David McWilliams (on the history of money)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. Today we have an economist on and this I've been wanting to do this for a while and I think it was maybe probably Malcolm who who planted the seed, which is Malcolm Gladwell said. It is really peculiar how powerful money is in our lives. Yes. And how it is a forbidden topic. It's like there isn't a more relevant

force that we don't talk about. I agree. It's interesting. It's at play and it's interesting for everything. I think'cause we know intuitively it leads to envy. Yeah. So you just avoid it to avoid envy. Or like bragging or something. Like I i it there are traps.

But like if you work with someone they go, how much do you make? The issue is, well, I'm afraid to say because if I make more than them, we have issues. Yes. And if I make less than them, now I have an issue with them. I know somebody who who a few times has like been in a group and said how much money they've made on something. Yeah. And I am like, I'm so allergic to You bristle. Yeah. And I guess I don't it's a little And this one shock you, but I've always pretty much been very open about it.

Yeah. I remember um Kate Hudson's brother Oliver. Yeah. Who I love and was really tight with for a while. I think the first time we ever met, we were sitting in the backyard of someone's palatial house and we're like looking at the city. It's just it's pretty overwhelming with how gorgeous everything was.

And this is twenty one years ago. And I'm like, Oh, this is quite a place on he's like, Yeah. And we both worked a bit as an actor and I'm like, Yeah, I and then somehow I'm I don't know how, but I I he was just like, Yeah, how much do you have in the bank? And I'm like Oh, I have like four hundred thousand dollars. Mm-hmm. He goes, Oh my God, that's exactly what I have. Oh wow. And I was so excited and we like Yeah. There was something very bonding about it too.

But like, yeah, I've always kind of been that way. I had to learn about M. I always had less than everyone, so it didn't matter. Exactly.

And my family was very open about money. Oh, see. And a lot of families are very tight-lipped about money. My parents would never I would ask them so how much money do you make? Ah, isn't that weird? They would never tell me. My mom's approach, which I I agree with, was like Hey, they got you gotta learn how to manage all this and feed yourself. You better know what it like I c I make this, the house is this, the groceries are this. Like you need to understand. Yeah.

And that is more logical to be including your kids. So they leave the house with a real sense of what it all is. I mean, they were definitely instilling like You need to have enough. You need to be safe. Everything costs so much money all the time. Like they were instilling fear around it. But so then I would say, like, well, how much do you make? Like if it's everything's so scary.

And then they didn't want to say. That was not for us to ask. I know. It's very, very common. Yeah. Um what's what you're already detecting if you're listening still is that we had a break. And now we're so excited to be back together and chatting a lot. So this was an intro that kind of became a fact check. The last Uh, David McWilliams' book is called The History of Money and it's absolutely fascinating. Yeah. It is it is a force that really you don't have the luxury of ignoring because

It fuels revolution and despotic rulers, and you gotta keep your eye on it. Yeah. Please enjoy David McWilliams.

Europe's surprisingly close to New York. Yeah. We really appreciate that because in our heads America occupies a different place. Five hours it's not a big deal. That's why the Vikings were able to get there. Exactly. Whereas Hugh Boster's like you're fucking miles away. Yeah, I know. We're the real deal. This is like going to a different civilization for us. For a lot of Americans, LA's a different civilization.

Is it not maddening if you're in the rest of the world going like that place changes so radically every four years? I mean I can't believe you went from Obama to Trump to Biden back to Trump. Yeah. And you're you're kind of sitting here in America thinking, hmm, this is a country I really don't understand. I think most Europeans look at it and think,

We thought it was left, now it's right. We thought it was socialist, now it's MAGA, now you have Mam Dami in New York. It's all right. I'm not kidding. That would comfort me. That you guys understand we're as confused as you are. That now is very reassuring because we're watching the news.

Particularly as an Irish person, we thought we knew the United States. I was a dishwasher here. I was a bartender, a student. Came over to Boston, hung out with the Irish Americans. We kind of knew our St. Patrick's Day. You guys came over. What, forty million Irish Americans? We thought, okay, we know this country. You're more than ten percent of the place. Yeah. But now we have no idea. But we don't either. Yeah, we don't either. Well that's reassuring. And now in our defense.

I think we're getting a lot of the heat, but this is a global phenomenon. It is not unique to here. There has been a very huge rise of populism and authoritarian type leaders. So it's like it's not unique to here, but of course unfortunately we moved the needle the most. So like America's got four percent of the world's population and twenty four percent of the world's income. So that's huge. Yes.

So you gotta take it serious. When America sneezes, the rest of us catch a cold. Oh no, so true, yeah. Yeah, we catch freaking covet. So you look at the states and you think, Okay, do I have any sense of what's going on in that country? But you know what? You're right. Britain has got a reform party which is probably gonna win. Francis got Le Pen, Italy's got Maloney.

He's not doing this democracy stuff at all. Now what I saw was great, it was on an English TV show and they said it was when Biden came in and the joke on the show was, Yeah, this season of America's boring. As if for a TV show. So at least I hope you're entertained. Are you not? Nah, it's kind of like succession. I hope you're having a laugh. I guess that's what I'm saying.

Okay, so you grew up in Dublin and and mom was an educator, yeah, she was a teacher. Yeah, my mom was a teacher. She's still with us. She's ninety and I brought her to New York six weeks ago. No way. Extraordinary thing. So we're sitting at home and she's from Cork in July. And we're chatting, chatting, chatting.

And she goes, Scott, I'm ninety this year. So I said, Yeah, you are. And I said, What do you want to do? She says, You know what I'd really like to do? I'd love to go to New York. The last time she was in New York, think about this. She went on a boat. Wow. In the early sixties. We forget air travelers knew. And it was really funny. She's ninety.

So is myself, my wife, my two kids, and granny. We go to New York. We're all jet lagged. After the third day, Granny says, I'm going to go to bed for half an hour. I said fine, okay, in the hotel. So myself, the kids and the missus are sitting having a drink. I thought she was gone for the night. Text me by seven o'clock. What's the plan? Where are we going? She was true to that now. She did eleven thousand steps. Oh my on average.

Every day. Wow. And she's 98. Oh wow. So yeah. So that's she'll be listening. Okay, great. Hello, mom. Okay, hello, shout out to Alice. To Alice. Shout out to the Alice. Well you gotta bring her to LA now, next, and her ninety fifth. No, it's a little bit too far. It's too far. Post up in New York for a few days and then swim through.

And then dad worked at a chemical plant. My dad's passed away a long time. He worked in a chemical plant and a factory. You'd know it from Detroit. Blue collar, old school, Irish, really decent guy.

Passed away a long time ago, two thousand and nine. But yeah, he was a good skin. Heavy drinker? On the country. What kind of working class guy was that? So it's interesting. In Ireland you've got these weird things, right too. You've got the boozy working class guys and then you've got these slightly teetotally not so much conservative, but they were not

Boozers. My dad wasn't a boozer, my mum wasn't a boozer. It was unusual Irish upbringing. So there was no shouting and roaring, no fights, no slapping around. Dad never came home with a black eye. Yeah, yeah, none of that. It's funny, you know, when you watch the wire and you see McNulty. And all the paddies and all the cop paddies and the fireman cop paddies drink it wasn't our family. Looking at that.

family and thinking, well he'll certainly become an economist. No, that's true. That's very that's why I lay out both of them. No, no, that's true. I shouldn't become a school teacher or something. Or a cop.

Actually, I would almost think you would seem greedy to even go into that line of work. I went to school and in Ireland we have this. very strange, very narrow education system, which is highly academic. And essentially what happens is you do these final exams, you get a certain amount of points, you have the same thing as GMATs, and those points allocate you to certain courses.

in university and the points I got allocated me to doing economics. That prescriptive. Almost that prescriptive, right? Doing kind of businessy commercy thing. And then I went into this course and thought, okay, fine, let's have a look at this. And I realized Wow, this is amazing. This gives you a framework to totally understand the world. And I was completely hooked when I went to university. No sense of it at all prior to this.

I had no sense of economics, I had no sense of what it was about. Think about it, born in Ireland. So the economy is a disaster from day one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've a banking crisis, we've fiscal crisis, we've currency crisis, everything. Half of the country lives here, emigrated, and we've a war going on. Yeah, yeah. A little kid with your little head in the seventies, eighties, and you think Wow, the last thing you wanna do is economics because we can't do that. We can we can write.

We can talk, we can sing, we can dance. You can join you two, maybe. I went to university, Ole University in Dublin, Trinity College, where I now teach, which is kind of a bizarre sort of symmetry. And I thought, wow, we might not be able to understand Ireland because we're a particularly weird bunch. But we could maybe understand America. I think what happens if you're lucky as a late teenager, something happens in your life. Where you think, Okay, I like the stuff.

Right. Then you do the masters, you do you know, all that sort of carry on. And the reason I did a masters was because there was no jobs in Ireland. Right. So I did a masters in Belgium. Nobody emigrates to Belgium. Yeah. Except for me. Okay. Yeah. So then you found yourself At the Central Bank of Ireland from 90 to 93, and some pretty dramatic shit went down in those few years, right? You have the German. reunification so they're gonna have to combine a currency and absorb this

half of themselves that has nothing. You had Black Wednesday, is that what it's called? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Sterling thing. And then you had the EU, the treaty Maastricht, yeah. And I had no idea. And like none of us have any idea that there was gonna be, as you said, German unification. Which totally transformed Europe. Then you have the General Maastricht Treaty, which totally transforms Europe. And then the Brits did what they always do, which is they screw up.

