The Blindboy Podcast - The History of Money with David McWilliams

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

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

Play the devil's tennis you windswept canids. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. I have a wonderful treat this week. I have a fantastic guest. This person is... They're an economist. They're an economist who I've had on this

podcast before who goes by the name of David McWilliams. Now if you live in Ireland you know who David McWilliams is because he's Ireland's foremost public economist. Well he's more than just an economist, he's a brilliant storyteller, he's a fantastic storyteller. He's a fantastic storyteller. And he's one of the people who introduced me to the hot take. When I was just out of school, about 18 years of age, as you know I didn't have a very good time in school. I failed my leave insert. 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 never have done homework. I'd have just made my mind up from the start, I'm not smart enough for this economic stuff that has to do with money and numbers. I'm just going to fail this. And I did. I failed economics in the leaving start. 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 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 go, 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 of 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 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 Irish characters that emerge in this new economy. And

when I read it 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 on 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, Giffin 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' 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 boom in 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 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 the class. I was seen as messing. So David McWilliams' writing, it was very important

to me when I got out of school in igniting a feeling of curiosity and also just something as simple as being able to say to myself, you're not thick, you're not stupid. I know you failed economics in the leaving search 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 leaving cert in Ireland, it's treated as a death sentence. You become what's known as a as a God help us. No future, no hope. And it's communicated to you in people's size 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 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 school is over and you're out in the real world and you're an adult and all your friends are going off to college. Then people start to call

you a loser. And I had this little, just this little beating heart inside me that used to say, you know, 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 go to college and study literature. Like people off in college who are 18 and they're studying James Joyce. It used to be really hurtful, it used to feel really hurtful that like I can't do that, I'm not allowed to do that. The system says I'm too stupid to do that. So what I used to

do, I was in a PLC course. 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. Up out in our yard, this coach, it's a university that you need to have a very good leave insert to get into. And I used to go out there when I was about 18 and just like pretend to be a student and I'd walk into the library in University of Limerick. 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, on 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. 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,

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. 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 insert 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 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, wherever 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 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 encyclopedia. I taught myself how to read an adult encyclopedia. I taught myself how to read an encyclopedia 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 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 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, 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 it 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 thick kids who are disruptive. 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 going to have an asthma attack and they just let me stay at home. But looking back, I was avoiding the burnout, I was avoiding the burnout 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 Williams' 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 genes 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. And 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. Blimey, you are you're the reason for me unleashing my own podcast on people. Fuck off. That's true. It's true. I think you'd be branded as the Doki Shelver. I think was your introduction. It was particularly difficult for me. I forgot about that.

Remember that? Doki 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, we were chatting away and you know, you said, you know, what about, you know, doing your own podcast? I said, I'm not too sure. And so so, yeah, you are the reason you are the reason the David McWilliams podcast.

But that was we should do it again, actually. We should do it again on stage was. Yeah, it was great, Craig. It was four or five years ago. You're absolutely right. In Vicar Street. And I want to chat about your most recent book, right? It's to me, it looks slightly different in that. This new book about the history of money, this looks to me that you're looking

really international with this. Yeah, it's I tell you, well, first of all, it's an international publisher. It's Simon and Schuster. All right. OK. 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 blind by. I was thinking of writing a book.

