Dan Snow's History Hit - The History of Money

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

It is said that money makes the world goes round and has done for millennia, but what exactly is money and where does it come from? To find out Dan is joined by Jacob Goldstein, American journalist, writer, podcast host and author of: Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. They explore the concept and form of money from the first coins in the ancient world through the many booms and busts to the invention of stock exchanges, central banks and into the digitised world of today. Through this, we see that money is an ever-evolving concept and Dan and Jacob look at how it may continue to change into the future.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. One thing that's particularly fascinated me during this Covid crisis, but frankly ever since 2008,

is what on earth is money? And if the government and other organizations can print it seemingly without end, why are we worried about having not enough of it? I don't understand. And the great joy of having a podcast is that you can ask some of the world's most intelligent and articulate people the questions that pop up into all of our heads. What even is money? Am I talking about the old-fashioned coins and notes even is money? Am I talking about the old-fashioned coins and notes in my pocket? Am I talking about the figures on my app or on my desktop? What is it? Where is it? And given that we spend so much time in our lives talking and freaking

out about it, it's bizarre how few of us can actually define what it is. Now, someone who can define what it is, is Jacob Goldstein. He is a legend. For years, he presented the NPR podcast, Planet Money, a smash hit. He's now doing lots of exciting projects, but he's also written an amazing book called Money, The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. And we had a great chat.

This was enlightening and important, and I enjoyed it enormously. I could have gone for hours. You'll be glad that I didn't. If you enjoy listening to these podcasts, but want to do so without the ads, or you want to access our new Netflix of history, our new digital history channel, where there are hundreds of documentaries just about history. No aliens, no crazy stuff, just history from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age, you can do so at historyhit.tv. You just go to historyhit.tv. Then you subscribe to historyhit.tv and you get all of those wonderful advantages that I've just outlined. So head over to historyhit.tv. You get 30 days free if you begin your trial day at works ever in the world where you can get the internet. So head over

to historyhit.tv, join the revolution. But in the meantime, here's my conversation with Jacob Goldstein about money. Jacob, thanks for coming on the pod, man. Oh, thanks for having me. Well, this is the big one. Jacob, what is money? I don't even know what it is. What is it?

I mean, you know, we could start with it's whatever you use to buy stuff. How about that? Is that a letdown or a relief? Thanks for listening. Yeah. Good to be here. Buy the book. Okay. Come on. Keep going. Okay. It's what you pay your taxes with. It's what everybody agrees is money. That's a big one, right? It's the thing everybody says, yeah, I'll take that useless thing you want to give me in exchange for my work. That useless thing you want to give me in exchange for my work. That useless thing that everybody agrees to take in exchange for their labor, that's money. Is it a symbol? Is it a symbol of exchange, a symbol of value?

Symbol. Symbol's okay. Yeah, I'll take symbol. A token. I like token. Okay, token's better. Yeah. But now that it doesn't even exist anymore, even in the kind of pathetic, valueless, physical

form, it's even more complicated, right? Because it just... I don't know that it's more complicated. It's more abstract, right? Yeah. If you think of money, you probably think of a piece of paper, right? We have paper money, but most of your money, almost certainly, unless you're doing something very strange, is not paper, right? Most of your money is just numbers in the bank's computer, right? The bank does not have a stack of paper in the back in the vault representing all your money in the bank. It's just numbers in the bank's computer, right? The bank does not have a stack of paper in the back, in the vault, representing all your money in the bank. It's just numbers on the computer. Jacob, this may be a good time to share with you

the totally hysterical panic preparation I did before the first lockdown. And there is quite a lot of paper money in this house at the moment. Okay. Which is useless for two reasons. One is it would have been no use if society had broken down. And two, there's been a bill exchange here in the UK, so most of it's about to go out of date. So,

I mean, bad decision-making from me. I didn't know the UK was doing a bill exchange. So they said, you got to turn in all your paper money or it'll be worthless? Yeah. Well, particular notes, they change occasionally. Yeah. Unlike the US, where you guys obviously secretly quite like being this weird greenback global currency and never changing it and therefore it being the kind of unofficial method of exchange around the world. I agree with everything you said there except secret. We love it.

We love that everybody wants the dollar. It's literally free money for us. That's true. So therefore never change it because you don't want to mess with a good thing. Oh no. Ben Franklin. What's wrong with Ben Franklin? He's been working for a long time.

