Dreaming of Money: thekumarmethod

Since I have Written More Than 1 Thing Can I be Considered a Writer? (Plus stats!)¹#

You ever feel like you’re just hating for the love of the game? Because why do some things live rent free in our heads when ultimately, it’s all happening inside a metal box. Sometimes it’s the little things that trigger a previous trauma, or suddenly connect to some outbound idea that might actually result in something happening in our limited world. Sometimes we hate, because we know what it was like to love, only to remember the pain that betrayal left us with.

Which is all too serious for a blog post about how fishy a viral account seems.

JJK SEASON 3#

Who is this guy?#

1 week. 6 posts. 1 Million Followers. I can’t lie @thekumarmethod’s absurd rise to fame is nothing short of impressive, or at least worthy of scrutiny. Things go viral on the internet all the time but, as a bad data scientist, it also seems like he has insane staying power for something that went so viral so quickly. If his 2 weeks of post statistics are anything to go off of.

If you don’t know who I’m talking about (who is this guy?) the tldr is that this man has poised himself as an “anti-finance influencer” planning on releasing a FREE method based knowledge from his experience as a retired accountant. With the end goal of disturbing the lies of the “finance-bro” space. But why is he the one that’s popping off? Plenty of other probably good (i don’t trust finance influencers) exist so why is he the one that people are eating up?

Gen X looks at Gen Z Soft Club LARP#

Calling familiarity with aura farming trends and the Dark Triad style⁴ of edits, he utilizes heavy lighting contrast, dressing himself in all black while leaving his backgrounds bright and minimal. Even pairing it with red text to give it a “hypebeast” and magazine editorial⁵ touch. This has already shown itself as a notable aesthetic choice, as evidenced by its widespread influence on the modern manosphere. He even has the traditional tech-bro black crewneck⁶, reminiscent of the CEO of Evil Corp memes. Consequently, we’re called to question if he’s some dark hero, maybe even anti-hero, or a calculating shadowy villain.

Yet, his trademark black turtleneck is accompanied with a Transitional 18th century Serif font⁷ which transforms the brooding style of Dark Triad edits into something luxurious, yet reserved. Think, “old-money”. Think Bruce Wayne. In other words, his “aura” utilizes the confidence given by the hard-style edits to give credibility and credence to his accounting advice by presenting him as someone who has all the luxury but none of the self-centered ego to flex it tastelessly. Where as, we have plenty of “new-money” crypto-bros all to eager to tell all about their Lambos and “knowledge”. Or more accurately, to gatekeep their knowledge UNTIL you pay them money for their new and shiny course.

And this is where Kumar’s rhetoric builds on the video’s already substantial contrast. Kumar’s method is actually currently unavailable and is projected to release on July 10th for free, according to his videos. And this is important because most grift is usually presented for a price and more importantly, AFTER release. His unique approach to marketing his course further divests him from the negative stereotypes of financial courses and implies that perhaps his method will ironically be the one to be worth any money at all.

Further, as a retired accountant, he’s not a part of Gen Z, and is in fact likely much older than most finance influencers. But the fact he’s able to fit seamlessly into the novel subculture gives him an ironic touch that makes him amusing and potentially more credible than his younger contemporaries. Almost akin to John Chungus.

And as a cherry on top his wife is present through out a few of his videos whom he claims he’s been married to for over 39 years and is his “greatest treasure”. A moot point, such marriage stability is something that is notably lacking in a majority of content occupying the manosphere/financial space. Yet it’s a significant flag of humanity, both literally (AI) and figuratively, which allows people to relate and feel empathized with. Which in turn makes people more interested into “buying” into his message. But is this too good to be true? Is this merely just a personality one can wear to go viral? Maybe so, but plenty can’t even manage to do that.