I've been thinking about writing a book about the nature of money and what money does to humans for about 20 years, literally. 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, 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 called money. So it took a long time. Then of course, it is a much more international book because it starts in Africa 20,000 years ago. Yes. And goes all the way up to Bitcoin. And today. And it was an absolute joy to write. It was I spent the pandemic down here in my little cubbyhole reading away and getting 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 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. 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 have a look and see 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 the Renaissance and the Reformation and all this period seen the relationship between money and people and how it changed us and how we are changed by it all the time. And it's been fascinating. It's been a fascinating journey. Was it frightening? Because the thing is, like you are an economist, right? It's a bit like a musician deciding, you know, you're a musician, you dedicate your life to all the different instruments, all the different types of composition. And then you decide I'm going to 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 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 just I just 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, 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. They had, 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 you 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, Lennon, also. Destroyed Russian money at the very, very start of the revolution and deliberately, deliberately, deliberately. So this is an amazing story. So Lennon comes in after the Russian revolution, goes straight to the central bank of Russia and starts printing rubles 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 you say either identity, but also be also B, their grasp on reality. 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 is 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 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, metalworkers, mathematicians who could do the serial numbers, fine artists who could actually copy the art. And 123 disheveled, starving, desperate individual men arrived in Saxon housing concentration camp under one guy called Sally Smulyanov, who was the lead printer. 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 where they forgeries. Could the Swiss bankers verify the notes for him? The Swiss bankers came back after looking at the notes and said, yes, they're real. Your man doubled down and he said, look, I'm still not sure. Can you send them to the Bank of England and see if they can verify it? And amazingly, the Bank of England in London verified the forgeries that were done in Saxon housing for the Swiss bankers who then told the German and the German industrialist who was a Nazi told Hitler and away they went.

Did it happen? Did they try it? Yes, 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 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. They 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? 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 them back. And how did they get them back? They bribed the partisans. With the fake British money. With the fake money. So that's where it went. And at the end of the Second World War,

the Bank of England were so disturbed by the accuracy of these notes that they retired all five pound notes and issued meals. 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, we'll say, a separate timeline where the Luftwaffe did manage to drop just loads of money on London, right? Yeah. What would have happened? Well, so they thought 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. 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 had... Because you don't have scarcity. You don't have scarcity. So Hitler had basically taken... Napoleon dismissed the English as a nation of shopkeepers.

That was his put down. And he said, these people are obsessed by money. And Hitler said, look, what we will do is we will destroy England's resolve from the inside out by using money to 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 at 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 like, I've seen what

happens in Germany, the same thing will happen in England. And I remember I looked at that story and said, that's kind of fascinating because what it does is it shows you that money is more powerful than an army, than a religion, than an ideology. 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 magic 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. They don't understand. They're a bit like in the

same way, for example, as a plumber can tell you how water travels through the pipes of the house, right? They can tell you that all day, right? 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 go to a time before money existed. What are you dealing with? So 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 Belgium Museum of Science about two summers ago and it's a little femur of a baboon. When I say little because it 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 money to me is something that represents a value.

Exactly. So this is here is written proof of a death. Of a death 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 you would scratch off the notch on the on the bone. So that's 20,000 years ago. And and then the next time we meet it is about 5000 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. OK. 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, OK, well, we would have writing is one of these amazing human technologies. OK, I would have thought if I if I hadn't gone and studied this, well,

you know, 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 money to whom. So basically, writing comes from accountancy. I know it's terrible for novelists to know this,

but actually, the 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 is ever written down is a fellow called Cushy. Who was a maker of home brew. Amazingly, he was a small time brewer. And the first evidence we have his name is he owed another fellow money and he had to go and find barley and cereal to pay the guy back.

When you say money, did he own coins or did he own goods? No, he owned goods. You're still using the word money. You were still using because money is value. Money is not OK. Coins money is 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 serpents- 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've 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 would be extended family tribe, all that sort of stuff. Once we settled down, and this is where you see money emerging as we settled down, we went into much more complicated and complex societies. We went into 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 or answers came up with money. So I described 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 400000 years of our existence, yeah, but our hind legs, we were in very small groups. You're getting that Dunbar's number.

It's you're absolutely right. This is exactly. Robin Dunbar. Yes. 150, isn't it? So it's a Robin Dunbar says that that's human. The human brain is 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 that 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, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that what happened was money emerges just at the time when the human brain needed, as I said before, a coping mechanism to deal with complexity. 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. The fire thing is fascinating because anthropologists refer to us for the first 400,000 years of our existence as a pyrophite 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 to scare people with it. You just did a podcast on terrorizing people. We terrorized other animals with fire. We used fire to clear huge swathes of forest. All those sort of stuff.

