 I certainly wouldn't invest in the stock market, I never believed in it. Most people lose money because of the emotional difficulty involved. Bernie Madoff, from his home in Butner Correctional Facility, 2014. Welcome to Object Class Explained. Today we're going to be looking at one of my very favorite SCPs and one that had a huge influence on me as a writer coming up in 2014, SCP-2557, a holding of envelope logistics. This video is produced in partnership with SCP Declassified and you'll be able to find the full Declassification written by Chaltak on their subreddit via link in the description. SCP-2557 is an advertisement for an anomalous investment company known as Envelope Logistics, written in 2014 by Kate McTarras. It's a multimedia presentation that does a great job of emulating investment advertising while also satirizing those same marketing materials. Part 1. Containment, or a lack thereof. Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. I'd given them the best show that was ever staged. It was easily worth 15 million bucks to watch me put the thing over. Charles Ponzi. SCP-2557 is something we would call on the wiki a format screw. This sort of thing has become increasingly common over the last four years, but at the time it was written, this was innovative and deviations from that format are more common today than they were then. A quick look at the various Series 5 contest entries will give a pretty good picture of what I'm talking about. But SCP-2557's format screw is that it delivers the information in the form of what's essentially an investment brochure. That is most evident in the first line of the containment procedures. SCP-2557 can no longer be contained by the SCP Foundation as it is now a holding of envelope logistics. With that line you already know something is up, even if the weird colors and pictures at the top of the page hadn't already tipped you off. It continues, however, with this obviates in a null's all pre-existing containment procedures. Foundation personnel reading this file can receive the first transactions in their targeted portfolio free with coupon code Dristadyumna. From this we start to see exactly what kind of company we're dealing with here. Now some of this is standard contract speak, and while somewhat dense it still communicates the company's motive pretty well. This is an investment management group for esoteric investments, and by esoteric I mean things like concepts, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. That coupon code, by the way, is the name of a figure from the Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic about a dynastic struggle. It was a character that was born of the gods and prophesied to kill a man who'd wronged his father. I imagine this reference may indicate that in ancient India you could have invested in one side of that struggle and probably gotten paid for it. Or perhaps Dristadyumna wasn't born of the gods at all, but part of an effort by envelope to influence that struggle for their investors. Either way, given the form's investments in envelope logistics tend to take, this is likely an obvious hint that they've been around for a very long time. Part two, getting yourself invested. There have been some complaints that you're not helping people do transactions. Instead, you're spending all your time acting like cops. We don't need cops. Jeffrey Skilling, CEO of Enron. Unlike some modern format screws, SCP-2557 never shies away from telling you exactly what it is. I mean, it's right there in the first lines of the description. The concept of SCP-2557 as a set of special containment procedures in the Foundation database is a possession of envelope logistics, the leading buyer, seller, and holding company for abstract concepts in the tri-universe region purchased from a Foundation employee in quarter four of 2011. SCP-2557 is now one of many locations where you can get started investing in concepts with a trusted envelope logistics agent. And by telling you that, it also tells you additional information. Tri-universe region, purchased from a Foundation agent. More is certainly going on here, but it doesn't shy away from immediately telling you at least some of what's going on. Part of that is there's no net benefit in the writing to try and objuscate the meaning. This article doesn't trade on the idea of mystery. Rather, the primary theme here is a satire of marketing and investing, but there's still some inherent mystery because it's actually part of the satire. I mean, the examples they get for investment packages immediately signal this is something alien and weird. They'll help you buy, sell, and trade the dreams of 33-year-old residents of Baluik, Guernsey, the effectiveness of HR policies at E.I. DuPont, Dan and Morrison Company, and gender dysphoria. This is investing in abstract concepts, and if the description didn't quite click with you, that's fine, because there are actual testimonials from customers. Dana invested in the abstract concept of Tony Blair's political career. Kassel have invested in cancer rate and cell care from Manitoba, which kind of hope he didn't make any money off of that, but it looks like he did. The last testimonial comes from someone called V-star-H-star-Q-star-H, and it's just a bunch of gibberish, but he seems to have invested in trip hammers? We'll probably never know. Part three, biting satire. I know what I don't know. To this day, I don't know technology, and I don't know finance or accounting. Bernard Ebers, co-founder and former CEO of Worldcom, currently serving a 25-year sentence for accounting fraud. At its core, SCP-2557 is a biting satire of investing. This is a sign of the times, to be fair, we hate bankers today, but the closer you go back in time to 2008, the stronger that hate becomes. Investment managers take fees from you and purport to be experts in the investing world, but given that you're using them because you are not an expert, there's no guarantee that they actually know what they're doing or that they won't use what knowledge they have to screw you over. That is reflected in the satire. Regardless of what we know about investing, we still trust these people to use our money wisely. Can you honestly say you know more about how good of an investment a AA-rated, housing-related collateralized debt obligation would be in comparison to the abstract concept of Tony Blair's political career? Even though the latter is completely silly and you have no idea how the investment would work, you still understand it better than the AA-rated CDO, and therein lies the core of the satire. Down below, logistics doesn't try to hide what it does, and it doesn't require complex financial knowledge to understand it, but we inherently find the idea silly anyway. What does that say about the kinds of investments we don't find silly? That's it. If you liked it, be sure to hit that subscribe button and leave a comment down below. Check me out on Twitter at D. Sumerian and definitely support the channel on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash D. Sumerian. Links to both will be in the description. Thanks for watching.