David McWilliams - The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

28:33And I believe that was a reaction to money. In effect, it was a message of Christianity. It was a message of love for the losers in the monetary economy who needed something to believe in. And that, I think, is an interesting way of examining where he came from, why he came at the time he came from. and why his message, the message of Christianity, was so unbelievably popular. Sure. You also explain Pompeii, because obviously, you know, Vesuvius buried the place. So we have quite an archaeological record. Can you just kind of teach our listeners, you know, as you move forward to Rome, how celebrated money was in a place like Pompeii?

29:18Yeah. So you have these two countervailing narratives, the Christian narrative, and then you have the Roman narrative going on at the same time. So Pompeii is 79 AD. Just to put the Christian man, you know, it's about 30 years after Christ dies, 40 years after Christ dies. By the way, at this stage, the Pompeians hadn't got the memo of the Meikle and Hurt the Earth. They hadn't got that yet, right? So they were partying, they loved money, etc., etc. But then once we start to excavate money, what you begin to see are an extraordinary amount of small little shrines to a god with this little small wings on his feet.

30:02A kind of a flinty guy, a deal-doing guy, a hustling guy. And he was the Roman god of money and his name was Mercury. And so what you see is this extraordinary devotion to Mercury, to commerce. In fact, commerce comes from com-merx, with Mercury. Our word commerce comes directly from the Roman god. What you see is hordes, hordes of coinage. What you see in Pompeii is evidence they were trading incredibly far around the world, like so far out to India, for example. So these were our deeply, deeply commercial people. And then when you begin, as you begin to excavate intellectually as well as physically, you realise that the Roman Empire wasn't just an empire of conquest, it was an empire of credit.

30:52The Romans had a highly sophisticated credit system. They had booms, they had busts, they had banks, they had speculations, they had insurance policies. They had a stock market. They managed to turn the Ronan Empire into, in effect, one large rights issue for the Roman upper class. They had IPOs. They had all sorts of things that we would now recognise as not just the rudiments, but the building blocks and the sophisticated building blocks of a financial architecture. And that I found really fascinating. The very first credit crisis came in 33 AD, actually the year Jesus died, under the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.

31:41The Romans had a beautiful idea about the notion, the mercurial notion. Even mercurial comes from mercury. There's actually money can slip through your fingers, right, of money. It had this expression called pecunia non olet, which means money does not smell. And they took that to mean that the provenance of money doesn't really matter as long as it works. There's a lovely story about how they taxed pee or piss or urine and all that sort of stuff in the book. Yeah, for the ammonia? The intellectual idea was that they understood the power of money and they braced it. And I also believe that the reason the Roman Empire collapsed was because money died.

32:23They had a series of hyperinflationary moments which so debased the currency that when you get to the end of the second century AD, into the third century AD, as the Roman Empire's borders are beginning to atrophy, what you see also is a series of monetary crises, which undermined, again, the faith in the system. It undermined the power of the empire. It undermined the brand of Rome, the credibility of Rome, the integrity of Rome. And, you know, before you know it, it's all over. When you mention in your book, which is a really fun story, You talk about how Tiberius, obviously, he created the credit crisis in 33 for political purposes, as you kind of point out, and then used it to his advantage to accrue power, which plays at your other big story idea, which is money.

33:19Money is provided power by the state because, in effect, it controls the people. And that's what Tiberius really showed. On that idea, let's fast forward to the Dark Ages, right? Because Europe really went backwards compared to that structure that we just talked about in Rome. Who do you think was really to blame for that? I mean, you talk about you really had the church being as a focal point, but it's not like a church who's emanating ideas and go read your Bible. It's very much like there's not much information passed. You're in your locality, and the monastic orders kind of dominate society at that time.

33:59Yeah. No, I mean, again, I come back. The central thesis of the book is that money and human progress march hand in hand because money allows us to communicate together, to create together, but also gives us the incipient propulsion to innovate. It gives us that structure. So if you believe that thesis, well, then something's very interesting, which is what you see in the Dark Ages, we see the disappearance of art, of poetry, of all these sort of highly civilized inventions that the Romans had and were using all the time, right? But you also see the complete disappearance of money. There is no coinage.

