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Episode: The History of Money with David McWilliams

Author: Blindboyboatclub
Duration: 01:44:50

Episode Shownotes

David McWilliams is an economist who has just written the book, Money: a story of humanity  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
Play the devil's tennis, you windswept kennets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. Have a wonderful treat this week.

00:00:18 Speaker_03
I have a fantastic guest. This person is They're an economist. They're an economist who I've had on this podcast before, who goes by the name of David McWilliams.

00:00:31 Speaker_03
Now, if you live in Ireland, you know who David McWilliams is because he's Ireland's foremost public economist. But he's more than just an economist. He's he's a brilliant storyteller. He's a fantastic storyteller. And

00:00:47 Speaker_03
He's one of the people who introduced me to the hot take when I was just out of school of about 18 years of age. As you know I didn't have a very good time in school. I failed my leave insert.

00:01:02 Speaker_03
I wouldn't have considered myself to be particularly intelligent or good at anything to be honest.

00:01:08 Speaker_03
When you're a teenager, and you fail at school, and you consistently get into trouble, and you don't have a sense of self, you're young, you're immature, you can begin to blame yourself. That's certainly what I did.

00:01:23 Speaker_03
When I got out of school, I just simply assumed. The reason I was shit at school and the reason I couldn't behave myself is because I'm not very smart and I'm not very good. And I studied economics, I studied economics in school.

00:01:39 Speaker_03
It was one of those classes where I had to do economics because I wanted to do art. So if I was to do art, you know, have two classes a week in art, whatever way the schedule worked, I had to pick another subject I wasn't interested in.

00:01:56 Speaker_03
And I just picked economics. And I studied economics in my Leaving Cert, probably twice a week for two years. And I don't think I paid attention once. And I would have felt very frightened in class. And I would have felt, this isn't for me.

00:02:14 Speaker_03
I'm not capable of this. I'm not able to do this. I would never have done homework. I'd have just made my mind up from the start. I'm not smart enough for this economic stuff that has to do with money and numbers. I'm just going to fail this. And I did.

00:02:29 Speaker_03
I failed economics in the Leaving Cert. That's where my head was at. That's where my self-esteem and confidence was at. And then when I got out of school. A friend of mine was reading one of David McWilliams' books called The Pope's Children.

00:02:47 Speaker_03
And my buddy was saying to me, you got to read this book. It's really fascinating. It's really interesting. It's by David McWilliams. He's an economist. And then I'm going, I studied economics. I don't understand it. And my buddy was like,

00:03:00 Speaker_03
No, no, it's not like that. He talks about fucking breakfast rolls and he talks about decking out people's back gardens and he talks about bouncy castles. It has nothing to do with economics.

00:03:11 Speaker_03
So I went and I got the book, The Pope's Children, and I loved it. I adored it. This would have been around maybe 2005. Ireland would have been in the stage that was known as the Celtic Tiger. This was before the recession.

00:03:27 Speaker_03
And here I have this book, I have this book that's describing everything about the Ireland around me in this very clever, simple way that's joining these dots that seem unconnected.

00:03:42 Speaker_03
It was a portrait of a country that all of a sudden got very wealthy. And it tells this story through different characters, different, different Irish characters that emerge in this new economy. And when I read it, I felt I felt intelligent.

00:03:59 Speaker_03
I felt smart. Wow. I'm reading a book about economics and I understand this intimately. I love this. I just failed economics in my leaving cert. And here I am reading this book and I fucking adore it.

00:04:13 Speaker_03
And the reason I adored it and the reason I understood it and I realize this now is because David McWilliams was a brilliant storyteller. And when I was in school learning economics, It was about role learning. It was about data.

00:04:29 Speaker_03
It was about having to remember the law of diminishing marginal returns, Giffen goods. I had to remember all this fucking shit. And there was very little storytelling or understanding or applying economics to my life or the world around me.

00:04:45 Speaker_03
And as an autistic kid, as someone who's neurodivergent, if I can learn in a way that's self-directed, then I will excel massively. If I can learn in a way that incorporates storytelling, humor, divergent thinking, then I'm gonna fucking learn.

00:05:05 Speaker_03
But if you force me to learn in a way that's more suited to neurotypical brains, such as rote learning, then I just switch off. and David McWilliams' books, they suited my particular learning style.

00:05:19 Speaker_03
And now, all of a sudden, I'm interested in this thing called economics because he's writing using storytelling. This is the story of how these two completely different things are actually connected.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
Like one story in this book, The Pope's Children, was this is how breakfast rolls explain the boom in construction. All around Ireland in 2003, 2004, there's a big property boom. There's construction sites everywhere.

00:05:51 Speaker_03
But on these construction sites are men who are earning a lot of money, are very busy and need a lot of calories to work their jobs. So a new sandwich was invented in the petrol stations of Ireland.

00:06:05 Speaker_03
That's a French baguette that contains sausages and rashers. And this is eaten by construction workers. So I'm going to tell you the story of this sandwich, but really it's going to talk about Ireland's booming construction industry.

00:06:18 Speaker_03
And that there is a hot take. That's the dragon that I chase every week on this podcast and that's how my brain works. That's how I see the world. It's how I learn and it's how I understand the world. And it's a very joyful way of thinking for me.

00:06:33 Speaker_03
But school didn't allow me to have any hot takes. If I had a hot take in school, I was just called disruptive. I was kicked out of the class. I was seen as messing.

00:06:42 Speaker_03
So David McWilliams' writing, it was very important to me when I got out of school in igniting a feeling of curiosity. And also, just something as simple as being able to say to myself, you're not thick, you're not stupid.

00:06:58 Speaker_03
I know you failed economics in the leaving cert, but here you are reading an economics book and you love it, you understand it all. So maybe you're not stupid. And within a year,

00:07:10 Speaker_03
I'd gone from reading David McWilliams' books to reading academic sociology books. You see, everything about my environment, my external world, had told me that I'm stupid. When you fail your leave insert in Ireland, it's treated as a death sentence.

00:07:32 Speaker_03
You become what's known as a god help us. No future, no hope. And it's communicated to you in people's size and disappointment and awkwardness.

00:07:45 Speaker_03
You see, when you're in school, when you're in like sixth year and you're misbehaving and you're failing your exams, you get to be a rebel. You're kind of cool or that person doesn't care.

00:07:57 Speaker_03
There's cultural capital within your peer group that goes, that accompanies being a rebel against the system or being like, I don't care about school. I don't care if I fail my leave insert. And that works for you in school.

00:08:13 Speaker_03
But then the second the second school is over and you're out in the real world and you're an adult and all your friends are going off to college. Then people start to call you a loser.

00:08:23 Speaker_03
And I had this little just this little beating heart inside of me that used to say, you know, you're right. You're actually smart. You're actually smart. And it used to feel like shit. It used to feel terrible that

00:08:36 Speaker_03
There was people my age who were in college courses that I would love to do and I'm just simply not allowed. Like people who got to go to college and study literature, like people off in college who are 18 and they're studying James Joyce.

00:08:54 Speaker_03
It used to be really hurtful. It used to feel really hurtful that like I can't do that. I'm not allowed to do that. The system says I'm too stupid to do that. So what I used to do, I was in a PLC course.

00:09:10 Speaker_03
A PLC course is called a Post Leaving Certificate course. It's like second and a half level, we used to call it, not third level. It's like an access course. It was an access course that I did to eventually get into art college.

00:09:24 Speaker_03
But while I was doing my PLC course, I used to go off to University of Limerick, up out near Yarty's Couch. It's a university that you need to have a very good Leaving Cert to get into.

00:09:38 Speaker_03
And I used to go out there when I was about 18 and just like pretend to be a student and I'd walk into the library in University of Limerick.

00:09:48 Speaker_03
I'd find out what books were on the course material of literature, economics, sociology, psychology, whatever.

00:09:58 Speaker_03
And I'd go and find these books in the library in University of Limerick and I'd just sit down all day on a Saturday and I'd read these books, these academic books on the courses that I wasn't allowed into. And I'd understand them.

00:10:13 Speaker_03
I'd understand... I'd love them. I'd fucking adore them. I would consume them voraciously and come away with a huge amount of knowledge. And then I'd also get to say to myself, you're not stupid. You're it.

00:10:28 Speaker_03
This is the course material of a course that you're not allowed into because you don't have enough Leaving Cert points. But not only are you able to understand this book, you fucking love it.

00:10:41 Speaker_03
And I used to do that to regain my confidence, to regain my confidence and to be able to say to myself, Do you know what actually, you are smart.

00:10:49 Speaker_03
But what I couldn't understand at the time, because I'm 18, I couldn't understand, like a year ago you were in school and you were unable to learn anything. I couldn't get my head around that.

00:11:02 Speaker_03
I was like, there's no way your brain has grown massively between the ages of 17 and 18. I couldn't fathom.

00:11:10 Speaker_03
how here I am sitting in UL in the library reading academic books and understanding them and then a year previously I couldn't understand anything in school on the leave insert syllabus. But now as a middle-aged man

00:11:26 Speaker_03
Like, I was diagnosed with autism three years ago. I now realize the reason that I was able to go to University of Limerick by myself, sit down in the library and read these really complicated books and understand them, was because I'm autodidactic.

00:11:46 Speaker_03
The problem was people. My particular neurodivergence, wherever the fuck I am on the spectrum,

00:11:53 Speaker_03
The confusion of people, the confusion of communicating, the feeling of being overwhelmed by other people and how much my social battery gets drained by being around other people. That was way too stressful an environment for me to learn effectively.

00:12:14 Speaker_03
But if you just give me the textbooks and let me fuck off by myself and not have to deal with any people, just me with those textbooks, I will not only learn, but I'll excel and retain about six times as much information as a neurotypical person.

00:12:33 Speaker_03
And that's what I realize now. I'm autodidactic. Anything I've ever achieved in my life, I've done it by teaching myself on my own using source material by myself. That's what works for me. That's joyful to me.

00:12:51 Speaker_03
If I can do that, I literally do it all day long and be happy. If I have to be around people or in the social environment of a classroom, then that's way too stressful and I'm learning fuck all.

00:13:05 Speaker_03
So what I really needed in school was leave me stay at home and teach myself with my books and come into school whenever I want, whenever I feel like it. And I know exactly what you're thinking. She can't fucking do that. That's nuts. That's chaos.

00:13:21 Speaker_03
A little child in school and he can just come in whenever he wants and he's teaching himself at home and he's not in the classroom and there's no teacher. It's just him reading a book. Yes, that's that's how my brain works.

00:13:35 Speaker_03
That would have worked for me. I taught myself how to read when I was three, four years of age. I taught myself how to read an adult encyclopedias. I taught myself how to read an encyclopedias for adults. And my brothers used to bring their friends over.

00:13:51 Speaker_03
And they'd like point at the names of dinosaurs and I'd read out the names and it was clear that I could I could actually read the big long names of dinosaurs and it was like a party trick and all my brother's friends were like that's impossible he's only three there's no way he can read that and my whole family would be like

00:14:10 Speaker_03
My God, he's so smart. He can be whatever he wants when he grows up. He's going to fly through school. He's going to be amazing. He's so smart. And then my first day of school comes around. And on my first day of school, I cried so much I got sick.