He's still working. Everybody loves hundreds. I'll tell you, here's some fun facts. There are more $100 bills in circulation than $1 bills. There are something like 40 hundreds for every man, woman, and child in America. 40, right? Thousands and thousands of dollars for each person. I don't know where all that money is, right? Nobody knows. It's an amazing thing, the actual paper money, the persistence of it, especially dollars, but also euros.

There's a whole separate part to be done on the US paper money, whether it's the people on them, whether it's the deliberate decision not to update it and therefore cause trouble. But let's get back to money itself. There's been exchange, we assume, since forever, right? Trade goods, you giving me some stuff, I give you some stuff. Money is so efficient because you don't need an antler or some salt. You can just go buy your own thing. I don't care if you need an antler, you have this. It's beautiful. There's like a mists of time kind of origin. The first thing we would recognize as money is coins. And coins, we know, was about 06, 700 BC in the Eastern Mediterranean,

the kingdom of Lydia, which is present-day Turkey. And that kingdom, actually, Croesus, you know the old phrase, riches Croesus? It was ruled over by Croesus, perhaps not coincidentally. They had a lot of this metal called electrum, which is an amalgam of gold and silver that occurs naturally, which is like great, right? It's great to have your kingdom full of gold and silver, but it's kind of inconvenient because you get this lump of metal that's like, well, I don't know how much it's worth because I don't know how much is gold and how much is silver. So they started taking electrum that had a relatively consistent ratio of gold and silver and chopping it into standardized mass size lumps and stamping the royal symbol of the lion onto those lumps. And that was the invention of coins right there.

So let's just drill down. What's that doing? That says, if I give you a lump of this metal, but it's got the stamp on it, it's for real. It's confidence, right? Confidence is essential to money. It is confidence. And in that instance, I mean, one thing that is sort of aligned through the history of money is it's also the state, right? The king. And so you have this raw thing, in this case, metal. Obviously, money was often metal. But then you have it sort of intersecting with the state, the king, which is pretty classic. And then it pretty quickly turns into just silver coins. And then the Lydians get conquered by the Persians. So they're gone. Sorry, Lydians.

But then the Greeks love coins. And I think it's not a coincidence that, you know, the Greeks are creating this new kind of society, right? Like the proto-democracy thing happens to rise up right when coins rise up. And that's in part, I think, because coins allow for this really easy, ready kind of bottom-up trade that is flourishing in Greece along with proto-democracy. I guess coins like weights and measures, they are, as you say, bottom-up. It allows you to not have to like drag a whole tree trunk through the agora to go, like, I'll exchange this amount of lumber with you. What's the word you guys use? They're liquid or they're- Fungible?

Fungible. That's the one. That's it. Fungible. Putting the fun back into fungible. I mean, yeah. So you don't have to drag a tree through the agora. On the other side, there were these big complex civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean around that time and earlier where they were very top-down, right? Like the king, the high priest would basically tell everybody like, okay, I'm going to take some of your stuff. I'm going to take some of your barley and I'm going to redistribute it, right? They called those temple economies or palace economies or tribute societies. And so you can have a complicated top-down society

where somebody at the center is just command and control, we call it today, telling everybody, you get this, you get that. But you can't have a bottom-up society that way, pretty much by definition. Because in other cultures you use, whether it's cowrie shells or beer, like we think many people were paid in beer

in the ancient Near East, that's not very fungible. You give someone a beer and then five days later, they want to buy something else. I don't want your five-day-old glass of beer. Yeah, beer, well, it's not durable in particular. Cowrie shells were pretty good, though. Cowrie shells, they are discreet and they don't fall apart too fast. And they're pretty fungible. Fungible meaning like one is like another, right? So cowrie shells worked quite well and were money in Africa and Asia for a long time. There was an interesting thing that happened once the Europeans started going more to Africa and realized that cowrie shells were money. They started bringing

in sort of industrial quantities of cowrie shells. And there was, as you would expect, this massive inflation and that messed up the cowrie shell economy. That's so fascinating. Talk about paper money. Presumably, I'm taking a guess that comes out of China. Good guess. Paper comes out of China, right? So yeah. And again, like with coins, we actually know, we can look and see like, oh, here, there is this time and this place when paper money was invented. And it was around 1000 AD in the province of Sichuan. And as with a lot of inventions, it was a response to a problem.

The problem in Sichuan was that they used iron coins for money. And iron is crap money, right? It's so low in value that you needed like a pound and a half of iron coins to buy a pound of salt, right? So it's just terrible. It's a bad thing to use for money. And they had paper and actually printing by this point. And so some merchant, we don't know who, but some merchant in the capital of Sichuan is like, okay, you leave your coins with me and I'll give you basically like a claim check, right? Like when you leave your coat at a fancy

restaurant or something, you get a claim check. But to use your word, these coins were fungible, right? So you didn't have to have like your iron coin. So you have your IOU good for a thousand iron coins at the merchant's shop and people start using the IOUs to buy stuff. It's quicker. It's quicker. It makes so much sense. Like, well, I could go and get the thousand coins and give them to you, but then you'd have a thousand coins that you don't know what to do with. I'll just give you this IOU. And it worked and it spread. And again, the government took over pretty soon. Again, the government sees this thing arising basically in the private sector and saying, oh, we like that. We're going to get in on that. And paper money takes off in China

and contributes to this real economic boom, sort of like a proto-industrial revolution. There's scientific advances and urbanization and cities with a million people at a time when Europe had a tenth that in its cities. And so money is part of this broader economic technological boom. Yes. Okay, Jake, let me talk about that. Why does availability of specie, of money, why does that lead to a boom? Good question. It's funny, we take for granted the fact that there's always enough money to do business, to do what we want. But in many times and in many places, that was not the case. People used to talk about coin famines, where there just wasn't the stuff of money. And so a few things happen. The simple thing that happens is, I mean, it sounds dumb to

say, but if you don't have money, you can't buy stuff, right? That's the dumb version. And it seems weird because it's like, wait, isn't what we care about wealth? Isn't what we care about stuff? But not having money makes it hard to do business. More narrowly and sort of more simply, if you have to like schlep around iron coins in an era when there's no mechanized transport, it's costly, right? If you want to trade over large distances in a place where there's no trains and no cars, just carrying the metal is a big cost that increases your cost

of exchange. And if you can, instead of carrying a wagon load of metal, carry one piece of paper, it makes trade cheaper. So now it makes sense to take your goods farther away where you can get a better price for them because you don't have to bring a whole wagon load of metal back with you. And then I guess that's where we get trust again. I'm so interested by those medieval networks, often Italian families who would set up in different cities around Europe. And it'd be like, you can take your piece of paper from Milan. You take it to London. It's as good in London as in Milan because my brother will sort you out. My cousin will sort you out. Yeah, it was beautiful. And fundamentally, it wasn't even the paper.

It was just that they would record it in the ledger, right? So it'd be like, I got you here in my ledger in Milan. I'll tell my brother in Florence that you've got this much money in the ledger. And so in that sense, money, even many hundreds of years ago, was like the money in the bank today where there's no paper, right? The fundamental thing is not the piece of paper or the metal. It's just the ledger. It's just that somebody has in the book, Goldstein has 10 florins on account with us. That's really old. Which strangely is also very modern, right? That's the amazing thing. Yes. Money is not a thing, right? We get tripped up with like, oh, there's a thing, there's a gold coin, there's a piece of paper,

but the essence of money is not that. It's basically like IOUs, really. And let's talk a bit more about banking and Europe. Is this where the action starts to happen now? If we move away from Tung China, we get to Europe in the medieval, early modern periods. What's going on in Europe? Is it the different jurisdictions? Why is this such a febrile period of development of money and banking and loaning? And then we get the national debt as well, which is fascinating. That is a great question. And I don't know if anybody knows the answer.

The different jurisdictions idea is a big one. As you may know, you kind of dropped that in passing. But there is this sort of deep historical question, which is China was clearly sort of ahead economically, technologically in like 1200 AD. And yet they kind of stagnate. In fact, they actually get rid of paper money altogether around 1400. And their economy stagnates. They actually get poorer.

And then Europe starts to take off a couple hundred years later, around 1600. And there are lots of things going on, right? I mean, there's the scientific revolution is starting around that time. Exploration is starting, right? One of the big drivers of financial capitalism in Europe is funding these journeys. You know, the Dutch are early. They're about 1600. I mean, the Italians are before they're like 1400.

You have Venice, which is a trading spot. But let's talk about the Dutch, right? 1600 is a good place to kind of start modern financial capitalism. You have the Dutch East India Company, which is sort of like the first multinational, right? They create this thing where anybody who wants to, who lives there, can buy stock and sell it. And you get the first stock market very quickly springing up like on a bridge, essentially. People are wheeling and dealing. And Jacob, what's interesting is that's similar to money, but it's not get the first stock market very quickly springing up like on a bridge, essentially, people are wheeling and dealing.

And Jacob, what's interesting is that's similar to money, but it's not quite the same. Is it like owning a piece of a company? It's the same idea of like you have a piece of paper that just says that you own this thing and that you can then trade that. I mean, again, it's basically like an IOU. It's not exactly an IOU, right? It's not debt, it's equity, but it's abstraction, right? In the same way that money is abstracting stuff, stock, what it's really abstracting is ownership, which itself is kind of an abstraction, right? And more technically, like a promise of future profits is really what you're buying when you buy a stock.

I mean, I'm amazed. That first publicly traded company in Amsterdam, and that is up there with the wheel and the internet. It's a big one. It's a big one. It's such a big one. Who came up with that? Well, like a lot of things. So you'd had these, they called them joint stock companies for a while. You'd had- Merchants would work together. Merchants would work together. And once you have the rule of law and the idea of a corporation and the sort of beginnings of capitalism, it works. The big breakthrough of the Dutch East

India Company was that it was easier to trade, right? Before that, you could go in on a company and get future profits out of it, and then the companies would typically wind down. But when the Dutch East India Company was getting going, they're like, well, we got to build the ships, we got to send them around to Asia, it might be a long time before we give you any profits. So just in case you need to sell before you get the profits, you can do that. Come into the office and we'll write again in the ledger that you sold your shares to so-and-so. And I don't think they thought they were creating some booming stock market, right?

I think it was like a kind of an aside, almost an afterthought. But what happened was it quickly created this booming market. People would actually go, there was a bridge where the ship captains would walk across when they came back from their sea voyages. And so it's sort of like high frequency trading today, right? Of course, everybody wants to be the first one to hear news of the voyage so they can trade on that information. So suddenly that bridge becomes crowded with traders, so much so that people are like,

I can't even get across the bridge. It's so full of traders. So then Amsterdam actually built a dedicated stock market to get the traders off the bridge so people could use the bridge. And that was the first stock market. You listen to Dan Snow's History Hit, talking to Jacob Goldstein about money. It's fascinating. More coming up. If you love ancient history, then don't worry, we've got you covered. I'm Tristan Hughes, host of The Ancients Podcast, the podcast for all things ancient history. And these are the only surviving boxing gloves from the Roman Empire and the earliest surviving

boxing gloves for over 1,600 years. The Romans of course become so powerful and the Romans conquer the whole of the Mediterranean world and Hannibal was the one powerful and the Romans conquer the whole of the Mediterranean world. And Hannibal was the one who challenged the Romans the most. Bards of Cleopatra. I had never come across any such thing before. Subscribe to The Ancients on History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Then we imported what we called at the time Dutch finance into England. Yes. So England obviously had its own East India Company around the same time. I feel like England's big breakthrough comes later.

So that's the beginning of the 1600s is Dutch East India Company. Yeah, we were a 1690s kind of setup here. So 1694, I believe, is the Bank of England, right? Which is a huge breakthrough, a huge sort of contribution. And one of the interesting things to me, I don't mean to keep going back to government, but it is a big theme, right? So this is after the Glorious Revolution. And here, you're going to know this stuff better than I am. So tell me what I'm getting wrong. But it's this moment when Parliament is getting more power relative to the King. And I feel like the creation of the Bank of England is really that story. It's this moment when there's this new possibility that

says, well, maybe we can actually make the King pay us back. Because before that, it'd be like, yeah, people would lend to the King, but then the King could be like, I'm not going to pay you back. And I feel like a key piece of the Bank of England is it's this way under the law to lend money to the king, to the government, but also have more confidence that you're going to get paid back because the king is no longer such a sort of sole authority and parliament can keep the king in check. It's not a capricious Plantagenet like some of his ancestors. Exactly. So why is it the Bank of England when it's actually just a mechanism for lending money to government? This is good. I can ask all my 101 questions from you. It's brilliant. But is it also a bank? Can I like leave all my silver coins in there if I want? Not now. You could at the beginning. And it was, in fact, a private bank. It was not like a modern central bank that is a public institution. One of the key things about the Bank of England, it used to be a thing

where companies would get monopolies, right? The government would basically sell a monopoly on this or that to companies. And a thing that the Bank of England got was basically a monopoly, at least a monopoly in London, on printing paper money. And paper money was a new thing in Europe at the time. It had actually started in Sweden because they used copper coins, kind of like an echo of that China story. And they had these giant 40-pound, two-foot-long copper coins that people wore strapped to their backs. So maybe it's not surprising that they were like, this is terrible. I would way rather have a piece of paper. So maybe it's not surprising that they were like, this is terrible.

I would way rather have a piece of paper. And then in London, the goldsmiths in the mid-1600s had started giving out IOUs. All these stories sort of repeat themselves. And anyways, by the, oh, around early 1700s, the Bank of England gets a monopoly basically on paper notes, or at least monopoly in London on paper notes. And that really helps it to take off and become this sort of special thing. See, the financial revolution of which the bank is an eye-catching part in the 1690s, Britain goes on this kind of unbelievable acceleration. It goes off a ski jump after that.

So it's availability of money, like you said, in China and elsewhere and Athens. Availability of money is really important in that. I guess you can give money to these guys in the north of England who are coming up with ever-improved weaving machines, things like that. Right. So the financial revolution sets up the industrial revolution, right? And I do think we live in such a sort of financialized world where it often feels like it's too easy to borrow money, right? It seems like a problem how easy it is to get into debt. But for a long time in a lot of places, you couldn't really borrow

money or it was really expensive to borrow money. And so borrowing money is really useful. It's the most basic thing that finance does, right? There's one person who's like, I got more money than I need right now. And I'd like to have a little more money later. And I'm willing to take some risk. And there's somebody else who's like, I want to build a factory so I can make money. But to do that, I need more money than I have, and I'll pay you back more later. And then you got a bank standing in the middle being like, okay, I'll take the money from the guy who's got too much and give it to the guy who wants more and charge some interest and take a little piece off the top, right? That's the basic, basic banking model. And you need it to have an

industrial revolution, right? You need to be able to lend money to the guy in Manchester who wants to build a factory. And you need money, you need finance, you need a functioning, dynamic financial system for that to happen. Badgett, I don't know, do people talk about Badgett in England? They don't talk about him in the US. We talk about little else, man. England. They don't talk about him in the US. We talk about little else, man. All day. It's like, Badgett, Badgett, Badgett. He was great on this, right? So Walter Badgett was the editor of The Economist in the 1800s. And he was really good about how having just a dynamic financial market made the UK a more powerful country. And it's really true. I mean, it's easy to vilify finance,

and there's a lot of reasonable reasons in many instances to do so, but fundamentally, it's really useful. Why can't everybody have lots of money? Well, in historical terms, almost everybody in the developed world does have lots of money. One of the incredible things that has happened in the West since, say, 1800, since the Industrial Revolution, and even in China in the last 20 years, and in other parts of Asia in the last, whatever, 50 years, is almost everybody has gotten more money, which I think is underappreciated, right? I think we feel like money is zero sum, right? I think we still think of it like gold. Like if you're getting more money, somebody else is getting

screwed. Somebody else is getting less money. But that's not true, right? When we have productivity gains, when we figure out ways to build machines that mean we get more stuff out of a day's work, in fact, everybody can have more money. And in the long run, almost everybody does, In fact, everybody can have more money. And in the 1790s when the French accidentally land in Wales. The Bank of England says, OK, screw this. We're not converting notes to specie anymore, to precious metal anymore. What effect does that have when you just give up the idea that this note represents actual wealth?

Well, so there's two questions. I mean, much of the world was on the gold standard until the Great Depression, right? I mean, the Bank of England was, in fact, on the gold standard in the first part of the 20th century and went off in, I believe it was 1931, certainly in the early 30s. And the United States similarly went off in, I believe, 33. And so the effect that it has really is to give the government more power is one thing it does, right? I mean, the gold standard, basically, just to state it, what the gold standard meant was your currency, whether it was the pound or the dollar or whatever, was convertible to gold at a fixed rate, year in, year out, forever. And it didn't change, right? And it basically worked that way. Ordinary people could go and trade in paper money for gold, and