34:40There is no minting of coins in Western Europe from about 500 AD. When I say no, there's no significant minting of coins. from a 500 AD to a 1000 AD. And when money disappears, all these other expressions of human civilization disappear too. So this is an amazing, again, I don't over-egg the pudding. I don't say this is absolute correlation. I say, isn't it interesting? Isn't the co-evolution of these things interesting? And then when money begins to re-emerge in the, around the thousands, then you begin to see the European economy begin to kick in again. When you mentioned, back to your point on the church's role, you mentioned the mega churches that were built around starting in 1000 AD.

35:24And it's like, as you were explaining that in your book, you could just see the, hey, the church, right, effectively the state and the currency provider in some respects need to build churches. So they got to raise money. So what do you got to have? You got to have coins. It all makes sense. Yeah. And I mean, what I always think as a European, you know, like architecture is evidence. So where you don't have written evidence, you look around at the landscape, wherever you are. Here in Ireland, you look around the landscape and say, okay, who was building these churches? Okay, you guys called the Normans, right?

35:57Okay, well, they obviously had a lot of money to build those churches. So what was happening in the society that allowed the big guys to acquire these, or to build these extraordinary structures? structures. Some of them took 200 years to build, like, you know, Notre Dame in France. What was happening? There must have been some surplus being thrown off in the agricultural world. Okay, now what was that? Then you realise that these are all come about 100 years after the invention of the metal plough. The metal plough increases agricultural yields, humans starve less readily or less... Well, I would say that the history of humanity is the history of hunger as well.

36:39And so then you say, okay, they're not starving. Okay, so if they're not starving, they're having more kids. Those kids are living. There's a surplus. And then suddenly you realize, okay, there's an economic surplus, but how do they capture that? And then you look at coin evidence, and what you see is the re - emergence of the minting of silver coins, mainly out of Germany in Europe, a place called Goslar, where they minted many, many tens of thousands of silver coins. And again, And you go, yeah, wow. And then you begin to see again, as money emerges and re-emerges, then you see places becoming small little urban centers, people coming to market towns, those market towns having little mints, those market towns trading with each other.

37:26And then you track the currencies around and you realize, wow, Vikings were trading out of Ireland all the way to the Caspian Sea. Sure. That the world was getting smaller as money was reemerging. And all those things are essential to understanding why humanity and money march together in an innovative whirlwind, which propels us forward all the time. I agree. So let me pivot that because you're right on a topic that you touch on in the book. Let's talk about the Malthusian trap, right? Obviously named after John Malthus. I agree with what you just said. That's why I've always had trouble with the idea of Malthusian economics in general.

38:14Wasn't it just a money trap from too little liquidity that caused what we look at as Malthusian problems back then? Wow, that's an interesting question Particularly as you're talking to an Irishman in the west of Ireland Which is the only country that really experienced a Malthusian moment We are the exception that proves the rule That, you know, Ireland We're the country that actually became over-dependent on one crop The potato We became a unidimensional, highly dependent country That crop failed And as Malthus would say, then Bob's your uncle the rest of Irish. Irish-American history is a Malthusian history.

38:55But Irish-American history is rather unique. It didn't happen elsewhere. I think that the problem with Malthusian... To your point, Malthus would say, therefore all the Irish died and the system corrected itself in a way. But that's not what happened to the Irish. They proliferated everywhere else in the world. Exactly. Malthus was wrong. Yeah, exactly. He was completely wrong. They followed the money, as you could say. But then we followed the money to New York City and for there and Boston and Philadelphia and the rest is history, you know. And so Malthus was wrong because he underestimated the extraordinary innovative power of collective human innovation, right?

39:41So that humans – but he was right in one way is that – and this is what gave Darwin and this is what I found fascinating because I do think the economy is a big evolutionary ecosystem. I think the economy has got more to do with biology than it has with physics. And I think economists in general, my tribe, has become enamored with physics and therefore has missed some of the great, great moments because in effect, we started with Schumpeter, that it's the creative gales of destruction that define the healthy economy. Economy is never at equilibrium because an equilibrium means the economy is inert or asleep or snoozing.

40:21The economy, it's on 24-7 all the time. You know it, I know it. If you're doing well, you're doing well just for now. Somebody else prettier, better looking, clever, rich or smart is coming up behind you. This is the way. It's an evolutionary process. And what interests me about Malthus was that Malthus did give Darwin the idea, and this is fascinating, that Darwin was a great man for collecting data. But he wasn't a very good theorist. And Darwin got his biological theories from economics, from Malthus's book, because what Malthus said was that, yes, the Irish will die, but they will also adapt their behavior.