00:14:26 Speaker_03
I had about 90 panic attacks. I just couldn't do it. And everybody else in the classroom was just getting along with it. And I just can't stop crying, can't stop crying.

00:14:36 Speaker_03
And then when I finally vomited, they had to call my brother, I think it was, back in. And I left early on my first day of school. And then as the months went on, probably four or five, I was terrible at school. I wasn't the bright person in the class.

00:14:52 Speaker_03
I wasn't doing my lessons like the other kids. I was behind. We thought he was so smart. He taught himself how to read. What happened? I guess we were wrong. And that's really common with autistic people.

00:15:03 Speaker_03
A lot of autistic people, the ones who are closer to my end of the spectrum, teach themselves how to read as kids.

00:15:10 Speaker_03
But the thing is, what I'm asking for there, my needs there, to be a little kid who comes and goes as he pleases in school, can stay out of school for three weeks if he wants, and just studies at home by himself. That's a wildly unreasonable demand.

00:15:27 Speaker_03
It's unruly and disruptive. And how the fuck do you make that happen? You can't do that. What about the other students? So I just, the autistic kids, the neurodivergent kids, they just have to toe the line.

00:15:41 Speaker_03
They just have to show up every day, become overwhelmed with being in the classroom and just become the thick kids who are disruptive. And looking back too, I tried to make that situation for myself because I was asthmatic.

00:15:57 Speaker_03
I was asthmatic as a kid, but I wasn't as asthmatic as I let on. I used to stay out of school for maybe two, three weeks at a time by just saying to my ma, oh I feel really wheezy, I think if I go into school I'm going to have an asthma attack.

00:16:12 Speaker_03
and they just let me stay at home. But looking back, I was avoiding the the burnout, was avoiding the burnout of having to be in school all the time, navigating the social fabric of other people.

00:16:26 Speaker_03
I've gone off on a tangent now, but what I'm getting at is. So David Williams's book, The Pope's Children, when I read that, when I did just out of school, it gave me a feeling of confidence. Here I am reading a book about economics.

00:16:40 Speaker_03
Maybe I could try something more. That's why I have him on this podcast. That's why I've had him on the podcast a couple of years back. And that book, by the way, The Pope's Children, by David McWilliams, that's still relevant today.

00:16:54 Speaker_03
If you want to understand the Celtic Tiger, the Irish economic boom of the mid-90s to mid-2000s, if you want to understand that economic boom, get yourself a copy of The Pope's Children.

00:17:08 Speaker_03
Or if you can find the fucking Pope's Children documentary that he made around the same time on RTE, if you can find that online somewhere, A lot of boot cut jeans. Too many boot cut jeans in that. So I've got David McWilliams on the podcast this week.

00:17:24 Speaker_03
Also he's got his own podcast called the David McWilliams podcast. I brought him on the podcast this week to speak about his new book that he's just released called Money. And it's called Money, A Story of Humanity.

00:17:40 Speaker_03
It's a book about the history of money. It goes back to the fucking Iron Age and it's it's it's one big long hot take. So me and David McWilliams, we spoke for 90 minutes about the history of money.

00:17:55 Speaker_03
This is quite a long podcast because we had so much crack talking to each other. And it's such a fascinating subject. So you might want to listen to this one. in two parts. That's the beauty of podcasts.

00:18:07 Speaker_03
Listen to this one in two parts or go the full shebang for the 90 minutes. But without further ado, here's the chat I had with David McWilliams about the history of money.

00:18:17 Speaker_03
And check out his book, Money, A Story of Humanity, and listen to his podcast, The David McWilliams Podcast. David McWilliams, what's the crack? I had you on the podcast about, Jesus, four or five years ago near the start of the podcast.

00:18:34 Speaker_04
Blind Boy, you are, you're, you're the reason for me unleashing my own podcast on people. It's true. It's true. I think you'd meet Brandon as the Docky Shelver, I think was your introduction, which was particularly difficult for me.

00:18:48 Speaker_04
Do you remember that? Docky Shelver, yeah. It was a particularly difficult, uh, pose to, to strike as I walked on stage there to that introduction.

00:18:59 Speaker_04
But remember you said to me afterwards, you know, we were chatting away and we, and you know, you said, you know, about, you know, doing your own podcast? And I said, I'm not too sure.

00:19:07 Speaker_04
And so, so yeah, you are the reason, you are the reason for the Dave McWilliams podcast. But that was, we should do it again, actually. We should do it again on stage.

00:19:16 Speaker_03
It was, yeah, it was great craic.

00:19:17 Speaker_04
About four or five years ago.

00:19:18 Speaker_03
You're absolutely right. In Vicar Street. And I want to chat about your most recent book, right? It's to me, it looks slightly different in that this new book about the history of money.

00:19:34 Speaker_03
This looks to me that you're looking really international with this.

00:19:37 Speaker_04
Yeah, it's, I tell you, well, first of all, it's an international publisher. It's Simon & Schuster. And it's been published in, which is great, in 15 countries, which is really brilliant.

00:19:48 Speaker_04
And so I tell you what I did, Blind Boy, I was thinking of writing a book. I've been thinking about writing a book about the nature of money and what money does to humans for about 20 years, literally.

00:20:00 Speaker_04
And I never had the time to actually give it proper analysis and read deeply about it and read history. And I started a bit like yourself. I started reading, you know,

00:20:11 Speaker_04
biology and I started reading anthropology and evolutionary biology and all these sort of things to try and get a sense of what money does to humans, number one.

00:20:21 Speaker_04
And number two, probably more importantly, the relationship between the human being and this bizarre technology called money. So it took a long time.

00:20:32 Speaker_04
Then, of course, it is a much more international book because it's it starts, you know, in Africa 20,000 years ago. Yes. And goes all the way up to Bitcoin and today. And it was an absolute joy to write.

00:20:47 Speaker_04
It was I spent the pandemic down here in my little cubbyhole reading away and getting going down rabbit holes and getting caught in my mad ideas. But, uh, because if you want to tell this story, you have to actually go right back to the start.

00:21:02 Speaker_04
And it's, it's an amazing story, the story of money.

00:21:05 Speaker_04
And sometimes we don't really quite, because we don't think about what it is and what it is conceptually, you know, like when you tap, you go into a cafe this morning, you tap for coffee, you don't, you're not really thinking about the whole transaction and what's going on.

00:21:20 Speaker_04
And so I decided to, to have a look and see, what, when did money start? When did it emerge? Why did it emerge? When it did? How did it change us?

00:21:32 Speaker_04
And go through lots and lots of different civilizations like the Sumerians and the Greeks and the Romans and then the Renaissance and the Reformation and all this period seeing the relationship between money

00:21:44 Speaker_04
and people and how it changed us and how we are changed by it all the time. And it's been fascinating. It's been a fascinating journey.

00:21:53 Speaker_03
Was it was it frightening? Because the thing is, like you are an economist, right? It's a bit like a musician deciding, you know, you're a musician, you dedicate your life to all the different instruments, all the different types of composition.

00:22:07 Speaker_03
And then you decide, I'm going to write a book about cards. You know what I mean? Like you described economics to me before as, like you described to me before as it's just human behavior. It's just human behavior.

00:22:22 Speaker_03
So you didn't have money involved at all. It's like economics is the study of how humans behave. But now you're looking at, cause if I hadn't known, I just, I just said economics was the study of money.

00:22:35 Speaker_04
No, so economics is just the study of human behavior and how we behave all the time with each other. And on a different level, it's also the study of how we organize societies, how we organize the world around us.

00:22:49 Speaker_04
And when I started looking at money, so the first thing that fascinated me was this story, which is what I opened the book with, which is an amazing story of Adolf Hitler's

00:22:59 Speaker_04
effort to try and undermine the British during the Second World War by orchestrating the biggest forgery the world has ever seen and has still never seen anything like it. So Hitler lived through the Weimar Republic. We know that.

00:23:14 Speaker_04
And he understood what messing around with money

00:23:18 Speaker_03
Oh, those are the German photographs of people. They'd go to buy bread and they have a wheelbarrow full of cash.

00:23:26 Speaker_04
Exactly. So imagine that Hitler was a young man when this was happening and he understood what destroying money does, not to economics, but to the society. And basically he understood what destroying money does

00:23:40 Speaker_04
to people's head because you mess with money and you mess with people's heads. And interestingly, his, basically his ideological nemesis, Lenin, also destroyed Russian money at the very, very start of the revolution.

00:23:55 Speaker_04
And deliberately, deliberately, deliberately. So this is an amazing story.

00:23:58 Speaker_04
So Lenin comes in after the Russian revolution, goes straight to the Central Bank of Russia and starts printing rubles in order explicitly to destroy what he called the illusion of money. Right.

00:24:11 Speaker_04
And he said that this was one of the basic foundations of the state. And you destroy that, you destroy the state, and then you start again.

00:24:20 Speaker_03
Hitler. Oh, it's amazing. Like bleach, like bleaching a bathroom to get rid of everything. It's just you start again.

00:24:26 Speaker_04
And you start again, right? So you destroy everything that went before when you destroy the money of that state. So that's what Lenin, and he called money the great illusion.

00:24:35 Speaker_03
And also what Lenin is thinking there, I'm assuming, is you destroy money, you also destroy people's sense of identity almost.

00:24:42 Speaker_04
A, their identity, but also B, their sort of little, their grasp on reality, right? And he was saying, we've got to do this to create this new state out of the old state, new ideology. We've got to destroy everything that went before.

00:24:58 Speaker_04
And part of destroying that's destroying the law, destroying the cops, destroying the army, destroying the political opposition and destroying the money. So that really intrigued me. And then Hitler comes in in 1941.

00:25:11 Speaker_04
he decides we are going to destroy the British, not with bombs, but with money. And the plan was, and it's an amazing story, to drop five pound notes, 10 pound notes, and 20 pound notes all over England. by about 1943.

00:25:31 Speaker_04
Amazingly, a call went out to all the concentration camps around Europe to find engravers, printers, metal workers, mathematicians who could do the serial numbers, fine artists who could actually copy the art, and 123

00:25:49 Speaker_04
disheveled, starving, desperate, individual men arrived in Saxonhausen concentration camp under one guy called Sally Smolianoff, who was the lead printer. And their job was to forge as many English banknotes as they could.

00:26:07 Speaker_04
They eventually forged 123 million, which is about 7 billion in today's money. It was about four notes out of every 10 that were printed were German forgeries. It's an amazing story.

00:26:21 Speaker_04
They managed to convince the Bank of England that these were legible and these were legit. And they did this by sending a so-called industrialist, a German guy, to Switzerland with a bag of these notes.

00:26:33 Speaker_04
And he claimed to have done a deal on the black market. He was paid in sterling. He wasn't sure were they forgeries. Could the Swiss bankers verify the notes for him. And the Swiss bankers came back after looking at the notes and said, yes, they're real.

00:26:47 Speaker_04
And your man doubled down and he said, look, I'm still not sure. Can you send them to the Bank of England and see if they can verify it?

