Griftmap: The Mikkelsen Twins
Comments (27)
What I really want to know is: who taught the Mikkelsen twins how to run their workshop grift? Their online pitch and course rely on tried-and-true high-pressure tactics. That doesn't happen by accident, and it's also more sophistication than I would expect from two driftless stoners who predictably got very little out of the college education they invested almost nothing in. Is this something that came from the Moutinhos? Did the four of them cook it up together? Did they all get it from somebody else, like a rich parent or family member who wanted them to find a way to support themselves?
"within 400 feet of an elementary school" is comedy genius. I'm intensely curious about the conversation Dan had with Don J about doing narration for this video.
Great video as always. Would love to see more from you regarding worker exploitation, which you touched on in the NFT vid and went into depth here.
First off, I love the direction this channel has been going with respect to online scams/cons. I would be really interested in hearing your hot takes these real estate seminars - Grant Cardone is the big name that comes to mind, but I’m sure there are dozens of others
I joined for the hypnosis book, but I'll stay to complain about audio quality.
Okay – so here’s my weird audiobook scam story. Different model, but adjacent weirdness. I wrote a book in 2010 about how to design workplace learning. It did modestly well, so we did a second edition in 2015, and it sells steadily. Then last summer, I noticed that (in addition to the paperback and kindle version) there was an audiobook of my own book available. My publisher hadn’t told me they’d sold the audiobook rights, but they are spotty about communication, so I thought it was possible. My concern was that the cover was pretty crap and showed a picture of two schoolkids doing homework at a dining table. My experience is that people get pretty unhappy if they think they are buying a K12 book and then find it’s focused on adult education, so at a minimum I wanted to see if my publisher could negotiate a different cover. The sample was actually a good recording, and (as I later found out from someone who had bought the audiobook) it was a complete, decent quality audiobook. It was an enormous amount of work for what had to be modest payback (I’m sure it wasn’t moving a huge number of audiobook sales). Bizarrely I had the #1 bestselling audiobook in the “Desktop Publishing” category for a while, though. But my publisher reported back that they had, in fact, NOT sold the audiobook rights, and had no idea where the audiobook had come from. The audiobook publisher was “Rita Stone” and their only other book was an audiobook recording of a Carl Jung book. They took the issue up with Amazon, who managed to be spectacularly unresponsive for many weeks, but eventually took the book down. Very weird. But the even weirder follow up was the guy who messaged me on facebook, explaining that he was the guy who did the audio recording. If he’s to be believed, he did the audio recording for free with the deal that he’d split the audiobook sales 50% with the “Rita Stone” publisher. He’d fronted the work for the audio recording and now wasn’t going to get the backend split, so he offered me the same deal – we could put the recording up and split the sales profits. Despite that *charming* offer, my publisher’s legal department let him know that wasn’t going to happen.
Agh, that really sucks for the narrator! Royalty splits are common in self-publishing and I wonder how many narrators aggressively background check the authors/small presses they deal with. I did a 50/50 royalty split with my narrator on my single successful fantasy book because, at the time, I wasn’t able to front him the money for production. When we made the agreement, I was preemptively guilty because I wasn’t confident he would make his money back for the sound editing and studio time. A couple years on and I WISH I had come up with a way to cover the production costs upfront. Because boy did he get a sweet deal. But looking at your story, I think about how my narrator couldn’t know for sure that I was a reliable person to work with (I mean, imo I came off pretty flaky in our emails). Assuming the narrator who contacted you wasn’t in on the plagiarism, it hurts to think about someone putting in the hours it takes to create an audiobook only for that work to go unpaid.
I'm worried about Scott 😟
I occasionally get sent The Urban Writers/Dibbly Inc. job alerts. After watching your video, I'm very, very grateful I've never ventured down that sewer line.
I genuinely hope that voice over was done by Don Jacobsen. It would have really tied the video together in a nice bow. Alternatively getting Kelly Rhodes would have been rad.
Note that "Kelly Rhodes" is mentioned in the "special thanks" in the credits. I wonder a lot about how we should interpret that, in light of that mangled slide in the DFY presentation.
How mad were you when you noticed the “done for you” / “made for you” mistake? 😅 (I’m just teasing, it was cute. and who cares what the grifters call their grift)
I love the fake contrapreneur adds at the beginning - with the fake skip add button - just great.
"dollar general Winklevi" came out of nowhere and made me burst out in laughter while fixing my lunch for tomorrow in my kitchen, thanks for another great video!
Another zinger, among many I guess: "spam in audiobook form".
Another tour de force; great material, lays it out in a great explanation, with an edge that does not become mean or shames the victims, and some sweet absurd humour (complete with great graphics and music). Nicely done!
Congrats on another amazing video Dan (and contributors). The tone was spot on, particularly wrt ghostwriters. Im sure you already know all that, being a qualified worth decider, but wanted to pass on my amateur appreciation.
Any day that Dan puts out a new video on a subject I had no idea was a thing is a flipping Great day. 30 minutes in as I write this and I was only thinking of listening to the intro.
Having thought about it more, I'm shocked that they would admit to being friends with the ghostwriting company, though I suppose that's part of a pattern where they say the quiet parts out loud. I would be fairly surprised if they didn't have "an undisclosed financial interest" in the ghostwriting company. If they were real pros instead of putting in a low-effort grift, they wouldn't be sending people to Fiverr to get covers and thumbnails made, they'd have their own trash version of Fiverr that's steer everyone towards so they'd keep more of their marks' money.
The Worth Decider thing, is that just a prop, or did you actually contact an unaccredited university to get that :D
Pretty sure Nelson Mandela wasnt available to sign, so Im going to say prop. But the Ted Kaczynski signature could be real if Dan has some odd pen pals.
Ok I admit to being intrigued by Stoicism for Pussies
A quick question: how pervasive do you think AI generation is in this ghostwriting business? I have a feeling a lot of the "Scotts" could actually do nothing more but correct and adjust the output of GPT-3, most of the time?
(For anyone curious, he answered on twitter: https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1574881908630360064. Thanks Dan!)
I gave a guest lecture in the spring semester this year about online scams (I'm a finance professor and I was presenting to a course for freshmen). I was pretty happy with the Coffeezilla video I had students watch beforehand, but if I do it again I'm going to point them towards Contrepreneurs.
I really love how your work breaks down these frauds in an accessible way without shaming would-be victims!
Really disappointed in Mads Mikkelsen's nephews