40:59And the adapting their behaviors, they will emigrate to the United States. They will change. They will, right? That once there's a big event, humans adapt, and it's that very adaptation which allows us to survive. Sure. So Darwin is looking for a theory of specialization and a theory of evolution. And he goes back to Malthus and he says, that's it. It's that all species adapt. And it's the species that adapts the best that explains the evolutionary nature of the world. And in a way, I find it sort of quite joyful as an economist who believes that the world is more like an evolutionary ecosystem than a physics laboratory.

41:48That the greatest biologist of the world did get his rudimentary arguments or his constructive arguments from Malthus, or at least the bits of Malthus at work. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance. If you're an investor who plays the long game and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit SmeadCap.com. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

42:26Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead Funds Distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. And the other part of your story that I love, because I mean, we know this to be true, but you said it, which I appreciate because to your point, a lot of economists would never say this. You talk about gossip. There's like the human form of gossip as an important piece of money. And you use the story of you growing up as a kid in Ireland in the 1980s.

43:05Explain like the gossip that you'd be dealing in at that time that you mentioned in your book. Yeah. So like money is social, right? It's a social technology. You know, it brings us all together. And gossip is the way in which humans communicate. We communicate in many ways. many ways but the the most surreptitious the most exciting the most delightful way we communicate is via gossip and if you look at any for example boom bust in any sort of market it's actually a gossip driven event it's a fomo driven event it is a fear of missing out so my god did you see that's going up or this guy this guy right so the way i look at gossip is i i think that once you realize that at the core of humanity of the economy is the human being is the people making the human decisions every single day then you realize that notions like for example economists will tell the kids you know when they come into university and i see it and i try to bash it out of them but so what's one of the first laws of economics and the kids will say well we learned last year man is rational i'm like really man is rational what does that mean oh man is cold and scientific and unencumbered by moods and as logical and mathematical have you ever met a human like that no yeah would you go for a drink with someone like that you wouldn't right we're actually irrational right and the irrationality is amplified by the fact that we all communicate together all the time we get excited together we get giddy together we move away together and i think in the book i was talking about emigration and you know when when kids when kids in our street went to london or new york right this is way before the internet way before mobile phones yeah a guy would go off and he'd send a letter home right or somebody else would go to new york and they'd fly back and say jesus your man who mc williams is doing brilliantly over there and that gossip would go around the street to the younger kids.

45:17So we were on a big estate of, let's say, 100 homes, let's say five kids in every home. So it's 500 kids, right? So it's like, I used to call it, it was like a big reservation, right? Our street. Irish reservation. I've heard that one before, but that's good. Everyone's flirting away, chatting away, doing their thing. But the gossip had this amazing propulsive power because you'd hear about a guy doing well or a guy, you know, he's got a good job, he's got good money, he's buying drinks for everybody. And it was the gossip that propelled us, that encouraged us, that coaxed us to leave so that we would become the source of the gossip.

46:01And this is the way I think humans behave. We're just a social, we're just an animal that chats. We're just a chatty ape. Chats away. So on that, you talk about Saracen magic, and this is kind of, to your point, the gossipy nature of this, where you have a collision of people in places like Sicily, right? You have the Normans, who you'd mentioned just a few minutes ago, who had gone there and they're running into all these cross cultures. Since the church dominated things like currency and really the people, they didn't have a notion of zero because like with God, why would you need a zero, right?

46:39Plain and simply. But yet the Pope knew what Saracen magic was. Is that a fair way of thinking about it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Saracen magic is what the church dismissed algebra as, okay? They were very, very perplexed by the fact that Arabic traders in Sicily seem to be able to do mathematics in their heads, which they could, using fractions, using ratios, using algebra. And algebra had come from the Arabic countries, but it hadn't come from the Arabic countries. It had actually come from Persia, which the Arabs conquered in the 6th century, but they had borrowed it from India. And the reason the Indians were quite happy with zero is that zero is the nothing.

47:28It's the void. It's nothingness, right? When you look through zero, there was nothing there. And this scared Christian theology because we believed in proof, we believed in geometry, we believed in God. So, or a form of God. Whereas the Hindus, they had no problem in the void, etc. So, this weird technology gets transferred to mathematical technology from the Persians to the Arabs and then to the Arabs to Europe in Sicily. But what the Arabs could do was use zero they could count in very big numbers. They could use basic algebra in their heads and therefore they could express, you know, a kilo of dates in terms of a kilo of sugar or a kilo of cotton in terms of, I'm using the weights of kilos, it wasn't kilos, but whatever the weights was, in terms of a day's wages.

