so please take care of yourself good distance watch your hands if you can stay at how we do w. here for you we are working tirelessly to keep you informed on all of our platforms are all in this. together make it. stay safe everybody. stay safe stay safe please stay safe. big ideas drive big changes in business and in society as a whole some are hailed as visionary but visions often turn out to be wrong or even

stupid today are made we'll be examining a range of illusions in the economy i'm chris colfer welcome to the show now one big illusion that drives people in business is the notion that you can make a fast buck for a little work if someone promises that you should be suspicious my colleague went undercover to examine the world of multilevel marketing which has often been criticized as a pyramid scheme. sounds pretty cool the whole thing cost me $86650.00 euros i've never met anybody who's taken out more money than they paid in. multi-level or network marketing the 1st time i heard of it was because a good friend who had got involved with it and tried to sell me let's say some funny stuff. and it goes like this you become an independent seller of

a product weight loss shakes make up financial products just about anything goes plus you can make money by bringing people into the system you earn a percentage of their sales too but of course this can't go on forever every member recruits 5 new people they in turn recruit 5 new people after 14 times there will be more people in the system than in the entire world. while i'm researching this i come across masses of office like it's always about making a lot of money without really having to do very much also always important bringing in other people and then i come across an offer where the software makes the money for me. so i can trade in the currency markets even if i have no idea of what i'm actually

doing. the trading is basically you betting that one currency will go up against another one it's extremely high risk you can win a lot of money quite fast but you can just as quick. the video tries to persuade me that the software will work automatically for me with amazing returns. i want to know more how do these people work the 1st step is not to blow my cover i create a fake profile. i travel to vienna to meet the marketers i've only seen online up to now. quickly i get ready hide the camera and i'm on the cover i am totally nervous at the event in a small hotel for year i see extremely young people and. only in the audience the

guy who wants to sell me the trading software is only 18 years old i'm supposed to pay $250.00 for the 1st month to use the software and again he reminds me what's kind of profits are possible here. and i keep getting it drummed into me recommendations in other words network marketing mean even more income and that it's totally easy to sell the software. issue in this group since the. truth her 'd story. this from what you have these 18 year olds float on stage tell you all about 4

techs trading and you can make a 20 percent yield in one month which is obviously crazy. but they still seem to get people into making money off of it which is even crazy. attorney patrick wilson confirms my doubts small trades often work but the big money is quickly gone. and i haven't met a single person who ended up making more money than they put in if it wasn't a stupid coincidence and then it's only a matter of sam's like someone deposited 500 euros and got back 800. and of course that's a small price to pay if it gets you someone who invests 100000 euros and loses all of it to his competitors. the european supervisory authority says almost all small investors lose often several 1000 euros of course that's nowhere to be seen in these presentations. it takes

a long time to find someone who is willing to talk to me about his loss just before we finish filming i travel to see him i want to hear his story. the man wants to remain anonymous only 3 of his friends know that he has lost 87000 euros in the beginning he was very excited about the software. i would say is just pure euphoria. finally you have a chance with stocks. you always heard about things like stocks. or you can make a lot of money very quickly. these people are trained. they are lucky even more hype and enthusiasm so that you can hardly a scape. he bore money from his friends to do it soon it was all gone my children all turned 18 around that time they wanted cars wanted a vacation graduated from high school and so on they went to university and i

simply could not support them it just wasn't possible. this has happened many times some 200000 cases have been reported in germany alone i want to know from the network as in vienna why they do not provide precise loss figures as the e.u. requires after repeated inquiries i get an answer and surprisingly. the disclaimer has been checked by a lawyer and covers everything it points out that investors risk losing part or all of their initial capital. but it doesn't say that the vast majority of people lose their money. obviously these guys from vienna on straight up criminals there this claim but they've also shown as these accounts with 20 percent yield their fancy cars they're just some are selling a tree and that's definitely not for me i like to know where my money is all the time and how quickly i can access it if you are interested in this sort of trading

i recommend going to your bank and getting some advise that's a whole lot safer than giving your money to someone you just met on social media. sounds about right so what makes so many of us susceptible to dubious money making schemes well we tend to focus on how we would like things to turn out rather than inconvenient facts now to distinguish between illusion and reality we have to use our common sense and as the ancient greek philosopher plato showed that can be difficult. what our economic illusions. imagine we spend our whole life tied up in a cave in front of us is a big wall on which we see figures passing by but they are mere shadows of things moving in front of the fire. we believe it's reality but it's an illusion plato's

cave the allegory by the ancient greek philosopher is still valid today. politicians entrepreneur and consumers can fall victim to illusions misunderstanding or misinterpreting reality. in the 1950 s. the soviet union aimed to overtake the u.s. economy among other things its plan called for communist corner that was twice as large as capitalist corn but the plan fell apart due to crop failures and unwieldy . the picture you have socialism proved to be an illusion. illusions also took root in the west for example you're going to shrimps vision in 1998 was to turn the maker of mercedes cars into a global automobile company so he merged bence with u.s. car maker chrysler celebrating it as a match made in heaven. but the 2 company's culture and philosophy were completely incompatible the project failed alternately at

a cost of around $40000000000.00 euros the vision to be an expensive illusion. and consumers believe their diesels were environmentally friendly intil it turned out that emissions test said been manipulated and the vehicles polluted bunch more than was claimed i'm a loser driven by fraud. and how about the rest of us honestly we love illusions at least at 1st nothing pulls us in like a well made illusion. advertising consumption financial markets a large part of the economy is based on illusions. and today we sit in our cage or at least in front of our screens voluntarily but before our illusions shatter we'd better leave the cave and seek out reality.

