The Big Self Help Scam.

YouTube Ads And Self Help Gurus.

If you are on YouTube, you’ve probably seen the ads. It started with Tai Lopez, and now every scammer is doing it. Funnel a few thousand dollars through the YouTube ads, catch a few vulnerable, unsuspecting individuals and steal their money. Then repeat (and increase the scale each time). The promise?

Attend my free seminar, and I’ll give you the secret to health, wealth and happiness. Btw, did I tell you I have a Ferrari and a ten-figure income?

We all look at those ads and wonder, “Who the hell falls for this?” - and yet the ads keep coming. Do you know why? Because when everything in our life is going fine, regular people like you and me grossly underestimate how vulnerable we can become when life is hard on us. The scammers who run these ads know this.

The people who are falling for these ads are not idiots or losers. They are regular folks like you and me. They are just going through a bad phase of their life and because of that, they are super vulnerable. The best product to sell them at a time like this? Hope.

Most of us derive energy from hope. I mean, think about it. If your life was miserable, and I came to you and told you there is no hope of things changing for you for the rest of your life, a few things would happen: 1. You would get even more depressed. 2. You would even stop trying, because, what’s the point? 3. You wouldn’t like me very much for telling you that. 4. I would have nothing to sell you to make your situation better.

On the other hand, If I told you, that things will change, but you need to work really hard for the next 2 years, life would still look grim, but you would have a reason to keep trying. You would still not like me all that much, because what I am saying seems obvious, and I still wouldn’t have anything to sell you.

Now, let’s say, instead of telling you that, if I told you, that things are going to change if you just work hard for one week; and just do what I told you to do. You would be so much more motivated to work for that one week compared to the two years; you would like me so much better, and you might be much more inclined to do what I was telling you to do.

The human brain is amazingly tuned for energy optimization. We look at a problem, quickly calculate the amount of stress and energy that problem is going to require, and decide if we want to invest our energy in solving that problem. And this psychology of optimizing for lest energy is what these so-called self-help gurus exploit.

Imagine you are having a difficult time in your life. You’ve been struggling for months to make things right. Deep down, you know that your problems are going to take another four years to solve. This is when I come to you and tell you that you’ve been doing it all wrong. You are just one seminar away from solving all your problems. I assure you that I was just like you. Well-intentioned and hardworking.

But you know what? Your approach is wrong. There is just one small insight that you lack, one little secret that you are unaware of, and that one secret, could change your outcomes drastically. I show you my credentials and the success I have achieved, and I assure you that, like the rest of the world, I am not going to judge you or call you a loser. Instead, I am going to help you. I am going to take you through a one-hour seminar where I tell you that secret and hand hold you all the way to success. And all for just 10 dollars with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Before I even sell you the seminar or my technique, I’ve sold you hope. I’ve sold you a promise that you don’t have to work hard for another four years. I’ve sold you the idea that just by deploying this secret, I can help you optimize your energy and reduce the effort you put in at solving the problem.

You know, if I asked you to drive from point A to point B, and there were two equally safe paths leading to point B, you would take out Google Maps and take the shortest path. If I gave you two foods, one bland and one sweet, you would pick the sweet one. This energy optimization is so baked into our evolution that we go out of our way to find out ways to spending the least amount of energy in a task (hence the preference for shortest path) and we also go out of our way to find the quickest way to acquire more energy (hence the preference for sweet foods with a higher caloric intake).

The self-help guru who is selling you a seminar is not selling you a dream. He is selling you hope that with his help you will be able to optimize your energy and efforts of getting to where you want to get. Most self-help gurus do this because they intuitively know how vulnerable your brain is towards natural energy optimization. Why waste years slogging when a one-week seminar can get you more assertiveness, higher happiness, amazing wealth and a beautiful life partner? And then they minimize your risk by offering it to you at just 10 dollars, so there is nothing to lose. Or is there?

At the surface of it, this looks like a 10 dollar scam, and if that is all this was, I would have said “Meh!” and moved along. But the reality of this scam is murky and gray, and that is what makes the scam really dangerous.

The Real Problem

The real problem with this scam doesn’t lie in the fact that a scammer produced a fake ad on YouTube and scammed ten thousand people with a value of ten dollars each. To understand the real problem, you need to attend one of these seminars.

Most of these seminars, follow the same format. They are video oriented, with vibrant high dopamine, high motivation audio and visuals. Powerful messages of how your life is about to change. Assertive style of delivery, like the person delivering the talk has figured it all out and has all the answers in life.

I recently walked in on a friend attending one such online seminar on assertive negotiations, and the speaker was literally screaming on the mic:

Don’t be a doormat! If you are a doormat, people will walk over you. Turn your microphones on and say out loud, “I WILL NOT BE A DOORMAT!”

And the gullible participants obediently followed along. For ten dollars, I am guessing the whole talk was full of obvious messages but delivered with high dopamine delivery style and motivational exercises like, repeating what the speaker says loudly and confidently as if they were affirmations that were going to change your life. Of course, the seminar ended on a high note. Something alone the lines of:

We have a detailed workshop where we take you step by step through strategies of ensuring that you do not become a doormat. For a thousand dollars, you will get a community of like-minded mentors who will hand hold you and support you in your assertiveness journey. And if you commit now, we will give you a 90% discount on the workshop price, which means you can get it for just one hundred dollars.

No wonder, more than 50% of participants said yes to enrolling. And that right there is where the scam gets murkier. This is all about exploiting another one of your evolutionary developments. To understand what is happening here you have to go into evolution, how your brain works with generating dopamine, how video games are designed and sunk cost fallacy. So let’s start there.

Levels Of A Video Game And Sunk Cost Fallacy

I don’t know about the secret of living a successful life, but I do know that most video game designers know the secret of making successful video games. The basic idea is simple - Keep level 1 really easy and fun. As the player gets better and climbs up the levels, increase the difficulty. Now, going by our energy optimization mindset, players should quit, right? But the exact opposite thing happens here. Want to understand what’s going on here? Enter dopamine.

Dopamine is a trick neurotransmitter your brain generates. Everyone who knows an iota of neuroscience flaunts it as a feel good hormone. But most people miss the point that dopamine is also a goal-chasing hormone. So let’s say you had said you will earn 10000 dollars from side income by the end of the year and in the first month you make 1000 dollars your brain shoots a rush of dopamine in your system, which makes you feel amazing about your own accomplishment. Why? Because that is your brain’s mechanism to ensure you don’t quit in between. The rush of making progress ensures that you continue playing the game. And that is why I like to see dopamine as a goal-oriented hormone.

Dating a partner? With every successful date, as you fall in more and more in love, your brain streams a rush of dopamine in your system. The point? To ensure that you stay motivated and follow through by brining the relationship to a closure in the form of a marriage.

This is a fact game designers have known for years, and that is why games are easy at first and get progressively harder. They know that as you cross each level, the rush of dopamine your brain creates will keep you working harder on the next level.

What they also know is that your brain is loss averse. So if you’ve invested a hundred dollars in the share market and your stocks are down by 10%, and you get a tip that the prices are going to shoot up next week, you put in another hundred dollars. The idea is, simple - you’ve already put in so much time, money and effort shortlisting the share. Why give up now? You’ve already spent so many hours going through the first few levels of the game, why give up now? If you’ve gone on a hundred dates with a potential partner, and you’ve slowly started seeing the ugly side of their personality, why dump them now? Sunk cost fallacy is a real thing. It’s why businesses lose millions of dollars every year by not scrapping projects that are not going anywhere. Simply because they’ve “already invested so much, it’s too late to back out”.

Plus there is the Ben Franklin effect where research shows that if someone asks for a small favor from you, and you oblige them, you are likely to oblige them when they ask a bigger favor.

The self-help gurus organizing these seminars know that - 1. You’ve been primed with a rush of dopamine in the seminar. 2. You’ve already invested time and money in clearing level one of the self-help game, level two can be made slightly more expensive. 3. Not only that, but you are so close to getting to the concrete steps of achieving success that if you back out now, all the time and that ten dollar you’ve invested goes to waste (sunk cost). 4. They’ve already asked you for a small favor, and you’ve obliged, so it’s highly likely if they ask you for a bigger favor you’ll oblige too. Suddenly, before you know it, they are using years of evolution and neuroscience against you at a time when you are the most vulnerable.

And before you know it, the smartest of us, are not that smart at all as we take out our wallets and give our hard-earned money to these scammers. So that next time you see these ads and go, “Who are these idiots who are clicking on these ads? I would never pay this idiot anything.” - think again. It could be you.

Remember, they are in no rush. They are going to keep running these ads, waiting for life to make you vulnerable and when you are, they would be just a click away, ready to exploit a million plus years of evolution against you. We’ll see how smart you are then.

I can only hope you remember how dangerous these scams are before you click “just to find out more”; because once you do, there is usually no turning back. Not before you’ve paid them something. And you’ll be lucky if you get out of the cult before you shell out a couple of hundred dollars.