00:26:54 Speaker_04
And amazingly, the Bank of England in London verified the forgeries that were done in Sachsenhausen for the Swiss bankers who then told the German and the German industrialist, who was a Nazi, told Hitler and away they went.

00:27:11 Speaker_04
And the problem was... Did it happen?

00:27:13 Speaker_03
Did they try it?

00:27:14 Speaker_04
That's the thing. By 1943, the end, the Germans were losing on the battlefield in Russia, and the Luftwaffe couldn't spare a squadron or two squadrons of bombers to actually drop the notes.

00:27:28 Speaker_04
But then the Germans, the Nazis decided, okay, we have the money, what are we going to do? And they went on the biggest spree. So you know all that stuff, all the art they robbed? Yes. They paid for all that. with, in the black market.

00:27:42 Speaker_04
And amazingly, they paid for all the visas. Do you remember the Vatican organized visas for Nazis to get out to Argentina? They were all bribed with this money. And the last one, Mussolini, who was deposed and kidnapped by Italian partisans.

00:28:04 Speaker_04
was, the Germans said, we need to get him back. And how did they get him back? They bribed the partisans. With the fake British money. With fake money. So that's where it went.

00:28:13 Speaker_04
And at the end of the Second World War, the Bank of England were so disturbed by the accuracy of these notes that they retired all five pound notes and issued new ones. So that story, I read that story and I thought, wow,

00:28:27 Speaker_04
This is about somebody understanding the relationship between humans and money.

00:28:33 Speaker_03
Let's talk about, we'll say, a separate timeline where the Luftwaffe did manage to drop just loads of money on London, right? What would have happened?

00:28:43 Speaker_04
Well, so what they were hoping for, and I think it would have happened, is that your average English person season, but what would you do if 50 euro notes started falling out, you're sitting in the back garden, falling out of the sky?

00:28:56 Speaker_04
You'd put a few in your back pocket. So that's what Hitler was hoping for, that the average English person would put a few quid in their back pocket and then spend it. And what that would have done was that inflation would have taken off like a rocket.

00:29:08 Speaker_03
When you throw a lot of fake money that looks real into the economy, now the value of that money goes down. Exactly. And of course Hitler- Because you're going to have scarcity.

00:29:16 Speaker_04
don't have scarcity. So Hitler had basically taken, Napoleon dismissed the English as a nation of shopkeepers. That was his sort of put down. And he said, these people are obsessed by money. And Hitler said, look,

00:29:29 Speaker_04
What we will do is we will destroy England's resolve from the inside out by using money to do what we can't do with bombs.

00:29:37 Speaker_03
So they'd also culturally identified the English as being quite consumerist.

00:29:41 Speaker_04
This is what their idea was, that basically this is a nation that has always had an interest in money and has the world's reserve currency, sterling, as their money.

00:29:51 Speaker_03
I'm coming at this knowing literally fuck all, right? So even when you say they're sterling at the reserve currency, like what does that even mean?

00:29:59 Speaker_04
Sterling around the time of the Second World War was a bit like the dollar now. Everybody used it. Everybody traded with it. And it was the currency that everyone trusted.

00:30:11 Speaker_04
So what Hitler was thinking was, if we destroy the currency that everyone trusts, the impact on their society will be enormously amplified because they'd never have gone through this before. And he was like, I've seen what happens in Germany.

00:30:26 Speaker_04
The same thing will happen in England. And I remember I looked at that story and said, That's kind of fascinating because what it does is it shows you that money is more powerful than an army, than a religion, than an ideology.

00:30:43 Speaker_04
It's the most powerful substance in the world and yet we use it every day. And we don't ask, what is it? Where does it come from? Can it run out? Who makes it? All that sort of stuff. So I decided to start the book.

00:30:58 Speaker_04
And you asked about, not where an economist, I actually, for many years, having worked in the area of monetary economics, I started in the central bank years ago and all this where the money's magicked up.

00:31:11 Speaker_04
Something over the last about three decades struck me, which is that economists don't understand money, which is a big sort of reveal to me. Yes, they don't understand.

00:31:22 Speaker_04
They're a bit like in the same way, for example, as a plumber can tell you how water travels through the pipes of the house, right? They can tell you that all day, right?

00:31:32 Speaker_04
But a plumber might find it hard to explain to you why water is essential for life, why we need it. And I think the same thing, an economist can tell you how water goes to the banks and to the government and basically the pipes of the system.

00:31:46 Speaker_04
But when you say, What is it? Where did it come from? Why did we start using it?

00:31:51 Speaker_04
Then I think economics breaks down and you have to go into anthropology, you have to go into evolutionary biology, and you have to go back to the very beginning when we were hunter-gatherers. And that's what the book does.

00:32:04 Speaker_03
So let's go to a time before money existed. Like what are you dealing with?

00:32:10 Speaker_04
So there's the first evidence blind boy of money, is about 20,000 years ago, a thing called the Ashango bone. And I went to see it in the Belgium Museum of Science about two summers ago. And it's a little femur of a baboon.

00:32:27 Speaker_04
And when I say little, because it's shrunk over the years, but it's a baboon's femur. And cut into it are little notches. And it was found in 1951 in the Congo.

00:32:38 Speaker_04
And the Belgian archaeologists brought it back to Belgium and they couldn't understand, they started to speculate what these little notches were. And there's lots and lots of speculation about what it is.

00:32:49 Speaker_04
But one of the speculations is that this is the first evidence we know of basically what they call in economics a tally stick or an account. So each notch represents you owe money to me, you owe something to me, right?

00:33:03 Speaker_04
So this is the very, very first evidence we have.

00:33:06 Speaker_03
So that's... So money to me is something that represents value. Exactly. So this is, here is a written proof of a debt.

00:33:16 Speaker_04
Of a debt from Blind Boy, let's say, to David, right?

00:33:19 Speaker_03
So you might have given, you gave me 20 chickens and here's the proof. Here's the proof. I need the value of these 20 chickens.

00:33:25 Speaker_04
And at the end of a year, so at the end of some period of time, I'd come and pay you back the 20 chickens. And then you would scratch off the notch on the bone. So that's 20,000 years ago. And then the next time we meet it is about 5,000 years ago.

00:33:44 Speaker_04
So the suggestion is that in Africa, people were thinking about value and money and trade a long, long time ago.

00:33:54 Speaker_04
And then what you see is then you see the next proper evidence of money comes around 5,000 years ago in the Sumerian civilization, which is basically the Fertile Crescent, now the south of Iraq.

00:34:07 Speaker_04
And there you see money exactly as we almost have it today, which is really interesting. Okay. And what really I found totally fascinating was where you see money emerging, you also see other things co-evolving with it, like writing.

00:34:24 Speaker_03
Writing. Yeah. That's your Acunaform tablets there in Samaria.

00:34:28 Speaker_04
Yeah. And then writing, you know, you would have thought, okay, well, we would have, writing is one of these amazing human technologies. Okay.

00:34:36 Speaker_04
I would have thought if I, if I hadn't gone and studied this, well, you know, we, we probably wrote first to tell each other stories. And maybe the first, the first writing would be about some great King or a great God.

00:34:46 Speaker_04
And then you realize, no, we wrote down stuff because we wanted to know who owed money to what and who owed money to whom. So basically writing comes from accountancy.

00:34:57 Speaker_04
I know it's very, it's terrible for novelists to know this, but an actual accountant was the beginning. And fascinatingly, the first person whose name we know we've ever written down.

00:35:08 Speaker_04
So the first person whose name's ever written down is a fella called Cushim who was a maker of home brew amazingly.

00:35:15 Speaker_04
He was a small time brewer and the first evidence we have of his name is he owed another fella money and he had to go and find barley and cereal to pay the guy back.

00:35:24 Speaker_03
But when you say money, did he owe him coins or did he owe him goods?

00:35:28 Speaker_04
No, he owed him goods. But you're still using the word money. We're still using it because money is value. Money is not coins. It's symbolic value. Symbolic value. And of course, you just think like, well, why did

00:35:41 Speaker_04
When money evolves, so too does numerals, writing, legal systems, organized religions, the stuff that actually goes into what we would call these foundational ideas of human civilization. And why is this?

00:35:57 Speaker_04
It's because when we went from being hunter-gatherers to being surplus. Is it surplus? It's not just surplus, it's complexity in our heads, right? Now get your head around this, right? So if you and I are just sitting down talking to our family, right?

00:36:11 Speaker_04
You've a fairly stable amount of relationships that you're dealing with. The hunter-gatherers would have had very, very stable relationships, maybe at the very maximum 50 or 60 people, which would be extended family, tribe, all that sort of stuff.

00:36:24 Speaker_04
Once we settled down, and this is where you see money emerging as we settle down, we went into much more complicated and complex societies. We went into little small towns, big farms, little villages, towns.

00:36:36 Speaker_04
And suddenly we needed to deal with far more complexity, far more relationships, far more hierarchies, far more transactions all the time. And so humans required a technology to make an incredibly complicated world simple.

00:36:54 Speaker_04
And they came up with, or we came up with, our ancestors came up with money. So I described money originally like a coping mechanism to deal with their head being melted by so many relationships.

00:37:06 Speaker_04
Because if you think about it, for the first 400,000 years of our existence on our hind legs, we were in very small groups.

00:37:15 Speaker_03
You're getting at Dunbar's number.

00:37:17 Speaker_04
You're absolutely right. This is exactly... Robin Dunbar.

00:37:20 Speaker_03
Yeah, 150, isn't it? So Robin Dunbar says that the human brain is comfortably able to deal with 150 people. And then once we go beyond 150, things start getting a little bit too complex for us.

00:37:36 Speaker_03
And he also found that 150 was the average amount of Facebook friends that a person has.

00:37:41 Speaker_04
Facebook friends, they were saying it was the ideal structure of a military unit, all these things. So Dunbar is a British, very brilliant British evolutionary biologist. And he was trying to say, as he said, how do we explain

00:37:55 Speaker_04
the growth of the human brain. What is it? Was it absorption of a food? Was it all this? And he said, no, no, no. The brain fired up based on the amount of relationships we had and connections. And as we went from being hunter gatherers

00:38:12 Speaker_04
to being agricultural farmers, the brain in effect was mugged by complexity. Okay, if you think about that. And then we had to come up with these technologies. So religion would be a similar technology.

00:38:23 Speaker_04
It's an organization way of trying to make sense of the world. I always think that money is very much like language. So language is one of the most extraordinary human evolutionary technologies because it allowed us to be precise.

00:38:37 Speaker_04
It allowed us to deal with lots of people, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that what happened was money emerges just at the time when the human brain needed, as I said before, a coping mechanism to deal with complexity.

00:38:51 Speaker_04
And what you see then is other coping mechanisms to deal with complexity like writing and maths and all these sort of things all evolve around the same time. And that really intrigued me because then it struck me that

00:39:06 Speaker_04
maybe money is not the only, but one of the foundational technologies of modern humanity. Like you're putting it up there with fire. Exactly, exactly.

00:39:18 Speaker_04
The fire thing is fascinating because anthropologists refer to us for the first 400,000 years of our existence as a pyrophyte species, right? So a species that was adapted to and is constantly adapting to a technology and that technology was fire.

