Author: Merritt K

Look: I hate to get political on this, the comedy website where I write about dick fights, but one of my core beliefs is that the existence of billionaires is proof of our failure as a society. A billion dollars is a staggering, unthinkable amount of money to be owned by a single person. In 2025 I imagine that you can have a million dollars and still understand human life reasonably well. A hundred million and reality becomes Grand Theft Auto Online. At a billion dollars, you are effectively a different species.

But, of course, some billionaires feel a pang of social conscience, a sensation comparable to what you or I might experience when considering the plight of cows and pigs under industrialized farming. Some of these enlightened billionaires spend money on researching disease. Some of them start pretend charities. And some of them make cartoons to teach kids about the world. That’s right — this week we’re finally talking about George Soros’s Totally Tubular Paid Protestors.

I jest, of course. A simple jape. Those are still free, after all. We’re actually covering Secret Millionaires Club, a semi-educational kids’ television program about managing money produced by Berkshire Hathaway and starring four students who look like glossy, if occasionally melting, corporate-grown clones of The Weekenders for the early 2010s.

Our crew comprises Radley, the tech genius; Lisa, who dreams of leadership; Elena, the upbeat optimist; and Jones, the reckless cool guy. They are led by an elderly advisor who teaches them the traditions of his culture: investor Warren Buffett himself. Together, they do battle with the Foot Clan of financial illiteracy. I guess in this analogy, Krang is the SEC?

Maybe it’s just that thinking about the Ninja Turtles has put me in a positive mood, or maybe it’s that I’ve listened to it a dozen times at this point, but I have to say the theme song for this thing kind of goes. Take it to the bank, boys, this one’s a certified Buffett banger.

The first episode functions as an origin story. Our core foursome sits through a Warren Buffett talk at their school, then discusses how excited they are for their upcoming class trip to New York. Immediately after, however, the principal informs them that the trip has been canceled due to budget cuts. The public sector has failed, as it always will. Only private enterprise can save the day.

Our heroes devise one get-rich-quick scheme after another to fund their school themselves — a skateboard washing business, selling popsicles, marketing an advanced autonomous robot one of them made in his spare time… these all fail. In desperation, they seek out Warren Buffett, who advises them to try something different.

They combine their powers like they’re summoning Captain Planet — only, you know, the opposite of that — and create a successful juice business that leverages all of their unique abilities. The trip to New York is back on, and Warren sets the kids up to meet Jay-Z while they’re in town, effortlessly slicing the Gordian knot of “would you rather have $10,000 or a 10-minute meeting with Jay-Z.” The answer is both, because you’re friends with Warren Fucking Buffett.

It’s the sort of story that gets passed around as an example of grit and entrepreneurial spirit but which in fact speaks to the utter disregard with which American political power treats our country’s youth. It is a story that would not exist in a just world. Then again, a just world would not allow a man like Warren Buffett to exist, either.

Speaking of things that should not be, I watched Secret Millionaires Club on YouTube, but it originally aired on The Hub. The channel began life in the mid ’90s as Discovery Kids, broadcasting science and nature-themed shows back before Discovery pivoted to bridezillas and ghost detectives. In 2010, it was rebranded as The Hub with the involvement of Hasbro, who paid $300 million for joint ownership of the channel. And that’s how we got a whole new generation of 22-minute cartoon advertisements for Hasbro toys, including Transformers, Littlest Pet Shop, and, yes, My Little Pony. This is where Friendship is Magic and, subsequently, bronies originated from. The Hub is, indirectly, why The Jar exists. If you don’t understand that reference, just move on with your life. Don’t look it up. You’re looking it up, aren’t you?

Secret Millionaires Club, then, was a kind of penance. Savvy actors do one for the studio and one for themselves. Hasbro did three for themselves and one for the kids. For Warren Buffett? For the money. But the show at least ostensibly teaches its viewers something. Let’s try and discern what exactly its lessons are.

1. Cut Corners, Because Nobody Will Notice (Except Some Asshole a Decade Later)

Nobody except me has ever watched Secret Millionaires Club this closely. My obsession with noticing errors like this, in which some overworked Korean animator left the storyboarding in on the principal in the show’s very first episode, is why I will never join the ranks of the rich. I could be speculating on real estate right now, or doing whatever people did with GameStop a few years ago.

You think Warren Buffett got to be a billionaire by giving a shit whether his cartoons were finished or not? No, he did it by some kind of financial trickery that I don’t fully understand and don’t care to research. He definitely didn’t do it by making sure the characters’ eyes were properly aligned.

2. Filesharing is the Great Moral Issue of Our Day

Diversification is important to any portfolio. Two amongst the number of the Secret Millionaires have formed a band, just in case being mentored to financial success by Warren Buffett doesn’t work out. Their bandmates are British teens. The sentient robot to which one of them casually gave the gift of life is not in the band. They’re emphatic about this.

Nick Cannon shows up and takes the kids to London because Warren Buffett knows him, I guess?