No, but they screwed up massively screwed up massively. And so when their currency collapsed, our currency collapsed with it. So you're a kid, but this is your first job. And what is Interesting about the work in central banks. Like working for the Fed here. You begin to understand how the system works.

Is it fair to say you're learning about the levers that can be pulled and how effective they are in different situations? And you're kind of learning about the mechanisms by which the state can kind of try to help or attempt.

It's very easy to sit in the sidelines and say, you know, the state is this and it's that. But actually when you work in the system, you realize that most of the people are actually trying to help. Yes. Most of the people are trying to do the right thing. So for example, I was born So you're the poorest of the rich.

Ireland was the poorest country. You're saying Eastern Europe's not communist. No, so Eastern Europe is a communist, right? So when you're born in the poorest country of the rich world, it's maybe the most deleterious place to be because You're always comparing yourself to your neighbors. You can only upcompare, really. Yeah. Your neighbors are rich. Yeah. So when I was a kid, I worked in Boston, I worked as a dishwasher. We used to ride over

with degrees in mathematics and economics and all the jobs you could get were washing dishes here in America. I remember working when I was eighteen in Boston, washing dishes and thinking to myself, okay, these Americans who we are serving are much richer than us. But they're not that smarter than us.

They're not that better read. They're not clever. What are they doing that makes them so or what are we doing that makes us so backward? Right. And that was something that always prompted me in the world of economics. The other issues, my dad, who you mentioned, lost his job when I was about twelve.

And we lived in a pretty middle class area and that wasn't really supposed to happen. So I remember my dad when I was Looking at the window in the morning, he put on a shirt and tie and pretended to go to work. And I remember as a kid, this really weighed on me, and I thought, how can this man who was so decent be made redundant by somebody else. Like, what is this world? How does it all work? How is it so much that he feels so ashamed and embarrassed?

That he's letting on to our neighbors that he's going to work, but everybody knew he was and maybe it's also for him. It was for him. So you asked me about working for the institutions and working in economics. That had a profound effect to make it. You didn't want to be powerless. Precisely. How can A man who's decent, honest,

gets screwed by the system. So what is the system that's screwing him? So I don't get fucked by it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that was a sort of a propulsion mechanism that I only realise as I get older. But to come back to it, I think the people in the institutions of state are trying to do the right thing. However, they will never experience what my dad experienced. And the reason they won't

It's because they're in the big public sector. So they can hide. They're not gonna get screwed. Nobody's gonna knock on the door and say you're gone. And I remember also he worked in this pharmaceutical factory, which is a big kind of chemical factory. And I worked there for a summer when I was fifteen. And I remember thinking to myself,

Fuck, this is hard work. Mm-hmm. Yeah. This is proper work. This is actually back breaking work. Yeah, yeah, where you're in pain after work. I was carrying crates and crates of chemicals. I was like sixteen, so as strong as I was ever gonna be, it was guys at fifty doing that.

Guys at 40, guys at maybe close to 60. And they're bent over and they're broken. And they're working for the feckin' industrial wage. I remember seeing this and thinking to myself, okay, that's hard work. Now you don't want to be doing that. So maybe not an obvious economist?

There was a certain amount of triggers that said, uh, maybe economics is more interesting. Yeah, so these three events that you oversaw and I imagine in some capacity got to weigh in on as much as the Central Bank of Ireland would have been involved in any of them. How did those three events

overarching philosophy on economics. Working inside the great institutions of state, the European Union, the Irish government, but My only lesson was that. Nobody's in control. And that's a very strange thing to arrive at that conclusion at the age of about twenty-five. Yeah, yeah. Because most of us watch the telly. You see Jay Powell coming on TV, the head of the Fed. You think, okay, he's in control. He knows what's going on. And once you work in these institutions, that

Slightly ephemeral, but incredibly satisfying notion that the somebody in control disappears. And you realize that. The world, the economy, The stuff that I do is entirely random. Can we drill for one second down in that? Because I just was in a debate with my brother while he was in town. And my brother leans more into conspiracy theories than certainly I do. And we're

chatting in the car. And I said, David, my thing that I got to push back on a little bit is I've been lucky enough to know a lot of these people that you think are at the head of these these conspiracies and I'm like, no one really has as much control as you think. No one can pull the strings the way. Not one person, not one entity, not even a collective of 20 people can. It's way too random and dynamic. And there's too many players

And the notion that this person's in control of that it's quite an illusion. That's just not how I don't think I sold him on it, no But it's true So I've always thought that Economics is much closer to biology than physics. Sure. So biology is messy. Evolution is messy. The notion that humanity is an animal is that arrived at the top of this evolutionary chain, it's a mess. It's unpredictable and you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow, let alone next year.

became captured by, intrigued by, infatuated by physics. I think this is what happened, this is to go back to your story about conspiracies, is that economists always wanted to be clever. And in the nineteenth century, the clever science was biology. So Pastor and Darwin and evolution. In the twentieth century, the clever

Science was physics. So Einstein. He was a global superstar. And economists said, Oh, why don't we be clever like those guys? So they introduced all these mathematics into economics. Thinking That the world is predictable. Yeah, it has the illusion. So to come back to your brother. So the idea is, is it possible that one person and one Illuminati run the world? No. Because the world is beautifully chaotic. Yeah, yeah. Because we One of the joys of doing economics is to realise

That at the core of this economics idea is this crazy thing called the human being. What's interesting is yes, to your point, the biologists were kings and then the physicists were kings, but there has been this really interesting thing I've seen in the social sciences, which More and more psychologists borrow.

from economics. All these models of benefit and loss and these games you play, right? They're all kind of game theory. They're adjacent to economics and they're using kind of the mathematical equations. to help us get to of all things psychological phenomena. It's moving that in that direction. And psychology, as we know, it's impossible to study the collective human, which is economics is about, without

And particularly group psychology, maybe not individual psychology. And it's becoming very vogue at the moment. It's persuasive too. I think all sciences pursue academia, once it starts to borrow from everywhere else, it's becoming much more interesting. Agreed. So I think that economics should be seen bizarrely in that field as a form of

Intellectual communication about the world. Trevor Burrus Okay, so your book, The History of Money, immediately appeals to me. I am of the opinion that we have.

This enormous force in all of our lives that everyone is completely uncomfortable. So I share this opinion with Malcolm Gladwell. He and I will lament often when he's on here. It's just like how bizarre is it that it's the most powerful force in our life and it's almost the most taboo topic to ever approach. Your book is great in so many ways because we're gonna go through how do we even get here?

And I think we should start with how we got here. We should start with the previous most powerful invention of ours, which is fire. So I spent thirty years as a monetary economist, professional in private sector, public and one thing that really struck me after all this was that economists didn't really understand money.

So economists of my tribe took it upon ourselves to explain money to the world. And I remember watching this, I said, do they really get it? The first thing I was always intrigued is I'd never met a rich economist.

It's like clairvoyance you don't play the lottery. Well, why aren't we playing the lottery? Exactly, exactly. Okay. So I thought that that was the first thing. I was like, well, that was unusual. And the second thing is I thought, what does money do to Well it's It's mendacious, it's dangerous. It's transgressor. It turns us into strange creatures.

This is an a mad force. Creates envy and creates envy and resentment, but also it creates love and great stuff and imagination and we're animated. It creates great innovation. I thought to myself, there has to be another way of looking at this. I mean I've been thinking about this for about twenty years. But I was sitting during COVID in the basement, we'd have serious lockdown. And so you're kinda stuck.

And I thought actually what money is, is this amazing technology that humans invented. We have been a species. that has always been defined by mastering technology. Solving problems, figuring shit out. And so if you read anthropology, you realize that our big technology prior to money was fire. So we were the species that figured out how to make it, how to keep it, how to use it. And fire has changed us physically. Makes our jaws smaller.

Our stomachs more. Our teeth small our teeth. Look at the three of us. We are the evolutionary products of fire. Yeah, there will be a lot of people that are anti meat eating that'll go, like, Well if you look at our mouths, we don't have the teeth of a carnivore or a proper omnivore and it's like Yeah, because they didn't have fire, we did. And we could chew, yeah. Yeah. And fire makes stuff soft. Soft and edible. Exactly. So that intrigued me, this idea that if

If the first three hundred thousand years of our existence as humans was characterized by the relationship between fire and us, this clever ape, which is what we are in effect, and that changed us. So we were a pyrophyte species adapting to and adapted by fire. If you look at the last five thousand years and particularly now, we have become and I made this word up so for the uh we've become a plutophyte.

So Pluto being money in Greek and wealth. So we are a species that has been constantly adapted by and we adapt to this technology money. But the fascinating thing about money is unlike fire. So when the Greeks thought about the world they had the four elements the earth, wind, fire and water. I think money is the fifth element. It is a human invented element that only exists in our mind. We can't understand ourselves without understanding money. You can't understand the modern world. I'm in LA.

I came from Dublin. I'm in a hotel down the road. You guys are doing a podcast. Rob is from Chicago. What is the technology that binds us all together? It's actually money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you can't understand there's seven billion people on the world There's no way in the world you can understand us without understanding our relationship with this technology. You make a great point. The Rickshaw driver in Old Delhi. The one thing that assuredly

He understands in the same way as the trust fund kid from New York is they both understand money. That's maybe the most unifying thing. Could we add love to that? That's not a technology, but that's also a universal element if we're adding it. Well, love is the thing that gets us. Out of bed in the morning. Right. But love is Even more ephemeral than money as a force.