00:39:38 Speaker_04
So what they say is that one of the reasons that humans began to dominate their environment was because we mastered fire better than anybody, any other animal.

00:39:51 Speaker_04
We figured out how to make it, we figured out how to keep it alive, we figured out how to cook with it, we figured out how to scare people with it. You just did a podcast on terrorizing people. We terrorized other animals with fire.

00:40:03 Speaker_04
We used fire to clear huge swathes of forest, all those sort of stuff. And socially, this is the interesting thing, Blind Boy. Socially, fire allowed us to sit around chatting, talking, imagining, looking, imagining.

00:40:18 Speaker_03
The introspection that comes, like, it doesn't matter who you are. If there's a fire in front of you, before you know it, you're going to daydream.

00:40:27 Speaker_04
You're absolutely right.

00:40:28 Speaker_03
And that's just part of who we are.

00:40:30 Speaker_04
And so what fire and the human imagination, that thing that makes us special, are absolutely linked on that level.

00:40:39 Speaker_04
You're saying, when you look at a fire, if you go out tonight and put a fire in your back garden, within, you're right, a couple of seconds, you're gone, right? You're gone completely. You're captivated, right? So

00:40:50 Speaker_03
I'm just going to pause here so we can have a little ocarina pause. Fascinating stuff there from David McWilliams, but I am conscious that we need to have the ocarina pause. I have with me today my ceramic otter.

00:41:04 Speaker_03
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00:42:18 Speaker_02
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00:42:52 Speaker_03
You heard an advert for something there. That was the the ocarina pause. I blew into a ceramic otter's anus there. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com.

00:43:07 Speaker_03
If this podcast brings you entertainment, distraction, mirth, merriment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider becoming a patron, because this podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living.

00:43:22 Speaker_03
It's how I rent out my office. It's how I pay all my bills. It's how I have the time and the space to deliver this podcast each week and to put out whatever the fuck I want. This podcast is only possible because of patrons.

00:43:35 Speaker_03
So please consider becoming one. But if you can't afford that, if you don't have any money, whatever the fuck, if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. The person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.

00:43:47 Speaker_03
So everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or the price of a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. Upcoming gigs, the second of November.

00:44:07 Speaker_03
I'm in Claire Morris in Mayo. Fuck all tickets left for that. Down to about maybe 20 tickets left. Then, on the 19th, up in Vicar Street, wonderful relaxed Tuesday night gig that's selling really quickly.

00:44:23 Speaker_03
So go get your Vicar Street tickets there for the 19th of November. Then, 2025, the 9th of February, I'm in Leisureland in Galway. Come along to my wonderful Galway gig. Then, I'm in Drada in the Crescent Hall on the 21st of February.

00:44:43 Speaker_03
Then, I'm in Belfast in the Waterfront Theatre on the 28th of February. Then, April I think there, Australia and New Zealand tour pretty much sold out. Very few tickets left for, is it Melbourne and Sydney? Cause they're bigger venues. Yeah.

00:45:07 Speaker_03
And also as well, I forgot to say, Whatever app you're listening to the podcast on, rate the podcast, leave a review and recommend the podcast to a person in real life who you think might enjoy it. That's that's the lifeline of this podcast.

00:45:23 Speaker_03
I think people in real life who say to a friend, I think you'd like this podcast. This is a pure word of mouth podcast. Back to the wonderful chat with the magnificent David McWilliams. Like I said, this is a long conversation.

00:45:39 Speaker_03
But it's a podcast, you don't have to listen to it all in one, you can listen to the rest tomorrow if you want.

00:45:43 Speaker_04
We were pyrrified species for many hundreds of thousands of years. One of the contentions in the book is that fire is one of the four elements that the Greeks talked about that were elemental to us, right?

00:45:56 Speaker_04
So you've got fire, you've got water, you've got air and you've got earth, right? The earthman and fire sort of idea. The book's idea is that sometime around 4 or 5,000 years ago, we created our own human element called money.

00:46:11 Speaker_04
And since then, money has been almost a Promethean force, an elemental force in humanity.

00:46:18 Speaker_04
And what I've said in the book is that we have become a plutified species, a species constantly adapting to and adapted by this extraordinary technology for good and bad called money that humans invented as we became much more complicated and as our world became more complicated.

00:46:39 Speaker_04
And then you see that as money went from different civilizations, all sorts of other things that we would describe as human progress emerged around the same time.

00:46:53 Speaker_04
So what I find fascinating is the fact that money passed willingly from society to society, from civilization to civilization, and every civilization that adopted money as a way of organizing their world seemed also

00:47:09 Speaker_04
to acquire a competitive advantage over other civilizations, the ones that didn't have money.

00:47:15 Speaker_04
And therefore money just jumped from civilization to civilization, and over a period of maybe a thousand, two thousand years, it becomes increasingly the dominant way in which humans organize their world.

00:47:28 Speaker_04
And so what I do then is I take the book, we start with the Sumerians, we go into a crowd called the Lydians. You know, the Midas touch, Midas was a Lydian.

00:47:38 Speaker_04
And again, the story of gold is actually based on a real elemental story that there was a river that flowed through Lydia, which is kind of

00:47:49 Speaker_04
which were called Western Turkey around now, called the Pactolus, which had an electrum in it, an electrum, which was what the Greeks called white gold. And we also see, I don't know, Croesus, you might remember the expression.

00:48:02 Speaker_04
I remember my granny used to use it, as rich as Croesus. Croesus was the king of the Lydians. So the Lydians were the first people to use gold and to use coins, to come to your idea of coins.

00:48:13 Speaker_03
Okay, so to use gold, so, because that's, like I know that salt was used as money, I know seashells was used as money, but gold, is there a link between money and then the scarcity of gold?

00:48:27 Speaker_04
Yes, yes. So the Lydians used gold. The Sumerians used gold for adornments, right? For the high priests and jewelry and what have you, right? But the Lydians were the first people to use gold as coins. And they figured out two things, which I think are

00:48:44 Speaker_04
really essential, and they're absolutely with us today. One was the printing of the state on the coin, right? So basically, they were the first people to link the state with state money, which we still have today.

00:48:58 Speaker_03
And what does that do? That means, okay, the king has signed off on this. This is legit. This isn't counterfeit. And obviously, if you try and counterfeit it, there's going to be punishment.

00:49:07 Speaker_04
Exactly, exactly. That basically state power and money begin to become intertwined very early on. like about a thousand years before Christ, right? And that is something that's with us today.

00:49:18 Speaker_04
In fact, the entire discussion about crypto and Bitcoin is all about this conflict between state money and private money.

00:49:27 Speaker_04
And we might get onto that because I think it is actually crucial to understand how money is going to evolve and where it's going to go in the future. But the Lydians also made small coins. So what they figured out was one thing, was that money

00:49:43 Speaker_04
because the promise of money today and back then was that with money you can transform yourself socially, you can buy freedom, they understood that money is a democratic force. And this was a big, big challenge to them.

00:50:00 Speaker_04
So much so that when you look at the Greek civilization who came after the Lydians, I think that what really intrigued me was why did the Greeks surpass every other civilization in a very small period of time in philosophy, in architecture, in art.

00:50:18 Speaker_03
Do you want to know a theory that I reckon, before you get onto it?

00:50:22 Speaker_04
Go for it.

00:50:23 Speaker_03
So the Greek civilization, it was in tiny islands, right? Yeah. But the agriculture was not, it was on the mainland. So it meant that you had all these people living in tiny islands, but they didn't have to farm.

00:50:38 Speaker_03
So what you had is people with a lot of excess time because the food was being grown on the mainland and on the little islands, they weren't growing anything. So you had people with a lot of excess time. That's just something I've thought about.

00:50:50 Speaker_04
And let's keep that thought, right? Why did they not have, couldn't, they couldn't feed themselves. It's an amazing story. Oh, okay. Go on.

00:50:58 Speaker_04
So, so most big empires up to the Greeks were big muscular things, you know, big landmasses creating an agricultural surplus, as you say, then using the surplus in the granary, doling it out and basically creating an entire hierarchy around the surplus, right?

00:51:13 Speaker_04
Okay. Greeks are amazing. They couldn't feed themselves. because they didn't have the land. They didn't have the land. And all, as you're absolutely right, the Greek republics were tiny, little, dotted. Plato described them. It's a lovely expression.

00:51:27 Speaker_04
He described the Greek republican cities as frogs looking into a pond, right? Because they were all looking into the Aegean and the Mediterranean, the Black Sea. There were little trading points. So you think, okay, how did they

00:51:40 Speaker_04
get to the situation where they didn't need to farm. They had to coax other people in to do the farming for them, to give them the time that you're talking about, to think about profound things, right? They did it by mining silver.

00:51:54 Speaker_04
There was a massive silver mine called Larium and it is just outside Athens, right? And over 700 years, they minted over a million silver coins, which were called the drachma then.

00:52:07 Speaker_04
And they were called the drachma up until about 20 years ago, which is amazing. The Greek currency

00:52:11 Speaker_04
in the Greek civilization was called the drachma, which actually means a handful in ancient Greek, because it was based, the silver relates to a handful of grain. So that was their value system.

00:52:22 Speaker_04
And by minting the coins and getting other people to farm for them, they could sit back and like Plato and like Aristotle, think about logic and rationality and mathematics and philosophy and art and all those other things.

00:52:37 Speaker_04
So it struck me that without money, they could never have got there. So it's money that liberated the Greeks to think about the profound things in a way in which the Egyptians didn't do, because the Egyptians didn't have a currency.

00:52:50 Speaker_04
So I've always tried to think, why did the Greeks break through the sort of glass ceiling that had suppressed all other cultures?

00:52:58 Speaker_04
And one of the things, not the only thing, but one of the things they were using was the Greeks were the first really financialized empire. And they had their currency, and they had their language.

00:53:10 Speaker_04
And then, of course, because people were getting rich and poor in Greek countries, they thought, well, hold on a second. We need to figure out a way of including people so that they don't feel excluded. That's where democracy comes from.

00:53:27 Speaker_04
So they said, look, we'll create. And democracy is so radical. Nothing like that had ever been thought of before. but we will include people in the democratic process.

00:53:37 Speaker_04
Now, you know, in fairness, now, it was only fellas who could vote, women, and the place was the probably ratio of free people to slaves as opposed to slaves. But to the extent that it was an interesting jump in human civilization,

00:53:53 Speaker_04
what you see, again, is this co-evolution of democracy and money. And then what also fascinated me when you leave the Greeks was why Jesus Christ and Christianity emerged where it did and when it did. And is there a connection to money?

00:54:14 Speaker_04
Because when you look at the Greek gods, right, and all the gods were really alpha male, big macho guys, right? Like Zeus and Prometheus,

00:54:22 Speaker_03
And they were flawed as well. They were jealous. They had all the, you know, they weren't perfect like the Christian God or loving even.

00:54:29 Speaker_04
Yeah. They were vengeful fuckers, right? Yeah. Like you cross these bastards and they will basically, they're going to make your life a misery, right? And they were macho and they were big and they were all powerful and all knowing and they ran the kip.

00:54:43 Speaker_04
They ran the place, right? And then this fella comes up and he says, no, no, no. The meek are going to inherit the earth. The poor man is going to be rich in the next life. The rich man won't get to heaven.

