Money: it’s like if bitcoin wasn’t a scam. Invented around 3,000 BCE and adapted for the big
screen in 2016, money has long been the number one answer to the question, “how do you buy stuff?”
Now, for most people, money is not free: if you want to get, say, one dollar, you’ll typically
have to pay about a dollar for it. But money can be free if you belong to a few select groups: bar
mitzvah boys, armed robbers, people with the last name Walton, and people who are the Australian
bartender Dan Saunders—a man who also, by the way, has no licensable pictures on the internet,
so for this video, we’ll be using the next best thing: these pictures of an American Pianist also
named Dan Saunders that I found on Getty Images. One night in 2011, Dan was out drinking with his
mates in his hometown of Wangaratta, when he decided to pull some money out of an ATM to buy
some grog. Now in order for this story to make sense, it’s key to understand that Dan had two
cards, and two accounts, with National Australia Bank. One was a savings account, linked to a Visa
debit card, that had $3 sitting in it. And one was a credit account, linked to a Mastercard
credit card, with a $1,000 credit limit. Being the semi-responsible joey he was,
Dan tried to find out the balance on his savings account with his debit card, but the machine told
him his balance was unavailable. Then, he decided to transfer $200 from his credit account to his
savings account. He put in his credit card, punched in the transaction, but once he did,
the machine flashed “transaction canceled’ and spat out his card. But fueled with the courage
of Vitamin B, Dan decided to try pulling out the $200 from his savings account anyways,
using his debit card. And it worked. Given that Dan only had $3 or so bucks in his savings
account before, he figured the transaction must have gone through. So he tried again with $500.
Then $600. And it kept working, well past his $1,000 credit limit. The next morning, he woke
up with $2,000 in his wallet, and assumed his credit card was $2,000 in debt. But when he went
to check his account, it listed no record of the transaction. Dan had turned water into wine—and
by water I mean nothing and by wine I mean money. Dan didn’t know it at the time, but the reason
this was working is because he’d done the transfers between 1 and 3 am,
which is when ATMs for National Australia Bank go offline. So when he tried to transfer money
from his credit card to his savings account, the machine wasn’t able to check whether his
credit card was actually able to send that much money. It just blindly honored the transaction,
crediting the money to his savings account. But, the tricky part, which Dan would soon discover,
is that the ATM would eventually realize that it had mistakenly trusted the transaction,
and it would undo it. But—and this is key—that process took a full day.
So Dan developed a system: every night, he would double down on his transfers and stay
one day ahead of the bank. So, for example, on a Tuesday between 1-3am, Dan could add, say
$10,000 to his savings account. During the day on Tuesday, he could spend that $10,000 buying
this 1996 kangaroo beanie baby that is actually listed on ebay for $10,000. But then by Wednesday,
his savings account would have figured out the error, undone the $10,000 transfer,
and the $10,000 he spent buying the beanie baby would still be subtracted from his account,
so his savings account would be negative $10,000. So, to stay ahead of it, on Wednesday between
1-3 am, Dan could transfer $20,000 to his account. That way, during the day Wednesday,
when the $10,000 transaction from Tuesday morning is undone and taken from his account,
it won’t matter, because that account now has an additional $20,000 in it, which won’t disappear
until Thursday. And then Dan just repeated and repeated and repeated every day, increasing the
amounts every time he spent money to stay ahead of the bank, creating a kind of death spiral of
money—which would also coincidentally be a great tagline for our new channel Jet Lag: The Game.
But, granted one shot, and one opportunity to seize everything he ever wanted, Dan captured
it. In four and a half months, he spent $1.6 million of the bank’s money: betting wildly in
casinos, staying at the $2,000-a-night Emirates resort, eating Mayura wagyu and beluga caviar,
but also acting as a sort of Australian Robin Hood—an Ostrich Bonnet if you will. He paid off
his and his friends’ student loans, sent a woman to Paris to learn French, tipped everyone $500,
and even dropped $90,000 on a private jet to take him and his mates to Bali.
Now if there’s anything we’ve learned from The Big Short, it’s that Brad Pitt
is a character actor stuck in a leading man’s body, and also that banks are dumb. You see,
National Australia Bank never caught on to what Dan was doing—the only calls he got were
from the bank asking him to confirm that he had made his purchases. Ultimately, Dan was caught,
but only because he started feeling guilty, and stopped the daily transfers. The dominos fell,
the bank called him in, gave him a talking to, and Dan waited for the coppas to arrest him. But two
years passed and nobody came, seemingly because publicly acknowledging the mistake would be worse
for the bank than just eating the loss. So, in total madlad form, Dan went on a press tour,
appearing on news shows explaining what he did, and essentially saying, “somebody please come
arrest me.” Eventually his wish was granted and he served one year in prison on fraud charges,
and was ordered to pay back $200,000. In a reddit AMA, when asked what he’d do
differently, Dan said, “I don't second guess things. I'd just do everything the same.”
What would you do with infinite money? Well, if you’re my friend, YouTuber Patrick Willems,
you’d make an entire feature-length movie called Night of the Coconut that’s available exclusively
on Nebula, which is exactly what he did with that arguably irresponsible budget Nebula gave him for
it. The HAI writers, Ben and Adam, and I got to go to the premiere of Night of the Coconut and
we were blown away—it’s not only, like, a real movie, it’s a good one, about a multiverse and
an evil coconut trying to take over the world by gaining clout, and it’s extremely funny and it’s
got a whole musical number in it for some reason… look, if you’re one of the 5% of our viewers who
like our jokes, you’ll love Night of the Coconut. The best way to get Nebula—which, of course, is
the streaming service started by me and my creator friends that also has a ton of original content
I’ve made—is through the Nebula-CuriosityStream bundle, where you also get a subscription to
CuriosityStream, the incredible documentary streaming service with, for example, the awesome
six-part series “Inside the Mind of a Con Artist” all for under $15 a year. Just click the button
on-screen or go to curiositystream.com/HAI, and you’ll be helping support HAI while you’re at it.