People have been copying function long before AI#

There are a lot of look-alikes now who are precisely capturing Kumar’s style. But truth be told, without the following it’s frankly pitiful. I’d argue, when you see the copycats, the first thing you’d think is “WOW ITS THE KUMAR METHOD AESTHETIC” which actually just reminds you of Kumar and distracts from whatever the video author had to say. The lack of originality precisely comes back to bite them and the lower the production value the less enjoyment someone gets from seeing such an edit. Another Kumar style edit could go viral, but most people will just think of Kumar and move on. They won’t stay because they’ll assume there’s not much substance, which is a given when the video that pops up is merely a copy. It’s entertaining, but it’s not motivating like the original is because it’s entirely decoupled from the curiousity the original one inspired.

Which is interesting because Kumar’s isn’t exactly unique of itself. What is unique is HIM. The fact he’s using an unoriginal format and juxtaposing it against “himself” which goes against traditional “Dark Triad” content creators is exactly what gives the videos a uniquely ironic taste that inspires curiousity in the viewer. The other copycats are just pretending to be him which is why no one cares what THEY have to say while at the same time the edits are always entertaining. There’s no irony from that makes a user curious, only entertained that they’re watching someone else thought that Kumar was cool enough to copy.

But does all of this go out the window when there is a popular Kumar copy?

Here’s a look-alike I think does work: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DZdb9srTFbs/ ⁸#

It’s metrics are far and above better than most clones so what exactly did it do here? It’s Kumar’s aesthetics but the rhetoric is completely changed. This time Kumar is the enemy of the author which runs the risk of returning the script back to traditional “finance bro” rhetoric. But he’s able to still distance himself from it by displaying politeness to Kumar, “With all do respect including accountants.” And the beef he’s developing plays off of classic beloved tropes:

• Old vs young
• Copycat enemies fighting over a name and video aesthetic
• Freedom of information vs capitalizing on information.

So the magic touch that made this video worthy of attention comes from the juxtaposition of rhetoric, even if the juxtaposition of aesthetic is not as present now. Curiously enough though, a lot of the popular copycats I’ve seen usually center around an AI product or are just generally pro AI. It may also be the case that mentioning AI attracts negative attention from the Kumar crowd resulting in an ironic rise to fame in the first place.

This flatly unoriginal one would go against my previous points though, right? https://www.instagram.com/p/DZp4Wj5E8wS/#

I think this is just another case of the rich getting richer. This was already a well establish brand, Nothing has been around for over 5 years now with plenty of phones. Being entertaining IS enough here because Nothing has already found it’s audience of people that will entertain the values the company has stood for. Even if it’s presented in a wholly unoriginal way. And further, based on personal research (aka personalized search bias) I have not found a trend copycat that has broke past ~10K likes that hasn’t either come from an established company/brand/personality or from an innovative creator that iterated on the trend in a unique way. Because otherwise, why watch a copy of Kumar’s video, if not for the brand’s values or the unique innovations?

Lists of People Who Never Have My Trust#

In my relatively short list of people who never have my full trust, I include advertisers. I am still suspicious of his rise which sounds ridiculous because I seem like I have an exact diagnosis. When in reality, I have an idea of what made this likely stick for people who did see it, but I don’t know HOW so many people saw it. All of these videos are just advertisements without the label, yet they aren’t ignored the way people ignore advertisements. What about these videos, beyond the rhetoric, beyond the aesthetic, is so appealing as to ascend beyond their status as empty advertisements? Because yes when you stop and take a look at what’s there it’s all smoke and mirrors.

Content creators on Instagram are well aware, most people don’t follow creators anymore. They just hope they pop up in the algorithm hoping to go viral at least once and milk it for all its worth⁹. Given that, why would someone try to build a stable knowledge sharing platform on INSTAGRAM of all places, one of the least stable places for content given it’s deleterious nature and naturally unstable audience building that occurs on there.

Also, WHERE is this financial knowledge? He claims he has revolutionary financial advice, rivaling modern day finance bros. But all we have to show for it is a couple of aura farming edits and an arbitrary date. And what we’ve seen so far of his financial advice does not seem worthy of competition. It’s gatekeeping for reasons that aren’t exactly clear. Very much dissimilar when developers delay releasing things to avoid clashing with other releases or when people set aside a generous timeline for to account for the bureaucratic processes.

