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Comment by ozzythecat | Hacker News Reader

Not familiar with his crypto hustle, but I watched some Martin Kleppman talks on YouTube, and Tech Lead commercials started devouring my YouTube. The algorithm mistook me for not knowing how to code? Not sure.

Apparently this tech lead guy created programming videos to teach you how to get hired at big tech companies. It turned out the partner guy in the videos wasn’t even a developer but had maybe interned somewhere in data science? And both of these guys were claiming to be career professionals, as if they were staff or principal engineers.

The ads reminded me of another character from many years ago that would show off a Lamborghini or some sports car in his garage with a wall of books - another scammy self help guru.

Edit: I looked tech lead up on YouTube as I read the Reddit post and typed up this post. I can’t tell if this guy is trying to be a parody/using dry humor or if he’s a narcissist sociopath.

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Tai Lopez!

“Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood hills. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.””

If you think about it that video is really a masterclass in how to instantly capture advertising audience attention. I'm willing to bet that ad had magnitudes lower skip rates than 99% of other YouTube ads.

I agree. I‘m guilty of doing so, because I found them bizarre and impudent. They are like a window into another grotesque and worrisome world, but I still had to look.

There was a great series of videos on this called "Contrepreneur Bingo" by Mike Winnet. He took on all the usual suspects - Tai Lopez, Dan Lok, Dan Pena, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone...

Unfortunately it looks they all got pulled from youtube. Not on bitchute either.

Not sure who you refer to as being pulled, but looks like Mike Winnet is still up at least, good thing: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UComkllJTMHNZr4UNxCThdcw

He had a whole series of videos called "Contrepreneur Bingo" where he would rip into them on an individual basis. Scrubbed from youtube. Kicking myself for not downloading them at the time.

This is my favourite of those: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko

I never enjoyed TechLead's main channel content but respected him (and still do) for covering the 2019 employee suicide at Facebook when they tried to sweep it under the rug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbEQriZEfoI

Backstory: an H-1B Facebook Ads-team employee was on a PIP, was denied internal transfer, and had a SEV follow-up task he was called to present at a SEV Review. I don't have any first-hand knowledge of pressure-levels within Ads, but considering that's where the money comes from I assume it's pretty high. He tried to request more time, but a task nagbot kept changing the task "due date" back any time he tried to adjust it. He never made it to that SEV Review #JusticeForQin

Thank you for posting this, I didn't know it happened. It looks like they also fired another person who was talking about it: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/15/facebook-employee-i-was-fire...

I just found the LinkedIn of Yi Yin, he got a job from Google just in time after being kicked out of Facebook for speaking up: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yi-yin/

The H1B probably only caused more pressure on them. It's far worse if you get fired on an H1B.

Sounds like you need to build some passive income streams and generate wealth. Please buy the online course I'm hucking on YouTube because I'm such an expert in these topics.

Seriously though, it pains me to see the young and naive fall for these scams. Also, wasn't there a data science YouTuber recently that was busted for more or less plagiarizing their content?

> Also, wasn't there a data science YouTuber recently that was busted for more or less plagiarizing their content?

You might be thinking of Siraj Raval?

https://mobile.twitter.com/AndrewM_Webb/status/1183150368945...

(Or not, I’m sure there’s been a dozen other cases of this in data science alone)

Yes! That is who I'm thinking of. For anyone else reading, the scandals go beyond the one twitter thread: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/10/16/why-siraj-ravals-...

> I looked tech lead up on YouTube as I read the Reddit post and typed up this post. I can’t tell if this guy is trying to be a parody/using dry humor or if he’s a narcissist sociopath.

He's clearly comedic, the question is whether he's also an unhealthy person. I lost interest in him when it looked like he was destroying his own life while simultaneously making a show out of it. I do hope it truly is just a show, because otherwise it's sad that he basically lost his family while being absorbed into an absurd YT personality.

Narcissist sociopath. I'm a huge fan of dry humor (and British) so should be able to read sarcasm or dry humor but he just annoys me. Putting "as a millioaire" in video titles is the most crass thing I've seen.

I think you are missing the joke. The crassness of plastering "as a millionaire" everywhere is a joke on its own. Sort of a parody on other tubers who throw in similar catch phrases. In his early videos he talked about how being a "millionaire" isn't actually that uncommon. Now it is a meme to the viewers of the channel.

I don't like his sense of humor either, but I have to admit he exposes certain aspects of tech life and attitudes that people in general don't talk about, and maybe this is what make us uneasy (or: is funny to some). Things like badly camouflaged pride in one's achievements, position, being successful, being better than others. He is deliberately ambiguous.

Yeah, he's no idiot, he knows what he's doing by mixing relevant/important opinions with his scams.

Luckily he's a very bad actor as well, he doesn't sound very trustworthy when trying to pull a fast one.

> Putting "as a millioaire" in video titles is the most crass thing I've seen.

It's a meme.

> Narcissist sociopath. I'm a huge fan of dry humor (and British) so should be able to read sarcasm or dry humor but he just annoys me. Putting "as a millioaire" in video titles is the most crass thing I've seen.

You would describe someone as a narcissistic sociopath from the basis of your web psychoanalysis?

There were two options in GPs edit and I stand by my choice. The guy thinks he's some sort of god for a mid-level fang role while scamming his followers.

You're stating that TechLead is a narcissistic sociopath who is engaged in scamming, such as with this alleged pump and dump scheme? There's over a hundred comments in this post, and so far nobody wants to detail the alleged criminal behavior.

It's a very serious claim to say that someone has mental illness, or that they are engaged in criminal behavior over cryptocurrency scams, especially in a public forum where you have zero ability to unring a bell.

> I can’t tell if this guy is trying to be a parody/using dry humor or if he’s a narcissist sociopath.

Art imitates life imitates art...

> I can’t tell if this guy is trying to be a parody/using dry humor or if he’s a narcissist sociopath.

That's his shtick.

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