Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins

“I’m here within 400 feet of an elementary school to prove the haters wrong!” Easily one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard

"Amazon's best kept secret.... Audible" He missed his true calling as an actor because being able to say that with a straight face is legitimately impressive

As someone concerned with ethics, I am sickened by their efforts to rob people of their money. As an engineer, I am truly even more sickened by how just... fucking inefficient they are at robbing people.

Their little rant about success is surreal. They tell you “Work three jobs, get your money, then get back to work.” As if having three jobs is not working

Dan's not making passive income; he's making passive aggressive income.

"The crystal healing community deserves better than these two" That's... Bleak

The analysis where Dan acknoledges how, in essence, he was playing "easy mode" with what was already an incredibly stressful and soul destroying task is amazingly awful. Just thinking about how much worse the situation would be if he actually had to deal with an editor, and having to buy groceries and truly needing the money.. This is truly horrific

Everytime someone trains people to be apparently a competitor to themselves you can safely assume it's not working anymore

Me: "I wonder what Dan Olson's been up to since that big NFT video?" Dan: furiously writing a terrible nonsense book on purpose and driving himself insane in the process

"I'm here within 400 feet of an elementary school to prove the haters wrong" had me on the FLOOR

This video came out right before the advent of chat gpt. I can’t help but think that the Mikkilesens have pretty much cut real people out of the writing process.

Okay, listen. I know these are bad people and we shouldn't support them in any way. But, "Stocisim for Pussies" is the greatest book title of all time.

Blurring out just one of the twins' faces is an underrated joke.

Dan striding on screen with a mostly gray beard, a sensible sunhat, and using the word "nonsense" in the first sentence -- peak dad energy.

"Even if you're a little unsure, please hand us $2000 immediately." Holy crap. Who even has $2k to just spend?

The introduction was all based on REAL ads that were super prevalent during covid, when YouTube was desperate for advertisers. The audio was unmistakably and uniquely horrible in each, and he absolutely nailed mocking everyone’s pitch. There really was a shirtless guy in front of a bad greenscreen promising ridiculous returns (I think he was high). Strange times.

"Get a second job, get a third job" says the guy who wrote a book about walking out on his job and smoking pot for a month

"I'm here within 400 feet of an elementary school to prove the haters wrong" is such a rollercoaster of a sentence that i've literally been laughing at it on and off for the past three weeks

When I worked with The Urban Writers as a ghostwriter, the Mikkelsen Twins featured our company as one of the ones they liked to use for their grift to get books written quickly and cheaply like you mentioned in the book. For whatever reason, the higher-ups apparently saw this as a compliment and proudly let us all know, which I guess then later turned into "friends of the CEO". That was about when I realized I needed to quit and find a job that paid better/valued my time and energy more lmao Also, you're right: we used to have no contact with the person who placed the book order, and could just write the book and pass it along. Then 2 years into my stint there they shoved the burden of interfacing with the customers on us, PLUS constant revisions through the platform's chat and edit features. As one of their higher tier writers, I was repeatedly pressured to take on multiple 30k+ word books at a time, sometimes meaning I was writing for 10 or more hours straight every day with no days off. In short, it was a terrible place to work that gave me burnout I am still recovering from to this day Sidenote, the advice the Mikkelsen Twins give people for how to write outlines to pass along to the ghostwriters is horrible and made these clients a hundred times more annoying to deal with than if they had just given us nothing but a title

Plot twist: this whole video was a clever and elaborate ad for "The Skeptic's Guide to Hypnosis."