And socially, this is the interesting thing, blind boy. Socially, fire allowed us to sit around chatting, talking, imagining, looking at... The introspection that comes... Like, it doesn't matter who you are. If there's a fire in front of you before you know it, you're going to daydream. You're absolutely right. And 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 safe 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. You're captivated. I'm just going to pause here so we can have a little ocarina pause. Fascinating stuff there from David McWilliams, but I am conscious that we need to have the ocarina pause. I have with me today my ceramic otter. I'm going to blow into this ceramic otter's anus and you're going to hear the beautiful tones that come out of his mouth and then you'll hear an advert for something while I do this. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market.

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So everybody gets a podcast, I get to earn a living. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or the price of a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. Upcoming gigs, the second of November, I'm in Clare Morris in Mayo, fuck all tickets left for that. Down to about maybe 20 tickets left. Then on the 19th, up in Vicar Street, wonderful relaxed Tuesday

night gig that's selling really quickly. So go get your Vicar Street tickets there for the 19th of November. Then 2025, the 9th of February, I'm in Leisureland in Galway come along to my wonderful Galway gig. Then I'm in Drada in the Crescent Hall on the 21st of February. Then I'm in Belfast in the Waterfront Theatre on the 28th of February. Then April I think there Australia and New Zealand tour pretty much sold out. Australia and New Zealand tour pretty much sold out. Very few tickets left for Melbourne and Sydney because they're bigger venues. Yeah and also as well I forgot to say whatever app you're listening to the podcast on rate the podcast, leave a review and recommend the podcast to a person in real life who you think might enjoy it.

That's the lifeline of this podcast, I think. People in real life who say to a friend, I think you'd like this podcast. This is a pure word-of-mouth podcast. Back to the wonderful chat with the magnificent David McWilliams. Like I said, this is a long conversation, but it's a podcast. You don't have to listen to it all in one. You can listen to the rest tomorrow if you want. We were a pirified species for many hundreds of thousands of years.

One of the contentions in the book is that fire is one of the four elements that the Greeks talked about that were elemental to us. Right. So you've got fire, you've got water, you've got air and you've got earth, the earth, wind and fire sort of idea. The book's idea is that sometime around 4 or 5,000 years ago, we created our own human element called money. 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 plutified species, a species constantly adapting to and adapted by this extraordinary technology for good and bad called money that humans invented as we became much more complicated and as our world became more complicated. 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 them, but we start with the Sumerians, then we go into a crowd called the Lydians. You might, you know, the Midas touch, Midas was a Lydians. You might know the Midas touch. Midas was a Lydian. And again, the story of gold is actually based on a real elemental story that there was a river that flowed through Lydia, which is

kind of what you would call Western Turkey around now, called the Pactylus, which had an electrum in it, an electrum, which was what the Greeks called white gold. And we also see, I don't know, Croesus, you might remember the expression, you know, I remember my granny used to use it as rich as Croesus. Croesus was the king of the Lydians. The Lydians were the first people to use gold and to use coins, to come to your idea of coins. OK, so to use gold. So because that's, I know that salt was used as money. I know seashells was used as money, but gold, is there a link between money and then the scarcity of gold?

Yes, yes. So the Lydians used gold. The Sumerians used gold for adornments, right? For the high priests and jewelry and what have you, right? But the Illidians 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 today. One was the printing of the state on the coin, right? So basically they were the first people to link the state money, which we still have today. And what does that do? That means, OK, 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 on to that because I think it is actually crucial to understand how money is going to evolve and where it's going to go in the future. But the Lydians also made small

coins. So what they figured out was one thing was that money, 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 and philosophy, in architecture, in art.

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

Let's keep that thought, right? Why did they not have? They couldn't feed themselves. It's an amazing story. Oh, OK, go on. So most big empires up to the Greeks were big muscular things, you know, big land masters 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? Greeks are amazing. They couldn't feed themselves. Because they didn't have the land. They didn't have the land. And all, as you're absolutely right, the Greek Republics were tiny, little dotted. Plato described them. It's a lovely expression. 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. There 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 time that you're talking about, to think about profound things, right? Yes. They did it by mining silver. There was a massive silver mine called Laurium, and it is just outside Athens. 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 on 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 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 a democracy is so radical, like nothing like that has 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. The place was the probably ratio of free people to slaves. 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? Because when you look at the Greek gods, right, and all the gods were formed, 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.