And it can't meet any of our survival needs other than what it creates, which is a bond where you can create more of us. It's the most beautiful thing we have. I don't think you can live without it. No, we can't. Yeah, I would die. You meet loveless people and you know it. Yeah. Yeah. You can sense it.

What's exciting for me to talk with you currently about this is we know all of the pejoratives about money, right? It is the root of all evil. It is is what makes everyone envious and jealous and all these things. And I think there are increasingly people in this country which I think is only a gift of being in such a rich fucking country.

Is that people want to do away with it. Like they really have this naive sense that it's evil. We need to do away with it. They really need to understand what a tool it's been for us. Probably everything they love about life.

Will find its way down and be distilled into money created it in some way. So let's start in Mesopotamia. Just on that point. I was educated by Catholic preachers. And they came in and they said money is the root of all evil. And I thought, Well, that sounds okay. I accept that. But then when you think about it, there was a French sociologist called Marcel Mauss, and he said something very interesting from the nineteenth century. He said

In order to trade, man must first throw down the spear. And what he meant was that trading and money. was an alternative to war. 'Cause in the old days, if I wanted what you had or you had, I'd kill you for it. Yeah. Take it. Monica, you say, Well, actually, David, why don't we m use this thing called dollars and you give me a hundred dollars and I'll give you and suddenly

You have this technology that allows cooperation. Yeah, peace. So going back to Mesopotamia, what is absolutely fascinating for me was that civilizations that adopted money. particularly the Lydians and then the Greeks, they seemed to acquire a competitive advantage over other civilizations. And I thought, why was there like So for example, how did the Greeks, a tiny little civilization, Fight off the Persians, which is a massive empire for so long. Why did the Greeks

break the intellectual ceiling, why did they come up with rationality? Why did they come up with democracy?

Greeks were the first monetized society. And the interesting thing about money is that if you start with a monetized society, then you have to count. Then you have to be precise. Then suddenly, if you're being precise, then you're being rational, you're being logical. So I was always intrigued by why the Greeks moved from myth. To logic in about three hundred years. Because it's not a long time. Right, right. I argue in the book that one of the reasons they did this.

Is they were the first monetized society. And a monetized society requires precision. And precision requires you to be logical. And logical requires you to be rational, and rational requires you to question. The Greeks were the ones that came up.

with money and coins and coinage. And then the thing about coins, it makes money real. It puts it in your pocket. It's a day to day thing. You're starting to be commercial. What I was always intrigued by the Greeks was that At the center of the Greek city. Wasn't some big palace or some big wide street for soldiers to go down, was the market. They put the agora in the center of their society. And once you put the market in the center of your society, everybody can come.

Trading, spoofing, talking, all that sort of stuff. Moscow could never have been created by a democracy. Have you been there? Mm-hmm in Moscow is huge. Big For parades. For parades. For parades. For guys walking down with guns and machine guns and shit like that, right? Whereas You go to an old Greek town, tiggledy piggledy markets, the whole thing. Well, David, I did go in ninety five to St. Petersburg. And driving around the morning like.

Where would anyone gather? There's no cafes, there's no supermarkets, all the things that we take for granted. We underestimate that they're also the place that you gather and be social and meet your neighbors. There's nothing to congregate around here. And when you gather and you're social, you grumble. You get pissed off, you gossip, all the good stuff. You're like, I don't like the big guy. Okay, so yeah. It's by design. Yeah.

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So, if you look at these civilizations and people say, well, why did they propel themselves forward so much? Lots of ideas have been thrown around. I think one of the basic ideas is And the monetary mind changes the world. In Anthro, you spent a lot of time on this, which is once we moved to an agrarian or farming subsistence mode, you had Surplus, which was a new thing. We had never had surplus. We had storage of food. So all of this facilitated

Specialized labor. Now you could have a cobbler who only did shoes. He didn't have to have an occupation that fed himself. He now could have an occupation where he become a specialist. So now he's gonna learn everything there is to know about it in a way that someone would never have had the bandwidth to do.

And then I'm presuming through monetization that would have been all done with trading. And now you have calligraphers, you have writers, you have all these people that are dedicated to something other than feeding themselves. So knowledge is exploding. But still the trading system's very inefficient versus a monetary system to handle the trading. So the monetary system is the elixir of the trading system. It what kind of

Hypercharges the trading system. And it's an amazing intellectual leap in economics. They call it the law of one price, but I don't think that really captures what it is. But the idea That the three of us could align upon a notion of value. So you want this, you want this, I want this. And rather than discuss

And convince each other that we're wrong, we should say, okay, here's a piece of coinage. That settles the discussion. So if you think about societies, what is so essential for our urban societies to work is trust.

You go to a cafe, you turn up, say, could I have a flat wipe? The geezer says, Yeah, fine. He knows nothing about you, Monica. Doesn't know your track record, doesn't know who you are, doesn't know where you're from. But because of the dollar, that's sufficient trust between the pair of you to trade.

And so you click on your phone and it's done. Money amplifies trust and trust is essential for us to live in complex societies because we have to trust each other. So what you're seeing is the introduction of money. had this incredibly Constructor

way of all humans, strangers dealing with each other. And once you start dealing with strangers You start sleeping with strangers, You start hanging out with strangers, you start mixing with them, you've got exposed families, and you're into the world that we begin to understand. as the urban society that we all come from. Yeah. Don't you think there's an argument for it engages distrust? Because if you're making the price

If I'm trying to buy something from you and you're like it's ten dollars and I'm like but it's not Dax is having this happen right now with the Christmas lights. I got a bid to install Christmas lights. And it's so much money and he's like It's not that much it cannot be that much money. to do to install a few lights. Right. And so he's like, I don't trust you.

because you've decided to up the charge, maybe because you know it's me and I have money or whatnot. So I feel like money's a distrust. Think about this in another way, Monica. I agree with you, but the price Sets the signal to you I don't trust you.

So in the prices all this information, can you imagine the guy whoever isn't stolen? Let's say the Christmas guy. Yeah, yeah. Christmas lights guy, okay. Santa Claus. Santa Claus, right. So you're thinking, okay, I don't really trust you. But actually what triggers your lack of trust? And in the prices, all this information, in one number, this is where economics is fascinating. So in one number, Monica says, Shit, nah, I'm not having that. Then you begin the process of the negotiation.

And then you will arrive at this conclusion of whether it's right or wrong. But my point is it's money expressed in a number, which is the price. That triggers whether or not you trust somebody. And that's a fascinating thing. Yeah, it is. Because it's such an amazing shorthand. For everything. Let's talk though a little bit about mustate me, because once we have a monetary system, we get immediately some very abstract things built on top of it.

Which would be credit. The first person in human history to be written about is a guy Borrowing, essentially, barley to brew beer. So he's a guy called Cushim. So it's the first name we know has been written down.

was a dude called Cushim. In the history of the world. And the reason his name so you would think as some great god or some great storyteller or a hero from town. No. He was a homebrew hustler. Could easily be from here in LA, okay? A guy yn gwneud, ac rydych chi'n ei wneud, ac rydych chi'n ei wneud, ac rydych chi'n ei wneud He was borrowing money from somebody else in order to make beer to pay that dude back.

In a year's time. Two and a half years? Two and a half years. The rate of interest was thirty three percent. Which seems deep to us now. But again Tiny window of time though. Tiny window of time. And that's what I found fascinating about doing this. I can now feel But Kushim this guy felt at night waiting for the harvest. So he needed a good harvest, so he could get cheap cereal to pay back the dude. And then you realize money makes the ancient really modern.

Because you know if we look back at ancient history, like old Irish history, there'd be knights and big chieftains, it's not real for us. Cushing, you can see the dude. He's got a mortgage to pay. He's like shit, I don't have money. I've got these guys paying and the taxman on my back. And that's what I found fascinating. But it introduces this concept, which I love how you articulated it, which is credit is Being able to spend the profits of tomorrow today. Yeah.

Which is a fascinating again, this is such an abstraction and this is such a paradigm shift and this Opens us up to kind of an unimaginable world of potential because you can spend the money, the profits of tomorrow today. The potential profits.

It's an amazing thing, right? And we kind of can't grow without that. Money allows us to travel in time. And that's a really essential thing to grasp. Think how cool that is. So for example, people listening to the podcast will have a mortgage. They go to the bank. They buy a house. Mortgage, in effect, is painting a picture of who you're gonna be in 30 years' time. And everybody believes this.

And the rate of interest is the price at which we decide is the risk. It's an amazing idea. And you're traveling in time all the time with finance. As you said, you're borrowing from tomorrow from an unimagined tomorrow and an unpredictable tomorrow. for reality today. And that's why credit and interest rates are so much more fascinating than economists talk about. Because what you're actually doing is you're traveling in time. You're projecting into the future.

The three of us have no idea what's gonna happen. In an hour's time. So we're painting a picture of the person we're gonna be over the next thirty years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But and that opens up the world of possibility. In the book I call money magic. Because it is like magic. And what's more magical is we all Suspend our critical faculties. To imagine a future.

With money. And that I find not just fascinating. It's just I find really electrifying. Minimally it's very optimistic, saying I believe it's going to work out in the end to the degree that I'll take this risk. But this is the thing, all of us humans

Are programmed to be optimistic, which is why pessimists are so unusual. Well that's when you have depression, when you think the world will be worse. Why do you get out of bed in the morning? You get out of bed in the morning because in some little part of your head, you think Tomorrow or today is going to be better than yesterday. It's what doctors call your biological arrogance. Which is that we are gonna be better today than we were yesterday.