00:54:56 Speaker_04
In fact, not only will he not get to heaven, it'll be easier for the camel to get through the eye of the needle than the rich man to get there. This is an incredibly radical idea. And I was thinking, why did this emerge?

00:55:06 Speaker_04
And could money, this weird, wonderful technology, have something to do with it? And it struck me that

00:55:13 Speaker_04
As Greek and Mediterranean society became more and more financialized, what actually was happening also was that people who were winning in the monetary economy

00:55:25 Speaker_04
were beginning to move up and think of themselves as very brilliant and meritocratic and all that. So it meant that the losers, the people who lost in the monetary economy, in the old days, if you were poor, you remained poor, right?

00:55:41 Speaker_04
You were born poor, you remained poor, pre-money. But with money, you could be born poor and end up rich, and you could accumulate loads of money, right? So

00:55:52 Speaker_04
That meant the losers in this world, the people who didn't do well, required a countervailing ideology.

00:56:01 Speaker_03
So obviously, as well, it means that there was, if you were poor, it meant that you were a bad person, and if you were rich, it meant that you were a good person. Exactly. Okay. So they needed a countervailing ideology to say, no, I'm worth something.

00:56:13 Speaker_04
I'm worth something. Even though I don't have anything, I still have worth.

00:56:16 Speaker_03
Exactly.

00:56:16 Speaker_04
And I'm going to create the next life, and the next life is where I'm going to get all my rewards. So Jesus emerges. Also, if you think the apostles spoke Greek, they didn't speak Aramaic. Greek was the language of commerce.

00:56:29 Speaker_04
It was the language of ideas. It was the language that St. Paul went to when he talked to the Ephesians and the Corinthians. They didn't speak Aramaic. They spoke Greek. It was the default language of the time. And I think

00:56:41 Speaker_04
that it's no coincidence that after about two or three hundred years of the financialization of the Western Mediterranean, in and around the Greek civilization, and then later with the Romans, that Jesus emerges with this countervailing, totally radical ideology called Christianity, because they needed something

00:57:02 Speaker_04
to at least give people another story that wasn't about money. They all kind of go together and then of course you get the Romans. And the funniest thing about the Romans is although they were

00:57:15 Speaker_04
huge conquerors, they were also obsessed by credit, the Romans. They really created a banking system, a credit system, the first credit crisis. Remember in Ireland with this big banking crisis?

00:57:24 Speaker_03
What does credit mean? Just again, I know nothing. What's your definition of credit there?

00:57:29 Speaker_04
Credit is money in the form of a promise. Okay. So imagine that.

00:57:33 Speaker_03
So it doesn't exist yet.

00:57:34 Speaker_04
It doesn't exist.

00:57:35 Speaker_03
It's not savings. It's not a loan.

00:57:37 Speaker_04
It's not gold. It's not currency. It's a promise that I have. You and I get together. You say, All right, David, I'll borrow a thousand euros for you, and I'll give it back to you next year. And I promise I'll give it back to you. That's an effect.

00:57:52 Speaker_03
Okay, so it doesn't really exist, but it does. It's a promise, and it's about your word, the word of the person who's lending.

00:57:58 Speaker_04
Word, and it's about reputation, and it's about trust. So this is where we're into really interesting stuff, because What money is, is this extraordinary feat of human imagination, right? Because it doesn't exist. It's not a real thing.

00:58:17 Speaker_04
And it only exists in the human mind. It doesn't exist in the animal world at all.

00:58:21 Speaker_03
But even back then, even back then when you're dealing with a gold coin, is it still imaginary?

00:58:27 Speaker_04
The gold coin has a little value because you can say, well, I can melt that down and make a necklace out of it, right? Yeah. Okay. But when you're dealing with credit,

00:58:35 Speaker_04
you're dealing with a promise, when you're dealing with, I'll buy something off you and you'll pay me back in four or five years time. Then what you're dealing with, you've created the money, you've created the idea, and the money is just a promise.

00:58:49 Speaker_04
There's nothing to back it other than your good name and your basically your reputation. And this was what the Romans figured out.

00:58:58 Speaker_04
And then once you create credit, you create an entire parallel structure of money that doesn't exist, that is only underpinned by law and reputation.

00:59:08 Speaker_04
And that's where you see us moving towards, even in the Roman times, an economy that begins to look and smell and feel like something we have today. So these things are really very old.

00:59:19 Speaker_03
This is what fascinates me. Because didn't Rome collapse when they started to fuck with money?

00:59:25 Speaker_04
Exactly. Right. So there have been, again, when I was, during the pandemic, reading a lot of books about money and Rome.

00:59:36 Speaker_04
and there have been given, there was an exhaustive survey done about seven or eight years ago, which collated all the classical scholars and everything about the end of the Roman Empire, because there's been so much effort put into trying to figure out why did this great empire fall.

00:59:54 Speaker_04
And there's over 140 different reasons given by various scholars. Okay, But what isn't given or focused on is towards the end of the Roman Empire, they started debasing their currency so much that Roman money lost almost all its value.

01:00:14 Speaker_04
So much so that by the empire of Diocletian, Diocletian who was from Croatia around Split, the coins were so soft they could only print emperor's head on one side of them.

01:00:28 Speaker_03
You mean literally that they were taking gold coins and going, I'll throw a bit of copper in, I'm going to mix this, and now you're not dealing with, it's a lie, you're carrying around a lie, this isn't 100% gold. Exactly.

01:00:38 Speaker_03
And they're moving to lead eventually.

01:00:40 Speaker_04
To lead and any else shite that they can put into it, right. And of course, all the time you get The currency is debased and debased.

01:00:49 Speaker_04
And for the last about 100 years, the Roman Empire, the Western Empire, you've no mention of banks, which you had all the way through, like at the beginning of the empire, the banks were there, they were lending credit, etc. And so

01:01:02 Speaker_04
What other scholars have said is that the end of the Roman Empire coincides with the end of Roman money. And I think that's really plausible, because money is a foundational tool for society.

01:01:16 Speaker_04
It's around which, whether we like it or not, we tend to orbit around it. And if you take the value of money and you besmirch it and you degrade it, you really mess with the power of the empire.

01:01:29 Speaker_04
And again, don't forget that the Romans paid their soldiers, you know, initially in salt, which is where the expression worth your salt comes from. Salary and salary comes from salt, doesn't it? Exactly. But eventually they pay them in coins.

01:01:41 Speaker_04
So you start messing with that, then you start messing with the empire, you start messing with the soldiers. And, you know, I think as a reason for the end of the Roman Empire, the end of Roman money should be at least entertained.

01:01:57 Speaker_03
And then, so moving into the Middle Ages now, right? So I heard something, and I'd love you to clarify it, that the first international banking system existed because of the Knights Templar.

01:02:11 Speaker_03
So the Knights Templar were this Christian organization of poor monks, but they were also warrior monks. Europe wanted to get the Holy Land back, so Christianity was waging war on Jerusalem.

01:02:23 Speaker_03
If a wealthy person wanted to travel to Jerusalem from England, they would probably get robbed on the way.

01:02:29 Speaker_04
Yeah, so they were a protection right.

01:02:33 Speaker_03
instead of taking all your wealth with you, leave it back in England, and I'm going to give you this credit note.

01:02:40 Speaker_03
And then when you arrive in Italy or arrive in Jerusalem, just hand this into a Templar center, and they'll give you the equivalent of your goods back. And international banking was invented that way.

01:02:50 Speaker_04
That's absolutely the beginning of it, right? Because what we forget is that all these things were evolving in and around the same time. But as you said, it was the first checkbook was issued by the Knights Templars. That's exactly what it was.

01:03:07 Speaker_04
When I was a kid, checkbooks were everything. People were writing checks for everything, right? So the first checkbook was issued by the Knights Templars. The angle I came at it probably

01:03:18 Speaker_04
unusual angle was I've always been interested in mathematics and where it comes from, and particularly the role of zero in changing the power structure of Europe, right?

01:03:29 Speaker_04
So before the Arabs introduced zero in Sicily in the 12th century, Europeans never used it. We never used it. And of course, the Arabs got zero from the Persians. The Persians got zero from the Indians.

01:03:46 Speaker_04
And one of the reasons the Europeans never used zero is we were afraid of it. We called it Saracen magic. And the reason we were afraid of it... It's true. That's what it was called.

01:03:55 Speaker_04
They thought that the Saracens, the Arabs, had some magic in their heads because they could do algebra in their heads. And I'll tell you the story. It's fascinating, right? So the Greeks were obsessed with proving everything.

01:04:09 Speaker_04
And if you want to prove everything, the thing that really freaks you out is nothingness is the void. So intellectually, and we all came from the Greek thought, right? So intellectually European Christians were afraid of the nothing.

01:04:27 Speaker_04
In contrast, the Hindus in India embraced the nothing. They loved the void because it's only in the nothingness, it's only in the nothingness that you can achieve all sorts of peace. And zero is the nothingness. Zero is the void.

01:04:44 Speaker_04
Zero is the black hole you look through that is nothing. And so there was this relationship between philosophy and religion and mathematics that the Hindus in India were very comfortable with.

01:04:57 Speaker_04
So for example, even now, Indians will say, what did India give the world? Nothing, meaning everything. And so they were using zero, not just in mathematics, but also in their whole philosophical worldview.

01:05:09 Speaker_04
And the Arabs then took zero from the Persians, who robbed it from the Indians, and they started using zero. And the great thing about zero, it allows you to go from negative and positive numbers

01:05:19 Speaker_04
It also allows you to deal with very big numbers, a thousand, 10,000, 100,000, a million, big, big numbers using zero as a place number. And what happened is algebra comes from the ability to use zero.

01:05:33 Speaker_04
And the Arabs, Arab merchants, learned algebra as like a parallel language of commerce, like the way in which scholars of the Renaissance learned Latin. The Arabs were learning algebra, and they brought this algebra

01:05:49 Speaker_04
with them when they started to trade with the Europeans, which they did ironically in Sicily, was the center of European intellectualism, trade, art, etc.

01:06:00 Speaker_03
Is this when Sicily was under the Islamic caliphate or is it later than that?

01:06:05 Speaker_04
It's a little bit later, it was under a Norman. Actually the Normans that came to Ireland in 1136, right? Okay, Strongbow and all that carry on. Their cousins went to Sicily. It's quite a fascinating story. Yeah, it's an amazing story, right?

01:06:24 Speaker_04
Under a fellow called King Roger, right? Who was this Norman lad. And amazingly, he set up, he's talking about the Caliphate, a very tolerant, liberal,

01:06:34 Speaker_04
unbelievably unique civilization where Normans, Byzantine Christians, so the Normans would be Roman Christians, the Byzantine Christians, Islamic Arabic traders and Jews all lived together for about 200 years, right?

01:06:49 Speaker_04
In a relatively tolerant place at the time of the Crusades. This is the amazing thing. So when the rest of Europe and the Arab world were killing each other,

01:06:57 Speaker_04
in Norman Sicily, they were living side by side, and they were bonded together largely by commerce.