They were vengeful. They were, they were vengeful fuckers, 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, they're going to make your life a misery. Right. And they were macho and they were big and they were all powerful and all knowing and they ran the kip.

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 we knock it to heaven, it'll be easier for the camel to get through the eye of the needle than the rich man to get there. This is an incredibly radical idea. And I was thinking, why did this emerge? 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 financialised, what actually was happening also was the 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 remain 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 if you were poor it meant that you were a bad person and if you were rich it meant that you were a good person. Exactly. Okay. So they needed a countervailing ideology to say no. I'm worth something. I'm worth something.

Even though I don't have anything I still have worth. Exactly. And I'm going to create the next life and the next life is where I'm going to get all my rewards. So Jesus emerges also if you think the Apostles spoke Greek they didn't speak Aramaic. Greek was the language of commerce, it was the language of ideas, it was the language that St. 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 300 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. 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 there? 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 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 in effect. Wow. OK. 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 learning word, 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.

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. OK. But when you're dealing with credit, when you're dealing with a promise, 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 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 things are really very old. This is what... Beacons, 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, are 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 of them. And 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. Moving to lead and any other shite that they can put into it, right? To, and of course all the time you get the currencies debased and debased. And for the last about a hundred 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, et cetera. 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 international banking system existed because of the Knights Templars.

So the Knights Templar were this this Christian organisation 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 there were there were protection rights. 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 centre 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. When I was a kid, checkbooks were everything.

People were writing checks for everything. So the first checkbook was issued by the Knights Templars. The angle I came at it, probably an unusual angle, was I've always been interested in mathematics and where it comes from, and particularly the role of zero in changing the power structure of Europe. 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 embrace 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 to positive numbers. It also allows you to deal with very big numbers, 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, et cetera.

Is this when Sicily was under the Islamic caliphate or is it later than that? It's it's it's a little bit later. It was under a Norman. It was under. Right. OK. Yeah. No, actually, the Normans that came to Ireland in 1136. Right. OK. Strongbow and all that carry on. Their cousins went to Sicily. It's quite a fascinating story.

Fuck off, 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, thing. So when the rest of Europe and the Arab world were killing each other in in Norman Sicily, they were living side by side and they were bonded together

largely by commerce. And he said look that's where you say you start 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 competing 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 fucker was talking to them. Right. Wow. They thought they were possessed by the devil. The devil was whispering in their head because how could they figure out the ratio of dates to feckin, you know, to wheat and do this all, it seemed to the Christians in their heads, because they could do it in their heads because

they learned algebra. So they were just cleverer than us, right? That is amazing. Isn't it amazing? 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 learned algebra and he wrote a book called Liber Abaci. 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?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's Al Quahazen, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, I think it's Al-Khwe Hazen. It's KHA. 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. Within like, it's kind of taboo to draw anything that's created by God. So Islamic art tends not to be representation.

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 you get like that's what they invented modern mathematics, basically. They did. And they also invented this style in architecture called Arabesque, which is exactly that. It's absolutely beautiful. Like in two weeks time, I'm going off to Cardoba in Spain, which is

the center of it. It's the old Caliphate from a thousand. I call it hot Limerick because well, it looks like Limerick the same time that the Normans built old Norman Ireland in the eleven hundreds. That's the same time that the Islamic castles are in Cordoba. So they're actually quite similar. 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. Right. Yeah. Just listen to the water. Sit there on your thought and listen to the way in which these the Arabic caliphate understood how water travels, how water gives life, how water reassures and 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 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 I love anything to do with the history of food, whatever the fuck it is, you're gonna 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, paella 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, 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 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 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 not to expose, are you a hidden Jew or a hidden Muslim?

100%. Wow, 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 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, racism, race is completely made up. All humans are the exact same, the exact same. So this idea of there being different races, that's a social construct. 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 Moor Slayer or something like that. I don't know his name, but if you look at the patron saint of Spain, like they're St. 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 saints wrist, the blue veins. So that's where you get blue blood and the origins of racism. It's Spain. Christianity equals white skin. And then, of course, where does Spain go?

