That "award" ceremony video is both surreal and ridiculously cringe-inducing at the same time. It wouldn't surprise me if he actually felt like he had "achieved" something when he gave himself that award, either.

It was like you were watching his fantasy of what people would say about him if he was a productive member of society instead of a criminal and fraud.

FWIW, this is only marginally worse than your standard 'industry award' in that he had the nerve to give it to himself. Pretty much every industry has a boatload of meaningless awards. It is done largely for marketing and for 'social engineering'[1]. It is cheap (both in cost and tact) but effective.

[1] Curries favor with the awardees, creates an 'in group' etc...

Feynman spoke at length on the shallowness of awards.

>epaulets, uniform, position: it has nothing to do with something intrinsic of that person.

I see someone that listened to Hidden Brain last week!

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/697641324/better-than-cash-ho...

When you have the chance to fulfill your childhood wet dreams fantasy you go for it. Those fake claps, the huge bouquet, beautiful ladies...

Placebos work even when you tell people they’re placebos.

I’m sure he went to bed proud pulling all that off. It still looks like a lot of work.

why is this strange. that's what they do all the time with tech giants who die :D how some awkward old videos and rejoice that they took everyones money for hardly any effort :D

> black tie ceremony

OMG that trophy is indistinguishable from any other tacky chunk of lucite that, say, a particularly motivated carpet distributor might earn as a sales award.

Not to insult carpet distributors, whose work with tangible goods is worth at minimum 500x more than what any fintech slob contributes to the world.

Assuming their contribution is even positive

The applause echoes so tellingly in the mostly empty room..

It also fades in rather than starting. They took a longer applause clip and started in the middle. As someone with a lot of audio production experience, this stuck out to me immediately. So either they used stock audio or there was an edit they didn't hide properly (or both).

Looked like those hilarious techniques taken from street magic to pull off the illusion.

Sounds like typical stuff for the cryptocurrency world.

Or perhaps “widow”

Perhaps seems pretty accurate yes