01:07:05 Speaker_03
And he said, look... That's where you say you start. So that's why you get Christians dealing with Islamic lads who are using algebra. That's why you get these two competing languages coming together.

01:07:18 Speaker_04
Exactly, and that's why the Christians call it Saracen magic, because they couldn't understand how the Arab lads could compute things in their heads, right? They thought some fucker was talking to them, right?

01:07:28 Speaker_04
They thought they were possessed by the devil, and the devil was whispering in their head, because how could they figure out the ratio of dates to fucking, you know,

01:07:38 Speaker_04
to wheat and do this all, it seemed to the Christians in their heads, because they could do it in their heads because they learned algebra. So they were just cleverer than us, right? That is amazing. Isn't it amazing?

01:07:50 Speaker_04
And then, of course, we brought zero. Then there's a fellow called Fibonacci. So listeners who are into mathematics might have heard of this guy called Fibonacci. And he was a guy, a young fella, whose dad was a trader.

01:08:04 Speaker_04
He learned algebra and he wrote a book called Liber Abaci.

01:08:08 Speaker_03
And when you say learned, because I know algebra, was it invented by a fella called Al Hazen? The very man, yeah. It was Al Hazen, wasn't it?

01:08:15 Speaker_04
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's Al Quahazen, it's K-H-A.

01:08:19 Speaker_03
Because I heard too as well, within Islam, right? Like, you know the way You can't draw the Prophet Muhammad within Islam. You can't draw a picture of the Prophet Muhammad.

01:08:30 Speaker_04
Yeah, idolatry and all that stuff.

01:08:32 Speaker_03
Yeah, within like, it's kind of taboo to draw anything that's created by God. So Islamic art tends not to be representational, tends not to have They don't draw a human or a dog.

01:08:47 Speaker_03
Instead, Islamic art is about geometry and patterns and shapes because mathematics is the language of God within Islam. So that's what they invented modern mathematics basically.

01:09:01 Speaker_04
They did. And they also invented this style and architecture, an architecture called Arabesque, which is exactly that, which is absolutely beautiful.

01:09:08 Speaker_03
Like I'm in two weeks time, I'm going off to Cordoba in Spain, which is the center of it. It's the old caliphate from, I call it hot limerick because it looks like limerick the same time that the Normans built old Norman Ireland in the 1100s.

01:09:26 Speaker_03
That's the same time that the Islamic castles are in Cordoba. So they're actually quite similar as cities. So I go there to hot limerick, but it's just incredibly well preserved Islamic architecture from the Middle Ages.

01:09:38 Speaker_03
It's fucking phenomenal, you know.

01:09:40 Speaker_04
It is phenomenal. And you go to the Alhambra and you just sit there and you listen. It's an extraordinary thing in the Alhambra. If you just sit there next week now, whenever you're going right and just listen to the water. Oh yeah.

01:09:54 Speaker_04
Just listen to the water. Sit there on your tot and listen to the way in which the Arabic caliphate understood how water travels, how water gives life, how water reassures in the heat.

01:10:06 Speaker_03
How it cools down a building.

01:10:08 Speaker_04
Amazing.

01:10:08 Speaker_03
It's amazing. The way those fountains, they understood very, very complex ways that water and humidity can cool the air. The way that you're speaking about money, right? I'm not great at maths.

01:10:23 Speaker_03
The way that you, you're looking at money basically as a way to tell the story of humanity. And I do that with food. So with food, I love anything to do with the history of food.

01:10:35 Speaker_03
Whatever the fuck it is, you're going to find a very interesting human story. And an interesting one there around when you mentioned Sicily and Norman Sicily being a place of tolerance for Christians, Islam and Jewish people.

01:10:49 Speaker_03
The same shit was happening in Islamic Spain under the caliphate around the year 800, 900. There was Christians, Islam and Jews lived together harmoniously and there wasn't any discrimination.

01:11:01 Speaker_03
And then when the Reconquista happened in Spain, when Christian Spain basically took over the Muslims and kicked them all out.

01:11:10 Speaker_03
That's where you start to see, we'll say Islamophobia and anti-Semitism pop up, but you can see the history of all of this in Spanish food to this day. So if you take even a dish like paella, paella used to be Arabic.

01:11:25 Speaker_03
The Moors brought rice from Africa to Spain. Only when Christianity came in, do you have paella that contains pork and shellfish. Why do you think that is? That's fascinating.

01:11:36 Speaker_03
To find out who's a hidden Muslim and who's a hidden Jewish person, and also even the Spanish tradition of everybody eating together at the table. Because if you if you I go to Spain and I'm an Irish person, when I order food, I'm Irish.

01:11:50 Speaker_03
Here is my dinner and here is my plate. And this is what I eat. If I'm eating with Spanish people, they're like, no, you're not. Get your plate and put it into the middle of the table because we're all eating off each other's food.

01:11:59 Speaker_03
And that's the culture. But that also comes from the Reconquista. So we're going to we're going to get we're going to sprinkle ham on your food like salt. Eat it. Eat it. Are you Jewish or are you Muslim or are you Christian? Prove it. That's what it is.

01:12:12 Speaker_03
Even on a fucking Saturday, man. You go there on a Saturday and everyone's hanging out there washing. That's because Saturday is the Sabbath for Jewish people. So work, work on the Sabbath, do some housework, show us your washing.

01:12:27 Speaker_03
Why aren't you showing me your washing? Are you Jewish?

01:12:29 Speaker_04
So this was all to expose, are you a hidden Jew or a hidden Muslim?

01:12:33 Speaker_03
Wow, that's fascinating. There was tolerance under the Islamic caliphate. There was tolerance of Jewish Christian. It didn't matter.

01:12:41 Speaker_03
But then when the Reconquista comes in and it becomes Catholic, that's when you start to see forcing Jewish or Islamic people to convert or basically get the fuck out. Christianity is the only religion.

01:12:54 Speaker_03
It's also where you start to see the emergence of modern racism. because like race, racism, race is completely made up. All humans are the exact same, the exact same. So this idea of there being different races, that's a social construct.

01:13:09 Speaker_03
And where that you see the first emergence of that is When Islamic Spain, right, which was 800 years of a caliphate, a lot of those people, they came from North Africa, so they look like North African people that were darker.

01:13:24 Speaker_03
But Spanish, northern Spanish people were white skinned.

01:13:27 Speaker_03
So when the Reconquista happened, that's when you first started to see the emergence of an ideology of if you are white skinned, you are worth more than somebody with dark skin, because that means you're Christian and it means you belong to this land.

01:13:40 Speaker_03
And even the patron saint of Spain, I think his name is like John the Moor Slayer or something like that. I don't know his name. But if you look at the patron saint of Spain, like their St.

01:13:50 Speaker_03
Patrick, it's literally a saint who is holding a recently decapitated Moorish person's head in the air. And then if you look at that, the saint's wrist, the blue veins. So that's where you get blue blood.

01:14:05 Speaker_03
And the origins of racism, it's Spain, Christianity equals white skin. And then of course, where does Spain go? They go to fucking America, the slave trade. So a lot of it starts there, you know?

01:14:17 Speaker_04
Well, I mean, the thing is like, you know, like I, the way you think about food and the way you think of what you would call the social clues that are emitted from eating, right? And whatever. That's what I've done with money in this book.

01:14:32 Speaker_04
I thought to myself, this story is so much bigger than economics, right? This story is so much bigger than the way we tell the story. This is the story of us. It's the story of innovation. It's the story of colonization.

01:14:48 Speaker_04
There's a big chapter on Casement, who happens to be a favorite of mine, a favorite individual, maybe one of the most impressive Irish men. Roger Casement in the history of money. Yeah, he's in there. There's a big chapter on Roger Casement.

01:15:00 Speaker_04
I'll tell you why. Is it because of the Congo? Is it because of the Congo? And it's even more fascinating.

01:15:05 Speaker_04
My grandfather is, my father's parents are buried in a place called Dean's Grange Cemetery, which is a big cemetery here in the south, just in Dean's Grange and around Dun Laoghaire. And I was there, I don't know, with some of the family years ago.

01:15:22 Speaker_04
And what I noticed was not so far away from him was the grave of Roger Caseman's brother. And that interests me, just like, oh, this is interesting. But also within a stone's throw of that was the graver fellow called John Dunlop.

01:15:41 Speaker_04
And John Dunlop was the guy who invented the pneumatic tire. Wow. Hadn't been from John Dunlop, Caseman would never have been in Congo. Is it a rubber connection? It's the rubber connection he made the tire. It's amazing. And had it not been

01:15:57 Speaker_04
Dunlop Casement wouldn't have ended up in the Congo, wouldn't have ended up radicalized, and wouldn't have ended up interned in the UK. So how did that... Was Dunlop from Ireland? Dunlop was from Ireland.

01:16:10 Speaker_04
He was a vet, and he was a vet from Downpatrick in County Down before, obviously, partition. So he'd be up and down to Dublin all the time. Dublin would be the city that he'd engage with all the time.

01:16:21 Speaker_04
He retired to Dublin and he died in 1922, just after independence. right? And Casement would have been buried in the family plot in Dean's Grange had he not been hanged in Penfield Prison and his body was not returned to Ireland in 1966, right?

01:16:37 Speaker_04
And this always intrigued me. And then I decided to look into Robert, look into Casement, look into the trial of Oscar Wilde, look into the trial of Casement, his involvement. I mean, Casement was like a one-man walking NGO.

01:16:51 Speaker_03
They call Casement the They call him the inventor of modern human rights.

01:16:57 Speaker_04
Exactly, completely. So what I decided to do was look at that story of the Belgian Congo, the link between rubber, the Belgian Congo, what happened in the Congo.

01:17:06 Speaker_03
For people who don't know, the Congo was run by Belgium. It was like a personal state owned by King Leopold.

01:17:13 Speaker_03
He was extracting rubber resources in the Congo, enslaving people, chopping people's hands off, just really, really treating the indigenous population as absolute dirt.

01:17:26 Speaker_03
And Roger Casement was basically investigated, King Leopold, for human rights abuses and justice was brought against him, I believe. And he received a knighthood from the Brits for doing it. But that's what Casement did.

01:17:40 Speaker_03
Casement was an Irish man who was a, he was a liar, wasn't he?

01:17:45 Speaker_04
No, he was an unusual fellow. He emerged as a sort of a civil servant. He went down to Africa and worked for the British Foreign Office, taking notes in effect for a long time.

01:17:58 Speaker_04
But he becomes increasingly radicalized as he begins to see what's happening in the Belgian Congo. And then he's furious by the time he meets Joseph Conrad, who wrote The Heart of Darkness, upon which Apocalypse Now is based.

01:18:12 Speaker_04
And the main character, Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, was based on a Belgian sadist who was documented by Joseph Conrad. But it was Casement who actually alerted him to all this sort of stuff happening.

01:18:27 Speaker_04
So Casement gave Conrad the basis for the book, The Heart of Darkness. And then Casement becomes radicalized and he just says, look, we have to expose this.

01:18:36 Speaker_04
And he does expose it and he gets, as you said, a knighthood for his exposing of exploitation of the native Congolese. And then Casement says, well, hold on a second. they're not just exploiting the natives here.