This isn’t even his first rodeo on Instagram (what the irony relies on btw). He’s previously been on Instagram, according to Mason Benoit. Especially in this video, it’s very obvious with the same guy, right in the same office. Make no mistake, he is NOT an authentic creator who just happened to drop some genuinely cool edits, but rather someone who is crafting an ideal persona. We’re looking at someone first crafting an aesthetic before they’ve even presenting any knowledge.

Specing into the Skepticism and Cynicism#

Okok let me relax here a bit because it’s not like this guy did anything specifically wrong. Yet… But it’s honestly shocking to see someone with almost nothing of actual SUBSTANCE take off so quickly. If I was bolder with my speculation and less relaxed about my desire for epistemic accuracy I’d suggest that this guy is an industry plant.

But the real interesting thing is the absolute obsession with NOTHING. It’s not an original topic, people complaining about how style has superseded substance in modern times. But it still remains one of the world’s most favored traps ever.

Trump voters fell for this in the 2024 elections, hoping that the only man brave enough to challenge the status quo¹⁰. This man had little to NOTHING to show for from his last term, rather some might argue he had anti-feats. Yet people had HOPE that something might change. When faced with Kamala Harris, someone extremely symbolic of a lack of change¹¹ vs Trump, a seeming enemy of the status quo. Even further, to a lot of minority voters, Trump was actually the status quo and Kamala, a potential first woman 2nd black president, was the enemy of the status quo. Point being, no matter who was voting everyone was extremely dissatisfied and hoping for change, yet aesthetics played a much bigger role in the previous election than their actions or qualities.

In our hope for love we download these dating apps, but the experience of connection on them is anything but personal. We rely heavily on evaluating the aesthetics of the photos. We formulate arbitrary judgments about people who can’t craft a witty response to a generic set of prompts from hinge. We scrutinize each and every bit of a person’s bio, striving from something that might barely related to a preestablished red flag. When in reality, does it really matter if the guy has a photo of his fish? Does it matter if the girl says she “likes yapping” in her hinge bio? Is someone’s height or weight really that relevant if they’re someone you’ve managed to legitimately connect with? Connecting with people is hardest on the apps where the priority is optimizing one’s aesthetics for an algorithm and scrutinizing pictures and pixels on a black mirror.

You’ve heard this before “You’re not immune to propaganda” but the reason for this is that hope is inevitable. It’s a natural consequence of living because if you didn’t things could ever be well or worthwhile why would you live? But it’s also dangerous, especially when we seek out hope in the words and aesthetics of people and things instead of within ourselves. and salvation from others or in popular thought¹² instead of ourselves.

Kumar Ruined my Blog Post#

Typical of the online game, as I was finishing up this post Kumar uploads another video and appears to have made some significant changes to his profile, almost like an ARG. The big thing is the statements he makes in his latest video where he AGAIN changes the games. A couple things he’s doing the finance bros aren’t:

• His video is much calmer and direct overall, there’s very few flashing lights or jump cuts
• He’s not promising riches in his course
• He’s not promising even ENJOYMENT from his course, going as far to say you may not enjoy his course
• He subverts the relaxing vibe of his video with his sudden execution by a shadowy figure

I’ll be honest, I still expected a lot of extreme promises from him but it’s good to see he’s taking a grounded approach, even pointing the over-reliance on aesthetics (similar out what I’ve written) that finance grifters were relying on! And yet he’s still holding out on us which I still don’t see as anything more than a manipulative marketing ploy. Even turning up the suspense again with the early termination of the only promise he was making on this video. Perhaps this is just a difference of philosophy but I can’t help but wonder if the overengagement with the marketing will ultimately overshadow and even ruin the actual knowledge Kumar does share, if he gets around to that. He’s still “selling” a promise, but we still aren’t exactly sure of what and it’s still unclear why this would be worth someone’s attention.

Of course, the more interesting thing to most people is the weird changes to he made to his profile so let’s take a look at those.

