This video was made possible by ExpressVPN. Start browsing the web securely with 3 months
free by going to expressVPN.com/HAI. In 1788, England hatched a devious plot: one
by one, they rounded up tens of thousands of local criminals onto ships, sailed them
out into the middle of the Indian Ocean, and sunk the ships, killing everyone onboard. The ships—and the innumerable bodies trapped
inside them—remain hidden for eternity at the bottom of the sea right here, where Australia
would be… if it existed at all. That’s right, Australia doesn’t exist. It never existed. The entire fictional landmass is at the center
of the largest cover-up in human history. And sure, now you’re probably thinking,
“But I’ve been to Australia!” Wrong—you’ve actually been to the Eastern
Patagonian Desert in Argentina after being tricked by a cabal of corrupt airline pilots
sworn to covering up 18th-Century England’s sixty-seventh worst genoci… wait, hold on. I’m sorry, guys, I think my new intern has
been feeding me research from conspiracy theory sites again. And, believe it or not, this isn’t the only
widespread conspiracy theory about Australia not existing—a lot of people, even some
Australians, believe that Australia isn’t a country but is, actually, an American corporation. The weird thing is, it turns out that they’re
actually kind of right, but in order to explain exactly how—and in order to determine whether
or not Australians should be jumping in the ocean and swimming to the nearest real country—we
need to talk about how Australia became a company in the first place. The year is 2009. Barack Obama has just been sworn in as the
44th President of the United States. Peanut Corp is being implicated in the deaths
of nine Americans and the poisoning of 600 more. You are alone in your room, recovering from
the swine flu, playing Wii Sports Resort on mute as your mother weeps in the living room,
unsure if your family will ever be able to recover from the worst economic recession
since the Great Depression. By June, all of these connected dots will
eventually culminate in Australia’s incorporation in the United States. Well, I mean, except for the Obama thing,
and the peanut thing, and the swine flu thing, and the Wii thing… really, just the recession
thing. The recession is what will lead to Australia’s
eventual incorporation in the United States. You see, when a country’s economy starts
to collapse, the idea of drawing all of your money out of your bank account and investing
it in gold and man-killing crossbows before the bank collapses starts to sound really
appealing. Suddenly, everyone is kicking down the door
of the nearest Wells Fargo, draining the banks of all of their money, and things get… really
bad. Like, “a whole bunch of people lose their
entire life’s savings because the banks ran out of money and shut down” bad. Knowing that this sort of “run on the bank”
could happen in their country if the downturn reached them, Australia promised all of its
citizens that even if all of the banks collapsed, the government would be able to pay back any
of the money that they weren’t able to withdraw in time. With this sort of reassurance, there would
be no reason for people to panic and, hopefully, the “run on the bank” would never need
to happen in the first place. Now, that sounds good, but it also sounds
good when you tell a girl at a bar that your favorite hobby is skiing down a giant mountain
of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck—the problem, however, is the same: when you need to prove
it, where’s that money gonna come from? Australia couldn’t just print more money—well,
I mean, they could, but then you run the risk of crazy hyperinflation like the Weimar Republic
and lesson one of history is that you really, really don’t want to be the Weimar Republic—so
they decided that if it ever came to it, they should just borrow the money from someplace
else. Specifically, American companies. Now, it’s not quite that simple—lending
money to a country instead of a company comes with certain risks. For example, if I lent money directly to Australia,
Australia could just pass the “Sam is a total rube and no one ever has to pay him
his money back” law. So, in order to follow the same regulations
as other American companies, Australia had to register as a corporation with the US Securities
and Exchange Commission, creating its very own prospectus, business plan, budget outline…
basically, everything a real American corporation would need to secure investors. So, what does this mean for Australians? Is Australia not a real country? Are Australians all just American employees? Are evil American investors pocketing Australian
taxpayers’ hard-earned money? Yes, yes, and y—wait, sorry, that was my
conspiracy theorist intern again. The real answer is, of course, no. The Australian Treasury owns the corporation
in full, the shares are not available on any stock exchange, and the prospectus prohibits
any share of the company from being traded, sold, or compensated with dividends. And let’s be honest, it’s not like investors
are jumping to cash in on a company whose most popular product is a middle aged guy
with a big knife, anyway. The point is, Australia’s incorporation
is largely a precautionary measure to protect its own citizens, and in fact, the company
has never once needed to be used because its very existence successfully prevented the
disaster it was built to remedy. Now, if you’re an Australian watching, you
might be frustrated to learn that your country is an American corporation when you still
don’t have access to every American movie and TV show on your Netflix servers. That’s why you should use ExpressVPN—ExpressVPN
allows you to change your location so that you can watch any movie or TV show that’s
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