And we know biological arrogance is a ridiculous notion'cause we're all gonna die. Yeah, we're all getting closer to the other one. We should be biologically pessimistic, but we're not. And that is a beautiful elemental part of humanity. And I think money To the extent that it is this amazing technology animates that That's why I can't believe we don't talk about it more. It is this incredible power. And it's not without its wards. But I do think people

Without the awareness of how much it's given us. And you're only aware of the warts, which those are very visible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could really throw the baby out with the bathwater and I would urge people to really understand the relevance in our life and our culture and our expansion. And why it's so emotional. Money is complex. Because money is all about humanity and we're weird. We're odd and we're different and our brains are weird.

And therefore money's unusual. Yeah. So it gives us writing. It gives us this new paradigm of again, spending tomorrow's earnings today, which allows for growth and investment and hope. And it allows for trust.

Okay, so you give us the Greeks, right? And they become probably the best sales pitch for money. What then did the Romans you say the Romans Empire was built on credit. How did they Take what the Greeks did and then expand it. For example, if you watch a movie like Gladiator, you know, you think the Romans, it's all about killing Christians or killing animals or fighting. Big armies, all that stuff, big muscular guys, beefy guys, buffed up guys walking around with shields.

And then you realize, okay, but what was actually fueling this whole thing? What were they doing it for? What were the Romans conquering Syria for? What were the Romans conquering North Africa for? Why did the Romans go to Britain? They were looking for resources. Now, why were they looking for resources? Because it was An empire built on credit. Tomorrow had to be more profitable than today. Exactly. Exactly. So they have this great expression called Pecunia non Olet.

Which means money does not smell. And so the Romans had this, and it comes from Vespasian, the Emperor, because they actually used to tack. You're alright. Oh what? Because in urine is ammonia. They use it to clean their teeth. Oh wow. So you think now so you think about it, okay? So you guys have American teeth. Uh-huh. American teeth are whiter, okay? We don't do that shit, okay? So you guys have American teeth.

Austin Powers did a good job at that. No, but it's it's it's it's just a thing. Yeah Europeans don't whiten our teeth as a general rule, right? But Americans do. Now why do you do that? Because you wanna look younger, you will look better, it's more beautiful. It looks cleaner. It looks cleaner. Yeah, I think it's that. When I see American teeth, I think. Hm.

They're clean of us. I have a mouthful of those, okay? So you think the Romans thought the same thing? And also clean teeth are a symbol of youth. And so they understood that in order to make their togas whiter, to clean their togas and their teeth, they needed this chemical. So it became valuable.

So the use of these big latrines, I know this podcast is going in a strange place, but here we go. Full of piss, which the Romans collected. And then they thought, okay, if piss is valuable, then we should tax piss. Why is that? So there was a piss tax agent, right? That was his job. Or her job. And fascinatingly So the Colosseum was built by a guy called Vespasian, and Vespasian was a Roman emperor around seventy two AD. And so of course you're building the Colosseum so you're spending money.

So what he had to do when you're spending money is because a tax broad So he thought, let's tax piss as well as everything else. Now his son, a guy called Titus, who subsequently became an emperor, was one of these sort of aristocratic sort of guys. Titus said to his dad, Vespasian, he said, Look, man, we're the Roman Empire. We can't be doing something as derogatory, degrading, as taxing pests.

And Vespasian responded Pecunia non Olet Money does not smell and what he meant by that It's people don't care where it comes from. As long as it works. He was slapping down his son and saying, Don't you be too uppity. But on the other hand, he was saying, This is an amazing concept.

And so the Romans you see were this amazing empire of credit. The Romans, like the Greeks, had something very bizarre, is they couldn't feed themselves. So the empire was too big, they didn't have enough agriculture. So they had to persuade other people And they persuaded other people through military occupation and a credit. So what you see is all the credit cycles. Like so for example, 2008, what happened here in America when the property market goes up and everyone's doing these things.

The same thing happened, believe it or not, in AD thirty-three, under a different emperor. So what you see is the Romans were like us. They speculated. They bought and sold. They spent tomorrow's money today and sometimes tomorrow's money wasn't there. They had banking crises, they had their Lehman. Brothers moment, that's what intrigued me about writing the book. You realize this is just the story of us.

Yeah. And we never learn. Yeah. So with the obvious success of money up to that point, why when we enter the Middle Ages do we see money go away? What happened? Why? Well, in Western Europe it disappeared.

The fascinating thing is if you look at, for example, Indian or East Asian culture. Money existed there all the time. The fascinating thing with the Romans is they traded with Indians, but the Indians didn't want anything. that the Romans made'cause it was all second grade. So the Indians acquired gold from the Romans. Because they said, you know what, we don't want your stuff. Even today Indians hoard gold. Oh yeah. Yeah, they love gold culturally.

And remarked that all the Roman gold that they were getting from the Roman gold mines in Iberia, but also they're robbing for everybody else, ended up in India. So what you see after the end of the Roman Empire, one of the things never really focused on the end of the Roman Empire was the Roman Empire ended around the same time as hyperinflation set in in Rome. So I think one of the reasons the Roman Empire collapsed

was that the monetary system broke down. And once the monetary system breaks down, you break down the whole gel of society. Which we'll get to. We see this pattern emerge in Germany. We see it emerge in Russia. It's a well worn trope. It's not even a trope, it's a phenomenon. When you fuck with money, you fuck with people's heads. That's why inflation is so dangerous.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Government's collapse. Just the threat of it, even if it's not there. Yeah. It's an incredibly elemental force in our world. So one of the interesting things about the Dark Ages for me looking at the history of money. Was money disappears, coinage disappears, people stop. Inventing, innovating in money. We also stop innovating in art, culture, in literature, in architecture, all these things that are

Expressions of human dynamism. We went backwards. In Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, well in the Ottoman Empire, well it was Byzantine Empire, and further east we didn't. But in Western European civilization we really went backwards. Now, is there a link between the elimination of money? And the elimination of culture? I think yes. is the gelling agent of civilized urban societies. So I mean the last thing you wanna be is a peasant

Born in 8th century Western Europe. You're an indentured slave. You're never getting out of that. You can't buy your piece of property. There's no there's no means to do that. Precisely. I mean the promise of money today and then, and the reason people want it. Is that with money you can change and alter your material situation. You can go from being poor to being rich. And that's what people want. Without that, it's just hereditary. And you can't break out of those actually. So imagine

when money disappears that hereditary brace or straitjacket becomes even more tight. And then what you see is that when money begins to reemerge from Germany in the tenth century. You begin the process which leads to the inevitably to the Renaissance.

To the reformation, to European civilization, to European philosophy, all that good stuff. Without money you don't have it. Our next resurgence is the Renaissance and you're in Florence and they have now the very famous coin. The Florent. Tell us How that money created the greatest explosion of art, of literature. It's a fascinating story which begins in India and is located in the island of Sicily in the Mediterranean. And in the Mediterranean in Sicily. When the Arab faith

Islamic faith literally burst out of Saudi Arabia. If you think about it, they conquered all of North Africa and Persia and into India. And what the Arabs were doing like all conquerors, they were taking good bits of everything. And the bit they took from India, which is fascinating, is they took the concept of zero the number zero. Which Europeans

Greek philosophy, which is where our philosophical hinterland is, was obsessed by proving things. And if you're obsessed by proving things, there's one thing you really, really dislike is nothing, the void. And zero is the void, so Greek philosophy closed down notions of the void. Indian philosophy, on the other hand, embraced nothingness, embraced the void, and therefore Indian mathematicians embraced zero. And they exported that to Persia. And the Arabs thought

This is really interesting. So algebra is a Arabic word. You can't have algebra without zero. So they brought this and the reason they brought it to Sicily is that Sicily was this extraordinarily cosmopolitan entrepo in the eleventh century where Arabs, Jews, Christians, Byzantines all lived together. Unusual in Europe. And there, a young man who's now known as Fibonacci, who's the father of mathematics, was the son of a Genovese tax collector, and he went to school in Sicily.

And he learnt from the Arab traders. Mathematics, algebra, zero. To flourish. with him. And that created I know it sounds weird, as accountants are tend to be diminished as not particularly interested. But it was accountants that brought this amazing thing called double entry bookkeeping into Europe. And this allowed European traders to to begin to figure out sets of accounts. And this is the elixir.

of commerce because commerce needs a technology. So imagine zero and double entry bookkeeping is the software. How does double entry bookkeeping work? Can you tell me in seconds? Yeah, very simple. Debits, credits.

So like a PL sheet. Yeah, you take your PL of the podcast. How much we cost, how much money we're raising, how much of the advertising, what's our net? And then every week you can say, Are we up or are we down? Relative to the next guy, the competition. It's kind of hard to imagine that wouldn't be obvious. It didn't always exist. I didn't always exist. You take it for granted. Someone invented that. Somebody invented it, yeah. It's not a natural way to look at the world.

We think it's natural enough. But it came from somewhere. And it came from the Indians who gave it to the Arabs, who gave it to the Europeans, and then the Europeans So that's what I find fascinating. So in a way the book is about all these kind of odd things that you think, fuck, that's important. Yeah. Yeah, with our remaining time, I would love to talk about the Sorry, because we are going on. I don't know. We're going on. No, it's so funny.

