Gold video release candidate preview
Hay all y'all, here's a potentially finished draft of the next video. I don't have any changes personally planned at this moment, but I haven't done my own watch-through of the YouTube upload yet, I will do that tomorrow while I make the thumbnail and get the transcript that becomes the captions finalized, so unless someone catches some fatal mistake or, like, the audio is just missing from the last ten minutes this is the version that'll go live once everything else is squared away.
In addition to all that I am going to try and have a post up in the next few days talking about the goals of Folding Ideas for 2024.
Cheers y'all, love you.
Comments (53)
I knew nothing about any of this (and now I do! which is great!). Watching, I kept thinking about how jewelry, and especially gold jewelry, has been a way for women to access and preserve wealth. My grandmother kept “the emergency silver spoons” until she died, it was her only financial crisis plan when she couldn’t even have her own bank account. Just something actually interesting Elba’s documentary could have covered, instead of like, planting trees!
Great video. Dan, dunno if you'll see this, but I do have one suggestion for future videos: When embedding other material, *especially* ads or other corporate propaganda, instead of having the media be full-frame with no chyron, shrink its frame slightly (and put a contrasting frame around it) and add a chyron describing what we're seeing. I think it helps to avoid any sense that your reproduction of the material (usually for critical purposes) might have the uncritical effect of perpetuating its claims.
We love you more DAN.
This is neat! I'd watch videos about gold in the other two contexts too.
Still wish my title idea “Idris Elba sells you golden shovels” got used but otherwise enjoyed it. Also nice to see some Tom Scott featuring
At around 7:21, you say Gold has challenges in 2023. Did you intend for that to reference last year, or should it be 2024?
I just got to the end, and I feel like "Gold is no longer the gold of the gold rush; it's only a shovel in the investment rush" is a very good concept to end on. (And also crying out for a heavy-handed political cartoon that I am not a good enough artist to create.)
I have adblockers on everything I can possibly block (to the point where setting up a PiHole is on my to-do list), but I am fascinated to hear about all this stuff Sidebar: There's a food-themed children's museum in Vevey, Nestle's headquarters. I loved it as a kid (because chocolate) and made the mistake of revisiting it as an adult and uhhh yeah, 100% Nestle-paid. Whoops.
Great doc!
I really liked how you did a deliberately shitty tiktok greenscreen effect
Great video, as always. At 26:16 it sounds like you're saying: "Don't let mining companies leave states in a state that will produce a toxic pit." I assume you meant to say "sites" there. Don't know if that's worth fixing, though. Nothing else to report. Keep up the fantastic work!
Love this. I love bad media analysis, and weird crank analysis, and this is great intersection of that.
Hi, I watched this multiple times and took notes, which I'll share here. Please excuse me if this isn't useful/actionable/relevant, I'm never certain how granular to be with my feedback. [2:41] The lighting on Dan's face seems overly harsh in a few places, with the right side being almost completely in shadow sometimes. [4:09] I kind of want the video overlay in the Wikipedia section to be even crappier, like with the selfie cam sort of jittering around, just to really sell the bit. [7:01] The framing/editing makes me feel like there should be a set of bullet points here, listing gold as an element, narrative, and commodity. [11:12] Just want to say thanks for bothering to include this definition. [18:17] I remember on one of your editing streams you were hesitant about using this montage of Idris saying "gold" a bunch, and given that you're essentially making the same joke at the beginning and and end of the video, I agree. I think it might be more appropriate/effective to instead use one or more clips of Idris saying something utterly vapid in a bored tone, like that other clip you used where he says "this is so exciting!" while not sounding remotely excited. Lastly, the discussion of "shovel salesmen" at the end keeps reminding me of the bit from Twin Peaks (2017) with the guy spray-painting a bunch of shovels gold, and I just feel like there must be some sort of good joke/compelling visual/incisive bit of commentary there. On the whole I really enjoyed the video, I particularly liked the comedic bits, but even after following the creation of this video (via your twitch streams) and watching it twice, I'm still not 100% sure what exactly I'm supposed to take away from it. Is it just supposed to be a demonstration/warning of how corporate propaganda works, or is there another point being made here that I'm not seeing? Anyways, thanks for the video, and I apologize again for this long and rambling comment. Cheers!
I know you're using "global south" as a shorthand for non-industrialized/colonized/poor countries, but at 31:45 it's a bit jarring to hear "It's one thing for New Zealand to strongarm ... but what about countries in the Global South?", because New Zealand is pretty firmly in the southern hemisphere.
"Global south" as a term is distinct from "southern hemisphere" though. New Zealand and Australia are not included in the term global south.
I'm not sold on the point about gold being price stable over a period of 400 years. Historically, more and more gold has been mined out of the ground so I would intuitively assume that with an increase in supply the value of some fixed amount of gold would slowly depreciate.
I have family who use gold as investment, and that's generally an accepted element of the whole thing. The idea is that it's stable overall, so even if it deprecates somewhat, it'll deprecate less than anything else you're likely to do with the money rather than running the risk (however minor) of an investment. In the case of e.g. a complete government collapse or a hyperinflation scenario, all your money may be worthless, but your gold will only be a bit less valuable than it was when you bought it.
Presumably you already know this since you have the gold Wikipedia page in the background but while gold is immune to the more common types of corrosion it is vulnerable to being dissolved in mercury.