They go to fucking America, the slave trade. So a lot of it starts there. Well, I mean, the thing is, like, you know, like I, the way you think about food and the way you think of what you would call the social clues that are emitted from eating, right. And whatever. That's what I've done with money in this book. Yes. I taught myself this story is so much bigger than economics. Right. 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 colonisation. There's a big chapter on Casement, who happens to be a favourite of mine, a favourite individual, maybe one of the most impressive Irishmen. Roger Casement in the history of money. Yeah, he's in the office, a big chapter in Roger Casement. I'll tell you why. Is it because of the 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 Dean's Grange Cemetery, which is a big cemetery here in the south, just in Dean's Grange and around Dundee area. 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, that was the grave of a fellow called John Dunlop. And John Dunlop was the guy who invented the pneumatic tire.

Wow. Hadn't been from John Dunlop, Casement would never have been in Congo. Is it a rubber connection? It's the rubber connection. He made the tire. It's amazing. And had it not been 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, 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 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. And Casement would have been buried in the family plot in Dean's Grange had he not been hanged in Penfield Prison and his body was not returned to Ireland in 1966. And this always intrigued me. And then I decided to look into Robert, look into Casement, look into the trial of Oscar Wilde, look into the trial of Casement is involved.

I mean, Casement was like a one man walking NGO. He they call Casement that they call him that 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 Irish man who was a he was a liar, wasn't he? No, he was he was he was an unusual fellow. He was he was he emerged as a sort of a civil servant.

He went down to Africa and worked for the British Foreign Office, taking notes in effect for a long time, 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 Isman 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 home town. 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 around the Congo basin. And then he comes back to Ireland and he says, okay, hold on a second.

There's a similar cultural colonialism going on here. And he becomes radicalized and by 1913 he's a member of the IRB. 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 in what is really the trial of the century. He was a bit of a celebrity as well, wasn't he, you see? 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. It's 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 that way as soon as it 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 defense, which is amazing when you think about it. And but as you said, the the British, I think it's MI5 or whatever was the forer made sure that whoever was going to be outraged by these diaries got sight of them. 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. What's the connection with Dunlap, though? Dunlap was a vet. And Dunlap'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, the wheels, right. They haven't got rubber in 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, and he retired as a sort of a very, a very affable elderly gentleman in Dublin.

And he was 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 wouldn't be buried right beside each other. The coincidence of that is insane.

Isn't it insane? It's insane. And so that's up in Dean's Grange Cemetery, you know. But what happens is you're writing a book like this. It's a bit like you do in the pod. You know, you go off little tangents and little tributaries and you're on a river and you go, you start to go up a stream and a little tributary and then you're 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, the story of industry is involved in the story of mercantilism, it's involved in the story of colonialism. And what also intrigued me was the notion that botanists were at the frontline of colonialism. When we think about botanists, we always think, you know, people who are, you know, sort of buffony 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 gota parcha.

Have you ever heard of gota parcha? No, what's that stuff? Oh my God. So gota parcha, it's a bit like rubber and it could only be grown in Indonesia with trees that were very, very old. Right. And got a part. 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,

OK, and especially under seas cables. The only substance that could sufficiently insulate the undersea telegraph was this stuff called gota partja. 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 under seas fucking telegraph cables. So you had to have this got a part 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 got a part. That was it. And I think what replaced it was the vulcanization of Robert, that

process. But got a part was it. And I think what replaced it was the vulcanization of Robert, that process. But God of Parcha was a plant. So what you're talking about there, botany and empire, the God of Parcha was, it's in Ulysses, in Ulysses, one of the characters mentions God of Parcha boots. God of Parcha was so ubiquitous that it used to be just a phrase that someone would say, have you got your God of Parcha referring so ubiquitous that it used to be just a phrase that someone would say, have you got your Gara Parcha referring to a type of boot? I love that. And I found out what Gara Parcha was.

I was in an antique shop in Limerick and I looked in the window and there was a dagger and the dagger was about 100 years old and it said Gara Parcha 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 stories, 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 conquistadors, 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.