48:24And they could do this really quickly and they could use mathematics in their brain because they could use zero. and they were taught zero. So the way in which bourgeois kids were taught in Christian countries in the classical period, just before the Renaissance, was we were taught the classics. So we were taught Cicero and Plato. We looked back all the time. Yeah. Whereas the Arabs, because they were using mathematics, were looking forward. So we were using deductive reasoning. They were using inductive reasoning. They were much more scientific. And the church got scared of this because the church probably understood that once you release the merchant armed with money and algebra, what you do is you create a parallel power in society.

49:16Prior to that, there had been the king and the church. the renaissance and the rise of merchant classes and commerce puts in a third character called the merchant and in many ways the history of power since the renaissance has been a fight in society between the kings the priests and the merchants sure and these three classes are still very much dominant today. You mentioned, you point out some interesting things. You throw out the idea that Gutenberg wasn't just going into the Bible business for God. He was seeking a prophet. And then also to your point about what you just said, we also can see from history, and you touch on this slightly, but I know there's been other books on it, how the church figured this out and said, well, we better get into business too if the merchants are in business, which is why Jacob Fugger and Pope Pius II ended up creating St.

50:20Peter's Basilica, not all for the sake of the church. Absolutely. So the church got to realize, okay, what I call the priestly class, right? The Brahmin class, if you will. Okay. They had to figure out, well, where's the power base? If these merchant guys are coming up, you know, and they're financing some sort of arrogant, rather desolate aristocrats, we should back these merchants, like the Fugars and the Medicis. These are the guys who've got the real power because they understand money and they are using their brains rather than their brawn. And these are the guys who've got the networks all around the world.

51:01So if we want to be relevant, we've got to get into bed with these guys. And in a way, this is the story of the Reformation. It's the story of, you know, certainly Northwest Europe and the Mediterranean from, let's say, broadly 1500 all the way through to now, which is a fascinating story. I actually should have. When I look back at it now, Fugger was a man I should have had an entire chapter on and the Fugger family. Well, his whole life – I mean back to your point about the silver mines in Germany. They were involved in the silver mines in Germany. He was effectively – the king had given him a royal charter if I remember correctly, and then the king's making money off of Jacob Fugger.

51:44I mean it made – to your point, it was either church or state doing business with Fugger at different times. So I agree. I think he's probably the, you know, for someone that came in contact with him only a couple of years ago, he might be the most understudied person in the history of the Western world, in my opinion. I think you're right. And when I look back and I look back at the book and I'd finished it, you know, and I just thought, ah, I missed Fugger. I missed him. He should have been there. Except that you touched, like, you did a wonderful job in your portion on the Netherlands and Amsterdam.

52:17and I never knew that Peter the Great went to Amsterdam, which was a great story because he's like, I can see the success of what's going on. Like as I'm reading your book, he's like, I can see the success, but he knows what he'd have to risk as czar to provide that. And it kind of reminds me of like Chinese capitalism. We'll take a little bit of it, but we sure don't want to try it all. No, exactly, exactly. And actually, that's a very good analogy. I hadn't thought of that because, you know, as you know, the Dutch were the first people to elect out the king to redundancy. Yeah. Because they knew that with money and commerce, and if you want to liberate the human commercial mind, you've got to liberate the human mind in all sorts of other ways.

53:02And, you know, what Peter the Great couldn't get his head around was how this tiny little country that had no resources, no resources at all, right? They even had to rent their armies. There's so few of them. how they could become so rich. And he was the emperor of the biggest landmass, the most slaves, the biggest army, and Russia was poor. And he forgot that there's another thing going on. But it's a fascinating story how he went there undercover. It's incredible. I'd never heard that story before. And so as I read your book, again, like I said, you're putting all these breadcrumbs out and it's like, wow, I got to go way deeper on that.

53:40That is a great story. And so I will probably be separately emailing you saying, hey, what are your two or three best sources on that? Here's another thing I really liked because, again, I was thinking about there's a lot of things in your book that you're picking up and then setting down for the reader. But there's a lot more connection, I think, in your book than I think a lot of people would just assume on its face. So you talk about the idea that there's really only two investors out in the world. There's momentum investors and value investors. okay and you point out how credit can change these things and kind of the the repercussions of those two phenomena but that's kind of simply you put you know that's what it is and this is kind of hitting me right now but couldn't it also be explained that therefore momentum is just the mythos and value is just the logos that's a great way of putting it i i would love to have been able to come up with that myself cole but you came up with it you're absolutely right okay that's exactly Yes.