About the clips from Tom Scott's documentary (around 26:30)... He was talking about two different lakes right? First filled with acidic waste and the second alkaline (a pool with pH>11 is Wild)... but having these two clips back-to-back can be a bit confusing (I wasn't looking at the screen and was like what which one is it? Because knowing nothing of this topic I assumed they were not producing both acidic and basic waste and disposing of those separately wth...)
Yes, he was. They are from 2 different videos I believe (just based on the fact that Tom almost never goes to 2 separate locations in 1 video). Can be solved by adding little title cards I guess, or by picking shots where the backgrounds are obviously different.
Having just listened to his 6-part episode of Behind the Bastards, that G. Gordon Liddy cameo hit me like a bag of bricks.
Good video, though I was almost a little surprised when I realized it wasn't going to veer off into an analysis of "Sound Money", Peter Thiel and relevent libertarian conspiracism, since that would have been in line with what's felt like the channels recent trend.
Dan, I was turning in my office chair, and the arm of it hit my keyboard *just right* to hit the YouTube hotkey to increase playback speed, precisely when you started listing off Cool Gold Facts at 4:07, and I assumed it was a tongue-in-cheek artistic choice :D Also, how are we really out here rattling off cool gold facts but not talking about how relativistic contraction is why it's such an unusual color for a pure metal?
Great video! AlllLllLllsooo when are we getting a full-length version of the intro/outro song? It's super goofy and I love it.
Great job Dan and Nathan, I appreciate that you brought up Oceana Gold's fuck up in the Philippines
Thank for your thoughtful contributions to our world, Dan. 🌷 These guys talking about the “beauty” of the context of the CA Gold Rush…wow.
This is an incredible documentary about gold for being a documentary about a documentary about gold
jokes aside i do need a multipart documentary series about the history of labor and mining across time and geography
The editing on this one matches the subject matter so well. I don't really know what it is precisely but the format and the alteration of the green-screen and desk portions are particularly snappy. Great vid all around!
5:06 - the credit to wikimedia stays even though the image switches from the gold chunk to a Wikipedia page (briefly) I really want to watch a gold documentary now...
This is a great teardown of digital shovel salesmen. The intro and outro song is brilliantly silly.
This may not be relevant. A few years ago, we had Idris Elba as a DJ for my department’s virtual Christmas party. It’s a large company and a large department in the company, but it seemed odd that we would get him for that. Watching this, I’m wondering if Idris Elba is just a really easy person to get if you need a celebrity for whatever weird corporate gig you have.
He is a notorious workaholic.
33:16 - the beginning of the word 'company' comes in a bit hot 39:17 - 'and when i' sounds crackly
i like it when things thank me at the end of them :)
Loved it! Definitely will have the Idris Elba “gold” remix stuck in my head forever.
There's a little visual bug about 4:52 when you're switching to the visual of the chunk in the field museum, but other than that this is amazing!
7:22 - Did you mean 2023 or 2024, given we're now on the other side?
Okay, I loved this. But also, because it came up a lot tertiarily, but never fully adressed (unless I just missed it), I have to ask: is the idea that gold is useful in the event of an economic collapse even remotely true? I feel the implication is that gold would, at least temporarily, become de-facto currency; and that sounds ahistoric. The only part of the doc I actually found kinda disgusting was the Boxing Day Tsunami part, where they seem to make that subtext text. I kind of wish you delved into wether what they said about gold there was true, but I guess I can't complain about you treating an aside as an aside lol.
It's in there, it's not entirely false but their narrative relies heavily on a lot of unspoken assumptions between "gold will likely have value in a post-apocalypse" and "gold is a wise investment for a post-apocalypse." Humans have valued gold for too long across too many different collapses to say gold would be worthless, but if you bought $1,000,000 in gold instead of $1,000,000 in bandages, water filters, canned goods, sugar, salt, bleach, etc. then sure you're gonna be able to trade it, it will have trade value for all the reasons its had trade value in the past, but you're gonna take a really steep haircut on your $1,000,000.
I like this a lot. It’s a solid look at the existence of corporate propaganda without any sense of agenda. The final conclusion of “this is interesting in how boring it is” is exactly the kinds of conversations I love, so found listening to you talk about it was great
I also like the click bait TS thumbnail
At 4:53-4:55 the background image flickers and is first out of focus.
Also 7:24 you say 2023 but it’s now 2024
Small note about the YouTuber you show ~@26:40: he calls the mining lake "acid" and "alkaline". Those are opposites. If the pH is above 11, as he states, he means alkaline and is using "acid" colloquially instead of scientifically. Might be worth adding a text note about his inaccuracy.
He happens to be at 2 different pits - when Dan says "here's some quick facts as to why pit lakes are dangerous" you can see the 2 locations with their pH levels listed.
Holy shit the Gordon Liddy reference was wild. I forgot he was in those ads.
Nothing could have prepared me for the Intro.
I hadn't even heard of this documentary but I'm so excited for your next video 😁
I'm 3 minures in, and enjoy it so far. I'm not sure if this is the kind of feedback you want, and I usually don't point out pronounciation errors (I tend to assume it's just a dialect), but at 3:15 you pronounce "especially" with an x.
Maybe I should have left in the text-on-screen gag making fun of that 🥲
Screw my uni readings, I know what I'm doing tonight
Was about to go to sleep but I guess that’s not happening