But I do want to make sure we get to the destructive power that it It holds. And let's talk about revolutions. Yeah. I mean revolutions are usually about money. So the American Revolution was about money. We didn't want to pay that tax. It was about taxation, but it was also about resources. Started let's say setting the rules of the game. Revolutions all need to be financed.

There was an expression America. I'm not sure if it's still used because not worth a Continental. Is that still used? No. It certainly was used up until the 60s. And the Continental was the currency of the revolutionary Patriots. Which was so devalued, so debunked, so debased.

That this American expression not worth a continental was something that your fathers or grandfathers would have used all the time. So because the continent was his shit currency. And that was the first one we came up with? That was your currency. And the problem with the American Revolution is you had no money. So the Brit

Squeezed you so you'd know money. So the French lent you a little bit because they wanted you to win to piss off. Yeah, exactly. So that's very simple, right? But of course, to pay the patriotic army, George Washington had to print A useless currency to keep everything going called the Continental. Because of course that was the name of the United States.

Before the United States became the United States. And in 1792, our friend Hamilton comes in and he goes, No, we've got to have a proper currency and we're going to call the currency the dollar. Now the fascinating thing was the dollar didn't exist. the lexicon of America. Because the dollar is a German expression called a taler, and taler means valley. Most of the silver in Europe was found in a place called Joachimstaler, which is now in Czech Republic, but then was in Germany.

So the taler was always seen in Europe as currency. The problem for the American revolutionaries was they were using the Spanish silver dollar, which was called the Real, which was coming from Mexico, and they were using this as currency here. But even though the American Patriots were anti British They were English and their real DNA hated the Spaniards. So they couldn't name the currency after the Real after Spain, Hamilton, Washington, all those guys.

So they said fuck it. What name were we gonna come up with? Who do we not hate currently? The Germans seem pretty annoying. Ah, the Germans. They'll have their day again. Don't worry. They're the stories of us. Well, here's where money has to be protected in some sense. So

For the people who don't already know, I'm sure they do know, post-World War I, Germany, as a product of the Treaty of Versailles, they get these incredible war reparations they have to make. And the end result of that is that their money becomes completely valueless, which is how we get Hitler.

That's pretty well known. I didn't realize until your book, which is fascinating, is that Lenin after the nineteen seventeen Russian Revolution He said, how do we get rid of all remnants of the Russian government to now try this experiment? Communism, we must completely annihilate. The currency. Yeah. And that's what they did. And so he just printed all day long as much money as he could.

To make it fucking useless. Think of the power. That's how that revolution stuck. That's how that revolution was successful. Yeah. That's the interesting thing. So Through money. When we read about the Russian Revolution, we had Trotsky and the Red Army and the battles and the White Russians and the Red Russians. Actually.

What Lenin did was so much more destructive because he said, Okay, money exists in people's heads and stability exists in people's heads and the system exists in people's heads. So if I can destroy the very, very elemental tool of this system. I will destroy the system. And they destroy the rubber. So suddenly you've no savings.

Hãy subscribe cho kênh La La School Để không bỏ lỡ những video hấp dẫn You guys don't know how much money you have if you have money and he destroyed the Russian society. From the inside actually. Got them to not believe in the story. But that disproves that one person can't have A huge impact. That's the opposite of the conspiracy theory. You're right. If that person is totalitarian and can turn the printing press on, you're right. That person. But they can destroy Russia.

They can't destroy the world. Still, but you forget that Russia is the biggest country in the world. Physically is an enormous country. No, there's not. Right. Lenin was unbelievably intelligent person. Yeah, that's so clever to think of. You don't want that guy running your country at the end. Psychologically brilliant. And Hitler learned from that. Talk about the airdrop that Hitler was gonna have to do So nineteen forty one, the Luftwaffe, the Battle of Britain.

the Germans that had conquered France, that conquered Netherlands, they'd conquered Belgium, conquered Poland, they thought to themselves, Okay, Britain, yeah, it's an island. Să vă mulțumim pentru vizionare! The Brits are obsessed by their empire. That's what's really important to them. And of course the Brits fought. And they were like, whoa. And the Brits beat them in the air. So they thought we can't beat these guys.

In the air. We can't really invade them. What are we going to do? So you forget that Hitler lived through the Weimar Republic. So he saw The destruction of German democracy. from the destruction of German money, from the hyperinflation he thought, Okay, what we're gonna do is we're gonna replicate that in Britain. So how are we gonna do this? Well he said we need to have the world

largest counterfeiting operation. What? So this actually happened. This is the real story. Listen to this. In nineteen forty one, Hitler and Himmler got together and they said, What we're gonna do is we are going to have the largest Forgery operation ever in history. And we're gonna forge British banknotes, five pound notes, and we're gonna airdrop them over the UK.

And we are going to destroy the spirit of the British people by destroying their money. Because this is what happened to us in Germany, and that's why we are here. They figured out the reason we're here with our crazy Nazi regime is because money was destroyed. And so in an amazing story, the Nazis sent out to concentration camps all over Europe flyers that they needed artists. Mathematician.

Printers, mechanical things, people who were good with paper, all that sort of stuff, right? Even to the degree where they had the serial numbers correct. But the serial numbers. So they needed mathematicians, the whole thing. And so they went out and they found A hundred and twenty seven, I believe, Jewish men who had been artists, bankers, serial numbers in the camp. And they brought them to a place called Sachsenhausen, which is a concentration camp outside of

Berlin. It's only about fifteen miles outside Berlin. So they took them from Auswitch, they took them from everywhere. And they brought them there. And their job was to break up. The Bank of England. And they started in 1942. By 1943, they were ready to go. They had printed, can I say, the equivalent of 10 billion dollars. What? Oh my god. It was 184 million pounds. In forty.

Two. The long and the short of it, they came up with the currency. What was most difficult for them was to figure out the paper upon which the currency they thought that the paper came from Malaya.

Or what we now call Malaysia. But actual fact, British currency was closed, it was washed and pulped and washed and pulped and washed and pulped and washed and pulled. And they figured that out. The watermark, the serial numbers, that wasn't the hard thing. The hard thing was the texture. So what they did was a Nazi turned up.

with a bucket load of this money in Switzerland in nineteen forty three and he went, ironically the bank I used to work for UBS, Union Bank of Switzerland, which is kinda weird. He said to the Swiss bankers, I've just done a trade I think this is counterfeit money. Can you check it for me? So the Swiss bankers checked it, their big headlights.

And they came back about a week later I said, No, this money's cool. They passed the ultimate. The guy then doubled down, he said, Look, I know you say it's real, but I'm really suspicious. Could you possibly send this to the Bank of England to make sure That this is real. So the Swiss bankers sent the batch to the Bank of England. The Bank of England came back.

a couple of days later and said, Yeah, this is stuff. We printed this money. They said, this is our shit. Yeah. Therefore, the forgers had got it right. So the guy goes back to Saxon House and says we're in business and they printed and of course the problem was The idea was to airdrop this stuff over Britain in nineteen forty three, nineteen forty-four, but by that stage

The Germans were losing the war in Russia and they couldn't risk Luftwaffe planes because Luftwaffe planes were fighting in Russia, so they didn't have the planes. So they were going to airdrop the whole thing. It was called Operation Heinrich. And that would have been even Churchill would have had a hard time straightening that. What happens is

If you imagine if you walk out in the street here and dollar bills come out of the street. Money everywhere. Yeah. You're gonna put a few in your back pocket. And if it's indistinguishable, I mean that could have been a tipping point. The interesting thing is they had the money. So then what they do with it? The Nazis. So the last two years of the war, the Nazis bought all the art. They bought it all with counterfeit money, so much so.

that they bought Mussolini out of captivity. So Mussolini was kidnapped by Italian communists at the end of the war. The Germans didn't capture him. They paid for him. And they paid for him with counterfeited British note. So this money is it in museums? I mean, has it been accounted for? Does it exist? The amazing thing is the Bank of England at the end of the war was so worried about this money.

So worried were they about the accuracy and the precision of these German counterfeits, and they knew there was millions of pounds out there. That they retired all their five pound notes. Yeah, that's smart. Redesigned. Because they were so aware that this was out there and it could undermine sterling. And of course, Sterling was the dollar of the time, sterling was the reserve currency of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's crazy. That's why you need to think about it this way. That's why you need to take inflation seriously. Crypto seriously. You need to take all this stuff seriously. Yeah.

Let's end on crypto. What we're talking about there is Hitler forging money, basically having his own printing press. Not in all senses, but in a sense. All crypto is trying to do is replace the United States dollar. Money conventionally has been state ordained. Money is state or crypto is private. So this is the key thing. So for example, what gives the United States dollar its potency?

at the end of the day is the fact that the United States government requires you to pay your taxes in dollars. So the dollar is soldered onto the American economic system. I can't pay for a beer in Euros here. I can't go into a bar. I can't do it. I need dollars. The American dollar and the United States system are one and the same thing. And they are provided by the state. A state that whether you like it or not,

Is democratically elected, you have the institutions, the Federal Reserve. So money is public. The American dollar is a public good issued by the American state. Crypto is private money issued by private individuals. And Private money means But the people who really, really benefit are the people who print it.

It's a business. It's a business. So it's not actually money. I'll go further. It's a Ponzi scheme. It's not even a business. It only works if people are buying into it. So for example, you say that money. Think of money. Well that's also the way money works. It only works if everyone buys in, but we just have. It is backed by the state and it is related to something. It's related to GDP. It's related to interest rates. Yeah, yeah. There's a ton of mechanisms to help keep it a trustworthy story.

Three months ago, I was in Kenya. You fly into Kenya, find an Nairobi, you get into the back of a cab, taxi driver talks to you about dollars. What's the value of the dollar? So why is that? It's because the dollar is this universal currency that everyone understands the value of. In the book I compare money to language.

What gives money its potency is its usability, that we all use it. How many people does it unite? That's its total power. The reason the English language is interesting is that the three of us can communicate using a language that maybe our grandparents didn't speak. Like, right, right. So we use this language as a technology so we can communicate together. English, if you were to look at it now,

It's not the easiest grammatically, it's not the easiest phonetically. It's kind of weird. Knight is N I G H T. Yeah, bullshit. Don't get Dax about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then A nitis K N I G H T right. If you were to invent a language today that the world would use To communicate, it wouldn't look like English. Although, can I add one thing? We were in India or at Microsoft learning about their AI. English is the most efficient language for AI. It costs

40% more to have AI working in Spanish. It is a very concise language. So it does weirdly now in this age, it has a value, which is you need less. Syllables in data entry to convey it costs more to run models in other languages. So if you think the English language is the default language of the world, the dollar is the default currency of the world. So the way I look at crypto, crypto is like Esperanto.

Esperanto was a language that was invented in Europe. Between the wars, that was going to be the unifying language. Esperanto is incredibly important to people who speak it, but the rest of us don't give a shit. It's still being spoken? No, it's only it's only academic. It's only academic right now, right? Crypto is the Esperanto of money.

Incredibly important to people who own Bitcoin and they'll tell you. You'll sit in a bar and they'll tell you what. No, it's a religion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the rest of us don't give a shit. No. You go down to the pub, you go down to the grocery store, give me this stuff in dollars. My point is that it's a private scam. Which is a function of social media

Tech bros, young males, all that stuff. People with too much money that are constantly looking to diversify an inflation-proof. People with no money who want. That's why it's preying on vulnerable people who need to really rich and the really poor the rest of us don't care. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And all of its appeal is all of the issues with it, right? So it's deregulated, there's no government.

oversight. But then when it's stolen, which so many people have had it stolen, there's no one to pick up the phone and call. There's no investigative body that's gonna go out and find your money. Remember it was meant to be anti establishment. Who are the biggest traders in crypto now? Wall Street. Governments have been hoodwinked into it. The Trump Family are now printing their own shit. I'm surprised it got this

Big here because I mean there's already so much conflict and issue around American healthcare, which is this: private versus public. A lot of people want the government to take over healthcare and are mad at the private sector. So it's like why would you want that and then also want private money? That makes no sense.

Well, I can tell you what the sales pitch was is I should be able to move currency between David and I without the government having any sense of that, without them trying to tax it, without them being involved. It's my thing and it's your thing. We should have the freedom. We should have the liberty to do that. That's the appeal. But in function, it doesn't operate that way. We know

that the vast, vast, vast majority of crypto and I know Bitcoin it's not crypto It's the crypto family, right? It's the alternative money. The vast majority of this Is still for criminal behavior. We know this. Number one. Number two, the vast use of stablecoin. Is trading between people who already own stable coins. It hasn't broken out into the world. I think we are looking at maybe the most spectacular high. foisted upon people.

That we have ever seen. It's a pyramid scheme. It's a multi-level marketing scheme. It's a promise of riches for nothing. It's all there. And someone's feelings are really hurt right now. And I get it. People have made a lot of money on it. So I don't hate on them. I understand the appeal. But ultimately, someone's gonna hold that back. And it's not gonna be the rich people. Making a lot of money on something that's speculative isn't a sign of reality.

It's part of the speculative mania that makes us human. AI the same sort of thing. What's gonna happen when NVIDIA or whatever that share price collapses? It's just a speculative thing. We are in a casino world. By the way, we already watched NFTs come and go. Yes, I remember them. Talk about confirmation bias. That doesn't fit into my narrative. So while we'll just ignore the fact that there was

Billions of dollars lost in NFTs, and that that's not even a thing people talk about. It'll go away like that. It'll be the same. Yeah. Now, will digital currencies matter? Of course they will. And the state, the central banks, will issue digital dollars. I've been in America for two days. I have not seen a dollar note. It's all cash. Right? You know it's all cashless. So I've been here. I haven't seen a dollar note

At the end of the day, the Federal Reserve will issue digital dollars and that's it. But isn't that what we already have? We have that already. We have that already. And we're gonna migrate towards us. And some people want cash because they don't wanna be traced. But as a general rule, the idea That some private tech bro

is gonna be issuing the money? Yeah. I get that you don't trust the government. I get that you don't but the notion that you trust an individual even more is pr is fucked in the past. Hasn't that proven a million times over? Well David, this has been a blast.

I love this book. And I'll tell you why it's a great read because it is every bit as much a history book as it is a book about money. You're learning something. so many fascinating details about history from the beginning till now. So it's a very fun ride and it moves fast and you're full of characters and great stories. It's wonderful. The history of money, a story of humanity. I really urge people to check it out. This has been delightful. Thank you guys so much. Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

How is the party? There was a party last night. Rob and I were both there. Rob, you better get behind a microphone so I can hear your up your update too. He was mingling and schmingling. Oh, I bet he made a lot of connections. It was really fun. So yeah, last night Well when this comes out All will be over. We'll know the results. All will be revealed. All will be revealed. But um yeah, this week has a lot of events leading up to the Golden Globes. Last night was a

Spotify by the Hollywood Reporter Party. Uh-huh. And um and it was really fun. It was really fun. Many friends of the pod there. I saw Kumel. Oh you did. Ding ding ding. Dingles. And Uh Mel Robbins was there. Okay, great. Friend of the pod Amy Polar was there, but I did not get to see her. She was walking out as I came in. I was sad to have missed her. Um, I brought Anna as my plus one, and she's the best plus one because she's so fun. Yeah. And she loves free drinks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So it was great. So much fun. They threw a really good party. Um of cour oh Jackie was there. I hung out a lot with Jackie Tone. Yes. Always a good time. Jack and Joe. Jackie and Joe. Jack and Joe, always a good time. Jack and Joe. Yeah, there's a song in there for tracking Joe. Um Now. Yes. Of course. Of course things can't be Yeah. Yeah. Not complaints. These are not complaints ever. These are like just insecurities. Oh yeah, yeah. Uhhuh. That I'm just I'm just, you know, working through.

So, you know, we're invited to this and you can't go, you're sick. Yeah, well, we'll get to that. Okay. And we get there And Jordan, our old friend at Spotify. Incredible man and father. Yes. Um husband and husband. And son. I don't know how he is as a son. I know exactly because his mom is Tom Hanson's partner and I've met her and she adores her Jordan. Aw, that's nice. Anyway, Jordan's the best and he

So you know he was arranging with me beforehand and he was like, Do you want a car? Do you want to whatever? Uh-huh. And then he was like, let me, you know, tell me when you're pulling up. So I did, he's there, and he was like, let's expedite you through the carpet. And they had asked me before, they were like, I just spit I'm And I got an eye exam yesterday, so I would have been able to see it. Okay. Um now people will rewind. Um so

He had asked me earlier, I was like, will you do the carpet? And I was I said, sure. So he's walking, he he's trying to get me through and then the the man that's like, I don't know, the gatekeeper, but he's just a boy was like Only she can go. And I I said to him, I was like, he's like running this party. And then and Jordan was like, uh, it's okay. I know. I'll whatever. I'll meet you on the you stand by this. Whatever. It was like then it got chaotic.

Okay. Okay. All right.'Cause then he was gone and Anna was gone and then I'm just standing and I'm like, I don't know where I don't know what to do now. So then from the side they're like, go this way and I was like, okay, and then I'm still standing. Yeah. I end up on the carpet I'm taking pictures, but then there's nobody But really quick before we move on from pictures, what's your comfort level during those pictures? It's so awkward.

It's so I wanna look so cool and I just don't. And that's fine. Like it's fine. You were gone so long too, because we ran into Anna while you were at the carpet and she thought you were lost. I was I was she was in the I was because because uh Jordan was like I'll meet you on the end of that carpet so I was like looking for him

There was all these outlets and I knew I was supposed to do them. Uh-huh. But I didn't know how because I had didn't have anyone there to help me. Yeah. So then I just walked off the carpet. Okay. So I didn't do any of those things I was supposed to do. All right. And I felt really like fish out of water. This is the thing I I talk about a lot on here, which is like it's difficult for me and I'm enormous.

And you mean tall wise? Navigating the scenario. I'm a very big man who is not easily rattled and as I always bring up the like up fronts when you go to New York. And it's like here's this five foot one eighteen year old woman from a CW show. And she has to walk this gauntlet of all these maniacs. Yeah. And like it rattles me. And I so yeah, you were one of them. You're necessarily

Little tiny person. Just little mouse scurrying around the red carpet. Where do I stand? Yeah. Am I supposed to smile or look seductive? I mean, even the playful or panty dropper. I did the pictures, which I was like, good, like that's fine. But it was more like the outlets which I I knew I had said I would do. So I felt like I'm s I know I'm supposed to, but nobody's he and that someone was like, Where's your publicist? And I was like, I don't have one. Uhhuh.

Help. So I just scurried off my little mouse self. Scurried off. Um and then uh and then I entered the party. Well, rest assured on Sunday we'll be together. Yeah, exactly. And um and we will have a publicist. Actually we'll have a few. So Okay. That will be um better. And I'm glad we're gonna be doing it together. But I

Don't lose me'cause remember I'm so small. No, I'm gonna have two of you little people. So I gotta like bounce back and forth. It's gonna be a busy Sunday for me on that red carpet. Exactly. Anywho, so but it was really fun. Oh good. And you know, it is fun for me to get to work. Cute outfits. Yes, you love it. I do love that. Yeah, dream come true. They did have Ted Seeger's party last night. Fuck, I can't believe I wasn't there.

I know. And they had I told you this already, but they had little um appetizer bites named after us. Yours was named um Yours was named Dax's Michigan Strip. Was it a steaky? Yeah. It was a seared Petite Filet steak atop a crisp polenta square, gluten free. Oh boy. Yeah, I feel lousy now.

I c there's no possible way I could have gone. Um,'cause I was like, I gotta go. I love Jordan and I and I owe him so much and I gotta go. And then um Yeah, I got sick on December fifteenth. And as I've already talked about, I went to New York with my brother and just went hard, hard, hard. I've been never shook this cold, even until I got back. And then my sweet, sweet friend from London, England, Jethro came to visit and he's staying at the house and we've been

Hanging out and saunaing together. And uh he hit me, I guess, Tuesday morning. He's like, Oh my God, dude, I feel so terrible. I hope I didn't get you sick. And I'm like, I'm already sick. I probably got you sick. I'm sorry. But no, no, no, no. It definitely had a new flavor. And some second virus entered the scenario.

Two front wars, they would say. God, and you're in the sauna, it's like s you s definitely got it from the kissing and fucking and yeah. Yeah. But the sauna's really how it happened. Yes. Um So now you yeah, now you have a news. So really? It started going downhill and I was kind of ignoring them. Oh, that's the same thing I already have. No. Um it got much, much worse. Um

So yesterday I I woke up and I was like, oh I'm in trouble. I'm in I'm in trouble. Let's hope this is a good thing. And we have a big weekend. Huge weekend. And I had made a commitment to my sweet oldest girl that I was gonna take her to the go-kart track. Now backstory about the go-kart track. I took her one time like Three years ago with my fantasy of her starting to race go-karts. I took her to K one. She wrote

Our first session with the juniors and these boys were passing her a bunch and she thought she was terrible and she just didn't want to do it again. Yeah. And I was like, fuck man, that there goes that dream. So anyways, out of the blue, I was like, if you ever want to go to the go-kart track, I want to go. Oh, I want to go. Okay, so the whole ride there. She's like, uh I go, you're gonna ride in the adults. You're tall enough now. You're you're five feet, so you can ride in the adult cart.

No, I wanna ride in the junior cars. I'm like, we're gonna ride together. Oh. We're gonna do this as a team. I got you. I'm gonna ride behind you so no one can hit you. Like I'm gonna be running buffer behind you. Okay. We check in and she's even trying to talk the workers into putting her into the junior. She's going with me and the adult.

So there's two different tracks at K one. One's one's bigger and one's smaller. So the first session we're on the big track and um there was four other strangers out there, adults. Mm-hmm. And first lap was a little wobbly shaky. second lap she started to get the the feel. She started getting comfortable. By the end of this 10 minute session, she was like totally comfortable in the car. We got out and she was like elated, happy. Great. And you get times. And there were six adults.

And she came in third. Nice. And her time was 34, okay? You gotta remember 34. So we come off the track and now I want to. teach her a little bit about the strategy. So I go to the big map of the track on the wall and I start explaining to her how to go through corners. And I like explain the whole thing to her. I don't take a ton of time. Maybe we're

looking at that map for 10 minutes, I'm explaining stuff. Yeah. Then we go to a brand new track, um, the smaller track. And I start behind her and within one lap. This fucking kid is on the race line the entire time. I'm like, oh my god, did she get that quick? I was like smiling ear to ear behind her. Yeah. It was so fun. She like really loved the second session. We go back to the big track for our third one. And as we're walking to the thing, I said, Well, what's our goal?

And she said, I d I don't know and I said, I I think you gotta break thirty if you started at thirty four. Okay. Break thirty. She's like, Oh thirty, that's four seconds. Yeah. So we get on the track and we're going And she's just fucking Monica. I'm not I'm not like proud daddy it. It's bonkers how in natural. Yeah. We get off the track 27. Wow. And I gotta tell you.

When I go with the boys Seven seconds speeding. When I go with all the guys and I and I generally am in first I pulled up those old ones'cause I can look at'em in my email. I'm running twenty fours. I'm winning with twenty fours. And she was running twenty seven on her first day. That's amazing. Oh, was I happy. And then I was completely dead. Sure. Cycling through fever, chill, fever, chill, fever, chill. And uh

And then I felt terrible that I didn't go to that party. But I woke up and I have to say, definitely on the upswing. I was like, okay, I'm done with the fever part, I can tell. Okay. Yeah. Time to move the body a little bit and get going. I know you get really upset when I I mean Try not to get mad at me. I mean, I'm a little mad at you in the way that you would be mad at me and you do get mad at me if I'm like, ow, my back hurts. I'm like, why aren't you?

drinking water or taking this and and you get mad at me and I said, Don't get mad at me And you said, Well, you're not taking care of my friend That's true. That's what you say to me. But could you find all I'll ask is if you could find a scientific paper or study that says you shouldn't work out while you're sick. And if that's the truth

I'll abide by it. But I don't think that's the truth. Okay. It is. And so doctors, I'd like you to weigh in and I'll also find some studies on it and said um you can do some light. Yeah, it went pretty late. But I mean no, like walk. Like you can like take a walk. Yeah. But if your body is trying to recover, it it needs

Yeah, but I have to manage two things. I have to manage the illness and then I have to m manage my temperament. And I just was completely stagnant for two days and that'll fuck with me. So that's also for me. I know, but then you're just gonna be sick for like eight months. Then which is not like you have to give your body some time to really recover. Okay.

Now my snack was called Monica's Standards. And I love Monica. I wish I got that. What's the standards? Oh. Don't you think that's obvious? I think so. I think of music, standards, Sinatra. I'm like, d do you have favorite scriptures? What did you think, Rob? I got it. Okay. Um, cause it was Mel's permission slip, Amy's yes and, Dax's Michigan strip. Monica stands up.

I think it was clear. Are you going to do the update or do you want me to? I think you should read it in its entirety. Oh yeah. This is one of the funnest Ding ding dings we've had on the show for me. This is really fun. Also, there's another one. This is a separate thing. What did you send me, Rob? Oh, there was someone sent pictures of the Kmart thing. Oh yeah. Your shirt. The shirt I got you for your birthday. Yeah.

Um, someone sent an email, I'll pull it up. This is from Rob. So this person, Stephanie Oh my gosh reached out and she said, listening to the podcast yesterday in her decks opened his birthday gift from Monica. My first job out of Ohio State University was traveling manager for the KKRAD, K Kmart Kids Race Against Drugs program. Me I said Sinbada. So there's a photo up now of Sinbad on a lawn tractor that they put a fake hood scoop on and it's all stickered up with the Kmart.

I guess this is a ding ding ding. I wonder if this program ever like I y it'd be impossible to um measure it, but do you think it kept a single kid off drugs? Yeah. You do? I I really was affected by the Dare program. Um I never did drugs. Do you think'cause of the Dare program? Yeah. Okay. Um, me and sixty plus other postgrads got paid to travel the country for six months, setting up this giant racetrack in Kmart parking lot. See,

She said it was a party. We would give kids the opportunity to race a slick looking lawnmower and one year later a golf cart made to look like a Ford Mustang thanks to sponsorship from Ford. We love Ford. We love Jim Farley. To unveil the new Red Bull race car and I'm gonna hang with Max Verstappen. Wow and Jim Farley and uh Hajar, their new driver, and I think Ricardo. Oh fun. Yeah, yeah. Well we love Jim. He's a nice man. We do. Friend of the pod.

So I got some sweet Fords I love too. Okay. For each child that went through the race, Kmart donated five thousand dollars to the local DARE program. All the kids and volunteer staff received a free t shirt like the one Monica got taxed for his birthday. A lot of celebrities joined the cause from city to city, including Dick Clark, Mary Lou Retton Paul Newman. He ha you have the same shirt as Paul Newman. Oh my goodness. Kathy Island Shaq.

Mary from Gilligan's Island. You notice there's no pictures of Shaq in any of those vehicles. Not a fucking chance. He's getting a mini money Mustang. Um anyway That's adorable. I know. I thought that was so cute. But alas, that is not the thank you for sending that. Yes. But this And I'm gonna re I'm gonna remind people in case they didn't listen to the fact check for Walter Isaacson. We discussed our flight home from Nashville. You were seated next to a cute boy. That cute boy.

Started interacting a lot with the gal across the aisle from him. Then they I thought it was a meat cue. Yes. Emma sent me um a a text. She said um The girl you saw holding hands with that guy on the plane is an arm cherry and wrote into it. AA. By luck, she happened to hear that fact check. Yeah, she's a good listener. Uh-huh. She said, I was listening to the Walter Isaacson fact check, and I am the girl from the January 3rd, Nashville to LAX meet queue.

I heard Monica recount the meat cute she thought she was witnessing between me and my boyfriend, which is now a very fun, treasured memory for us. After listening, I felt bad and I wanted to figure out some way to let her know he didn't pick someone else over her in that moment. I checked the website as a long shot to see if there was a quick way to send an email and saw me cute as a prompt so hopefully this gets to her in some way. The full story from the other side of the aisle.