Something I learned about Warren Buffett in writing this article is that he’s one of these rich guys who’s worried about population growth. Nick Cannon is, at least in his personal life, famously the opposite of that. But wealth has a way of smoothing over what might otherwise be passionate philosophical differences. Anyway, this was 2013. Nick was only a sixth of the way to his current total at that point. He flies the kids to London to meet their bandmates. What’s great about this is how normal everyone’s faces are.

There’s a catch, though: their other bandmate wants to quit because her parents’ record shop isn’t doing so well. The kids don’t know what to make of this until they become the beneficiaries of yet more nepotism when Nick Cannon posts on Nick Cannon’s Blog about their single.

Suddenly, they’re stars, being chased around the streets of London by their adoring fans. But their newfound fame does not bring commensurate fortune — their fans have been illegally downloading their music. “Check the London webisphere to see how much music is being pirated,” a character written and voiced by human beings in the year 2013 says.

The thrill of creation and the privilege of connecting with human beings through art is immediately forgotten. Childhood is at an end. All that matters to the Secret Millionaires Club now is that those bastards who call themselves fans stole from them.

It’s a neat trick here, having the band become famous without a publisher and thus sidestepping the whole issue of executives being the primary beneficiary of traditional record sales. Hopefully the kids at home just follow along as the Secret Millionaires club turns to the camera and says “we need to dump all our pirated music! It’s so not right if we don’t pay!”

But what is the band to do? They can’t play gigs in bars because they’re under 18. “The answer is right under our under 18 noses,” one of them declares, in a sentence that makes me uncomfortable for both stylistic and other reasons.

They turn the struggling music store into a venue for kids. And Warren Buffet invites a very special guest.

The literal fucking Queen of England. As far as I can tell, they weren’t friends in reality — searching “Warren Buffett queen” suggests “warren buffett dairy queen order.”

3. Shaq is Six Robots Tall

In episode five, “Elena’s Shaqtastic Adventure,” the Secret Millionaires Club meets Shaquille O’Neal. There’s no pretext for this — he’s just friends with Warren Buffett and drops by their billionaire Batcave to say hi. I guess the normal Batcave is also a billionaire Batcave?

Radley, the team nerd, has created an advanced AI whose only purpose is defining financial terms and which spits out some of Shaq’s vital statistics. Think D’Nerd from Bots Master, only trapped on a teen’s iPad… for now.

Later, Shaq teaches Elena a lesson about the fragility of the human athlete’s body and encourages her to go to summer school instead of basketball camp. But the show’s got more to say about robots.

4. The Machines Will Inevitably Betray Us

Eleven episodes into Secret Millionaires Club, the writers became bored with the premise of a group of normal teens solving money-themed problems in the real world. Warren Buffett seemed to lose interest, too, because around this point he stopped voicing himself and was replaced by a couple of different actors.

I get it: you finally get in a writer’s room and it’s for a billionaire’s preachy vanity project. You try to have some fun with it. You’re green and want to make your mark. Maybe you get a little silly and pitch “three episode time travel arc to Arthurian England with Warren Buffett.” And hey, the team goes for it.

Only, hold on, that’s not how it went at all. The mid-series jaunt to Camelot, in which Warren Buffett casually accepts the existence of time travel and wizards with the world-weary attitude of a man who could run a thousand games of to-the-death human chess without meaningfully affecting his net worth was written by industry veteran Mark Zaslove. He worked on a host of ’80s and ’90s shows like Ducktales, GoBots, and… holy shit, this can’t be right — co-created Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad? Just when I thought I was out of the ’90s bullshit, they pull me back in.

Anyway, after saving King Arthur’s kingdom through fiscal responsibility, the team goes on a series of slightly more down-to-earth adventures. That is, until episode twenty three, “Far Out Future,” in which a girl from the 25th century seeks the assistance of the Secret Millionaires Club. She’s in a pickle because she borrowed a ton of money to invent her working time machine, but now she can’t pay it back.

Worse, the loan officer who made the deal with her appears to be Steven Seagal.

Only… this is the 25th century, so that must mean…

Yes, it’s that old chestnut. A sentient robot in a world where machines are second-class citizens disguises itself as a human to get a job at a bank and offers a predatory loan to a teenage genius so that she can create a time machine. When she is then inevitably unable to pay the loan back, the robot then repossesses the time machine, travels to the past, invests in Apple and Facebook, returns to the future, and uses its control of the economy to enslave humanity.

What we’re dealing with is Terminator if Skynet was Bernie Madoff. Warren Buffett is aghast at the idea — not the notion of messing with the linear flow of time or the prospect of robots overthrowing mankind, though. No, what ticks him off is that the robots are circumventing the best way to make money: saving a little at a time.

I know that this show is for kids, but come on. Kids aren’t stupid. They know Warren Buffett didn’t get rich by putting five dollars in his savings account every month. The show even has the audacity to have the teens save the day with compound interest — the account they started back in their time is worth a fortune now and they use it to pay back what their future friend owes.

Except, what about the bank closing the account when nobody’s touched it in centuries? What about the bank going under? What about inflation, which today already outpaces interest in consumer savings accounts? God help you, you haven’t considered inflation, you fools!

5. Bigfoot is Real

And his portfolio? It’s spectacular.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Gareth Powell, who had no idea about The Jar till he looked it up just now. Our bad.