% seriously. As a character Brad wanted a book about a subject
that he cared about, even if he had kooky ideas, low standards, a propensity for lying, and a
gullibility for any woo that crosses his path. It can get so much worse. The ideal client for someone at The Urban Writers
is someone who is, to one degree or another, an expert in their field, but not a writer.
They can provide the writer with sources, explain concepts, correct mistakes, and
help structure and focus the product. We can express their relationship like this A Writer/Expert, that’s just an author,
it’s going to be someone like Carl Sagan, both an accomplished scientist and a compelling
and prolific communicator. Non-writer/Expert, this is someone who hires a ghost writer, we’ll represent that one with JFK, a
talented man and skilled orator who wrote basically nothing with his name on it.
Really this one extends to most politicians, actors, and athletes, and the majority of
autobiographies fall into this category. A Writer/Non-Expert, that’s a ghost writer. Mikkelsen students are the worst square
on the board, neither writers nor experts, clients who specifically don’t know much
of anything about their chosen subjects and don’t care. They didn’t decide to write a
book about a subject that they’re interested in, they chose a subject that had favourable
metrics on the storefront. If the writer runs into problems with the client’s
outline the client can’t help. Combined with The Urban
Writers’ internal structure, the arrangement is basically guaranteed to
produce boring, inaccurate junk that leans very heavily on endlessly rewording shallow
dives into widely-available information. At every stage of their process
they tell you to take the cheapest option and wherever possible to
haggle the price down even lower. “the most important part is that you do not
use a mainstream ghostwriting company like this because we don't want to pay this much for our
manuscript why because we simply don't have to” “and because most narrators are just
trying to build their portfolio so they will narrate audiobooks for almost any price” “you'll just say hey Don I went through a
few of your samples and they were great I'd love for you to narrate my audiobook would
you do it for a 30 per finished hour rate” They are training their students
to be nightmare clients. The second is that it just doesn’t actually
work very well. Part of that is because it’s self-defeating, people who are willing
to shamelessly commission a book about a nonsense subject that they know nothing
about, purely because it shows up in a word cloud of popular subjects, eh, like,
the entire thing is so openly allergic to work and expertise that the personality matrix
needed to succeed basically eliminates people who aren’t sociopaths. By definition
this stuff is low effort to produce, which means there’s a ton of competition,
and while corporations like Amazon clearly have an incredible tolerance for spam, trash, and
misinformation they do still have their limits. Taken as a whole, the method is a machine
structured to produce low quality, low content junk that will only attract legitimate
readers and listeners by deception, and, like, you know things are just dire when
I’m telling you that the crystal healing crowd deserves better than what
they’re getting from these guys. [transition] The thing is that they know it doesn’t work. They don’t use their own
method. At least, not anymore. Remember all these? “all these this right here is just a
fraction of our audiobooks that I could fit on one screen and most of these aren't even
on Audible yet just because I've been too busy” And remember this little tidbit? “these are not books they hadn't published
yet when recording the seminar in early 2022 but rather books they had already published in
2018 and 2019 which have since been taken down” All their junk is from 2018 and 2019. They were
doing this, they were making low-quality audiobook spam, but they don’t do it anymore, they’ve
stopped and pivoted to selling the method instead. Word on the street is that they started trying to post “Spanish” versions of their books
by running them through Google Translate, and Amazon nuked their entire ACX account
and banned them from the platform for life. The Twins aren’t selling you a method that they’re
using, they’re selling you a method that they’ve already used up. They ran the grift all the way
to its natural conclusion. There was a narrow window of time where Audible’s gates were wide
open, but there wasn’t a lot of competition yet, that first-movers on generating SEO spam
could, in fact, make a pretty tidy profit without it being too much of a gamble, but
that window is closed now, the time has passed. The well isn’t dry, strictly speaking,
low quality dieting, wellness, new age, and crypto garbage will always
be a viable niche to some degree, but there’s a hell of a lot
of people lined up around it. Because they are right about one thing: it’s easy. It’s not easy for the Scott’s
of the world to crank out 25,000 words a month on nonsense for
less than $3 an hour, Scott’s life sucks, but it’s pretty easy to find a Scott to inflict
that on, because there’s a whole ecosystem of people willing to trick people like Scott
into thinking they’re getting a good deal. And to some degree it’s a sign of the
times. These kinds of grifts never go away, they’re always somewhere in the background,
but guys like this come out of the woodwork when times are tough. What really gets
to me, what really makes me angry, is that they always hit on the same
button where they shift the blame. self-publishing as a concept has incredible power
to allow voices that big publishing corporations didn't see as widely marketable in the past to get
their stories out there to the people who want to read them what's up my fellow small business
supporters that's how I greet everyone on my channel Savvy writes books Dan thank you so much
for having me on your Channel today to talk about the very important topic of publishing industry
scams especially in relation to the Mickelson twins who are out here making an absolute mockery