But the Indians, I'm going to call them Indians, the Native Amazonians used a rubber ball. So they played a type of football that they used with their elbows. And this is all true. So they played a type of football that they use with their elbows, right? OK. 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. Wow. In the medieval age. So 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 it 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 definitely want to speak to you about, right, and because it's something I know nothing about and I'm very curious about, which is, let's move into the 20th century with money, OK? Yeah. 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.

Yeah. 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 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 of it. Oh, 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, OK, we link our currency to the dollar. So implicitly, there was a link to gold that was abandoned in 1971. That's your Fort Knox. Yeah, exactly. 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 armament. Nixon wanted to make up money. Let's invent some money. It was basically Saigon or gold. You got a choice between Saigon or Fort Knox and he chose Saigon. Right. And 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 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 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 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 imagination and 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 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 bird shit parallel here, man, because this is you're going to love this. Oh, go, go, go. So what you're describing about there, right, with with 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 that you can say the exact same thing for nitrogen. OK, so. If humans in order to grow crops throughout the years, you need to be able to fertilize. But the thing with fertilizer was 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 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 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. You start going to Panama to these islands and they start depleting all the bird shit and they bring it back to Europe and now we're able to grow more food than 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 barge shit. We start to run out of these islands, these barge shit islands. And then they start freaking out. Where are we going to get nitrogen from?

They dug up Waterloo. They dug up the battlefield of Waterloo to look for the bones of horses and soldiers so they could get the nitrogen from that. By about 1903, there was a genuine risk of a global famine because we had lived off nitrogen resources that were now completely depleted. And there was actually a good chance of a global famine. And then a German chemist comes along called Fritz Haber. 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 just like you go from standard. That's what fucking Fritz Haber did. But that's also a reason why we have eight billion people, because since 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 story of humanity. It's it's got it that money needed to break away from what you were called the constraint of gold or the constraint of nitrogen, that's 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 extra ordinary discoveries by our German chemists, it always seems to be German chemists do a lot of this discovery in fairness to them, right? Then money adapts to that.

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 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 the answer 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

to put up big up against us. So you know, the way I end the book is just saying, 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 seemed 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 percent of the Kenyan economy is done by M-Pesa, which is money as mobile phone credit, which is like it. 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. So this is basically as happened in Ireland for hundreds of years. People left the country, went to the city, sent money home. But in Kenya, what you'd have to do is you'd have to pay a bus driver. Put the bag of cash into the bus in Dublin and send it all the way down wherever. 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 not, rather than send money down to their mother in the rural areas what they would do is the center mobile phone credit. She would use the credit this comes here back to your idea value right she would use the credit to buy milk and use the credit to buy stuff and this was beginning this is a way of transferring money that people said hold on a second. And this was beginning, this is a way of transferring money that 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,

and all this stuff orchestrated by big American superstars and Kim Kardashian and tech bros. What's much more interesting to me. And that's only, it's only a grift, by rich people to get poor people to power up 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. I would 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 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. 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 the 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 you 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 petrodollars are? OK, so petrodollars were dollar. Yeah, we're dollars do with Euros or petrol. Okay. Just so you know, right? They were originally dollars backed by petrol. So like everything, you remember your gold idea? Your gold is just the collateral that backs, I promise.

Okay. So you know, you're going to have to have a lot of money to get your gold back. And you're going to have to have a like everything, you remember your gold idea? Your goal is just the collateral that backs a promise. OK, 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. Well, feels happy about that, right?

It makes the promise real. Did it somehow make America really powerful? The dollar makes America really powerful. And the reason is the following is in economics, having the reserve currency. So that mean by having the concert currency that everybody wants to use and everybody. So, for example, when you go, let's say to your Kenyans, right, the taxi driver will talk to you straight away from the airport, wherever you're going about the rate of exchange with the dollar.

They won't talk about the euro or the yen or whatever, right? Because everybody uses the dollar to 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 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, what do they demand they get paid in? What do 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 else does. All right, so we leave it at that. That was I could have talked to you for another four fucking hours. I know. I know.

We like Joe Rogan. We're going on for days. Yeah. And thank you so much for that. That was great, Craig. 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, you glorious cunts. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan and genuflect to a crawl.. you you... Thank you.