So an important fact to note is that English is not a language where all the characters are equally likely to appear in a sentence. Rather certain characters are more likely to appear in the English language than others. For example, if I wanted to guess which single letter would go viral first among english speakers I’d guess E since it’s the most common letter in the language. Therefore, the stochastic process of meme makers would likely choose “E” and it would likely be quickly processed by viewers. More interestingly, we can then fit the cryptogram into this distribution (or something similar) to identify what letters would most likely fit into this.

But how do we know we’re working with a cryptogram? Or in English? Thankfully, the great part about math is that if we can structure our problem you’re already a good way through the problem. Here’s the encrypted captions below (ordered from earliest to latest post):

• L grq’w eholhyh lq frlqflghqfhv.
• Zlwkrxw wkh jodvvhv, krz fdq brx vhh?
• Brx zhuh fkrvhq orqj ehiruh brx nqhz lw. Bhv, brx.
• Wkh gdb ri uhfnrqlqj lv frplqj.
• Wklv lv mxvw wkh ehjlqqlqj.
• Nxpdu lv ghdg, exw wkh phwkrg olyhv rq.

Using this we can produce a list of letters and their respective frequencies (as a percentage) corresponding to the 26 letters (fill remaining values with zeros). Next, we’ll order the values largest to smallest so we get two vectors:

• Caption frequencies: [14.12,9.41,9.41,8.82,7.65,7.06,5.29,4.71,4.12,3.53,3.53,3.53,2.94,2.35,2.35,2.35,2.35,1.76,1.76,1.18,1.18,0.59,0,0,0,0]
• English frequencies (from Cornell link): [12.02,9.10,8.12,7.68,7.31,6.95,6.28,6.02,5.92,4.32,3.98,2.88,2.71,2.61,2.30,2.11,2.09,2.03,1.82,1.49,1.11,0.69,0.17,0.11,0.10,0.07]

So how do we know if these two distributions are the same? The key lies in my label for these list of numbers, vectors.

Take two lines, growing in one direction, sharing a point, in some euclidean¹⁴ space. How would you know they’re the same? Well we can measure the angle between the lines in order. If the angle is 0^o then we know the lines are definitely the same. If the angle is 90^o then we know the two lines are perpendicular and thus dissimilar¹⁵. And we also have the \(\cos\) function which takes that range of angles \([0-90]\) and transforms it into a measure of similarity \([1-0]\). With a little bit of computer math and the following equivalence for vector norms: \[ \overrightarrow {\mathbf{A}} \cdot \overrightarrow{\mathbf{B}} = \lVert\overrightarrow{\mathbf{A}}\rVert\cdot\lVert\overrightarrow{\mathbf{B}}\rVert\cos\theta \] We find that the vectors have a similarity of \(\sim0.98\). So it’s definitely reasonable to assume Kumar’s messages are English. Better yet, we know which letters correspond to which frequencies so we already have a good starting point for which letters belong to which (just match similar frequencies)! From here we can exploit the other English language patterns present in the messages to confirm our guesses. We can look at words such as “L” or “grq’w” which provide a very small set of letters that could fit these words. Or, you can think like a software developer and see if someone already built a tool to do this automatically, which is what I did¹⁶! Here’s the results:

• I don’t believe in coincidences.
• Without the glasses, how can you see?
• You were chosen long before you knew it. Yes, you.
• The day of reckoning is coming.
• This is just the beginning.
• Kumar is dead, but the method lives on.

Creepy! More interestingly this was actually encrypted with a simple Ceaser cipher! Just “shift” each letter 3 letters forward. However, if you run the above tool I’ve shown you may get a different result for the unusued letters.

• Decrypted: xyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw
• Encrypted: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

If anything I think this may lead credence to the idea that this is maybe some time type of internet game or social experiment. Or maybe, if the messages are taken more literally, we still have no idea what’s happening other than he’s dropping a “method”. Again, he’s holding out on us in favor working on generating hype over actual knowledge…