In one hour while shopping at Costco, Pro Contessoto made $179,000 in Dogecoin. A few days later, Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live and made a negative joke about the cryptocurrency. Pro lost a million dollars in minutes. Financial roller coaster rides like this have become commonplace over the past few years.

I know firsthand. In March of 2020, I started buying my first individual stocks and cryptocurrencies. That year, every single one of them went up in price. I became addicted. I reached for my phone every morning, scrolling ticker prices, and reveling in the dopamine hits. I quickly found a community of friends who encouraged me and shared in the same behavior. Together, we daydreamed of getting rich, and believed we were changing the financial system for the better. But we weren’t doing either. I wasn’t investing. I was gambling. I just hadn’t learned the difference yet.

Money has seemed to defy logic, as it’s become supercharged by the internet and social media. Unfortunately, many of us are woefully unprepared for how to manage our dollars in this fast and unpredictable modern economy. THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE began as a grassroots effort, when we put out a tweet to gauge interest in a documentary about beginner investors. Thousands of people engaged with the post, and within just three days, we started a film with XTR and the New York Times’ Nathaniel Popper. Initially, we thought the rise of the GameStop stock was the story, but we quickly realized that it was just a small chapter.

When production began in early 2021, we captured the euphoria of investing in a booming economy—a giddy-feeling like you could never lose. This period was the greatest economic bubble in U.S. history, where 96 percent of stocks went up, and speculative assets like crypto were seeing head-spinning returns. As a result, millions of people started investing for the first time, largely motivated by a fear of missing out (FOMO) but compounded by technological advancements like the rise of easy-to-use trading apps, zero-commission trading, and fractionalized shares. People finally had access to invest, and they all turned to the internet for financial advice.

As we headed into 2022, the economy came crashing down. Crypto companies like FTX imploded overnight. Trillions of dollars of people’s savings were lost. For our film participants, Pro and Rayz, who had risked all their life savings, we got to witness the raw consequences of their profound losses on their health and relationships. We sat silently in their disbelief as they tried to come to terms with their losses.

With hindsight, investing looks easy. Buy low, sell high. But in the moment, watching the price rise, it’s easy to get greedy, succumb to FOMO, be scammed, or simply follow the wrong advice. And as the price begins to fall, it’s terrifying and can become difficult to sell, because of the knowledge that it used to be worth so much more. The psychology of money is critical to this story, so structurally we knew viewers needed to experience it chronologically, in real time, for it to have the most impact. While Pro and Rayz’ stories are extreme examples of these emotional triggers in practice, every one of us is susceptible to the human instincts of fear, greed, or promise of the American Dream.

Making this film has been cathartic, and illuminating for my own relationship with money. The more we filmed with individuals getting caught up in our “get-rich-quick” culture, the more easily we could see their mistakes—and my own. The internet and social media are transforming wealth in this country by giving more people the chance to invest. But with that comes deep risks, particularly in a country where only 22 percent of high school students have taken a class related to personal finance, and 79 percent of young people are turning to online influencers for financial guidance. To survive this new era and generate wealth investing, people need to avoid scams, identify the difference between sponsored content and educational content, and lastly, recognize that social media algorithms are going to be biased toward stories of success, not loss.

While it might seem like everyone else is getting rich overnight, it’s not true. Armed with this knowledge, we hope this film will help millions of people learn how to be smarter investors and to better understand their psychological relationship to money.

– Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci