The History of Money with David McWilliams

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They're an economist.

They're an economist who I've had on this podcast before who goes by the name of David McWilliams.

Now if you live in Ireland, you know who David McWilliams is because

he's Ireland's foremost public economist.

But he's more than just an economist.

He's he's a brilliant storyteller.

He's a fantastic storyteller.

And

he's he's one of the people who introduced me to the hot take.

When I was just out of school, of about 18 years of age.

As you know, I didn't have a very good time in school.

I failed my leave and cert.

I wouldn't have considered myself to be particularly intelligent or good at anything, to be honest.

When you're a teenager, and you fail at school, and you consistently get into trouble, and you don't have a sense of self, you're young, you're immature, you can begin to blame yourself.

That's certainly what I did.

When I got out of school, I just simply assumed the reason I was shit at school and the reason I couldn't behave myself is because I'm not very smart and I'm not very good.

And I studied economics.

I studied economics in school.

It was one of those classes where I had to do economics because I wanted to do art.

So if I was to do art, you know, have two classes a week in art, whatever way the schedule worked, I had to pick another subject I wasn't interested in.

And I just picked economics and I studied economics in my Leave Insert probably twice a week for two years

and I don't think I paid attention once and I would have felt very frightened in class and I would have felt this isn't for me I'm not capable of this I'm not able to do this I would have never have done homework I'd have just made my mind up from the start I'm not smart enough for this economic stuff that has to do with money and numbers I'm just gonna fail this.

And I did.

I failed economics in the Liebincert.

That's where my head was at.

That's where my self-esteem and

confidence was at.

And then when I got out of school, a friend of mine was reading one of David McWilliams' books called The Pope's Children.

And my buddy was saying to me, you gotta read this book.

It's really fascinating.

It's really interesting.

It's by David McWilliams.

He's an economist.

And then I'm going, I studied economics.

I don't understand it.

And my buddy was like, no, no, it's not like that.

He talks about fucking breakfast rolls and he talks about decking out people's back gardens and he talks about bouncy castles.

It has nothing to do with economics.

So I went and I got the book, The Pope's Children, and I loved it.

I adored it.

This would have been around maybe 2005.

Ireland would have been in the the stage that was known as the Celtic tiger.

This was before the recession.

and here i have this book i have this book that's describing everything about the ireland around me in this very clever simple way that's joining these dots that seem unconnected it was a portrait of a country that all of a sudden got very wealthy and it tells this story

through different characters different different Irish characters that emerge in this new economy and when I read it I felt felt I felt intelligent I felt smart wow I'm reading a book about economics and I understand this intimately I love this I just failed economics in my leave insert and here I am reading this book and I fucking adore it and the reason I adored it and the reason I understood it and I realize this now is because

David McWilliams was a brilliant storyteller.

And when I was in school learning economics, it was about rote learning, it was about data, it was about having to remember the law of diminishing marginal returns, gifting goods.

I had to remember all this fucking shit.

And there was very little storytelling or understanding or applying economics to my life or the world around me.

And as an autistic kid, as someone who's neurodivergent, If I can learn in a way that's self-directed, then I will excel massively.

If I can learn in a way that incorporates storytelling humor divergent thinking then I'm gonna fucking learn but if you Force me to learn in a way that's more suited to neurotypical brains such as rote learning then I just switch off and David McWilliams's books They suited my particular learning style and now all of a sudden I'm interested in this thing called economics because he's writing using storytelling.

This is the story of how these two completely different things are actually connected.

Like one story in this book The Pope's Children was this is how breakfast rolls explain the boom in construction.

All around Ireland in 2003, 2004 there's a big property boom.

There's construction sites everywhere.

But on these construction sites are men who are earning a lot of money, are very busy and need a lot of calories to work their jobs so a new sandwich was invented in the petrol stations of ireland that's a french baguette that contains sausages and rashers and this is eaten by construction workers so i'm going to tell you the story of this sandwich but really it's going to talk about ireland's booming construction industry and that there is a hot take That's the dragon that I chase every week on this podcast and that's how my brain works.

That's how I see the world.

It's how I learn and it's how I understand the world.

And it's a very joyful way of thinking for me.

But school didn't allow me to have any hot takes.

If I had a hot take in school, I was just called disruptive.

I was kicked out of the class.

I was seen as messing.

So David McWilliams is writing, it was very important to me when I got out of school in igniting a feeling of curiosity.

And also, just something as simple as being able to say to myself, you're not thick.

You're not stupid.

I know you failed economics in the Leave-insert, but here you are reading an economics book and you love it, you understand it all.

So maybe you're not stupid.

And within a year,

I'd gone from reading David McWilliams' books to reading academic sociology books.

You see, everything about my environment, my external world, had told me that I'm stupid.

When you fail your leave-insert in Ireland, it's treated as a death sentence.

You become what's known as a God help us.

No future, no hope.

And it's communicated to you

in people's sighs and disappointment and awkwardness.

You see, when you're in school, when you're in like sixth year, and you're misbehaving, and you're failing your exams,

you get to be a rebel.

You're kind of cool.

Or that person doesn't care.

There's cultural capital within your peer group that goes that accompanies being a rebel against the system or being like, I don't care about school, I don't care if I fail my leave insert, and that works for you in school, but then the second, the second school is over and you're out in the real world and you're an adult and all your friends are gone off to college, then people start to call you a loser.

And I had this little, just this little beating heart inside me that used to say you know you're at you're actually smart you're actually smart and it used to feel like shit it used to feel terrible that

there was people my age

who were in college courses that I would love to do and I'm just simply not allowed like people who got to to go to college and study literature like people off in college who are 18 and they're studying James Jice.

It used to be really heartful.

It used to feel really heartful heartful that like I can't do that.

I'm not allowed to do that.

The system says I'm too stupid to do that.

So what I used to do, I was in a PLC course.

A PLC course is called a post-leaving certificate course.

It's like second and a half level, we used to call it, not third level.

It's like an access course.

It was an access course that I did to eventually get into art college.

But while I was doing my PLC course,

I used to go off to University of Limerick.

Out in our Yartes Coach, it's a university that you need to have a very good leave-in cert to get into.

And I used to go out there when I was about 18

and

just like pretend to be a student.

I'd walk into the library in University of Limerick.

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

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

I'd understand I'd love them.

I'd fucking adore them.

I would consume them voraciously and come away.

with a huge amount of knowledge.

And then I'd also get to say to myself, you're not stupid.

You're This is the course material

of a course that you're not allowed into because you don't have enough leave-ins or points.

But not only are you able to understand this book, you fucking love it.

And I used to do that to regain my confidence, to regain my confidence and to be able to say to myself, do you know what actually?

You are smart.

But what I couldn't understand at the time, because I'm 18, I couldn't understand.

Like a year ago, you were in school and you were unable to learn anything.

I couldn't get my head around that.

I was like, there's no way your brain has grown massively between the ages of 17 and 18.

I couldn't fathom how

here I am sitting in UL in the library reading academic books and understanding them.

And then a year previously, I couldn't understand anything in school on the Leave and Cert syllabus.

But now, as a middle-aged man,

like I was diagnosed with autism three years ago, I now realise

the reason that I was able to go to the University of Limerick by myself, sit down in the library and read these really complicated books and understand them, was because I'm autodidactic.

The problem was people.

My particular neurodivergence, whatever the fuck I am on the spectrum, the confusion of people, the confusion of communicating, the feeling of being overwhelmed by

other people and how much my social battery gets drained by being around other people.

That was way too stressful an environment for me to learn effectively.

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

And that's what I realize now.

I'm autodidactic.

Anything I've ever achieved in my life, I've done it by teaching myself on my own using source material by myself.

That's what works for me.

That's joyful to me.

If I can do that, I'll literally do it all day long and be happy.

If I have to be around people or in the social environment of a classroom, then that's way too stressful and I'm learning fuck all.

So what I really needed in school was

leave me stay at home and teach myself with my books and come into school whenever I want, whenever I feel like it.

And I know exactly what you're thinking.

She can't fucking do that.

That's nuts.

That's chaos.

A little child in school and he can just come in whenever he wants and he's teaching himself at home And he's not in the classroom and there's no teacher.

It's just him reading a book.

Yes,

that's how my brain works.

That would have worked for me.

I taught myself how to read.

When I was three, four years of age, I taught myself how to read an adult encyclopedias.

I taught myself how to read an encyclopedias for adults.

And my brothers used to bring their friends over.

And they'd like point at the names of dinosaurs and I'd read out the names.

And it was clear that I could actually read the big long names of dinosaurs and it was like a party trick and all my brother's friends were like that's impossible he's only three there's no way he can read that and my whole family would be like my god he's so smart he's he can be whatever he wants when he grows up he's gonna fly through school he's gonna be amazing he's so smart And then my first day of school comes around and on my first day of school

I cried so much I got sick.

I had about 90 panic attacks.

I just couldn't do it and everybody else in the classroom was just getting along with it and I just can't stop crying, can't stop crying and then when I finally vomited they just they had to call my brother I think it was back in and I left early on my first day of school and then as the months went on and probably four or five I was terrible at school.

I wasn't the bright person in the class.

I wasn't doing my lessons like the other kids.

I was behind.

We thought he was so smart.

He taught himself how to read what happened.

I guess we were wrong.

And that's really common with autistic people.

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

But the thing is, what I'm asking for there, my needs there.

To be a little kid who comes and goes as he pleases in school, can stay out of school for three weeks if he wants, and just studies at home by himself,

that's a wildly unreasonable demand.

it's unruly and disruptive and how the fuck do you make that happen you can't do that what about the other students so i just the autistic kids the neurodivergent kids they just have to toe the line they just have to show up every day become overwhelmed with being in the classroom and just become the the thick kids who are disruptive and and looking back too i tried to make that situation for myself because i was asthmatic i was asthmatic as a kid, but I wasn't as asthmatic as I let on.

I used to stay out of school for maybe two, three weeks at a time by just saying to my ma, oh, I feel really wheezy.

I think if I go into school, I'm gonna have an asthma attack, and they'd just let me stay at home.

But looking back, I was avoiding the barn out, was avoiding the barn out of having to be in school all the time, navigating the social fabric of other people.

I've gone off on a tangent now, but what I'm getting at is...

So David McWilliams' book The Pope's Children.

When I read that when I did, just out of school, it gave me a feeling of confidence.

Here I am reading a book about economics.

Maybe I could try something more.

That's why I have him on this podcast.

That's why I've had him on the podcast a couple of years back.

And that book, by the way, The Pope's Children by David McWilliams.

That's still relevant today.

If you want to understand the Celtic tiger,

the Irish economic boom of the

mid-90s to mid-2000s, if you want to understand that economic boom, get yourself a copy of the Pope's Children.

Or if you can find the fucking Pope's Children documentary that he made around the same time on RTE, if you can find that online somewhere, a lot of bootcut genes.

Too many bootcut jeans in that.

So I've got David McWilliams on the podcast this week.

Also, he's got his own podcast called the David McWilliams podcast.

I brought him on the podcast this week to speak about his new book that he's just released called Money.

And it's called Money, a Story of Humanity.

It's a book about the history of money.

It goes back to the fucking Iron Age.

And

it's one big long hot take.

So me and David McWilliams We spoke for 90 minutes about the history of money.

This is quite a long podcast because

we had so much crack talking to each other and it's such a fascinating subject so you might want to listen to this one in two parts.

That's the beauty of podcasts.

Listen to this one in two parts or go the full shebang for the 90 minutes.

But without further ado, here's the chat I had with David McWilliams about the history of money and check out his book Money, a story of humanity.

and listen to his podcast, The David McWilliams Podcast.

Um, David McWilliams, what's the crack?

I had you on the podcast about, Jesus, four or five years ago near the start of the podcast.

Blind boy, you are the reason for me unleashing my own podcast on people.

Fuck off.

That's true.

It's true.

I think you'd meet Brandon as the Dorkey Shelver, I think, was your introduction, which was particularly difficult for me.

I'd forgotten about that.

Do you remember that?

Dockey Shelver, yeah.

It was a particularly difficult

pose to strike as I walked on stage there to that introduction.

But remember, you said to me afterwards, you know, we were chatting away, and we, and you know, you said, you know, what about you know, doing your own podcast?

And I said, I'm not too sure.

And so, so, yeah, you are the reason.

You are the reason for the David McWilliams podcast.

But that was, we should do it again, actually.

We should do it again on stage.

It was, it was

great, Crack.

Monday night, about four or five years ago.

You're absolutely right in Vicar Street.

Um,

I want to chat about your most recent book, right?

It's it's To me, it looks slightly different in that

this new book about the history of money, this looks to me that you're looking really international with this.

Yeah, it's, I'll tell you, well, first of all, it's an international publisher.

It's Simon ⁇ Schuster.

Ah, right, okay.

And it's been published in, which is great, in 15 countries, which is really brilliant.

And so I'll tell you what I did, Blindboy, I was thinking of writing a book.

I've been thinking about writing a book about the nature of money and what money does to humans humans for about 20 years, literally.

And I never had the time to actually give it proper analysis and read deeply about it and read history.

And I started, a bit like yourself, I started reading, you know, biology and I started reading anthropology and evolutionary biology and all these sort of things to try and get a sense of what money.

does to humans, number one, and number two, probably more importantly, the relationship between the human being and this bizarre technology I'll explain that to you called money.

So it took a long time.

And then of course,

it is a much more international book because it starts

in Africa 20,000 years ago

and goes all the way up to Bitcoin

and today.

And it was an absolute joy to write.

I spent the pandemic down here in my little cubby hole reading away and going down rabbit holes and getting caught in mad ideas.

But

because if you want to tell this story, you have to actually go right back to the start.

And it's an amazing story, the story of money.

And sometimes we don't really quite,

because

we don't think about what it is and what it is conceptually.

You know, like when you tap, you go into a cafe this morning, you tap for coffee, you're not really thinking about the whole transaction and what's going on.

And so I decided to...

to have a look and see

what when did money start when did it emerge why did it emerge when it did how did it change us and go through lots and lots of different civilizations like the sumerians and the greeks and the romans and then it's the renaissance and the reformation and all this period seeing the relationship between money and people and how it changed us and how we are changed by it all the time and it's it's been fascinating it's been a fascinating journey was it was it frightening because the thing is like you're an economist right it's a bit like a musician deciding you know you're a musician you dedicate your life to all the different instruments all the different types of composition and then you decide i'm gonna write a book about cards

you know what i mean like i do

economics to me before as

like you described to me before as it's just human behavior It's just human behavior.

So, you know, you didn't have money involved at all.

It's like economics is the study of how humans behave.

But now you're looking at...

Because if I hadn't known, I'd have said economics was the study of money.

No, so economics is just the study of human behavior and how we behave all the time with each other.

And on a different level, it's also the study of how we organize societies and how we organize the world around us.

And when I started looking at money, so the first thing that fascinated me was this story, which is what I opened the book with, which is an amazing story of Adolf hitler's effort to try and undermine the british during the second world war by orchestrating the biggest forgery the world has ever seen and has still never seen anything like it so hitler lived through the weimar republic we know that and he understood what messing around with money oh those are the german photographs of people in

that they had uh they'd got to buy bread and they have a wheelbarrow full of cash exactly so imagine that Hitler was a young man when this was happening and he understood what destroying money does, not to economics, but to the society.

And basically he understood what destroying money does to people's head because you mess with money and you mess with people's heads.

And interestingly, his basically, his ideological nemesis, Lenin, also

destroyed Russian money at the very, very start of the revolution.

Deliberately.

Deliberately, deliberately.

so this is an amazing story so lenin comes in after the russian revolution goes straight to the central bank of russia and starts printing rubles

in order explicitly to destroy what he called the illusion of money right and he said that this was one of the basic foundations of the state and you destroy that you destroy the state and then you start again hitler oh it's amazing like bleach like bleaching a bathroom to get rid of everything you just you start again and you start again right So you destroy everything that went before when you destroy the money of that state.

So that's what Lenin, and he called money the great illusion.

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

And A, their identity, but also B, their sort of little, their grasp on reality.

right and he was saying we've got to do this to create this new state out of the old state new ideology we've got to destroy everything that went before, and part of destroying that's destroying the law, destroying the cops, destroying the army, destroying the political opposition, and destroying the money.

So, that really intrigued me.

And then Hitler comes in, and in 1941,

he

decides we are going to destroy the British, not with bombs, but with money.

And the plan was, and it's an amazing story, to drop five pound notes, ten pound notes, and twenty pound notes all over England by about 1943.

And he got,

amazingly, a call went out to all the concentration camps around Europe to find engravers, printers, metal workers, mathematicians who could do the serial numbers, fine artists who could actually copy the art.

And 123 disheveled, starving, desperate individual men arrived in Saxonhausen concentration camp under one guy called Sally Smolyanoff, who was the lead printer.

And their job was to forge as many English banknotes as they could.

They eventually forged 123 million, which is about 7 billion in today's money.

It was about four notes out of every 10 that were printed.

were German forgeries.

It's an amazing story.

They managed to convince the Bank of England that these were legible and these were legit.

And they did this by sending a so-called industrialist, a German guy, to Switzerland with a bag of these notes.

And he claimed to have done a deal on the black market.

He was paid in sterling.

He wasn't sure were they forgeries.

Could the Swiss bankers verify the notes for him?

And the Swiss bankers came back.

after looking at the notes yes they're real and your man doubled down and he said look i'm still not sure can you send them to the bank of england and see if they can verify and amazingly the bank of england in london verified the forgeries that were done in Sachsenhausen for the Swiss bankers who then told the German and the German industrialist, who was a Nazi, told Hitler, and away they went.

And

the problem...

What happened?

Did they try that?

By 1943, the end, the Germans were losing on the battlefield in Russia.

And the Luftwaffe couldn't spare a squadron or two squadrons of bombers to actually drop the notes, but then the Germans, the Nazis decided, okay, we have the money, what are we going to do?

And they went on the biggest spree.

So, you know, all that stuff, all the art they robbed.

Yes.

Paid for all that with in the black market.

And amazingly, amazingly, they played for all the visas.

They paid for all the visas.

Do you remember the Vatican organized visas for Nazis to get out to Argentina?

Or to Argentina, yeah,

they were all bribed with this money.

And the last one, Mussolini, who was deposed and kidnapped by Italian partisans,

was

the Germans said we need to get him back.

And how did they get him back?

They bribed the partisans with the fake British money.

So that's where it went.

And at the end of the Second World War, the Bank of England was so disturbed by the accuracy of these notes that they retired all five pound notes and issued new ones.

So that story, I read that story and I thought, wow, this is about somebody understanding the relationship between humans and money.

Let's talk about

a separate timeline where the Luftwaffe did manage to drop just loads of money on London, right?

Yeah.

What would have happened?

Well, so what they were hoping for, and I think it would have happened, is that your average English person

sees what would you do if 50 euro notes started falling out?

You're sitting in the back garden, falling out of the sky.

You'd put a few in your back pocket before

so that's what hitler was hoping for that the average english person would put a few quid in their back pocket and then spend it and what that would have done was that inflation would have taken off like a rocket when you throw a lot of fake money that looks real into the economy now the value of that money goes down exactly and of course hitler you don't have scarcity you don't have scarcity so hitler hitler had basically taken napoleon dismissed the english as a nation of shopkeepers that was his sort of put down and he said these people are obsessed by money and hitler Hitler said, Look,

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

So they'd also culturally identified the English as being quite consumerist.

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

I'm coming at this knowing literally fuck all, right?

So even when you say they're sterling as the reserve currency, like what does that even mean?

So, sterling around the time of the Second World War was a bit like the dollar now.

Everybody used it, everybody traded with it, and it was the currency that everyone trusted.

So, what Hitler was thinking was: if we destroy the currency that everyone trusts, the impact on their society will be enormously amplified because they'd never have gone through this before.

And he was thinking, he's like, I've seen what happens in Germany, the same thing will will happen in England.

And I remember, I looked at that story and said,

that's kind of fascinating because what it does is it shows you that money is more powerful than an army, than a religion, than an ideology.

It's the most powerful substance in the world.

And yet we use it every day.

And we don't ask, what is it?

Where does it come from?

Can it run out?

Who makes it?

All that sort of stuff.

So I decided to start the book.

And you asked about not where an economist, I actually,

for many years, having worked in the area of monetary economics, I started in the central bank years ago and all this, where the money's magicked up.

Something over the last about three decades struck me, which is that economists don't understand money.

which is a big sort of reveal to me.

Yes.

Basically, they don't understand.

They're a bit like in the same way, for example, as a plumber can tell you how how water travels through the pipes of the house, right?

They can tell you that all day, right?

But a plumber might find it hard to explain to you why water is essential for life, why we need it.

Okay.

Okay.

And I think the same thing an economist can tell you how water goes to the banks and to the government and basically the pipes of the system.

But when you say,

what is it?

Where did it come from?

Why did we start using it?

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

so let's let's go to a time before money existed like what what are you dealing with so so there's a there's a the first evidence blind boy of money is about 20 000 years ago a thing called the Ashango bone, and I went to see it in the Belgian Museum of Science about two summers ago.

And it's a little femur of a baboon.

I want to say little because it's shrunk over the years, but it's a baboon's femur.

And cut into it are little notches.

And it was found in 1951 in the Congo.

And the Belgian archaeologists brought it back to Belgium.

And they couldn't understand, they started to speculate what these little notches were.

And there's lots and lots of speculation.

about what it is.

But one of the speculations is that this is the first evidence we know of basically what they call in economics a tally stick or an account.

So each notch represents you owe money to me, you owe something to me, right?

So this is the very, very first evidence we have.

So that's

so money to me is something that represents value.

Exactly.

So this is, here is written proof of a debt.

Of a debt from blind boy, let's say to David, right?

So you might have given, you gave me 20 chickens and here's the proof.

Here's the proof.

I need the value of these 20 chickens.

And at the end of a year, so at the end of some period of time, I'd come and pay you back the 20 chickens.

And then

you would scratch off the notch on the bone.

So that's 20,000 years ago.

And then the next time we meet it is about 5,000 years ago.

So the suggestion is that in Africa, people were thinking about value and money.

and trade a long, long time ago.

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

And there you see money exactly as we almost have it today, which is really interesting.

Okay.

And what really I found totally fascinating was where you see money emerging, you also see other things co-evolving with it, like writing.

Writing.

Yeah, that's your cuneiform tablets there in sumeria yeah and then writing you know you would have thought okay well we we would have writing is one of these amazing human technologies

okay

i would have thought if if i if i hadn't gone and studied this well you know we we probably wrote first to tell each other stories and maybe the first the first writing would be about some great king or a great god and then you realize no we wrote down

stuff

because we wanted to know who owed money to what and who owed stuff to whom so basically writing comes from accountancy i know know it's very it's terrible for novelists to know this but an actual accountant was the beginning and fascinatingly the first person whose name we know

and we've ever written down so the first person whose name's ever written down is a fellow called kushim who was a maker of home brew amazingly he was a small-time brewer and the first evidence we have of his name is he owed another fella money and he had to go and find barley and cereal to pay the guy back but when you say money did he owe him coins or did he owe him goods?

No, he owed him goods.

But you're still using the word money.

He was still using because money is value.

Money is not

coins.

It's symbolic value.

Symbolic value.

And of course, you just think, like, why did

when money evolves, so too does numerals, writing, legal systems, organized religions, the stuff that actually goes into what we would call these foundational ideas of human civilization.

And why is this?

It's because when we went from being hunter-gatherers to being settled.

Is it surplus?

It's not just surplus, it's complexity in our heads, right?

Now, get your head around this, right?

So if you and I are just sitting down talking to our family, right?

You have a fairly stable amount of relationships that you're dealing with.

So the hunter-gatherers would have had very, very stable relationships, maybe at the very maximum of 50 or 60 people, which can be extended family tribe, all that sort of stuff.

Once we settled down, and this is where you see money emerging as we settle down, we went into much more complicated and complex societies.

We went to little small towns, big farms, little villages, towns, and suddenly we needed to deal with far more complexity, far more relationships, far more hierarchies, far more transactions all the time.

And so humans required a technology.

to make an incredibly complicated world simple.

And they came up with, or we came up with, our answers came up with money.

So, I describe money originally like a coping mechanism to deal with their head being melted by so many relationships.

Because if you think about it, for the first 400,000 years of our existence

on our hind legs, we were in very small groups.

You're getting at Dunbar's number.

You're absolutely right.

This is exactly Robin Dunbar.

Yes, it's 150, isn't it?

So,

Robin Dunbar

says that

the human brain is comfortably able to deal with 150 people.

And then once we go beyond 150, things start getting a little bit too complex for us.

And he also found that 150 was the average amount of Facebook friends that a person has.

Facebook friends, they were saying it was the ideal structure of a military unit, all these things.

So Dunbar is a British, very brilliant British evolutionary biologist.

And he was trying to say, as he said, how do we explain the growth of the human brain?

What is it?

Was it absorption of food?

Was it all this?

And he said, no, no, no.

The brain fired up based on the amount of relationships we had and connections.

And as we went from being hunter-gatherers to being agricultural farmers, the brain, in effect, was mugged by complexity.

Okay, if you think about that.

And then we had to come up with these technologies.

So religion would be a similar technology.

It's an organization way of trying to make sense of the world.

I always think that money is very much like language.

So language is one of the most extraordinary human evolutionary technologies because it allowed us to be precise, it allowed us to deal with lots of people, etc., etc.

And I think that what happened was money emerges just at the time when the human brain needed, as I said before, a coping mechanism to deal with complexity.

And what you see then is other coping mechanisms to deal with complexity, like writing and maths and all these sort of things all evolve around the same time.

And that really intrigued me because then it struck me that

maybe money is not the only, but one of the foundational technologies of modern humanity.

Like you put it up there with fire.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Now, the fire thing is fascinating because

anthropologists refer to us for the first 400,000 years of our existence as a pyrophyte species.

So a species that was adapted to and is constantly adapting to a technology and that technology was fire.

So what they say is that

one of the reasons that humans began to dominate their environment was because we mastered fire better than anybody, any other animal.

We figured out how to make it, we figured out how to keep it alive, we figured out how to cook with it, we figured out how scare people with it.

You just did a podcast on terrorizing people.

We terrorized other animals with fire.

We used fire to clear huge suedes of forest, all those sort of stuff.

And socially, this is the interesting thing, blind boy.

Socially, fire allowed us to sit around chatting,

talking, imagining, looking at, imagining.

Introspection, the introspection that come.

It doesn't matter who you are.

If there's a fire in front of you, before you know it, you're going to daydream.

You're absolutely right.

That's just part of who we are.

And so, what fire and the human imagination, that thing that makes us special,

are absolutely linked on that level.

You're saying when you look at a fire,

if you go out tonight and put a fire in your back garden, within you're right, a couple of seconds, you're gone, right?

You're completely captivated, right?

So, I'm just going to pause here so we can have a little ocarina pause.

Fascinating stuff there from David McWilliams, but I am conscious that we need to have the ocarina pause.

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Back to the wonderful chat with the magnificent David McWilliams.

Like I said, this is a long conversation, but it's a podcast.

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You can listen to the rest tomorrow if you want.

We were pirified species for many hundreds of thousands of years.

One of the the contentions in the book is that fire is one of the four elements that the Greeks talked about that were elemental to us, right?

So you've got fire, you've got water, you've got air, and you've got earth, right?

The earth, women, and fire sort of idea.

The book's idea is that sometime around four or five thousand years ago, we created our own human element called money.

And since then,

Money has been almost a Promethean force, an elemental force in humanity.

and what i've said in the book is that we have become a plutophy species a species constantly adapting to and adapted by this extraordinary technology for good and bad called money that humans invented as we became much more complicated and as our world became more complicated and then you see that as

money

went from different civilizations, all sorts of other things that we would describe as human progress emerged around the same time.

So what I find fascinating is the fact that money

passed willingly from society to society, from civilization to civilization, and every civilization that adopted money as a way of organizing their world seemed also to acquire a competitive advantage.

over other civilizations, the ones that didn't have money.

And therefore, money just jumped from civilization to civilization and over a period of maybe a thousand two thousand years it becomes increasingly the dominant way in which humans organize their world and so what I do then is I take the book we start with the Sumerians then we go into a crowd called the Lydians you might you know the Midas touch Midas was a Lydian

and again this the story of gold

is actually based on a real elemental story that there was a river that flowed through Lydia which is kind of what you would call western Turkey around now,

called the Pactolus, which had an electrum in it, with an electrum, which was what the Greeks called white gold.

And we also see, I don't know, Croesus, you might remember the expression, you know, I remember my granny used to use it, as rich as Croesus.

Croesus was the, was the king of the Lydians.

So the Lydians were the first people.

to use gold and to use coins to come to your idea of coins.

Okay, so to use gold, so because that's like I know that salt was used as money i know seashells was used as money but gold is there a link between money and and then the scarcity of gold yes yes so the lydians used gold

the the the sumerians used gold for adornments right for the high priests and jewelry and what have you right but the lydians were the first people to use gold as coins and they

figured out two things which I think are really essential and they're absolutely with us us today.

One was the printing of the state on the coin, right?

So basically, they were the first people to link the state with state money, which we still have today.

And what does that do?

That means, okay, the king has signed off on this.

This is legit, this isn't counterfeit, and obviously, if you try and counterfeit it, there's going to be punishment.

Exactly, exactly.

That basically, state power and money begin to become intertwined very early on, like about a thousand years before Christ, right?

And that is something that's with us today.

In fact, the entire discussion about crypto and Bitcoin is all about this

conflict between state money and private money.

And

we might get onto that because I think it is actually crucial to understand how money is going to evolve and where it's going to go in the future.

But the Lydians also made small coins.

So, what they figured out was one thing: that money,

because the promise of money today and back then was that with money, you can transform yourself socially.

You can buy freedom.

They understood that money

is a democratic force.

And this was a big, big challenge to them.

So much so that when you look at the Greek civilization who came after the Lydians, I think that

what really intrigued me was why did the Greeks

surpass every other civilization in a very small period of time in philosophy, in architecture, in art.

Do you want to know a theory that I reckon before you get onto it?

So, the Greek civilization, it was in tiny islands, right?

Yeah.

But the agriculture was not, it was on the mainland.

So, it meant that you had all these people living in tiny islands, but they didn't have to farm.

So, what you had is people with a lot of excess time because the food was being grown on the mainland and on the little islands, they weren't growing anything.

So, you had people with a lot of excess time that's just something i thought about then let's keep that thought right why did they not have couldn't they couldn't feed themselves it's an amazing story oh okay go on so so most big empires up to the greeks were big muscular things you know big land masses creating an agricultural surplus as you say then using the surplus in the granary doling it out and basically creating an entire hierarchy around the surplus, right?

Okay.

The Greeks are amazing.

They couldn't feed themselves.

Because they didn't have the land.

they didn't have the land and all as you you're absolutely the greek republics were tiny little dotted plato described them it's a lovely expression he described the greek republican cities as frogs looking into a pond right

because they were all looking into the aegean and the mediterranean and the black sea they were little trading points so you think okay how did they get to the situation where they didn't

need to farm.

They had to coax other people into to do the farming for them, to give them the the time that you're talking about to think about profound things right yes they did it by mining silver there was a massive uh silver mine called larium and it is just outside athens right and over 700 years they minted over a million silver coins which were called the drachma then and they were called the drachma up until about 20 years ago which is amazing the greek currency in the Greek civilization was called the drachma, which actually means a handful in ancient Greek, because it was based the silver related to a handful of grain so that was their value system and by minting the coins and getting other people to farm for them they could sit back and like Plato and like Aristotle think about logic and rationality and mathematics and philosophy and art and all those other things so it struck me that without money they could never have got there so it's money that liberated the Greeks to think about the profound things in a way in which the Egyptians didn't do because the Egyptians didn't have a currency.

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

And one of the things, not the only thing, but one of the things they were using was the Greeks were the first really financialized empire.

And they had their currency and they had their language.

And then, of course, because people were getting rich and poor in the Greeks, in Greek countries, they thought, well, hold on a second, we need to figure out a way of including people so that they don't feel excluded.

That's where democracy comes from.

Okay.

So they said, look, we'll create, and democracy is so radical, like nothing like that had ever been thought of before.

But we will include people in the democratic process.

Now, you know, in fairness, now, it was only fellas who could vote, women, and the place was the probably ratio of free people to slaves was loads of slaves, yeah.

Loads of slaves.

But to the extent that it was an interesting jump in human civilization,

what you see again is this co-evolution of democracy and money.

And then,

what also fascinated me when you leave the Greeks was why Jesus Christ and Christianity emerged, where it did, and when it did.

And is there a connection to money?

And because when you look at the Greek gods, right, you know, the gods who were performed, they were really alpha male big macho guys right like zeus and prometheus and they were flawed as well they were jealous they had all the you know they weren't perfect like the christian god or loving even yeah resentful they were they were vengeful right yeah like you cross these bastards and they will basically you they're going to make your life a misery right and they were macho and they were big and they were all powerful and all knowing and they ran the kit they ran the place right and then this fellow comes up and he says no no no

The meek are going to inherit the earth.

The poor man is going to be rich in the next life.

The rich man won't get to heaven.

In fact, he not only will not get to heaven, it'll be easier for the camel to get through the eye of the needle than the rich man to get to heaven.

This is an incredibly radical idea.

And I was thinking, why did this emerge?

And could money, this weird, wonderful technology, have something to do with it?

And it struck me that as Greek and Mediterranean society became more and more financialized, what actually was happening also was that people who were winning in the monetary economy were beginning to move up and think of themselves as very brilliant and meritocratic and all that.

So it meant that the losers, the people who lost in the monetary economy, in the old days, if you were poor, you remained poor, right?

You were born poor, you remained poor.

pre-money but with money you could be born poor and end up rich And you could accumulate loads of money, right?

So

that meant the losers in this world, the people who didn't do well, required a countervailing ideology.

So obviously, as well, it means that there was, if you were poor, it meant that you were a bad person.

And if you were rich, it meant that you were a good person.

Okay.

So they needed a countervailing ideology to say, no, I'm worth something.

I'm worth something.

Even though I don't have anything, I still have worth.

And I'm going to create the next life and the next life is where I'm gonna get all my rewards so Jesus emerges also if you think the apostles spoke Greek they didn't speak Aramaic Greek was the language of commerce it was the language of ideas it was the language that saint paul went when he talked to the Ephesians and the Corinthians they didn't speak Aramaic they spoke Greek it was the default language of the time and I think that it's no coincidence that after about two or three hundred years of the financialization of the Western Mediterranean in and around the greek civilization and then later with the romans that jesus emerges with this countervailing totally radical ideology called christianity because they needed something

to at least give people another story that wasn't about money that they all they all kind of go together and then of course you get the romans

And the funniest thing about the Romans is although they were huge conquerors, they were also obsessed by credit, the Romans.

They really created a banking system, a credit system.

The first credit crisis, remember in Ireland, with this big banking crisis.

What does credit mean?

Just again, I know nothing.

What's your definition of credit?

Credit is money in the form of a promise.

Okay, so imagine that.

So it doesn't exist yet.

It doesn't exist.

It's not savings.

It's not savings.

It's not gold.

It's not currency.

It's a promise that I have.

You and I get together.

You say, all right, David, I'll borrow a thousand euros for you and I'll give it back to you next year.

And I promise I'll give it back to you.

That's an effect.

Oh, okay.

So it doesn't really exist, but it does.

It's a promise and it's about your word, the word of the person who's lending.

And it's about reputation and it's about trust.

About trust.

So this is where we're into really interesting stuff because what money is, is this extraordinary feat of human imagination.

Right?

Because it doesn't exist.

It's not a real thing.

And it only exists in the human mind.

It doesn't exist in the animal world at all.

But even back then, even back then, when you're dealing with a gold coin, is it still imaginary?

The gold coin has a little value because you can say, well, I can melt that down and make a necklace out of it, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

But when you're dealing with credit, when you're dealing with a promise, when you're dealing with, I'll buy

something off you and you'll pay me back in four or five years time.

Then what you're dealing with, you've created the money, you've created the idea, and the money is is just a promise.

There's nothing to back it other than your good name and your

basically your reputation.

And this was what the Romans figured out.

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

And that's where you see us moving towards, even in the Roman times, an economy that begins to look and smell and feel like something we have today.

So, these these things are really very old.

This is what fast.

Because didn't Rome collapse when they started to fuck with money?

Exactly.

Right?

So there have been,

again,

when I was during the pandemic reading a lot of books about money in Rome,

and there have been given, there was an exhaustive survey done about

seven or eight years ago, which collated all the classical scholars and everything about the end of the Roman Empire, because there's been so much effort

put into trying to figure out why did this great empire fall.

And there's over 140 different reasons given by various scholars.

Okay.

But what isn't given or focused on is towards the end of the Roman Empire, they started debasing their currency so much that Roman money

lost almost all its value so much so that by the empire of Diocletian, Diocletian, who was from Croatia around split,

the coins were so soft they could only print the emperor's head on one side.

You mean literally that they were taking gold coins and going, I'll throw a bit of copper in, I'm going to mix this, and now you're not dealing with it's a lie, you're carrying around a lie.

This isn't 100% gold, exactly.

And

they're moving to lead eventually.

To lead and any Al Schite that they can put into it, right?

To,

and of course, all the time you get the the currencies debased and debased.

And for the last about 100 years, the Roman Empire, the Western Empire, you've no mention of banks, which you had all the way through.

Like at the beginning of the empire, the banks were there, they were lending credit, etc.

And so

what other scholars have said is that the end of the Roman Empire coincides with the end of Roman money.

And I think that's really plausible because money is a foundational tool for society.

It's around which, whether we like it or not, we tend to orbit around it.

And if you take the value of money and you besmirch it and you degrade it, you really mess with the power of the empire.

And again, don't forget that the Romans paid their soldiers, you know, initially in salt, which is where the expression worth your salt comes from.

Salary and salary comes from salt, doesn't it?

Exactly.

But eventually they pay them in coins.

So you start messing with that, then you start messing with the empire, you start messing with the soldiers.

And,

you know, I think as a reason for the end of the Roman Empire, the end of Roman money should be at least entertained.

And then,

so moving into the Middle Ages now, right?

So

I heard something, and I'd love you to clarify it, that the first

international banking system existed because of the Knights Templar.

So the Knights Templar were this Christian organization of poor monks, but they were also warrior monks.

Europe wanted to get the Holy Land back, so Christianity was waging war on Jerusalem.

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

Yeah, so they were a protection right

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

And then when you arrive in Italy or arrive in Jerusalem, just hand this into a Templar center and they'll give you the equivalent of your goods back.

And international banking was invented that way.

That's absolutely the beginning of it, right?

Because

what we forget is that all these things were evolving in and around the same time.

But as you said, it was basically, it was the first checkbook was issued by the Knights Templars.

That's exactly what it was, right?

When I was a kid, you know, checkbooks were everything.

People were writing checks for everything, right?

So the first checkbook was issued by the Knights Templars.

The angle I came at it,

probably

an unusual angle, was I'm always been interested in mathematics and where it comes from, and particularly the role of zero in changing the power structure of Europe, right?

So before the Arabs introduced zero in Sicily in the 12th century, Europeans never used it.

We never used it.

And of course, the Arabs got zero from the Persians.

The Persians got zero from the Indians.

And one of the reasons the Europeans never used zero is we were afraid of it.

We called it Saracen magic.

And the reason we were afraid of it.

It's true.

That's what it was called.

They thought that the Saracens, the Arabs, had some magic in their heads because they could do algebra in their heads.

And I'll tell you the story.

It's fascinating, right?

So the Greeks were obsessed with proving everything.

And if you want to prove everything, the thing that really

freaks you out is nothingness, is the void.

Wow.

Yeah.

So intellectually, and we all came from the Greek thought, right?

So intellectually European Christians were afraid of the nothing.

In contrast, the Hindus in India embraced the nothing.

They love the void because it's only in the nothingness, it's only in the nothingness that you can achieve all sorts of peace.

And zero is the nothingness.

Zero is the void.

Zero is the black hole you look through that is nothing.

And so there was this relationship between philosophy and religion and mathematics that the Hindus in India were very comfortable with.

So for example, even now, Indians will say, what did India give the world?

Nothing, meaning everything, right?

And so they were using zero, not just

in mathematics, but also in their whole philosophical worldview.

And the Arabs then took zero from the Persians, who robbed it from the Indians, and they started using zero.

And the great thing about zero, it allows you to go from negative or positive numbers.

It also allows you to deal with very big numbers with,

you know, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, big, big numbers using zero as a place number.

And what happened is algebra comes from the ability to use zero.

And the Arabs, Arab merchants learned algebra as like a parallel language of commerce, like the way in which scholars of the Renaissance learned Latin.

The Arabs were learning algebra.

And they brought this algebra with them when they started to trade with the Europeans, which they did ironically in Sicily, was the center of European intellectualism, trade, art, etc.

Is this when Sicily was under the Islamic Caliphate or is it later than that?

It's a little bit later.

It was under a Norman.

It was a little under.

Right, okay.

Yeah.

Actually, the Normans that came to Ireland in 1136, right?

Okay, Strongbow and all that carry-on.

Their cousins went to Sicily.

It's quite a fascinating story.

Oh, God, really?

Yeah, yeah, it's an amazing story, right?

Under a fellow called King Roger, right?

Who was this Norman lad.

And amazingly, he set up, he's talking about the Caliphate, a very tolerant, liberal, unbelievably unique civilization where Normans,

Byzantine Christians, so the Normans would be Roman Christians, Byzantine Christians, Islamic Arabic traders, and Jews all lived together for about 200 years, right?

In a relatively tolerant place at the time of the Crusades.

This is the amazing thing.

So when the rest of Europe and the Arab world were killing each other,

in Norman Sicily, they were living side by side and they were bonded together largely by commerce.

And he said, look, I'm not sure.

That's where you say you start.

So that's why you get Christians.

dealing with Islamic lads who are using algebra.

And that's why you get these two

languages coming together.

exactly and that's why the christians call it saracen magic because they couldn't understand how the arab lads could compute things in their heads right they thought some was talking to them right wow they were possessed by the devil and the devil was whispering in their head because how could they figure out the ratio of dates to faking you know to to to to wheat

and and and do this all it seemed to the christians in their heads because they could do it in their heads because they learned algebra so they were just cleverer than us right?

That is amazing.

Isn't it amazing?

And then, of course, we brought zero.

Then there's a fellow called Fibonacci.

So, listeners who are into mathematics might have heard of this guy called Fibonacci.

And he was a guy, a young fella,

whose dad was a trader.

He learnt algebra and he wrote a book called Lieber Abachi.

And when you say learned, because I know algebra, was it invented by a fella called Al-Hazen?

The very man, yeah.

It was Al-Hazen, wasn't it?

I think it's Al-Quahazen.

it's K-H-A.

Because I heard too as well, within Islam, right?

Like, you know, you know, the way you can't draw the Prophet Muhammad within Islam, you can't draw a picture of the Prophet Muhammad, idolatry and all that stuff, yeah.

Yeah, within, like,

it's kind of taboo to draw anything that's created by God.

So, Islamic art tends not to be representational, it tends not to have they don't draw a human or a dog, instead, Islamic art is about geometry and patterns and shapes because mathematics is the language of God within Islam.

So that's why that's what you get, like that's why they invented modern mathematics, basically.

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

Like, I'm in two weeks' time, I'm going off to Cordoba in Spain, which is one of the things that's

the center of it.

It's the old caliphate from a thousand.

I call it hot limerick Limerick because,

well,

it looks like Limerick.

The same time that the Normans built old Norman Ireland in the 1100s, that's the same time that the Islamic castles are in Cordoba.

So they're actually quite similar as cities.

So I go there to Hot Limerick, but it's just incredibly well-preserved Islamic architecture from the Middle Ages.

It's fucking phenomenal, you know.

It is phenomenal.

And you go to the Alhambra and you just sit there and you listen.

It's an extraordinary thing in the Alhambra, if you just sit there next week now, whenever you're going, right, and just listen to the water.

Yeah.

Just listen to the water.

Just sit there on your tod and listen to the way in which these the Arabic caliphate understood how water travels, how water gives life, how water reassures in the heat.

How it cools down a building.

Amazing.

It's amazing.

The way those fountains, like that, that was, they understood very, very complex ways that water and humidity can cool the air.

The way that you're speaking about money, right?

I'm not great at maths.

The way that you, you're looking at money basically as a way to tell the story of humanity.

Yeah.

And I do that with food.

So with food,

I love anything to do with the history of food.

Whatever the fuck it is, you're going to find a very interesting human story.

And an interesting one there around when you mentioned Sicily and Norman Sicily being a place of tolerance for Christians, Islam, and Jewish people.

The same shit was happening in Islamic Spain under the Caliphate around the year 800-900.

There was Christians, Islam, and Jews lived together harmoniously and there wasn't any discrimination.

And then, when the Reconquista happened in Spain, when Christian Spain basically took over the Muslims and kicked them all out, that's where you start to see,

we'll say Islamophobia and anti-Semitism pop up, but you can see the history of all of this in Spanish food to this day.

So, if you take even a dish like paella, paela used to be Arabic.

The Moors brought rice from Africa to Spain.

Only when Christianity came in do you have paella that contains pork and shellfish?

Why do you think that is?

That's fascinating.

To find out who's a hidden Muslim and who's a hidden Jewish person.

And also, even the Spanish tradition of everybody eating together at the table.

Because if you if you, I go to Spain and I'm an Irish person.

when I order food, I'm Irish.

Here is my dinner and here is my plate.

And this is what I eat.

If I'm eating with Spanish people, they're like, no, you're not.

Get your plate and put it into the middle of the table because we're all eating off each other's food.

And that's the culture.

But that also comes from the Reconquista.

So we're going to get, we're going to sprinkle ham on your food like salt.

Eat it.

Eat it.

Are you Jewish or are you Muslim or are you Christian?

Prove it.

That's what it is.

Even there on a fucking Saturday, man.

You go there on a Saturday and everyone's hanging out there washing.

That's because Saturday is the Sabbath for Jewish people.

So work, work on the Sabbath, do some housework, show us your washing.

Why aren't you showing me your washing?

Are you Jewish?

So, this was also to expose:

are you a hidden Jew or a hidden Muslim?

100%.

And that's fascinating.

There was tolerance under the Islamic Caliphate, there was tolerance of Jewish, Christian.

It didn't matter.

But then when the Reconquista comes in and it becomes Catholic, that's when you start to see forcing forcing Jewish or Islamic people to convert or basically get the fuck out.

Christianity is the only religion.

It's also where you start to see the emergence of modern racism because, like,

race is completely made up.

All humans are the exact same, the exact same.

So, this idea of there being different races, that's a social construct.

And where that you see the first emergence of that is

when Islamic Spain, right, which was 800 years of a caliphate, a lot of those people, they came from North Africa, so they looked like North African people, they were darker.

But Spanish, northern Spanish people were white-skinned.

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

And even the patron saint of Spain,

I think his name is like John the Moorslayer or something like that.

I don't know his name, but if you look look at the patron saint of Spain, like they're Saint Patrick, it's literally a saint who is holding a recently decapitated Moorish person's head in the air.

And then, if you look at that, the saint's wrist, the blue veins.

So that's where you get blue blood.

And the origins, the origins of racism, it's from Spain.

Christianity equals white skin.

And then, of course, where does Spain go?

They go to fucking America, the slave trade.

So a lot of it starts there, you know?

Well, I mean, the thing is, like, you know, like, I, I, the way you think about food and the way you think of what you would call the social clues that are emitted from eating, right?

And whatever, that's what I've done with money in this book.

I thought to myself, this story is so much bigger than economics, right?

This story is so much bigger than the way we tell the story.

This is the story of us.

It's the story of innovation.

It's the story of colonization.

There's There's a big chapter on Casement, who happens to be a favorite of mine, a favorite individual, maybe one of the most impressive Irish men.

Roger Casement in the history of money, yeah.

He's in the big chapter, Roger Casement.

I'll tell you why.

Is it because of Congo?

Is it because of the Congo?

It's even more fascinating.

My grandfather is, my father's parents are buried in a place called Deans Grange Cemetery, which is a big cemetery here in the south,

just in Deans Grange around Dundaria.

And I was there, I don't know,

with some of the family years ago.

And what I noticed was not so far away from him was

the grave of Roger Caseman's brother.

And that interests me, just like, oh, this is interesting.

But also

within a stone's crow of that was the grave of a fellow called John Dunlop.

And John Dunlop was the guy who invented the pneumatic tire.

Wow.

If it hadn't been from John Dunlop, Caseman would never have been in Congo.

Is it a rubber connection?

It's the rubber connection he made with tire.

It's an amazing.

And had it not been for Dunlop, Casement wouldn't have ended up in the Congo, wouldn't have ended up radicalised, and wouldn't have ended up interned in the UK.

So how did that, what was Dunlop from Ireland?

Dunlop was from Ireland.

He was a vet.

And he was a vet from Downpatrick in County Down before, obviously, partition.

So he'd be up and down to Dublin all the the time.

Dublin would be the city that he'd engage with all the time.

He retired to Dublin and he died in 1922, just after independence, right?

And Casement would have been buried in the family plot in Deans Grange had he not been hanged in Pental prison and his body was not returned to Ireland until 1966.

And this always intrigued me.

And then I decided to look into Rubber, look into Casement, look into the trial of Oscar Wilde, look into the trial of Casement, his involved.

I mean, Casement was like a one-man walking NGO.

They call him the inventor of modern human rights.

Exactly, completely.

So what I decided to do was look at that story of the Belgian Congo, the link between rubber, the Belgian Congo, what happened in the Congo.

For people who don't know,

the Congo was run by Belgium.

It was like a personal state owned by King Leopold.

He was extracting rubber resources in the Congo, enslaving people,

chopping people's hands off, just really, really treating the indigenous population as absolute dirt.

And Roger Casement

was basically investigated King Leopold for human rights abuses, and justice was brought against him, I believe.

And he received a knighthood from the Brits for doing it.

But that's what Casement did.

Casement was an Irishman who was a well, he was a lawyer, wasn't he?

No,

he was an unusual fellow.

He emerges as sort of a civil servant.

He went down to Africa and worked for the British Foreign Office, taking notes in effect for a long time.

But he becomes increasingly radicalized as he begins to see what's happening in the Belgian Congo.

And then

he's furious by the time he meets Joseph Conrad, who wrote The Heart of Darkness, upon which Apocalypse Now is based.

And the main character, Colonel Kurtz, in Apocalypse Now, was based on a Belgian sadist who was documented by Joseph Conrad but

it was Casement who actually alerted him to all this sort of stuff happening.

So Casement gave Conrad the basis for the book The Heart of Darkness and then Casement becomes radicalized and he just says that we have to expose this and he does expose it and he gets as you said a knighthood for his exposing of exploitation of the native Congolese.

And then Casement says well hold on a second.

They're not just exploiting the natives here.

They're exploiting the natives back in my place, in my hometown.

And he goes to Peru and he does the same thing because the native Peruvian Amazonian Indians were also being exploited because rubber could only grow naturally in the Amazon and in around the Congo basin.

And then he comes back to Ireland and he says, okay, hold on a second.

There's a similar, there's a similar

cultural colonialism going on here.

And he becomes radicalized.

And by 1913, he's a member of the IRB.

And by 1916, he ends up in Germany trying to get the Germans involved in an Irish international brigade.

And he comes back to Ireland and he gets captured in Banner Strand in Kerry.

So he was transported unmolested to England.

And he was tried.

What is really the trial of the century?

He was a bit of a celebrity as well, wasn't he?

So people come out and said, you can't execute this man.

And also, he's a knight.

What are you doing?

Yeah.

And then, of course, the black diaries get exposed.

Yeah.

This is the fascinating thing.

So

he's basically murdered or hung by the British for being gay more than for being a Republican.

All the support, everyone turned, well, as soon as so, so the Brits released these diaries that said, oh, it appears Roger Casement is gay.

And being called gay in 1916 was just like completely unacceptable.

So everyone who supported him said, oh, I didn't know he was gay.

I guess you should kill him.

And it's amazing the people who supported him.

So you have Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes, paid for his defence, which is amazing when you think about it.

But as you said,

the British,

I think it's MI5 or whatever was the foreigner, made sure that whoever was going to be outraged by these diaries got sight of them.

Yeah.

And

he was hanged in Pentonville prison.

And the hangman who hanged Casement

said that he was by far and away the bravest man he had ever had the displeasure of executing.

That's Roger Casement.

He's also in the book.

There's all sorts of characters in the book.

Connection with Dunlap, though.

Dunlap was a vet

and

Dunlop's five-year-old boy had been given a bicycle for his birthday.

It's the beginning of the bicycles.

And his little boy said to him, look, dad, it's too hard.

Okay, imagine it's too hard on my bum cycling around here, right?

And his dad said, Okay, right, what do we do?

We need to get something to soften the hard wheels, right?

They hadn't got rubber on the wheels.

And he said,

What we can do is we can create rubber tires.

And if we blow into these tires, we can create a soft, almost spongy rim that can go around the bikes.

And that's that was it.

So Dunlop invented pneumatic tires, and he then sold that franchise to the company that became the dunlop corporation one of the biggest companies in the world

and uh and he retired as a sort of a very a very affable elderly gentleman in dublin and he he was he alive when casement was alive he was alive when casement was alive so they didn't know each other i mean

they used to be a rubber connection there but they didn't know each other but the fascinating thing is they were buried they would have been buried right beside each other that's a coincidence of that is insane isn't it insane it's insane and uh so that's that's up in Dean's Grange Cemetery, you know.

But what happens is when you're writing a book like this, it's a bit like you doing the pod.

You know, you go off into little tangents and little tributaries, and you're on a river, you go, you decide to go up a stream and a little tributary, and then you're in a lagoon, and suddenly you find a gem and you come back again.

And

I just thought that, you know, by the time we get to the 19th century, the story of money is involved with the story of industry, it's involved in the story of mercantilism, it's involved with the story of colonialism.

And what also intrigued me was the notion that botanists were at the front line of colonialism.

When we think about botanists, we always think, you know, people who are, you know, sort of botany guys working about plants and leaves and things.

But in actual fact, you know, in the late 19th century, it was botany, i.e., rubber plants, etc.

And this stuff called gutta parta.

Did you ever hear of gutta parcha?

No, what's that stuff?

Oh my god.

So gotta parcha, it's a bit like rubber, and it could only be grown in Indonesia with trees that were very, very old, right?

And gutta parta,

it's it's it was like a hard plastic, a hard plastic that comes from trees, only from one place in Indonesia.

And this was hugely, hugely important to the British Empire because when the telegraph was invented, okay, and especially underseas cables,

the only substance that could sufficiently insulate the undersea telegraph was this stuff called gutta parcha.

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

So you had to have this gutta parta to be able to do it.

But it only came from these trees in Indonesia, and you couldn't farm them because the trees took like 40 years.

And eventually, they just used up all the gutta parta.

That was it.

And I think what replaced it was the vulcanization of rubber, that process.

process but got a partra was it was a plant so what you're talking about there in botany and and empire the gutta parta was was

it's it's in ulysses in ulysses uh one of the characters mentions gotta parta boots wow but got a party was so ubiquitous that it used to be just a phrase that someone would say have you got your guttaparcha referring to a type of boot i love that and i found out what guttaparcha was i i was in an antique shop in limerick and i looked in the window and there was a dagger and the dagger was about 100 years old and it said got a party handle and i'd never heard of that word so i looked it up and i was like fuck me i know i mean these these story i mean it's like it's it's when you when you start researching these type of things you just unearth extraordinary stories and all these stories to come back to our theme blind boy is about humanity that's the thing it's about us i was even looking at rubber like rubber first arrives with the, there was a movement when the conquiscadors, you mentioned them earlier, went to the new world, so to speak.

The vast majority of them were vicious sadists, but there was a small group of Catholic priests who actually thought, no, these people are humans like us.

We have to respect them.

And they brought a couple of Amazonians back to Spain to the court to prove, look, these people are intelligent, they're empathetic, they're emotional, they're like us.

And they brought them back.

And one of the ways they were going to show how brilliant these people were

was

to make them or to showcase an original game of football.

The Indians, well, I'm going to call them Indians,

the Native Amazonians used

a rubber ball, right?

Wow.

Really fascinating.

So they played a type of football that they used with their elbows, right?

Okay.

And this is all true.

The most amazing thing, what really fascinated the Spaniards was rubber.

They'd never met and come across a substance like this, so much so that European languages didn't have a word for to bounce

in the medieval age because they'd never seen a thing bounce.

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

So, it's a bit like you know, once you go into these things, you unearth all sorts of fascinating stories but our general theme the book is basically about that the story of money and the story of modern humanity for all its good and all its evil are massively intertwined so much so that i don't think you can tell the story of one without the other and i really believe that one thing i i definitely want to speak to you about right um

and because it's something i know nothing about and i'm very curious about which is

let's move into the 20th century with money, okay?

Yeah,

money right now scares the living fuck out of me because I don't know where its value comes from.

It seems insane.

And we used to have money, there used to be the gold standard, which meant that the money that's the pieces of paper that are floating around, don't worry about it because an equivalent amount of gold is somewhere in a safe.

And then that disappeared.

And then money basically just became imaginary.

Value became imaginary.

can you speak a little like

as if you're as simply as possible like what's the gold standard what happened when it ended and what's money now so so the gold standard was exactly as you say was this idea that you could go in to the bank with your bank notes and demand an equivalent in gold right so that gave you the comfort that it was backed by something

Now,

that was abandoned in 1971.

There were various different iterations iterations of it.

Oh, it was that late.

It was that late.

It was that late.

It was abandoned in 1971.

So it was, first of all, it was abandoned in 1936 by Roosevelt.

Then it came back after the Second World War.

The Americans said, we will link the dollar to gold.

And everybody else says, okay, we'll link our currency to the dollar.

So implicitly, there was a link to gold.

That was abandoned in 1971.

That's your Fort Knox.

Yeah, exactly.

And it was abandoned in 1971 because

Richard Nixon needed money to fight the Vietnam War, which the Americans were losing.

And gold constrained the amount of dollars they could print to pay for guns and armor.

Nixon wanted to make up money.

Let's invent some money.

It was basically Saigon or gold.

He had a choice between Saigon or Fort Knox, and he chose Saigon, right?

But since then, and this is the fascinating thing.

So since then, money has been entirely fictitious in the human imagination.

And I believe this gives gives its extraordinary power.

So I think that gold was a sort of a relic.

Keynes called it a relic, right?

It was a relic of a bygone age.

What I love about money at the moment is exactly that it is just a

figment of the human imagination.

And that, I believe, is a huge intellectual leap.

for the global economy and for society.

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

It's not great, it's not ideal, but people are improving in longevity, in education, in all these, in all these things.

You can't imagine China emerging as it has done if people had said, oh, well, you can't expand your economy because you have no gold.

So, what I've seen is that

the last 40 years has been an extraordinary leap of human human imagination in money.

And I think this is actually an incredibly sophisticated world we are in now, where you don't have to have a piece of gold or a piece of metal or a piece of silver to make legitimate the trade that we all do together.

So I can't imagine our

world of seven and a half billion people

living together without this technology called money.

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

I got to tell you that the bard shit parallel here, man, because this is, you're going to love this.

Go, go, go, go.

So, what you're describing about there, right?

With

say the gold standard, and then it goes from the gold standard into now we have confidence and we're printing money that doesn't exist.

The exact same,

you can say the exact same thing for nitrogen, okay?

So

if humans in order to grow crops throughout the years, you need to be able to fertilize.

But the thing with fertilizer was

it's you either you know you get the grass that you've just grown and you make silage out of the grass or you get cow shit.

But throughout human civilization, there's been a limit to the amount of because what what farmers are looking for is nitrogen.

There's been a limit to the amount of nitrogen that a farmer could get.

You can only get so much from the grass that you cut.

You can only get so much from the cow because they're eating the nitrogen from the soil.

Then what started to happen is around the

1500s, they figured out that bird shit was a lot of nitrogen was contained in bird shit, particularly in the age of colonialism when they went to South America and they found that there was islands made entirely out of bird shit, mainly around Panama.

So what happened is human civilization, the West, they started to go, wow, this bird shit makes astounding fertilizer.

It's full of nitrogen.

So now we had

we had more nitrogen than was in the soil.

Do you get what I'm saying?

Exactly where you're going.

Yeah.

They start going to Panama, to these islands, and they start depleting all the bard shit.

And they bring it back to Europe.

And now we're able to grow more food than we could previously do because we have a sudden influx of nitrogen.

But then, of course, by about the late 1800s, we start to run out of bard shit.

We start to run out of these islands, these bard shit islands.

And then they start freaking out where are we going to get nitrogen from they dug up waterloo they dug up the the battlefield of waterloo to look for the bones of horses and soldiers so they could get the nitrogen from that by about 1903 there was a genuine risk of a global famine because we had lived off nitrogen resources that were now completely depleted and there was actually good chance of a global famine and then a German chemist comes along called Fritz Fritz Haber.

And the thing is, with nitrogen, the air around us is 70% nitrogen.

There's fucking nitrogen everywhere, but it's in the air.

Fritz Haber was a chemist who figured out how to get that nitrogen from the air and make it into fertilizer.

So Fritz Haber invented unlimited nitrogen.

That's what happened.

Just like you go from gold standard, that's what fucking Fritz Haber did.

But that's also a reason why we have 8 billion people.

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

And if you, so again, I come back to our idea that the story of humanity, it's got a that money needed to break away from what you were called the constraint of gold or the constraint of nitrogen, as what you're saying now.

I don't really make this value judgment.

I just think that money constantly adapts to human other technologies and other technologies adapt to money.

So if, for example, you get these extraordinary discoveries by our German chemists, it always seems to be German chemists do a lot of this discovery in the fairness of them, right?

Then money adapts to that.

And what I keep saying in the book is that we can't understand

where we're going without understanding the relationship between money and how it both facilitates these things and acts as a constraint in these things and changes.

So, I know what you mean: that, you know, is there a world in which you just keep growing and growing and growing?

And very clearly, you can't because you come up against, are are we entirely determined by the earth's resources or do humans always try to figure out a different way of doing things and you know the funniest thing is blind but I'm not sure of the answer to that I think my my

my heart says the earth's resources but my head looks back at history and says humans have always come up with little schemes to try to actually deal with the constraints that put up against us.

So, you know, the way I end the book is just saying, look, there's no great big forecast of the future.

All I'm saying is that at every stage, what you see is money adapts to

problems.

And it is a technology.

At the end of the day, technologies enable humans to sidestep problems.

And I end where we started in the Congo with a thing called M-PESA.

which is money in the form of mobile phone credit, which is taking Africa by storm.

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

And I see all these people, maybe 50 people, buzzing around what looked like a mobile phone shop.

And I asked the geezer I was with, I said, what's going on there?

Because they seem too animated to be just buying.

mobile phones and he said they're buying money i said what he said they're buying mobile phone credit and they're using that as money.

I said, really?

He said, yeah, it's a new currency that's taken off in Kenya.

Now, 60% of the Kenyan economy is done by M-Pesa, which is money as mobile phone credit, which is

yes.

And of course, it's now extended into the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But why?

Are they afraid of the national currency?

Yes.

So what they are, basically,

in many parts of Africa, particularly rural Africa,

you'd never come across a bank, right?

Okay.

And what tended to happen, let's say you were working in the city and you'd sent money home to your mother, right?

So this is basically,

as happened in Ireland for

hundreds of years, people left this, country people left the city, left the country, went to the city, sent money home, right?

But in Kenya, what you'd have to do is you'd have to pay a fella, a bus driver.

in a put the bag of cash into the bus right in Dublin and send it all the way down wherever right?

And of course, at that stage, the bus driver would take a commission of about 20%, the cash might disappear, et cetera, et cetera.

But because there were no banks in the countryside, this is how money got transferred around.

But then once mobile phones came in and they might not have had banks, but they had mobile phones, what people started to do was rather than send money down to their mother in the rural areas, what they would do was they'd send her mobile phone credit and she would use the credit.

This comes back to your idea of value right she would use the credit to buy milk and use the credit to buy stuff and this was beginning this was a way of transferring money then people said hold on a second if i can buy milk why can't i buy other stuff with it and within a short period of period of time about four or five years mobile phone credit has overtaken real currency which is called the shilling in kenya as the money of choice for the vast vast majority of people and you can borrow and lend in it, and all sorts of stuff.

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

And again, what fascinated me was that

rather than talk about cryptocurrency at the end, which I do a bit, you know, quite a bit, you know, and all this stuff orchestrated by big American superstars and Kim Kardashian and tech bros.

Yeah.

Oh, that's shite.

What's much more interesting to me.

And that's only, it's, it's only, it's only a grift, you know, by rich people to get poor people to part with money.

What I found much more interesting.

There's a big smell of that office.

I don't know much about cryptocurrency, but I know that I don't trust this.

Do another podcast.

Do a podcast and I'll take you through it.

It's dreadful stuff, right?

But I was much more interested in, forget all that Hollywood stuff and the Super Bowl ads and the tech bros.

Poor Africans coming up with their own currency.

Who would have thought 10 years ago that mobile phone credit would become money and mobile phones would become banks?

And that's what's happened in Africa.

And that's what I love about the story.

It adapts all the time.

And that's where I end.

I start in Africa 20,000 years ago and I end in Kenya there last year.

And what I think is that the story of humans and the story of money just is so intertwined that

I can't imagine telling story of human civilization without the story of money and vice versa.

And that's what I've tried to do.

I mean,

it sounds unreal.

It sounds like a big, terrifying project, but I know by the way you're talking, like, you fucking lived with this.

You really, really.

I have one last question that I want to ask you.

It's something I know nothing about.

Can you explain to me what petro dollars are?

Okay, so petro dollars were

dollars that were backed by petrol.

So, there is a fun, there is a fantastic,

maybe it's not fantastic, I think it's fantastic, but in the book about Euro dollars, right?

Euro dollars and petrodollars have nothing to do with Euros or petrol, okay?

Just so you know, right?

They were originally dollars backed by petrol.

So, like everything, remember your gold idea?

Your gold is just a collateral that backs a promise, okay?

So, if you say

blind boy is given David McWilliams a grand, but David McWilliams has some collateral that it gives blind boy and that's blind boy feels happy about that, right?

It makes the promise real.

Did it somehow make America really powerful?

The dollar makes American really powerful.

And the reason is the following is in economics having the reserve currency.

So that I mean by having the currency that everybody wants to use and everybody.

So for example, when you go, let's say to your Kenyas, right?

The taxi driver will talk to you straight away from the airport, wherever you're going, about the rate of exchange with the dollar, right?

They won't talk to you about the Euro or the yen or whatever, right?

Because everybody uses the dollar.

It's the universal language.

And that gives the Americans what economists call an exorbitant privilege.

And the reason is the following, right?

The Americans print the money for nothing.

It's free for them to print.

But we, the rest of the world, have to sell real things to get dollars, right?

So there's an asymmetry asymmetry at the core of the system where the Americans get a free lunch by printing the currency that everybody wants to use.

Now, the Americans understood this at the end of the Second World War when they set up all the institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.

And those institutions were set up by Americans in Bretton Woods in America.

And the stipulation was you will use the dollar to clear all the trades.

So if you want to buy copper, you want to buy gold, you want to buy petrol, it's all priced in dollars.

It's priced in the currency the Americans print for nothing.

Nobody else can print the dollar, only the Americans.

So, it gives them this real economic power that they use all over the place.

And it's recognized all over the place, so much so.

And I'll leave you with this one, right?

When ISIS, apparently, the people who think America is the great Satan, demand a ransom,

what do they demand to get paid in?

What dollars

right yeah what gold not fucking prayers to allah dollars

and if that doesn't tell you that the americans have an exorbitant privilege i don't think anything anything else does

all right so we leave it at that that was i could have talked to you for another four hours i know i know it'd be like you'd be like joe rogan be going on for days

yeah

that was great thank you so much for that that was great crack not at all blind boy it was always a pleasure i'll talk to you soon.

Wonderful stuff there.

David McWilliams.

His book is called Money.

Go out and get it if you enjoyed that chat.

Wonderful writer, great storyteller.

His podcast is called the David McWilliams Podcast.

Dog bless.

I'll catch you next week, ye glorious cunts.

In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, and genuflect to a crow.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game, Day Scratches from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today, it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.

Hey, it's Mark Maron from WTF here to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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