My boyfriend and I were supposed to fly back from Nashville to LA on january second. Last minute we were able to snag a reservation at the restaurant locust on the night we were supposed to leave, so we decided to go. Pivot the flight to January third. Rob just made a noise, so that must be. I'm glad they got to go.

We had a mix up when rebooking our seats. So instead of sitting next to one another, we were sat across the aisle from one another. My boyfriend saw Dax get on the plane and tap me because he knows armchair is my favorite podcast. While I was trying to act cool, the girl sitting next to me struck up a conversation, which is why my boyfriend wasn't talking to me and didn't appear to be with me when Monica first sat down. When I went to talk to him, I saw Monica sitting there.

In an effort to give her privacy, I started texting my boyfriend rather than leaning into the aisle to talk. I also think people were still boarding the plane so it was Difficult to talk anyway. The irony is that while Monica was building the scenario out, I was thinking two things. One, sim. I just downloaded all of season five of Friends to watch on this flight. I was locked into Friends and he was locked into his book.

Two, I've listened to the podcast for years and so I've heard Monica talk about Meet Cute. Immediately when I saw her sitting next to him, I was hoping she wasn't thinking about this as a meque because she deserves one. And my boyfriend is a little oblivious and wouldn't notice if she flirted with him. It was also hard enough for me to get attention on that flight. That said, Sam was looking great.

That must be the boyfriend and reading, so I wouldn't have blamed her. I had a crush on him too. I've listened to the podcast for years and realized I was being a little over the top thinking this person I've never met would think about a meat cute with my boyfriend when in reality the girl is really just trying to sleep on this late night flight.

I did ask him to hold my wine when I went to the bathroom and we did hold hands during the turbulence, which there was a lot of because I've become a bit of a nervous flyer. I've been with my boyfriend for three years, but it made me feel so happy to hear someone I think of as an absolute badass, an incredible businesswoman, and someone I am personally grateful for with Race to 35 describe our interactions.

You don't typically get to hear unfiltered versions of how strangers observe you. It's a very interesting feeling driving home from work, turning on a podcast and hearing that someone perceived your actions as falling in love. I also have to thank Monica and Dax. In a lot of instances, it would have been very easy to try and make yourself or a friend feel better by cutting down the other girl in this scenario. I respect them both for fostering a story that built us up.

A story that my boyfriend and I both feel represents our love. I love that email. It's so good. I love it. Shout out to what I still consider a meat cube. Okay. Now it's a meat cue between me and her. Yeah we go. It is. This is the locust. Dinner. Oh he's still thinking. Their dessert? This is like a shaved ice with whipped cream on top. Is it an egg on top? No, it's looks like an egg, but It's a insane. Still thinking about that dessert. Yeah. Oh no. It's a carbon. Carbuncle.

It does look delicious. Anyway, that's it. That's that. That was a good update. Yeah, that was a really good update. Okay, so yeah, let's do some facts. Okay. David. So he said

Air travel is new, newish. Like we forget, you know? Right. And so then I was looking that up. We all know that the Wright brothers. had a successful flight. That was in nineteen oh three. Kitty Hawk. Great book by the way, m David McCullough. It's got a Wright Brothers book that's great. But really, it became mainstream in the fifties and sixties. Sure. So transitioning from luxury to common transport. So that is So recent.

Of the many things we're gonna do with our time machine, the list is so long. I don't know when I'll get to this, but I would like to go. Back in time to like nineteen sixty two and fly Pan Am. Oh, I know first class and see like was it crazy? Like did they really pamper you that's interesting treat you like you were royalty. Yeah. I have a question about going back in time. Yeah. Um do you think if you go back in time you could die? Like you could die? For sure.

And it'd be so confusing'cause on your headstone it'd say born in nineteen eighty seven, died in nineteen fifty. That's what doesn't make any sense. Wow. That's a movie. That is a movie. Yeah. It's like some kids are going through the cemetery and then they stumble across that. And it's weird because they were so tight lipped about the technology that they had time travel, but then they just put it blightly on a headstone. That'll be addressed.

Later. Loosely in the third act. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully so much will be going on. Just with one line of dialogue though. Clean everything up. Mm-hmm. Okay. Um, was Kushim or Cushim, now I forget, the first name ever written. Yes. All his facts were correct, basically. I did do some checking though, because I was like, can that be right? And then yes, it was.

Um it's he's widely considered the earliest known individual name in recorded history, appearing on Sumerian clay tablets from around thirty-two hundred BCE in ancient Mesopotamia. Is algebra an Arabic word? Yes. Meaning restoration, reunion of broken parts, or completion. Ooh, completion. Yeah, I like that. Were you about to say something? I was. I was gonna say how Lincoln always says

Was that back in the nineteen hundreds? Oh god. And it sounds like a joke, and it is, but it's not a joke. It's not a joke. Was that in the nineteen hundreds, she'll say? Oh it's so depressing. It's so depressing. It really does. That's really funny. It's a good joke. Okay, so Is English the most efficient language for AI? English is considered one of the most information dense languages, meaning it conveys a lot of meaning with fewer syllables.

It is it says it is not definitively the most efficient as efficiency can be measured differently. So you show it has a higher information rate, meaning personal I mean, that's just in general. So for AI, yes. But languages like Spanish and French compensate with faster speech rates, balancing out overall information delivery, making them

comparably efficient in terms of of overall speeding communication verbally obviously. Although we found out when our stuff was converted to Spanish that clearly did not pick up our speed of talking. And it was about one point six. As long. I know because I think what they were doing was keeping our speed. Our cadence and our speed. Yeah. And it made it.

Which is funny because we experienced that right before we went to India and sat with the AI AI people who told us it was more efficient. Right. Exactly. But be I was like, it has to be more efficient. Why? Why would it take an hour and a half to say what we said in an hour? I know. But also th if if a Spanish person was saying it, they would be saying it so much faster. You just have to talk really fast. But the computer runs at a standard Right, exactly. These are two separate things.

things, but yeah, it it's weird. Oh, and then I was looking up syllables for languages. Languages with very few syllables often have simple structures. Pop rotaco roticos, Papa New Guinea. Having one of the smallest inventories, around fifty possible syllables due to few consonants and vowels. Isn't that interesting? Very interesting. And Japanese being notable for its extremely small set of a hundred and seven syllables. Ooh. Yeah. Papua New Guinea is

One of the most fascinating places for many reasons, but it's one of the places where cannibalism has been well documented. Yeah, that's crazy. Is it still? I doubt it. Yeah. But that's also where they were weaning they wean weaned children off of breastfeeding with cigarettes and yet no lung cancer. There's like a lot of interesting stuff. Very. It still occurs. Oh

In really isolated cultures like parts of Papua New Guinea. And it's different than you would think,'cause I had actually had a class on this. i in anthro, which is like I think they consume their dead, like as a part of Oh, I think I've heard that. As a like a a respect ritual. Not like we're hungry, let's eat one of the members of the group. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's from corpses, it says. Yeah. Like when you go to KF.

See and it's like I'd like a drumstick. You want like a finger? Like everyone has their favorite body part. It's like can I have the nose? Yeah, I don't really want the calf. Can I you always get the calf. Yeah, you got the calf last time.

Do you think as you're like your grandparents aging and getting terminal that you're with them and you're kinda eyeing them like, yeah, well, I gotta eat some piece of this guy. What do I want? What like do you think you'd be distracted with knowing you're about to eat Eat some of this guy. Trying to find like

Oh that area that little patch of skin looks really healthy. Yeah, exactly. I hope I get that. I don't I bet if it's just part of your customs, you really like it's nothing. You know, you of course. Yeah. Do you think they cook it? I should know that. I can't remember. Yeah, yeah. Um, how much money was lost in NFTs? While exact total figures are elusive, the NFT market saw massive losses following its.

twenty twenty one peak, with reports indicating ninety to ninety-nine percent of collections lost significant value, leaving millions with effectively worthless digital assets. I kinda don't even feel bad for those people. I don't either. I mean I do It was just such a cash grab bullshit. I know, but people are desperate. People want money. They're desperate to get something for nothing, which I'm not very sympathetic to. I understand, but like They're just desperate to have something. Yeah. And

I was even wrestling with this last night. Yeah. I was thinking about like investing and like what percentage is acceptable. And mostly you just you you you have to outpace inflation. is the goal. But what's funny is like, but why could why is that even possible? Like this notion that you're you're you put your money here and then they you just get paid. I know. Ideally something above four percent. Yeah. And like people are, you know, they're bummed if they're not making ten percent. It's like

For doing what? For play parking your money over there? It's kind of it is fucking goofy. I know. And I too am like, yeah, I gotta be making it. It's like why are you gonna get you didn't go you didn't show up and work, you didn't do anything. It's it's because it's all comparison. It's like because that guy has ten percent, I should have that. Yes. It's not about

what you're doing to get it. You're doing everyone's doing nothing to get it. Although I guess in your head you're like, no, but if I traded correct Like you do make it about your own actions. You convince yourself you have worked your way into these riches. Exactly. Yeah. Um what happened to your arm? Uh what happened to my arm? Oh, I have a doodad stuck to it. Oh, it was just a doodad. Oh, you have a new tumor?

I thought it was a band-aid. I mean look, if we do this long enough, I'm just gonna have like fucking things hanging off of all skin tags everywhere. We'll have to go back we'll be the first show that went from audio to video and then back to audio. Oh all right, that's it. Love you.