in times of panic, did. So that proved to be a problem in the Depression because falling prices were driving the Depression. They were causing people in debt to have lower wages, which made them unable to pay their debts. They were causing banks to go bust because people weren't paying back their loans. And so things were getting worse and worse. And what you needed was more money to stop the falling prices so people would stop going bankrupt, so banks would stop going bust. On the gold standard, that was hard to do. Going off the gold standard stopped the fall in prices, allowed governments to

print more money basically, and forever after gave governments a more complete control over money. Can we come to the present day, well, 2008 and also the pandemic. It seems to me that this kind of a new idea that in the event of facing up to mass unemployment or a crisis that requires vast amounts of public spending, the new lesson seems to be, don't worry, just print the money and fire hose it all over the place. It's wild, isn't it? It is wild how much money governments have been printing. And to me, the maybe most underrated money story of the last 10 or 15 years, basically since the 2008 financial crisis, all the way through 2019, 2020 was low inflation. The thing that kept happening was governments kept printing and borrowing. And traditionally, that is inflationary. And yet in Europe, in the UK, in the United States, we had wildly low inflation, mysteriously low. Nobody thought that was going to happen. Unemployment kept coming down, the government kept borrowing and spending, and

inflation stayed low, stayed low, stayed low. And so that low inflation is like the secret sauce. It's the reason that could keep happening. Now, the interesting question now is inflation has popped back up, right? Inflation is not low right now. And so there are sort of different stories about that, right? The central bank's preferred story is, oh, pay no attention to that. That's just transitory is the weird jargony word they use. I would say transient, but that's just passing. That's just all these weird supply shocks, COVID. It's going to go back down. I don't know if it's going to go back down, right?

If it goes back down, great. We're back in our sweet free money universe. If it doesn't go back down, then that era is going to have to end. Speaking of eras coming to an end, we're hearing about cryptocurrency at the moment. Is the era of money and government finally coming to an end? Doubt it. I mean, it's theoretically possible, I guess, right? Cryptocurrency is technologically very clever. It could work as money, but it hasn't yet, right? It's remarkable how little people use it to buy stuff. And also, governments are not going to want to give up their monopoly on money. They're not

going to do it willingly. So is there some world where governments fight cryptocurrency as money, and in the end, it wins and becomes money? I guess, but it seems unlikely, right? Governments are still pretty powerful. They can make laws and arrest people and force them to use dollars and pounds and euros. And if it comes to that, I think they will. And it might not come to that. So what's the future of money? I don't know. I am particularly interested in that question we were just discussing.

It feels more boring than like cryptocurrency on the moon or something. It feels more boring than like cryptocurrency on the moon or something. But will governments continue to be able to print massive amounts of money without inflation is actually a huge, important question that's going to bear on people's lives, right? I mean, the poverty rate in the US over the past year was the lowest it's ever been for the simple reason that the government printed money and sent it to people. Also, it means that things like, as you say, infrastructure, the green revolution, all that becomes doable. Yes. Big if true, as they say on the internet.

Big if true. So, you know, it doesn't have the world historical zest of some secret guy creating a new kind of money that everybody uses, but it might actually happen. The probability is higher. And we're sort of running a giant experiment right now, and I'm excited to see how it comes out. Yeah, so am I. A little period of hyperinflation is- Hyper is a strong word. Hyper. Hyper. Hi. Let's say hi. Well, thank you so much. That was a tour de force. That was amazing. Tell us about your book and your pods and everything. Great. So my book is called Money, From Bronze to Bitcoin, The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. And I make podcasts at a company called Pushkin. I used to work at Planet Money. My new job is at

Pushkin. And I've got a new show coming out next year. Follow me on Twitter, Jacob Goldstein, at Jacob Goldstein. You know what, buddy? I'm doing that right now. Yeah. And by the book. We gave you the book. Money, From Bronze to Bitcoin,

The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. My kid asked me the other day, what is money? And I just sat down on the floor. And wept. Wept. And my wife's like, you're so dramatic. I'm like, this, you don't understand how difficult this is.

The book is short. We're about to get into it. The book is short. I don't know how old your kid is, but it might make for a nice bedtime story. Five. Kid's five. Well, it depends on how he or she feels. Great to have you on the pod, man.

Yeah. And I look forward to your new projects on Pushkin. It was really fun. Thanks for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History.

I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening, is obviously crucial for that project.

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then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. This is History's Heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.