3 Fictional Universes Where The Money Makes No Sense | YBOC (Star Wars, Harry Potter, John Wick)

this video is brought to you by nordvpn head over to nordvpn.com yboc to get a huge discount off a two-year plan and a month free plus it just really helps the show hey there nerds it's me dr jordan breeding and today i am metaphorically setting aside my stethoscope and putting on these uh non-prescriptive glasses they gave me as an award for being the best economics doctor of all time you are watching another episode of your brain on crack the most fiscally responsible show on the internet and the only show on cracked where i spent like like 40 dollars of my personal money on this freaking kong figurine for the pilot episode so i'm gonna squeeze every last cent from his sculpted simeon cheeks so please allow my sexy graduate teaching assistant and i to explain in the real world most trade policies and financial systems are built by economists or business people or dudes on our wall street bets who have some sort of training or expertise in that area in movies it's all designed by people who mostly have training in explosions and expertise and booby scenes and it shows the john wick movies are basically hyper violent harry potter rip-offs replacing wizards with assassins and goblins with ex-suicide girls john wake is so good at shooting he might as well be magic and this entire assassination world operates in the background of our own entirely undetectable by normal bad at shooting muggles and governed by its own ministry of magic called the high table it is a direct one-to-one comparison another similarity is both franchises use their own crazy form of currency but instead of blowing their copper nuts on butter beer assassins use their special money on hotel chains that exclusively cater to killers and corpse cleaning crews that specialize wearing fly ass hats and their own telecommunications infrastructure that appears several decades behind technologically which somehow makes it even more awesome order one one one one one one one one one confirmed well let's talk about those coins for a second you might assume that they have some kind of fixed worth like one coin equals one burrito chipotle without guac but according to the directors a coin's value is directly tied to the owner's reputation they specifically say that wix coins are more valuable than the continental bartenders which is kind of a dick thing to say but it does help explain how a single whitcoin buys him everything from a handgun to a drink at the bar to uh getting a half dozen corpses dragged out of his house precise but think how much that would suck for everybody else with real money the only reason people accept something like a paper dollar in a transaction is because they trust that they'll be able to use that dollar later and it'll hold similar value if that trust disappears then the paper dollar becomes worthless now imagine if the only way food lion lets you purchase cool ranch doritos is if they like you personally dessert the finest if somebody unearths john wick's questionable tweets from 10 years ago about how he really prefers to assassinate white people his personal fortune could plummet in minutes it's like bitcoin for the worst kind of people so like bitcoin and i thought i ladled the graveyard back but how can there possibly be enough money in killing people to support this many assassins alongside everybody else in the industry from the porny hr departments to full-time bureaucrats like the adjudicator or the mystical salt of sand how frequently are people in this world assassinated for serious money and not just because some crazy dude hates the beatles hey dude don't make it fast looking at the new york city specific board in john wick 2 we see that sure killing john wick is worth like 7 million but that seems relatively rare and obviously nobody is ever going to collect on that bounty and even in the top 10 we've got somebody worth only 25 thousand dollars that's not nothing but john wick kills nearly 100 hitmen in the third film alone all of whom are presumably fighting over that same pretty small pool of available bounties and remember if they don't collect on these cash payouts they're stuck with magic reputation tokens that may or may not be worth anything republicans are no good out here i need something more real the only way this makes any sense is if the assassin economy is almost entirely populated with part-time gig workers that's why all the kick-ass ninja dudes from parabellum work at a sushi shop they probably make way more money slinging fish than they ever do hunting down ex-boyfriends for a couple bucks assassinations are just a fun thing to do whenever grubhub orders are slow i'm a huge fan steven levitt the author of freakonomics once did a study on the earnings of drug dealers in chicago and found that street level dealers were actually making like minimum wage most of the wealth flows to the top like maybe winston can make a living running an assassin hotel because he's not living gig to gig but basically everybody else in these movies is the murderous equivalent of a 40 year old bassist living at home with his mom and driving ubers during the day and waiting for his chance to finally make it big and you know kill keanu reeves on bass play the grim reaper [Applause] similar to john wick harry potter movies are also basically just harry potter movies also similar to john wick their economy is built on nothing but dreams and unicorn farts to start there's literally only one bank in the entire world which is run by goblins who are also jewish stereotypes because rowling has always kind of sucked but