54:34Well, because I said – just use today's context as an example. Let me try and maybe say the mythos. The mythos of today, we're coming out of the mythos of American exceptionalism and the dominance of the US dollar and the dominance of American capitalism. And that's kind of like the mythos. And I say that because to your point, I've been in Thailand in the last year and I've heard people say that mythos, right? And it's like, okay, but that's the mythos. The question is, what is the Lagos? And the question is, what are we going to learn in the Lagos period? But I almost think of it as like the pendulum swings, right?

55:10So in Europe today, you know, we are, I would argue, we're seeing like the Lagos of things. We're seeing pretty matter-of-fact things happen in, say, some of the capital markets. They're surprising to people because it doesn't really fit the mythos of what people have been believing, if that makes sense. Well, I think that, you know, if we grab that analogy and go with it, you know, the mythos of Europe is the beauty, the history, the culture, the architecture, the quality of life. I was just in Switzerland, you know, just at the weekend, you know, it still is an extraordinarily beautiful place to live, maybe the best place in the world to be born, etc.

55:50Yeah. But we are being attacked physically by Russia, industrially by China, and the United States, who used to be our best mate, is no longer our best mate. And so the logos for us is this new world that we Europeans, just to take your analogy, we have to wake up, we have to figure out what do we do? We've got Russia in the East. We have America who's looking the other way in the West. And we've got China eating our industry on an hourly basis. And that is, maybe we're further along than the United States because the United States, the mythos was American power, etc. But America still is powerful.

56:41It still is a superpower. It still is in medical technology, in high tech, in biotech. it's still very very far away from the rest competition wise sure but we in europe are very much waking up to the cold and rather unpleasant feeling of logos sure because it's a very cal it becomes a very calculated view they have to take versus to your point kind of like a warm fuzzy you know everything's going to work out and the united states will always be on our side and that warm fuzziness is very gone. It's gone completely. You don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but you tell this story. You talk about Washington quieting the whiskey rebels at that time.

57:28In your mind, is that at all like Trump sending troops into these cities that are dangerous? It's very, very similar. Okay. I thought so too, but I just wanted to ask your opinion on it because it seemed like, wait a second, there's precedence to this because Washington did it for these guys in Pennsylvania that didn't want to pay a tax on their whiskey. I was fascinated by the whiskey revolution in the States. I hadn't thought about it and somebody alerted to it and I said, well, that's interesting. Let's get into that. Let's have a look at that one. Your other thing that touched that same chapter was when Hamilton nationalized the colonial debt, which as you pointed out, it created this breadth and liquidity to the federal market that if the states had traded on their own, the federal market would have never had that kind of liquidity.

58:13Yeah, you'd have been like Europe with our 17 ,000 bond markets or whatever we have, our 27 national bond markets. We should have one bond market. Correct. Right? And then we'd have massive liquidity and then we could raise money very easily. We could have a vehicle for European savers, all that stuff, right? Yeah. So basically you have Hamilton. Washington, you know, I'm not an expert in American history, but seemed to me to be a classic politician. He's a little one step forward, one step backward. Let's bring the guys with us. Hamilton, on the other hand, was much more of a radical. And Hamilton says, look, we are building not just a country that has got a manifest destiny that is separate from the world.

58:58We're trying to build a big federal bloc that at some stage will compete with the Europeans in capital markets, in industry, etc. We don't want to be some agricultural idyll, you know, that maybe Jefferson preferred or what have you, right? We've got to play the game. And playing the game is knocking heads together. And playing the game is going into the States, in that case, Pennsylvania, and saying to these whiskey guys, listen, lads, you want your little potstills, that's all good. But you've got to pay tax. You've got to pay tax to us. and of course Washington was very much well you know let's persuade them but Hamilton was like no we need to get a thing called the US Federal Army to go in and kick a few heads and impose our law, federal law and I think that he also saw the dollar as this mechanism by which Americans could create an asset that could unify a very disunified country so I think Hamilton the more I read about him, the more I thought about him, was an exceptional stabilizer.