of my industry with the rise of self-publishing has of course come the people who want to cash
in on the shovels that they can sell to aspiring authors who see gold available through selling
books on a top online retailer like Amazon as a result there is nothing that annoys me more
than people like the Mickelson twins who take the concept of self-publishing which should be a
groundbreak taking form of Industry disruption for small presses and turn it into a multi-level
marketing style grift for example take their podcast episode is Amazon publishing guaranteed
to work which is full of MLM adjacent dog whistles and some of the worst elements of toxic work
culture you know you hear those people they come to us and say listen I've tried eight different
things online before you know they always have tears in their eyes I've done eight courses
and they were all scams none of them worked and it's because they have their understanding
is that when you jump into the business model it just makes money for you when they say Amazon
publishing they're talking about their specific methods of publishing on Amazon that you can pay
them for it it's as close to a foolproof business as it gets as long as you actually do the work
it's very very hard to lose money this is how many business gurus and MLM scammers alike tend to
block themselves off from criticism by framing any failure as your fault rather than a flaw in the
system itself from the start the Mickelson twins set us up with this expectation they start telling
you that what you need to do in order to work hard enough and not give up your dream they tell
us success is guaranteed if you allow it to be guaranteed how you fail is you quit this mentality
plays into the way that many mlms business gurus and overall entrepreneurial grifters prey on our
tendency to give in to the sunk cost fallacy if we've come this far we'd be failures to quit right
even if the next step involves paying someone else even more money plus it has a little bit of that
manifestation BS slid in there as a treat success is guaranteed if you allow it to be guaranteed
because I'm the only thing holding myself back right of course I'm just scared of success
everyone who isn't a billionaire must have manifested their failures by being too scared
to work hard those things you need to do to work hard of course include investing more money in
yourself which is really code for investing more money with them people who have been listening to
us for a while have heard us say this many times I 100 subscribe to the belief that and I mean this
literally is that success is inevitable guaranteed it is guaranteed if you allow it to be guaranteed
it is a choice that is on that is in your control how you fail is you quit and quitting is a
decision that you made and then I know what some people are going to think they say no I ran
out of money so that was not me quitting I just didn't have a choice [ __ ] get a second job a
third job do whatever you need to do start saving money stop spending your money then boom now you
have your money back now and then get back to work and you know what really sucks about all
this a lot of the things they're saying in this episode are factually true in a vacuum but
when applied to their business model which like an MLM is basically a course on how to sell
shovels to other people who hope to dig up the gold the same language becomes manipulative
because it's not meant to work in that context if you made your own lipstick at home and
it made people's lips swell up 10 sizes and break out in hives you'd also lose money and
that would be your own fault but if you join Mary Kay and lose money that's the company's
fault because that company thrusts you into an oversaturated industry with an unsustainable
long-term model the same applies here For months now, since signing up for their
mailing list, I’ve been getting just the most spectacular spam, like just absolutely
transparent emotional manipulation. Minutes after finishing the seminar I received an
email ominously titled Dan, I Warned You. Guaranteed Plan for Staying Broke “Always hang around with broke people” What to do if your family
and friends aren’t supportive (Spoiler, the answer is give them money
to join their private Facebook group) “What do I do if my parents/partner/friends aren’t being supportive of my
decision to pursue audiobooks.” You’re not, you’re not pursuing audiobooks, you’re building a business generating
spam in the form of audiobooks. There is this truly beautiful double-think
exercise the Mikkelsens play in all of this which is to assert on one hand that this is a process
that requires very, very little input from you, the operator, that you get to kick back and
literally just gleefully exploit the labour of others as they churn out low quality
trash credited to a dozen different pen names on your behalf, but also that doing all
of this will bring you the same pride, respect, and prestige from your family and peers as
being an author and writing your own book, or even meaningfully contributing to a
ghost-written book about a subject that you actually are passionate
about and put your name on. “We sell books and audiobooks online.” “Oh, you’re
writers! That's very cool.” We both laugh to ourselves, flattered that he had mistaken us for
professional writers. “Definitely not. Far from it,” Christian says. “We don't write our books
ourselves. We hire professionals to do that for us. We just publish the books and audiobooks and
get sent the earnings at the end of every month.” “You can do that?! But you have to split profits
with them, right?” he asks. “No, they work for a one-time fee,” says Christian, “so I own the book
100 percent and only split profits with Amazon." “So you're telling me you
literally have no writing skills, yet it's what you do for a living and how
you're able to live in Bali?” “Exactly!” so this right here is Don Jacobson he is
an experienced jazz radio and live narrator imagine having a radio broadcaster narrate
your audiobook imagine showing that's off to your friends and family when they ask you how
is it you were able to quit your job again and do what you want then you just showed them