it's okay because at some point she'll tweet that they're actually trans lesbians because you know rowling loves trans people what exactly are these things here come goblins harry but gringo's wizarding bank isn't really a bank so much as a vault gringotts doesn't extend credit or offer small business loans it's literally just a place to physically store your nuts that's a bit more secure than shoving them into your underwear and that's doubly important in a world where all currency is physical and there's no such thing as debit cards or venmo to become a small business owner you either need to suckle the teats of a wealthy patron like the malfoy's who would already refuse to give you anything if you had even an ounce of non-magical blood in you or i don't know you need to rob somebody and steal their big bag of nuts or whatever come goblin these difficulties explain why most businesses like ollivander's the wand shop have been open for almost 2 000 years it's very stagnated which means that there's also very very little competition if all of anders starts patting his wands with hippogriff there's nothing anybody can do about it say hello to me but even if there were opportunities for new business ventures what would actually be profitable i mean think about it there's no need for construction companies when you can turn a literal shoe into a 5 000 square foot mansion inside with a flick of a wrist and also in my experience pouring jet fuel into an owl's butt actually makes them worse at flying that's a major problem for the magical fuel industry no and if you've got a broom or can apparate you can basically travel anywhere in the world and again sleep in a wondrous magical shoe so airbnb and travel agencies are out and there's no traditional media entertainment if it relies on any technology more complicated than paint on canvas so the arts are also pretty much out [Music] the only things that wizard would ever spend money on are basically eating out the magical equivalent of five guys or buying stupid goofy like wands that turn into rubber chickens that is why the books make such a big deal out of all the candy and toys harry is always buying because what else even is there a little bit common even worse this clearly limits job opportunities if you're not slinging magical burgers the only other clear jobs are in the government which includes the state-sponsored competition free education system that's why all three of our main characters become magical cops or in hermione's case a bureaucrat attempting to abolish the literal system of slavery that exists in this backwards-ass culture bobby is john c like i know this is just my opinion but i think that people who agree with slavery shouldn't be in charge of a society i don't do it on purpose the world of harry potter is only fun to live in until you're 17 and you realize there are almost no job opportunities you've been taught nothing but specific spells with zero focus on creativity or problem solving and even if you do manage to convince somebody to give you their nuts for your time there's nothing to spend them on except uh whoopee cushions that turn you into frog or something [Music] i wouldn't be surprised if the wizarding community's biggest issue isn't muggles discovering their wonderful little secret world but wizards doing everything they can to escape and become an accountant in the real world so they can buy a ps5 which by itself does things twice as magical as anything dumbledore's ever done and i already know it's gay nobody's gonna have to tell me 20 years later oh the ps5 is gay we know [Music] star wars has always dedicated as much effort to its world building as its actual story and characters and this has not always been a good thing we should know about come goblins anyway the first big issue is the insane fragility of the centralized government the republic falls to the empire which falls to the new republic which causes the first order which falls to the new republic 2 double xl all in the span of like 70 years that is absolutely insane turnover especially in a galaxy with over 3.2 million inhabitable systems all with our own wildly varied currencies tax policies governmental regulations and god knows what other freaking local quirks i like the sound of that pre-empire trade was mostly facilitated by independent institutions like the trade federation which in theory meant that individual localized planetary economies had a fighting chance to weather the constant political shifts but after the clone wars the empire actually went ahead and nationalized the trade federation meaning that when the empire fell so too did the people managing interplanetary trade at a galactic level what what did you say that's not good because the galactic government needs galactic industries especially in the universe where entire planets have a singular topography like snow planet thought planet fan planet and they only export one thing breeding womp rats for their thick milk probably wouldn't be super lucrative on mustafar what with them constantly catching on fire but trade between planets requires a standardized currency yet each new government comes with its own new currency which according to wikipedia causes local valuations to fluctuate wildly like maybe the empire is cool with eating wookie meat for christmas and so the price is super low but then the new republic comes in a week later and wages a galactic war on christmas by massively taxing wookie meat causing the price to skyrocket and creating a trade imbalance overnight if only there was somebody who specialized in smuggling juicy wookie thighs and all that's without the added stressors of