well sometimes we want to escape reality and what industry helps those do that better than the movie business it's rise on the lucian's and today digital technology can create a perfect illusion of reality gone are the days when an actor was stuffed into a good sailor costume to bring terror to makeshift cardboard cities just look at the science fiction film avatar it's fascinating and the company right here in berlin is among the leaders in these 3 d. animation technique and we put the focus of his. music video in the make. the computer is simultaneously transferring the movement of the dancers to a digital character the technical director oversees everything interrupting and readjusting until all the scenes are finished be careful what you do with your fingers know. the gray sensors mounted to the dancers suits are especially

important they can't slip or shift 3 d. cameras on the ceiling capture the movement of the sensors and send. data to the software. you have a different system the motion the body motion capture which is going from an optical system call up to trucks so it's trucking these markers that we velcro onto his skin this is a completely separate system this is official system with a device we can use a phone or any camera whatsoever and we are actually capturing the expression on his face. the client is a d.j. who is hoping to hit the charts with his song the d.j.'s face and body will later be superimposed onto the robot step by step the result it will look like the d.j. himself is dancing. with motion capture you can create doubles that are deceptively real here for example with clue. the pop singer is long deceased but

his avatar has hit the pop charts. and they productions is an animation studio based in berlin and most of the 20 employees are 3 d. artists the couple had my any flynn and david bennett run the place in 2009 but it worked on the ground breaking hollywood blockbuster avatar bringing the humanoid species navi to life it felt like that was the 1st time that this whole system really worked with facial expressions on such a big scale when we were working on it we just really had no idea how big that movie with going to be because of the time consuming post-production motion capture ends up being more costly than normal productions but there are exceptions for example that you're working with a celebrity and they're charging how many thousands per minute they're on said if

you don't have to work with their physical time and you instead have their character it can be done much cheaper using the sensors her mind the flynn created a 3 d. avatar of herself it was revealed her double can speak at conferences simultaneously the avatar will take on the facial expressions of the speaker. and. distinguishing between reality and fiction is becoming more and more difficult some may find that frightening but flynn isn't worried the people that are most astonished are my parents you know they keep asking me if i shaved my head and i might know it's not me. i think it's the people who who know me and can see me in my digital double i think that always gives them a surprise. their projects range from a hologram for a commercial with football star neymar. animating batman in the then most

successful computer game in the world. to helping artist jeff koons translate one of his iconic sculptures into a moving ballerina. there's a kind of a consciousness to the world where people are starting to realize the potential for them and they're getting affordable now. animation technology and motion capture are developing in leaps and bounds the business with illusions can only get stronger. ok so hollywood can make anything look real and we delight in this deception but the downside is that we are vulnerable to manipulated images just think propaganda misinformation luckily there isn't an area that's free of illusions hard data economic indicators such as g.d.p. which measures the value of goods and services produced in

a country surely numbers like that are real and meaningful well maybe. the gross domestic product i know that doesn't sound so interesting but it is seen as the most important indicator of our wealth but what if g.d.p. is no longer relevant in our. words if it's a misconception. let's say garden for example in 2015 the irish economy grew by 26 percent 26 percent and the reason for that is right well. and it. made it possible in that he transferred intellectual property rights to a subsidiary an island as

a way of avoiding taxation after the sales of apple products no matter where in the world are reflected in the island's g.d.p. . but despite the massive increase of people living in that it would be hard to say how they have benefited if you do anything. at the same time toplessness in the country went down only 1.5 percent and higher tax revenues didn't materialize as apple and other multinationals used to avoid corporate tax and while islands g.d.p. increased due to foreign tech companies the effect of those companies causes it to fall in other places. he would digitalisation take the music industry. now they can listen to all the music i want using cheap streaming services in the past a spend a lot of money on c.d.'s and cd players so now i'm saving money but what i'm doing has a negative impact on my country's g.d.p.