your audiobook narrated by Don Jacobson the radio broadcaster and that's something you
can be really proud of there's this bit that kind of makes me laugh the Christian is talking
about how proud will you be when you tell your family that you've got a you know a DJ narrating
your book that you didn't write and I'm like why would you feel proud of that all you've done is
send a message saying can I pay you less than your rate there's a large percentage of people
that believe that buying the course and going through the content is equivalent to actually
building the business we are switching from a do-it-yourself course which is what AIA was to a
proven and all-inclusive done for you partnership where we do all the heavy lifting for you so you
no longer have to rely on yourself to have success now you're getting us the people that don't have
good results I can say with the utmost certainty with no hesitation whatsoever their books are
not good but now we're taking it a step further by doing things like straight up giving you
a winning audiobook topic to go out and list on Audible and multiply with do you want to
dominate social media in 2019 would you like to learn all about social media marketing are you
looking to take your business to new heights with up-to-date social media marketing but that's not
the case with publishing to fail at publishing is incredibly challenging challenging with the
caveat as long as you do the work in other words someone else does the work but we get paid
that's how the whole model works the biggest Mantra the Golden Rule with publishing is what
you put out is what you get back if you garbage in garbage out if you put in poor quality work
you're going to get a poor quality result you do not need to narrate anything yourself you do
not need to write anything yourself you do not need to design any cover yourself you do next to
nothing when it comes to actually creating your done for you audiobook and we need you to show
your commitment because if you aren't committed then we shouldn't invest our time our money our
team our everything in you because we're in this together now [ __ ] get a second job a third job
do whatever you need to do start saving money stop spending your money then boom now you have
your money back now and then get back to work Let’s close this out. The Mikkelsens are not unique. As
I said before they are simply an entertaining example of a type. They’re
not alone, and they’re not even flying solo in their own venture. This thing that
they’re doing is part of a whole ecosystem. It relies to some degree on the complicity
of the platforms, Amazon has an incredibly high tolerance for low-value, repetitive spam,
though to give Amazon an absolutely microscopic amount of credit they do have their limits
and people are actively evading the rules. More directly the Mikkelsens rely on gig economy
arrangements like The Urban Writers because the only way the economics work out is if you can
under-pay your writer 90%. The Urban Writers, in turn, uses the Uber model: they onboard
far, far more writers than they have clients to service and make writers compete with
each other, ensuring that anyone looking to churn out content mill gristle will
enjoy quick turnarounds and low prices. Now, I didn’t post Treating Epilepsy with
Self-Hypnosis: A Guide to a Free and Healthy You onto Kindle or Audible because, like, I just don’t
want it wandering free, it’s a book that shouldn’t exist, but I did post A Skeptic’s Guide to
Hypnosis since that one is just a little sloppy. Caveats on that, I didn’t do any review
trading, I didn’t spam it anywhere, and definitionally I think a book with
“skeptic” in the title is not going to hit the typical target market, but at the
root I actually just took the Mikkelsens at their word and pushed it out onto
Amazon to make me some passive income. In the months that A Skeptics Guide to Hypnosis
has been available, it has sold one copy. They hedge their pitch by saying that their
results are real but not indicative nor a promise, and that’s… legally accurate, but not spiritually.
The implication that they allow to follow that disclaimer is that while their success, and the
success of all the testimonials they include, is exceptional, your success will probably be
proportional. If you’re making even ten percent of their highest performers, a mere one-tenth, then
that’s still a few hundred dollars a month, right? What they don’t cover is that your success can
be, and most likely will be, zero. That you will, in fact, end up down hundreds of dollars
from under-paying some overworked gig writer, and thousands of dollars from buying their course. They say it’s worth thousands. They
say it’s worth tens of thousands, with numbers they pulled right out of their ass, and that the thousands they charge is a
bargain so good that it’s practically theft. what you're getting today is all the
bonuses right here you know what they are for a bonus value of over twenty one
thousand dollars bringing the total value of everything you're getting today
to fifty six thousand dollars and you can get it all right now for just one
small investment of nineteen ninety five They tell you that it’s so
valuable, so worthwhile, that you shouldn’t even think
about it, you shouldn’t pause, you should just pull out your credit
card and do it. Do it now, think later. even if you're a tiny bit unsure I need
you to go there and secure your spot In fact, if you can’t afford it, if you
don’t have two thousand dollars to give them, if you don’t have six hundred dollars
to pay their friends at The Urban Writers for your first, second, third
manuscript, what you need is some debt. and if your card gets declined which is
completely normal try again or just give a quick call to your bank and approve of
the transaction and it'll go through so guys there's a good debt and there's bad debt
this here is taking on good debt because the thing is saying yes to this is a mental game
you know you want it you know you need it What they’re offering is less
than worthless, it’s predatory, it is actively harmful, and I’m qualified
to say that, because I’m the worth-decider. [Heavy dubstep]