01:18:49 Speaker_04
They're exploiting the natives back in my place, in my hometown. And he goes to Peru and he does the same thing because the native Peruvian Amazonian Indians were also being exploited because rubber could only grow naturally in the Amazon

01:19:04 Speaker_04
and in around the Congo Basin. And then he comes back to Ireland, and he says, OK, hold on a second. There's a similar cultural colonialism going on here. And he becomes radicalized. And by 1913, he's a member of the IRB.

01:19:20 Speaker_04
And by 1916, he ends up in Germany trying to get the Germans involved in an Irish international brigade. And he comes back to Ireland, and he gets captured in Bannistrand in Kerry.

01:19:33 Speaker_04
So he was transported unmolested to England and he was tried in what is really the trial of the century.

01:19:41 Speaker_03
He was a bit of a celebrity as well, wasn't he? So people come out and said, you can't execute this man. And also he's a knight. What are you doing?

01:19:47 Speaker_04
Yeah. And then, of course, the Black Diaries get exposed.

01:19:50 Speaker_03
Yeah.

01:19:51 Speaker_04
It's the fascinating thing. So he's he's basically murdered or hung by the British for being gay more than for being a Republican.

01:20:03 Speaker_03
So the Brits released these diaries that said, oh, it appears Roger Casement is gay and being called gay in 1916 was just like completely unacceptable. So everyone who supported him said, oh, I didn't know he was gay. I guess you should kill him.

01:20:17 Speaker_04
And it's amazing the people who supported them. So you have Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes, paid for his defense, which is amazing when you think about it.

01:20:29 Speaker_04
But as you said, the British, I think it's MI5 or whatever it was, the foreigner, made sure that whoever was going to be outraged by these diaries got sight of them. And

01:20:43 Speaker_04
He was hanged in Pentonville Prison and the hangman who hanged Casement said that he was by far and away the bravest man he had ever had the displeasure of executing. That's Roger Casement. He's also in the book.

01:20:59 Speaker_04
There's all sorts of characters in the book. What's the connection with Dunlop though? Dunlop was a vet and Dunlop's five-year-old boy been given a bicycle for his birthday. It's the beginning of the bicycles.

01:21:14 Speaker_04
And his little boy said to him, look, dad, it's too hard. Okay. Imagine he says, it's too hard on my bum cycling around here. And his dad said, okay, right. What do we do? We need to get something to soften the wheels. They hadn't got rubber on the wheels.

01:21:30 Speaker_04
And he said, What we can do is we can create rubber tires, and if we blow into these tires, we can create a soft, almost spongy rim that can go around the bikes, and that was it.

01:21:42 Speaker_04
So Dunlop invented pneumatic tires, and he then sold that franchise to the company that became the Dunlop Corporation, one of the biggest companies in the world. And he retired as a sort of a very affable elderly gentleman in Dublin.

01:21:59 Speaker_04
And was he alive when Casement was alive? He was alive when Casement was alive.

01:22:03 Speaker_03
And did they know each other?

01:22:04 Speaker_04
I mean, do you see a rubber connection there? But they didn't know each other, but the fascinating thing is they were buried they would have been buried right beside each other. The coincidence of that is insane. Isn't it insane? It's insane.

01:22:16 Speaker_04
And, uh, so that's up in Dean's Cringe Cemetery, you know, but what happens is you're writing a book like this.

01:22:22 Speaker_04
It's a bit like you do in the pod, you know, you go off little tangents and little tributaries and you're on a river and you go, you start to go up a stream and a little tributary, and then you're, you're in a lagoon and suddenly you find a gem.

01:22:32 Speaker_04
and you come back again. And I just thought that, you know, by the time we get to the 19th century, the story of money is involved with the story of industry, it's involved in the story of mercantilism, it's involved with the story of colonialism.

01:22:46 Speaker_04
And what also intrigued me was the notion that botanists were at the front line of colonialism. When we think about botanists, we always think, you know, people who are

01:22:56 Speaker_04
you know, sort of boffiny guys working on plants and leaves and things, but in actual fact, you know, in the late 19th century, it was botany, i.e. rubber plants, etc.

01:23:04 Speaker_03
And this stuff called gutta parcha, did you ever hear of gutta parcha? No, what's that stuff? Oh my God, so gutta parcha, it's a bit like rubber. and it could only be grown in Indonesia with trees that were very, very old, right?

01:23:19 Speaker_03
And got a parcha, it was like a hard plastic, a hard plastic that comes from trees, only from one place in Indonesia.

01:23:27 Speaker_03
And this was hugely, hugely important to the British Empire because when the telegraph was invented, okay, and especially underseas cables, The only substance that could sufficiently insulate the undersea telegraph was this stuff called gutta partia.

01:23:45 Speaker_03
And if you look at the only way that the British Empire could expand the way it did, I'm talking 1890 onwards, was for one element of the empire to be able to immediately communicate with the other via underseas fucking telegraph cables.

01:24:00 Speaker_03
So you had to have this gutta partia to be able to do it. But it only came from these trees in Indonesia and you couldn't farm them because the trees took like 40 years. And eventually they just used up all the gutta parcha. That was it.

01:24:14 Speaker_03
And I think what replaced it was the vulcanization of rubber, that process. But gutta parcha was a plant. So what you're talking about there is botany and empire. the gutta parcha was, it's in Ulysses.

01:24:28 Speaker_03
In Ulysses, one of the characters mentions gutta parcha boots. Wow. Gutta parcha was so ubiquitous that it used to be just a phrase that someone would say. Have you got your gutta parcha? Referring to a type of boot. I love that.

01:24:43 Speaker_03
And I found out what gutta parcha was. I was in an antique shop in Limerick and I looked in the window and there was a dagger and the dagger was about 100 years old. And it said, got a part to handle. And I'd never heard of that word.

01:24:57 Speaker_03
So I looked it up and I was like, fuck me.

01:24:59 Speaker_04
I know. I mean, these, these stories, I mean, it's like, it's, it's when you, when you start researching these types of things, you just unearth extraordinary stories. And all these stories to come back to our theme, Blind Boy, is about humanity.

01:25:13 Speaker_04
That's the thing. It's about us. I was even looking at rubber, like rubber first arrives with the, there was a movement when the conquistadors, you mentioned them earlier, went to the new world, so to speak.

01:25:26 Speaker_04
The vast majority of them were vicious sadists, but there was a small group of Catholic priests who actually thought, no, these people are humans like us. We have to respect them. And they brought a couple of

01:25:40 Speaker_04
Amazonians back to Spain, to the court to prove, look, these people are intelligent, they're empathetic, they're emotional, they're like us. And they brought them back. And one of the ways they were going to show how brilliant these people were was

01:25:57 Speaker_04
to make them or to showcase an original game of football. The Indians, well, I'm going to call them Indians, the native Amazonians used a rubber ball, right? So they played a type of football that they used with their elbows, right? Okay.

01:26:16 Speaker_04
And this is all true. The most amazing thing, what really fascinated the Spaniards was rubber. They'd never met and come across a substance like this, so much so that European languages didn't have a word for to bounce in the medieval age.

01:26:32 Speaker_04
They'd never seen a thing bounce. They couldn't understand how something could be quite heavy to throw and yet bounce light as a feather because they'd never come across this elastic substance called rubber.

01:26:42 Speaker_04
So it's a bit like, you know, once you go into these things, you unearth all sorts of fascinating stories. But our general theme, the book is basically about

01:26:53 Speaker_04
that the story of money and the story of modern humanity, for all its good and all its evil, are massively intertwined, so much so that I don't think you can tell the story of one without the other. And I really believe that.

01:27:08 Speaker_03
One thing I definitely want to speak to you about, right? And because it's something I know nothing about and I'm very curious about, which is. Let's move into the 20th century with money, OK? Yeah.

01:27:20 Speaker_03
Money right now scares the living fuck out of me because I don't know where its value comes from. It seems insane.

01:27:28 Speaker_03
And we used to have money that used to be the gold standard, which meant that the money, that's the pieces of paper that are floating around. Don't worry about it, because an equivalent amount of gold is somewhere in a safe. And then that disappeared.

01:27:43 Speaker_03
And then money basically just became imaginary. Value became imaginary. Can you speak as simply as possible, what's the gold standard, what happened when it ended and what's money now?

01:27:57 Speaker_04
So the gold standard was exactly as you say, was this idea that you could go into the bank with your banknotes and demand an equivalent in gold, right? So that gave you the comfort that it was backed by something. Now, that was abandoned in 1971.

01:28:15 Speaker_04
There were various different iterations of it. What was that late? It was that late. It was that late. It was abandoned in 1971. So it was, first of all, it was abandoned in 1936 by Roosevelt. Then it came back after the Second World War.

01:28:29 Speaker_04
The Americans said, we will link the dollar to gold. And everybody else says, OK, we link our currency to the dollar. So implicitly, there was a link to gold. That was abandoned in 1971. That's your Fort Knox. Yeah, exactly.

01:28:43 Speaker_04
And it was abandoned in 1971 because Richard Nixon needed money to fight the Vietnam War, which the Americans were losing, and gold constrained the amount of dollars they could print to pay for guns and armaments.

01:28:58 Speaker_03
And Nixon wanted to make up money, let's invent some money.

01:29:01 Speaker_04
It was basically Saigon or gold. You got a choice between Saigon or Fort Knox, and he chose Saigon. But since then, and this is the fascinating thing. So since then, money has been entirely fictitious in the human imagination.

01:29:16 Speaker_04
And I believe this gives it its extraordinary power. So I think that gold was a sort of a relic. Keynes called it a relic, right? It was a relic of a bygone age.

01:29:27 Speaker_04
What I love about money at the moment is exactly that it is just a figment of the human imagination. And that, I believe, is a huge intellectual leap for the global economy and for society.

01:29:45 Speaker_04
And I think that there's no coincidence that the period since the 70s up to now has been a period where you've seen massive improvements in global health.

01:29:56 Speaker_04
It's not great, it's not ideal, but people are improving in longevity, in education, in all these things you can't imagine. China emerging, as it has done, if people had said, oh, well, you can't expand your economy because you've no gold.

01:30:11 Speaker_04
So what I've seen is that the last 40 years has been an extraordinary leap of human imagination and money. And I think this is actually an incredibly sophisticated world we are in now, where you don't have to have

01:30:26 Speaker_04
a piece of gold or a piece of metal or a piece of silver to make legitimate the trade that we all do together. So I can't imagine our world of seven and a half billion people. living together without this technology called money.

01:30:46 Speaker_04
And I can't imagine seven and a half billion people living together if we were constrained by gold, which is only a geological legacy.

01:30:54 Speaker_03
I got to tell you that the birdshit parallel here, man, because this is you're going to love this. Go, go, go, go.

01:31:02 Speaker_03
So what you're describing about there, right, with we'd say the gold standard and then it goes from the gold standard into now we have confidence and we're printing money that doesn't exist.

01:31:11 Speaker_03
The exact same that you can say the exact same thing for nitrogen. OK, so. If humans, in order to grow crops throughout the years, you need to be able to fertilize. But the thing with fertilizer was.

