This video was made possible by Skillshare. The first 1000 people to sign up can learn
with Skillshare for their first 2 months for only 99 cents. This is Tuvalu. You’re probably going to need to zoom in
because Tuvalu is the forth smallest country in the world by area and second smallest by
population. Only 10,000 people live there which is less
than Kirksville, Missouri—a town who’s main attraction is the Museum of Osteopathic
Medicine. Tuvalu lies about halfway between Sydney,
Australia and Honolulu, Hawaii so it is isolated. The main island stretches a mere 2,000 feet
across at it’s widest and space is so limited that, when not used for flights, the airport’s
runway is used as a public park and gathering place. Tuvalu also has the lowest total GDP of any
country worldwide. Of course it doesn’t help that it’s the
second least populous country and the least populous country, the Vatican, literally has
a bathtub worth two billion dollars, but the overall gross domestic product of this country
is a mere $32 million. Just, for some reference, that’s less than
the amount the US government spends on printing each year. Just to be more clear, that’s 85 times less
than the amount the US government spends on printing each year because the US government
spends $2.7 billion on printing every year. But that’s not the point. The point is that Tuvalu is very small, very
isolated, and very poor. When you’re situated in the middle of the
Pacific, it can be tough to make money. A lot of other Pacific island countries rely
on income from tourism, but it’s particularly tough to get to Tuvalu. Its airport only sees three flights a week
from Nadi, Fiji and this 650 mile trip costs about $800 round trip. In metric that’s too damn much. Auckland, the nearest large city, is also
just as close to Antartica as it is to Tuvalu, so, they make their money by killing… fish
that is. Not only do 42% of Tuvaluans work in fishing,
but the country also has an enormous exclusive economic zone in which they have exclusive
rights to resources so they sell fishing licenses to foreign ships which provides a significant
portion of the government income, but the country’s most interesting source of income
came to them entirely by chance. If you remember Half as Interesting episode
four, back before all my jokes became terrible, I talked about the International Organization
for Standardization which sets standards on how to make tea among other things. One of them is standard 3166 which defines
two-letter codes for each and every country so, for example, Japan got JP, Romania got
RO, and Guatemala got GT, but then the internet came around. In an internet address, there is generally
a third-level domain, a second-level domain, and the top-level domain, which is what we’re
interested in. The top-level domain is the last part of a
domain name such as .com, .org, .net, .gov, etc. Starting in 1985, the Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority, which assigns top-level domains and has a pretty terrible website for the
organization that basically runs the internet, started creating top-level domains for specific
countries and rather than just choosing codes for each country, they took the ISO 3166 list
and used the pre-set codes for each country, and here’s where Tuvalu got really lucky. Their code was “tv” and so their top-level
domain was “.tv.” As it turned out the internet did not fail
like journalist Clifford Stoll predicted when he wrote in 1995, “you can't tote [a] laptop
to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT
Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” A few people even starting watching video
on the internet and “.tv” was the perfect top-level domain for new streaming sites and
so Tuvalu starting selling domains. Originally a company called DotTv bought the
licensing rights for the .tv domain but in 2002 this company was acquired by Verisign
which, aside from being a nightmare of a name for dyslexics, is the registrar for a bunch
of different top-level domains including .com, .net, and now .tv. It’s believed that the country of Tuvalu
now receives $2-3 million per year from the registration of different .tv domains. Up until 2000, Tuvalu was not part of the
United Nations but they joined after this deal went through because they could finally
afford the $100,000 joining fee. The revenues from this domain now amount to
almost 10% of the country’s GDP and have been used to pay for crucial development in
this tiny island country. If you want to learn how to join the United
Nations, Skillshare sort’ve has a class for that. They don’t have a course about how to get
your country into the UN—that might be just a bit too niche—but they do have a course
about how to get a job at the UN. It covers the application process, the skill
assessments, the interview stage, and much more, but if you want to learn something a
little less practical, they also have courses like how to solve a Rubik’s Cube by fellow
YouTuber Mike Boyd. What’s great about Skillshare is that they
have over 18,000 classes so if you want to learn something, there’s a good chance they
have a course on it. You can get started learning today with Skillshare
by being one of the first 1,000 people to sign up at skl.sh/hai7 and by doing so, you’ll
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