. so it's g.d.p. it's to look at that in the case of that. the modern economy. question to the organization for economic cooperation and development the o.e.c.d. in paris which helped make up the rules for measuring g.d.p. it's always been wrong to only use g.d.p. for policy decisions that's always been the case i mean it's one macro economic indicator what we observe in today's concept of g.d.p. is there are lots of transactions that you as a consumer benefit from that are not in the economic system because they're free but you derive value from them so you think there must be something wrong because i'm getting all of this utility all this value from something that isn't being recorded in conventional g.d.p. systems and as we saw advancing digitalisation and globalization makes it increasingly difficult to measure the countries real economy. challenge and how much g.d.p. was generated by an economic entity that has no reporting mechanism in my country

is an impossible question to answer let me just be clear i mean it's not the wrong measure for for measurement or for policymaking it's a measure that should be used in isolation the changes in the mother world are challenge distances titian's like not. making g.d.p. less and less of the mirror of the real economy so it's g.d.p. an illusion well no but i see that it's no longer useful as a sole indicator for decisions that the fact does all. well some decisions that had very real impact on people's lives were the ones that led to the financial crisis of 2008 karen anderson gave people a glimpse of a reality many hadn't known about its best selling book city boy it's an insider's account of the heady days of banking in london featuring reckless trading 6 figure bonuses and cocaine fueled. until everything went belly up

a decade later our correspondent barry moused met up with. put 12 years he was one of them then he turned against his former colleagues and published a book on greed in the city of london. gerund and his and the full utilities analyst with some of europe's biggest banks in this place was populated by gamblers who took big risks who were thinking short term and who didn't really care about the consequences their actions. this is one of the many places i see come back in the day would you have 34 hour lunches and maybe there's a bunch of strip joints of about 500 yards that way cocaine dealer was just over there. it was all very good back in the good old days.

but how would you describe your former so the caring and isn't that what here in this environment. was pretty cocky pretty arrogant i was a gambler by nature risk taking over confident so i was basically a pretty perfect personality for the stock broker and in fact my attitude. as i was then helps explain why the financial crisis happened. the people invented the financial products that exploded sent the global economy into a tailspin knew they were creating a financial part of that was doomed to fail because interest rates don't stay low for a copy process don't go up forever but they didn't because in the 10 years while they fry these products they made millions in bonuses but. how was the atmosphere in the city why did you sense that something was going to happen and i've been kind of calling it financial crisis pretty much every 2 or 3

years since i joined the city. in 1906 i say ok this is it this is the big one guys . and we all felt that and that was actually one of the problems because when you feel like the whole house the cold is going to fall down the incentive then is to make as much money by whatever means possible. that year and you're thinking only of that year before you know the bank even exists 2 years' time he'll be very critical of myself but is actually a little bit late now i had guilt pangs all the time about the industry i was working in from year one to when i finally left after 12 years every year i said this in my last year i'm just going to do it for one year and every year that bonus would come i think we're also going to do in my life is going to be even bigger next year i'll stay so i got trapped so did you sell your soul to the devil then i did sell my soul to the devil very good price. yeah i did i sell myself the devil i

would do anything to get that bonus safe in the knowledge that if my actions then later proved to create fits that were not real it didn't matter it's too late i had the money good boy it's mine if somebody was solved because of your actions. i would say the. worse off because of the actions of this place of which i was a member i mean we've been living in austerity here all real wages. so haven't even changed for about 10 years in the u.k. and so on that basis the casino i was working in and paid up member of help to make sure most people in this country's laws so probably slightly less well off than we should be. and finally we have to destroy another illusion the one of a flawless t.v.

production just take our resident a sortie force authorial style and matching patterns my colleague got our 1st look behind the scenes a dress code shows that the reality is less than perfect. reason enough to his people wouldn't dad. and. i wish i knew the rest of the script one more thing. and one more thing. take your time by concentration of one more thing and take your

time with. my constituency. one more thing ok all right. ok sports. plus a present for your homes since. ok. one of the most employers use to watch for 3 things. you have that's now with all of that because of the. what is now remember modi and all. the fine tie. in the mix of the find targets the mexican president and rick opinion yet all is wearing one more thing. if you see what i mean it's more fluid ringback.

that's enough. and that's it for us too i hope you enjoyed this week's edition of made for me chris coburn the entire team thanks for watching so you're next. the the. the. the the.

the the. something. to take is never satisfied i always have doubts something can only achieve artistic quality if you question it. it's the recipe for his international success busy. john knowing my aunt has the edge of the handbag ballets in 1973.

devoted his life to down. on the v.w. . conservation that one of. the coral reefs companies are endangered by climate change it. the local people are aware of what's happening. and they're all pitching in to protect barry. reforestation nothing different coming. 3000. and 90 minutes. for. the global corona crisis you can find more information online at d

w dot com and on t.w. social media channels on. on. it's a deadly sin. and the whim of nature. to motivate serves. and threatens to mock greed. insatiable desire. it's good drives. good to be one big love i've come to oppose capitalism because i see the harm is done to the world was soft because. we could really run the risk of being the 1st form of water to be responsible for all that special op will go in search of an answer.

good starts may 25th on t.w. . could get a bit. odd . this is d.w. news live from berlin a grim marker for the united states the corona virus has infected more than 1000000 people in the u.s. as the number of confirmed cases rises some states are lifting their restraint sions president donald trump insists that enough testing is being done to protect americans wherever they live also coming up president vladimir putin extenders

russia's lockdowns it may and told russians the pandemic is likely to get worse confirmed cases sought by almost.