01:31:25 Speaker_03
It's, you either, you know, you get the grass that you've just grown and you make silage out of the grass or you get cow shit. But throughout human civilization, there's been a limit to the amount of, because what farmers are looking for is nitrogen.

01:31:38 Speaker_03
There's been a limit to the amount of nitrogen that a farmer could get. You can only get so much from the grass that you cut. You can only get so much from the cow because they're eating the nitrogen from the soil.

01:31:49 Speaker_03
Then what started to happen is around the 1500s, they figured out that a lot of nitrogen was contained in bird shit, particularly in the age of colonialism when they went to South America and they found that there was islands made entirely out of bird shit.

01:32:07 Speaker_03
mainly around Panama. So what happened is human civilization, the West, they started to go, wow, this bird shit makes astounding fertilizer. It's full of nitrogen. So now we had, we had more nitrogen than was in the soil. Do you get what I'm saying?

01:32:24 Speaker_03
you're going, yeah. They start going to Panama, to these islands, and they start depleting all the bird shit, and they bring it back to Europe.

01:32:31 Speaker_03
And now we're able to grow more food than we could previously do because we have a sudden influx of nitrogen. But then, of course, by about the late 1800s, we start to run out of bird shit. We start to run out of these islands, these bird shit islands.

01:32:47 Speaker_03
And then they start freaking out. Where are we going to get nitrogen from? They dug up Waterloo. They dug up the battlefield of Waterloo to look for the bones of horses and soldiers so they could get the nitrogen from that.

01:33:01 Speaker_03
By about 1903, there was a genuine risk of a global famine because we had lived off nitrogen resources that were now completely depleted. And there was actually a good chance of a global famine. And then a German chemist comes along called Fritz Haber.

01:33:19 Speaker_03
And the thing is with nitrogen, The air around us is 70% nitrogen. There's fucking nitrogen everywhere, but it's in the air. Fritz Haber was a chemist who figured out how to get that nitrogen from the air and make it into fertilizer.

01:33:32 Speaker_03
So Fritz Haber invented unlimited nitrogen. That's what happened. Just like you go from gold standard. That's what fucking Fritz Haber did. But that's also a reason why we have 8 billion people.

01:33:43 Speaker_03
Because when Fritz Haber figured out how to get nitrogen from the air, then you can just keep growing and keep growing and keep growing.

01:33:51 Speaker_04
And if you... So again, I come back to the story of humanity. It's got a... that money needed to break away from what you would call the constraint of gold or the constraint of nitrogen, as what you're saying now.

01:34:04 Speaker_04
I don't really make this value judgment. I just think that money constantly adapts to human other technologies and other technologies adapt to money.

01:34:12 Speaker_04
So if, for example, you get these extraordinary discoveries by our German chemists, it always seems to be German chemists do a lot of this discovery in fairness to them, right? then money adapts to that.

01:34:25 Speaker_04
And what I keep saying in the book is that we can't understand where we're going without understanding the relationship between money and how it both facilitates these things and acts as a constraint in these things and changes.

01:34:38 Speaker_04
So I know what you mean that, you know, is there a world in which you just keep growing and growing and growing? And very clearly you can't because you come up against, are we entirely

01:34:50 Speaker_04
determined by the Earth's resources, or do humans always try to figure out a different way of doing things? And you know, the funniest thing is, Blind Boy, I'm not sure of the answer to that.

01:34:59 Speaker_04
I think my heart says the Earth's resources, but my head looks back at history and says humans I've always come up with little schemes to try to actually deal with the constraints that are put up against us.

01:35:17 Speaker_04
So the way I end the book is just saying, look, there's no great big forecast of the future. All I'm saying is that at every stage, what you see is money adapts to problems. And it is a technology.

01:35:32 Speaker_04
At the end of the day, technologies enable humans to sidestep problems. And I end where we started in the Congo with a thing called M-Pesa, which is money in the form of mobile phone credit, which is taking Africa by storm.

01:35:49 Speaker_04
So I was in Kenya doing work with Oxfam about four years ago. And I was sitting on the side of the street in Nairobi, an amazing city, big, bustling, fantastic city.

01:36:00 Speaker_04
And I see all these people, maybe 50 people, buzzing around what looked like a mobile phone shop. I asked the geezer I was with, I said, what's going on there? Because they seemed too animated to be just buying mobile phones.

01:36:14 Speaker_04
And he said, they're buying money. I said, what? He said, they're buying mobile phone credit, and they're using that as money. I said, really? He said, yeah, it's a new currency that's taken off in Kenya.

01:36:26 Speaker_04
Now 60% of the Kenyan economy is done by M-Pesa, which is money as mobile phone credit, which is phenomenal. Yes. And of course, it's now extended into the Democratic Republic of Congo.

01:36:39 Speaker_03
But why? Are they afraid of the national currency?

01:36:42 Speaker_04
Yes. So what they are, basically, in many parts of Africa, particularly rural Africa, you'd never come across a bank, right? And what tended to happen, let's say you were working in the city and you'd sent money home to your mother, right?

01:36:57 Speaker_04
So this is basically, as happened in Ireland for hundreds of years, people left the country, people left the country, went to the city, sent money home, right?

01:37:08 Speaker_04
But in Kenya, what you'd have to do is you'd have to pay a fellow, a bus driver, put the bag of cash into the bus, right, in Dublin, and send it all the way down wherever, right?

01:37:18 Speaker_04
And of course, at that stage, the bus driver would take a commission of about 20%, the cash might disappear, et cetera, et cetera. But because there were no banks in the countryside, this is how money got transferred around.

01:37:28 Speaker_04
But then once mobile phones came in, And they might not have had banks, but they had mobile phones.

01:37:36 Speaker_04
What people started to do was, rather than send money down to their mother in the rural areas, what they would do was they'd send her mobile phone credit. And she would use the credit. This comes back to your idea of value, right?

01:37:49 Speaker_04
She would use the credit to buy milk and use the credit to buy stuff. And this was a way of transferring money. And then people said, well, hold on a second. If I can buy milk, why can't I buy other stuff with it?

01:38:01 Speaker_04
And within a short period of time, about four or five years, mobile phone credit has overtaken real currency, which is called the shilling in Kenya, as the money of choice for the vast, vast majority of people.

01:38:17 Speaker_04
And you can borrow and lend in it and all sorts of stuff.

01:38:20 Speaker_04
And now all over Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, people are using mobile phone credit because they have phones and they have credit and they understand the value of the amount of minutes, time minutes.

01:38:31 Speaker_04
And again, what fascinated me was that rather than talk about cryptocurrency at the end, which I do a bit, quite a bit, and all this stuff orchestrated by big American superstars and Kim Kardashian and tech bros, what's much more interesting to me, and it's only a grift.

01:38:51 Speaker_04
by rich people to get poor people to borrow money.

01:38:54 Speaker_03
What I found much more interesting... There's a big smell in that office. I don't know much about cryptocurrency, but I know that I don't trust it. We'll do another podcast on it.

01:39:01 Speaker_04
We'll do a podcast and I'll take you through it. It's dreadful stuff, right? But I was much more interested in, forget all that Hollywood stuff and the Super Bowl ads and the tech bros, poor Africans coming up with their own currency.

01:39:16 Speaker_04
Who would have thought 10 years ago that mobile phone credit would become money and mobile phones would become banks. That's what's happened in Africa. And that's what I love about this story. It adapts all the time. And that's where I end.

01:39:31 Speaker_04
I start in Africa 20,000 years ago and I end in Kenya there last year.

01:39:37 Speaker_04
And what I think is that the story of humans and the story of money just is so intertwined that I can't imagine telling the story of human civilization without the story of money and vice versa. And that's what I've tried to do.

01:39:54 Speaker_03
I mean, it's it's it sounds unreal. It sounds like a big, terrifying project. But I know by the way you're talking, like you fucking you lived with this. You really, really. I have one last question that I want to ask you.

01:40:09 Speaker_03
It's something I know nothing about. Can you explain to me what petrodollars are?

01:40:14 Speaker_04
Okay, so petrodollars were dollars that were backed by petrol. So there is a fantastic, maybe it's not fantastic, I think it's fantastic, but in the book about euro dollars, right?

01:40:27 Speaker_04
Euro dollars and petrodollars have nothing to do with euros or petrol, okay? Just so you know, right? They were originally dollars backed by petrol. So like everything, you remember your gold idea?

01:40:39 Speaker_04
Your gold is just the collateral that backs a promise, okay? So if you say, Blind Boy is given David McWilliams a grand, but David McWilliams has some collateral that he gives Blind Boy and Blind Boy feels happy about that, right?

01:40:54 Speaker_04
It makes the promise real.

01:40:55 Speaker_03
Did it somehow make America really powerful?

01:40:58 Speaker_04
The dollar makes America really powerful, and the reason is the following. is in economics, having the reserve currency.

01:41:06 Speaker_04
So that means by having the currency that everybody wants to use and everybody... So for example, when you go, let's say to your Kenyans, right? The taxi driver will talk to you straight away from the airport

01:41:19 Speaker_04
wherever you're going, about the rate of exchange with the dollar, right? They won't talk about the euro or the yen or whatever, right? Because everybody uses the dollar. It's the universal language.

01:41:29 Speaker_04
And that gives the Americans what economists call an exorbitant privilege. And the reason is the following, right? The Americans print the money for nothing. It's free for them to print.

01:41:41 Speaker_04
But we, the rest of the world, have to sell real things to get dollars, right? So there's an asymmetry at the core of the system where the Americans get a free lunch by printing the currency that everybody wants to use.

01:41:56 Speaker_04
Now, the Americans understood this at the end of the Second World War when they set up all the institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. And those institutions were set up by Americans in Bretton Woods in America

01:42:09 Speaker_04
And the stipulation was, you will use the dollar to clear all the trades. So if you want to buy copper, you want to buy gold, you want to buy petrol, it's all priced in dollars. It's priced in the currency the Americans print for nothing.

01:42:24 Speaker_04
Nobody else can print the dollar, only the Americans. So it gives them this real economic power that they use all over the place. And it's recognized all over the place. So much so, and I'll leave you with this one, right?

01:42:38 Speaker_04
When ISIS, apparently the people who think America is the great Satan, demand a ransom, what do they demand to get paid in? Fucking dollars, right? Not gold, not fucking prayers to Allah, dollars.

01:42:56 Speaker_04
And if that doesn't tell you that the Americans have an exorbitant privilege, I don't think anything, anything else does.

01:43:03 Speaker_03
All right. So we leave it at that. That was, I could have talked to you for another four fucking hours.

01:43:07 Speaker_04
I know, I know. We'd be like Joe Rogan. We'd be going on for days.

01:43:11 Speaker_03
Yeah. Thank you so much for that. That was great, Craig.

01:43:15 Speaker_04
Not at all, Blind Boy. It was always a pleasure. I'll talk to you soon.

01:43:19 Speaker_03
Wonderful stuff there. David McWilliams, his book is called Money. Go out and get it if you enjoyed that chat. Wonderful writer, great storyteller. His podcast is called The David McWilliams Podcast. Dog bless. I'll catch you next week, ye glorious cunts.

01:43:38 Speaker_03
In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, and genuflect to a crow.