entire planets and industries that can blow up at any second like make your living exporting alderaanian pot oh sorry the senator said something mean to an admiral and now your entire stock is so much space dust you light all three ends at the same time really and then the smoke converges creating a trifecta of joint smoking power who can afford to invest in interplanetary trade when these planets might not even be there tomorrow the last jedi implies that the only industry guaranteed to turn a profit is one that supplies the means of waging this infinite war but even then that's only true if there's some sort of political stability i mean let's look at the death stars they are extremely expensive it's estimated they might be in the 200 quintillion dollar range and they don't even create wealth they make their money back by creating millions of jobs and hopefully restimulating the economy after the fall of the republic and also you know establishing faith in a new system by becoming a terrorist attorney i mean after all our current economy plunges every time there's a domestic terror attack like 911 or netflix upping their annual fees god bless america furthermore their seemingly unlimited power should reassure investors that the government won't change again anytime soon but but then they explode and the empire falls meaning that any loans borrowed from huge banks are probably going to be defaulted on likely obliterating these galactic banks and throwing the whole stock market into chaos and then only a little while later the first order builds starkiller base and even bigger even crazier superweapon and uses it to blow up another star system right along an important shipping lane ultimately causing the new republic government to fall before starkiller base itself is blown up and then the emperor somehow builds like a million death star caliber star destroyers and then all those explode basically good luck growing any of those milky fire rats moves too far because the infrastructure for interplanetary trade it is never gonna happen anytime soon i'd recommend betting whatever savings you have left on pod races because that is tight and will survive any economic upheaval now this is a story all about hey there i'm an economist you can tell i'm an economist because i have glasses i need it from to look at money and i just wanted to tell you about a good way to improve your own personal economy and by that i mean save money for example i wanted to watch the john wick movies the other day and i went on my netflix to watch but i couldn't watch him they don't have it in american netflix which is bad economic move in my opinion because our economy is in the crapper i got nordvpn and i switched my ip address to look like i was in australia who has a much better functioning economy because their john wick movies are on netflix i don't have to just do australia they have servers in 59 different countries so if i want to watch whatever weird stuff they've got going on on japanese netflix again one click and then i'm there and even if i don't want to save money because i suck and i don't understand the economy what and even better you know if you're one of those people who likes to do the bitcoin that's fine you don't want people to know that you're one of those bitcoiners and that's fine too because they have a strict no logs policy which means they're not tracking what you do and they're not watching so you can you know dabble in all the doge coins that you want and nobody will ever have to know it's a perfect system the good thing is that nordvpn one account can connect six devices at once which means that you know you can set your mom up with john wicks in australia in the bedroom but then you can sneak into the bathroom and watch japanese netflix on your smartphone it's a perfect system and all you got to do to get some of this goodness in you is go to nordvpn.com yboc and use code yvoc at checkout for a huge discount on a two-year plan plus an extra month free and then you can be watching all sorts of john wick and all sorts of japanese stuff wherever you want and even better if you hate all this if you hate a good economy if you hate john wick if you hate japan that's fine they have a 30-day risk-free money-back guarantee where if after 30 days you've decided you know you don't like anyone or anything and you hate yourself that's fine you can just uh get all your money back trade away all the fun that you were going to have and then you're done all right so we shorted the butter beer market misvalued the wookie meat trade and helped uh kong here pay back some of his life debt looks like that's everything be sure to see kathy on your way out for a couple of those pills from limitless that make you do math like bradley cooper friend in the hangover it's not illegal it's frowned upon like masturbating on an airplane but trade between planets requires a standardized currency yet each new government comes with its own new currency which according to wikipedia causes local valuations to fluctuate wildly fluctuate wildly you look at your fluctuating government

Channel: Cracked

Views: 235,974

Keywords: Your Brain On Cracked, Cracked, Cracked.com, John Wick, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Keanu Reeves, Broken Movie Economies, Economics, Gamestonks, r/wallstreebets, Sequel trilogy, original trilogy, prequel trilogy, Jordan Breeding, Doctor Jordan Breeding, sketch, movie money, movie plot holes, funny, Star Wars films, Disney, Warner Bros., Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Dobby, Chewbacca, Wookie meat

Id: EnlD8p_F4FU

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021