1:00:08And all revolutions need stabilizers. It's all great to have a revolutionary, but you need a guy who comes in at the fire and says, well, what are we doing all this stuff for? And he stabilized things. Hey, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on this show. You know, we recently hit the top 10 in investing podcasts on Apple Podcasts, and even number one in the business category in several countries. As you may know, this show is brought to you by Smead Capital Management. Smead Capital Management understands how frustrating and illogical the stock market can be.

1:00:40If you're searching for funds with a proven track record, give the Smead funds a look. Or better yet, reach out at SmeadCap.com. And don't forget to mention your fan of the podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead Funds Distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. Capitalism creates incredible products. It's funny, because of the bicycle mania of the 19th century in the UK, I'm quite aware of John Dunlop, of Dunlop Tires, who's obviously a fellow countryman, and he's from Ireland, where he wanted to create a bike for his son.

1:01:31And so that's what created the pneumatic tire as we know it. But as you point out, the place that you could most easily extract rubber was in the Congo and enter King Leopold stage left. And I remember in grade school, we had to read a book by Adam Hochschild called King Leopold's Ghost, which really speaks to the atrocities of the time. How do you think about, it's kind of like, this is one of the truly physics moments of capitalism, in my opinion, where it's like Newton's third law for every action. There's an equal and an opposite reaction that took place there. Obviously, we created new products.

1:02:09There was profit that was created out of that. The negative reaction was there was these atrocities and really victims that came out of that. How do you think about the kind of discussion of that? Well, what I wanted to do in the book was look at, as well as the upsides and the extraordinary positive stories around money, I also wanted to look at the negative stories around money. How when Europeans decided to go out in the mid-19th century and colonize, particularly Africa, what people who looked like you and me, right? We might not have the same accent, but we looked like them. Yeah. Did pretty horrible things to people who didn't look like us, right?

1:02:56Sure. And one of the fascinating things was that I had always thought that botany was one of the bridesmaids of colonialism. That what actually happened was throughout this. So if you think of cotton, think of sugar, these are all plants. So new plants that were discovered in the new world in America and whatever, which changed the way the world looked, which had colonialism, slavery, etc. But an example was the rubber boom and the extract of nature and how it was extracted in Congo under the Belgian stateling called the Belgian Free State or the Congo Free State in the late 19th century, early 20th century was a story worth telling.

1:03:45there were two Irish heroes in it the reason there aren't many Irish people in the book so there's a couple of Irish heroes in it it has to have an Irish flavour one was John Dunlop the innovator who came up with pneumatic tyres and he just basically says well if we put air into this rubber we may well make the driving experience a little less harsh but once they figured that out you had air and rubber not in just bicycles but in trucks and tractors and everything and a guy called Roger Casement who was an Irish revolutionary hero who exposed the extraordinary exploitation of the local people in Congo.

1:04:24And I think the story, it's the base story of Apocalypse Now. It's the base story of Heart of Darkness. It's worth telling, I think, Cole, to just show us what an unfettered human obsession with profit alone can do and why we need to realize that money is complicated because humans are complicated. Humans do horrible things to each other, sometimes in the name of profit, in the name of money. But it's actually what happened in Congo, you could argue, was the basis for or the foundational crime of the decolonialized movement, which is one of the greatest movements of the 21st century, the decolonized movement.

1:05:13I think of it, I mean, I'll use a more current example. The internet is incredible. And what a great way to find prices and markets and all these things and the spread of information, et cetera.

1:05:29The, how do I want to put it? The indentured nature of OnlyFans is a really bad thing. It just is. It's not good for us. and I'm sure some people really disagree with what I just said but the truth is it's no different than the Congo. It caused people to be completely subject to things that we don't think are best off for society and that's highly contentious to say today but I think in 100 years we'll look at it like prostitution, hopefully but much like we didn't look at the Congo like that at that time and years later we say, you know, that probably wasn't the best idea. The other way, you know, you mentioned that Lenin considered colonialism like peak capitalism.

1:06:10I don't agree with that, even though I'm sure I disagree with Lenin on a lot of things, because ultimately less humans and less humans that have freedom always hurts money. Yeah, I think what Lenin was saying, Lenin was, as I always say about Marx, and Lenin, Marx is amazing because he wrote the most successful, unsuccessful book ever written, right? It was, you know, Das Kapital, probably the most successful or influential publication in the last two centuries in terms of what it did to galvanize political movements in the 20th century and still now in the 21st century. But actually, if I could book that if you actually really agonize and interrogate makes no sense at all on any level and is a profoundly misdiagnosis of the human condition.

1:07:00But be that as it may, and as an Irishman which is probably the only European colony. We were colonized. I do think that colonialism, and I see what happened to us over 400 years, was indelibly associated with a form of freewheeling capitalism that regarded the plunder of other people's resources for somebody else's gain as being fair game. So it wasn't that Lenin was right, but I think that colonialism and that idea of robbing other people's resources that are not yours and excusing that under the altar of profit is morally dubious. It doesn't mean that the anti-colonial movement has produced knights in shining armor or angelic leaders.

1:07:58It hasn't. It's produced its own fair share of appalling creatures. but as a general rule, you'll find it very hard to get an Irishman to be pro-colonial. Sure. And I totally agree. I just say it because I also think of other things like, you know, where you find the proliferation of money, you find freedom. And I don't think anyone would argue colonialism was freedom to a lot of people, to your point. And so I think it's like, you know, back to, you know, let's use China. Can you be capitalistic and not really believe in money. I think China proves that. You don't really believe in the power of money.

1:08:32You believe in doing business for profit, but that's not money and that's not freedom in my mind. And those are, I think those can be confused. Let me ask you, I loved your beer hedgers. Your beer hedgers was awesome because to your point to start this discussion, it takes the economist and says, listen, you can do all the surveys you want and you can produce all the graphs and to your point, physics relationships, but the guys who drink beer on Friday night, they know what's going on better than you do. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this story comes from when I was an economist in the Central Bank. We had a currency crisis.

1:09:08Our governor said, well, David, you guys go out there and explain to the people why there'll be no devaluation. And the people are talking about devaluation are wrong. And we've got all the economic theories and Ireland's part of the European Union. And we've got this massive balance sheet and we can defend ourselves. And that was all very well. And it sounded great on the news, or in the financial pages of the newspapers, or in the academia, or in talking to brokers and investors, right? But meanwhile, all the guys who drink beer on a Friday night said, hold on a second, this currency is about to collapse.

1:09:42Yeah. So I'm going to go to Northern Ireland with our just about to collapse Irish currency and buy beer today because it's going to be more expensive tomorrow once the currency collapses. So you get a run on beer, which is the, and these are cops and soldiers and guys who work in construction companies and bus drivers. They get the economy better than all economists. They know what's going on. You can't fool them. And it's the same in America. They know what's going on. Right? Yeah. And we can talk about all our theories and all that. But, you know, you go to a bar, you go to, you talk to guys and very quickly you realize they've got it sussed.

1:10:22Yeah, I agree. You mentioned since the end of gold, the number of children per mothers in low-income countries has fallen from five to 2.4. The dark ages show in your story that people with no money was bad. Might we prove that money with no people is the same thing? I think we should probably end here. It's been a fascinating conversation, Cole. I think you're absolutely right. And that is the massive, massive demographic reality that is facing our world, the Western world, which is not necessarily going to be solved by simply opening the doors to people from the rest of the world to come in.

1:11:10I agree, because that doesn't change the world. That just changes your country's population. Exactly. So I think we have concluded that. I think it's a very good way to conclude. I think that that is a challenge. The demographic challenge, if money is a sort of a reasonably difficult thing to get your head around, but it is actually a foundational technology of humanity, you're absolutely right that without the humans, the foundational technology doesn't matter. It has no value. Exactly. David, where can people follow you going forward? I mentioned your podcast, which is the David McWilliams podcast.

1:11:47Are you active on social media or any places out there that they can follow you? So the David McRinney's podcast comes out twice a week. You can get it, again, wherever you get your podcasts. It's economics, politics, geostrategy, all that sort of good stuff. And thankfully, it's well received. On Twitter are xDavidMcW. D-A-V-I-D-M-C-W. They're the best places to get me. I'm also on LinkedIn under my own name. But on Twitter, I'm more active. Or on X, I'm more active. And we'd love to talk to you because these are international stories. Yeah. No, it's wonderful. David, your book reminds me how a fight on money is a fight on humanity and the complexities, sensitivities, and battles we have faced as mankind.

1:12:38Our listeners should go out and buy a copy of The History of Money today. If you enjoy this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to A Book with Legs. Give us a review. Tell others about the books and great authors like David McWilliams that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com. That's podcast at smeedcap.com. You can also send your suggestion to us on X. Our handle is at smeedcap. Thank you for joining us for A Book With Legs podcast.

1:13:13We look forward to the next episode.